Harvey Martin began his initial research into the Aramaic Bible in 1982. As the Founder of the Church of Living Truth, Harvey has spent much time researching the claims and beliefs of many different branches of the Christian faith in search of the essential truths that inspired the followers of Jesus.

Founded in Hawaii in 1977, The Church of Living Truth established a solar-powered spiritual healing center that sponsored spiritual healers from throughout the world to educate and heal the people of Hawaii. In 1982, the Church sponsored a world famous healer from the Philippines at the Hawaii center. Through this healer, Harvey discovered a form of Christianity that revolved around the Holy Spirit and concentrated on the development of healing gifts. These healing gifts, refined and used to demonstrate the spiritual power that had founded the original Christian Church at Pentecost, were used in exactly the same way among Filipinos as they had been used by the original followers of Jesus. Harvey's encounter with these Asian Christians gave him his first experience of Christianity as it is described in the biblical narrative.

Harvey eventually realized that the element missing in Western Christianity was the Holy Spirit. He writes about the theology of the Holy Spirit that he discovered in the Philippines in his book "The Secret Teachings of the Espiritistas - A Hidden History of Spiritual Healing. Harvey questioned the Filipinos at length on questions concerning the absence of the role of the Holy Spirit in Western Christianity and learned that the Filipinos didn't have the background nor the fluency in English to critique the Christian doctrines of the West. The Filipinos did tell him, however, that the emergence of the Holy Spirit within Christianity had been suppressed almost since its inception. His imagination fired, Harvey began to study Western Christianity for clues in his search for the Holy Spirit.

Shortly after returning from the Philippines, Harvey was given a copy of The Holy Bible from Ancient Eastern Manuscripts written by Dr. George M. Lamsa. Dr. Lamsa confirmed what Harvey had long suspected, the interpretations of Christian doctrine in use in the West had been derived from a Bible that had been subject to a number of translations over the centuries. Blaming no-one for the great number of errors he discovered, Dr. Lamsa merely pointed out the imprecise nature of translation work. Dr. Lamsa proceeded to clarify the mistranslations as only a Syrian Bible scholar, born in a biblical culture similar to the one that Abraham was raised in could. One of the great gifts that Dr. Lamsa bestowed was in making it clear that Jesus spoke the Palestinian dialect of the Aramaic language.

While doing research for his book, Harvey made a discovery that tied his inquiry into the Holy Spirit into the issue of establishing what the original teachings of Jesus were. In the twelfth century, an Abbot of the Catholic Church had a vision that has influenced the Church ever since. A highly literate and learned man, the holy Abbot faithfully recorded what he saw in the vision. The Abbot's name was Joachim of Fiore. His vision involved the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Joachim experienced this vision on the day of Pentecost, in 1183 A.D., while visiting Casamari, one of the most important Cistercian monasteries in Italy.

The Abbot writes, "I had entered the church to pray to Almighty God before the Holy altar, when there came upon me an uncertainty concerning belief in the Trinity, as though it were hard to understand or to hold that all the Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) were one God and one God all the Persons. When that happened, I prayed with all my might. I was very frightened and was moved to call on the Holy Spirit, whose feast day it was, to deign to show me the holy mystery of the Trinity. The Lord has promised us that the whole understanding of Truth is to be found in the Trinity. I repeated this and I began to pray the Psalms to complete the number I had intended. At this moment without delay, the shape of a ten stringed psaltery (musical instrument) appeared in my mind. The mystery of the Holy Trinity shone so brightly and clearly in it that I was at once impelled to cry out, What God is as Great as our God!"

The teachings of the Holy Trinity that Abbot Joachim received in his vision were radically different from any other theological system before or during his time. Had Joachim been any less formidable a member of the Catholic hierarchy, or had he possessed any less influence, his theology would never have found acceptance during his time, nor would it have survived into our own time. Joachim summed up the fundamental understanding that was revealed to him during his vision with these words:

"Therefore, because there are two divine Persons of whom one is ungenerated (unmanifest,) the other generated (sent,) two testaments have been set up, the first of which, as we have said above, pertains especially to the Father, the second to the Son, because the latter is from the former. In addition, the spiritual understanding, proceeding from both testaments, is one that pertains especially to the Holy Spirit."

In Joachim's vision, the Holy Spirit, as a distinct Divine Person, enters the formal theological world for the first time. The Holy Spirit revealed to Abbot Joachim that the Resurrection was the first stage of the spiritual understanding (intellectus spiritualis) meant to be conveyed by both the Old and New Testaments. While the Resurrection conveyed the idea of Jesus' victory over death, it did not fully communicate the fullness of its spiritual meaning. Joachim learned that the revelation of the spiritual understanding conveyed through both the Father and the Son was to be fully divulged by the Holy Spirit in a coming age, which he called the "Third Status."

He called the first status the Status of Law (Father,) the second status, of Grace (Son,) and the third status, of Spirit (Holy Spirit,) whom he believed would come in the future. Joachim saw that when the Age of the Spirit arrived, the Holy Spirit would communicate Divine knowledge directly to human beings. In Joachim's vision he saw the coming of what he called the Viri Spirituales (Spiritual Men) who would possess great spiritual understanding and power. Joachim believed the angel described in the tenth chapter of Revelations to be the Viri Spirituales. In the angel's hand is an open book, which Joachim believed contained the revelation of all that has been previously hidden in the Scriptures. The angel is described as having "his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the land," which Joachim interprets as meaning that the Viri Spirituales will be grounded in both the Old and New Testaments.

In speaking of the spiritualized human beings of the Third Status, Joachim says, "All those wonderful things written about Solomon and Christ will be completed in them in the Spirit, because in this people Christ will reign more powerfully." As the agents of the Holy Spirit, the Viri Spirituales would serve to prepare the way for the emergence of what Joachim calls the "Ordo Novus," or the "New People of God" in the Third Status. Joachim saw that the Viri Spirituales would be divided into two groups, one of preachers and the other of pure contemplatives. Joachim foresaw that they would engage in conflict with evil and emerge triumphant. In their triumph, they would usher in an age in which the Holy Spirit would do His own work, distinct from that of the Father and the Son. Joachim tells us, "He (the Holy Spirit) has reserved His own time for Himself in which He will do His work, not like some divine powers which are called gifts of the Holy Spirit, but like true Lord and God just as the Father and Son." Joachim saw that the Third Status would bring Peace, Harmony, and Spiritual Understanding.

Bernard McGinn, a professor of Divinity at the University of Chicago, details the Abbot's work in the book, The Calabrian Abbot-Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought. The Abbot's vision revealed that, with the Coming of the Holy Spirit, a deeper meaning of the Scriptures would also be revealed to a waiting world. A spiritual (as opposed to literal) interpretation of the Scriptures would then result from a new relationship being forged between the Holy Spirit and humanity. This new relationship was to begin with the bestowal of a special gift of the Holy Spirit that Joachim called 'intellectus spiritualis.' Professor McGinn states, "The predominant characteristic of the Third Status of history, the fundamental dynamic behind all its manifestations, is the fullness of the intellectus spiritualis (spiritual understanding) that will be given by the Holy Spirit."

According to Professor McGinn, Joachim interpreted the miracle in which Jesus changes water into wine as an analogy of the manner in which the gospel as interpreted by the spiritual intelligence sent by the Holy Spirit would be changed into the intoxicating wine of spiritual understanding and Divine contemplation in the Third Status. Joachim openly criticized those who were guilty of what McGinn describes as "the intellectual error of the persistence of the literal interpretations of the Scriptures." In his writings Joachim says, "And if the preachers of the Gospel according to the letter were preferred to the Jewish doctors who preached Moses' law, they are still far below those who have spiritual knowledge of that Gospel and who preached Moses' law, they are still far below those who have spiritual knowledge of that Gospel and who walk in no way according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." The Abbot prophesied that as the Third Status approached, the conflict between spirit-directed and literalist Christian theologians and churches would become more intense and, that ultimately, the "pagans and heretics will outlaw the dissemination of the spiritual understanding."

Reading between the lines, the inferences of the Abbot suggest that a conspiracy based on the intentional misinterpretation of the Scriptures originated early in the history of the Church. The Abbot describes the nature of the conspiracy by saying, "The external evil they did was a sign of the greater evil they conceived within, that is, to snuff out the spiritual understanding and bury it in the belly of the letter so that its voice might be heard no more in their streets nor have any further place in their possessions." Theologians, past and present, have accused Abbot Joachim of abandoning the centrality of Jesus in salvation history. Joachim believed Jesus to be central to the progressive revelation of the will of God; but the Abbot's revelatory experiences had brought him to an understanding of Jesus' role in history that was unique. For Joachim, the Christ-centered interpretation of the Bible fails to take into account Jesus' extensive references to the Holy Spirit. When Jesus articulates the coming of the Holy Spirit as an extension of his own work, the inference is that the Holy Spirit is to complete what he began. Joachim was the first in history to assign five great works to Jesus, whereas, other theologians saw only four. In addition to the four great works of the Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, Joachim added a fifth: the Sending of the Holy Spirit. This fifth great work of Jesus, the Sending of the Holy Spirit, was thought of as having two separate phases in history. The first was the Pentecost. The second phase would take place at the beginning of the Third Status.

The second outpouring of the Holy Spirit would culminate in the perfect spiritualization of the members of the Body of Christ. Professor McGinn writes, "Joachim had no intention of creating a new theology of history: such a notion would have been abhorrent to him. He was convinced that everything he had to say was clearly revealed in the Scriptures to those who had been granted the intellectus spiritualis and that he was doing nothing more than pointing to something already under our noses." Those who failed to grasp the message, failed simply because they lacked the spirit-directed understanding that revealed the inner significance of the letter. In placing the coming age of the Holy Spirit at the center of his theology, Joachim reversed the conventional wisdom that all perfection was to be found in the past, in some golden age such as the time of the primitive Church, which later ages could only hope to revive in imperfect fashion.

The Holy Spirit revealed that the age of perfection lay ahead. Joachim prophesied the coming of a new stage of history, established by a group of powerful spiritual beings, in which human beings would consciously participate in the revelation of the Divine numen described as "that which leaves the flesh completely behind and passes over into the spirit." In this revelation of the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the Scriptures, Joachim inferred that fresh, even contemporary, meaning would be imparted through texts whose meaning, theologians insisted, were already complete. By placing the magnet of reform in the future rather than in the past, the Abbot broke with previous theologies of history in a manner that has continued to be a source of inspiration for many, and a bone of contention for others. In the Third Status, Joachim describes a future event in which a divinely revealed understanding of the Scriptures will introduce true peace and ecstatic prayer on earth ... an event, which will usher in an age in which harmony and spiritual insight will bring to completion all that is spiritual in human history - the Age of the Holy Spirit.

In the visions of Abbot Joachim of Fiore, Harvey understood that the discovery, translation, and publication of the original teachings of Jesus were more than an exersize in scholarship. The very fulfillment of the salvation history of Christianity as a religion depends upon the resurrection of the original doctrine. The entry into the third stage of the prophesies of Jesus, the Coming of the Holy Spirit can only be accomplished by those who possess the spiritual understanding of the scriptures. It is through this process that "fresh, even contemporary, meaning will be imparted through texts whose meaning, theologians insisted, were already complete."

In the context of these prophesies, all of those who have contributed to the re-discovery of the original Aramaic teachings of Jesus and his followers, have acted as instruments of this coming dispensation. Having realized this, Harvey decided to re-construct the entire history of the contemporary emergence of the original Aramaic Bible. The Aramaic Bible Center website, which is sponsored by The Church of Living Truth, is the resource that Harvey has chosen to publicize this body of knowledge. In addition to building the website, Harvey has re-published seventeen books that have long been out-of-print. Harvey is continuing to publish the books that were originally written by adventurous Christians who searched the Middle East and found the greatest treasure ever given to Christians, the original teachings of Jesus.

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