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© 1999, all rights reserved
Archaic Judaism, as it is described in the Bible, was organized around the revealed wisdom of the prophets. The prophets served as messenger/administrators, who received their instructions directly from God via the Holy Spirit. The prophets were seers, possessed of an inner understanding that enabled them to receive revelations directly from the Mind of God. Empowered by the Spirit of God, the prophets manifested a constellation of paranormal abilities that included divine healing and prophesy. This interaction between the spiritual and material worlds was very much dependent on the cooperation and spiritual understanding of human beings. In the nineteen hundred years that have passed since the Pentecost, the inner understanding of the prophetic tradition of archaic Judaism has been lost.
What has remained is a living culture, isolated for eighteen hundred years, in which the language and customs of the 1st century A.D. have survived intact. The sacred literature of the Israelites was originally written in Aramaic and Hebrew. The seventy apostles that Jesus sent, (Luke 10:1) went East, beyond the confines of the Roman Empire into the countries of Iraq, Iran, and Mesopotamia and as far East as China and India. With them, they brought the gospels written in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. Many of the first Christians were converted by these very texts. What was to become the first Catholic Church, the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church of the East, received these original biblical texts directly from the hands of the Apostles. With the Muslim conquest, Christianized, Aramaic speaking Syrians retreated into inaccessible mountains where they were isolated, surrounded by hostile forces, until the dawn of the twentieth century. For century after century, these sacred texts of the Old and New Testaments were preserved. More, however, than the texts was preserved. The Assyrian Christians also preserved ancient Biblical customs, idioms, similes, parables, and metaphors, in what is equivalent to a time capsule hidden during the time of Jesus and recovered, fully intact, in the twentieth century.
The man appointed by God to bring this ancient legacy to the modern world was George M. Lamsa. Born of an Assyrian mother in a mountainous stronghold in Northern Iraq, Lamsa grew up inside this time capsule. A born scholar, raised in a society of shepherds, Lamsa lived a lifestyle that had not changed since the days of Abraham. Through a stroke of good fortune, Lamsa was allowed to attend a British operated school in Iran. He graduated at the age of 19 at the top of his class. Caught up in the turmoil in the Middle East during the First World War, Lamsa barely escaped with his life. Through a series of fortuitous meetings, Lamsa was gradually recognized as a pre-eminent Aramaic scholar. With the help of his friends, Lamsa was able to found the Aramaic Bible Society. As his first attempt at publishing, Lamsa translated the Four Gospels from the original Aramaic. When he took the manuscripts to a potential publisher, he found that no one believed his story that the Greek Bible wasn¹t the original. Rejected by the academic community, Lamsa found a friend in A.J. Holman, a Bible publisher in Philadelphia. Mr. Holman very much wanted to clear up any obscurities in the Bible and felt that Lamsa was the man for the job.
Upon publication, Lamsa began to receive wide acclaim. Wealthy donors flocked to him, enabling him to publish the entire Bible from Aramaic for the first time in 1957. George Lamsa devoted his life to finding and correcting the translation errors and contextual misrepresentations in the modern Bible. Dr. Lamsa was determined to provide Western Christians with a Bible that was free of error. He was well aware that the Greek influence in Bible lands did not begin until after the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century AD. In releasing his translation of the Aramaic Peshitta Bible, Dr. Lamsa was indirectly challenging seventeen hundred years of Western scholarship. After teaching the inerrancy of the Bible for seventeen hundred years, Western Divinity Schools were loath to admit that the Bible they used was full of translation errors. For centuries, obscure, even incomprehensible passages of scripture, were presented as Biblical mysteries that required faith in order to accept. Dr. Lamsa discovered that the obscure scriptures were incomprehensible because they were mistranslated.
As a child, I always thought that the reference to a 'camel getting through the eye of a needle' was surely a death sentence for anyone who had the 'misfortune' to be rich. It turns out that in the days of Jesus, Jerusalem was a walled city. At night the main gates were closed, and entry was only possible through a narrow gate through which a camel could not pass without much difficulty. This gate was called "kheta," Aramaic for needle. A camel could pass through the "needle" it turns out, but not without difficulty. The translation of the passage from the Greek was both a translation error and a contextual error. Needless to say, this is a very serious error. Every error that Dr. Lamsa found increased the discomfort of Western religious scholars. If the rich aren't doomed to hell, as implied in the Western translation, then we must wonder what other serious errors may have been made.
Most troubling was the question of contextual errors. What if the corrected Bible contradicted Western religious orthodoxy? Though Dr. Lamsa discovered a number of contextual errors, he was under considerable pressure to not rock the boat. Much to his credit, he played it safe and succeeded in opening a dialogue concerning the accuracy of the Greek translation of the Bible. Dr. Lamsa states in the introduction to the translation of the Aramaic Peshitta Bible, ³We believe that the scriptures were conceived and inspired by the Holy Spirit and written by the Hebrew prophets who spoke and wrote, as the Holy Spirit moved them, to the people in their days.² The Gospel of Matthew was written in Aramaic while Jesus was still preaching. When Dr. Lamsa passed away in 1975, the mantle passed to The Aramaic Bible Society.
In 1966, the oldest manuscript of the Aramaic New Testament, now known as the Khabouris Manuscript was gifted to the Yonan Codex Foundation by two Americans who are thought to have received it from an ancient religious sect known to modern scholars as Nestorian. This sect was a surviving remnant of the See of Babylon of the Church of the East. It is thought by some to have been part of the library of a small church atop one of the mountains of Kurdistan. The contents of this library were seized by Turkish authorities in 1966 and are now in Ankara, Turkey, as per announcement in the Istanbul Gazette of June 11th, 1966, complete with pictures of the church and some of the documents then in hand.
Written
on animal skins, the Khabouris Manuscript represents the Canon
of the New Testament on which the early followers of Jesus were
in agreement before divisive controversies split the church in
the fourth century A.D.. Dr. Lamsa examined the Khabouris Manuscript
and verified its authenticity. In translating the Khabouris Manuscript,
Foundation scholars realized that the Aramaic text could be approximated
to a fairdegree in English where English equivalents of the images
existed. The scholars also realized, however, that certain Aramaic
words were formulated to express concepts that do not exist in
the English language. With this realization came the understanding
that central themes of the Gospels, themes that Jesus believed
to be of great importance, had been filtered through the limited
understanding of translators and never accurately understood.
Unlike the translators before them, the Foundation scholars did
something that had never been done: they admitted that they didn't
know what the Aramaic terms meant and left them untranslated.
In leaving the unknown terms untranslated, the Foundation scholars
indicated that in order to understand these biblical scriptures,
the inner understanding possessed by the ancient Hebrew Seers
had to be re-discovered and reconstructed.
One of the words left untranslated is the Aramaic word 'naphsha.' Naphsha has been unsuccessfully translated as 'life,' 'soul,' 'self,' and 'itself' in English and Greek texts. All attempts to find an equivalent in the symbolism of English language has failed. The reason earlier translators have failed to understand its meaning is simple. Naphsha was the word Jesus used to describe a component of a complex philosophy that formed the basis of a highly developed system of what we now call psychology. Another untranslated term that is central to this system of spiritual psychology among the archaic Jews is 'rukha d'koodsha.' Rukha d'koodsha has been translated as the Holy Spirit. The Aramaic term 'rukh' has been translated as 'spirit,' 'energy,' and 'wind.' The terms 'magnetism' and 'electricity' can also be regarded as descriptive of 'rukha.' The commonality of these terms is in the fact that, while invisible, they produce visible effects.
The term 'koodsha' is the Aramaic ancestor of the Hebrew word 'kosher.' While kosher means 'proper' as delineated by the five books of Moses, koodsha is broader and means 'proper as determined by the will of God for man, both known and unknown.' It represents that which is divinely intended for man. It also represents an innate and undetectable, yet tangible force that can be transferred from one human being to another when the human will is aligned with the Will of God. When the two terms combine, they represent the most sacred core concept of archaic Hebrew psychology. Jesus defined denial of rukha d'koodsha as the unforgivable sin. Mary conceived of ruksha d'koodsha. Rukha d'koodsha descended from the sky in the form of a dove following Jesus¹ baptism. Rukha d'koodsha led Jesus into the wilderness to test his strength in the face of adversity. Following the resurrection, Jesus told his Apostles to "Receive rukha d'koodsha." At the Pentecost, the followers of Jesus describe the descent of rukha d'koodsha as "a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, that appeared as 'tongues' that divided into flames of fire that rested upon each of them, filling them and causing them to speak in various languages simultaneously."
Prayer is one example of an invisible force that exerts a visible effect. If we could understand the inner mechanism of the power of prayer, we could gain some insight into spiritual psychology, as Jesus understood it. The Apostle James tells us,
"if any be sick, let him call for the elders of the church, and let him pray over them, anointing him with oil in the name of our Lord: and the prayer of faith shall heal the sick, and our Lord shall raise him up; and if he has committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man is powerful." (James 5:14-16)
In Dr. Larry Dossey's book, "Healing Words," he discusses the findings of strictly controlled scientific experiments that were conducted in hospitals to determine the effectiveness of prayer in healing. In his well documented research, he discovered that while prayer was able to produce proven scientifically verifiable results, prayer could not be described in terms used to describe the exchange of energy as it is normally defined by science. Dossey writes,
"If prayer were a conventional form of energy, it would weaken as distance is increased, and this does not happen. If it were energy, its effects could be shielded, but this has not proven possible. This strongly suggests that prayer does not involve any conventional energy or signal, that it does not travel from here to there, and that it may not go anywhere at all."
Dossey continues saying,
"If prayer does not go anywhere, then it may simultaneously be present everywhere, enveloping sender, object, and the Almighty all at once."
Dossey refers to this quality of omnipresence as 'non-locality' and describes the work of the physicist, John Stewart Bell, who succeeded in proving the existence of non-locality in physics. Dossey tell us,
"The non-local view suggests that the mind cannot be limited to specific points in space (brains or bodies,) or in time (the present moment,) but is infinite in time and space; thus, the mind is omnipresent, eternal and immortal. If minds are indeed non-local, this means that they cannot be walled off and separated from one another: at some level they are unitary and one."
The ability to heal at a distance, through prayer or through any other means, seems to involve the virtual manipulation of the very fabric of space and time by an unknown component of human consciousness. Dossey suggests that the component of our consciousness that operates through prayer is infinite in time and space, immortal, and eternal. While this speculation has been around for a long time, Dossey's studies in indirect intercessory prayer provide evidence for the existence of the soul. For the first time, science has indirect proof that the 'soul' exists as a non-physical presence within everyone. Dossey's research has not only indirectly proven the existence of the soul, it has also proven that human beings are capable of therapeutic interventions via the soul. While healing accomplished through prayer is non-local, I believe that the spiritual gifts defined in the Bible as Words of Wisdom, Words of Knowledge, Spiritual Discernment, Faith, Healing, Miracles, Prophesy, Diversity of Tongues, and Interpretation of Tongues, may well be the manifest 'local' manifestations of the same healing dynamic that has been scientifically proven through Dossey's research into the non-local therapeutic interventions brought about through intercessory prayer. Perhaps the non-local presence that Dossey discovered is the naphsha, and the mysterious power that translates the prayers of the faithful into therapeutic interventions that can only be described as miracles is rukha d'koodsha.
In my book, The Secret Teachings of the Espiritistas- A Hidden History of Spiritual Healing, I document my experiences with a little known Christian sect in the Philippines that, through their intimate knowledge of rukha d'koodsha, may well have spearheaded a resurgence in the modern world of the same system of spiritual psychology that was practiced by Jesus. The Filipinos have much in common with the Hebrews of the 1st century A.D. The Filipinos were the only monotheistic society in Asia, long before they ever heard of Christianity. They are also the only pre-dominantly Christian country in Asia, and are a tribal culture. Most importantly, however, the Christian sect that I documented practices a form of Christianity that places the Holy Spirit (rukha d'koodsha) at the center of their religious activities. While Western Christianity is centered around the Father and the Son, the Filipino Espiritistas have learned to operate as 'instruments' of the Holy Spirit. While much remains to be discovered in reconstructing and practicing the spiritual psychology that formed the core of Jesus' original teachings, what I learned from the Espiritistas certainly suggests that the inner understanding possessed by the Hebrew Seers has reemerged.
For the first time in 1700 years, the inner understanding possessed by the ancient Hebrews, and demonstrated by Jesus in the biblical narrative, have re-surfaced. These are exciting times, indeed, for those who seek more from Christianity than dogma based on flawed translations of a Bible whose original authors were inspired by Rukha D'Koodsha.
For those who, like myself, want to understand the Truth of the Holy Scriptures, and the Mysteries of the Presence and Power of Rukha D'Koodsha, Metamind Publications now offers access to books through its website that can enlighten and reveal the truth. These books are not available in bookstores. In addition to "The Secret Teachings of the Espiritistas ­ A Hidden History of Spiritual Healing," we are proud to offer Enlightenment From the Aramaic ­ Selected Passages from the Khabouris Manuscript - An Ancient New Testament Scribed In the Language of Jesus of Nazareth. We are also offering the complete Lectures of Dr. George M. Lamsa on audiotape. Dr. Lamsa's Lectures cover a broad range of subjects that will be of great interest to anyone who desires a deeper understanding of Jesus' teachings as Jesus understood them and meant them to be conveyed
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