Quotes From "The Illusion Of Truth: The Real Jesus Behind The Grand Myth" By Thomas Daniel Nehrer

New Testament gospels are traditionally accorded a cultural sanctity and lofty regard completely out of line with their literary worth. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Without understanding your place as a conscious entity manifesting and engaging an experiential Reality, you will only be able to perceive Jesus within the confines of your belief structure. And that would present that hall-of-mirrors Jesus caricature comprising a divine myth or a deduced, amenable stick figure — either of which may perhaps satisfy your own needs, but have nothing to do with the real man. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Moving man’s view of himself and life past common thinking, the true visionary faces great difficulty: exactly that deluded mindset the sage would have listeners outgrow is the very filter through which any new perspective must pass. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Most people, solidly frozen into long-held, common notions, are unable to grasp clearer views. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Visionaries have two principal means to immediately communicate insights beyond people’s mundane, common mindset. They can liken awareness to equivalent situations in life to which the listener can relate — using metaphor, analogy and other grammatical tools to picture points. Or they can illustrate how listeners can gain such awareness — a path to proceed on, techniques to engage, what to look for within. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

As to “facts” as a basis of understanding things in this investigative age: if there is anything greatly preferred to valid, reliable information in our culture, it is the appearance of facts — nice, tidy story lines that seem complete and perfunctory, stories that can be widely circulated in mutual agreement, despite lacking validity. And, as there are absolutely no historical facts concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth — not a single word about him recorded during his lifetime — Christianity provides such a wonderful substitute appearance. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

It is vital to see not only what Christianity asserts, but where its precepts came from — how they evolved from primitive, superstitious metaphysical claims into “Gospel Truth”. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

While scholarly research provides extensive information, the real Jesus, the man who voiced various timeless insights on life, can only be revealed when life is understood better than the common mindset of our time allows. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Religions take hold and dominate a culture, not because they accurately portray reality, but because they appear to, once having been accepted — such that succeeding generations are heavily indoctrinated into the shared cultural mindset from birth. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Yet, reality operates in a consistent way — the same physical, interactive functions are in play for every conscious human in existence. If religion reflected reality as it actually works, all religions would be the same: accurate rendering in words depicting life’s real flow Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Reality’s functional flow can never be debated: reality manifests as it does regardless of individual recognition of its value-based inter-active function. Only simulated notions about reality — creeds, definitions, assumptions, paradigms — can be argued over. And that debate knows neither end nor resolution, as each arguing party hosts a personally customized fantasy — with each appearing unwaveringly valid to the holder. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Understanding points Jesus presented to his peers requires exploring how Jews, local Greeks, Romans and other ethnic mixes inhabiting the region perceived reality. Without a clear recognition of the common ancient mindset, regard for precepts presented in the Gospels and Christian tradition becomes distorted by a default — yet highly flawed — impression that people back then thought and acted like people today . Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Had the common man in (first century) Palestine thought about it at all, he would have considered the world flat, with land riding on and surrounded by water below and above. Keeping water up there was the “firmament” — a great, canopy-like dome not too far beyond where birds could fly. Indeed, the firmament had gates for the sun and moon to go through, and through which water fell as rain from the waters above. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Clouding the exact evolution of El and Yahweh as concepts (and any other aspect of belief, for neither El nor Yahweh ever existed as anything except mind images of fervent believers) is the invariable propensity of associated religions to revise their history along the way according to subsequently popular interests. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Judaism, for example, presents itself as monotheistic and retrofits that claim on its history by revising its lore. But in ancient times, Judaism was much more accurately Henotheism, wherein people (particularly common folk) worshipped a principal god while accepting the existence of other deities, or Monolatrism, where many gods were acknowledged, but only one worshipped. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

But for centuries, since the capitulation of Judah, the Jewish peoples had been almost continuously under foreign control. So, where was Yahweh all this time while his people suffered..? Far from ever questioning the very being of such an inept deity, the conclusion was invariably reached — likely promoted by religious authorities living privileged lifestyles — that the people had sinned, had worshipped other gods, had somehow failed their side of the bargain. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

The only difference between holding one god as exclusive or supreme and believing in many gods specialized in function is the number. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

In terms of idols which represented various gods: worshipping an idol or star cluster is no different than worshipping a concept. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

The religious and scholarly alike arrive at conclusions as to Jesus’ nature based on the world-view they hold, the belief structure that shapes their interpretation. Inaccurate views of the function of reality can only lead to erroneous conclusions. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Understand that religion, at least western versions of it, rests on a type of thinking called Revelation. This mode holds that truths concerning the workings of reality are hidden, masked by, through or behind a deity such that only a few privileged souls are able to see through the veil and “reveal” those truths. But (around 1600) revelation as a means of understanding began to be challenged by two other methods of differentiating truth from fallacy: Reason and Empiricism. . Thomas Daniel Nehrer

However, just as earlier, when Christianity was introduced it didn’t eliminate pagan conceptualizations, but layered new beliefs on top of them, so science simply added to the western mindset. It didn’t fully displace religion, luck, fate, etc. Science just heaped other definitions onto the average person’s already conglomerated psychic truckload. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

You encounter, at its core, a subjective Reality, one based on meaning and value reflective of your own Self, not an objective universe, cold, particle-based and indifferent as science projects. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Various visionaries through time came to see with some degree of clarity that Oneness, that intrinsic connection between Self and experienced Reality. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

The fact is: Jesus wrote not a solitary word that survives. Equally astounding is historical silence: not a single historical account refers to him during his lifetime from any source whatsoever, Roman or Jewish, official or personal. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Josephus is the first historian to make note of Jesus having even existed — and that happened six full decades after his death. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

The authors of the gospels, like all writers in all time periods, either reference information they have at hand — including things they’ve heard or read — or they make things up.. . For reference material, the author of Mark relied not on Jesus himself or any writings from him.. .. His sole source(was): oral traditions passed along by word-of-mouth for four decades. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

That means 19 or 20 of the books of the NT (New Testament) are anonymous. Many are blatantly pseudepigraphic (forgeries, see next section), with famous names applied to artificially promote veracity. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

The gospels, never meant to report, butrather to convince, are in no sense objective and dispassionate biographies. They are glowing accounts meant to persuade people of the writers’ convictions. Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Of course, the original (anonymous) writer of (the Gospel of) John didn’t use quotes — as they didn’t exist in written Greek — but the translator/publisher of the modern Bible does. And that style strongly implies a validity that is pure illusion. Thomas Daniel Nehrer