Roberta Grimes

Whose Christianity? (#5)

Posted by Roberta Grimes • April 26, 2025 • 6 Comments
Book News, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus

Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
still all my song shall be,
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!

Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,
darkness be over me, my rest a stone;
yet in my dreams I’d be
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!

There let the way appear, steps unto heaven;
all that thou sendest me, in mercy given;
angels to beckon me
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
– Sarah Flower Adams (1805-1848). from “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (1841)

When you have witnessed the murder of Someone you love dearly, and seen Him laid out stone-cold dead in His tomb; and then you go to that tomb before dawn two days later, and you discover to your horror that His corpse has been stolen…   

¹¹ Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping; and so, as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb; ¹² and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying. ¹³ And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” ¹⁴ When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus. ¹⁵ Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing Him to be the gardener, she said to Him, “Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.” ¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to Him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means, Teacher). ¹⁷ Jesus said to her, “Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.’” ¹⁸ Mary Magdalene came, announcing to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and that He had said these things to her (JN 20:11-18).

Fascinating. There was a time, many years ago, when I very closely read each one of these Biblical Gospel accounts of Jesus’s appearances right after His resurrection, and it was clear that He had very briefly walked around wearing an already rapidly-decaying body that no one could recognize at all. That body was not alive again! Its blood was no longer flowing; it was dead, and it was decaying fast.  And, OMG, Jesus was inside it? All you can think is, “Ick!”  It was also now a fragile body. Notice how Jesus does not want Mary Magdalene to come closer to Him, and He certainly does not want her to touch Him.

That dead body was not usable for anything much any longer, so by that same evening, Jesus already had discarded it. We can tell that He had thrown it away, because by the evening, Jesus had taken on a readily usable body that even was able to go through closed and locked doors with ease. It is not surprising that Jesus’s execution, and then the unexplained disappearance of His body, briefly demoralized His disciples, these men who would nearly all later go on to bravely die for Him their awful martyrs’ deaths. That night they were hiding out from the Jews, but Jesus found them, and He already wore an efficient astral body that nevertheless bore His crucifixion’s marks:

¹⁹ So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰ And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹ So Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” ²² And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³ If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.”

²⁴ But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, or the twin, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵ So the other disciples were saying to him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”

²⁶After eight days, His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors having been locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷ Then He said to Thomas, “Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” ²⁸ Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹ Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed” (JN 20:19-29).

That Jesus simply switched to using an astral body for the forty days that He remained on earth before He ascended makes sense. Astral bodies are what we wear in the afterlife, when we wear a human body at all. They are solid and mind-created, and they can look and seem exactly as we like, so Jesus’s astral body could carry the crucifixion marks on His hands and in His side that He wanted His disciples to see and to feel. He also could lose the astral body and then pick it up again when He wanted to get through a closed, or even a locked door. What He did with His material body almost right away does not matter; it may be that He simply ditched it in a thicket somewhere, and it rotted in the manner of all flesh.

There is more than sufficient evidence for the Easter events, just within the Biblical Gospels themselves and in contemporary history. I had exhaustively done my own research; and for a long time, even deep skeptic that I am by nature, I thought the overall evidence was good enough. I had known about the Shroud of Turin, which was reportedly Jesus’s own burial shroud, but I doubted that it could be even possible that Jesus’s genuine shroud and sudarium (face-covering) might truly have survived to this day. However, on these matters, I am a skeptic no longer. As was true of all that afterlife evidence, and the evidence confirming the Lord’s words in the Gospels that I have researched so diligently, the modern evidence that these relics are in fact genuine is abundant, and I consider it now to be irrefutable. Here is what has persuaded me:

• Both the Shroud and the Sudarium actually date to the time of Jesus. The original linen of which the Shroud of Turin (Italy) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) are made actually can be carbon-dated to the time of Jesus. (An earlier carbon-dating attempt of the Shroud used linen from a later patch, and its resulting Medieval date has now been discredited.) The linen of the genuine shroud is of a weave in common use in the first century, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
• The blood on both relics is male and of the same type. That type is AB, which is so rare that only about two percent of modern people share it.
• The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s reported injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they both covered the same Man, that He was Jewish, that He died on the eve of a Sabbath Day, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report were inflicted on Jesus.
• The Shroud carries an image of a Man. That image is only smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed. More obvious to a casual observer are smoke and burn marks from a fire in 1532, and another in 1997, together with efforts that were made over time to mend and patch the damaged Shroud.
• The image on the Shroud turns out to be a photographic negative. It was only when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898 that the clear image of a crucified Man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image.
• No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it does not penetrate the fibers at all. Close analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim happened well after the blood on the fibers had dried.
• Something to think about… Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce the scorches would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body roughly equivalent to, or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge.

Jesus’s dead body was not actually made alive again by that energy discharge. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated, its flesh was decaying, and those who personally knew Jesus did not recognize Him wearing that pale and haggard, rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His dead body to be so fragile that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could fully re-inhabit and re-animate the body to the extent that He could move its limbs and jaw and make it seem to walk and talk, so He could use it to demonstrate His own survival. And then by that evening, He apparently cast it away, and He used an astral body from then on until He ascended, some forty days later. That astral body was why He could so easily appear inside the enclosed and fortified rooms where His disciples had hidden themselves (see JN 20:19-20). And having mind-created mimic wounds on His astral body, He invited doubting Thomas and others to probe those wounds and satisfy themselves that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Wayshower, Jesus. Two thousand years ago, God was born on earth in the Person of Jesus, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then for our sake He delivered Himself up to be tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists to this day, and He was laid out in a tomb. Two days after that, He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy that was at least equivalent to all the electricity that we now can produced on the earth being generated at once. Jesus then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and now to us and to all the ages still to come, that human life is indeed eternal, and to prove that none of us ever will die.

So, now we can at last attempt to answer the question with which we began this five-posts Easter series. Just whose Christianity is this, anyway? Who truly owns it? The Roman Emperor Constantine would have you believe that it is God’s Own Christian religion, blessed by and handed down directly from God to Constantine himself. The Roman Emperor did, after all, take over Jesus’s Way of Love in a bloody massacre in the year 312 C.E. And thereafter, Constantine and his successor leaders within the religion that he had begun called seven successive church councils, beginning in the year 325 C.E. with the First Council of Nicaea, and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in the year 787 C.E. They all claimed that their Councils were under God’s guidance and inspiration, so they insisted that those Councils created God’s infallible Christianity. But, look, a movement that began in a massacre of many of Jesus’s followers; that included doctrinal splits, inquisitions, and crusades; and that now includes more than forty-five thousand different versions of Christianity that are still often immersed in petty squabbles in which both sides claim that God is on their own side can hardly claim to be righteous on any level! And anyway, no religion comes from God. Every religion is human-made, by definition.

So, now we are more or less back where we began when we first asked this title question. But, not quite. We now understand more certainly than we ever have understood it before that the one and only straightforward way to end our fear-based turning on the wheel of repeated lifetimes on earth is to return to following Jesus, and following only Jesus. His Way alone is sure! Jesus’s original Way is not a religion at all, but rather it is the steady and certain path that He long ago was born on earth from out of the Godhead to bring to us, and He lovingly taught us to daily follow, his Way of just absolute, prevenient forgiveness and God’s endless and perfect love.   

Then, with my waking thoughts bright with thy praise,
out of my stony griefs Bethel I’ll raise;
so by my woes to be
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!

Or if, on joyful wing cleaving the sky,
sun, moon, and stars forgot, upward I fly,
still all my song shall be,
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
– Sarah Flower Adams (1805-1848). from “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (1841)

 

 

 (Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)