These false interpretations allow no other understanding of the teaching of Jesus Christ than what would be in agreement with all preceding and subsequent revelation. So their goal is not to genuinely explain the sense of Christ’s sermons, but only to find the least contradictory meaning for all the most hopelessly conflicting writings: the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, the Acts, i.e., in everything that is considered scripture.
With such an approach to Christ’s teaching, it is obvious that it would become incomprehensible. All of the innumerable disagreements on how to understand the Gospel flow out of this false approach. One might guess—and guess correctly—that these explanations, which are interested primarily in reconciling the irreconcilable, i.e., the Old and New Testaments, would be innumerable. So, in order to profess this reconciliation as truth we must have recourse to external means: miracles and the visitation of the Holy Ghost.
Everyone reconciled the differences in their own way, and such reconciling continues today; but in their reconciliation, everyone asserts that their words are the continued revelation of the Holy Ghost. Paul’s epistles follow this model, as does the founding of the church councils, which begin with the formula: “It pleases us and the Holy Ghost.” Such too are the decrees of the popes, synods, khlysts* and all false interpreters who claim that the Holy Ghost speaks through their mouths. They all rely on the same crude platform to confirm the truth of their reconciliation, they all claim that their reconciliation is not the fruit of their own thoughts, but the testimony of the Holy Ghost.
When one refuses to enter this fray of faiths, each of which calls itself true, it becomes impossible not to notice that in their common approach, wherein they accept the enormous amount of so-called scripture in the Old and New Testaments to be uniformly sacred, there lies an insurmountable self-constructed obstacle to understanding the teaching of Christ. Moreover, one notices that it is from this delusion that the opportunity and even necessity for endlessly varied and hostile sects arises.
Only the reconciling of an enormous amount of revelations can foster endless variety. Interpreting the teaching of one individual, who is worshipped as a God, cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a God who has descended to earth in order to instruct people cannot be interpreted in different ways because this would be counter to the very goal of descending. If God descended to earth in order to reveal truth to people, then the very least he could have done would be to have revealed the truth in such a way that everybody would understand it. If he did not do this, then he was not God. If God’s truths are such that even God couldn’t make them understandable to people, then of course there’s no way that people could have done it.
If Jesus isn’t God, but was a great man, then his teachings are even less likely to give birth to sects. The teachings of a great man can only be considered great if he clearly and understandably expresses that which others have only expressed unclearly and incomprehensibly.
That which is incomprehensible in the teaching of a great man is simply not great and the teaching of a great man cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a great man is only great insofar as it unifies people in a single truth for all. The teaching of Socrates has always been understood uniformly by all. Only the kind of interpretation which claims to be the revelation of the Holy Ghost, to be the only truth, and that all else is a lie, only this kind of interpretation can give birth to hatred and the so-called sects. No matter how much the members of a given denomination speak of how they do not judge other denominations, how they pray for communion with them and have no hatred toward them, it is not so. Never, going back to Arius, has any claim, regardless of its supporting dogma, arisen from anything other than condemnation of the falseness of the opposing dogma. To contend that the expression of a given dogma is a divine expression, that it is of the Holy Ghost, is the highest degree of pride and stupidity: the highest pride because it is impossible to say anything more prideful than, “The words that I speak are said through me by God himself,” and the highest stupidity because when responding to another man’s claim that God speaks through his mouth, it is impossible to say anything more stupid than, “No, it is not through your mouth that God speaks, he speaks through my mouth and he says the complete opposite of what your God is saying.” But, all along, this is exactly what every church claims, and it is from this very thing that all the sects have arisen as well as all the evil in the world that has been done and is being done in the name of faith. But apart from the outward evil that is produced by the sects’ interpretations, there is another important, internal deficiency that gives all of these sects an unclear, murky and dishonest character.
With all the sects, this deficiency can be detected in the fact that, although they acknowledge the last revelation of the Holy Ghost to be its descent onto the apostles and subsequent passage down to the supposedly chosen ones, these false interpreters never express directly, concretely, and definitively what exactly that revelation from the Holy Ghost is. Yet all the while it is upon this supposed continued revelation that they base their faith and by which they consider this faith to be Christ’s.
All the leaders of the churches who claim the revelation of the Holy Ghost recognize, as do the Muslims, three revelations. The Muslims recognize Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. The church leaders recognize Moses, Jesus and the Holy Ghost. But according to the Muslim faith, Mohammed was the last prophet, the one who explained the meaning of Moses’s and Jesus’s revelations; he is the last revelation, explaining all that came before, and every true believer holds to this revelation. But it is not so with the church belief. It recognizes, like the Muslim faith, three revelations—Moses’s, Jesus’s and the Holy Ghost’s—but it does not call itself by the name of the final revelation. Instead, it asserts that the foundation of its faith is the teaching of Christ. Therefore the teachings they propagate are their own, but they ascribe their authority to Christ.
Some sectarians of the Holy Ghost variety consider the final revelation, the one that explained all that preceded it, to be that of Paul, some consider it to be that of certain councils, some that of others, some that of the popes, some that of the patriarchs, some that of private revelations from the Holy Ghost. All of them ought to have named their faith after the one who received that final revelation. If that final revelation is from the church fathers, or the epistles of the Eastern patriarchs, or papal edicts, or the Syllabus of Errors, or the catechism of Luther or Filaret, then say so. Name your faith after that, because the final revelation which explains all previous revelation will always be the most important revelation. However, they do not do this; instead they promote teachings completely foreign to Christ, and claim that Christ himself preached these things. Therefore, according to their teachings, it turns out that Christ announced that he was saving the human race, fallen since Adam, with his own blood, that God is a trinity, that the Holy Ghost descended upon the apostles and spread via the laying on of hands onto the priesthood, that seven sacraments are needed for salvation, that communion ought to occur in two forms, and so on. It turns out that all of this is the teaching of Christ, whereas in Jesus’s actual teaching there isn’t the slightest hint of any of this. These false teachers should call their teaching and their faith the teaching and faith of the Holy Ghost, not of Christ. The faith of Christ can only rightfully refer to a faith based on Christ’s revelation as it comes down to us in the Gospels, and which recognizes this as the ultimate revelation. This is in accordance with Christ’s own words: “Do not recognize any as your teacher, except Christ.” This concept seems so simple that it should not even be a point of discussion, but strange as it may be to say so, to this day, nobody has attempted to separate the teaching of Christ from that artificial and completely unjustified reconciliation with the Old Testament or from those arbitrary additions to his teachings that were made and are still being made in the name of the Holy Ghost. What is even stranger to see in this error is the convergence of two camps on the extreme edges of the debate: the church leaders and the free-thinking historians of Christianity. One group, the church leaders, calling Jesus the second personage of the trinity, understand his teaching only through the filter of the supposed revelations of the third personage, whom they find in the Old Testament, in the epistles of the councils and the edicts of the church fathers. As a result, they preach the most peculiar principles, claiming that these principles are Christ’s. In just the same way, the other group, not recognizing Christ as a God, does not understand his teaching as he might actually have expressed it, but as Paul and the other interpreters have understood it. Considering Christ to be a man and not a God, these interpreters deprive Christ of the most legitimate human right to answer for one’s own words and not for another’s false reading of them. In trying to explain the teaching of Jesus, these scholarly interpreters entwine Jesus in ideas he never would have thought to speak. The representatives of this school of interpreters, beginning with the most popular of them, Renan, make no attempt to separate from Christ’s teaching—from what Christ himself actually taught—all that has been calcified onto it by his interpreters, and so, they make no more effort to understand this teaching than do the church leaders. They attempt to understand Christ as a phenomenon and to understand the proliferation of Jesus’s teaching through the events of his life and the conditions of his time.