The Great Gospel of John
Volume 9
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
The Lord in Jericho
- Chapter 20 -
Nojed asks about true religion.
The innkeeper called the 3 immediately, and so they came right away. They were in a better shape and thus also more cheerful, and they thanked the innkeeper for the great friendship he had shown to them.
2
And the speaker asked if he still could add a few words of thanks.
3
The innkeeper said: "Just speak, but keep it short, because you will hear and experience now something very important, which will be for your greatest benefit."
4
The speaker, whose name was Nojed, said: "Friend, and most noble among men, I will think about that, because your wish will from now on be a command to us. Since we have found a true person in you as a gentile, and moreover a wisdom that is united with true goodness, which can actually no more be found among the Jews, we thought about your gods and we came to the idea that they could be more than a fable after all. We gladly want to become more familiar now with your doctrine in order to bring offerings also to your gods and to give them all honor.
5
For this is how I think: the religion, where the best of people can be found, must also be the best and most truthful one itself. Our religion is really not so, because the people who were born and reared in it, are now certainly the worst that can exist anywhere in the whole wide world. The better nations consider and recognize their priests in general as a true pestilence to the people. And a religion whose womb produces only true tigers and hyenas and wolves and bears instead of good and wise people cannot be a good, and still less a true teaching. What do you think, noble friend of men, about this idea of ours?"
6
The innkeeper said: "My friends, about this matter you should talk with this Friend who is sitting here next to me, because He is unspeakably much more skilful and wiser than I and all the Greeks, no matter how good and wise they are."
7
Nojed said: "Your wish is our command. Although this Man and Lord is according to His appearance also a Jew, but He can have become very wise after contact with Greeks, because if He would be a teacher of the temple it would be a sin to waste words about Him, no matter how clear and true they might be."
8
Then he turned to Me and said: "If You are not a disciple of the temple and if You maybe have searched and also found what is true and good as much as we are searching it now and are hoping to find it in some way, then give us Your opinion about the ideas that we have spoken out aloud. Are we not right to search for the truth and its goodness only there where we have found good and wise men?"
9
I said: "Yes certainly, but nevertheless, the religion of Moses is the only true one, although in this time it was just as much trampled down and destroyed by the pigs in the temple as during the old Babylon and Nineveh and still other former cities of whores.
10
Believe Me: our Jehovah is since eternity the only true, good, living God and has never failed to answer the supplications of those who without doubting believed in Him, who have kept His commandments and thus also who loved Him above all and their fellowman as themselves. Even if He sometimes delayed to completely answer their supplications in order to purify their souls all the more, but He still has never failed to answer them completely and has always fulfilled them, often at a moment when those who prayed for it thought about it in the least.
11
You yourselves - I know this very well - have often prayed in your need to God that He would take away your misery, but because you previously lived in great wealth as men who were in high esteem, but have thereby manifested physical and spiritual laziness in every respect, He let you go through a serious and hard school of life for a few years, so that you would not only experience the attractiveness of the earthly life but also that you yourselves would experience its bitterness, so that from then on you would search in yourselves and come to know the real value of life and its purpose.
12
Now you have tasted the cup of the bitter life unto the last drop and have thereby become true, deep thinking men, capable to absorb the true living, godly light of life from the Heavens, and so God has at this moment answered your supplications, now that you needed His help the most.
13
And what He has done now for you, He has already done very faithfully for a lot of people when in their need they have, really believing, turned to Him, and therefore you cannot say anymore that the religion of the true Jews is false and untrue, but the religion of all pagans surely is.
14
Do you perhaps think that this innkeeper, who is a patrician of this city, would have shown you mercy if he still were a pagan? Oh, absolutely not. As a pagan he would have treated you with all the sharpness of the Roman law. But since he, together with his whole house, is in his heart no more a pagan but a true Jew, just like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he therefore has on My advice done you well, what you are enjoying already now and will enjoy even more in the future. Can you see that?"