Roberta Grimes

Is Jesus a Christian? (#2)

Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 30, 2025 • 2 Comments
Book News, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!

Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

Christianity bears Jesus’s name, although nearly all of what modern Christianity teaches is not even remotely what Jesus teaches in the Gospels. So, you would think that at some point, more Christians might start to wonder what Jesus’s opinion is of the religion that they practice. Is He pleased with it? Is He disappointed in it? Or is He even, at this point, disgusted by it?

Okay, so since nowadays we can communicate with people that we know are dead, why has it never occurred to anyone that we should be able to communicate even better with Someone that we know has risen from the dead? I have been reluctant to proclaim the Shroud of Turin to be Jesus’s actual burial cloth, miraculously preserved for two thousand years. But the experts who continue to study the Shroud are by now making an overwhelming case for it.  There really is no other explanation for all the Shroud’s amazing details! Not only is it the genuine article, it is indeed the cloth that received and wrapped Jesus’s body when it was removed from the cross; but also, the Shroud of Turin and the marks on it prove that Jesus came to us as a literal Divine Being. For one small example, some of those marks are a photographic negative, and they have been there since long before anyone then living on earth could have known what a photographic negative even was! And the scorch on the Shroud that was made when Jesus reanimated His dead body would have required more concentrated power for it to be made in a single burst than anything that we can produce all at once worldwide, even today. And all the horrific details of the torture that Jesus willingly put Himself through are right there on the Shroud of Turin. Just reading about the way they used those nails turns your stomach. And all, so He could die a very public death and then resurrect Himself very publicly, and thereby prove to us at last that we live eternally.  No other explanation for all the details of the Shroud of Turin, and the marks that it carries, than that Jesus came to us as God on earth is even possible.

So, we do have definitive proof that at least Jesus’s body was briefly actually dead, and that He then reanimated it. And incidentally, He is the only person ever known to have done that, because those who have near-death experiences (NDEs), no matter how vivid their experiences might seem to them, never actually die and then come back to life. Death for everyone else but Jesus always is a one-way trip! But the fact that Jesus in fact rose from the dead is vividly documented in the Gospels (see e.g. JN 19:40-20:18). So then, should we not even more be seeking to speak with the still-living Jesus, who is alive right this minute on the third level of the astral plane, and He still greets every new afterlife arrival who asks to meet Him and receive His blessing? Why aren’t Christians asking Him directly through good mental mediums how He feels about this religion, which is the largest on earth; and although it follows Jesus almost not at all, it still somehow claims Him for its leader? Since Christianity teaches very different doctrines than what Jesus ever taught in life, do we now not owe Him at least the courtesy of asking Him straight-out whether He ever personally adopted the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created and formalized at the First Council of Nicaea that was held in the year 325 AD, since that was three centuries after Jesus’s death and resurrection, and it had so little to do with what Jesus taught when He was on earth? Or, does Jesus just consider Himself to be still a Jew? Or, perhaps, has He spiritually moved far beyond any human religious belief and practice whatsoever?

I never have presumed to ask Jesus any of these questions, but now I know what His answers would be. And not only that, but I know that Jesus wants Thomas and me to tell you now how He feels about the Christian religion, whether or not you even care what Jesus thinks. Actually, I had been thinking now that maybe we might not talk about it in this week’s post, after all. Thomas wanted to finally say it this week. We wrote last week’s post, intending to talk this week about Jesus’s opinions; but now, I have been thinking about maybe just dodging it all. I don’t want to talk about it. I still love my gentle childhood version of Christianity! The one that my sweet Reverend Turrell taught and lived. The one that we sang. We sang today’s frame-verse very often! And there are a good two billion practicing Christians on earth who still love the gentle version of Christianity, the one they still imagine that Jesus heads, just as I do. I didn’t really want to say it today, after all. However, I was driving on Wednesday, running some minor errands, when I heard Jesus’s unmistakable voice in my mind. He said, very strongly and clearly, “Say it now.”  

Oops! Okay, Sir. Yes Sir! Yes. I’ll do it. Jesus’s voice is unmistakable. And you don’t say No to Him!

So, for the past couple of days, I have been thinking about the best way to go about doing this. Thomas has been helping me a lot! It is his view that the core of what is so wrong with all forty-eight-thousand-odd versions of Christianity is the religion’s insistence that Jesus’s death on the cross was a sin-sacrifice. In the nature of Judaism’s ancient sin-sacrifices of animals.  

But, what does Jesus say about sin? Jesus destroyed most of those old religious ideas about sin in one stroke! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead, He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And He confirmed that His abandonment of religious laws was consistent with the divine plan, when He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (MT 5:17). So, Jesus told us that spiritually, we didn’t need those old religious laws about sin anymore. We were now rising above them all.

The concept of sin is grounded in religious laws, and of course all religions are human-made. So, in shrinking the Law and the Prophets down to just two commandments about love, and thereby discarding nearly every Jewish law, was Jesus abolishing the whole ancient concept of sin? I think the answer to this question is yes! To the open-minded Gospel student, the many times that Jesus pushed aside what were then inviolate religious laws, and He gave us cagey reasons for His doing so, look like a campaign to discredit those laws without running afoul of the always-listening Temple guards. Here are some examples:

“At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here! But if you had known what this means, “I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath’” (MT 12:7-9). And the strictly religious folk of His day acted pretty much the way some Christians do now: they shamed and shunned anyone they judged to be sinful. Jesus, on the other hand, especially loved even the most unlovable! For example, we read, “And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him” (MT 2:15). He even told us why He especially loved sinners. He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (MK 2:17).

“Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!”  In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’” (LK 15:1-10).

The more you read the Lord’s Gospel words with the guess that perhaps He was abolishing the very concept of sin, the more you realize that was precisely what He was doing! Jesus had replaced the Law and the Prophets with God’s new law of love; and in doing that, He was announcing that we were ready to move beyond a primitive and puerile thou-shalt-not morality, so then we could begin to live by a standard that is based entirely in love. Whatever we might do is no longer so important, but instead all that matters is what is in our hearts. If we have raised our spiritual vibration sufficiently that our every thought, our every impulse is based in nothing but love, then everything that we do from out of that love is good and moral, by definition. And when you think about it, you realize that in fact, this is a much stricter standard than any old-style, sin-based law ever could be. This law requires that we make no decision without first weighing it on the scales of love that are becoming ever more perfectly manifest in our hearts.

It is from this more profound base of understanding where there is only love that we come to understand why we also cannot so easily judge the woman who has committed adultery. This is from JN 8: “But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.  Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again, He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on, sin no more’” (JN 8:1-11). This is so beautiful! 

And yet, the religion that carries Jesus’s name is based in the false notion, which never came from Jesus, that we are all irremediable sinners, to the point where Jesus had to be born as a sinless sacrifice to take all our sins upon Himself. And then Jesus is purported to have died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, after the manner of all the animal sin-sacrifices made to God by the Jews in their Temples. And the Christian religion has, for most of its history, been extraordinarily barbaric, to the point where Jesus is displayed on crosses in gory detail in all the Catholic churches to this day. Wow, to be a Catholic Christian is to be torn and riven with guilt even from childhood, knowing that such a good Man as Jesus had to die like that because you are so sinful, and so just plain awful! The whole history of the Catholic Church displays a surprising level of brutality, too. If you have not yet read Helen Ellerbe’s horrifying book, which is entitled The Dark Side of Christian History, then you really ought to do that now. And know that Jesus has spent much of the time since He last died on earth and then rose and ascended, simply healing the hundreds of millions of victims of the worst of Christianity’s most horrifying acts of raw and sadistic cruelty.   

Then, since around the early part of the twentieth century, Jesus has been communicating with some on earth who were especially able to receive His communications. Some of these messages that look especially real to me were received from Jesus via automatic writing through James E. Padgett, a Washington, D.C. Attorney, between the years 1914 and 1921, and were first published in 1940 in a book entitle Book of Truths. Now Jonathan Beecher, the head of White Crow Books, which is the pre-eminent publisher of such spiritual books, is republishing these teachings in a new book just out, entitled No One’s Dead – The Jesus Messages. I won’t be interviewing Jonathan on Seek Reality for a few more weeks, so I have only just begun to read his book; but one quotation from it already jumps out at me. Jesus says there, “I did not die for your sins; those are on you.”

The definitive answer to the question that begins this post is that, No, of course not. Jesus is not a Christian in Constantine’s mold! And nor is God, for that matter. Neither of them follows any religion, but rather every religion is strictly human-made. Jesus taught His followers a spiritual movement which He called The Way that was based upon and meant to more easily spread His Gospel teachings; and His Way soon had millions of followers, spreading rapidly in the first three centuries following His death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. Until Constantine’s armies destroyed most of it, and drove its remnants far into the desert. Let’s see now what happens next, as Constantine’s religion begins to fall of its own weight….

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

 

 

 (Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)