The Way: The Religion of Jesus Before Christianity

The earliest followers of Jesus used the term “The Way” to characterize the religion that they had learned from Jesus. His was a new revelation, unencumbered by creeds, rituals, and rules of institutional religion. It was a religion for the world, not exclusively for a designated population or religious tradition.

His religion guides each individual to a living spiritual connection with a way that sustains and empowers an entire cosmos, a way compatible with the Tao of the East and the Logos of the West—a way to abundant life, both in this life and the life to follow.

This book retells, in chronological order, the story found in the four New Testament Gospels, sometimes adding content to make fuller sense of those gospel stories. When we listen to Jesus in the four Gospels, we hear him refer to himself as “The Bread of Life,” “The Way the Truth and the Life,” “The Good Shepherd,” “The Resurrection and the Life,” “The True Vine,” and “The Light of the World,” but never as the “Lamb of God”—that was the inference of others.

Jesus as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” became a central doctrine of evolutionary Christianity. But that doctrine is inconsistent with his religion, and incompatible with the world-wide religious and philosophical foundation that had been prepared for the reception of his life and message.