The Body Document Series
Document 1 of 4
A note from the author: I was studying John chapter 1. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh. The correlation between a body and a document, if the document became a body, that means the document was a body in the first place. That is where I came up with the statement about the Torah, Psalms, and Prophets. That they were the body document. Especially through the hermeneutic of Yeshua himself this is where you will find me. Not about him. Not pointing to him. It is him. I called it the body document. I carried it for years, knowing it meant more than I could yet absorb. It means more now.
In Beginning Was the Document
Yochanan (John) 1:1. In beginning was the Logos. Not in the beginning, as though the Logos arrived at a moment on a timeline. In beginning. The same construction as Bereshit (pronounced Beh-reh-SHEET, in beginning, the absolute origin, the condition of beginning itself before beginning had a before, no definite article, not a point in time but the realm of origin itself). In that realm, before time had a container, before anything was made that would be made, the Logos already was.
Logos. The Greek word carries more weight than the English word carries. Not merely word in the sense of a spoken sound or a written mark. Logos, the self-expression of a rational nature, the declaration of an identity, the organizing principle that holds a thing together and makes it intelligible. When Yochanan used it he meant the self-declaration of YHWH. The document of the divine nature. The expression of who YHWH is that was present before anything was expressed into existence.
The Logos was the document. And the document was in beginning. Before the creation. Before the Torah was written. Before Moshe drew the first Paleo-Hebrew picture in the wilderness. The document of who YHWH is was already present in the realm of beginning, because YHWH is who he is prior to and independent of any written form of that declaration. The writing came after the document. The document was always already there.
And then verse 14. Kai ho Logos sarx egeneto, and the Logos became flesh. The document became a body. The self-declaration of YHWH entered the tzelem (the shadow or image of humanity, the shape in which the divine nature would make itself visible in the creation) and moved in. Eskenosen, tabernacled, pitched his tent, took up residence. The same root as mishkan, the dwelling Moshe built in the wilderness for the presence to inhabit. The document moved into the dwelling the document had declared in the first picture of the first word of the Torah. The Bet. The house. The document moved in.
If the document became a body, that means the document was a body in the first place. The Logos did not become something it was not. It became visible in the form it had always been declaring. The body and the document are the same declaration in two modes.
The Torah Is the Body Document in Written Form
Moshe wrote the Torah in Paleo-Hebrew, the pictographic script in which every letter was a drawn image, a picture of a recognizable thing declaring its meaning directly to anyone who could see it. He wrote it in the wilderness in the only script available to him, in the script the physical inscriptions of the period confirm was the writing of the covenant people.
What Moshe wrote was not a legal code requiring compliance. Not a historical record of ancient events. Not a system of predictions about a figure who would arrive centuries later. Moshe wrote the Logos in pictographic form. The self-declaration of YHWH expressed in drawn pictures, the body document in its written mode. The document expressing the body before the body arrived.
The Bet drawn as a house, the document showing the dwelling. The Resh drawn as a head, the document showing the head of all things in the house. The Vav drawn as a nail, the document showing the connector who holds both sides. The Yod drawn as a hand, the document showing the acting, creating, reaching presence of the divine nature. Not illustrations of theological concepts. Not symbols pointing toward future events. The written form of the Logos. The body document in pictures.
Yeshua said in John 5:39, the scriptures marturousin peri emou. They bear witness concerning me. The legal covenant witness-bearing of a document about the one the document is. Not predicting him. Not encoding information about him from a distance. The written Logos bearing witness about the embodied Logos. The same identity. Two modes. One declaration.
And in Luke 24:44, all things written about me in the Torah of Moshe and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Three witnesses. The Torah of Moshe, the body document in Paleo-Hebrew pictures. The Prophets, the body document in covenant declaration and vision. The Psalms, the body document in the cry and the completion, including Psalm 22 where YHWH wrote his own cry through David before he made it from the cross, ki asah, he has done it, at the close of the Psalm that opens with the cry of the darkness. Three written witnesses. One document. One body. The same declaration in three written modes, and one embodied mode that arrived to confirm what the three had always been saying.
The Torah, Psalms, and Prophets are the body document in written form. Not about him. Not pointing toward him from a distance. The written form of the same Logos that became flesh. Three witnesses bearing witness about the one whose body the document had always been.
The Hermeneutic He Gave
Yeshua established the hermeneutic himself. Luke 24:27, beginning from Moshe and from all the prophets he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. Beginning from Moshe. The Paleo-Hebrew pictures. The body document in its earliest written form. And from that beginning he moved through all the prophets, showing the disciples on the road to Emmaus that what they were reading had always been the document of his identity.
Not, here are the passages that predicted what would happen to me. That reading makes the document a prophetic forecast about an arriving figure. The body document reading is different. The document is the identity. These are they that speak of me, present tense, direct, the scriptures speaking the identity of the one standing before them, not predicting events that would happen to the one standing before them.
This is the hermeneutic that changes everything. When the Torah is read as the body document, when the pictures are read as the self-declaration of YHWH in drawn form, every passage opens onto the same identity. Not what will happen. Who it is. Not events the document predicts. The identity the document declares. Because the document is the body. And the body is the document. And the one who said I am in the garden and the soldiers fell backward, that is the I am the Paleo-Hebrew pictures had been showing since Moshe first drew them in the wilderness.
Not about him. It is him.
In beginning was the document. The document became a body. The Torah, Psalms, and Prophets are the body document in written form, three witnesses bearing witness about the one whose body the document had always been. Not about him. It is him.
Yochanan 1:1
In beginning was the document.
Yochanan 1:14
The document became a body.
The Paleo-Hebrew pictures: the document in drawn form.
The Torah, Psalms, and Prophets: the document in written witness.
The tzelem of Yeshua; the document in embodied form.
Not about him.
It is him.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
Michael Lilborn-Williams
Document One of Four • The Body Document Series
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams