When Matthew is able to distance himself from Jesus-the Saint, he occasionally injects a degree of realism in his gospel.
Jesus, he wrote, warned his disciples: "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
"(Matthew 10:5) It is essential to understand that Christian Jesus simply did not exist.
There was no worship of Yeshua while he was alive.
What there was the tenuous resonance in the ragtag band of his Jewish disciples of his enhanced Hebraic teachings.
We know there was no worship, as such because these simple men abandoned him in the crucial moment that preceded his arrest.
When the disciples sensed danger for Yeshua, they would have known that the same danger faced them.
Between the possibility of being sentenced by stoning by the Jewish tribunal, the Sanhedrin, or being tied to a crossbar by Roman soldiers, their lack of intrinsic faith in the one they had called their Teacher saw them pretend they didn't know him.
For them, it was all rather simple: a Messiah, a great leader of men - in their kingdom or in the Kingdom of God - would have known how to extricate himself from the humiliation and the pain of a crucifixion.
Or, as our current teen culture might see it, Only losers get nailed.
Luke 22:54: Then they seized him and led him away, bringing him into the high priest's house.
Peter followed at a distance; and when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them.
Then a maid, seeing him as he sat in the light and gazing at him, said, "This man also was with him".
But he denied it, saying, "Woman, I do not know him".
And a little later someone else saw him and said, "You also are one of them".
But Peter said, "Man, I am not".
And after an interval of about an hour still another insisted, saying, "Certainly this man also was with him; for he is Galilean".
But Peter said, "Man, I do not know what areyou saying.
" Having said that, Peter, himself a Galilean, would have known that before any Jew could be arrested by Roman soldiers, a minimum of two witnesses had to identify the alleged perpetrator.
If Yudah (Judas) acting his part was one, then, perhaps, Peter, in the absence of a supportive mob, preferred to give Yeshua a fighting chance by simply turning his back on him.
The earliest form of Yeshua-spiritual entity began with belief he had resurrected.
What would eventually become of the ministry of Saul (Paulus/St Paul) was actually triggered by Yacob (Jacob), one of Yeshua's brothers,years after the crucifixion Indeed, soon after the death of Yeshua, Yacob created a knesiya, a place of gathering where he and, presumably some of the disciples, as well as others who believed news of the 'resurrection' could meet.
This meeting place, knesiyat ha-nimolim, would later be renamed the Church of the Circumcised, though one must realize that the word church, based on the German word kirche, was not used in the years that immediately followed Jesus' death.
As the name suggests, Yacob's new sect did not take in any non-Jew adherents for the same reasons that Yeshua kept himself separate from the pagan Gentiles, following the Mitzvah commandment mentioned above.
Under Yacob's guidance, this group of Orthodox Jews added the worship of Yeshua, the resurrected Messiah, to the scriptures of their Jewish faith.
They became the first Messianic Jews, popularized today under the banner of Jews for Jesus.
All of that makes perfect sense inasmuch as we accept that Yeshua did exist.
It makes sense in so far as we believe that this man is the only prototype for a historical Jesus, the one on which Christianity has been founded along with the pagan-inspired trilogy of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which technically holds Christianity one hair's breath away from true monotheism.