The Great Gospel of John Book 11

[3] I, of course, reason and say: True goodness and true wisdom, exhibited by whoever must forever remain good and wise and therefore deserve no punishment! The smart people representing the gods on earth secretly know, like us goodnatured Essenes, that there are no gods, but only a universal, primordial, raw natural force whose work is purely accidental and degenerates into inevitably nobler forms only in further processes and in the most different branch-offs. That is why god’s representatives using their imagination allegorically personified the natural force as a god and presented it figuratively for adoration and worship to the other people, who never thought for themselves.

[4] The god contrived in such a way would have to start stirring and that, of course, as miraculously as possible! Once the people had experienced the god through multiple miracles, they would soon have to put up with his severe laws. Woe to the violators of these laws! So that humankind, in its blind and foolish fear of the once undoubtedly accepted, miraculous god would not pass over into complete desperation after an easily committable sin, the smart representatives of god thought of means for reconciliation with the offended divinity, and invented for that purpose sacrifices and other painful kinds of penance, by which the sinner can again gain the amity of his offended god. And so, everywhere on this dear earth, there are, along with the civic state laws, laws coming from one or the other god. These laws are posed in such a way that even a person chaste and virtuous in everything will readily break at least ten times a day, by which he will have made himself a little unworthy of his god’s mercy and liking. He must clean himself by prescribed means in the evening before sunset, otherwise he can immediately lapse into greater evil.

[5] I cannot and do not want to call this bad because there is no harm, if people have a tender conscience, and certain ablutions and purifications of the body have never hurt anyone. But one may not impose them on me and people like me as orders of a god who does not exists! My companions and I know what we 79