In the
course of time, those who believed that Messiah was God changed the
intentions of it's original founders and alienated all Jewish participation.
As Rabbi Yakov Fogelman writes:
Had the followers of Christ not
insisted on his divinity, then the Jews might indeed have embraced Jesus as
a Jewish revolutionary, who fought to remove Rome's oppressive hand from his
people, and was murdered by Pontius Pilate for his act of rebellion against
the mighty and intolerant authority of Rome. Jews might have embraced Jesus
as another learned teacher who offered beautiful and stirring ethical
lessons. They might have embraced Jesus as the man, who not only did not
abrogate the Torah, but, said in Matthew, that anyone that gives up even a
single letter of the law of Moses would be the least in the kingdom of
heaven. But what the Jews could not, dare not, and indeed never will, accept
is that Jesus was anything more than a mortal man.
A Change of Text
If we look at
how the text of John 1:1 has changed over the years we can get a sense of how
"clarifying" the text has helped to institutionalize the orthodox Christian
doctrines.
First let's
take a look at the Tyndale Bible of 1525
"In
the beginnynge was that worde, and that worde was with God: and God was
that worde. The same was in the beginnynge with God. All thinges were
made by it, and without it, was made nothinge, that made was. In it was
lyfe; And lyfe was the lyght of men ..."