Sunday, January 24, 2010

Code breaking and the Gospel

By Dan Cathcart

During WWII there was a relatively unknown place called Bletchley Park located in northern England. Something extraordinary took place there that arguably contributed most to the allied victory in the war. “The park” as it was known, was the center of the most secret operation of the war effort, the breaking of the German Enigma code. It is a fascinating story involving mathematics and intuition and much has been written about it.

What does this have to do with the Gospel of Jesus and God’s word? Nothing directly, but much has also been written about so called bible codes. A recent popular documentary style book and movie called The Da Vinci Code purporting to reveal the “historic Jesus” was purely a work of fiction using many of the extra-biblical texts as a basis for the story. For those not well grounded in the word of God, the deception is both intriguing and convincing.

This has played into the hands of many critics and scholars who propose disturbing questions about what they call the “historic Jesus.” Their implication is that Jesus is someone vastly different than the Jesus of the Bible. A recent History Channel presentation on the Extra Biblical texts called Banned from the Bible is a case in point. Only viewpoints of secular scholars and the most liberal of Pastors and Rabbis were consulted or interviewed for the program. As a result of these types of books and programs, people are asking questions about the “real Jesus”. Questions about the veracity and accuracy of the scripture. In many ways, I say bring it on. If the Bible as we have it today is the true Word of God, then it will be able to stand the scrutiny.

How do we really know that the church canonized the correct gospels? Why is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John acceptable where Thomas, Judas and Mary Magdalene not? The premise behind Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is that the Roman Catholic Church suppressed the “authentic” gospels for some sinister and hidden purpose. This, of course, comes across looking like an organized conspiracy, but I don’t think that is the case here.

If the church was really bent on hiding the real historic Jesus from the world, then perhaps they would have been better off to have canonized the Gnostic gospels and built a “superhero” type of character out of Jesus. The only conspiracy here is one of ignorance, prejudice, theological confusion and outright anti-Semitism.

So what is the real secret code hidden in the scripture? What is the “Enigma” of the Gospels? When we develop the tools of understanding and prepare ourselves to read the scriptures from its original cultural and historic perspective, the answer becomes clear: Jesus was a Jew. Most everyone knows that Jesus was a Jew as a point of fact, but do we really understand this simple concept and all that it implies?

For centuries, the church tried to hide this embarrassing secret. From the early second century on through the middle ages and the reformation, the church has ignored or outright denied the Jewishness of the Messiah. If it were possible to erase this fact from the Bible, Christianity would have done so long ago.

The Christian culture of historic Europe is steeped in anti-Semitism. From the popes and reformers, to the art and architecture, the clues are everywhere. Take the famous painting of the Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci for example. Several things are quickly evident to the educated eye. The bread on the table is not the unleavened bread of the Passover Seder as it should be. All the disciples are dressed and look like Europeans with the exception of Judas, the lone Jew in the painting. This is a classic example of the centuries old denial by the church as to the Jewishness of Jesus.

All the first so-called Christians were Jews! Read the accounts in the book of acts where thousands were saved. They were all Jews and many were the priests from the Temple! They believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah, the rightful heir to David’s throne. His death and resurrection were the primary evidence along with His genealogy (Matthew chapter 1). The next time you read the accounts in the Book of Acts, consider this: those first Christians did not consider themselves Christians. The word “Christian” had not yet been coined and they did not even imagine a religion called Christianity. They were all Jews practicing Judaism just as they had been taught their entire lives. They went to the Temple with their offerings and sacrifices, they attended the synagogue and studied the Torah (law in the NT Greek text). They were Jews before recognizing Jesus as their Messiah and remained Jews after recognizing Jesus as their Messiah.

It was only in the second century that Christianity emerged as a distinct religion separate from Judaism. The path to this distinction is complex and steeped in the culture and politics of the day and I am not going to examine it here. Suffice to say that as more and more gentiles came to faith in Jesus and through systematic persecutions and Jewish revolts against Rome, Jewish believers disappeared into obscurity and a gentile Greek/Roman cultural Christianity emerged and grew more and more dominant. Finally in the early fourth century this new religion became the “official” religion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine.

The one thing preserved throughout this turbulent history are the many sacred writings of the early church, the Gospels and Epistles left behind by the early Jewish believers. These testify to the Jewishness of Jesus and the original faith. But the evidence of this is in a kind of hidden code. Not because the early believers intended to write in code, but we, in our modern world, are two thousand years removed culturally, linguistically, and historically from them. Today we read those very same ancient writings without suspecting or recognizing any “hidden” code.

If we fail to aknowledge the “code”, we loose the capacity to understand the Gospels as the writers intended them to be understood. We read the words without real comprehension. We tend to make up meanings to fit our culture and our place in today’s world. The real historical teachings of Jesus are lost.

When a code is deciphered, such as those done at Bletchley Park, a “crib” is used. A crib is a kind of guide or cheat sheet. It, in simple terms, eliminates the improbable or impossible solutions to the cipher allowing one to dramatically reduce the work needed to solve it correctly. There were actually two cribs used for a given cipher: one was mathematically based on the known parameters of the cipher process, (the Enigma machine itself, captured and analyzed.) The other was more intuitive and focused on the human elements of communication. For example, you may have a favorite author. This author has their own unique style of writing that you would recognize even if you only had a page or two from a book of theirs that you have never read before. The same is true of reading a cipher. The German Enigma operators and Commanders made a serious mistake in that they allowed the same people to create and send the coded messages day after day from the same location. The cryptanalysts at The Park began to recognize these same patterns of style in the encrypted messages they were tasked to decode. In other words, they began to give themselves away by becoming predictable.

In the same way, there is an under laying “human element” code embedded in Gospels and Epistles of the Bible. In order to decipher this code, it requires a change in our paradigm of thought. We must put ourselves in the mindset of the Jew in the late second-Temple era. We need to find the “crib” that fits the “code” embedded in the scriptures. The best way to do this is to gather more data. Our data source is the vast amount of Jewish literature and scholarly works done in this same period or before.

In the late second century, the Jewish people found themselves scattered to the far corners of the Roman Empire. They were literally forced out of Jerusalem and much of the homeland they had occupied for centuries. The Jewish sages, knowing that their culture and religion could be lost, began to compile the traditional oral teachings that had been handed down to them from their teachers for generations. The first of these was called the Mishnah. This written form of the oral teachings could then be “transmitted” throughout the world wherever Jews were and maintain their tradition, culture, and identity. Later came the Gamara, a commentary on the works in the Mishnah. Together these formed the large volume of writings called the Talmud. There is also a collection of oral teachings and interpretations of the Bible known as the Midrash. The Midrash is a source of many parables very similar in nature and topic to those recorded in the Gospels and attributed to Jesus. The use of parables as a teaching and interpretation tool was a common practice in the second Temple era.

If we examine these rabbinic works and compare them with the Gospels, we will notice the patterns of similarity. In many cases, one will find the identical parables that Jesus used in His teaching in the Midrash. Many of the maxims, parables and sayings recorded by the rabbis are in the same linguistic style as the Gospels. In other words, they contain the same cultural clues giving us the human element “crib” we need to “decode” the scripture. This lifts the veil of obscurity from the text of the Bible and allows us to look at it from its intended historic and cultural perspective.

The gospel code is real and can be broken. The original communication can be recovered with the right tools and the right process. There is an abundance of rabbinic literature in the Jewish world from which to draw our code-breaking skills from. We can not only examine the scripture in a new and exciting light, but we will quickly understand that works of pure fiction like The Da Vinci Code are just that, fiction. We can discover the intrinsic Jewishness of the Gospels thanks to the veracity and determination of the early Jewish sages who preserved the traditions and teachings. No second, third or fourth century church fathers could have manufactured such intrinsically Jewish documents as the Gospels. The early church founders were Greeks and Romans and given the politics of the second, third and fourth centuries, would have no motivation to keep anything Jewish in the Church. The fact that the Jewishness of the New Testament scriptures remains intact, is a testament to the power of God working through ignorant and even hostile and violently anti-Semitic gentile leaders of the period.

We can use our new found “crib” to test the authenticity of the Gnostic Gospels and other apocryphal writings of early Christianity. When we do so, we quickly find that these writings just don’t hold up to the test. Under the light of Judaism, they are exposed for the counterfeits that they are.

שלום ברוך
Shalom and Be Blessed

Brenda and I are going to Israel next June 19th to 29th. Join us in the land promised to Abraham for a special tour where you will see the promised Messiah of Israel like you have never seen Him before! We will visit places off the beaten path and follow in the foot steps of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Come with us as we also explore the people, culture, politics and conflict that is today’s Israel and for a special Sabbath day in Jerusalem. For details on the tour visit .