The Greatest INSULT Ever Told

By Arthur David Beaman

Embark on a Riveting Journey of Faith and Discovery

In the heart of war-torn East Africa, a former Christian bishop steps beyond the bounds of his previous life, extending his hand to those caught in the chaos. But it's upon his return to the United States that a moment of divine revelat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Way Followers Institution, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218196950

Arthur David Beaman

A. David Beaman was born toward the end of World War II. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the City University of New York, a Masters Degree from C. W. Post Center of Long Island University, and a Doctoral Degree from Union Institute and University. He has had several careers, including that of a NYPD Sergeant and Executive Officer of the police department's psychological services. In that capacity, he also served as a spokesperson on behalf of the police department. He appeared in newspaper and magazine articles. Following retirement from the NYPD, he became a Mental Health and Substance Abuse Program Director in public mental health centers and hospitals where he won a Virginia Governor's award. He also served as a reviewer of substance abuse and alcohol treatment protocols for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). He left that profession to attend seminary. He eventually became a missionary in Burundi, Africa. Returning to the United States, he was elected as a bishop of the church. Currently, he is the President of a non-profit institution. Married since 1970, he has 4 sons, 9 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild on the way.

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The Greatest INSULT Ever Told

Copyright © 2023 by Arthur David Beaman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Printing, 2023

The Greatest INSULT Ever Told

The Greatest INSULT Ever Told

A. David Beaman

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Way Followers Institution, Inc.

This book is dedicated to Grace Abbate Beaman. the one and only woman I have ever loved, my one and only wife of 53 years, 

Contents

Dedication

1 God and Me

2 Judaism in the Distant Past and Now

3 Jesus from Birth to Baptism

4 Jesus in the Wilderness

5 Back from the Wilderness

6 The Canonical Gospels

7 Paul vs James

8 Antisemitism

9 The Greatest Insult Ever Told

Appendix 1 - The Talmud

Appendix 2 - Did Jesus Build the Church?

Appendix 3 - The Ark of the Covenant

Notes

References

1

God and Me

IN THE BEGINNING 

Where I came from and who I am will be important for you to know as you read this book. There was a time when neither I nor anyone who knew me, would have thought that I would write what you will read in this book. It was so unlikely that it took an act of God to bring it about. 

It was toward the end of World War II that I was born in Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. My mother lived in Manhattan. She was not married, so she probably went to a hospital in Brooklyn to give birth to avoid the social stigma of being an unmarried mother in her neighborhood. In the 1940s, there was a lot of shame and judgment around having a child out of wedlock. Going to another borough allowed more anonymity.

I was born a little after President Roosevelt died. He was a president who was beloved by many people during his time in office. My mother told me that on the delivery table, under the influence of medication, she was saying, Oh no! Not Roosevelt!

When my mother was discharged from the hospital, she took me home with her to a Manhattan apartment. She lived with her sister and her mother. Five years later, we were living in an apartment in Queens, another borough of New York City.

Once I learned to talk and understand enough words, my mother taught me to pray before going to sleep at night. I would kneel by the side of my bed, put my hands together, and pray several prayers that my mother had me memorize. Every night I would pray the following, which later in life I discovered was a variation of the original written in 1839 by Mary Lundie Duncan:

"Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me;

Bless Thy little lambs tonight;

Through the darkness be Thou near me;

Bring me safe to morning light.

All this day Thy hand has led me,

And I thank Thee for Thy care;

Thou hast fed me, clothed me, warmed me;

Listen to my evening prayer!

Let my sins be all forgiven;

Bless the friends I love so well;

Take me when I die to heaven,

Happy there for me to dwell."

I would also pray by beginning with God bless and adding all the people whom I wanted God to bless. My nightly prayer routine ended with the Lord’s Prayer. My mother, having been a member of the Church of England before she immigrated to the United States, taught me a version of the Lord’s Prayer from the King James Bible.

Just after my fifth birthday, something happened that I will never forget. It was a hot, rainy summer day. There was no air conditioning in our home, so my mother let me wear shorts without a shirt. I still felt uncomfortable, so to cool myself, I was standing in front of an open window over a radiator that had a metal cover on top of it, something common in those days.

It was lunchtime. My mother came up behind me with a sandwich. Hearing her, I turned away from the window and took it. She told me to sit on the floor and eat, cautioning me not to sit on the radiator because it might be lightning. If lightning struck while I was sitting on metal close to an open window, it could kill me. When she left the room, I climbed onto the radiator to eat my sandwich. Despite my mother’s warning, my discomfort from the heat overcame any fear I had. The breeze coming from the open window felt wonderful on my sweaty skin. Suddenly, there was a flash of light, and I saw a stream of sparks run down my wet chest as I heard thunder. The lightning my mother warned me about got me. I was frozen with fear. It took me another moment to realize that I was not dying or even injured. I guess my mother’s teaching about God made me think that God had saved me. I Jumped down from the radiator cover, wanting to thank God, but I didn’t know how. 

In my little mind, prayer was something you did before sleeping every night. None of the prayers I prayed at night had anything to do with getting hit by lightning and thanking God for not letting me be killed, or so I thought. Even the one by Mary Lundie Duncan said nothing about getting hit by lightning. To me, being a 5-year-old child, the thankfulness in that prayer was about being fed, clothed, and warmed. I had a child’s mind, very literal with concrete thinking. Under the circumstances with which I was faced, the only way I could think to thank God was to get a book from the nearby bookshelf that I knew had a drawing of Jesus in it. Jesus and God were strongly associated in my mind because I was born into a Christian family. In my little world, everyone said the same things about God. My mother told me that Jesus was God’s son. I heard that at home and in church. You could not see God, but you could see Jesus. His picture was in church and in books that I was shown. So, there was no reason for me to doubt it. Looking at a picture of Jesus would be a way to show my gratitude to God, his father. So, I sat on the floor and skimmed through the book’s pages until I found the drawing of Jesus. I looked at it, having as much gratitude in my heart as I could muster for being saved from lightning death. After a few moments, I put the book back on the shelf and went on with my day. 

As I grew older and started school, I became more aware that other kids had a father, but I didn’t. My mother told me he was killed in the war. She said he was in a submarine that got sunk during a battle in the Pacific Ocean. That was a lie. When I was older, in my thirties, I located my father. I learned from him that he was in the Navy, but he was an electrical engineer who took part in the design of submarine engines. He was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

My father was seeing two women at the same time. He had gotten both pregnant. One was in the Navy along with him. She threatened to report him if he didn’t marry her. Things were different back then. If a naval officer got a woman pregnant out of wedlock, he could be dishonorably discharged. So my father married her and never saw my mother again. However, my grandparents on my father’s side kept in contact with my mother, and I would talk to them on the phone. I was still very young, and they never mentioned my father.

CAREER #1

When I grew older, I quit kneeling by my bed to say my prayers. I just prayed the Lord’s Prayer as I lay in bed. However, throughout the day, I would pray silently, not in formal prayer, just talking to God as I would to a trusted person of the utmost authority and held in the highest esteem. Maybe God was a substitute for the father I didn’t have in my life. It didn’t seem that way to me as I remember it, but it could have been so in my unconscious mind.

I graduated from High School just before my seventeenth birthday. Having won a scholarship, I started college. During my junior year, my mother’s alcoholic brother came to live with us. He made things so chaotic that I couldn’t concentrate on my studies, so I withdrew from college. Eventually, my uncle left, but I didn’t return to that college. When I continued with my education, it was at another college, studying mechanical engineering. However, I left after my first year because my family was poor. I couldn’t wait any longer before earning money to make things better. So, I left to get a job. 

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) pays a relatively high salary to its police officers. I took the civil service exams for the NYPD, one written and one testing physical strength, which was taken contingent upon passing the written exam. I passed those tests, scoring high on each one, and entered the police academy. After graduating, I worked in what was one of the highest crime precincts in New York City. The pay was good; the benefits were excellent, and a police officer could retire after 15 years with a pension prorated according to how long they served before retirement at the mandatory age. Another benefit was that health insurance was provided for the rest of the officer’s life at no cost.

Three years later, I got married and stayed married to the same woman whom I loved dearly and still do. As of this writing, we have been married for 53 years. She is a first-generation Sicilian American and a Roman Catholic. We were married in a Roman Catholic Church. After we were married, we attended church regularly.

I didn’t convert to Roman Catholicism until sometime later. It was after I came upon a book about the then-current Pope and read it. After that, I read books about Roman Catholic theology and biographies of prominent saints, as well as a Roman Catholic study Bible. I never thought to read anything critical of the Roman Catholic Church. That was a mistake.

My wife was and is a good and kind person. I had no reason to believe that there was anything wrong with her religion since it had played an important part in her formation. While Roman Catholicism has served some people well, others have been wronged by it. There will be more about that later in this book.

After ten years in the NYPD, I got transferred to an inside job, working steady hours at the Police Academy. I went back to college, first earning a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s. My field of interest was mental health, substance abuse, and public administration. Because of my education, I was able to transfer to the Substance Abuse Services Section of the Police Department. While there, I was promoted. I served for a few months in a precinct to satisfy a requirement for promotion. Then, at the request of the Director of the NYPD Psychological Services Section, who was an accomplished psychiatrist, I was transferred to that section as its executive officer. The duties of the executive officer were mostly administrative, but when the unit got very busy, the executive officer also performed the duties of a police psychologist. I stayed in that position until I retired.

CAREER #2 

After retiring, I moved to North Carolina. Because of the low cost of living, especially housing, compared to the rising costs in New York City, I thought it was an excellent state in which to retire. I was only forty years old, so after about six months, I wanted to get back to work. I took a job at a public mental health center as a substance abuse counselor. When the director of substance abuse services retired, I was given his job. 

My older sons were finishing High School, and I knew college would be expensive. So, I bought a children’s shoe store in a shopping mall relatively near to the mental health center. My wife managed the store during the day while I was working at the mental health center, and I went there after work to install a new computerized inventory system, manage advertising, and do all the back-end work. My efforts paid off, and I increased the store’s profitability. 

A bit later, at the mental health center, forensic services were also put under my directorship. Having a master’s degree in public administration, my administrative skills were good. However, I wanted to get a higher level of education in the area of counseling people with mental health issues as well as substance abuse issues. So, I went back to school and earned a doctorate covering a variety of forms with which to work with patients. Following graduation, I passed the state licensing exam, enabling me to practice unsupervised and collect insurance payments.

I worked at the mental health center and the store for another year. Then, I got an offer to direct a hospital program in Richmond, Virginia. It appealed to me, so I sold the store and moved to Virginia. I also volunteered for a program started by the Governor of Virginia to teach pastors about alcoholism and other types of substance abuse so they could recognize it in their congregations and learn where to direct the sufferers and their families to get help. I received a commendation from the governor for that work.

CAREER #3

The Roman Catholic Church in America didn’t abide by all the pope’s directives. I knew of its scandals and the doings of the local church as well as what was going on within the church in other countries.

Members of the Roman Catholic clergy were supposed to be celibate. However, there was, within the clergy, heterosexual and homosexual activity. Worst of all, doing lifelong damage was pedophilia. Just as bad was that the church hierarchy tried to hide it and shield the guilty from consequences. That was very disturbing to me. I had children by then who would be going to church. I certainly didn’t want my children, or anyone else’s children, to be exposed to that. There also were other things changing in the church. Because of a shortage of men applying for the priesthood, they were ordaining men whom they never would have before. To me, that meant that they would bend their standards when it suits them. So, I walked away from Roman Catholicism.

I changed denominations several times, joining and being active in several churches of differing denominations. In my youth, I had been an Episcopalian, which was the closest my mother could get to the Church of England in the United States. I realize that many people only know one church. They are born into it and they remain with it. I was born into the Episcopal Church and stayed within it throughout my youth. However, there seemed to be a disconnect between my thinking about God, my relationship with God, and what I observed and felt when I was in Church.

As a married man, I was an Episcopalian, and later, a Roman Catholic. When I quit the Catholic Church, I joined with the Lutherans, eventually feeling called to the clergy. I think God led me to that, but not for the reason I thought at the time. Now, I think God wanted me to get a broader view of various Christian denominations from within the clergy.

I enrolled in Concordia Seminary, an LCMS seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, choosing that seminary because I had been attending one of the LCMS churches after leaving the Catholic Church. I thought Martin Luther had got it right, and the Catholic Church wanted to kill him for it. Looking back on it, I think it was all part of God’s plan to open my eyes.

I had been so immersed in Christianity that God knew my eyes wouldn’t easily be opened. There is something that stands out to me from when I told a pastor in the LCMS Church that I wanted to go to seminary. He said, Seminary will make you lose your faith. At the time, I thought it was a strange thing for him to say, but now I know that it was God working his plan for me, slowly, but surely, opening my eyes.

As seminarians, we were each assigned to attend an LCMS church in the area. It sounded to me like the pastors of those churches were to help us understand congregational life and how a pastor was supposed to do things in their churches. However, the pastor of the church to which I was assigned had no desire to even speak with me. Furthermore, he was using a creed in his church that was not one of the traditional creeds of the church taught in seminary. It spoke of only two persons of the Trinity, instead of three. I wanted to ask him about that to understand it, but he wouldn’t even speak with me in church. So, I wrote him a letter and asked him about it. He didn’t respond to my letter and he never spoke to me. Instead, he notified the seminary of my letter, and I was yelled at by my faculty advisor as though I was a disobedient child for asking a question. I was stunned and dismayed.

There was a disconnect between the seminary and the churches. The