For those readers there are only two alternatives: humble repentance and renunciation of these lies or persecution of those who can expose them for what they have done and are still doing.
If they do not renounce their lies, they have only one choice: to persecute me. And having finished my writing, I now prepare for this with joy and with fear for my weakness.
—Leo Tolstoy
The Gospel
A Proclamation on Goodness from Jesus Christ, the Son of God
Introduction KNOWLEDGE OF LIFE
Jesus Christ’s proclamation replaced faith in an external God with a knowledge of life.
The Gospel proclaims that the source of all things is not an external God, as people think, but a knowledge of life. And therefore, in place of that which people call God, the Gospel posits a knowledge of life.
Without knowledge there is no life. Every man is living only because he has knowledge. Those people who do not understand this and propose the flesh as the source of life deprive themselves of true life. But those who understand that they live not by the flesh but by knowledge are the ones who have true life. And Jesus Christ demonstrated this true life. Realizing the truth that man’s life comes from knowledge, he gave people a teaching and a model life of knowledge in the flesh.
Previous doctrines expressed themselves as laws dictating what one must do and not do in order to serve God. The teaching of Jesus Christ is based on a knowledge of life. No one has seen and no one can know the external God, and therefore the service of an external God cannot govern life. The path of life can only be seen when one recognizes that the knowledge located within, as it arises from the source of all knowledge, is the basis for everything.*
In the beginning stood the knowledge of life, as the foundation of all things. Knowledge of life stood in the place of God. Knowledge of life is God. According to Jesus’s proclamation, it stands as the basis and source of all things, in the place of God.
All that lives was born into life through knowledge. And without it, there can be nothing living.
Knowledge gives true life.
Knowledge is the light of life. It is the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot extinguish it. The true light has always been in the world and it illuminates every person born into the world. It was in the world and the world is living only because it had that light of knowledge within itself, but the world did not hold on to it.
It revealed itself to its own, but its own did not keep it. Only the ones who understood the knowledge, they alone were given the opportunity to become like it, by virtue of their belief in its essence. Those who believed in the fact that life is based in knowledge did not become sons of the flesh, but became sons of knowledge.
And the knowledge of life manifested itself in the flesh, through the person of Jesus Christ, and we understood his meaning—that the son of knowledge, a man in the flesh, the only begotten of the father, begotten from the source of life, is the same as the father, the same as the source of life.
The teaching of Jesus is the perfect and true faith. Because by fulfilling the teaching of Jesus we have come to understand a new faith in place of the old. The law had been given through Moses, but we have come to understand the true faith, based on the attaining of knowledge, through Jesus Christ.
Nobody has seen God and nobody ever will; only the son, the one who is within the father, he alone has shown the path of life.
Chapter One THE SON OF GOD
Man, the son of God, is powerless in the flesh and free in the spirit.
OUR FATHER
Jesus was the son of an unknown father. Not knowing his own father, he referred to God as his father during his childhood. In Judea at that time there was a prophet named John, who prophesied the coming of God to earth. He said that if people would change their lives, consider all people equal among themselves, not harm each other but instead help one another, then God would come down to earth and his kingdom would be established on earth. Hearing this sermon, Jesus leaves the company of people and goes into the desert in order to understand the meaning of the life of man and his relationship to the endless source of all things, that which is called God.
After a few days in the wilderness without food, Jesus begins to wither from hunger, and he thinks, “I am the son of the almighty God and therefore should be as almighty as he is; but here I am, hungry, and bread does not appear according to my will. So it would seem that I am not almighty.” After this, he says to himself, “I cannot turn these rocks into bread, but I can abstain from eating bread. And therefore, if I am not almighty in the flesh, I am almighty in spirit—I can conquer the flesh. Therefore I am the son of God, not in the flesh but in spirit.”
“But if I am the son in spirit,” he says to himself further, “I can renounce the flesh and destroy it.” And to that he answers, “I was born by the spirit in the flesh. Such was the will of my father, and therefore I cannot oppose his will.”
“But, if you cannot satisfy your desires in the flesh and cannot renounce the flesh,” he says to himself further, “then you should work for the flesh and savor all of the pleasures that it gives you.” And to that he answers, “I cannot satisfy the desires of the flesh and cannot renounce the flesh, but my life becomes almighty within the spirit of my father and therefore in the flesh I should serve and work for the one spirit alone—the spirit of the father.”
And convincing himself that the life of man can only be within the father, Jesus leaves the wilderness and begins to preach to the people. He says that the spirit is within him, that from now on heaven is wide open and that the heavenly powers are united with man, that free and endless life has begun for people, and that all people, no matter how unlucky they might be in the flesh, may be blessed.