It is easy to understand why the Talmud of Jmmanuel (TJ) is so heretical for Christianity, as it indicates that:
(a) Jmmanuel survived the crucifixion and was not resurrected,
(b) resurrection is thus a false concept, but reincarnation is a true one,
(c) Jmmanuel did not come to save mankind from their sins,
(d) Instead of teaching God's forgiveness of sins, Jmmanuel emphasized learning from one's mistakes,
(e) he was not the Son of God or divine, and
(f) his true name had not even been Jesus.
But it may not be as clear why the TJ, in the form of its original Aramaic scrolls, was treated as being heretical for Judaism by high Israeli officials who had been informed about it. Here are some of the reasons as I see it, listed in order of importance:
(a) The TJ indicates that Jmmanuel's teachings were quite distinct from those of the Old Testament, the latter having been fed into the first Christian Gospel by the writer of Matthew, who had been a Jewish scribe before converting. Hence the reverence that Christian religions place upon the Hebrew Scriptures -- the Old Testament (OT)-- would conceivably be totally undermined if the TJ's authenticity and content were to be made public. If this occurred, Americans' sympathy towards Israel as the seat of its Christian religious heritage would vanish, along with their political and economic support for Israel. Such a situation would be intolerable from both Jewish and Christian viewpoints.
(b) In the TJ Jmmanuel teaches that the Jewish God (Yahweh or El) is not the true God, or Universal Consciousness, but rather was an advanced human or humanoid. Nowadays many of us would identify such an entity as an ET alien, but two thousand years ago this could not have been understood. This in turn opens the door to interpreting angels as aliens, sky chariots and pillars of cloud or fire as UFOs, and similarly identifying other elements of OT Merkabah mysticism. All this is truly blasphemous to mainstream Judaism, and was the true reason, not expressed in the Gospels, why Jesus' teachings were considered blasphemous by the high priest.
(c) In the TJ, Jmmanuel expresses the opinion that Israel should not be considered a chosen race, and that the land of Israel was unjustly acquired from others through abominable wars. This of course goes against everything that Zionism stands for.
(d) Although the TJ does not contain the many allusions to OT verses that Matthew does, it nevertheless contains some scriptural citations, and some of these indicate that the OT version is inaccurate and incomplete. The implication is that the ETs who planned Jmmanuel's mission knew what they or their predecessors had implanted into the minds of some of the OT prophets, especially Isaiah, and imparted this information to Jmmanuel also, during his 40-day period of intense learning under the tutorship of his contacting ETs. The implication that the Hebrew Scriptures contain inaccuracies and gaps would not be acceptable to Jewish fundamentalists.
(e) Jmmanuel's teachings on reincarnation would be just as repugnant to mainstream Judaism as they are to mainstream Christianity.
For these reasons, one sees that leaders within both Christianity and Judaism who had become informed of the TJ and its heresies would have had reason to team up together against this common threat, as indicated in Rashid's letter to Meier. Although at the time the TJ was discovered, the discovery site, being on the West Bank, was under Jordanian authority, it was well after the 1967 war, when Israel took control of the area, that knowledge of the TJ somehow reached Israeli authorities. It is not known just how news about the contents of the TJ leaked out, however. But some time prior to mid-1974 it apparently did leak out, perhaps due to the difficulty for Rashid to keep his translation activities a secret for so long, since his wife, for one, must have known what he was involved with. Rashid may also have confided in a friend or two in Jerusalem about the TJ, or perhaps have occasionally consulted experts in the Aramaic language at Hebrew University as to how best translate this or that word.
The existent TJ translation is no threat to Judaism or Christianity, however, since definite proof of its Aramaic origins is lacking (though the German version does show some Aramaisms and many signs of deriving from an ancient document). Anyone who might feel threatened by it has only to claim that it was composed by a literary hoaxer.
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