THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 34 -
Roklus compares the deeds of man with those of God.
Here, I only ask what the secular courts would do to a person, who together with several accomplices, would make the bad joke to one night devastate as much as possible the blessed fields of just one small area? I think the Romans would crucify such a willful villain at least ten times, if they caught him, or after some possible medical findings they would banish him for life to an insane asylum. But one still worships a god and holds him for endlessly wise! Not bad, if one feels fortunate doing it! The gods' highest wisdom has the invincible prerogative in the entire creation to play the maddest pranks; it can rob at its discretion, murder and ruin, and it will not occur to anyone even to imagine that it had played a madly bad prank. The superstitious people dare to think only that the above mentioned devastation of the crops was not a good thing; had it been something good, the poor, good people would have certainly saved themselves the walk to the representatives of the gods.
2
What happens to a person who sets another's house on fire and thereby destroys not only the house, but also everything that was kept in it, and thus turns the other from a well-to-do citizen into a beggar? To my knowledge the murderer and incendiary belongs according to the law on the cross. If, however, the lord god Zeus throws the devastating flash into somebody's house and thereby lets everything be devastated by fire, it is unimaginably other than extremely good and very wise! Woe to the one who would not take it that way and firmly believe it; the Pontifex maximus would let him feel god Zeus' rage in a way compared to which the burning of a house would be regarded as an enormous blessing! I, however, am free to ask the question, and say: If the people representing god consider Zeus' house burning deed as wise and extremely good and just, why do they regard the same deed committed by a human so highly abject that they find it necessary to punish him for it with the most tormenting death?
3
I, of course, reason and say: True goodness and true wisdom, exhibited by whoever, must forever remain good and wise and therefore deserve no punishment! The smart people representing the gods on earth secretly know, like us good-natured Essenians, that there are no gods, but only a universal, primordial, raw natural force whose work is purely accidental and degenerates into inevitably nobler forms only in further processes and in the most different branch-offs. That is why god's representatives using their imagination allegorically personified the natural force as a god and presented it figuratively for adoration and worship to the other people, who never thought for themselves.
4
The god contrived in such a way would have to start stirring and that, of course, as miraculously as possible! Once the people had experienced the god through multiple miracles, they would soon have to put up with his severe laws. Woe to the violators of these laws! So that humankind, in its blind and foolish fear of the once undoubtedly accepted, miraculous god would not pass over into complete desperation after an easily committable sin, the smart representatives of god thought of means for reconciliation with the offended divinity, and invented for that purpose sacrifices and other painful kinds of penance, by which the sinner can again gain the amity of his offended god. And so, everywhere on this dear earth, there are, along with the civic state laws, laws coming from one or the other god. These laws are posed in such a way that even a person chaste and virtuous in everything will readily break at least ten times a day, by which he will have made himself a little unworthy of his god's mercy and liking. He must clean himself by prescribed means in the evening before sunset, otherwise he can immediately lapse into greater evil.
5
I cannot and do not want to call this bad because there is no harm, if people have a tender conscience, and certain ablutions and purifications of the body have never hurt anyone. But one may not impose them on me and people like me as orders of a god who does not exists! My companions and I know what we know, and nobody can accuse us that we have ever recruited followers for our purest knowledge. But we should be allowed, at least secretly, not to hold X for a U ?! We will never offend somebody because we are all people loving men; but we also ask to be left unscathed. Why do the priests of Jerusalem cull us Essenes on and on? They ought to be what they are, and we, what we are; before the forum of pure reason they are not by a hair more than us, - basically neither are we more than they. We do not curse them, but feel sorry for them only because of their crass blindness. However, who gives them the right to curse us, given that we have set for ourselves the difficult task never to judge and debase a person, but only to help everybody with words and deeds?!
6
If we perform false miracles - because there have never been true ones-, it is done so that we can more easily help blind and wanting to remain blind humanity because it can no longer be helped in a light, purely human way. This, however, should be understood by such priests who call themselves scribes and should nevertheless know how they are at it! They should join us and work with us, and in few years already it would look quite differently for humanity."