Not God for Yeshua
The impoverished and imperialized prophet, Yeshua of Nazareth, had little to do with the Yahweh pasted over the traditions of the Elohim. Nowhere does he even refer to God using that name.
On the contrary, the prophet was highly critical of and even rejected any understandings of an exclusively national God, much less as one who commanded the slaughter of enemies.
Instead, Yeshua spoke of God as a Universal Father and as the One his disciple Paul of Tarsus described as the Source of the universe and everything in it - as the One in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).
For Yeshua and his disciples, God was international, universal, and unconcerned with Temple worship and sacrifice. This eventually led Yeshua's followers to reject not only Judaism's limited understandings of God, but Judaism and its law in general.
Still, the Christian tradition continued to embrace the Jewish Testament as part of the Holy Bible as though Jesus was a worshipper of Yahweh. It did so because Christians understood Jesus as fulfilling Jewish testament prophecies.
The resulting process of distortion was straight forward. Christianity started out as a sect of Judaism that followed the teachings of the Jewish prophet, Yeshua. After his execution around 30 CE, his followers inspired by his international and universal vision had grown geographically and numerically far beyond the Jewish community. Their movement had spread to all parts of the Roman Empire to become a largely gentile association that for various reasons even came to despise its Jewish origins.
These international characteristics led to the Bible's becoming a world book by the 4th century CE. For it was then that the Roman Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan legalized Yeshua's Jewish movement now called "The Way."
The change was necessary because the Roman Empire's unifying religion (also for various reasons associated with the increasing cultural diversity of its subjects) had lost credibility across its ever-expanding territories. It needed an international unifying religious ideology that would uphold the belief that the Emperor was supported by divine authority.
So, in the early 4th century and after long years of persecuting "Christians," the Empire's Office for Religious Affairs (under Constantine) decided to legalize the sect that had become more universal than what the Roman pantheon had come to represent. Eventually, by 380 CE Christianity became Rome's official religion (under Theodosius).
Afterwards, widely diverse beliefs about the identity of Yeshua of Nazareth (and about the Bible and its tales) were streamlined into official doctrines, while alternative understandings were condemned and punished as heresies.
Thus Jesus became understood as a worshipper of the Elohim-become-Yahweh with all their contradictions, instead of as a prophet who rejected all but the Mosaic tradition as championed by Israel's prophets and as universal father and spirit in whom we live and move and have our being.
Conclusion
To summarize: the Bible is not a world book written for humankind in general. Instead, it is a memoir of a small marginal and relatively insignificant group in the ancient Mideast called "Hebrews." It was written for them, not for Christians.
Neither is the Bible about a universal "God." Rather, it is about various kings and generals and Powerful Ones from the world above. In their various ancient pre-literate oral traditions Hebrews called them "Elohim," "El," "El Shaddai," "Ruach," "Baal," "Ashera," and "Yahweh." The Powerful Ones included generals and kings who were often gradually elevated to divine status, just as happened with kings in other Mideastern cultures. Many of these Elohim were cruel and violent colonizers interested only in accumulating herds, gold, and virgin girls to improve their DNA.
"Yahweh" was the member of the Elohim to whose protection the Hebrew people were assigned, while (according to pre-literate traditions) other peoples were assigned other protectors drawn from the supra-human "Powerful Ones" who might even have been extra-terrestrials referenced in their own ways by virtually all ancient traditions across the planet.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
