From Scrolls to Speculation: The Gospel Distorted

There was a time when the gospel was proclaimed not as a conclusion about who Jesus is, but as a declaration of what God had done through Him.

That time was the first century A.D., but it was also true in my experience in congregations during my childhood and early adult life here in America [1960s-1990].

When I was a young boy, the Gospel that saved me was this:

“Jesus is the Son of God, and God sent Him into the world to die in the place of sinners. He died on the tree [cross] to atone for sin, God raised him from the dead, and he is now seated at God’s right hand making intercession for us, and will return for His Bride, bring ‘her’ to heaven to see God, and then return to earth to rule for 1000 years before the final judgment of the damned, and then God will create a new heaven and a new earth.”

It was a complete gospel, but simple enough for a nine-year-old boy to understand. “Allow the little children to come to me.” And it saved me. God put His Spirit inside of me, and I continued to believe in His Son and trust that God would save me.

After five years and a family move to a bigger city, and the lack of attending any kind of regular worship service, I wandered from fellowship for eight years, but always ‘believed.’ Then, after eight years of that ‘wandering’, including my first four years in the Navy, I finally ‘returned’ to God like the prodigal son, and I simply asked God in Heaven to tell me what His Son would say to me if He were standing in front of me. He did. And He showed me that I was not living out the faith to which I was called, for which I was saved, which would compel me to be: poor in spirit, mournful [of sin], meek, merciful, pure, persecuted for right behavior. I was none of those. But, that began to change that day.

I had some Bible knowledge at 22 years old, but I did not have any depth of knowledge. But, I was ‘saved’ enough not to fall prey to Mormons, the first group I encountered outside my religious wheelhouse. I knew enough to know that I was already given the Holy Spirit. And I knew enough about who Yeshua is to know that He was not ‘another son of God’ the way they communicated their Jesus to me, but for me He is the only BEGOTTEN SON of the Father.

And since that time, which was 1989, there was never a question in my mind that Yeshua [which I came to call him shortly thereafter] was the SON of God, SENT by God, RAISED by God, and SEATED next to God, soon to be SENT by God again to get us, to bring us TO GOD.

I have never once doubted that Yeshua was SUBORDINATE to God, not drastically, but subordinate nonetheless. He had been given all power, but one day would RETURN ALL THINGS back to His Father.

I preached it. And I saw many saved by communicating that message clearly. 

But of late, churches have been preaching an entirely different Gospel, and a different Jesus. Protestants are now preaching the ‘Catholic Jesus’.

This is, for us, a violation of Biblical instruction:

“For if he who has come to you declares another Yeshua whom we have not declared, or if you have received another spirit which you had not received, or another “good news” [gospel] which you had not accepted, you might have given in.” 2 Corinthians 11:4

I did not give in, and I will not give in.

The Yeshua declared by those first 12 Jewish men was very clearly preached not as “God”, but as the Son of God. Those Jewish Apostles and people of the first century had no concept at all of some of the things that are preached today….

The “we” in 1st Corinthians 11 was Paul and his partners, and by extension anyone sent [Shlikhim/Apostles] by Yeshua to declare the Good News of who Yeshua is. 

The book of Acts is the only book that records what was preached to Jews and to Gentiles in the Bible, and the message for both groups was identical. 

A summary of what they preached concerning the Gospel of Yeshua would be this: 

God sent, accredited, raised, exalted, and enthroned Yeshua the Nazarene, a man, and God made this man Yeshua both יהוה and Messiah, giving Him His Name and His power. God offers repentance, forgiveness, and eternal life through Him.

There is nowhere in any proclamation of Yeshua in the original preaching of who He is that even hints that “God became a man”, or that Yeshua was “god on earth”. Rather, the emphasis on both who Yeshua is and what Yeshua did is relationship and agency [sent, with God’s power], vindication, exaltation, and SONSHIP. 

Let’s not just speculate, but let’s prove this through scripture. I am using greek-sourced texts for the sake of Greek primacists. 

Peter preached the very first ever Gospel message. Note that he had ‘studied’ under Yeshua as a Talmid to his only Rabbi [student of Torah-teacher]. If anyone knew how to preach who Yeshua is and how to be saved through Him, Peter certainly did.

“Yeshua of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did through him….” [Acts 2:22]

This is clearly God working from heaven through Yeshua on earth, who is a man from a tiny town in Israel. This is the agency of the Son of God, on God’s behalf. ἀνήρ (anēr) — a man :: δι’ αὐτοῦ (di’ autou) — through him (agency, not identity).

Peter goes on and explains, “God has raised up this Yeshua…” [v. 32] And He goes on and explains in verse 36, “Therefore let all the House of Israel know that God has made this Yeshua, whom you executed, both יהוה and Messiah.” ἐποίησεν (epoiēsen) — made / appointed :: κύριον καὶ χριστόν (kurion kai christon) [kurion is mar-ya in Aramaic, יהוה in Hebrew]. This is God’s very name conferred, and not an eternal identity as “god” on Yeshua’s part. [The Greek word ‘kurios’ replaced יהוה in the OT Septuagint, and thus also in the NT]  God acted on the man Yeshua.

The next time Peter preached was in the Temple on Shlomo’s porch, and Peter said, “The God of Avraham….glorified His Son Yeshua…” [Acts 3:13] God is here acting on Yeshua, His Son, again. [some translations say ‘servant’ here, which does not detract from the Son receiving action from The Father. The Greek is actually παῖς (pais) — child / servant.] He goes on, “You killed the Prince of Life, whom God raised from the dead”… “God, having appointed His Son, sent Him to bless you…” [3:26].

So, in Peter’s first two messages, given in relatively short order after Yeshua ascended to Heaven in front of many witnesses, he is very deliberately and consistently calling Yeshua a man, who is sent, and who acts as the agent of God’s will on earth. This is exactly what is meant in John 1:1, which is consistent with the preaching of the Apostles, in spite of modern doctrine.

Peter then gets arrested, and has to testify before the “high court” of Israel, the Sanhedrin [Acts 4]. In answering their charge, he very clearly articulated that Yeshua is distinct from the Father.

“By the Name of Yeshua the Messiah of Nazareth, whom you executed, whom God raised from the dead…” [4:10]

Yeshua was a dead man. In order for His body to come back to life, someone/something had to act upon it, because there was no life in Him. But, Our Father, God, is life. Yeshua did not and could not raise Himself: His soul was in She’ol, according to Peter and David as expressed in Acts 2. God acted upon Yeshua’s body and reunited His soul with it, to raise Him from the dead.

Later in the chapter, Peter and the other believers are praying. They do not pray to Jesus, but to God, in the Name of His Son, Yeshua [verse30]. Peter is again quoting the psalms, Psalm 2 in this case, in their prayer,  which identifies the Messiah [verse 2] as a Son born of God [verse 7, 12] and later, affirming Psalm 2’s sonship of Messiah, “against your Holy Son, to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose decreed to occur…” [27-28]. Again, this is Yeshua acting as His progeny and the agent of God’s will. 

In the next chapter, Peter gets specific about the deeds of Yeshua’s agency, and His exaltation for obeying Him in carrying out that will: “The God of our fathers has raised up Yeshua whom you killed when you nailed Him on the tree.  This very One, God has appointed a Prince and a Savior, and has lifted Him up to His right hand so that He may grant repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel.” 

After Peter, just a few years later in chapter 7, Stephen makes a speech in which He declares the gospel very plainly to the Jewish religious leadership of the day. He identifies “The Righteous One”, which is the mark of Yeshua’s obedience to God. [7:52] Then we read very plainly that Stephen looked up to heaven and saw Yeshua standing at God’s right hand, and he communicated that to the Jews around him: “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (huion tou anthrōpou) This belies the idea that God the Father is an ethereal gas. He is in fact the same ‘shape’ as we are [Exodus 34, Genesis 1:27], and Yeshua, the “Son of Man”, which should be thought of as “The Human Being of Human Beings”, is standing next to God, at His right hand.  This is the Son of God beside God, not identified as ‘very god’ as later done.

All of this is very plain, easy language to understand, that only very later gets flattened out and complicated by theologians who distort God’s word.

Another apostle preached Yeshua to another Jew, a man from Ethiopia who was in Jerusalem for the feast. [Acts 8] Philip used the Isaiah scroll the prince was reading in order to preach Yeshua to him. In verse 37, that Jew said back to Philip, showing that he must have listened to Philip’s interpretation of the Old Testament Messianic passage, “I believe that Yeshua the Messiah is the Son of God.” [8:37] On that confession alone, the Ethiopian was immersed into the faith.

Not long after Philip’s encounter, in the very next chapter, Sha’ul/Paul gets saved, having seen Yeshua in the sky, having heard His voice, and having his blindness healed and being given immersion into the faith by Ananias. “He began proclaiming Yeshua in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God’.” When we finally ‘hear’ Paul preaching the gospel in Galatia, he does not identify Yeshua as “God”, but as His Son, consistent with all those who preached before him. We also see the same role of the agency of the Son of God, and not a son who replaces a god. “From the descendants of David, God brought to Israel a Savior, Yeshua.” This is Paul speaking to a Jewish and Gentile audience. And his message is consistent with that of the Apostles who preached to the Jews only in the previous chapters. He separates between the identity of God and Yeshua when he says, “But God raised Him from the dead.” And then, in identifying who Yeshua is, he quotes the same Psalm as Peter did in the prayer with the congregation in Acts 4, saying here, “You are My Son; today have I begotten You.” [13:33] This was a prophecy about Yeshua, and Yeshua affirmed that He was the fulfillment of it when He said to Nicodemus in John 3, “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son…” And after saying He is God’s begotten Son in two ways, Paul calls that son a man: “By this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you…” [v. 38]. Paul must make very certain that these Jews and Gentiles know who Yeshua is in order to save them. He emphasized sonship, agency, raising and exaltation by God acting on Him and through Him, and not identity as “God on earth”. 

In two other places in the book of Acts we hear Paul declare or imply Yeshua is a man. First, he preached at the Areopagus in Athens that God has fixed a day on which he will judge the world [remember the introductory salvation message?] in righteousness: “by a man whom He has appointed, having given assurance by [God] raising him from the dead.” [17:31] And before King Agrippa similar language was used, “That the Messiah was to suffer, and that by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light…” [26:23]

It hasn’t been brought up, but it should be: God cannot die. Yeshua did. God attests to it in His Word. God raised Yeshua: He was external to God, His body was in a tomb, His soul in She’ol, [Acts 2:27, Ps 16] and God, from Heaven, acted upon Him to raise Him from the dead, exalt Him to His own throne, give Him power, and give Him agency to save us.

So, in all the preaching of Yeshua, with which everyone who professes faith in Jesus should be aligned, He is identified as Yeshua, a man from Nazareth, God’s Son and Messiah, acted upon by God as an external agent of authority and power, vindicated from His death by God raising Him back to life, exalting Him by bringing Him to heaven to stand at God’s right hand, using His agency to intercede, save, and command us in His Father’s Name, and predicted to return to judge the living and the dead in our future. Not once did even one shade of language ever hint that we should call Him “God”, “God on earth”, part of a ‘godhead’ [a word invented in 1611 A.D. to support later theology] or that God died, or that “Jesus is God incarnate”, “God made man”, or the ‘second person of a trinity’. What the apostles proclaimed was God → sent → raised → exalted → appointed → Yeshua. He is divine and eternal, but He is, by Himself, not “God”. The Father is. The Apostles thus demanded the very confession the Ethiopian gave to Philip: Yeshua is the Messiah, the Son of God, whom God raised from the dead. This is the only textual message one can extract from Scripture with truth, lest one be guilty of doing exactly what Paul warned us about, declaring another Gospel or another “Jesus”. And so many are guilty of that very perversion. 

Preachers of America’s yesteryear did not preach that way. My generation and before all heard the gospel very simply declared from the pulpits. The preacher may have had his own imaginings about who Yeshua is, but if he did, he kept them to himself. If people asked, they might just dismiss them, or give the analogy of the egg to try to explain what they ‘claim’ is a mystery.  [This mystery idea is a result of perverting 1 Tim 3:16 by inserting “god” into the text, when the earliest Greek texts do not have it.] God was very plain-spoken by the power of His Spirit in all the men cited above to very clearly communicate who Yeshua is. His begotten Son.

Begotten explains why Yeshua said what He said in John 8:42: “I proceeded forth and came out of my Father”… proceeded forth and came out of is the very literal definition of the Hebrew word “yalad”… begotten. Yeshua says it again in John 16:27. He said it to Nicodemus. Even the Greek word for begotten, γεννάω (gennaō), means ‘to bring forth’. Both of these words always mean ‘coming to be from out of another’. God did not ‘become a man’ or come to earth. Yeshua came out of God and was sent into the world at 30 years old, by God His Father. Nothing else is truth. There was a moment in time, some 2,000 years ago, when The Word ‘became’ a human body: when Miryam begot Yeshua, through the Holy Spirit, [which is a feminine noun, btw].

This was the common message to most believers in America from the 1950s up to the 1980s. Today, that is not what people are preaching. Sensing this paradigm shift over the last few years, since we are not hearing what most people preach, but social media is throwing it in our faces, we began to do some research of late, and found that starting in the 1990s up to now, the gospel preached today is very different.

“Jesus is God. Grace is complete and redemption is finished [often expressed without repentance]. Obedience only means “love God love People”, those are God’s only two laws. There is no judgement, no wrath, no eschatology, no millennium, no hell, no need for “Jesus” as our intercessor.  Focus on ‘belonging’, ‘healing’, ‘social justice’, ‘inclusion’, ‘personal meaning’, and ‘emotional and physical wellness’.”

This is indeed ‘another gospel’. And it presents ‘another Jesus’. One who is Greek. One who is worldly, one who ‘tolerates’ sin, one who is utterly “God”, thus either killing God the Father off, having power to nullify God’s law, or adding another god to heaven, when God said there is only One God, “You shall have NO OTHER gods before [in front of] me!” For many, Jesus has indeed eclipsed the Father, based on today’s preaching. God the Father is dead. Or absentee. Or has abdicated to a ‘new god’.

What most people fail to consider is that, in spite of Paul’s warning not to participate in philosophy [Col 2:8], early Greek believers did, and they ended up eventually outnumbering the Jewish and Hebrew-aligned thinkers of the fourth century. They took over, and they changed the ‘law’ and the ‘times’.

Paul wrote in Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Messiah“. Remember the apostolic description and explanation of Messiah from the book of Acts, our foundational preaching?

Plato and Aristotle approached reality through ontological categories, in contrast to the Judaic worldview, which understood the world in relational, covenantal, and event-driven terms. The new Greek believers ask different questions than the Scriptures concerning the mind of man.

In the Hebrew mind of first century Jews, God is known through His actions—God acts, people respond, and meaning is revealed within history itself—whereas the Greek philosophical mind approached reality by asking abstract questions about what a thing is in itself, its essence (οὐσία), and how life relates to “being.” It was not until Greek philosophers became nominal believers that Yeshua’s identity began to be questioned in categories beyond what the Apostles taught, as Greek metaphysics introduced concepts such as divine immutability—the idea that God cannot change, cannot act in time, and cannot acquire new relations. Within that framework, new “Christian philosophers” were compelled to ask a question foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures and apostolic proclamation: if God begets a Son, does that mean that God has changed?

They concluded that change is allowed, so the ‘begetting’ must be eternal! [See the Nicene Creed] So theologians today call it ‘eternal generation’.

This is not how the Jewish apostles proclaimed the gospel. They announced that God sent, God raised, and God exalted Yeshua; that Yeshua appeared, received authority, and glorified God—all unmistakably actions in time. When this proclamation entered the Greek Christian philosophical world, a problem arose: Greek metaphysics insisted that God is immutable and cannot change or enter new relations. The question therefore became, if God begets a Son, does that imply a change in God? The philosophical answer was no—change in God was impossible—so the fourth-century solution was to redefine begetting as an eternal, changeless relation rather than a historical act at a moment in time. Yet this same tradition has long tolerated, and often preached, the notion that God Himself changed between the Old and New Testaments—precisely the error condemned in Marcion—revealing a deep inconsistency in which philosophical immutability is defended at the level of doctrine while a functional Marcionism governs the way Scripture is actually read and proclaimed today. And they excommunicated Marcion!

Nothing in scripture teaches this!

A second pressure came from the Greek problem with Jewish divine unity. Greek philosophy demanded numerical simplicity—one essence, no division, no hierarchy of being—whereas the gospel proclaimed God, His Son, and God’s Spirit acting distinctly in history. To Greek ears, this sounded intolerable: either Christianity should teach three gods, or reduce the Son and Spirit to inferior beings. They either refused to learn the Jewish mindset on the Shema, and on the Messenger of יהוה , and on the breath of God, or they learned it and did not like it. In response, theologians reached for Greek metaphysical categories—οὐσία (essence), ὑπόστασις (subsistence), φύσις (nature)—tools native to Greek philosophy rather than to the biblical narrative. This moment marks one of the earliest appeals to what would later be called progressive revelation, the idea that the apostolic proclamation required philosophical completion, and the new ‘universal church’ had the authority to author the changes. Yet Scripture consistently resists such a move: the faith was “once for all delivered to the Holy Ones” (Jude 3); Paul warns against going “beyond what is written” (1 Cor 4:6); and the gospel itself is declared complete and sufficient, not awaiting ontological refinement (Gal 1:8–9). Rather than anticipating later metaphysical clarification, the apostolic witness presents itself as a finished revelation—proclaimed, not progressively corrected. Yeshua’s Gospel is in fact a STONE foundation, immovable. But Greek theologians move it, and people today continue to do so.

Greek believers read the gospels through a metaphysical, philosophical lens, and not through the eyes of God, the Scriptures, and the Jewish Apostles. And they ‘developed’ the language and philosophy of trinity based on those methods. 

The Protestants of 20th Century America rejected the idea that “Jesus is God” outright, but very passively ignored it, and instead just declared what the text said, without exposing or perhaps even attempting to understand, the cause of the error of Greek philosophical theology imposed by the Catholic realm. And thank God for that, because many people were saved in spite of the hidden doctrine. Protestants sang the Doxology of Trinity, but refused to teach the official Catholic Catechism of trinity: Jesus and God and the Spirit are three PEOPLE stuffed into a single “Essence/Substance/Body”. For fifty years of my life, I never heard a protestant preach the Gospel by saying “Jesus is God”. Today, that is almost all one hears from most prominent preachers. We hear it from our politicians now. Our celebrities. It is becoming the very ‘new gospel’ of America. And it is wrecking souls. And those souls do not know it.

If this sounds severe, it is because the consequences are severe. Souls are not abstract ideas; people do not ‘have a soul’, they ‘are’ a soul, the soul is the person, — they are people who were taught, not conspirators who devised error. Many who now confess what they were given have never rejected God the Father, never intended to eclipse Him, and never set out to follow a different Jesus. They trusted their teachers. They repeated what was familiar. And God, who searches hearts, knows this. The warning here is not condemnation, but correction; not accusation, but a summons to return. “Come out of her, my people.” Scripture does not rebuke ignorance the way it rebukes rebellion, and neither should we. The Father whom Yeshua reveals is not fragile, threatened, or distant—He is patient, near, and ready to receive those who turn again to the simple truth once proclaimed. No one is asked to “deconstruct” their faith, only to re-anchor it—not in philosophy, not in creeds forged by controversy, but in the simple, living proclamation that God sent His Son, raised Him from the dead, exalted Him, and now calls all people everywhere to repent and believe through Him. That gospel does not shame; it restores. It does not erase faith; it gives it back its center: The Cornerstone, Messiah Yeshua’s risen, human body.

“For if he who has come to you declares another Yeshua whom we have not declared, or if you have received another spirit which you had not received, or another “good news” [gospel] which you had not accepted, you might have given in.” 2 Corinthians 11:4

The gospel that saved me was not a metaphysical puzzle, nor a philosophical identity claim about God’s inner essence. It was a proclamation—plain, historical, covenantal, and powerful—of what God in Heaven had done through His Son on earth. God sent Yeshua. God accredited Him. God raised Him from the dead. God exalted Him to His right hand. God appointed Him Messiah, Lord, Prince, Savior, Judge, and Intercessor. God gave Him His own Name, יהוה Yeshua the Messiah.  And through this same Yeshua—God’s only begotten Son—God offers repentance, forgiveness of sins, and eternal life. This is the gospel proclaimed by the apostles, recorded in Acts, confessed by Jews and Gentiles alike, sufficient to save a child, strong enough to preserve a wandering believer, and clear enough to resist false gospels and counterfeit messiahs.

This gospel does not diminish Yeshua; it magnifies Him. Sonship is not weakness. Agency is not inferiority. Obedience unto death, followed by resurrection and exaltation, is not a demotion—it is the very path God ordained for His Messiah. The glory of Yeshua is not that He replaced God, eclipsed the Father, or redefined monotheism, but that He perfectly revealed the Father, obeyed Him without fault, and now reigns at His side until the day He returns all things back to Him. In this way, God remains God, Yeshua remains the Son, and the Spirit remains God’s living breath at work in the world—just as the Scriptures declare.

What has changed in our time is not Scripture, but interpretation. The shift from proclamation to speculation, from narrative to ontology, from covenantal action to philosophical essence, has produced a different gospel and, inevitably, a different Jesus. When the simple apostolic confession—“Yeshua is the Messiah, the Son of God, whom God raised from the dead”—is replaced with metaphysical assertions foreign to the biblical worldview, the foundation itself is moved. And when that foundation is moved, souls are placed in danger, not because God’s truth has failed, but because it has been obscured.

I did not give in then, and I will not give in now. The gospel once delivered is sufficient. It needs no philosophical completion, no ontological refinement, and no Greek scaffolding to hold it up. It stands as it always has: God acting in history, people called to respond in faith and obedience, and salvation accomplished through His exalted Son. That gospel saved me. That gospel transformed me. And that gospel—unchanged, unashamed, and unapologetically apostolic—is the one I will continue to proclaim.