Almost everyone who has ever read the New Testament, or even heard of Jesus, takes it for granted that the New Testament provides an accurate picture of him. They dont realize that the picture of Jesus presented by the various writers of the New Testament emerged over a period of almost a century. In the first place, Jesus was totally absorbed with the Hebrew scriptures and devoted his life to bring about the ideal world that the prophets portrayed. Secondly, nothing about him was written for at least a generation. This period of oral tradition gave the authors of the New Testament and related writings about Jesus an opportunity to reflect deeply on what they wanted to convey, interact with those believers who were certain that they understood him, and put down the first written records about him.

The earliest Christian community consisted of Judaean believers who maintained their beliefs within Judaism. They thus continued the tradition of John the baptist in believing that God was going to intervene in history in the imminent future. The Judaean believers were subsequently led by James, the brother of Jesus, and maintained a tradition that frequently conflicted with that advocated by Paul. The record of their beliefs can be retrieved by carefully examining the Didache, the epistle of James, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Sayings Gospel Q,. The ideas within these four records are earlier and more primitive than those within the first Gospel, Mark, which was written in one of the Gentile cities of the eastern Roman empire around 70 CE. Matthew and Luke, writing at least a decade after Mark, also had access to additional Jesus material that circulated within their own communities. They used these traditions regarding Jesus to revise Mark, incorporate selections from Q, and add additional accounts of their own. Finally, by the end of the first century CE, John prepared a new Gospel that was based on a substantially different understanding of the same oral and written traditions that were used by Mark, Matthew and Luke, so that Jesus came to be understood as Gods manifestation in human form.

The literary development from the prophetic vision of Gods coming reign on earth, to a future union of all believers with the heavenly Christ, is the story behind the Gospels. In Chapter 1, I explain that Jesus understood Jewish history and dedicated himself to the goal of bringing about the ideal world of the prophets. In Chapter 2, I identify the key elements of the prophetic vision of a perfectly just world. In Chapter 3, I show that Jesus vision of the kingdom of God was indeed based on this prophetic vision. In Chapter 4, I examine the earliest written documents of emerging Christianity the Didache (Appendix A), the epistle of James (Appendix B), the Gospel of Thomas (Appendix C), and the Sayings Gospel Q (Appendix D) noting those passages that were later modified by the communities that valued them. In Chapter 5, I explain that James and Paul had a different understanding of Jesus kingdom, but James was closer to Jesus than Paul. In Chapter 6, I show how Mark (Appendix E), the earliest written Christian Gospel, supplemented the original Judaean Christian version of Jesus gospel by making distinctively Gentile Christian additions. In Chapter 7, I look at the final transformation of the Christian gospel. In Chapter 8, I show how it is possible to recover the original message of Jesus from the Gospels. I explain that we cannot understand the genuine message of Jesus unless we eliminate the influence of Paul and the ideas he introduced.

The gospel of the New Testament developed on a trajectory from Jesus to Gentile Christianity in order to reach its current form. However, only the earliest Judaean Christian Gospel accurately reflects the original message of Jesus. We can thus understand him and his message only if we realize that Paul betrayed him and set Christianity on a wrong course for most of the last 2000 years. We can recover the authentic Jesus, however, if we identify and eliminate the Pauline transformation. This process will give us a genuine picture of the true prophet who was determined to bring about the prophetic kingdom of God. Christianity, in other words, made a major mistake when it began to follow Paul. In consequence, most Christians have been on the wrong track ever since. Jesus had a valid message. His earliest followers in Judaea got it right. Paul, however, preached his own version of the gospel to Gentiles throughout the eastern Roman empire. The original message of Jesus, in consequence, was lost when the Judaean church was wiped out during the Jewish war with Rome. We have been living with Pauls distorted version of the gospel ever since.

This book is written for those who have a basic understanding of the biblical message. It intentionally avoids all appearances to be academic in order to be comprehensible to the ordinary lay person. Nevertheless, it incorporates the basic ideas of many scholars from the last century of scholarship, and is intended to challenge ordinary believers by making them realize that reading and studying the New Testament is not sufficient to understand the real Jesus. The text can be used, accordingly, as a study guide by those who are interested in understanding how Christianity developed, whether as believers or unbelievers.

The authentic Jesus who lived and died in first century Galilee and Judaea can NOT be found by spending time on only the final version of the writings that have come down to us. His life was profoundly influenced by the Hebrew scriptures that were available to him. The writers who produced the first Gospels in the first century CE, moreover, were deeply affected by the Greek culture around them. By immersing ourselves in their world and realizing how they were guided by extraneous ideas introduced by Paul we can come to understand why we have been taken in by the greatest misrepresentation in human history.