The Pharisees means "the chosen" in the Aramaic language. They were an elite group of scribes and high priests of Judaism at the time of Jesus. They were the guardians of the Scriptures or the Law. Most of them rejected Jesus as the Messiah at the time, because they claimed that he didn't fulfill the prophesies written about him. They were expecting that the Messiah would give them a temporal kingdom when he came. Their interpretation of the Scriptures was distorted and they continued to distort the Scriptures until they'd convinced themselves that Jesus was an imposter. No matter what miracle he performed they denied it. Even when he rose from the dead, they didn't believe in him.
Today the elite of modern-day Christianity, who claim to be the authorities over the Scriptures and argue that the Bible was originated in Greek. Hebrew, Latin and a few Books in Aramaic, are similar to the Pharisees. They think of themselves as the chosen. They call themselves the Gentiles and declare that everyone who believes in a different definition of Salvation is going to hell. Some Protestants think that on the Day of Judgment everybody will go to hell. They have invented a concept of rapture that will occur just before the End. Therefore, according to their definition all the people who died before Jesus came would go to hell on Judgment Day, and all the people who never got to hear about Jesus, because of geography or circumstance, would go to hell also on that Day. When confronted with the unfairness of this, they say that Jesus went to hell after his death on the Cross and preached to everyone who'd died before his coming. And as for the rest afterwards, well, the world wouldn't come to the end until the Bible was preached to all the nations. So, therefore, there would be no excuse for anyone not to be saved before the End. Thus, they argue that everyone who's resurrected on Judgment Day will go to hell. They don't see the irony of it all, that why would God resurrect the dead just to condemn them to hell? For whose benefit would He do that? They reject the extensive passages when the New Testament and Jesus say, "They will be judged according to their works."
They don't understand that there are those who will be judged according to their faith and those who will be judged according to their works. The ones who are judged according to their faith and make it, they go straight to heaven. The rest, who must await the final judgment, may or may not make it; but the Protestants reject this. They're like "the chosen," the elite, who interpret the Scriptures according to their own predilections.
The Catholics believe in purgatory and limbo. They think that after someone dies, there's still a chance for repentance and salvation even if they were incorrigible sinners in this lifetime. Some Protestants claim that the holocaust was God's punishment against the Jews for crucifying Jesus. I've seen Jewish converts to modern-day Christianity on TV go into a Jewish-Christian meeting and say this. According to them, all the Jews who died in the holocaust will go to hell, unless they repented just before they died. Well, most of them were gassed; they died without the chance to "repent." What about that, they would go to hell too?
I believe that Christians today must return to the roots of Christianity and re-adopt the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures of the Disciples and the Apostles. We need to send new missionaries into the field, first to America, then to the rest of the world. First, we must put our own house in order. Quit preaching from falsified Gospels to the rest of the world, even if most of it is true. We need to be clear about what the Scriptures say before we preach to others.
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