Beyond Dogma: The True Teachings of Jesus & Christ Consciousness with Aaron Abke
Ep 55

Beyond Dogma: The True Teachings of Jesus & Christ Consciousness with Aaron Abke

Show Notes: 

 

This week, Tonya Papanikolov is joined by spiritual teacher Aaron Abke for a profound discussion that explores the roots of mystical Christianity, the historical Jesus, Christ consciousness, and the deeper meanings behind key spiritual texts. Aaron shares insights from his journey as a third-generation pastor’s kid, his exploration of religious and mystical traditions, and his work at 4D University, weaving together perspectives from both scholarship and lived spiritual practice.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Aaron’s journey from evangelical pastor’s kid to founder of 4D University (and proud new dad!)
  • Why the original followers of Jesus—the Nazarenes—were labeled heretics and what this means for modern faith
  • The misunderstood split between Jewish and Gentile Christianity (and how Greco-Roman culture shaped theology)
  • Jesus and the Essenes: communal living, vegetarianism, and why Jesus overturned the sacrificial system
  • The practical spiritual laws at the heart of the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and more
  • “God as Law”—a universal perspective on karma, forgiveness, and free will
  • The real meaning of Christ consciousness & how to live it daily through three forms of prayer
  • What ancient prophecy, the “2012 Shift,” and our current collective awakening have in common
  • Surprising historical evidence about Mary Magdalene’s role and the sacred masculine-feminine union
  • Practical advice for contemplative, affirmative, and passive prayer to deepen spiritual connection

Connect with Aaron Abke:

Connect with Tonya:

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Show Transcript:

Tonya [00:00:00]: Hi Aaron, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the Rainbo Podcast.

Aaron Abke [00:00:05]: Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be with you.

Tonya [00:00:07]: I would first of all love to hear about who you are if you want to share that with our audience. And I love to start every episode with what is something in your day or week that has been sparking a sense of gratitude for you?

Aaron Abke [00:00:21]: Well, that's an easy question for me right now because I have a 8 month old little baby girl and experiencing fatherhood for the first time and yeah, just taking advantage of every moment I can to have with her, mostly usually in the evenings after the work day. And I just look forward to it all day. I just can't wait to get with my little baby girl and just play with her and kiss her and love her and experience life through her. It's just an amazing thing to be around a newborn and just the incredible innocence and purity of their perception of everything and really trying to soak a lot of that innocence up and maybe more so remember that kind of innocence within myself. I think children really bring out that purity within us.

Tonya [00:01:03]: Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you're doing with 4D University, how you got into this line of work?

Aaron Abke [00:01:14]: Oh boy. Well, I'm a third generation pastor's kid, so I grew up in Evangelical Christianity and wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps most of my life. And so I went to Bible college, graduated with a degree in theology, started my pastoring career at 23, and then had this big awakening out of religion at 24 due to mostly the church I was working at at the time. And once I was willing to question the religious depiction of God I grew up with, I really dove into all these different traditions that were up to that point deemed evil and heretical. And I was forbidden from exploring. And I found a lot of incredible things about the Christian tradition actually by studying other traditions. Most notably that the teachings of Yeshua or Jesus bear so much resemblance to all the other Enlightenment teachings of figures like Buddha and Lao Tzu and Krishna and so forth. And so I came back full circle to kind of mystical Christianity. About seven or eight years later, after studying Eastern philosophy almost exclusively, I kind of came back home again to the teachings of Jesus. But with this new context of understanding non duality and Eastern Enlightenment teachings and seeing Jesus now through that lens, I was finally able to make sense out of Jesus and his teachings. And so in any case, what I do now is I have an online platform called 40University, where I create all these different programs and courses for these different teachings that have really helped me to find freedom from my own suffering. So to find real relationship and union with God that anybody can enjoy and participate in if they're willing to put in the work to cleanse the obstructions in the system that are preventing us from fully enjoying that union. And so I pull mostly from texts such as the Law of One and A Course in Miracles. I would put the I am discourses of Saint Germain in that category. And then a lot of mystical Christian texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Didache, the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. And I just kind of weave them all together because to me, they all really say the same things in their own unique ways. I like using the phrase the Law of One to describe it the best, because the Law of One perfectly summarizes Jesus's gospel to me. Jesus was very clear. The greatest commandment is this single commandment. Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. And if you do this, you fulfill the entire law in one commandment. And Jesus taught this law in parables and direct teachings such as Luke 6:37, Judge and you'll be judged. Condemn and you'll be condemned. Forgive and you'll be forgiven, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back. That's the Law of one. And so the Law of One really is the framework of all, everything that I teach, because I think it's just easier for me personally to understand divine principles through the philosophy of law itself. Meaning there is no deity up there who's choosing a rule set or something, or who's choosing who to judge and who to forgive moment by moment. God is law, not a person. God is not a changeful being that has potential and actuality that changes over time. God is law, unchangeable and immutable. And so only by understanding these divine laws can we really have loving relationship with the universe, because otherwise we will just kind of ignorantly continue to violate and imbalance these laws in ways that always come back down upon us, because the universe is perfect and can't be imbalanced. So any attempted violations we have of the divine law, which would be doing harm to something else, always comes back upon us. The violation comes back upon the violator in due time. And that's what we call karma. So I like to simplify spiritual teachings through this framework. And again, mostly relying on the teachings of Jesus and, and the philosophy of law as it pertains to ontology, metaphysics, I Think it's just easiest to understand the universe as a game with rules that we have to learn and abide by. And the path becomes a lot more simple, I think, once we understand those rules.

Tonya [00:05:20]: Can you elaborate a little bit about what you mean by God being law? What does that mean exactly?

Aaron Abke [00:05:27]: Yeah, it's a great question. To me, what it means to say that God is law is very simple. It just means that what we call law is really just God's nature. Meaning the reason that doing harm to another sentient being requires that same degree of harm to come back upon you is because the nature of God is love. And so there is no harm in love. Love cannot do harm. Love can only heal, help, and bless. And this is one of the immutable characteristics of God's nature. We call it omnibenevolence. Omnibenevolence means God is all loving, all benevolent, meaning everything that the Creator does is for the flourishing and the health and the life of creation, and never to the harm or the damage of creation. And so when you try to harm creation, you are violating God's nature. And because God's nature can't be violated, once again, those violations have to be paid off by you. Meaning you have to experience the consequences of your own harm. Because oneness means that there's really just you here. And so every person you harm, even an animal or any sentient being, is just another manifestation or extension of your own being. And so we're here to learn these rules or laws which are really just what God's nature is like. And when we understand what God is like, God's ontology, then it informs our awareness of the universe in a way that makes it very childlike and simple. It's like, hey, man, God is love. So just don't judge anybody, forgive everyone, let people be where they are and. And just try to be of service. And in the same way that harm always comes back upon you, service also always comes back upon you, Meaning giving is multiplying, giving is increasing, because that's also God's nature, which makes it one of God's laws that it is impossible to bless another person or sentient being without yourself receiving that same blessing. And so the law works both ways. And so I think it just creates a perfect canvas for free will to be explored and enjoyed when you have the same consequence to the positive or negative, negative end of how you relate to the law. I think the Creator couldn't have possibly invented a more fair and balanced universe than that.

Tonya [00:07:44]: That's beautiful. Thank you. I guess one question I've always had. I also grew up in a. My family was Orthodox, Orthodox Macedonian, and we were kind of brought into a Catholic school system and that whole piece. And as I have really rediscovered my own relationship with God and Jesus and just everything over the past, say, 10 years, I will have conversations with my sister sometimes, and she's like, well, who was Jesus? Was he a real man? And when you were going back into really understanding what his true message was, how can you be assured? Or where does the true text of his message lay? And is it within? Have you had to really read between the lines or find certain texts that have been unadultered or unchanged? And then from that, too, where has mainstream Christianity misinterpreted his message?

Aaron Abke [00:08:41]: Would you say, yeah, this is a big one, man. This is a big subject. Since you brought up Catholicism, I would actually start there because we know that the first Gentile Church tradition was the Catholic Orthodox Catholic Church. You know, I think the best way to explain this is to help people understand the difference between the two cultures we're dealing with. When we're talking about the Christian tradition, we have the Greco Roman Gentile tradition and the Hebrew Aramaic tradition of Jesus and his actual disciples. And most people don't know this, but there was actually a Christianity before Paul and the Gentile Catholic tradition. There was an original brand of Christianity which scholars refer to as Jewish Christianity, in that the very first disciples of Jesus were called Nazarenes, not Christians. That term was a much later term. And that's because, of course, Jesus was called the Nazarene. Nazarios in Greek and Netzara in Hebrew. And this word means keeper of the law. And this was a sect of Judaism that Jesus was involved, was a part of, and emerged out of. And we have multiple attestations from early church fathers corroborating this as early as the second century. And we have a lot of first century attestations, such as the book of Acts, Acts 24:5 says, Paul is on trial and he's accused of being the ringleader of the Nazarene sect in the Book of Acts. And this is, of course, in the first century. And Paul says, yes, I am in fact a follower of the Way, which they call a sect. So that's the Nazarene sect. And so this puts to rest a lot of the debate in. In Christianity for, you know, centuries, millennia, that, oh, no, Jesus, the Nazarene, that's not an actual sect of Judaism. That's just a designation of the town where he was from Nazareth, right? Well, scholars now know especially Jewish Christianity, scholars such as Hugh Seanfield and James Tabor and so many others I could mention who've dug into this, Helmut Kester, Elaine Pagels, they pull out this idea that Nazareth is almost certainly a later kind of obfuscation attempt from the Catholic Church to hide and obfuscate the fact that the Catholic Church, within a hundred years of Jesus's death, turned around and persecuted the Nazarene Christians as heretics and officially labeled them heretics, outlawed their books, burned their books, banned any kind of practice of Nazarene Christianity from Rome. And you can imagine the head scratching that would have gone on from this where people are like, hey, you know, I'm reading this decree that Nazarene Christianity is officially heretical. But wasn't Jesus called a Nazarene? Seems a little bit weird to call his, the sect he emerged from heretical. And so this is the best way to describe it for people is that when you have a Hebrew Jewish Messiah, Jesus Yeshua, the Nazarene Yeshua hamashiach, who was seen by all his followers as being exactly that. Jesus was the Davidic Messiah who the Scriptures foretold. And every Hebrew prophecy of the Messiah from Isaiah 11, Daniel 7, Jeremiah, all the prophecies of the Messiah are that he will be a man, the Son of man, which means a person who will be the Messiah of God, the chosen, appointed Messiah of God. So Jesus's first Jewish disciples, James, Peter, John, Thomas, all of them, they did not see Jesus as being God or exclusively God in human form. They would have all seen that as the ultimate blasphemy to say such a thing, that God can be a person. The Old Testament has numerous verses where God says, I am not a man, God is not a man, God cannot be a man, God cannot be a person. And so the Jewish people had this idea that God was a transcendent deity that could never appear in a physical form. How are you going to limit an omnipotent eternal God into one single physical form? It's ontologically fallacious and impossible. So they didn't believe Jesus was God. They believed he was the Messiah of God, a messenger of God. And so you try to imagine taking that idea to the gentile Greco Roman world where as we know, the Greeks, the pagans had numerous demigods who pre exist in the heavens with Zeus or whoever, and they incarnate into human form. They perform miracles and signs and wonders and then they sometimes die and get resurrected and they ascend back to heaven. Apollos Heracles, Perseus, and many, many others we can name all have these archetypes. And so the Greeks are used to these powerful demigods incarnating into human form. So why would a Gentile world be the least bit impressed by a human Messiah who got crucified? It's just not impressive to a Greek. They're like, oh cool, you can keep your pathetic Jewish crucified Messiah. I'll stick with our powerful demigods who pre exist with Zeus and incarnate into human form and do miracles. We're good. We don't need your Messiah. And so you can understand why Paul and the later Gentile Christians who were trying to evangelize Christianity to the Greco Roman world, they had to keep updating Jesus over time to match point for point all the other pagan deities who the Greeks were used to. And what they did was they actually made Jesus even greater than the pagan deities. Because to the Greco Romans there was still a bit of a hylomorphic distinction between a true God and a demigod. There was like a half and half nature. And the Gentile Christians did this impossible thing where they said, no, Jesus was fully God and fully man at the same time. And you're just like, wait, so you're telling me Jesus was fully square and fully circle? How are you going to reconcile that claim metaphysically? How does someone become fully and completely God and fully and completely man? Like that is a contradiction, my friends. You cannot have something be finite and infinite at the same time. But that's what Christianity had to do. The Trinity, the pre existence of Christ, These are conclusions in search of an argument. You can't justify these claims metaphysically, ontologically, in any way. They violate every law of logic and reason we know of. But you have to say these things to have your theological cake and eat it too. So when you understand that this is how Jesus became God in the Gentile tradition, and you study that against the Jewish tradition, Jewish Christian tradition, you realize there are two very different forms of Christianity. And so what I do is I study the scholarship of the Bible and of especially Jewish Christianity. I have a degree, a bachelor's degree in theology, but I'm currently taking my Master's in Religious Studies. And I read a lot of the original Hebrew in the Old Testament and all I can say is like, if you haven't actually learned some Hebrew and can look at and read the Bible, the Old Testament in Hebrew and start soaking up the thought system of this ancient culture, you cannot fully appreciate how what a Wild and flagrant deviation Christianity today represents from the original Judaism of Jesus and his disciples. There is no question whatsoever Jesus would have torn his shirt in half and protested in rage if he had seen what came of his teachings. And 2000 years later that they deified him and made him a God. And all this stuff. And what they did is that they completely overlooked the message of Jesus and they just made the messenger into a God to be worshiped. And yet this is where I really decided to leave Christianity at 24 is because I started reading the red letters, the teachings of Jesus with a little more discernment and going, I don't see a single claim in any of the four canonical gospels or even anything that approaches a claim of Jesus saying, you have to confess me as your personal Lord and Savior, or you have to believe in my death and resurrection to be saved, or my blood is going to atone for your sins. Nothing of the sort whatsoever. But what we do have Jesus saying over and over and over in every single Gospel is if you want to be forgiven by God, you must forgive your brothers and sisters. And if you don't forgive others their trespasses and your heavenly Father cannot forgive yours, and I love that Jesus said, cannot forgive yours versus like God is going to be upset with you and will refuse to do it. You know, this isn't like a free will decision on God's part. Jesus said, you're basically tying God's hands. Why? Because God is law and the law only works in one direction. So what you hold against somebody else, you're given the right to do that. You have all the free will you want to judge, harm, hold things against people who for sure, it's a free will universe. But what you don't have is the luxury of avoiding the consequences of doing those things. You must experience the consequences of judging, condemning and hating people. And so Jesus taught this over and over and over. Forgive and you'll be forgiven. Repent and turn your heart to God and God gladly forgives you. Jesus walked around telling people their sins were forgiven. When he saw that they had a righteous, humble and repentant heart, he was like, hey, just so you know, you, your sins are forgiven. Jesus says this to the thief on the cross, famously right, who doesn't confess Jesus as Lord, who doesn't believe in his death and resurrection, who doesn't say the Nicene Creed. He just looks to Jesus and says, I'm getting what I deserve because I'm a sinner. I really did steal from people. And this is a Just punishment. But this man has done nothing wrong, and he is innocent. And then he says, remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom. And that's all Jesus needed to know that this guy was going to be in paradise with him. He's like, hey, you've got humility. You've got repentance. You're going to be with me in paradise. And there's no twisting this right. Even after Jesus rises from the dead, he doesn't tell people to believe in his resurrection. But in Luke 24, the Great Commission, in Luke 24, he says to his disciples, now go and preach to all the nations. Repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And he rises up. It's like, where's. Confess me as Lord and Savior. Believe in my death and resurrection and that. It's just go and teach everybody to repent, to have their sins forgiven, repent and be baptized. As he says at the beginning, Jesus taught a very clear Gospel. Every time he was asked, lord, what do I got to do to enter eternal life? Jesus said, keep the commandments. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And if you do this, you fulfill the entire law. So how do we get from that to, oh, no, all that stuff will send you to hell. If you just forgive people, but you don't confess Jesus, you burn in hell forever. If you just repent and turn your heart to God, but you don't confess Jesus, you burn in hell forever. It's like, how did we get from that to this? And it's through this pagan Gentile tradition where they had to keep upping the ante over the first few hundred years of Christianity to make this gospel appealing to a gentile world. And when you continue that, you know, like, you've probably seen how they do the two lines, and you just deviate one line like a half a degree, but then extrapolate that out 2000 years, and now we're hundreds of miles apart in our theology.

Tonya [00:19:52]: Yeah. Whoa. So what? Yeah, it's like, we're going. Right.

Aaron Abke [00:19:58]: Told you. Is a lot.

Tonya [00:20:00]: What else about the Nazarene way? Or. I don't know the exact word, but here his.

Aaron Abke [00:20:06]: Yeah, I like that.

Tonya [00:20:07]: What is it about? Was it a lifestyle? How did Jesus eat? How did he live? What was that like?

Aaron Abke [00:20:14]: This is a really fun topic to nerd out on. A lot of people know that Jesus was an Essene, right? We've all heard that term, but it's a difficult term to use from a scholarship perspective because The Dead Sea scroll group that we classically call Essenes definitely did not call themselves Essenes. There is no such word anywhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls in any of the manuscripts. The only designation that shows up in the Dead Sea Scrolls as something that paleographers and scholars identify as, hey, this looks like a self designation of, like, this is what the group was calling themselves is Pesharu al adad ha abionim. So it's the congregation of the poor ones. The ebionim means the poor ones. And we know this is very much harkens back to the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And many times in the Gospels, Jesus tells people who show a lot of, let's say, potential to be his disciple. He says, hey, if you want to be made perfect, sell all you possess, give it to the poor, and then come follow me. And we typically read that as if Jesus was just kind of giving bad financial advice to people of, hey, get rid of all your possessions and then be my disciple and physically follow me around. But he wasn't saying that it was an invitation to join his community, because in the book of Acts, we know In Acts chapter 2, it describes what the first Jesus church led by his brother James. James the justice was like. And it said they all lived in common in a community together. They all gave up all of their possessions to the community, and they shared all the money together so that there was no need that was not met. And they shared in prayer and thanksgiving together each day. And they just lived in a community. Right. Well, this is the only Jewish sect on record we know of who lived in this way, which is called voluntary poverty or communalistic living, except until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 and they started unpacking what's in these texts. There's a. Probably the most prominent text of the sectarian manuscripts is called the Community Rule. And it seems to be the kind of liturgical rule set for this Dead Sea scroll group. And let me just give you a couple snippets of it to show you the striking parallels to the Jesus movement. This Dead Sea scroll group that identifies themselves as the congregation of the poor. They were a apocalyptic, messianic baptizing group. All three of those are shared in common with the Jesus group. They all believed the end times were coming soon. Right? That's apocalyptic. They all believed the Messiah was coming, which was Jesus. And they believed in baptism, water baptism, as an alternative to animal sacrifice at the Temple. So this group, the Dead Sea scroll group and the Jesus group both rejected the temple, an animal sacrifice as an abomination and a defilement of God's temple. Famously, Jesus in the Gospels goes into the temple, right, and he cleanses the temple. He unlocks all the cages of the animals and lets all the animals run out. And then he uses the prophecy from Isaiah and Jeremiah saying, it is written my house should be called a house of prayer, but you have turned it into a den of thieves. And the word thieves in English is not the correct translation in our Bible because he's quoting from Jeremiah. I think 31 can't remember the reference, but the word in Hebrew that Jesus would have said in Hebrew is the word paritz, which means a violent shredder. Or the fourth and final definition of the word is a robber who is violent. So like a robber who beats you up when he robs from you. The other three definitions are like murderer, shredder, killer. So what Jesus was really saying is, you've turned my father's house into a den of murderers.

Tonya [00:23:55]: Was this in relation to the animals?

Aaron Abke [00:23:58]: Oh, yes.

Tonya [00:23:59]: Okay.

Aaron Abke [00:23:59]: I mean, those are the only beings being murdered in the temple. But I'll do you one better than that. In the book of Matthew twice, Jesus quotes the most famous anti sacrifice prophecy from Hosea 6, 6. And he says to the Pharisees, he says, go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. The knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. And then he says, if you knew what this meant, you would not have condemned the innocent. And you're like, oh, what a clear reference to the animals, right? Jesus could not have possibly been meaning the priests who are the ones slitting the throat of the goats over and over all day. They're not innocent. They're committing murder. The people who are offering the sacrifice are obviously not innocent. That's why they're offering a sacrifice, because they're sinners, right? The only innocent being in the equation of an animal sacrifice between the priest, the person and the animal is the animal. They're completely innocent. And Jesus is pointing this out in the freaking Bible we have today that we read in church. He's defending animal rights and it's just totally glossed over. So this group, this Qumran group, rejected the temple, just like Jesus. They were apocalyptic, messianic and baptismal. But when they described their liturgical structure, they say, our community will be led by a teacher of righteousness. That was the name of their leader. Surrounded by 12 council members, aka disciples, and three appointed priests, which we know for Jesus were James, Peter and John. These three names, James, Peter and John, are mentioned together many, many times in the New Testament. And they're never said to be the chief priests of Jesus's group, but they're always mentioned together, which kind of lets us know these were probably the three most appointed disciples Jesus had. So, wow, just right there, a ton of parallels. But then you add the communalistic living and voluntary poverty, this Qumran group and the Dead Sea Scrolls, it literally says word for word in some sections what it says in the Book of Acts, that those who join our community will give all their possessions to the community and share everything in common. That's exactly what the Book of Acts says that the Jesus Church was doing. And so you take all these things together, all these threads and connection points, and say there are no other Jewish sects, not the Pharisees, not the Sadducees, not the Zadokites, not the Herodians that practice any of these. Not even just some of them, any of them. Apocalypticism, water baptism, believing in the Messiah, appearing in this day and age, communalistic living, voluntary poverty, all of these beliefs are completely unique to the Jesus community of the first century and the Dead Sea scroll group. So that's pretty shocking to scholars who say, okay, so even if we're not going to say that the Jesus church we see in the Book of Acts is identical to the Dead Sea scroll group, at a minimum, we have to say this church or Jesus movement emerged out of this Essene type of Judaism. And so Essenism is actually seen now by scholars to be kind of a catch all term for this brand of Judaism of which there are many different sects. There's the Nazarenes, the Ossenes, the Carmelites, the Mandeans, and a bunch of other ones, I'm forgetting Alkacites, all these different groups in the Transjordan region. But what they all have in common is they all have the same exact beliefs and practices. They all reject the Temple, they're all strict vegetarians, they all practice baptism as an atonement ritual, alternatively to the Temple. And so in the first century, you can imagine, wow, there's like a dozen different ascetic Jewish Christian groups in the Transjordan. What word can we use to refer to them all? And Essenes became this kind of catch all term for these ascetic communities in the Transjordan that see Jesus as the Messiah, reject sacrifice, are strict vegetarians. And so to answer your question of like, how did Jesus eat and his Disciples. Well, we know, based on multiple church fathers as early as the second century, say that James, the brother of Jesus, was a strict vegetarian from birth. He was raised as a vegetarian, it says. So Mary and Joseph raised James to be a strict vegetarian. I believe Origen or another church father says in one of their writings that all of the disciples of Jesus were vegetarians and forbid the eating of meat. In the oldest gospel account we have, which is the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, which we only have like 48 surviving quotes from that gospel in tiny manuscript fragments. But in the ones we do have, Jesus is quoted as saying, and by the way, this dates to about 30 to 50 AD, so it's easily the earliest gospel record we have of Jesus. And in the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, which is purported to have been written by the disciple Matthew himself, that's what all the church fathers say. Matthew wrote that Jesus said to the priests at the temple, I have come to abolish sacrifices, and until you cease from sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from you. And that's a huge quote because we know that the Essenes, these ascetic Jews that rejected the temple, this is what they were saying. They were all saying, hey, the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, has been corrupted by the lying pen of the scribes. Jeremiah 8, 8. To institute these pagan practices of animal sacrifices, which Moses never commanded from the beginning. Jeremiah 7:21. And so we reject the temple and we reject most of the Torah because it's all been contaminated. And they said, this is the reason why you, the Jews, the Jewish people, have been in slavery and captivity your entire history. Basically. First the Egyptians, then the Babylonians, then the Assyrians, now the Romans. Everybody's capturing the Jewish people. You know, it's like the new hobby in town was to kidnap the Jews and stuff. It's like, why are they always being sold into slavery and captivity, always being conquered? And the Essenes said, it's because you have defiled the law of God with paganism through animal sacrifices. And until you stop this demonic, barbaric system of slaughtering animals for atonement, as if God wants bloodshed for atonement, you will not stop being kept in captivity. And when you read the Old Testament, the prophets, I remember being like 16 years old reading some of these prophets that say, you do not delight in sacrifice, or else I would be giving it. The sacrifice of God is a repentant and humble heart. And this, O God, you will never despise. And all through the Old Testament it says, repentance, repentance repentance. God wants your heart. So repent and turn your heart to God. And God says over and over, I will gladly forgive you of all your sins if you repent and turn your heart to me, I will cast your sins as far as the east is from the West. God says, I will remember them no more. I will blot them out as if they never occurred. And so then you're like, how do you factor animal sacrifice into that message? You can't. They're irreconcilable. Right? There are these two separate atonement doctrines in the Old Testament. One that says you have to slaughter animals to be forgiven, and the other that says you just have to repent and turn your heart to God to be forgiven. And Jesus carried that atonement doctrine into the New Testament and said, repent and forgive others and you'll be forgiven. He's trying to restore Mosaic Law back to the Jewish people who had deviated so far away from the heart of the law because of these ritual, man made laws and animal sacrifices. And Jesus came and condemned the sacrifices, emptied the temple, pronounced condemnation on all of it, and always pointed his finger at the priestly class for being hypocrites, for inverting the laws of God and upholding the traditions of men instead of the traditions of God. And so scholars know now that this was a community Jesus emerged from, that these ideas were not unique to Jesus, as if he was the only guy walking around with these ideas. He was just the boldest and the wisest and the most courageous probably of his group, and knew that I can be the fulfillment of these scriptures. I can be the Messiah. I'm going to go bring this message to. To the Jewish people in Jerusalem. And so he made his way from the Galilean, Transjordan region, eventually to Jerusalem, where he cleanses the temple. And then in the Book of Mark, it Sundays, in Mark 11:18, after Jesus said these things, the priests sought how they would put him to death. So right there, it says in the Bible, in the oldest gospel in the Bible, the Book of Mark, it says the reason Jesus got crucified is because he cleansed and opposed the temple. And that makes all the sense in the world. It's like, yeah, this was. That'd be like going into Pfizer and, like, pronouncing condemnation. I'm going to tear this whole company down. It's like, oh, yeah, they're going to get rid of you, bro.

Tonya [00:32:46]: Yeah.

Aaron Abke [00:32:46]: And that was the temple of Jesus's day. It was like the Big pharma, big ag, central banking system. It was all of it kind of wrapped into one.

Tonya [00:32:53]: Can you clarify what this animal sacrifice is? Was this ritualistic? Were they eating these animals after? Or was this separate, kind of like they just kill them in order to repent? Does this relate to consuming animals?

Aaron Abke [00:33:08]: Essentially, yeah, it does. From what I've understood from my research, not all sacrifices would be eaten. So there's a word called. I think it's olah in Hebrew, which is a whole burnt offering. And that's where you just put the cow on the altar and light the whole thing on fire until it's just ash. But then there's sacrifices where you slit the goat's throat and you can read it in Leviticus. It's totally disgusting. It's like open the goat's neck and spew the blood everywhere and sprinkle it on all the sides and ugh. And then it's a forgiveness atonement offering for your forgiveness. And then they would take that goat and they would butcher it and eat it. The family would eat it later. So a lot of the sacrifices, yes, would be eaten. And this is another huge piece of evidence of how anti sacrifice, anti meat consumption that Jesus anti his disciples probably were. Again, we have a ton of attestation from church fathers saying that all the Nazarenes were all vegetarians and the very first Christians were called Nazarenes. Epiphanius says this, Eusebius says this, a bunch more say this. So all the Nazarenes were vegetarians. Hmm. Kind of hard to imagine Jesus wasn't a vegetarian if all of his first followers were. That's the first piece of evidence. Kind of hard to imagine Jesus wasn't vegetarian when his blood brother was raised vegetarian. In the Book of Acts, chapter 10, Peter has this kind of famous vision where it says that a sheet comes down from heaven and there's every kind of animal on the sheet, every kind of living creature. And Peter hears a voice say, rise, Peter. Kill and eat. And interestingly, Peter responds to the voice in the vision and says, not so, Lord, for from my birth I have never eaten anything that is unclean. And he's looking at a field of animals. He's saying, no, Lord, I've never eaten these unclean things before. Kind of hard to construe that any other way than Peter saying, I'm a vegetarian. I've never eaten animals. Because this was the belief that eating living, sentient being that God created. Eating the flesh of a sentient being is unclean. It's detestable before God to do that. So then you have all of those attestations. And then I think one of the biggest pieces of evidence is in the book of Acts, chapter 15, when Paul is in a trial before James, the just the brother of Jesus, who, again, we know, was the appointed successor of Jesus. Jesus hand selected his brother to be his successor. And all of the attestations of James we have are just remarkable to read. Everybody from Josephus to Hegesippus, Eusebius, Epiphanius, they all write about James as, like, the most righteous man who ever lived of his day. He was just like a little bit under Jesus in people's eyes. And I think it's really cool to know that, you know, there was a lot more enlightenment in Mary and Joseph's DNA than just went to Jesus. But Jesus had a very enlightened brother, and he ruled the Jesus church. He led the Jesus church for almost 30 years before he was eventually stoned to death by the opposition Herodian priest who was jealous of James. James was like the people's priest who they appointed. And so in the Book of Acts, chapter 15, Paul is on trial and they're trying to decide, hey, should we tell Gentiles that are converting to Christianity that they have to follow the Torah and obey all of the observances? And James, very Nazarene of him, says, no, they don't have to follow all the Torah. But here are four things you must tell them that they must do if they want to be called Nazarene Christians like us. Here's four requirements you must tell them. And three out of the four requirements are about not eating meat. He says, abstain from eating any meat sacrificed to an idol. Abstain from anything with blood. That's all meat has blood in it. And then anything that's been strangled. And then the fourth criteria is sexual fornication. So abstain from sexual fornication. And we know that one was probably because the Greeks were kind of known for a lot of sexual fornication and free love and all this stuff, that they didn't have the same kind of rigidity about sexual purity that the Jewish people had. So that's what the brother of Jesus tells Paul when he says they don't have to follow anything except for these four criteria. It's, like, hard to imagine that James, who is the closest reflection we have to Yeshua, and what Yeshua was like, what he believed, what he would have practiced. James was trying to carry forward the ministry of Jesus, his brother. And so we see a Powerful reflection of what the historical Yeshua must have been like. And it's clearly vegetarian anti sacrifice. It's the Edenic ideal that is in the Old Testament that says from the beginning God ordained man to eat the plants and the herbs of the field, the fruits of the trees, the honey of the bees. That this is the created order is that to live in God's universe does not require murder. You don't have to go kill a sentient being to live in God's universe, because God is a God of life, not of death. And so vegetables, cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, these are products of plants that are meant to be eaten. You know, bell peppers have the seeds in them, tomatoes have the seeds in them. Cucumbers to spread around fruits of the trees are meant to be eaten by the trees. To us, we spread their seeds is a symbiotic relationship. And you can even if you wanted to, you could even add in eggs and milk into that equation if you do it according to natural law. And you're raising these animals with love and care and no forced insemination and all this horrible stuff, but you're just giving them a place to live. You're giving them food and shelter, protection from predators, and in return they give you some of their eggs and some of their milk. It's always meant to be a giving and receiving mutual reciprocity that doesn't death. And so I'm very convinced, based on the historical evidence and just the spiritual principles Jesus taught, that he would have definitely been against the consumption of flesh.

Tonya [00:38:50]: And what about fish? Like that would have been. It's not blood. It sounds like that's a. Yeah.

Aaron Abke [00:38:56]: Do fish not have blood?

Tonya [00:38:57]: Fish don't have blood. No.

Aaron Abke [00:39:00]: I've never thought about that until now. I think you're right.

Tonya [00:39:03]: Yeah, no, they don't.

Aaron Abke [00:39:05]: You're totally right. That's super interesting.

Tonya [00:39:07]: Yeah.

Aaron Abke [00:39:08]: Well, on the fish thing, I don't really know for sure. I would lean towards no because it is flesh technically. But I can see a scenario where that would have been okay with Jesus because fish don't suffer anywhere near like a cow or a goat suffers being kept in captivity and factory farms and stuff. I don't think fish probably have as much capacity for psychological suffering as a cow does. And usually when you catch a fish, it's like it just suffocates within a minute or so and that's it. So I can see some justification for maybe we can eat some fish here and there. I don't know for sure. But the only passage that has Jesus eating fish in the Gospels. That's always pointed to is at the end of the Book of John when it says he's cooking fish by the beach and the disciples find him there and they sit down and have a conversation. And scholars are in unanimous agreement that the chapter 21 of John is a much later addition to John from like the mid or late second century. Because if you read the book of John, chapter 20, and you read the end of chapter 20, it actually reads like the conclusion of the book. You're like, oh, what a great ending. Then there's another chapter tacked onto it. And chapter 21 has like 40 or 50 unique Greek words that don't appear in the rest of John and that are mostly like 2nd century Greek words. So scholars are pretty sure that chapter 21 looks like a definite late addition to the Gospel of John. And even the Gospel of John itself is not considered a historical account of Jesus by any secular scholars I know of. It's definitely seen more like theology and narrative form, because the sayings of Jesus and John are very different than the synoptics. In the synoptics, Jesus is like, shh, don't tell anybody who I am. Like, keep it a secret. And he doesn't ever claim to be God or be I am this, I am that. He doesn't make any of those statements in the synoptics. But in John, it's like all he does is say, I'm the way, the truth and the life. I'm the bread of life, I'm the resurrection and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. It seems to be a later gentile theological update of Jesus, probably in the early second century. So John is not historically a reliable text anyways, but especially chapter 21 is seen as a later edition. So it's definitely not evidence that Jesus ate fish, in my opinion. But that doesn't mean that he may not have been okay with it. I think it's undoubtedly clear that he would have been much more against the consumption of land animal flesh, especially pertaining to the sacrificial system.

Tonya [00:41:32]: Yeah, I want to pivot us a little bit because there's still two topics I want to dive into with you. Can you tell us a little bit about Christ consciousness as a force and something that exists outside of dogma and this invitation that Jesus had for us to be in our hearts? And what does that mean? And how would you define Christ consciousness?

Aaron Abke [00:41:53]: Yeah, I love talking about this topic because this is to me what the whole gospel of Jesus was about Jesus wanted us to follow him and to emulate him. And I believe Jesus was clearly setting an example for us that we were to follow. Like a blueprint, sort of. And so when we read any of the stories of Jesus, we can see them as archetypal blueprints for all of humanity for every one of us, such as the 40 days in the wilderness, for example, or even the crucifixion. Like the way Jesus goes through the crucifixion is a story version of. It's a storytelling of Christ consciousness. Meaning these gospels are showing us what Christ consciousness looks like in action in these kinds of situations when it comes to his crucifixion. The way that Jesus goes through the entire process with no resistance, right, and refusing to judge his persecutors is like a living example of how the Christ consciousness in us moves through persecution, suffering, the dark night of the soul. The Christ in us does not resist and does not judge, you know, And Jesus demonstrated that by going through the most torturous death ceremony imaginable, basically, and doing it all with love and forgiveness in his heart. And so to me, the sort of Catholic picture of Jesus with his arms outstretched on the cross, it really is the ultimate picture of enlightenment, isn't it? Because we have Jesus forgiving his murderers while they murdered him. And, you know, maybe the Buddha could have done that, maybe Krishna could have done that, maybe some other enlightened beings could have done that. I don't know. But that's the point, is that we don't know. We only have the testimony of Yeshua the Nazarene, that at least one man was able to prove this is possible. This level of Christ consciousness, of enlightenment is possible because if he can do it, we can do it, right? And that, I think, is the message of Jesus from the start is be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Strive to enter through the narrow way. Jesus said, for broad is the road that leads to destruction. The word for strive in the Greek is agonizomai, which means to struggle with great effort and difficulty. And so Jesus is trying to say, hey, the way to eternal life is not easy. It requires you to daily die to yourself and take up your cross and crucify your ego on the cross of love every day if you want to be my disciple. The way is hard. And so that is Jesus's description, I think, of the path of Christ consciousness. It is a daily dying to the ego self and taking up the identity of the Christian. And so to your question of what is the Christ what does that term really mean? I think that's where the Book of John comes in and gives us a lot of good reflections. Because I think the Book of John is like a mystical insight. Even though it's not a historical text, it does serve as like a mystical insight into the consciousness of Jesus. Meaning I really do believe that inwardly Jesus knew I am the way, the truth and the life and all these things. I don't think Jesus would have historically walked around Palestine shouting these things around like he does in John, because he would have been crucified immediately for it or stoned immediately for it. I think Jesus was more like the Synoptics where he's like, shh, quiet, don't tell anybody, because he understands the world he's living in. But inwardly I do think Jesus knew I am the resurrection and the life, and it's the I am, right? That's what John gives us, is the I am statements of Jesus, that that is what Christ consciousness is. It is to know, as Jesus clearly knew, that the God presence in me is literally my own consciousness. Because in the book of Exodus, God reveals God's self identity to Moses. When Moses says, who should I say sent me, Lord? And God responds, tell them I am. That I am has sent you. And so that's the holy name, even in Judaism, is the I am. And what that really means metaphysically is that God is the first person in the present tense, I am. And so the fact that you are the first person in the present tense, meaning you never experience yourself as the second or the third person, as simple as that, is of like, yeah, it's always I. It's never they or you. When I talk about myself, it's always I, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty. That is God. That's the godly principle in all living beings, is that first person, present tense, I am consciousness. And that, that is the seed of all existence within us. And the more we come to know that principle, that, that awareness, that consciousness, that existence, that somehow I'm aware right now, and somehow I know that I'm aware as well, that's God within us. And so Christ consciousness is to shift your identity away from the false ego nature, the personal self, to the I am principle within us. Knowing that the only thing that's real of me, like even from an epistemological perspective, like the only thing I can know for sure, like for sure for sure, is I am. Like, everything else is technically kind of up for grabs, right? But nobody can deny I exist. And I think as simple as that is, is as powerful as it is. And Jesus, in the Book of John at least, is definitely demonstrating what the I am state looks like is that Jesus, when he makes these statements, is absolutely not speaking from a personal ego position, as Christians say. Right? Christians read I am the way, the truth, and the life, and they think that Jesus was making this statement about his physical body and his personhood of like me, the person. Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago in Nazareth, is the way, the truth and the life. It's like, no. In the synoptics, Jesus said, if anyone wants to be my disciple, first deny yourself, take up your cross, and then you can follow me. It's like, okay, so if Jesus was advocating for ego death to be his disciple, it stands to reason that Jesus probably had already done that himself. He had probably already denied himself. He'd probably already crucified his ego before he's commanding all his disciples to do it. So we know that Jesus was not speaking as a personal ego. And so how else can we interpret these sayings? Well, obviously he's speaking from the I am position itself. He's standing in the place of the I am, which is in all of us saying, I am the way. There's no other way to the Father, but through I am. And I think over time in translations, it's gotten really misconstrued, obviously. But you can go back to even the translations we have, and you can see those mystical gems. Jesus is packing in these statements, that these are universal statements that all of us can make with Jesus if we can access that I am state with Jesus.

Tonya [00:49:17]: There's so much to unpack in this whole episode. You are such a wealth of knowledge. What are the practical ways that people listening can embody this?

Aaron Abke [00:49:29]: Perfect question. Perfect question. This is the really fun part for me. I love to geek out on the scholarship and the philosophy and all that, but what really lights me up is like, hey, how do we embody this stuff and how do we live this stuff? And I just did a episode last week on the Jesus Way podcast that I think serves as the best kind of embodiment instruction for the Jesus Way, which to me is prayer. And what we talked about in that podcast is that there's really three sort of types of prayer or three ways we can pray, or three modes of prayer, if you like that word. And the first one we could call contemplative prayer. And contemplative prayer is the classic style of prayer for mystical Christians or mystical Christianity. And that's where you. There's different ways to do it. But let's just say you get into a kind of meditative state and you have some kind of anchor point, a mantra or a concept or an image that represents some aspect of God's nature, love, peace, beauty, joy, forgiveness, whatever. You choose an anchor point like that, and you meditate using that mantra, and you sort of contemplate in a very loose, childlike way, not like a hard intellectual type, but just in an open, playful way, like, what is love? What is God's love? And you kind of try to open your consciousness to receive new insights of the nature of God's love. And really those insights come in the form of feelings and impressions, right? More so than like concepts in the. In thought. But that's what contemplative prayer is. It's just like communing with God's nature in a kind of meditative way. That's one type of prayer. Another type of prayer, we could call active prayer or affirmative prayer. And this is, you know, law of attraction, manifestation style, where you have an intention, something you want to ask for. Jesus said in Mark 11:24, whatever things you ask for in prayer, just believe that you've already received them and they will be yours. Best law of attraction verse ever. There's Matthew 7:7, Ask and it shall be given. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Jesus taught active prayer in many different passages. And the formula is simple. Whatever you need from God, you just connect to the idea of it with an elevated emotion and gratitude. You say, oh, what would it be like to be fully healthy in my body? Or whatever you're praying for. And you go to the version of you that is fully healthy. Because in the mind of God, in the divine mind, everything is a divine idea. And so there is always the perfect blueprint of any divine idea, whether of man, of animal, doesn't matter, right? There's a perfect blueprint of your own self. There's a perfect idea of you. And you can call upon that idea by connecting to it. And so you kind of go within and experience what it's like to be at your dream job, right? This is the classic law of attraction. And you just enjoy that experience of imagining what my dream job feels like. And then you close by saying, thank you, Lord, I'm so grateful for this gift. I received this, Lord, I'm so grateful. And you just end with gratitude, as Jesus said. And then in every case I've done that, it always manifests in your life in some way that's the second type of prayer. And in that prayer, I think it's important to know we're not asking God for something because asking is always coming from a position of lack of, I don't have it, so I'm asking you for it. Instead, we get out of the position of a lacking self altogether, right? Abandon that position and just get into the field of infinite possibilities and know that all that the Father has is mine, as Jesus says. And so we just connect to what it is that excites us or what we want or need. And we say, thank you for it. And God says, let it be done according to your will. This is what Jesus taught. And the third type of prayer is my personal favorite practice for embodiment of Christ consciousness. And we could call it passive prayer if we want. So we have contemplative, active and passive prayer. Passive prayer is more of a. I don't know, you could call it like an attitude or a disposition that you carry throughout the day where you just try to remain aware as much as possible of the presence of God. That's it. Just a constant awareness of God's presence in you, with you, around you, in the person in front of you, in the wind, in the breeze. Everywhere is the manifest presence of God. But are you looking for it? Are you connecting to it? Are you celebrating and worshiping it? That's passive prayer is just to be in an attitude of being aware of God. And St Lawrence of the 17th century famously coined this as practicing the presence of God in his famous book, which I highly, highly recommend. Can't recommend enough for anybody looking to dive into mystical Christianity like this. And he just described how he did it, and he was famous for this, that his only spiritual practice, the only one he had, was this constant awareness of God's presence with him. And so there's stories told about St. Lawrence that he would be washing the dishes in the ashram or whatever, and he would be glowing with the presence of God while he's washing dishes, because he was qualifying that presence in his consciousness all day, every day, for years and decades. And so I think that is actually, of the three, is the most powerful and transformative form of practice. All three are used for different reasons, of course, and have different applications. But if you're just looking for the most bang for your buck of, hey, I want to raise my consciousness. I want to experience union with God. I would say just do this one thing. Just orient your entire life to. This is my one focus. I want to carry a. Even if it's Subtly in the background. I want there to always be an awareness of God's presence with me and the effects of that for opening that Christ consciousness, opening the heart chakra, accessing the I am state of awareness. It is the most powerful practice there is for doing that by far.

Tonya [00:55:45]: Thank you. Those are so practical and really, really beautiful. I want to also talk a little bit about 40 shift 2012. And when we think about in Jesus's time where there was this apocalyptic nature of the end, times are near, was that related to 2012? Was there some like universal karmic cycle that like really referring to the 2012 shift that many years before and then grounding it in today? A little bit. What's happening with this shift that we're all undergoing?

Aaron Abke [00:56:19]: Another excellent question. This topic is super important I think for people to understand how again the first century Jewish people understood these concepts and how different it is from our understanding of some of these concepts. If you ask a Christian about the end times or the rapture or whatever, or hell or any of these topics, they'll point to these verses that talk about the end of the age, even until the end of the age or through the next age or whatever. I'm trying to think of the verse in Revelation and the Greek word for that is aionios and it means literally an age or an epoch. And so this is the way that the ancient world, not just the Hebrews, but the Greeks, the pagans, every culture understood time as unfolding in epochs and ages, right? And so the end of the age in Jesus's day and the Dead Sea scroll group really confirms this in their sort of doom literature that they believe that their epoch, their age was coming to an end. And whether that's astrological or not is up for debate. I think it definitely was like they were looking at the stars to know when the ages are coming to an end. They probably knew about the 2000 year cycle and the procession of the equinox and all of that. But the Qumran group, especially when you read their apocalyptic literature, they're saying, hey, very, very soon, any day now, God is going to judge the sons of darkness on this planet. And so they believe that all the power structures of Rome and the Herodian corrupt priestly class that was running the temple and running Judaism, they believe that all these man made power structures were coming to a close very soon and that the sons of light were there would be a big battle, they believed between the sons of darkness and the sons of light. And the sons of light would ultimately Win and would redeem Israel back into prominence and all that. Jesus prophesied the destruction of the temple. He said, very soon the armies will surround the temple. When you see that happen, flee to the mountains, get out of here, everyone's going to be killed. He warned them about the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. and I think it all really did revolve around the temple for them that this pagan practice was so abominable to God that it would not be around very long. And if you actually go back to the Old Testament, what's really interesting, Jeremiah is my favorite prophet of the Old Testament. And Jesus quotes Jeremiah a lot in the New Testament. And there's even a passage where Jesus says, hey, who are people saying I am? And his disciples say, oh, some say you're Elijah, others say you're Moses, other people say you're Jeremiah or one of the prophets. And I'm like, oh, look at that. People were thinking that Yeshua was Jeremiah, Yirmeyahu is his name in Hebrew. And so Jeremiah, when you study Jeremiah was angrily, vehemently anti sacrifice. And Jeremiah pronounced the exact same condemnation as Jesus. He said, because of this practice, this pagan practice of animal sacrifice, this temple is coming down. And Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of the first temple 40 years, almost exactly 40 years to the day before it came down. And would you believe that Jesus pronounced the destruction of the second temple almost identically 40 years before it came down? So there is this awareness in people like Jeremiah and Jesus who understood the age they were living in and the karma of the world they lived in. And I think when you have spiritual discernment like that, you can sort of see the writing on the wall. You can feel the karma of like, yo, this whole system ain't going to last much longer. The karma's coming, right? And so that's what the apocalypse of Jesus's time was. And it had nothing to do with the Mayan calendar 2012 stuff we've been through. Our 2012 shift into fourth density is our epoch, right? Two thousand years later, this is our apocalypse, which we're living through right now. Where the sons of darkness, the negative polarity on our planet that's been in power for so long, just like in Jesus's day, is slowly unraveling and being destroyed and coming down. And so hopefully we will live to see the end of this dissolution of the negative polarities control of our planet. I don't know how long it'll take. Altogether it didn't take very long in Jesus day, only about four to six years. But I think we are in the midst of a massive collective shift that was not ready in Jesus day to take place. Two thousand years ago, the consciousness was still much lower than it is now. And so the Earth wasn't ready to shift into fourth density 2,000 years ago. But with social media and the Internet and so much innovation and technology and the connectedness of the world, our planet is waking up so freaking fast right now. And I can only attribute that to the fact that we have just clicked into the fourth density, as Ra says in the Law of One. And this process of becoming fully green versus yellow, fully fourth density out of third density, I think they say will take between 100 to 700 years, approximately, depending on how fast we wake up and do our shadow work. But there's no doubt about it that we are really living in a very similar kind of time that Jesus was living in, where he could see like, yo, the judgment of this world is coming down upon the systems and the powers of darkness.

Tonya [01:01:50]: Wow. One other thing I appreciate. I don't know the extent of this, and I'm curious if you do, but I have heard a lot of that. Yeshua was there was an acknowledgment of the feminine within his time, he and of sacred union. And Mary Magdalene's story is something that I've been starting to explore more of. And I would love if you know anything about this topic, I'm very fascinated by this.

Aaron Abke [01:02:18]: Nice. Yeah, it's another super fascinating topic. The short answer is there's no question in my mind that Jesus had female disciples. I think Mary Magdalene was definitely one of them, but I think more so she was his wife. Now this gets back to the Nazarenes historians know, based on our earliest attestations that the Essenes, at some point, this sectarian group in Qumran sort of divided into two different branches. The Ossenes to the south and the Nassarenes to the north. And the dividing issue was over marriage and celibacy. And Josephus writes about this. He describes both groups of Essenes. And so we know Nazara was the region Jesus came from, that where the Nazarenes lived and had their encampment. And they were very pro marriage, very pro reproduction that they believed. Hey, this is natural law. We're supposed to fill God's earth with children and life and the next generation and all that. It's our duty. Whereas the Oseans were like, sex is bad, marriage is bad. We don't have any women here. But they did adopt children and raise children, which is kind of cool. And so Jesus came from the northern tribe of the Nazarenes who did believe in practice in marriage. So it makes perfect sense. In fact, I think in that tradition a rabbi had to be married because it's like how is a rabbi going to give marriage counseling and advice to couples if they have no marriage experience? So I think that Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene was obviously had to be erased from the history books. Just like for example, the virgin birth, that Jesus had to be born of a virgin. You know, his mother Mary couldn't have had actual sex with a man because that would make her unclean. This is all utter nonsense that was added into the Bible maybe as late as two full centuries after Jesus. And the reason we know this is because there's a letter from a gentile Christian named Julius Africanus who's writing a letter to Aristides. I want to say the person is. And this letter dates to 220 CE. So that's almost 200 years after the death of Jesus. And he's giving this guy in this letter a breakdown of the genealogies, trying to show that yes, Jesus really did come from the Davidic lineage. He really was the Davidic Messiah. And would you believe it? There isn't even a mention of the word Mary, her name in the entire document, let alone a virgin birth. But over and over, Julius Africanus in 220 calls Jesus the son of Joseph, the son of Joseph, the son of Joseph, the son of Joseph. And in some of our earliest manuscripts of the gospels, in the genealogy accounts, it has Joseph begat Jesus. And then in later manuscripts, they scrubbed that out and they made Mary the Davidic descendant, not Joseph, that, oh, Mary actually had the Davidic line. Right. So that's an easy one to nuke, based on the evidence we have that they had to change some of that with Mary and all the, you know, prejudice against women having sex and stuff. But I think the same exact thing happened with Mary Magdalene. One of my mentors is Dr. James Tabor, and he actually discovered with some other archaeologists the Talpiot tomb, which was a finding in Jerusalem in 2008 or something. And they found these tomb underneath an apartment building like excavators found on accident, a tomb which had all these bone boxes just like the ancient ossuaries would have looked. And just to give you a brief summary of it, it's absolutely astounding. They had these bone boxes called ossuaries where they would put the bones of deceased people for the Resurrection, because they believed at the resurrection, all the flesh comes back onto your bones and you float up to heaven. So it's a very Jewish customer. Whether people believed in the resurrection or not, it doesn't really matter. It's like, this is the way all Jews did it. And so we have this ossuary tomb, and all the names match perfectly with the Gospel's names, even to the point that in the Gospel of Mark, one of Jesus's brothers is called a different name than he's called in Matthew, Luke and John. And when archaeologists were going through the bone boxes and reading the Hebrew names inscribed, they got to this one name. They're like, wait, this isn't familiar. I can't remember the name of it. But then one of them, I think Tabor actually said, oh, oh, that's actually the name of that brother in the Gospel of Mark alone. It's like a more ancient version of his name. And they had some bone fragments, and they DNA tested the bone fragments, and sure enough, they all came back as matching the same genus of family, like they were all related. And would you believe it, one of the bone boxes says, Yeshua Ben Yosef, Jesus, son of Joseph. Next to that, Mary, the wife of Yeshua. And then next to that was a son, a bone box for a son, I think, whose name was Jacob Yaakov, I want to say. And the Jewish authorities, long story short, found out what had happened. And it's against Jewish law to dig up a grave. And so they shut the whole thing down. They covered over the tomb and sealed it so no one can ever go in there again. And you're just like, oh, no. Like the greatest discovery of all time covered up by Jewish law. What a bummer. But the good news is they actually did. I just found this out from Tabor himself a few days ago. They kept the bone boxes. And the interesting thing is there was one bone box missing, one empty slot, and they knew it had to be James because James was Jesus's brother. Jesus was the oldest and then James. And so it should have been there, right? Well, in the markets of. I don't know where, I can't remember where. He said there was this big ossuary that had been in the antiquities dealership world for a while, and it was purported to be the ossuary of James. But scholars or people thought, ah, it must be a forgery. It can't be real. And finally, after the Talpiot tomb discovery, James Tabor and some other scholars got their hands on this bone box, which is Inscribed James, the brother of Jesus, son of Joseph. And they cross tested the bacteria microbes on the ossuary because they said, hey, if this ossuary was the missing one from the Talpiot tomb, that means at some point somebody robbed this grave and stole this one ossuary and sold it on the market. And it's been circulating ever since. It was kept somewhere for like 500 years. So the original bacteria of the microbes in that cave would be on the bone box. And sure enough, it matches perfectly with the DNA of the Talpiot tomb. So he's working on some pretty interesting DNA testing stuff that they're going to do with it. I'm not going to spoil it yet, but suffice to say, this tomb has Mary next to Jesus. And all the evidence right now is converging on the fact that this might actually be the tomb of the Jesus dynasty that we found. And it corroborates what many scholars have suspected, that, you know, Mary shows up in all the gospels over and over and over. She's always there. She's at the crucifixion, she's at the resurrection, she's at the baptism. Like, she's everywhere. How are you going to say this woman was not romantically involved with Jesus? It just doesn't add up. And it feels to me much more like a later theological change from the Catholic Church tradition.

Tonya [01:09:30]: Aaron, thank you so much. I think we got through like 10% of my questions for you.

Aaron Abke [01:09:35]: Only 10%.

Tonya [01:09:36]: I mean this was so vast and I think the work you're doing is so, so important and thank you for that. Where can we find you? There's 40 university. We're going to link all of the things your podcast the Jesus Way, some of the books you mentioned. But yeah, tell us how we can connect more with you.

Aaron Abke [01:09:53]: Well, we will definitely have to do a part two with the other 90% we didn't get to today. For me it's really simple. Everything is just Aaron Abke so YouTube.com Aaron Abke Instagram TikTok Aaron abkey.com Easy.

Tonya [01:10:08]: Awesome. Okay, thank you so so much for spending this time together this morning and sharing all of this wisdom beyond wisdom. I loved this conversation. Thank you.

Aaron Abke [01:10:18]: Likewise. And thank you for having me.

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