Publisher's Synopsis
The Peace and Harmony Gospel of Jesus. Jesus Speaks. 90 pages.The Christian Bible can be divided into three major sections; the Old Testament, the first four gospels of the New Testament, and the balance of the New Testament.The Old Testament begins with Adam and Eve and the story of Creation. It then moves to the beginning of Jewish history with the introduction of Abraham. The next major Jewish player is Moses who delivered the law, in the form of the Ten Commandments, to the Israelites after their Exodus from Egypt. This is the core of the Old Testament.The New Testament begins with a man called Jesus. He claims to be the Jewish Messiah who was foretold throughout the Old Testament. He states that he has come only to the Israelites. He says that he has come with a new doctrine, a new focus and a new understanding regarding the Israelites and their relationship to their God and to each other.This new doctrine had only two commandments: the first, love God; the second, love one another. The first four books of the New Testament consists of the gospels (good news) of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All four gospels relate the story of Jesus' life. With a few very minor exceptions, they are the only books of the Bible which directly quote the sayings of Jesus.The balance of the New Testament consists of commentary on what Jesus said, what he did and how his words and acts relate to humanity. This commentary which began over 1900 years ago has never lost its momentum as Christians and non-Christians continue to seek an understanding of the words and deeds of Jesus.In this book, I have considered only those sayings attributed to Jesus in the first four gospels of the New Testament as well as the gospel of Thomas. I have not focused on what came before Jesus as recorded in the Old Testament and I have not attempted to comment on what others said after his ordeal on the cross. Consequently, I have ignored most of the traditional Bible.The gospel of Thomas is not one of the officially sanctioned books of the Bible but I have counted it as a fifth gospel because it is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Many of these sayings have parallels in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The gospel of Thomas is part of the Nag Hammadi Library which was rediscovered in 1945. The Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of the 1500-year-old texts which were copied from more ancient documents, some of which are believed to have been written within decades of Jesus' death. The gospel of Thomas is one of many rediscovered texts that are focusing new light on the life and sayings of Jesus.In reality, there is no way that we can know exactly what Jesus said because it was allegedly not written down at the time he said it. Each of the five gospels records what the authors believed were the most important sayings of Jesus. Obviously, there was some disagreement over which sayings were the most important because the gospels are not identical.For the purposes of this book, the valid sayings of Jesus are the ones which are quoted in at least two of the five gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Thomas. (Except for the conflict between Jesus and the Jewish religious bureaucrats) Also, I only considered the sayings having parallel wording and not the ones having parallel thoughts. Logically, I considered the most significant sayings to be the ones that are the most often quoted by the gospel authors. In this book, I have focused only on what Jesus allegedly said as recorded in the Bible and how his sayings relate to increasing the level of Peace in the world human society. I have generally declined to include the sayings that relate to the divinity of Jesus, the death on the cross, the many miracles ...
