261010 – Biblical Text Transmission – Sons of God

by Thomas Abshier | Oct 10, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Sons of God: How the Bible Came to Us

Oct 10, 2026 · @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

A Verse on Jerome’s Desk

The Bible did not fall from heaven as a single bound book. It came to us through many hands over more than a thousand years: speakers and scribes, copyists and translators, councils and congregations. One short verse shows how that process worked better than any summary can.

Near the end of the fourth century, the scholar Jerome sat in Bethlehem translating the Old Testament into Latin. When he reached Genesis 6:2, his sources disagreed. The Hebrew text read b’nei ha’elohim, “the sons of God,” who saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took them as wives. Some copies of the Greek translation he also had in front of him read “the angels of God” instead.

Jerome had to choose. What he chose, and what readers did with his choice, tells the larger story of how the Bible was made and handed down. This essay examines that story.

From Voice to Scroll

The first stage was the people of Israel receiving and keeping God’s words. Much of what became Scripture was first spoken: laws given at Sinai, prophetic oracles, songs sung at worship, and the family histories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Over generations, people wrote these down in Hebrew, with a few later portions in Aramaic.

Writing did not end the work; it began a new kind of work. Scrolls wore out. A scribe had to make each new copy by hand, letter by letter. Scribes were careful, and Jewish scribes became famously careful, but a hand-copied text always carried some risk of a skipped word, a repeated line, or a smoothed-out spelling.

By the time of Jesus, Jews recognized the Scriptures in three broad parts: the Law (Torah), the Prophets, and the Writings. Jesus himself spoke of “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). Genesis stood at the head of the Law, and Genesis 6 was read as part of it in Hebrew.

The Greek Bible

The second stage was translation, and it began before the time of Christ. After Alexander the Great, Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean. Many Jews, especially in Alexandria in Egypt, no longer read Hebrew well. Beginning in the third century BC, Greeks translated the Torah, and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures followed over the next two centuries.

This Greek Old Testament is called the Septuagint, from the Latin word for seventy. The name comes from a legend that seventy-two Jewish elders translated it for an Egyptian king. Whatever the legend’s details, the Septuagint became the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and then of the early church. When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they often quote it in this Greek form.

A translator must decide what a phrase means before rendering it. At Genesis 6:2, some copies of the Septuagint read hoi angeloi tou theou, “the angels of God,” where the Hebrew has “sons of God.” The Greek translators did something similar in Job 1:6, where the “sons of God” who present themselves before the Lord also appear as angels. In those places, the translation was already an interpretation. Greek readers encountered the angel reading in their Bible itself, not only in commentary.

Many Copies, One Message

The third stage was copying, and it ran alongside everything else. No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. What we have are copies of copies, and the copies do not agree in every letter. The study of these differences, and the effort to recover the earliest wording, is called textual criticism.

For centuries the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles were medieval. They preserve the Masoretic Text, named for the Masoretes, Jewish scholars who between about the seventh and tenth centuries AD added vowel signs and marginal notes to protect the traditional text. The Leningrad Codex, copied in AD 1008, remains the oldest complete Hebrew Bible and underpins most modern translations.

Then, beginning in 1947, archaeologists found the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves near Qumran. They include biblical manuscripts copied between roughly 250 BC and AD 68, a thousand years older than the medieval codices. Most of them confirm the Masoretic Text closely. Some show that more than one form of the Hebrew text circulated before Christ, and that the Septuagint was sometimes translated from a Hebrew text different from the one the Masoretes later preserved.

The same phrase from Genesis 6 shows this in another book. In Deuteronomy 32:8, God divides the nations “according to the number of the sons of Israel” in the Masoretic Text. A Hebrew scroll from Qumran reads “the sons of God” there, and the Septuagint reads “angels of God.” So the question at Genesis 6 was not an isolated quirk. Copyists and translators repeatedly had to decide what “sons of God” meant, and their decisions entered the text itself.

These differences should be kept in proportion. Most variants are spelling, word order, or obvious slips. None of them overturns a teaching of the faith. But they show that the Bible we read came to us through a real history, and that faithful people had to make careful judgments to preserve it.

Jerome’s Latin Bible

By the fourth century the western church spoke Latin, and it already had Latin Bibles. Scholars call them the Old Latin versions. They translated the Old Testament from the Greek Septuagint, not from Hebrew, and the copies varied widely.

In 382, Pope Damasus asked Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels. Jerome went further. Settled in Bethlehem, he learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers and, between about 390 and 405, translated most of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew. He called this returning to the “Hebrew truth” (hebraica veritas). He still consulted the Septuagint and later Greek versions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, but he based his work on the Hebrew. Not everyone welcomed this. Augustine worried that departing from the Greek text the church had long used would unsettle believers.

At Genesis 6:2 Jerome followed the Hebrew. His Latin reads videntes filii Dei filias hominum, “the sons of God, seeing the daughters of men.” He had the Latin word angeli available and some Greek copies to justify it, but he did not use it. In his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, written around 390, he discussed the verse and noted that the Greek translator Symmachus had rendered it “sons of the powerful,” a reading also found in Jewish Aramaic paraphrases. Jerome knew the phrase could be taken in more than one way, so he chose a translation that left it open.

Jerome’s version was used alongside the Old Latin for centuries before it prevailed. Over time, it became the common Latin Bible and gained the name Vulgate, meaning the common or popular version. In 1546 the Council of Trent declared it the authoritative Latin text for the Roman Catholic Church.

The Text Leaves It Open; the Tradition Answers

A faithful translation did not settle the question, because readers never met the text alone. They met it within a reading tradition, and that tradition had worked on Genesis 6 for centuries.

The most influential voice was the Book of Enoch, a Jewish writing from before Christ. Its section called the Book of the Watchers expands Genesis 6 into a full story: two hundred angels descend, take human wives, father giants, and teach mankind forbidden arts. Aramaic fragments of Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Jewish writers Philo and Josephus also understood the sons of God as angels in the first century.

The New Testament shows that this reading was familiar to the apostles’ audience. Jude quotes Enoch directly (Jude 14–15) and speaks of angels who left their proper home and are kept in chains for judgment (Jude 6). Second Peter 2:4 speaks of angels who sinned and were cast into Tartarus, and 1 Peter 3:19–20 links imprisoned spirits to the days of Noah. These passages do not quote Genesis 6, but readers have long connected them to it.

Many early Christian writers took the angel view, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius and Ambrose. Through the Greek Bible and Enoch, Latin readers inherited that view as well. But a second reading was already rising. In the early third century, Julius Africanus proposed that the sons of God were the godly descendants of Seth, and the daughters of men the descendants of Cain. Augustine, Jerome’s own contemporary, argued for this Sethite reading at length in The City of God (Book 15, chapter 23). He noted that copies of the Septuagint differed, some reading “angels” and some “sons,” and he judged that the passage described men.

Augustine’s authority in the West was immense. After him, the Sethite reading became the standard in medieval Latin commentary, while Jewish interpreters shifted toward “sons of nobles” or “sons of judges.” So some readers read the same Latin words, filii Dei, as angels, while others read them as men, depending on which teachers they followed. Jerome’s wording left the door open. The tradition around the text decided which way most readers walked through it.

Gathering the Books

Alongside copying and translating ran a fourth process: recognizing which books belonged in the Bible at all. This list of recognized books is called the canon, from a Greek word for a measuring rod.

The Book of Enoch shows that this question was live. Jude quoted it, and many early Christians valued it, yet the church as a whole did not receive it as Scripture. Only the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes it in its Bible today. A book could shape how believers read Genesis 6 without becoming part of the canon itself.

The Septuagint carried several books not found in the Hebrew Bible, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and 1–2 Maccabees. Jerome, following the Hebrew canon, said these could be read for edification but not used to establish doctrine. The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) included them, and the Council of Trent later confirmed them for the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformers followed Jerome’s judgment and the Hebrew canon, printing these books separately as the Apocrypha or leaving them out.

The New Testament books were written in Greek between about AD 50 and 100. Letters and gospels circulated among the churches and were read in worship. Around 180, Irenaeus defended the four Gospels as a fixed set. The churches weighed whether a writing came from an apostle or his close circle, agreed with the handed-down faith, and was widely received. In 367, Athanasius of Alexandria listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament exactly. Councils later confirmed what the churches had largely come to recognize.

The Translator’s Choice Today

Modern translators stand where Jerome stood. They work mainly from the Masoretic Hebrew, check it against the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, and then face the same decision at Genesis 6:2.

They can keep the literal “sons of God” and let the reader work out its meaning. Most major English versions do this. They can follow the Greek and render it as “angels.” Or they can choose a phrase that leans toward one view while softening it, such as “divine beings” or “heavenly beings.”

None of these choices is neutral. A reader who meets “heavenly beings” has been guided toward the supernatural view before he reads a word of commentary. A reader who meets “sons of God” has been handed the question. Footnotes help, and many modern Bibles use them here to list the alternatives.

What This Means for the Reader

The Bible came to us through four processes working together: God’s word received and written, copied by hand across centuries, translated into the languages of new peoples, and recognized by the church as Scripture. Genesis 6:2 touches all four. One Hebrew phrase was copied, translated into two Greek versions, rendered faithfully in Latin, and read differently by the communities that received it.

Some people find this history unsettling, as if human involvement must weaken the Bible’s authority. It need not. God has always worked through people, and the history shows remarkable care: scribes counting letters, translators learning hard languages, and churches testing books over generations. The variants are real, but small, and the message of creation, fall, covenant, and redemption remains unchanged across all the manuscripts.

The history also gives the reader a duty. Every Bible in his hands carries choices made by translators, and every reading habit he has was learned from someone. A careful reader asks three questions. What does the original text actually say? What choices has my translation made? And what tradition taught me to read it the way I do?

At Genesis 6, the honest answer is that the Hebrew says “sons of God,” that faithful believers have understood the phrase as angels, as the line of Seth, or as powerful rulers, and that the text itself does not compel one answer. Jerome left that question where he found it. A reader today can do the same: hold his own view with reasons, stay open to a better argument, and let the text say no more and no less than it says.

261009 – Bonhoeffer and Surrender of Judgment

by Thomas Abshier | Oct 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Uniform and the Fear of God: What Bonhoeffer Actually Said About Stupidity

Renaissance Ministries Fellowship Essay | 09 October 2026

A short video of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s remarks on stupidity has circulated widely. It is well made and mostly accurate, and nearly everyone who shares it has the same person in mind: someone else. The progressive sees the populist crowd, and the conservative sees the campus. Each nods along, reassured that the stupid are over there. That reaction is the first sign the message hasn’t landed. When every listener uses a diagnosis only for his opponents, it functions as a slogan, and slogans are exactly what Bonhoeffer warned about.

In late 1942, after ten years of watching his country under Hitler, Bonhoeffer wrote a private reflection for a handful of friends in the resistance. One section addresses what he called stupidity, and he meant something specific by the word. He did not mean low intelligence. He observed that intellectually quick men can be stupid in his sense, and slow men quite free of it. For him, stupidity is a condition a man enters when he surrenders his judgment to a movement, a party, or a prevailing mood. Bonhoeffer thought it was less a psychological problem than a sociological one: every strong surge of power in public life, political or religious, infects a large share of people with it. Power seems to require the stupidity of the many, and the many supply it.

This is why he judged stupidity more dangerous than malice. Evil can be opposed. It can be exposed, protested, and if necessary stopped by force, and it tends to leave even its perpetrators uneasy. Stupidity offers no such handle. The stupid man simply does not believe facts that contradict his position, or waves them off as exceptions. He is fully satisfied with himself, and when pressed he becomes irritable and goes on the attack. In conversation, Bonhoeffer said, one has the sense of dealing not with the man himself but with catchwords that have taken possession of him. The video’s image for this is a good one: borrowed reason, worn like a uniform.

So far the video and Bonhoeffer agree. They part ways at the cure. The video says the cure is courage, the moment a man decides he would rather think alone than not think at all. That is half right, and the missing half matters more. Bonhoeffer said that stupidity is overcome not by instruction but by an act of liberation, and he said plainly what that liberation is. He quoted the biblical word that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), and concluded that the inner liberation of a man to live responsibly before God is the only genuine way out.

The reason this matters is practical, not merely pious. The video diagnoses the problem correctly: the man has decided that his group’s approval matters more than his own judgment. But approval is a real good, and exile from one’s own people is a real cost. Telling a man to “have courage” names the virtue he needs without telling him where to get it. A man does not stop fearing the crowd by an act of will. He stops fearing the crowd when he fears something greater. The Gospel of John records the same condition in the first century: many among the rulers believed in Jesus but would not confess Him, “for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God” (John 12:42–43). The problem was not information, since they already believed. The problem was whose verdict they lived under.

This also answers a weakness in the secular version of the cure. The man who merely “thinks alone” has escaped one master and acquired another, namely himself. His independent judgment is still subject to vanity, resentment, and the pleasure of being a contrarian, which is its own kind of uniform. Bonhoeffer’s phrase is more exact: the responsible life before God. The man who answers to God has a fixed point outside both the crowd and his own ego. He can disagree with his group without despising it, and he can change his mind without losing himself, because his identity was never on loan from either. Scripture states the rule in a single line: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” (Exodus 23:2). It states the means in another: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).

Two further points in Bonhoeffer’s text are dropped by the video, and both guard against misuse. First, he concluded that his analysis forbids treating people as simply stupid. The condition is induced by circumstances, and much depends on whether those who hold power expect more from people’s stupidity or from their inner independence. That places a heavy responsibility on anyone who leads, whether a nation, a church, or a household. A leader who rewards agreement and punishes honest questions is manufacturing the very condition Bonhoeffer described, however good his cause. Second, in the same reflection Bonhoeffer warned against contempt for humanity, observing that the man who despises another can never make anything of him. Bonhoeffer’s purpose was to explain why argument fails and where the real remedy lies. Using “stupid” as a label for opponents, which relieves one of the duty to love and to reason with them, abandons that purpose. He also noted, soberly, that inner liberation usually has to wait for outer liberation. While the spell of power holds, persuasion mostly fails, and patience is not the same as surrender.

What follows for a Christian fellowship is fairly concrete. If the cost of thinking is exile, then the remedy at the community level is a community where exile is not the price of honesty. A fellowship ought to be the one place where a man can say the thing that will not be applauded and still belong, because its unity rests on a common Lord, not on a common opinion. Such a group does not produce uniformity. It produces men who can stand alone when they must, because they are not in fact alone.

The video closes with two good questions: when did you last change your mind about something that mattered, and when did you last say something to your own side that you knew would not be welcomed? Bonhoeffer would press one question further back. Before whom do you stand when you form your judgments? A man who cannot answer that will borrow his answers from whoever is nearest and loudest. A man who can answer it has found the beginning of wisdom.

A note on sources. The passage on stupidity comes from “After Ten Years,” written by Bonhoeffer at Christmas 1942 for a few fellow conspirators, several months before his arrest in April 1943. It was later printed at the front of Letters and Papers from Prison, which is likely why it is often described as written from his cell. He was executed at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945.

261009 – The Buddha and Christ

by Thomas Abshier | Oct 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Awakened One and the Risen One

Buddhism: Its History, Its Beliefs, the Credibility of Its Stories, and How It Compares with Christianity

Oct 9, 2026 · @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Introduction

Most Westerners first encounter Buddhism as an image: a fat, laughing figure on a restaurant shelf, a calm face in a garden, a word like mindfulness on a wellness app. The laughing figure is not even the Buddha. He is Budai, a tenth-century Chinese monk whom some Chinese Buddhists honor as an incarnation of a future Buddha. The historical Buddha is Siddhartha Gautama, a teacher who lived in the borderlands of northern India and southern Nepal roughly five centuries before Christ.

The popular image presents Buddhism as a gentle philosophy of peace with no doctrines to quarrel over. That image is mistaken. Buddhism makes large claims about the universe, time, the self, and what lies beyond death. Those claims can be examined like any others, and they deserve serious consideration.

This essay asks four questions. What is the history of Buddhism? What does it actually teach? How credible are the stories told about its founder? And what follows, for a human life and a human society, if those teachings are true? Along the way, and at the end, Buddhism is set beside Christianity, because the two answer the same ancient question about suffering in ways that could hardly be more different.

A word about fairness. A Christian writing about another faith owes it the same honesty he would want for his own. Where Buddhism sees truly, that should be said plainly. Where it diverges from what Christians believe is true, that should be said plainly too, with reasons.

The Buddha as the Tradition Tells His Story

A title, not a name

Buddha is a title. It comes from the Sanskrit root budh, meaning “to wake up,” and means “the awakened one.” To understand what he woke from, one must understand the world as early Buddhists pictured it.

The wheel of rebirth

Buddhist art often shows the universe as a wheel, the bhavachakra or wheel of life. Its segments are the realms into which beings are born: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings. The wheel turns without end. A being dies and is reborn somewhere on it, then dies and is reborn again. Even the gods die.

Three features of this picture matter for everything that follows.

• No creator. Buddhism does not teach that a god made the wheel. It simply is, and on most accounts, it has turned without beginning.
• Rebirth is not good news. Western readers sometimes hear reincarnation as a second chance. Classical Buddhism heard it as a sentence. The endless round of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth is called samsara, and the goal is to escape it.
• Karma steers the wheel. Deeds leave traces that shape where and how a being is reborn. No judge oversees it; the moral order works like a law of nature.

The escape from samsara is nirvana, often translated as “awakening” or “enlightenment.” The word literally means a blowing out, as of a flame. One who attains it is no longer bound to be reborn. A Buddha is one who attains it on his own and then teaches others the path.

Many Buddhas

Because time in this picture is cyclical and vast, Siddhartha Gautama is not the only Buddha. Tradition holds that Buddhas arise again and again across the ages. Each one rediscovers and teaches the same truth, called the Dharma. Over time, people forget each teaching, the world sinks back into ignorance, and eventually another Buddha appears. Gautama did not claim to teach anything new. He claimed to have rediscovered what earlier Buddhas had found.

The vow of Sumedha

How does one become a Buddha? In the tradition, it takes an almost unimaginable span of lives, and it begins with a vow. In a former age, a previous Buddha named Dipankara was walking toward a muddy stretch of road. An ascetic named Sumedha lay face down in the mud and spread his hair over it so the Buddha would not soil his feet. Dipankara foretold that this man would, ages later, be born as Gautama and become a Buddha. Sumedha vowed to reach that goal.

From then on he is called the Bodhisattva, one whose being is set toward awakening. The Jataka tales, a large body of stories, recount his former lives. In one he is a monkey king who stretches his own body across a river as a bridge so his troop can escape hunters. In another he is a prince who gives his body to a starving tigress so she can feed her cubs. Across these lives he perfects generosity, patience, compassion, meditation, and wisdom, until he is born for the last time.

The prince and the four sights

The popular life story runs as follows. Siddhartha is born a prince of the Shakya clan. His mother dreams that a white elephant enters her side. At birth, he takes seven steps and announces that this is his last birth. His father, warned that the boy may renounce the world, shelters him in luxury. He marries and has a son.

Then, on outings from the palace with his charioteer Channa, he sees four sights: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering holy man. The first three show him that age, sickness, and death come for everyone, including his wife and child. The fourth shows him that some men are seeking a way out. He leaves the palace by night, abandoning his family, and becomes a wandering ascetic.

For about six years he studies under teachers and practices severe fasting until he is skin and bone. Concluding that self-starvation does not free the mind, he eats again and adopts what Buddhists call the Middle Way between indulgence and mortification. At Bodh Gaya, in what is now the Indian state of Bihar, he sits beneath a fig tree, later called the Bodhi tree. The tempter Mara assaults him with fear and desire and fails. Through the night he attains awakening. He then teaches for some forty-five years and dies at about eighty, entering what is called final nirvana.

The Buddha of History

Most scholars accept that a teacher named Siddhartha Gautama really lived. What we can know about him with confidence is modest.

• Place. He was born at Lumbini in what is now southern Nepal, near the Indian border. Around 249 BC, the emperor Ashoka erected a pillar there with an inscription marking the spot as the Buddha’s birthplace. That pillar is the oldest physical evidence connected to his life, and it was erected about a century and a half after his death.
• Clan. His family name, Gautama, marks his lineage; his people were the Shakyas, which is why he is also called Shakyamuni, “sage of the Shakyas.” The Shakyas appear to have been governed by an assembly of leading families rather than a monarch. His father, Shuddhodana, was likely a chief or noble, not the great king of the later stories.
• Dates. The traditional dates are about 563 to 483 BC. Many scholars now place his death later, around 400 BC. No one knows precisely.
• Setting. He grew up in a world shaped by Vedic religion, with its priests, sacrifices, and caste order, and by a growing movement of wandering ascetics who rejected home life in search of release. He belonged to that movement. Ideas such as rebirth and karma were already in the air; he did not invent them.

The earliest sources

There are no records of the Buddha written in his lifetime. The monastic community preserved his teachings through memorization and recitation. By its own tradition, the collection known as the Pali Canon was first written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BC, about three to four centuries after his death. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts, birch-bark scrolls from the region of Gandhara in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, date to about the first century BC and first century AD. Scholars nonetheless judge that a substantial core of the material goes back at least to the third century BC.

What do these earliest layers say about his life? Surprisingly little. In a discourse called The Noble Search (Majjhima Nikaya 26), which many scholars count among the oldest autobiographical passages, the Buddha says simply that while still a young man, with dark hair and in the prime of life, he shaved his head, put on the ascetic’s robe, and left home, though his mother and father wept and wished otherwise. There is no palace, no sheltering father, no chariot rides, and no four sights. A young man left home to seek what lies beyond death.

How Credible Are the Stories?

The Buddha’s familiar life, the prince and the four sights, is a later composition. Its fullest classic forms are the Buddhacarita of the poet Ashvaghosha, from the first or second century AD, and the Nidanakatha, the introduction to the Jataka commentary, from about the fifth century AD. These are five to nine centuries removed from the man they describe. Historians of Buddhism say so openly, and many Buddhist scholars agree.

Three observations follow.

First, the story grew. The earliest layer gives a young man leaving home. Later layers add the palace, the miraculous conception, the seven steps, the gods arranging his outings, and the demon Mara. This is the normal pattern of legend: the farther a story travels from its source, the more wonderful it becomes.

Second, the four sights appear to have been borrowed. In the Pali Canon itself, the full tale of a sheltered prince who sees an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a renunciant is told not about Gautama but about Vipassi, a Buddha of a far earlier age (Digha Nikaya 14). The tradition taught that every Buddha’s life follows the same pattern, so one Buddha’s story could fit another. The four sights are best read as a teaching template rather than a biographical report.

Third, the deepest claims cannot be checked at all. The Buddha’s authority rests on what he said he saw on the night of his awakening: his own former lives, the deaths and rebirths of other beings, and the end of his own rebirth. No one else was there, and nothing in the world could confirm or refute it. According to the tradition, the Jataka tales of former lives as monkeys and princes are things the Buddha remembered, and no one else could witness. Many of them reuse Indian folk tales that circulated independently.

Set beside the Gospels

It is fair to ask how the Christian sources compare under the same standard. The table gives approximate gaps between each founder’s death and the sources about him.

The Gospels were written within the lifetimes of people who knew Jesus, and they claim to rest on eyewitness testimony (Luke 1:1-4; John 19:35; 1 Corinthians 15:6). Legend certainly grew around Jesus, too. The so-called infancy gospels of the second century and later have the boy Jesus striking playmates dead and turning clay into birds. But the early church rejected those writings, and they stand outside the New Testament. The canonical accounts are restrained by comparison.

This comparison does not prove the Gospels true. It shows only that the window for legend to replace memory was far narrower.

Why credibility matters differently to each faith

Here the two religions part ways in a way that is easy to miss. Buddhism does not stake its truth on the historical accuracy of the Buddha’s biography. By its own teaching, the Dharma is an eternal truth that many Buddhas have rediscovered; if Gautama had never lived, the path would still be true. Many modern Buddhists can therefore treat the miracle stories as symbolic and lose nothing they care about.

Christianity cannot do that. It stands or falls on historical events, above all the resurrection. Paul states the stakes himself: “if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17, KJV). Christianity therefore invites historical scrutiny in a way Buddhism does not. For Buddhists, the question is whether the teaching proves itself in practice. For the Christian, the question is whether a man actually rose from the dead.

What Buddhists Believe

The Buddha’s teaching is usually summarized from his first sermon, given to five former companions in a deer park near Varanasi. At its heart are the Four Noble Truths, laid out like a physician’s diagnosis and prescription.

1. Suffering (dukkha). Ordinary life is marked by suffering. The word means more than pain. It covers unsatisfactoriness, the way every pleasure fades and every possession slips away.
2. The cause of suffering. Suffering arises from craving (tanha, literally “thirst”): craving for pleasure, for existence, and even for non-existence.
3. The end of suffering. When craving is extinguished, suffering ends. That extinction is nirvana.
4. The path. The Noble Eightfold Path is the way to that end: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These are commonly grouped as wisdom, ethical conduct, and meditation.

The three marks of existence

Buddhism teaches that all conditioned things share three marks.

• Impermanence (anicca). Nothing lasts. Every thing and every state of mind arises and passes away.
• Suffering (dukkha). Because nothing lasts, clinging to anything brings sorrow.
• Not-self (anatta). No permanent self or soul exists. What we call “I” is a changing bundle of body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Believing in an enduring self is the root illusion from which craving springs.

This last teaching set the Buddha apart from the Hindu thought around him, which held that each person has an eternal self, the atman. It raises an obvious question: if there is no self, what is reborn? The classic answer, from a dialogue called The Questions of King Milinda, compares rebirth to lighting one lamp from another. The second flame is neither the same as the first nor wholly different. A causal stream continues; no soul travels.

Karma

Intentional actions produce consequences in this life and in future lives. Good deeds tend toward happier rebirths and harmful deeds toward painful ones. No god administers karma. It operates impersonally, like cause and effect in nature.

Nirvana

Nirvana is the end of craving, rebirth, and suffering. The Buddha declined to say what it is in positive terms. Asked whether an awakened one exists after death, does not exist, both, or neither, he set the question aside as one that does not lead to liberation. Some Buddhists describe nirvana as a peace beyond description; critics have read it as extinction. Buddhists generally reject both “eternal life” and “annihilation” as accurate descriptions.

Ethics

Lay Buddhists commonly undertake five precepts: not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, and not to take intoxicants. Monks and nuns keep hundreds of further rules. Buddhism also prizes four boundless attitudes: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

How Buddhism Spread and Divided

Buddhism did not remain one thing. Over twenty-five centuries, it divided into several traditions that differ about as much as Catholic, Orthodox, and Pentecostal Christianity, and in some respects more.

The early community and Ashoka

After the Buddha’s death, his monks held councils to settle the teachings and the monastic rules. Within about a century, disputes over discipline produced the first lasting split. The decisive turn came under Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor of India who reigned roughly 268 to 232 BC. Horrified by the slaughter of his conquest of Kalinga, he embraced Buddhist ethics, set up inscribed edicts across his empire, and sponsored missions abroad. By tradition, his son Mahinda carried the teaching to Sri Lanka. Royal patronage turned a movement of wandering ascetics into an international religion.

The three great branches

• Theravada, “the teaching of the elders.” Preserved in the Pali Canon, it prevails today in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Its ideal is the arahant, one who reaches nirvana by his own effort, usually as a monk.
• Mahayana, “the great vehicle.” Emerging around the turn of the era, it produced new scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra and the Perfection of Wisdom texts. Its ideal is the bodhisattva who postpones final nirvana to save all beings. The philosopher Nagarjuna (about the second century AD) taught that all things are “empty” of independent existence. Mahayana spread along the Silk Road to China in the first centuries AD, then to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
• Vajrayana, “the diamond vehicle.” A form of Mahayana with esoteric rituals, mantras, and guru lineages, it took root in Tibet from the seventh and eighth centuries AD. The Dalai Lama belongs to this tradition.

Two East Asian schools worth knowing

Pure Land Buddhism teaches devotion to Amitabha, a Buddha who vowed to bring all who call on his name into his paradise, the Pure Land. In Japan, Honen and especially his disciple Shinran (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) taught that human effort is useless for salvation and that one must rely wholly on Amitabha’s “other-power.” Christian observers, including the theologian Karl Barth, have noted its striking resemblance to salvation by grace through faith.

Zen (Chinese Chan) stresses seated meditation and sudden insight over scripture and ritual. Its paradoxical teaching stories, the koans, are meant to break the grip of ordinary reasoning.

Decline in India and the modern West

In the land of its birth, Buddhism faded after the first millennium. The sack of the great monastic university at Nalanda around AD 1193 is often taken as its symbolic end there. Buddhism survived and flourished elsewhere in Asia.

The Buddhism most Westerners know is largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century product sometimes called Buddhist modernism. Asian reformers and Western enthusiasts presented it as rational, scientific, and free of superstition, emphasizing meditation and ethics and downplaying gods, demons, merit-making, and miracles. The secular mindfulness movement of recent decades extends that trend. Traditional Buddhism, as most Buddhists have practiced it throughout history, has been far more devotional and supernatural.

Today Buddhism has about 324 million adherents, roughly 4 percent of the world’s population. According to the Pew Research Center, it was the only major religion whose numbers fell between 2010 and 2020, mainly because of low birth rates in East Asia and because some people raised Buddhist left the faith.

261009 – Satan’s Hatred of the Jews

by Thomas Abshier | Oct 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

title: “The Deed and the Docket: Weighing the Case Against the Prosecutors of the Jews” author: “Thomas Lee Abshier, ND” date: 2026-09-23 module: CFE secondary_modules: [CAP] type: essay status: FIRST_DRAFT topics: [abrahamic_covenant, genesis_15, romans_9_11, two_house_theology, judah_and_israel, supersessionism, zionism_and_anti_zionism, the_accuser, zechariah_3, title_versus_possession, leviticus_18, class_versus_person, christian_antisemitism, galatians_3_16, ezekiel_37] engages: “Scott Lively, ‘Satan’s Oldest Case File: Why the War on the Jews Precedes Zionism,’ September 2026. Summarized and paraphrased here; not reproduced.”

The Deed and the Docket: Weighing the Case Against the Prosecutors of the Jews

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 23 September 2026

For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. — Romans 11:29

Occasion. Scott Lively has published a short essay on why Satan hates the Jews, and why Christians who join in that hatred, under whatever banner, are doing the devil’s work. He writes as an attorney, and the whole piece is built on a legal picture: a deed, a grantor, a chain of title, a defendant who has not yet been called to trial, and a prosecutor who would rather try the defendant’s character than contest the deed on its merits. The essay is short, dense, and useful, and it touches a question this fellowship has already argued more than once: what is the standing of the Jewish people before God now, and what does that require of us? This essay summarizes Mr. Lively’s argument, grants what is sound in it, tests the framework he builds it on, and proposes a set of working rules for how a Christian should speak of Jews, of Israel, and of the state that bears that name.

I should say at the outset where I start. I hold with Paul that God has not cast away His people, that the natural branches remain beloved for the fathers’ sakes, and that the Gentile who boasts against them has forgotten who bears whom. On the essay’s central charge I therefore agree with Mr. Lively before he opens his mouth. My questions are about the machinery he uses to get there.

I. The Argument in Brief

Mr. Lively’s case runs in roughly seven moves.

First, the reframing. He says the Christian quarrel over Zionism is being fought on the wrong question. The question is not whether the Jews are good, but who holds title to the land, under what instrument, and who has the authority to cancel it. To argue about the character of a people when the issue is a deed is, he says, exactly what the accuser does.

Second, the deed. God gave the land to Abraham’s seed by a covenant in which God alone walked between the pieces (Genesis 15), and He restated it as an everlasting possession (Genesis 17). Because the Grantor bound Himself, no exile, no Roman decree, and no modern resolution can extinguish the grant.

Third, the motive of the accuser. Satan’s hatred of the Hebrews begins with the oath, not with the Cross or with 1948. The Hebrews carried the seed, the land, and the line of the Redeemer, so breaking that chain would break the plan. Pharaoh, Haman, and Herod are the same attack in different centuries. And because Christians have been grafted into the same tree, the accuser hates them for the same reason.

Fourth, the two houses. Jacob’s estate was divided: the scepter and the oracles to Judah, the birthright and the name Israel to Joseph’s line. After Solomon the two houses became two kingdoms. The north was divorced for idolatry, scattered, and lost its name; the south kept its identity and came to be called the Jews.

Fifth, the two files. The New Covenant was promised to both houses. The Church, he says, is the restored House of Israel, the prodigal brought home at the First Advent; Judah remains a separate file, partially hardened until the fullness of the Gentiles, and reserved for corporate recognition of Christ at the Second Advent. Supersessionism (the teaching that the Church has replaced Israel and inherited its promises) errs by merging the two files and stamping Judah’s closed. He calls his own position Two-House Millennialism: two houses, one king, one land, in the coming thousand-year reign.

Sixth, title is not a merit badge. Judah’s present possession is not a verdict on Judah’s present righteousness. Leviticus 18, with its warning that the land will expel those who defile it, remains on the books for the long run. Mr. Lively supports the Jewish claim under the Abrahamic deed while refusing to treat the modern state as the whole of the prophecy.

Seventh, class and person. God chose a people to exhibit, in its individuals, the best and the worst of humanity measured by His law. Scripture records both. To treat “the Jews” as a single moral corporation is a category error and the accuser’s oldest move: try the people, and you never have to beat the deed. Christians who indict the class over bankers, Gaza, the Talmud, or the revolutionaries of 1917 are prosecuting defendants God has not dismissed, and are using their own covenant standing to strike the branches that still carry the older instrument.

That is the case. It is a good one.

II. What the Essay Gets Right

The reframing is the heart of it, and it is correct. Almost every Christian argument about the Jews I have ever heard has been an argument about character. One side lists what Jews have contributed; the other side lists what Jews have done; and both sides act as if the ledger decides the covenant. Mr. Lively’s first question, who holds title and who can cancel it, moves the case to the only ground on which Scripture actually argues it. Paul’s own question in Romans 11:1 is not “Are the Jews good?” but “Hath God cast away his people?” and his answer is “God forbid.”

The reading of Genesis 15 is sound. In the ancient rite, the parties walked between the halves of the slaughtered animals to say, in effect, “so let it be done to me if I break this.” In Genesis 15 Abraham is asleep, and “a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp” pass between the pieces alone. God took the whole penalty of breach on Himself. Hebrews 6 makes the same point without the picture: God, “willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath,” so that “by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie,” we might have strong consolation. Mr. Lively’s phrase for the consequence is exact: if your gospel requires God to have broken that oath, you have put a defect on the title you claim to share.

Ownership and tenancy are distinguished correctly. This is the part of the essay most likely to be missed and most worth keeping. The deed is unconditional; the occupancy is not. “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (Leviticus 25:23). The same law that forbids alienating the land warns, “That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you” (Leviticus 18:28). Both are true at once. A tenant can be evicted for cause without the owner’s deed being cancelled, and the tenant can be brought back under the same deed. Every exile and every return in Israel’s history follows this pattern. It lets a Christian affirm the Jewish claim without pretending that the present possessor is beyond judgment, and it lets him say hard things about a government without touching the grant.

The class-and-person distinction is biblical, and it cuts in both directions. Scripture is the most unsparing record of Jewish sin ever written, and it was written by Jews. It is also the record of Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Mary, and the twelve. Paul, a Jew, says “they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6), and in the same letter says of the same people, “beloved for the fathers’ sakes” (Romans 11:28). The man who makes “the Jews” a single moral unit, whether to damn them or to canonize them, has stopped reading the Bible’s own account. The Christian Zionist who will not hear a word against the Israeli government and the anti-Zionist who cannot say the word “Jew” without a sneer are making the same mistake from opposite ends.

The identification of the accuser’s method is the most important thing in the essay. Satan’s title in Revelation 12:10 is “the accuser of our brethren… which accused them before our God day and night.” His procedure is shown in Zechariah 3. Joshua the high priest, the head of the returned House of Judah, stands before the angel of the LORD “clothed with filthy garments,” and “Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.” The accuser’s case is the garments. They really are filthy. Judah had earned its exile. And the answer given is not a defense of the garments: “The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” The case is thrown out on the ground of election, and then the garments are changed. That is Mr. Lively’s whole argument in one chapter of Scripture. The prosecutor is answered not by proving the defendant clean but by naming who chose him. A Christian who stands at Satan’s right hand in that scene, adding to the list of stains, has taken a role Scripture has already assigned to someone else.

III. Testing the Two-House Framework

Here I have questions. None of them touches the conclusion. All of them touch the scaffolding, and I raise them because a sound conclusion resting on an overbuilt argument is easily knocked over by someone who only has to knock over the argument.

The estate was not split by Jacob’s two marriages. Mr. Lively writes that when Jacob married two wives, biblical inheritance law divided the estate between Leah’s house and Rachel’s. Scripture does not say this. The division it records is in 1 Chronicles 5:1–2: Reuben, the firstborn, forfeited the birthright by defiling his father’s bed, and it “was given unto the sons of Joseph,” while “Judah prevailed above his brethren, and of him came the chief ruler.” That is a division by disqualification and by God’s choice, not by the number of Jacob’s wives. And the division of the kingdom after Solomon is given its cause plainly: “Forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant… I will surely rend the kingdom from thee” (1 Kings 11:11), and to Rehoboam, “this thing is from me” (1 Kings 12:24). The two houses are real, and Scripture names them constantly. But they are the product of sin and judgment, not of a marriage settlement. The distinction matters because the law-of-inheritance reading makes the split sound like a permanent feature of the covenant, when the prophets treat it as a wound to be healed: “Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim” (Isaiah 11:13).

The northern house was not entirely lost. The essay says the north “lost its name among the Gentiles,” and a great many did. But Scripture also records that before the Assyrian deportation, “out of all the tribes of Israel such as set their hearts to seek the LORD” came south to Judah (2 Chronicles 11:16), and that under Hezekiah “divers of Asher and Manasseh and of Zebulun humbled themselves, and came to Jerusalem” (2 Chronicles 30:11). When the exiles returned from Babylon they offered “twelve he goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel” (Ezra 6:17). Anna the prophetess in the Temple “was of the tribe of Aser” (Luke 2:36), a northern tribe. James writes “to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” (James 1:1), and Paul before Agrippa speaks of “our twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night” (Acts 26:7). The people called “Jews” in the first century were, by Scripture’s own testimony, a remnant of all Israel gathered around Judah, not Judah alone. So the neat two-file picture, Judah in one and Israel in the other, does not quite match the census.

Paul does not use the files the way the essay does. This is the point I would press hardest. Mr. Lively says the Church is the restored House of Israel and that “Judah remains Judah,” partially hardened. But Paul never says Judah is hardened. He says “blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:25–26). He calls himself “an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin” (Romans 11:1), and Benjamin was a southern tribe. Throughout Romans 9–11, “Israel” is Paul’s word for the unbelieving Jewish people of his day, the same people the essay wants to file under Judah. If we adopt Mr. Lively’s vocabulary we have to read Paul against his own usage, and the essay’s strongest chapter becomes its most awkward one.

The Gentiles are grafted in, not repatriated. The essay’s identification of the Church with the returned House of Israel has an honorable pedigree and a real text behind it. Hosea says that “in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God” (Hosea 1:10), and Paul quotes exactly this in Romans 9. But look at what Paul applies it to: those God has called “not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles” (Romans 9:24). Peter does the same in 1 Peter 2:10. The apostles read Hosea’s “not my people” as a pattern that reaches the Gentiles as Gentiles, not as a prophecy that the Gentile believer is secretly an Ephraimite coming home. Paul’s own picture for what happens to us is the olive tree: the Gentile is a wild branch “graffed in among them” (Romans 11:17), made a “fellowcitizen” of “the commonwealth of Israel” (Ephesians 2:12, 19), part of “one new man” (Ephesians 2:15). That is adoption into Israel, which the essay also affirms. It is not the same as being Israel’s lost northern half, and I think the essay would lose nothing by dropping the second claim and keeping the first. Ezekiel’s two sticks (Ezekiel 37:15–22) are joined “in mine hand” under “one king,” and that reunion is placed by the prophet in the coming kingdom, which is precisely where Mr. Lively’s own Two-House Millennialism puts it. The Church does not need to be that stick now in order to be an heir now.

Romans 7 is being asked to carry a load Paul did not put on it. The essay says that at the First Advent “the Husband died,” freeing the divorced wife Israel to be reconciled. This is a way of solving a real difficulty: Jeremiah 3:8 says God gave the northern kingdom “a bill of divorce,” and Deuteronomy 24:4 says a divorced wife who has married another may not return to her first husband. The two-house teachers answer that the Husband’s death dissolves the bar. It is an ingenious reading, but it is not what Romans 7 is about. Paul’s point there is that the law has dominion over a man only while he lives, and that the believer, having died with Christ, is released from the law’s claim. The one who dies in Paul’s picture is the believer, not the Husband. God, for His part, answers the divorce difficulty in His own voice, without a death: “I will betroth thee unto me for ever” (Hosea 2:19), and “Turn, O backsliding children, saith the LORD; for I am married unto you” (Jeremiah 3:14). The Lord who wrote Deuteronomy 24 is not bound by it as a stranger would be; He is the one who pardons. The essay’s conclusion stands on Hosea and Jeremiah. It does not need Romans 7.

A word on proportion. The essay says the Gentile world before Christ had no covenant court in which to appear. As a generalization about the nations it is fair; as a statement about God’s dealings it is too flat. Melchizedek, Job, Jethro, Rahab, Ruth, the widow of Zarephath, Nineveh under Jonah, and the Magi all show a God who was never without witness among the nations, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them” (Romans 1:19). This does not weaken the essay’s point about why the accuser concentrated his fire on the Hebrews. It only keeps us from saying more than Scripture says.

IV. Galatians 3:16 and the Supersessionist’s Best Text

Any essay on this subject has to meet the strongest verse on the other side, and Mr. Lively touches it only glancingly. Paul writes: “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). And a few verses on: “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). The supersessionist reads this and says the case is closed: the seed is Christ, the heirs are those in Christ, and the unbelieving Jew holds nothing.

The reply is that the same apostle wrote Romans 11 about the same people some years later and did not think he was contradicting himself. In Galatians Paul is answering the question, “Who inherits the blessing of Abraham, and on what terms?” and his answer is, “Christ, and those in Him, by faith and not by the works of the law.” In Romans he is answering a different question, “Has God finished with the Jewish people as a people?” and his answer is, “No; they are enemies as concerning the gospel for your sakes, and beloved as touching the election for the fathers’ sakes, because the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” The first answer tells us where the inheritance lives now. The second tells us that the people through whom it came still have a future that God has sworn to. Both are Paul; both are Scripture; and the reader who keeps only one of them has torn the letter in half. Mr. Lively’s distinction between the irrevocable grant and the temporary Mosaic statute, drawn from the same chapter of Galatians, is the right way to hold them together, and the essay would be stronger if it met Galatians 3:16 head-on rather than assuming the reader will not raise it.

V. The Prosecutor’s Job and Who Has Done It

Mr. Lively’s closing charge is that Christians who attack the Jews as a class are doing the accuser’s work. This deserves to be said plainly and with history behind it, because the Church has done that work for a very long time and has usually done it with a Bible open.

John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers the Church has produced, delivered a series of sermons against the Jews of Antioch in the fourth century that later centuries would quote for their own purposes. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 required Jews to wear distinguishing dress. Martin Luther, who wrote warmly of the Jews in 1523, wrote a treatise in 1543 whose counsel was to burn their synagogues and drive them from the land, and the Lutheran churches of our own century have had to disavow it in writing. The men who did these things were not pagans. They believed they were defending the honor of Christ against the people who rejected Him. That is exactly the prosecutor’s posture in Zechariah 3: the garments are filthy, therefore the defendant has no standing. And the fruit of that theology, when the Christian inheritance was later repurposed into racial theory, was the murder of six million while most of Christendom kept silent.

I say this not to indict the fathers but to make the essay’s point concrete. The road from “the Jews rejected Christ” to “therefore we may treat them as we like” has been walked before, by better men than us, and it ends in a place no Christian wants to be found. Paul saw it coming in the first generation: “Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee” (Romans 11:18). “Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee” (Romans 11:21).

In an earlier meeting of this fellowship I said that the only thing the enemies of the Jews across the centuries have in common is a conviction that there is something about this people that must be removed, and that the only explanation I can find for that is that there is something about this people that God very much likes. I still think that is right. Genesis 12:3 is not a slogan; it is a standing order: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” A man does not have to approve of everything done in Tel Aviv to fall under the first half of that sentence, and he does not have to be a Nazi to fall under the second.

VI. But May a Christian Criticize Israel?

The essay might be read as saying no, and I do not think Mr. Lively means that. He supports the land claim and explicitly declines to baptize the modern state as the whole of the prophecy. So the question is worth answering directly, because our fellowship has members who are uneasy with the present Israeli government and members who are uneasy with that unease.

The prophets criticized Israel and Judah more severely than any Gentile ever has. Nathan said to David, “Thou art the man.” Isaiah opened his book by calling Jerusalem’s rulers “rulers of Sodom.” Jesus wept over the city and pronounced its house desolate. So criticism of Jewish persons, rulers, and policies cannot be what Scripture forbids. What it forbids is shown by the difference between Nathan and Satan. Nathan named a man and an act, and his purpose was David’s repentance and restoration. Satan named a class and its garments, and his purpose was Joshua’s removal. The Law gives the standard for the first kind of speech: “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour” (Leviticus 19:15). Righteous judgment is of persons and acts, without favor either way.

So the test for any statement about Israel or about Jews is not whether it is critical but whether it is a judgment of a neighbor or a prosecution of a class. “This action by this government was unjust, and here is why” is Nathan. “This is what Jews do” is the accuser. The same test applies in the other direction: “God has a purpose for this people” is Paul, and “Israel can do no wrong” is a different kind of respecting of persons, which the Law forbids just as firmly. I would add the standard I use for everything we say in the public square: would a Jewish neighbor, hearing it, feel that it came from a man who wished him well? Nathan’s words to David were hard, and David knew they came from a friend.

Leonard has raised in past meetings the question whether the leaders of the modern state represent biblical Israel in any covenantal sense. It is a fair question, and Mr. Lively’s own distinction answers most of it. The deed runs to the seed, not to a cabinet. A secular government’s possession of the land is a matter of God’s providence, not of that government’s merit, exactly as Cyrus’s decree was. A Christian can therefore hold the deed to be God’s, the present possession to be under His judgment as every possession has always been, and the government’s acts to be open to the same judgment any government’s acts are open to. None of those three positions requires the fourth, which is the only one Scripture actually forbids: that the people themselves have been dismissed from the case.

VII. Working Rules for Speaking of the Jews

Seven, for the fellowship to argue over.

1. Argue the deed, not the character. When the subject is the covenant or the land, the question is what God swore and to whom. A ledger of Jewish virtues or Jewish crimes is not evidence on that question in either direction.

2. Distinguish ownership from tenancy. God owns the land (Leviticus 25:23). He deeded it to Abraham’s seed for ever. He evicts and restores tenants according to their conduct (Leviticus 18:28). Affirm all three at once and the Zionist and the anti-Zionist both lose their favorite oversimplification.

3. Use Paul’s vocabulary. “Israel” in Romans 9–11 is the Jewish people; the Gentile believer is grafted into Israel’s tree and made a citizen of its commonwealth. Whatever we think about the ten tribes, we should not adopt a vocabulary that requires Paul to have meant something other than what he wrote.

4. Judge persons and acts, never the class. Nathan, not Satan. If a sentence cannot be rewritten with a name and a deed in it, it is probably a prosecution.

5. Bless, in the plain sense. Genesis 12:3 is not satisfied by a policy position. It is satisfied by wishing the Jewish neighbor well, praying for the peace of Jerusalem, and preaching Christ to Jews as Paul did, “to the Jew first.”

6. Remember whose garments were filthy. Every Gentile Christian was once “without Christ… having no hope, and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). The branch that boasts over the branch that was broken off has forgotten that it, too, stands by faith and not by nature.

7. Keep the two advents in order. Jesus came first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and said of Jerusalem, “Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord” (Matthew 23:39). The day when “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced” (Zechariah 12:10) is on God’s calendar, not ours. To curse the people He has reserved for that hour is, as Mr. Lively says, to take a knife to the timeline.

VIII. Conclusion

Mr. Lively has written a better essay than most of what is said on this subject from either side. He has moved the case to the right docket, identified the accuser’s method exactly, and drawn from Leviticus and Romans the two distinctions that make it possible to bless the Jewish people without flattering them and to judge Israel’s rulers without prosecuting Israel. On the charge he brings, that Christians who indict the Jews as a class are doing Satan’s work against defendants God has not dismissed, I find for the plaintiff.

The two-house machinery is another matter. Some of it is Scripture; some of it is a system laid over Scripture. The estate was divided by Reuben’s sin and God’s choice, not by Jacob’s marriages. The northern house was scattered but never entirely lost, and its remnant is among the people called Jews. Paul calls the hardened people “Israel,” not “Judah,” and calls the Gentile a grafted branch, not a returning tribe. Romans 7 is about the believer’s death to the law, not the Husband’s death to free a divorced wife. Every one of those corrections leaves the essay’s verdict standing, and I think the verdict is more secure without the scaffolding than with it, because an opponent who cannot beat Romans 11 can still beat a reading of Romans 7, and will be glad to change the subject.

What remains, when the scaffolding is set aside, is Zechariah 3. The high priest of Judah stands in filthy garments. The accuser has his list, and every item on it is true. And the LORD who chose Jerusalem rebukes him, calls the defendant a brand plucked from the fire, and orders the garments changed. That scene has not been reversed. Judah is still on the docket, and so are we, and the only safe place to stand in that courtroom is on the side of the One who chose.

I hold these conclusions as my best present judgment, and I would be glad to be shown a better argument on any of them.

Discussion Questions

1. Mr. Lively says the Zionism debate is fought on the wrong docket, character instead of title. Think of the last argument you heard or had about Israel. Which docket was it on? Would moving it have changed the outcome?
2. Genesis 15 has God alone passing between the pieces. What does it do to a person’s reading of Israel’s history, and of his own standing before God, to take seriously that God assumed the penalty of breach for a covenant only He could keep?
3. Leviticus 25:23 and 18:28 together give the ownership-and-tenancy distinction. Does that distinction let a Christian say everything he needs to say about the modern state of Israel? What, if anything, does it leave out?
4. Section III argues that Paul uses “Israel” for the Jewish people of his day and never says “Judah” is hardened. If that is right, what becomes of the claim that the Church is the restored House of Israel? Is anything of value lost by dropping it, and is anything gained?
5. Hosea 1:10 is applied by Paul to Gentiles (Romans 9:24–26) and by Peter to his readers (1 Peter 2:10). Read the three passages together. Are the apostles saying the Gentiles are the ten tribes, or that the ten tribes’ restoration is a pattern the Gentiles fall under? How would you tell the difference?
6. Galatians 3:16 says the seed is Christ. Romans 11:28 says the unbelieving Jews are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. State in one sentence how both are true.
7. Zechariah 3 shows Satan’s case against Joshua thrown out on the ground of election, not on the ground of clean garments. Have any of us argued for the Jews by trying to prove the garments clean? Have any of us argued against them by pointing at the stains? What does the chapter tell us to do instead?
8. Section VI proposes Nathan against Satan as the test for criticism: a name and an act, aimed at repentance, versus a class and its garments, aimed at removal. Apply the test to something you have said or read this year about Israel or about Jews. Which was it?
9. Genesis 12:3, “I will bless them that bless thee.” What does blessing the Jewish people look like in the life of a Gentile Christian in Montana who has no vote in Jerusalem and no Jewish neighbors he knows of? Is the verse satisfied by an opinion?

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. — Psalm 122:6

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute Of one heart to make Christ King — 1 Chronicles 12:38

261008 – The Resurrection Body

by Thomas Abshier | Oct 8, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Resurrection Body and the Third Glory: Answers to Five Questions on 1 Corinthians 15:35–41

Christos Fellowship companion essay (below) to “‘Bodies Telestial’: 1 Corinthians 15:35–41 in the Joseph Smith Translation.” 

Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | 08 October 2026

1. The seed and the plant: what carries over, and what changes?

Paul’s analogy works both ways. A farmer does not plant a wheat stalk; he plants a bare kernel. Yet what comes up is wheat, not barley. “To every seed his own body” (v. 38). The plant is the same living thing as the seed, and it looks nothing like it.

What carries over is the person. The one who rises is the one who died. Paul’s whole argument depends on this: if Christ did not rise in the body that was buried, the faith is vain (vv. 13–17). The risen Jesus is the clearest example of this continuity. The tomb was empty, so the same body was raised, not replaced. He told the disciples, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). He ate fish in front of them. He still carried the wounds of the cross (John 20:27). His identity, his history, and even his scars came through.

What changes is the body’s mode of life. Paul lists four contrasts in verses 42–44:

• sown in corruption, raised in incorruption;
• sown in dishonour, raised in glory;
• sown in weakness, raised in power;
• sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body.

“Spiritual body” (sōma pneumatikon) does not mean a body made of spirit, as if it were a ghost. The present body is called psychikon, literally “soulish.” That does not mean it is made of soul. It means the body is animated by ordinary natural life. In the same way, the raised body is animated and governed wholly by the Spirit of God. It is still a body, but no longer subject to decay, fatigue, or death. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption” (v. 50). The problem is not that the body is material. The problem is that it is mortal. Paul’s summary is “this corruptible must put on incorruption” (v. 53). The image is of something put on over what remains, not of a swap.

The risen Jesus also shows the change. He was sometimes not recognized at first (Luke 24:16; John 20:14). He appeared in a locked room (John 20:19). So the seed analogy holds on both sides: the same person, in a transformed body. Paul says Christ “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Phil 3:21).

2. Does verse 41 teach degrees of glory?

What the verse itself says. Read in context, verse 41 is not mainly about rewards. Paul builds his case from creation: God already makes many kinds of bodies, each with its own splendor. Flesh differs from flesh, earthly bodies differ from heavenly ones, and even the stars differ from one another. So it is no strain for the same God to give the resurrected a kind of body different from the one buried. Verse 42 begins, “So also is the resurrection of the dead,” and what follows contrasts the sown body with the raised body, not a ranking of the raised.

What the wider New Testament teaches. Still, the idea of differing reward among the saved is well grounded elsewhere:

• “The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works” (Matt 16:27).
• In the parable of the pounds, one faithful servant receives ten cities and another five (Luke 19:17–19).
• A believer’s work built on Christ will be tested by fire. If it burns, “he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire” (1 Cor 3:12–15).
• Daniel, whom Paul may well have had in mind, uses the same celestial imagery: “they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever” (Dan 12:3).

So a fair reading is that verse 41 does not teach degrees of reward, but it fits naturally with passages that do.

How this differs from the LDS three kingdoms. The biblical picture places differences of reward within one people. They are all saved through Christ, all in one kingdom, and all with him. Differences in reward follow faithfulness, but the dividing line between life and condemnation remains one.

The LDS doctrine of Doctrine & Covenants 76 is different in kind, not just in degree. It describes three separate kingdoms:

• Celestial: for those who received the testimony of Jesus and the ordinances of the gospel.
• Terrestrial: for honorable people blinded by men’s craftiness or not valiant in their testimony.
• Telestial: for those who did not receive the gospel or the testimony of Jesus. This includes the liars, sorcerers, adulterers, and whoremongers named in D&C 76:103, after they have suffered for their sins.

Nearly everyone ends up in some degree of glory. Only a small group, the “sons of perdition,” is excluded. Later LDS teaching holds that the highest level within the celestial kingdom also requires temple ordinances, including eternal marriage. The three kingdoms are therefore not rewards to faithful servants of one Master. They are separate destinies for believers, the morally decent, and the unrepentant, and most of these are saved apart from faith in Christ in this life. That is a different structure of salvation from what the New Testament describes, and verse 40 had to be revised to support it.

3. Translation, or adding to the text?

Proper translation. Every translation adds words in some sense. Greek and English do not line up word for word. A translator supplies “is” where Greek omits it, chooses between possible meanings, and smooths out the grammar. The KJV translators carefully printed these added words in italics so readers could see what was theirs. The test is not whether a word was added. The test is whether the translator faithfully carries over what the original says and is open about the choices he makes.

What the JST is. The Joseph Smith Translation does not claim to be a translation in that sense. Joseph Smith worked from an English King James Bible, not from Greek or Hebrew manuscripts. He presented his changes as restorations, by revelation, of material that had been lost or corrupted. That is a claim about history: that Paul originally wrote “telestial” and later dropped the word. Claims about history can be checked against evidence. The oldest surviving copy of 1 Corinthians 15 is in Papyrus 46, dated to around AD 200. It has two categories, as do all other manuscripts and early translations. Nothing supports a three-part original. The added word also cannot be translated back into Greek, because no such Greek term existed.

The scriptural warnings. Use the verses in the question carefully. Revelation 22:18–19 strictly concerns “the words of the prophecy of this book,” that is, Revelation itself. Proverbs 30:6 (“Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar”) and Deuteronomy 4:2 state the general principle. God’s word is not ours to improve. Anyone who puts his own words into God’s mouth is a liar, whatever his intentions.

A workable standard has three parts:

1. A rendering must be answerable to the manuscripts.
2. A translator’s supplied words must clarify what is there, not introduce what is not there.
3. Where a reading depends on a later revelation rather than the text, it should be honestly labeled as such, not printed as though Paul wrote it.

In fairness, the LDS church still uses the KJV as its official English Bible. It prints JST changes as footnotes and appendix material. Leonard’s version, which merges the change silently into the verse, is less transparent than the church’s own practice.

4. Why a three-tier afterlife appeals, and what Jesus taught

The appeal is understandable. Most of us know kind, honest people who do not believe. A stark division between heaven and hell feels to many people as though it treats a decent neighbor and a murderer alike. A graded afterlife answers that discomfort. It promises that nearly everyone will be saved to some degree, that justice will be proportional, and that no one we love is truly lost. It also seems to reward effort in a way people can measure. These are serious moral intuitions, and we should answer them with care rather than dismiss them.

What Jesus taught. Jesus’ teaching holds two things together.

First, the final division is one division with two outcomes. “When the Son of man shall come in his glory… he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats” (Matt 25:31–32). “They that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:29). There is no middle kingdom for the honorable but unconvinced. In Matthew 25, the line runs through how people treated “the least of these my brethren,” the same test as loving your neighbor.

Second, judgment is proportional on both sides of that line. The faithful receive different rewards (Question 2). The condemned are judged according to what they knew: “that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself… shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not… shall be beaten with few stripes” (Luke 12:47–48). “It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you” (Matt 11:22).

So the intuition behind the three-tier system is partly correct. God’s justice is proportional, and the one who knew little is not judged as the one who knew much. The error is in turning proportion into a set of separate salvations. Scripture places the decent unbeliever’s hope not in a lesser glory but in the justice and mercy of a God who “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4) and who alone judges the heart.

5. What the resurrection body means for our bodies now

If God intended to discard the body, it would matter little what we did with it. Two opposite errors have grown from that assumption. One despises the body as a prison, and the other indulges it because it does not last. Paul answered both errors in this same letter. “The body is… for the Lord; and the Lord for the body. And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power” (1 Cor 6:13–14). Because the body will be raised, what we do with it now matters. It is “the temple of the Holy Ghost… therefore glorify God in your body” (6:19–20).

Several practical consequences follow:

• Stewardship, not ownership. “Ye are not your own” (6:19). Caring for health, rest, and strength serves the Lord, who will raise this body. Neglecting or abusing the body dishonors him.
• Sexual integrity. Paul’s argument against sexual immorality in chapter 6 rests directly on the resurrection. What will be raised should not be joined to what God forbids.
• Care for the sick, weak, and dying. If the body awaiting resurrection is the same body, then the bodies of the disabled, the elderly, and the dying are not lesser things. Tending them is tending what God intends to glorify. The seed sown “in weakness” is still seed.
• Proportion. “Bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things” (1 Tim 4:8). The body matters, but it is not to be worshipped. Its glory is still to come, so we do not try to achieve it here by vanity or by fear of aging.
• Hope in labor. Paul ends the whole chapter not with speculation about kingdoms but with an instruction: “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord” (15:58). Work done in the body, for the Lord, carries forward into the resurrection, just as the seed carries forward into the plant.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

“Bodies Telestial”: 1 Corinthians 15:35–41 in the Joseph Smith Translation

Christos Fellowship discussion handout. Text brought by Leonard.

The passage

Paul answers two questions: how the dead are raised, and with what body they come. He answers with a seed analogy. The seed dies, and God gives it a new body suited to it (vv. 36–38). He then lists different kinds of flesh (v. 39), different kinds of body (v. 40), and different kinds of glory among the sun, moon, and stars (v. 41).

The one changed verse (v. 40)

Verses 35–39 and 41 are unchanged apart from modernized wording in the version Leonard found.

Background

• The Greek has two terms only. The terms are epouránia (heavenly) and epígeia (earthly). No Greek manuscript or early version contains a third category.
• “Telestial” is a coined word. It first appears in LDS scripture. It comes from Joseph Smith’s February 1832 vision of three “degrees of glory,” now Doctrine & Covenants 76, which names celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms.
• The edit harmonizes the text with that vision. Joseph Smith was revising the Bible during the same months. LDS teaching links the three kingdoms to the sun, moon, and stars of v. 41 and to Paul’s “third heaven” in 2 Cor 12:2.
• Paul’s own structure is a contrast between two bodies. Verses 42–44 spell it out: sown perishable, raised imperishable; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body. In this reading, the sun, moon, and stars in v. 41 illustrate how God gives each thing its own glory. They are not a map of ranked heavenly kingdoms.

Questions for discussion – See Above

1. The seed analogy implies that the raised body is continuous with the sown body, yet different from it. What carries over, and what changes?
2. Does v. 41 support differences of reward or glory in the resurrection? Compare Matt 16:27, Luke 19:17–19, and 1 Cor 3:12–15. If so, how does that differ from the LDS doctrine of three kingdoms?
3. Where does legitimate translation end and adding to the text begin? What standard should we apply (see Rev 22:18–19; Prov 30:6)?
4. Why might a three-tier afterlife appeal to people? How does it compare with what Jesus taught about judgment (Matt 25:31–46; John 5:28–29)?
5. What does Paul’s teaching on the resurrection body mean for how we treat our bodies now?

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

261007 – A 6th Dimension NDE

by Thomas Abshier | Oct 7, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

title: “The Light Without the Name: A Fellowship Reading of Van Ng Tran’s Near-Death Experience” author: “Thomas Lee Abshier, ND” date: 2026-10-07 module: CFE secondary_modules: [CAP, CWR] type: essay status: FIRST_DRAFT source: “Van Ng Tran, personal near-death-experience testimony, YouTube video (title as transcribed: ‘died and went to 6th Dimension’), viewed and transcribed 6 October 2026” source_url: “TODO — YouTube URL to be added; the transcript supplied did not carry it” engages: “Van Ng Tran’s account of a near-death experience during a severe COVID infection in Reims, France, in August 2022: the out-of-body moment, an ascent she numbers as the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions (a life review, a branching tree of choices, and a vision of all humanity as interconnected light under unconditional love without judgment), two visions of a future spacefaring humanity, her return, and the four years of ‘finishing her old life’ that followed.” topics: [near_death_experience, spirit_point_of_awareness, out_of_body_perception, dimensions_defined, numbered_heavens, life_review, book_of_remembrance, record_imprinted_on_space, branching_choices, foreknowledge_vs_causation, choose_yourself_vs_deny_yourself, light_in_every_man, evil_as_derivative_negation, no_condemnation_vs_no_judgment, love_that_pays, trying_the_spirits, experience_vs_revelation, isolation_and_fellowship, finish_your_old_life_vs_new_creation, captives_to_rescue, giving_the_name] scripture: [2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Ecclesiastes 12:7, Deuteronomy 10:14, 1 Kings 8:27, Revelation 20:12, Malachi 3:16, Psalm 139:16, Luke 12:2-3, 2 Corinthians 5:10, Genesis 2:9, Revelation 22:2, Ephesians 2:10, Jeremiah 10:23, Matthew 16:24-25, Deuteronomy 29:29, John 1:9, Genesis 1:27, Acts 17:28, Romans 14:7, 1 Corinthians 12:26, John 3:19, Romans 3:23, Romans 8:1-3, Romans 5:8, 1 John 4:10, Romans 2:4, 2 Corinthians 11:14, 1 John 4:1-3, Galatians 1:8, Isaiah 8:20, Acts 17:11, Deuteronomy 18:22, Revelation 21:2, Genesis 11:4, Revelation 22:1, Psalm 23:2, Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, Genesis 2:18, Hebrews 10:24-25, 2 Corinthians 5:17, John 3:3, Philippians 2:12-13, Matthew 7:16, 1 John 1:5, 1 John 1:7-8] prior_fellowship_essays_referenced:

• “transcripts/260301-living-in-the-spirit.md (Becoming What We Behold, 1 March 2026 — Leonard on near-death love)”
• “transcripts/260410-ai-consciousness-and-the-spirit-of-man.md (Is the Machine Awake?, 10 April 2026 — the spirit as a point of awareness)” changelog:
• “2026-10-07 v1.0 FIRST_DRAFT. Thomas’s directive: write a fellowship essay on the supplied otter.ai transcript of Van Ng Tran’s NDE video. Posture chosen by Claude under the standing delegation: receive the testimony as genuine experience, sort it by what can be asserted, define ‘dimension,’ honor what agrees with Scripture and the physics, and name what the account leaves out — the Name. Advertisement segments in the transcript (bank consultancy, credit card, home-repair plan, a resort) were ignored as not part of the testimony. One verbatim quotation from the source (‘finish your old life’) per copyright discipline; all else paraphrased. Gloss rule applied (CPP glossed at first use; no internal level labels in reader-facing prose).”

The Light Without the Name: A Fellowship Reading of Van Ng Tran’s Near-Death Experience

This week the fellowship was handed a video in which a young woman named Van Ng Tran tells the story of the day she believes she died. She tells it plainly, without music swelling under it and without anything to sell except an invitation to read her writing on Substack. She was raised in the Czech Republic, spent six years in Singapore and seven in Asia altogether, came back to Europe in the summer of 2022 looking for answers at a large spiritual conference in Basel, left disappointed, and drove alone to Reims, a French city where she knew no one, to hide in a rented studio for a month. She arrived with COVID. Within hours she could not sit up. A friend texted to ask where she was; she answered in three or four words, switched off her phone, and slipped away. What follows in her telling is an ascent through what she numbers as the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions, a vision of the future, a sudden return to a dark room at five in the afternoon, and four years of quiet obedience to an inner instruction before she told anyone at all.

I recommend the video. It is worth the half hour, and she deserves the hearing. She is honest about her confusion before the event and modest about her conclusions after it, and she does not claim to have been made a prophet.

My reading of it can be stated in one sentence, and the rest of this essay is the argument for it: Van was shown real gifts of the Father — the record of her life, the weight of her choices, the light He placed in every person, and a love that healed her — and she came back without being told the Giver’s name. The vocabulary she uses to describe what she saw — dimensions, a life contract, the lesson of choosing herself — is not the experience. It is the vocabulary she carried into it from the conference she had just left. Our work is to receive her testimony honestly, to sort what can be said from what cannot, and then to do for her experience what she could not do for it: give it its Name.

I. What the Account Asserts, and What We May Assert After It

Before arguing from a testimony, we owe it the ordinary honesty of sorting its claims into three kinds: what anyone could check, what is a reasonable interpretation, and what rests on one witness alone — and of saying which is which.

What could be checked. Almost nothing, and that is not a criticism. She was alone by design. There was no monitor, no physician, no witness in the room. That she had a serious COVID infection in Reims in late summer 2022 is plausible and unremarkable. That she lost consciousness in daylight and woke after dark is her report. The title of her video says she died; her own account never claims a stopped heart, and nothing in it establishes one. As a physician I would call what she describes a severe upper- and lower-airway inflammatory illness in a person who was dangerously alone with it. Whether she crossed the line the cardiologists draw, no one can say.

What is reasonable interpretation. Her account matches, element for element, the pattern that the study of these experiences has documented for half a century: the sense of leaving the body, seeing it from above, a review of one’s life, an overwhelming love, a boundary or decision point, and a sudden return. Raymond Moody catalogued the pattern in 1975. In 2001 the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel and his colleagues published in The Lancet a prospective study of 344 consecutive cardiac-arrest survivors in ten hospitals, of whom about one in five reported such an experience, and the experiences could not be explained by the drugs given, the duration of the arrest, or fear of death. Bruce Greyson, who has studied the phenomenon at the University of Virginia for decades, summarized the field in After (2021). Van’s experience is not exotic. It is typical. That is itself evidence: thousands of people of every culture, most of whom never compared notes, report the same architecture.

What rests on one witness. The numbering of the stages, the specific content of what she saw at each, the “they” who showed her things, and above all the two visions of the future — a one-person spherical spacecraft and a vast living city orbiting the Earth — rest on her word alone. That category means hold loosely and test, never dismiss. Single witnesses are sometimes right. But a single witness’s interpretation of her own experience is the weakest link in the chain, and she herself would say she did not understand for a long time what had been done to her.

II. The Bang and the Point of Awareness

Van says she was woken by a sound like a bomb, assumed it came from the neighbors or the street, and then realized it was her own departure. She rose, looked back, and saw her body unconscious on the bed — and not only its surface. She saw through it: the airway, nose, and mouth raw and red, the organs swollen with inflammation. She is careful to say she is not a doctor. What she describes is what a doctor would expect to find.

This is the part of the account that agrees most closely with what this ministry has argued about the nature of man. In our April essay on machine consciousness we described the human spirit as a single point of awareness given by God — not a brain, not a network, but the observer behind the eyes. In ordinary life that point watches the brain’s summary of the world, the picture assembled by the senses. That is why anesthesia removes consciousness: it does not destroy the observer; it switches off the picture he is watching. When the spirit is loosed from that arrangement, there is no reason its sight should be limited to the surfaces our eyes report. Van’s X-ray view of her own swollen tissues is exactly what we should expect of a seer no longer confined to the brain’s picture.

Scripture is not embarrassed by this. Paul describes a man — almost certainly himself — caught up to the third heaven, and twice says he cannot tell whether it happened in the body or out of it (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). The Preacher says that at death the dust returns to the earth and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7). The Bible’s anthropology has always had room for a self that can stand outside its own body and look.

III. What a “Dimension” Is — and Is Not

Van numbers her ascent: she was in the third dimension, rose until she felt something like the fizz of a shaken bottle being opened, and crossed into the fourth; again into the fifth; again into the sixth. The word is doing heavy lifting, and it is worth stopping to define it, because it is a borrowed word and it has been twisted.

In geometry and physics a dimension is an independent direction — length, width, height — along which a thing can be measured. Popular spirituality has borrowed the word to mean something else: a level of existence, a plane, a frequency.

Listen closely to how Van herself uses it, and you find she means neither. She says that when the fourth opened, it was stacked upon the third; nothing was lost; she was still here, in this world, the entire time, and more information simply became available. That is not a description of entering another space. It is a description of the same space seen with more and more of it in view.

So, by her own account:

• A dimension here does not mean a new geometric direction.
• It does not mean a separate world she traveled to.
• It does not mean a rung on a cosmic ladder of spiritual rank.
• It means a widening of access — the same reality, perceived with ever greater bandwidth by a spirit no longer filtered through a failing brain.

This is the reading that fits both Scripture and the physics this ministry is developing. That physics — we call it Conscious Point Physics — holds that the substance of reality is conscious, the sustaining thought of God, so that in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is description rather than metaphor. If that is so, the spirit does not need to leave space to see more of it. It needs only to stop being confined to the narrow summary the body provides. There is far more here than the senses report. The spirit set loose sees more of what was always here.

Nor is the numbering itself foreign to Scripture. Moses speaks of the heaven and the heaven of heavens (Deuteronomy 10:14); Solomon says even the heaven of heavens cannot contain God (1 Kings 8:27); Paul names a third heaven. The Hebrews counted heavens by ascent — the sky, the stars, the dwelling of God — as a way of speaking about increasing nearness, not as a surveyor’s map. Van’s six is her count, honestly given. It is not a cosmology, and no one should build one on it.

IV. The Book of Life

At the stage she calls the fourth, Van was handed what she describes as a book of her life. In a single second she knew all of it, from conception to her arrival in France; and yet she could also move through it at will, forward and back, drawn to certain memories that seemed to shine more than others. The ones that shone were the unresolved ones — the many times she had been the victim of whatever was happening. Her verdict on herself was blunt: she had failed. Her achievements had been a performance that looked good on paper while she was not well inside. She had not lived up to what she had agreed to do on Earth. She was sad.

Every element of this has a biblical name. The books were opened … and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works (Revelation 20:12). A book of remembrance was written before him (Malachi 3:16). In thy book all my members were written (Psalm 139:16). There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed (Luke 12:2). The life review is one of the most consistent features of these experiences across every culture, and the Bible described it long before anyone collected the reports.

The physics adds something here as well. If every event in a life leaves its imprint on the space in which it happened — the radiation of every act written into the fabric of the world — then the record is not a metaphor either. Nothing is lost. Total recall is not a miracle of memory; it is a reading of what is already written.

Notice what Van felt when she read it. She felt the weight. She judged herself and found herself wanting. I want to take that seriously, because in the next stage she will say there was no judgment at all, and her own testimony contradicts her. There was judgment. It came from the record itself, and it came from her own conscience reading it. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body … whether it be good or bad (2 Corinthians 5:10). What she tasted in the fourth stage was a shadow of that seat. Her sadness was the most honest moment in her account.

Her diagnosis of what had gone wrong, though, is incomplete. She located her failure in being a victim and in performing for appearances. Those are real, and they are often the wounds of what others did to us. But a life review that finds only wounds received and none given has not finished reading the book.

V. The Tree of Branches

At the fifth stage the book became a tree. From any moment of her life she could see the choice she made, the choice she should have made, and every branching possibility between. She went straight to 2016: she was about to complete her naturalization in the Czech Republic and ask her company for a transfer to its Palo Alto office — the path she wanted — when her partner of six years was transferred to Singapore on short notice, and she went with him. In the tree she saw that she had chosen the branch farthest from her own. She stayed six years. The lesson she drew was that however far a person strays from his path, he can come back to it, and that all it takes is to choose himself.

That lesson needs the same definitional care as the word dimension, because it can mean two opposite things.

If choosing yourself means being faithful to the person God made you to be and to the work He prepared for you — we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10) — then the lesson is sound, and it is a rebuke many of us need. It is possible to abandon a calling for the sake of a man’s career, or a woman’s comfort, or the approval of a crowd, and the abandonment is real loss.

If it means that the self is the north star — and Van does use that very image — then it is the oldest error there is. O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps (Jeremiah 10:23). If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it (Matthew 16:24-25). The cure for following a man instead of God is not following yourself instead of God. It is following God.

Here is the practical test. Ask of 2016 not “which branch did I want?” but “did I ask?” Her account of the decision has two parties in it: what she wanted and what he needed. It does not mention a third. The fork she saw was real, but the deeper deviation was not choosing his path over hers. It was choosing without consulting the One whose path both of theirs were meant to be.

Two things in this stage deserve credit. First, the picture of branching possibility is consistent with how this ministry understands God’s knowledge of the future: He knows every branch and the one that will be taken, but His knowing does not cause the taking. Foreknowledge is not compulsion. Second, Van declined to look at the fruit of the tree — at herself at seventy, eighty, ninety. She sensed the future was being made now and was hers to answer for, and she let it be. That was wisdom. The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29).

The Bible has two trees in the garden (Genesis 2:9). Van’s tree, the one that shows what might have been, is closer kin to the second than to the first. The tree of life in Scripture is not a diagram of our possibilities. It is a gift whose leaves were for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2). She will touch that healing in the next stage — but not by the tree she was shown.

VI. The Mesh of Light

The sixth stage is the heart of her testimony, and she calls it the grand finale. She was, in her words, swimming in the minds and hearts of all eight billion people on Earth. She saw herself without the dense body, made of light and of qualities of consciousness, and she saw every human soul the same way: light, each with its own signature, no one tainted, no darkness anywhere. She could focus on any person and find herself inside the fingerprint of who he was. Everyone was connected to everyone in a single mesh; the smallest act anywhere touched the whole. And she was held in a love without condition and without an ounce of judgment — not about what she was, what she had done, or what she would do. Without being given any answers, she was healed. Pieces of herself she had felt were shattered came back together. She had no more questions. She no longer needed the conference in Basel.

Let me state the strongest case for receiving this exactly as she tells it, because it is a strong case.

The Gospel of John says Christ is the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world (John 1:9). Every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). God is not distant from any of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself (Romans 14:7). Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it (1 Corinthians 12:26). And if the substance of the world is God’s own sustaining thought — if He is looking out through every person as through a window — then the interconnection she saw is not poetry. It is the plain structure of reality, seen for once without the walls the body puts up. The love she felt is the love that holds every point of the world in being. Leonard said at our fellowship in March that virtually everyone who leaves the body reports being overwhelmed first by love, and that this love permeates reality and is available to us. Van is one more witness that he is right.

All of that I affirm. And yet two of her claims, taken as she states them, are false — and the falsehood is not in what she saw, but in the conclusion she drew from it.

“No darkness, no one tainted.” Scripture says all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), and her own book of life said so a few moments earlier. How can both be true? The resolution is that she was seeing at one level and drawing a conclusion about another. What she saw was what God gave: the light He placed in each person, the image He stamped, the spirit He breathed. That light is not tainted, because it is His. Evil does not exist as a second substance alongside the good; it is a refusal, a turning away from the light, a negation that has no being of its own. A vision of what is will therefore show no dark substance anywhere, because darkness is not a substance. It is a direction. The same Gospel that says the Light lights every man says in the next breath that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19). Van saw the first half of that sentence. She was not shown, or did not see, the second. Her vision was true about creation and silent about the Fall.

“No judgment.” Here the comparison that matters is not between doctrines but between what each account does with the moral debt — the weight Van herself felt at the fourth stage. Her journey has a clear structure. The fourth stage revealed the debt: she had failed. The fifth prescribed a remedy: return to yourself. The sixth dissolved the debt in love, with no payment, and with the assurance that nothing was being held against her. The debt simply ceased to matter.

Christianity tells the same story with one difference, and the difference is everything. There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). No condemnation — not because there was nothing to condemn, but because God condemned sin in the flesh of His own Son (Romans 8:3). God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10). The love without condemnation that Van felt is real. It is exactly what the gospel offers. But it was purchased, and it was purchased at a price. A love that simply waived the debt would not be the love of a holy God; it would be indifference wearing love’s clothing. God cannot pretend the book was not written. He did something better: He paid what was written in it.

So I do not read her sixth stage as a counterfeit. I read it as a foretaste given before the explanation — the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance (Romans 2:4). The kindness comes first so that the turning can follow. It is an invitation, not a verdict.

But an honest reading has to add the warning Scripture adds. Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God (1 John 4:1). The test John gives is specific: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God (1 John 4:2). Van’s account names no one. The things she was shown were shown by an unnamed “they.” Something or someone sent her back. The test is not whether the experience felt loving. Many lies feel loving. The test is whether it leads to Christ. Her experience, as she reports it, did not deny Him; it simply never named Him. That silence is not proof of deception. It is a gap — and gaps get filled with whatever vocabulary is nearest to hand. For Van, the nearest vocabulary was the language of the Basel conference: life contracts, dimensions, choosing yourself. Paul said that even if an angel from heaven preached another gospel, it should not be received (Galatians 1:8). The safeguard is not to distrust every experience. It is to let Scripture judge the experience, and never to let the experience judge Scripture (Isaiah 8:20; Acts 17:11).

VII. The Spaceship and the Green Field

From the sixth stage a portal opened, and Van stepped into the future as into a virtual-reality scene. She was in a small spherical craft built for one — a bed, a shower, a workstation, a tall window — and through the window she saw a vast organic city orbiting the Earth, skyscrapers grown through with jungle, a living thing in orbit. She felt entirely at home and felt it would happen soon, within her own lifetime. Then she was back on Earth in a spring meadow somewhere like Europe, a river to her left, the greenest grass she had ever seen, birds singing, the spherical craft hovering half-open at the corner of her vision. She closed her eyes and felt the deepest peace of her existence — and in that instant she was thrown back into her body.

These visions are the weakest-attested part of her account and the part that should be held most loosely. Scripture’s test for a prediction is simple and patient: if it does not come to pass, it was not from the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:22). She says soon. Time will tell, and there is no need to mock what time will settle.

Two observations, offered gently. First, the meadow is familiar: He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters (Psalm 23:2); a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal (Revelation 22:1). The deepest peace she found was not in the city in the sky but on the restored earth, by the water. Second, the city in the sky runs the opposite direction from the city Scripture promises. The biblical hope is not a city men raise into the heavens — let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven (Genesis 11:4) — but a city that comes down from God out of heaven (Revelation 21:2). I do not know what Van saw. I know which city I am waiting for.

VIII. “Finish Your Old Life”

When she woke, sick and in pain, two thoughts came to her. One was that the worst was over and she would recover quickly. The other became an inner voice that repeated itself for four years: “finish your old life.” She obeyed it. She told no one until, this year, she felt the old chapter was closed and a new one had begun. She says that spiritually she was reborn the moment she opened her eyes, but that as a person she still had to live, grow, choose, and move.

Without knowing it, she has described the gospel’s own shape. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3) — that is the moment of opening the eyes. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure (Philippians 2:12-13) — that is the four years. The difference is that Scripture does not ask us to finish the old life. It announces that the old life can be ended and a new one given: if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new (2 Corinthians 5:17). The new creation is not completed by effort. It is received, and then lived.

And there is one more thing in her story that every one of us should take home, because she learned it twice. She went to Reims believing that if she cut herself off and no one knew where she was, things would sort themselves out. She switched off her phone. The thread that held her physical life was a single friend who texted to ask where she was — and on the fifth day she called that friend, and on the sixth she went back to Basel to be cared for. The great lesson of her sixth stage was that no soul sits alone in a corner, that everything anyone does touches everyone. The vision and the friend taught her the same thing. Two are better than one … for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10). It is not good that the man should be alone (Genesis 2:18). This is why we gather.

IX. Judgments, and What We Do With Such Testimonies

Testimonies like Van’s are multiplying, and many of us will hear one from a neighbor, a patient, or a relative. Here is where I come down, held provisionally and stated anyway, open to a better argument.

First: these experiences are evidence, and we should treat them as evidence. They are consistent with Scripture’s teaching that man is more than his body, and with the physics this ministry is developing, in which awareness is the substance of the world and not a by-product of the brain. The skeptic’s reflex to dismiss them as hallucination does not fit the data — the consistency across cultures, the clarity of perception during unconsciousness, the lasting change in the people who have them. We should not be embarrassed by them.

Second: an experience is not a revelation. The content of a near-death experience comes to us through one person’s perception and is reported in one person’s vocabulary. It can be true and misinterpreted, beautiful and incomplete. Scripture judges the experience; the experience does not judge Scripture.

Third: the love is real, and it is God’s — but universal love without the Cross is half the testimony. What these experiencers almost all report is the love of the Father. What almost none of them can report, unless someone tells them, is what that love cost. Van felt the absence of condemnation. The gospel explains why there is none, and on what terms.

Fourth: her lesson about isolation is right, and it is ours too. The one thread that held her was a friend who reached out. Be that friend.

What the fellowship can do:

• When someone tells you of such an experience, listen to the end. Believe what can be believed. Do not argue about the dimensions.
• Then ask one question: “Who was the love?” Most experiencers have never been asked. The question opens the door to the Name without forcing anyone through it. The person is not an opponent to be corrected; he is someone who has been shown the Father’s house and not yet introduced to the Son who opened it.
• Pray for Van Ng Tran by name — that the healing she received would find its source, and that the four years of finishing her old life would end in the life that does not need finishing.
• Bring your own stories on Sunday. Several of us have heard or lived such accounts. We should compare them openly, and test them the way John told us to.

X. The Bet I Am Making

I believe Van saw real things. I believe her spirit left a sick body in a rented room in Reims and saw it, inside and out, more clearly than any physician could. I believe she read the record of her life and felt its weight honestly. I believe she saw the light that the Word places in every man, and the web of connection by which none of us lives to himself. And I believe the love she swam in was the love of God, because there is no other love of that kind.

But I do not believe that the love is nameless, or that it waived her debt by pretending it was never written. That love has a face, and nail prints in His hands. It cancelled the debt by paying it. The no-condemnation she felt was bought, and it is offered to her and to every one of us on the same terms: come to the One who paid it. The light she saw in everyone is His light. The darkness she did not see is real, but it is not a thing — it is a turning away, and it can be turned back.

Van was right that there is no darkness in that light. John said so first, and then said what she was not told:

This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. … If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. — 1 John 1:5, 7

— Thomas

Sources

• Van Ng Tran, near-death-experience testimony (titled in transcript as “died and went to 6th Dimension”), YouTube. Van also writes on Substack; her links are in the video description. [Link to be added.]
• Raymond A. Moody, Jr., Life After Life (Mockingbird Books, 1975).
• Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich, “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045.
• Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021).
• Renaissance Ministries, “Becoming What We Behold: The True Imitation of Christ” (fellowship discussion of 1 March 2026), and “Is the Machine Awake? AI Consciousness and the Spirit of Man” (10 April 2026), both in the RM repository, https://github.com/Renaissance-Ministries/RM.
• Conscious Point Physics, Hyperphysics Institute, https://github.com/Hyperphysics-Institute/CPP.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38