The Prophet Jesus by Sir Anthony F. Buzzard

            The Prophet Jesus from Nazareth (Matt. 21:11)

Mark 6:11: “receive you or listen to you.”

Receive My Son = “listen to him” at the transfiguration (Matt. 17:5).

They “came to listen to him in the temple” (Luke 21:38).

Luke 24:19: Jesus, “a prophet mighty in deed and word.”

John the Baptist was also a prophet.

Andrews Norton: A Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians Concerning the Nature of God and the Person of Christ, 1882.

“The Christianity of the Gospels is not that of the earliest Christian Fathers…(I speak of the Fathers of the first three centuries)…We find in their writings the doctrines of Christianity intimately blended with opinions derived either from the philosophy of the age…

“Orthodox theology seems to have been the peculiar region of words without meaning…When I am told that the same being is both God and man, I recognize, as I have before said, a very intelligible, though a very absurd proposition…When it is affirmed that ‘the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God; and yet there are not three Gods, but one God’; no words can more clearly convey any meaning, than those propositions express the meaning, that there are three existences of whom the attributes of God may be predicated, and yet there is only one existence of whom the attributes of God may be predicated. But this is not an incomprehensible mystery: it is plain nonsense.”

 

Jesus the Prophet — The Ultimate Teacher

These opportunities give me just what I need to remind us all of the fixed and firm nonnegotiable basis of our Christian faith. I want to do this, because I think that some unitarians currently suffer from a degree of disorientation, failure to be clear about the Bible’s timetable in terms of the two covenants, which must always be clearly distinguished. This results from not paying proper attention to the words, teachings of Jesus our prophet. Not to know when the Old Covenant Law of Moses in the letter ended, and when the New Covenant in the spirit — the Torah of Messiah — began to be in force, presents the extreme danger of falling for the dreadful mistake of confusing the Christian faith.

Losing Christianity means losing the words, teachings of Jesus, the prophet, as our one solid, indispensable rock foundation.

John 12:44-50 is so clear — as well as very threatening:

ESV “And Jesus cried out [for special emphasis as he did in Luke 8:8, the parable of the sower] and said, ‘Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in Him who sent me….If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own initiative, but the Father who sent me has given me a command, namely, what to say and how to say it [CJB]. I know that what He commands is eternal life [Life in the Age to Come]. Whatever I say is what the Father told me to say” (GWN).

The value of us all thinking of Jesus as the Prophet will also get the ear of millions of Muslims who are well schooled on the idea of their prophet. What they need is the only real and true Prophet Jesus from Nazareth. That is the prophet Jesus as defined by Peter in Acts:

CSB Acts 3:22-23: “Moses said: ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. You must listen to everything he says to you. Everyone who fails to listen to that prophet will be removed from the people and destroyed’” (CJB).

Again, an ultimate threat and warning:

Every system of learning, supremely the Bible, needs a clear, central, backbone core and theme and thesis. In the case of New Testament Christianity, I select the unmistakably clear statements of Paul and John. Let us see if we really believe the prophet Jesus and his servant spokesmen. In 1 Timothy 6:3, Paul gives us the precise litmus test for telling the difference between true and false. Paul states categorically that anybody who does not bring the teachings of Messiah is ignorant and dangerous, and worse, and to be firmly rejected.

Another Apostle in 2 John 7-9 makes the same dramatically interesting point. Our destiny depends on our hearing the teachings of Jesus. We might say that the Devil has only one master trick — that is, to detach and separate the prophet Jesus from his own teaching. In that way the clever impression is given to the public that Jesus is being “received or preached,” when the actual teaching of Jesus is cleverly omitted and suppressed. We must pay the closest attention to this threat.

I arrive at this point of view by thinking long about what is surely the most alarming of all of Jesus’ statements: “Why do you keep calling me ‘lord, lord,’ and you will not do what I say?” What Jesus says is what he teaches. “Many will say to me in that future day, ‘lord, lord, don’t you see that we preached in your name, expelled demons in your name, and even did miracles in your name?’” Their protests will be greeted with the chilling words: “Depart from me; I never recognized you.”

How could that ultimate, crushing disappointment come to be? The answer must be that the sayings and teachings of Jesus had been neglected, overlooked, disregarded, while the name of Jesus had been offered to the public. This would be the essence of crafty, diabolical deception. It will be no less threatening of course to reject or twist the words of Paul, who spoke for the prophet Jesus.

The prophet Jesus says to us: “You call me rabbi and lord, and you do well to do so, for that is just what I am” (John 13:13). I suggest that current Christianity has lost much of this central thrust of rabbi Jesus’ teaching.

How well are we doing?

We need to reset our thinking and reestablish the NT timetable and program, fully grasping that the prophet Jesus is the minister and founder and High Priest of the New, not the Old Covenant (Heb. 12:24; 8:6; Luke 22:29-30; Heb: 9:15: or “will,” CJB). Note that Jesus “covenants to give us the Kingdom as God covenanted to give it to” him. The loss of the word covenant in many translations is a serious mistake.

Rotherham Luke 22:29: “And, I, covenant to you — as my Father hath covenanted to me — a kingdom…

Thus the Kingdom of God teaching of Jesus is the “whole deal.” Let us take stock of the enormous fact that Jesus the Prophet is the minister and servant of the New, not Old, Covenant.

Listening as we all do these days to a mass of Bible opinion coming at us from all quarters, certain statements are emblazoned in my heart as being shocking. I refer to a conversation in which I was told that when Paul said “I [a Jew and a Pharisee] am not under the law” (1 Cor 9:20), that really means “I, Paul, am not under the penalty of the law.” The effort on the part of the speaker was to promote the mistaken notion that Jewish Christians must remain as Christians under the Law of Moses in the letter, while non-Jewish Christians are under no such obligation.

I think we must reject that distinction as creating a divided New Testament church. There is in fact “one faith,” and only one faith. God is equally the God of the Jews and the Gentiles (Rom. 3:29). Circumcision in the flesh means nothing at all (1 Cor. 7:19). The New Covenant in the spirit is for all of us Christians, whatever nationality we may be. There is one faith only, and our practice as Christians is to be unified. We are to be the international Israel of God (Gal. 6:16; Phil. 3:3). Never of course must we forget the other, equally important definition of present ethnic Israel as the currently blinded ethnic Israelites or Jews. For these Jews a great future is promised as in Romans 9-11. This was a huge discovery by Abrahamics.

I want to advise all of us to pay careful attention to the backgrounds on which we may have been nurtured. We have all been there: in my case it was Armstrongism (Worldwide Church of God) with its heavy emphasis on clean foods, Sabbath and holy days, and “two Gods in the God family.” In the case of others, it was the heavy and very uneducated hand of Wierwillism (Way International) which formed our way of thinking, in those earlier days of ignorance. Under that system the dread word Dispensationalism appeared, learned unexamined and uncritically from the Bullinger Bible.

With my thesis that separating Jesus from his own teachings is the ultimate subtle and ruinous deception, it very easy to see how for example the Bullinger Companion Bible achieved its dangerous results. According to Bullinger the Gospel was not to be found in the Gospels! The Gospel in the Gospels was said to be only for Jews, not the rest of us. This is also exactly what C.S. Lewis announced: “The Gospel is not in the Gospels.” But that sort of view is antichrist, pure and simple, since it gets rid of the teaching of Jesus, and pushes Jesus back into the Old Covenant, removing him from us who claim to be, and must be, his followers, and followers of his teaching. To say that “the Gospel in the Gospels is really only for Jews” is a not too subtle way of saying that the prophet Jesus does not really count! That is pure Antichristianity!

The NIV cleverly invites you to the same sort of error by telling us that Jesus preached “the Good News,” but Paul preached “the Gospel.” The distinction hinted at is very false. It gets rid of the saving Gospel of the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, the prophet Jesus. Note too that the NIV very cleverly misled its readers to think that Jesus went “BACK” to heaven! (John 13:3; 16:28). Jesus was also made to “preexist” via the wrongly capitalized “Word” in John 1:1.

This Antichristian teaching is also what is so astonishingly stated in the following two quotations.

Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries (he died in 2007):

Many people today think that the essence of Christianity is the teachings of Jesus. That isn’t so. The teachings of Jesus are somewhat secondary to Christianity. If you read the epistles of the Apostle Paul, which make up about half of the New Testament, you’ll see almost nothing whatsoever said about the teachings of Jesus. Not one of his parables is mentioned. In fact, throughout the rest of the New Testament there’s little reference to the teachings of Jesus. In the Apostles’ creed, the most universally held Christian creed, there is no reference to the teachings of Jesus or to the example of Jesus. In fact, in recounting Christ’s earthly life, the creed states simply that He was ‘born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and was buried.’ It mentions only two days in Jesus’s life — that of His birth and that of His death. Christianity centers not in the teachings of Jesus but in the person of Jesus as the incarnate God who came into the world to take upon himself our guilt and to die in our place.

Also from Kennedy:

But Jesus says, “I am the way.” It is not the teachings of Jesus, it is not the preaching of Jesus, it is not the example of Jesus, it is not the Sermon on the Mount, it is not the Beatitudes, or anything else that He taught or said that is the way. The way is Christ Himself, the divine second Person of the Trinity, the Creator of the galaxies that came into this world.

I trust that these quotes leave you gasping, or as Greg Deuble would say in Australia, “gobsmacked.”

These statements are a huge and glaring falsehood, since Paul preached exactly the same Gospel of the Kingdom as did Jesus, to all, Jews and Gentiles alike, in Acts (14:22; 19:8; 20:24-25: 28:23, 31).

Now this equally alarming statement from another top evangelical scholar, Dr. Harold O.J. Brown:

Christianity takes its name from its founder, or rather from what he was called, the Christ. Buddhism is also named for its founder. And non-Muslims often call Islam Mohammedanism. But while Buddhism and Islam are based primarily on the teaching of the Buddha and Mohammed, respectively, Christianity is based primarily on the person of Christ.

The Christian faith is not belief in his teaching, but in what is taught about him. The appeal of Protestant liberals to ‘believe as Jesus believed,’ rather than to believe in Jesus, is a dramatic transformation of the fundamental nature of Christianity.

Is that not a colossal lie? You cannot believe in Jesus and not believe his teaching!

Then also C.S. Lewis. Lewis denies Jesus while claiming to follow him! He wrote: “The Gospels are not ‘the gospel,’ the statement of the Christian belief.” So then the words of Jesus are not the Gospel! This must be the ultimate falsehood, the ultimate deception. So Jesus has to be rescued from “church”!

Dr. James Dunn:

Hurtado does not think it necessary for Jesus to have thought and spoken of himself in the same terms as his followers thought and spoke of him in the decades subsequent to his crucifixion, in order for the convictions of those followers to be treated as valid by Christians today; though he also notes that most Christians probably think that there was ‘some degree of continuity’ between what Jesus thought of himself and subsequent Christology.

Has he read the New Testament?!

In all of these cases what this false teaching achieved was the removal of the teaching of Jesus, in the name of proclaiming only his death and resurrection. This appears to be also the core of the Billy Graham statement that “Jesus came to do three days’ work — to die, to be buried and to rise.” 1 Corinthians 15:1-3 and Romans 10 were then twisted to support the false notion. Paul did not say 1 Corinthians 15:1-3 was an account of the totality of the Gospel but only of some of its principal themes. In Romans 10 Paul said that we must “hear Jesus teaching” (v. 14), i.e. not just hear about him, that he died and rose.

It was I think the blessed revelation granted to the Abrahamic Bible students of the 1850s to point out and found a whole denomination (not a small achievement!), re-establishing the centrally important Gospel preaching and teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God. Acts 8:12 was then very intelligently selected as the slogan of that rediscovered Christianity. Luke 4:43 (Jesus’ own Mission Statement) was then also highlighted in all preaching to ensure that we never, ever lose track of Jesus’ own mission statement. If one has had the chance, as I have, to examine hundreds of books on evangelism — how to “get saved,” it is alarming to find Acts 8:12, Luke 4:43, and Mark 1:14-15, where Jesus begins his evangelism, completely absent from all presentations of what is called “the Gospel.”

The NT timetable can be reasserted and reset for us all quite easily. John 1:17 is quite clear:“While the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Messiah.”

Luke 16:16: “The Law and the Prophets were until John; since then the Good News of the Kingdom of God is preached, and everyone forces his way into it” (ESV).

It could hardly be clearer than this: Mark 1:1, 14: The beginning of the Gospel of God. Repent and believe the Gospel about the Kingdom.

Acts 10:36-37: “The word which God sent to the children of Israel, preaching the Gospel of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all) — that saying you yourselves know, which was published throughout all Judaea, beginning from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached.”

NAB Hebrews 2:3: “How shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?

Announced originally [“had its beginning”] through the Lord, it was confirmed for us by those who had heard.

Then Paul:

ESV Galatians 3:23: “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But since that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian” (CSB)

1 Corinthians 9:20: Paul speaks as a Jew, and for all believers, Jews or otherwise: We, including Paul, are not under the Torah of Moses.

I hope we all see how all the NT writers confirm the New Covenant which began when Jesus the High Priest showed up (Heb. 9:11). The beginning of Christianity is not the Ascension or Pentecost. It begins with the teaching, preaching of Jesus the Christian prophet and Messiah.

The claim by Armstrong that we are indeed still to be under the Law of Moses, was a not too well camouflaged invitation into Antichrist. Jesus was pushed back under the Old Covenant. The opposite error, just as insidious, happened when Bullinger’s ultra-dispensationalism relegated Jesus to the Old Covenant. The Devil’s trick persisted. The teaching of Jesus was disposed of.

Be it carefully noted that the historical Jesus before his death “cleansed all [unclean] foods” (Mark 7:19). He narrowed the rule on divorce given by Moses, putting the bar higher (Matt. 19:8-9): “But I say to you…” Jesus then reduces the reason for divorce to one cause only. He also moved away from strict Sabbath keeping by showing that even in the Law those who work in the temple are not subject to Sabbath keeping (Matt. 12:5).

Jesus illustrated a further wise policy of “compromise” and concession to others’ weakness when he told Peter that as Kingdom persons they did not need to pay the temple tax (Matt. 17:24-27). But in order not to offend the authorities, “let’s pay it anyway.”

Prominent in all our teaching and preaching there needs to be the easy fact that Matthew carefully structured his Gospel in five sections: “When Jesus had finished all these words,” to show that the prophet Jesus was the New Moses (whose teaching was in five books). Jesus was not just repeating Moses, but “fulfilling” his teachings (Matt. 5:17), bringing it to its new Christian perfection. The antitheses are crystal clear: “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you…”

Not to hear and understand this New Covenant is to fail to hear and understand Jesus. It is to promote antichristianity. I suggest that the current American “Bible atmosphere” is permeated with this false idea.

As to the matter of believing in the right rather than wrong Jesus, note that Trinitarianism bypasses Jesus’ own insistence on the superlatively greatest command, the Shema, in Deuteronomy 6:4: “The Lord our God is one Lord,” repeated in Mark 12:29. Trinitarianism adds two more Gods and makes a fully human Jesus impossible. Your friends who attend Trinitarian churches will not be told that the official creed under which they assemble says that “Jesus was man but not a man” and that Jesus had “a beginningless beginning.”

We are “up against” this difficulty: “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil” (Ecc. 8:11). A love of the truth remains, however, the only way to salvation (2 Thess. 2:10). God Himself says that He has remained silent (Isa. 42:14), but the demands of the prophet Jesus remain the basis of our relationship with God and Jesus.

The key to Jesus being the human Son of God is this:  Psalm 110:1 is massively quoted and alluded to in the NT.  In that oracle the one God YHVH addresses the lord of David, i.e. ADONI, my lord. This “my lord,” ADONI, is a non-Deity, human figure, all 195 appearances of ADONI.

Jesus as ADONI, David’s and our lord is now at the right hand of God. That “right hand” man is said to be “the man of Your right hand” (Ps. 80:15-17). This is “the Son of Man [the human being] whom you have made strong for Yourself” (v. 15).   This fits too with Psalm 8 and gives us the destiny of Jesus and of us (vv. 3-8). Hebrews 2:6-8 quotes this destiny for the human, Son of Man Jesus, now at the right hand of God, as in Psalm 110:1. “We do not YET see all things subject to him” (Heb. 2:8). This gives complete clarity to the Messiah as human. Daniel 7:13, 14, 18, 22, 27 (“obey them, the people of God”) fills out the same information in relation to the coming Kingdom, which is the heart of the saving Gospel first preached by the prophet Jesus and the Christians (Mark 1:14, 15: Luke 4:43; Acts 8:12).