The Forgotten Life of Jesus: Mystery Not Revealed in Religion

By Dr. Timothy B. Alabi

The Forgotten Life of Jesus is written for the enjoyment of you and me. The life of Jesus Christ is meant to impact all lives to live in the righteousness of God. This book is meant to be read by all people, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, color, or language. It provides an opportunity to correct misunderstanding and misguided interpretation of the life, purpose, mission, and utterances of Jesus Christ.

The lack of the complete understanding of Jesuss words and life has been responsible for the hatred, killing, and war that have ensued in the world. There is a need to clearly convey the truth to all people. This book explains his uncommon life and messages.

It is meant to broaden the understanding of readers to make positive life changes. Man, through religion, has misinterpreted the will of God. It has brought about killing, hatred, and war in the world. The ways of Jesus Christ supersede the ways of man and bring about his peace, his love, and his truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499053654

Dr. Timothy B. Alabi

Rev. (Dr.) Timothy B. Alabi has been pastoring for over thirty years. He is currently the general overseer of Evidence of Christ Church International. He has conducted over hundreds of television interviews, seminars, training sessions, and teaching around the world on the peace, the joy, the love, the truth, and the salvation messages of Jesus Christ. Timothy was born in Alla-Kwara State, Nigeria, in 1956 to the family of Chief Joseph Abegunde Alabi and Madam Asabi Abigael Onibipe Alabi. He completed his elementary and primary education in 1969 at a Baptist primary school in Alla-Kwara State, Nigeria; completed ordinary national diploma in telecommunication at the school of telecommunication (P&T Training School, Oshodi) in Lagos, Nigeria; completed a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering in 1984 at Capitol College of Engineering, Laurel, Maryland, USA; and completed a master’s degree in business administration in 1986 at Howard University, Washington, DC, USA. He was conferred with an honorary doctorate degree in theology at EOCCI by Rev. Noah Kola Afolayan (the former general overseer of EOCCI). Rev. (Dr.) Timothy B. Alabi is currently working as a principal network security consultant. He is certified as a Novell network engineer, a Cisco network administrator, a Cisco design administrator, and an information system security professional. He is married to Sister Oluwatosin Alabi and has four children.

Book preview

WHAT JESUS CHRIST SAYS MARRIAGE IS

But from the beginning it was not so.

The book of Matthew 19:3–8 says, The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.

What are those things that we have now and/or that which we see in our environment that were not so from the beginning?

But before we answer that question, what is that beginning? Please read chapter 2 of the book of Genesis. After you finish reading, you will see that that was how it was in the beginning. This is by the revelation given to Moses by God about how the whole earth was created and how heaven was created. But before then, we have been in the mind of God. God already knew that we were going to come forth. God had already given unto each life a name, unto each life a purpose, and unto each life a calling.

So what are those things that were not from the beginning that inhabit our lives?

The spirit of lies, self-will, the spirit of deceit, the way of the world, carnality, the spirit of the devil within one, the spirit of sin, the flesh, the spirit of tradition, the spirit of witchcraft, the spirit of stubbornness and of hardness of heart, the spirit of fornication, the spirit of pride, of lust, and of hatred, the marriage that is not unto God but unto man, the desire unto husband, the desire unto wife, the spirit of doubt/unbelief, the spirit of fear, the spirit of covetousness, the spirit of lack of contentment, the spirit of loneliness, the spirit of family, the spirit of church/religion, the spirit of anger, the inability to hear from God, one’s own understanding, the spirit of self-righteousness, respecter of persons, wanting to be accepted or loved by men / the world, strong-headedness, stubbornness, pride, family and togetherness, the need to always be seen and loved.

We can separate these things that have been named into groups. But the bottom line is that sin encompasses all these things that have been named and much more that have not been named. The book of Galatians 5:19–21 which states, Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God and Revelation 21:8, But the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death and Revelation 21:27 which states, And there shall in no wise enter into it [kingdom of God] anything that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life—these are those things that were not so from the beginning.

These are a few of the categories of all that have been named:

• Sin.

• Church/Religion.

• Traditions—there are so many traditions of how people live their lives and relate to one another.

• Culture.

• Education—what we have been taught, whether in the school or within the family, which we fall back on to live by every day.

• Family—nuclear and extended, relatives, connected by blood or genealogy, DNA. These resemble one another or bear the same name. That is what sets us apart from other families.

• Man/Woman—these fall under Adam and Eve.

Each of us knows what this topic means to us because we all come from one family. We know how we do things in our own family. We know how we move, we know the kind of language we speak, and we know our different skin colors. We know what we say, we can or cannot do. The family has its own reputation and identity.

Those are things that bring about self-will in the lives of individuals. We are given an identity the very minute that we are born through the first name that is given to us and that last name that is bestowed on us. And there is a spirit behind that last name that we bear, and that spirit is called the spirit of pride. With that same name, we go forward and establish ourselves in this world. Through education we enlarge that identity and with it our different reputations. That pride now gets greater and greater. That self-will gets larger and larger. As we progress in age, customs tell us that we can start making decisions of our own and stand on our own. As time goes on, we are expected to court (man/woman), then marry, and eventually become head of our household. So in all these, our self-will gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The more we acquire in this world, the greater our self-will, the greater our reputation, the greater our desire becomes. So when Christ attempts to reveal himself to us, he has to break through all that culture, tradition, society, government, this world, the wisdom of man, and our self-will, which we have built. In his attempt to do so, Christ faces resistance in our lives and refusal from us to have these things destroyed from our lives. That is why mankind has such difficulty in serving God the way that he wants to be served. This is what brings us to the topic The Spirit of Man Called Adam and Eve.

The Spirit of Man Called Adam and Eve

In the very beginning, when God created man, man was created in God’s own image, and God saw that what he created was good. He created man and gave him power over all creatures. This means that God has already preordained you and me to have power over all creatures that are not in his own image. When he created man, he saw that Adam needed help. Adam was not the one seeking for help of his own. Adam was not the one feeling lonely. Adam was not the one who felt that he needed something or someone to keep him company. But it was God that saw that need for him. It was God that provided that which was perfect according to his eyesight. That was why Eve was created. In the beginning Eve was perfect, without sin. The relationship that Adam had with God was an intimate relationship in which nothing was hidden. Everything was exposed to the eyes of God. They were naked. Being naked means that there was nothing that

Reviews for The Forgotten Life of Jesus

[kaulsu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is what it is. No miracles, no supernatural acts. This Jesus of Nazareth speaks with a sparseness and type of authority that convinces better than waiting for water to turn to wine. I place more value in this attempt to uncover the real Christ than I do in the Jesus Seminar theologians "votes." Especially helpful are the citations at the end of the book.

[mreed61 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Truly a fast read. I think all the essentials for following in Christ's path can be found here. I have always thought Jefferson was a little misunderstood by those who have generally read history, and much maligned by those who didn't dig deeper. Those who didn't dig deeper really don't have much of an understanding of theism and its break from religion and religious practices.

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up because it was recommended to me as "Jesus without the magic," which it turns out is not quite what it is (nor quite what I was interested in). But like any "best of" list, the most entertaining part of this is arguing with the selections -- "divorce is adultery" is in (twice!) but not the loaves and the fishes? I get wanting to take out the miracles, but in the process Jefferson's managed to remove everything that made it sound like the guy had a sense of humor. I was prepared to be annoyed by duplication, but it turns out that putting in the same story told in different gospels gives a remarkable effect of veracity.

[dyarington_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book will be a forever classic. I'm so glad I was able to get a first edition from Amazon.

[sunnydale_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thomas Jefferson was a Deist who believed in a distant "watchmaker" God. He revered Jesus as a great teacher, but rejected the supernatural events added to the gospels by authors who lived after Jesus died and never met him. "I hold the precepts of Jesus, as delivered by himself, to be the most pure, benevolent, and sublime which have ever been preached to man," Jefferson wrote. "I adhere to the principles of the first age; and consider all subsequent innovations as corruptions of his religion, having no foundation in what came from him."Jefferson endeavored to find a way to read Jesus's teachings without being irritated by the parts of the Bible he considered false. So with scissors and paste he cut the gospels up and made his own version of the Bible that included only the words attributed to Jesus, without the miracles or other supernatural trappings. The result is a small book of elegant simplicity and much worth.

[razinha-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

President Kennedy said something during a dinner honoring Nobel laureates about it being the greatest gathering of intelligence in that room since Jefferson dined alone. Mr. Jefferson had a good idea here, cutting out everything he thought to be unnatural (the more common, if incorrect, term is "super"natural). I wonder if he believed anything of his end product, of if he just passed it on without applying critical thinking. He was not without flaws.

I've decided that part of my reading track for 2016 will be Books I Should Have Read Already. This is the first. Am I enriched? Not very. I've already read the source material (not primary source material...those don't exist) in multiple versions.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Smithsonian Edition provides a nicely-done facsimile of the original "Jefferson Bible," accompanied by a historical essay by Harry Rubenstein and Barbara Clark Smith and a piece on the conservation of the volume by Janice Stagnitto Ellis. Rubenstein and Smith provide useful background on Jefferson's project and its origins, and Ellis offers a neat perspective on the steps taken to preserve the original volume and make it accessible for exhibition and research. Much different from other editions of the work I've seen, this facsimile helpfully provides the original context, showing the Greek, Latin, French, and English versions side-by-side as Jefferson placed them.

[stretch_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Finally, I have finished The Jefferson Bible, only took me two years to read a 169 page book. It's not for the lack on content or boring subject, I just kept losing my place over and over and over again... It's hard to find any organization that the original text had since Jefferson literally did a cut and paste job to produce this book, so I kept getting lost trying to follow the chapter verse layout.Thomas Jefferson worked for a couple restless nights in Washington carefully extracting bible passages from the gospels to revile the true essence of religion; collecting them into a single common sense gospel narrative. A brilliant and enlightening take on the essential heart of the teachings of Jesus of absolute love and service to others. Mr. Jefferson eliminated the virgin birth, the miraculous healings, and the resurrection, leaving only the essential teachings and a very human biography of Jesus.I found it fascinating to see which passages Jefferson felt were the correct telling of Jesus's life and what could be discarded. Then to try to piece those passages into a coherent biography. I think Jefferson did an admirable job, but parts still don't seem to fit quite right, often redundant information is conveyed in several places. I think that has far more to do with the structure of the gospels themselves then with Jefferson's edits. Overall, I feel this is one of the best ways to understand and grasp the true teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

[berthashaver · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Basically a "copy and paste" version of the highlights of the four gospels without all the repetition. It is a very short, condensed version of Christ's life starting with the birth of Jesus, goes through his childhood, selecting the diciples, beatitudes, Lord's prayer, and several of the more famous parables - the widow's mite, the adulteress, the good samaritan, the ten virgins. ends with the last supper and the crucifixion. Not a work of scripture that I would study intently or read again, but it was ok for a brief overview of the life of Christ.

[midlevelbureaucrat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The gospels according to noted deist, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson took the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, arranged them in chronological order to form a single narrative and expunged the miracles, creating an interpretation of the life of Jesus as a guide and teacher, not necessarily as the son incarnate. There's virtually no introduction to this edition; no historical context provided by the editor. Would've been nice to have one.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In his forward, Brent D. Glass writes, “By removing all references to superstition and the supernatural, Jefferson made clear his admiration of Jesus as a great teacher and moral philosopher while, at the same time, reaffirming his belief in and commitment to the power of reason as the basis for understanding life and the natural world” (pg. 7). Since all interpretations of the Bible are now biased by what the reader wants to find within its pages, it’s refreshing to see such an honest edit to a book that has undergone innumerable edits, translations, and other changes. According to Harry R. Rubenstein and Barbara Clark Smith, “Left behind in the source material were those elements that [Jefferson] could not support through reason, that he believed were later embellishments, or that seemed superfluous or repetitious across the Four Evangelists’ accounts. Absent are the annunciation, the resurrection, the water being turned to wine, and the multitudes fed on five loaves of bread and two fishes. It essentially offers what the title indicates: a distillation of the teachings of Jesus the moral reformer, combined with what Jefferson accepted as the historical facts pertaining to Jesus the man” (pg. 30). The main text of this facsimile reprint shows Jefferson’s cut-and-paste technique of removing supernatural elements, cleaning up the text to prevent multiple prepositions on the same sentence, and even allowing Jefferson to compare the original Greek text of the four Gospels, alongside their Latin, French, and English translations (pg. 38-39). For the philologist or those looking to see how meaning changed via translation, the work allows them to follow Jefferson’s scholarship. Further, the work represents an early step in scholarship on the historicity of Jesus, making it a must-read for all religious scholars. Finally, the Jefferson Bible offers the unique opportunity to gain insight into the private thoughts of one of the Founding Fathers of the nation who was among the first to articulate freedom of religion.

[thebentley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really interesting--not only the history of the book and of Jefferson's philosophy but actually the Bible itself. It's interesting to read the French text alongside the English (unfortunately, I can't read Greek or Latin), and it's also interesting to read just the moral philosophy of Christianity with the supernatural completely removed. I actually found that portion of the book much more engaging than I thought I would. Well worth the read.

[joshua7pelton7stroud · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The Jefferson Bible is basically a distilling of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, removing (most of) the miraculous acts and focusing instead on the words and teachings of Jesus. In this it succeeds quite well, though the language is old and in some places a little hard to follow. The one thing I felt really hampered the book was the amount of repetition; when reading the New Testament, you don't really get a feel for how often Jesus says the same things over and over again, but nearly each parable related is told twice, making it a tad bit monotonous.Over all, it is a good, short refining for those more interested in the message Jesus spent his life trying to convey; almost an early American "Cliff's Notes" of the Bible, more than a treatise on the scripture itself. I would like to see it modernized a bit, with the language brought up to date and the repetition cut down.

[terk71 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Inspired by a featured program on History Channel, I purchased this book as a curiosity and as additional Americana for my library. Two introductory articles by members of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History rebroadcast the core information contained on that TV show. An essay by Harry R. Rubenstein (Political Curator) and Barbara Clark Smith (Curator) elaborates upon the history of this publication. Conservation descriptions are expounded by Janice Stagnitto Ellis (Senior Paper Conservator).The subtitle reads: “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.” Thomas Jefferson had spent years cutting, aligning, and pasting typeset classical language passages against the English version. His patience and precision in amassing this assemblage are amazing. It has been decades since I could read Greek and Latin with understanding, so I was not able to decipher the first three columns on each page; but, I read the King James English text almost like the Cliff’s Notes version of the New Testament. This version is astonishingly clearer in presenting Christ’s messages. Jefferson has eradicated any confusion that might arise through reading the divergent texts of the four gospel writers. Since Jefferson has eliminated all the evangelical editorial remarks and hearsay from this text, Christ’s preaching parables and moral messages are more focused and remarkably more comprehensible.The inclusions of Jefferson’s handwritten bibliography as well as the folded map of the 18th Century Mediterranean area have added precious connections to this work. The reproductions of clippings, smudges, and handwritten marginalia are ribbons that connect us to hours of intensive effort two centuries ago in Monticello. The faux-leather binding and hard plastic book jacket create an elegant addition to any bookshelf. Paradoxically, this book by a U.S. President and sponsored by a renowned American institution was printed in China. I can appreciate why Jefferson used this book for his daily reflections. This work may become a reader’s breviary or a primer in learning classical languages, but certainly it will sit as an antiquarian acquisition on anyone’s bookshelf.