My Fathers House:

A New Understanding of the Imagery in John 14:2

James David Audlin
From The Gospel of John Restored and Translated, Volume II,
as published by Editores Volcn Bar.
Copyright 2013,2014 by James David Audlin. All worldwide rights reserved.
Reprinted here by permission of the publisher, Editores Volcn Bar.

http://audlinbooks.com/about-james-david-audlin/nonfiction-james-david-audlin/

The reference to my fathers house can also be taken in various ways. One
possible reference is to the Second Temple; in 2:16, for instance, Jesus speaks of the
Temple as my fathers house; the Greek is the same. As noted before, the Levites
associated with Temple operations had their living quarters around the Portico of
Solomon. In this sense, Jesus could be saying that, when he is recognized as Messiah
he will be able to uproot these Sadducees, priests, and Levites who are so badly
managing the Temple (the hired hands as he refers to them in 10:12-13, and slaves as
he says in 8:35), and then there will be rooms available for Jesuss disciples and others
who believe in him and live according to the . In this interpretation, that is why
Jesus adds if not, if these quarters in the Temple are not available at present, then I am
going to prepare a place for you.
Second, Jesus could be referring to the Samaritan Temple that had stood on Mount
Gerizim. The Samaritans believed then and still believe that Bethel, where Jacob had his
famous dream (Genesis 28:12-15) was on Mount Gerizim (A Companion to Samaritan
Studies, by Alan David Crown, Reinhard Pummer, and Abraham Tal). And the word Bethel
means House of God, which for Jesus would be his fathers house. Hence, Jesus could
here again be alluding to the conflict between the two temples, and again siding with
Gerizim, as in 1:45-49, 2:14-17, 4:20-24, and so on.
Third, Jesus may have intended here a reference to himself, specifically to his body,
as his fathers house, for the father is in him (17:21). That level of meaning appears in
2:19,21. Jesus, as Messiah, as Messenger of God, is in effect a vessel containing a
message from God, the presence of God, the Spirit of God. Indeed, Paul uses this very
metaphor at I Corinthians 3:16-17. This is also the sense of the phrase (ninegated city) in Bhagavad-Gita 5:13; the body has nine gates (eyes, ears, nose, mouth,
nipples, genitalia, and anus); it is echoed in Revelation 21:12-13.
Fourth, Jesus may have been alluding to the on theology that fills this gospel,
as in 8:35-36. In that passage, by the word house Jesus is referring not merely to the
Second Temple in Jerusalem, a mere finite, physical structure that was built by human
hands and could be (and was, in 70 C.E.) destroyed by human hands, but moreover to the
House of God, the House of the on; that is to say, the itself, Gods overarching
plan and purpose and pattern for the entirety of creation, not just the , this physical
aspect of it. There is no house in that sacred realm, for God Him-Herself is its house,
as the amanuensis explains in Revelation 21:22. In this house, which is infinite in time and
space, there are indeed an infinity of abodes, and Jesus assures them that he is leaving
this physical life for the heavenly realm to prepare their abodes for them. This

interpretation of the verse is strengthened by Jesuss several references in this final

discourse to his imminent death.
Finally, the house referred to here is ultimately this very gospel, which serves as a
house for the Spirit, the Paraclete for the expression of Gods .
( Many (are) they, the (sacred) places in the house (beyt) of my father). The later
( Many are the abodes in my fathers house).
My view is that all four meanings were intended, and that this is therefore a
quadruple entendre.
The word for father in Aramaic is written
in the archaic alphabet, as
in Samaritan script, and in the later Syriac script; the Hebrew is . In English
letters, it is ABA (often misspelled with two bs in English, Abba; and it is certainly not,
as some contend, the Aramaic way of saying Daddy). It should be instantly apparent that
this is a palindrome, with A-B-A symmetry (literally!), also called inclusio; as such, the word
is a verbal circle, again, a representation of infinity, like the Worm Ouroboros.
Even if you do not read Aramaic or Hebrew, you can see one letter at the beginning
and end of the word, on either side of another letter. The first-and-last letter is called aleph
in Hebrew, alaf in Aramaic. It is depicted by an ox head in early pictographic Aramaic,
; this became
in Samaritan Aramaic, in Syriac Aramaic, and in Hebrew, the first
letter in each alphabet. The ox head can even still be seen in the English letter A: especially
if we invert it thus we can better see the head with the horns above. And the presence
of God is traditionally represented as a bull, associated with the aleph/alaf; thus, ABA
suggests the sacred bull imagery that adorned the labyrinth in the Temple in Jerusalem,
and probably the Temples at Mount Gerizim and in Leontopolis as well, as discussed in
the essay beginning on page 420.
Jesuss reference to Jacobs ladder in John 1:51 is relevant. The ancient Jewish
sages said that (aleph), the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, symbolizes the oneness of
God. The modern word ladder is somewhat misleading; they saw more like a hillside
terraced for farming or the ziggurat construction of ancient temples. And besides, the
Hebrew word refers to something more like a stairway than a ladder, but I didnt
write the old hymn. According to these mystics, the letter comprises an upper (yud)
representing the hidden, ineffable deepest nature of God; a lower (yud) representing
the revealed presence of God in the world; and a (vav; hook) on a diagonal like
a stairway as noted, actually a series of gardened terraces up a holy hillside or a ziggurat
uniting these two realms, the heavenly and earthly (Jacobs ladder; cf. Genesis
28:12). Jesus speaks of himself in these very terms, as the emissary, the Messenger
of God who goes back and forth between these two realms, like the angels (in Aramaic,
Greek, and Hebrew, the words for angel literally mean messenger) on Jacobs ladder,
and the Prologue to this gospel is very much built on the same imagery. The Infancy
Gospel of Thomas (mid-second century) has young Jesus teaching similarly about the
aleph and beth, which also figure in his use of ABA (often Abba in English; see pages
810-16). Note also that yud and vav are the first and third letters in
(YHWH),
the Sacred Breath that is Gods Name, together with a he, an exhalation, following each
one. In effect, Jesus is the yud, the middle part of the aleph that unites the upper vav and
lower vav, and speaks Gods Name YHWH. Jesus is here iterating his statement of purpose,
which he will rephrase a number of times in the gospel, that he is the Way, that he
speaks the Truth, that he is the means by which messages (embodied in this image as

angels, messengers) will be borne back and forth between the heavenly ( ) and
earthly ( ) realms.
The letter in the middle of is beyt in Hebrew, bit in Aramaic, which in origin
is the depiction of a house with an open door. The word for house in both Aramaic ()
and Hebrew ( )is pronounced beyt, often spelled as beth, which of course is identical to
the name for the second letter in both alphabets, given slight differences in pronunciation.
Thus the three semiotic images in ABA offer a landscape image-complex comprising a
farmstead: a home with oxen grazing around it.
There are other possible landscapes in these semiotic script-images. The archaic
Aramaic letter, , comes from an Egyptian hieroglyphic letter that is identical in
appearance but represents the sound of h that is, an exhalation, the breath of God, the
ruach of life. But the earliest form of the letter in archaic Aramaic, , is a circle or a spiral,
representing infinity. Moreover, it is a spiritual labyrinth, drawing the spiritual pilgrim ever
deeper into the house of God, into the presence, of God: the symbol tells us that to be lost
in the labyrinth of God is to be truly found. This letter became
in Samaritan Aramaic
script, in Syriac Aramaic script, and in alphabetic Hebrew.
Note that the Hebrew alphabet in common use today is said to have been introduced
by the scribe Ezra, the same fourth century Jewish leader who was allied with the Judan
governor Nehemiah whose battle with the Samaritan governor Sanballat led the latter to
establish the Samaritan Temple. This is why to this day Samaritans use the early script; to
use these old letters to write Aramaic is in itself a kind of political statement.
Rod Borghese points out that the first-and-last letter, , aleph, has been since
ancient times for classical Jewish mystics symbolic of the sacred Breath/Spirit/Wind of
God that preceded even sound itself, the breath that existed before even the first Word was
uttered, even before the came into being since, the sages have observed, God had
to breathe in first, before exhaling the Word that created light. I would add to Borgheses
point that what God breathed in was chaos, and what God breathed out was the Word, which
so perfectly defines light that it is light. And that the fierce hot snorting powerful breath
of the ox, who can drive the mill and plough the field, is associated with the power that
makes creative things happen; thus it is that aleph represents power, breath, and creativity.
This makes the ox equivalent to the ( Chokma, Wisdom), who Proverbs 8:23 says
was the first of Gods creations, and his mainstay support in the act of creating the universe.
In this matter Jewish theology resembles Lakota theology. The latter speaks not of the
Sacred Ox but the Sacred Buffalo, Tatanka, the first living creation of Wakantanka, the
Great Mystery, whose first creation was not light (as in Judaism) but Tunka, stone. Buffalo
and Creator are both often called Tunkashila, Grandfather. Note the homophony among
these words. Read more in The Circle of Life.
And there is a final possible landscape of script images in our consideration of
, , ABA, coming out of a fascinating thought offered by Rabbi Ben Abrahamson in
reference to the Dispilio Tablet. This Neolithic Period inscription, found in Greece and
radiocarbon dated to around 5,300 B.C.E., thoroughly explodes the long-enshrined
assumption that the Greeks learned the art of writing around 600 B.C.E. To my eye, the
gramma in this tablet, written in the so-called Vina script of southeastern Europe,
resemble both Mycenan (Linear B) and the earliest Semitic scripts, and could be a very
early ancestor of both. The oldest examples we have of the latter two are far more recent,
dating to around 1500 B.C.E. Abrahamson writes:

The current theory of the origin of writing is that writing began with pictograms, eventually
followed by ideograms, eventually being replaced by syllables and lastly phonemes. I propose a
cognitive theory of writing: that the twenty-some symbols used in the Abjad alphabets represented
primitive cognitive elements: aleph = pattern, beth = group, gimel = increase, etc. Thus the
first written alphabets were cognograms, where the meaning of the word was made up of the
meaning of the letters. This letter devolved (rather than evolved) into pictograms, hieroglyphics,
and syllabic writing systems. If a connection can be made between certain symbols and the
cognitive processes, generalization, specification, increase, direction, etc., then this could provide
a mechanism for the early implementation of a symbolic alphabet.

The Vina script of the Dispilio Tablet is certainly an ancestor of the variously early
Greek family of alphabets. It is less certain that it is also an ancestor of the Semitic (what
Abrahamson calls Abjad) alphabets, such as Egyptian, and early Hebrew, Aramaic, and
Arabic, but Brian E. Colless (ASOR Blog, 27 January 2014) sees the latter as phonemes,
not letters, which significantly raises the possibility. Nevertheless, Abrahamsons
suggestion that some early writing actually was cognogrammatic is itself revolutionary. He
defines this word of his own coining thus: The meaning of the word is made up of the
meaning of the letters. He further states that these cognograms, single letters, were
grouped into more complex cognitive meanings that is, words and phrases. For instance,
he interprets AB as the pattern of a group, which would be patterning in accordance with a
father/prototype, and BA as the grouping of a pattern, which would be coming together to
establish a pattern. Combining these in ABA is in Abrahamsons words to state the pattern
of that which comes together; in other words, Jesuss cognitive message in ABA is that we
choose to come together to establish and accord with the pattern, the , of the
prototypical ABA, father, God.
Abrahamsons symbolic-alphabet approach offers a fascinating interpretation of
, , ABA, as a landscape of cognitive symbols: the word would signify a group of
people who are completely within a pattern: the people of God within the , Gods plan
or pattern for this created universe: AB says we are in the father and BA says the father is in
us, so ABA says both at once, as in John 17:21-23. This interpretation brings to mind the gospel
Prologue, in which those who choose to live lives in accordance with the are the
children of God a theme that Jesus often restates in the gospel itself. Abrahamson
concludes:
These are abstract meanings, so there were would be a range of practical meanings for AB: Father,
Prototype, Typical, Main, etc. The three-letter root ABA serves as subject-verb object, the pattern
that groups the pattern, by extension the Person who typifies and groups together the things that
I know, by extension My Father.

The symbolic and cognitive approach offered by Abrahamson is not far in its
implictions from that of the classic Jewish sages. They noted that the letter (aleph) begins
all three words in the most sacred name of God, ( I Am What I Am, but
literally I Shall Be What I Shall Be). Moreover, they taught, this primal letter (aleph)
symbolizes how God brings oneness to all creation, heaven and earth. According to the
Jewish mystics, the letter comprises an upper (yud) representing the hidden ineffable
deepest nature of God; a lower (yud) representing the revealed presence of God in the
world; and a (vav; hook) on a diagonal like a ladder or stairway uniting these two
realms, the heavenly and earthly (Jacobs ladder; cf. Genesis 28:12). Jesus speaks of
himself in these very terms, as the emissary, as in effect the vav, the Messenger of God
who goes back and forth between these two realms, like the angels on Jacobs ladder (cf.
John 1:51), and the Prologue to this gospel is very much built on the same imagery. Note

also that yud and vav are the first and third letters in
(YHWH), the Sacred Breath that is
Gods Name, with a he, an exhalation, following each one. And note as well that being a
vav surrounded by two yuds, this letter is itself a palindrome, a symbol of infinity, as is the
entire ABA word. The thirteenth-century Kabbalist Joseph ben Gikatila wrote of a sacred
garden on a hill where grows a tree that bears a nut (the Edenic fruit) which contains within
a stairway to the World of God. Song of Songs 6:11 is seen by the Kabbalists as a reference
to the garden of Eden as including trees bearing nuts. And the Sacred Bride (who is part of
the male-female unity of Elohim, who appears in the Song, and of whom Jesuss bride
Mary is a representation) is said by the Kabbalists to be like the walnut tree (cf., e.g.,
Halakhot Gdolot). Thus the Bride and the Groom together are the ladder to the higher
realm, the World of God, the fathers house.
As to the other letter in ABA, father, in Hebrew and in Syriac Aramaic (both
pronounced beyt): Borghese points out that this, the second letter in both alphabets,
originally referred not merely to house but to container or vessel. Again, we can see
this pictographically in the fourth side open in order to take contents into the vessel. Thus,
Borghese concludes, this name for God, ABA, shows us symbolically the Infinite contained
in the vessels, the Mystery of the Infinite contained within the Finite. That is to say, all
finite, created things in this universe contain in microcosm the Infinite, God. Again to add
to Borgheses point: In the essay on page 420 this letter is discussed as also meaning a
sacred labyrinth hiding the presence of God. This very Jewish philosophy has been around
at least from Philo to Martin Buber; the latter writes eloquently of God playing hide-andgo-seek with us, begging us to seek and find the Sacred Presence hidden in every leaf
and flower, and the Presence is saddened when human beings do not look for It, or look
but fail to find It. Also and again this philosophy of immanence, the idea that the presence
of God can be seen in and through every thing in creation, is very Buddhist and Taoist, as
well as very Native American. In short, it is the ancient truth that the modern civilization
of arrogation and greed has forgotten.
The Kabbalah also presents God in the image of a family father, mother, son, and
daughter. Of the name for God
(YHWH) Borghese writes:
Each letter came to represent in Kabbalistic theology a distinct familial aspect of Deity: Y ( , Yod)
representing Deity as Father; H ( , He) representing Deity as Mother; V ( , Vav) representing
Deity as Son; and the second H ( , He) representing Deity as Daughter. This Tetrad is not unlike
the Canaanite-Hebrew Tetrad of El-Asherah-Baal-Astarte. Father Yod and Mother He are
considered inseparable in permanent embrace, and filled with great unceasing mutual love for
each other. According to the Zohar, The Father and the Mother, since they are found in union all
the time and are never hidden or separated from each other, are called Companions.... And they
find satisfaction in permanent union. Son Vav and Daughter He are considered both siblings and
consorts. They have both a passionate and contentious relationship with each other. Both are given
numerous names and attributes. Son Vav is considered to be Sky, and Daughter He is considered
to be Earth. Son Vav is also commonly called the King. Daughter He is also called Night, Moon,
Sea, and the Matronit. Son Vav and Daughter He are thought to have wedded and embraced
nightly in Solomons Temple. Cherubim (Angels of Love) were born from their embrace. With
the destruction of the Temple, Son Vav is believed to have withdrawn into Heaven, while
Daughter He is believed to have accompanied the Hebrews into exile.

Some of this is very similar to the themes presented in this gospel. Jesus, son of God,
addresses God as father, and treats Mary as his spiritual consort and equal. They agree to
marry near one Temple and their hierogamy in chapter 20 will be near another. And the
Prologue speaks of Jesus as coming from Heaven.

Hindu mysticism also revels in this kind of symbolic thought. The Hindu scriptures,
such as the Bhagavad-Gita (10:33), likewise stress the primacy of aleph, called a-kra in
the Sanskrit alphabet, with the Lord Ka (his Sanskrit title is etymologically cognate to
Christ) declaring: (Of letters, I am the a-kra). The Gita also
affirms that the individual soul, (atman), contains (brahman), the ineffable
reality within and beyond this physical universe, the infinite within the infinitesimal just as
the Fathers house contains many abodes (John 14:2). Abbreviated to the first letters thus
this is clearly equivalent to
, , ABA. See also the quotation on page 507.
This, by the way, is the same theology of oneness expressed in the Revelation,
which was also written by the amanuensis John the Presbyter. In that book John uses 7 and
12 to speak of that oneness of heaven and earth, since 3 = heavenly things (the triangle and
pyramid are ancient symbols for God, and, to name but one among many examples, the
Hindus had the [Trimrti] of Brahm-Vishnu-iva long before the Christians
invented the Trinity) and 4 = earthly things (the four winds, directions, seasons, seas,
elements, winds, etc.); then note that 7 = 3 + 4 and 12 = 3 x 4.
As does the a-kra (see the quotation on page 521), the aleph and its Hebrew
symbol (aleph) have often represented infinity in both mathematics and also in the
symbolic uvre of Jorge Luis Borges. According to Borghese, Infinity, nothingness,
and continuity are concepts which have intrigued mathematicians, as well as Jewish
scholars, throughout history. In many religions and philosophies it is believed that one
must reduce ones mind to a state which approaches nothingness before one can begin
to grasp the infinite knowledge and the divine connection between all things. Borghese
is right, and I find this to be a very Eastern concept that Jesus may have picked up in the
Himalayas if scholars like Holger Kersten and Suzanne Olssen are right that he spent
his early adult years there though he may have also encountered this concept from the
sailors who plied the route from the Mediterranean to India or from Buddhist missionaries
visiting the Roman Empire (see page 507-08), or from early Jewish Kabbalists. It is also
very possible that the amanuensis, John the Presbyter, was familiar with Eastern mysticism
as his teacher Philo certainly was (see ibid.): the gospel has abundant references to classical
writers, and these Hindu or Buddhist allusions may be further examples of erudition.
Certainly the Revelation, his other great work, written alone (without Lazarus) and without
the responsibility of defining the theology of Jesus, also shows clear signs that John was
aware of Asian religion.
With this understanding in mind, we can see that Jesus meant the house of my
father not only (as discussed above) to refer to the Second Temple or his body or to
the on, but to how every created thing in this universe, though evanescent and
ephemeral, still contains the , the glory of the presence of God, and so too does
each one of us if only we would realize this!
Curiously, the Persian Diatessaron has Jesus say in 15:1 not I am the true vine,
but ( man dirakht-i mva-yi rst). This has been put into English as
I am the tree of the fruit of truth (Craig D. Allert) and, adhering a bit more closely to the
word-for-word meaning, as I am the fruit-tree of truth (Robert Murray, from the Italian
of Giuseppe Messina). However, a careful rendering of the Persian suffixes yields this
translation: I am the fruit of the tree of truth. The mention of fruit in this version of 15:1,

as an obvious reference to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil forbidden to Adam
and Eve (Genesis 2:17), supports the conclusion above, based on Horaces poetry, that
Jesus was speaking of himself in terms of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
This diatessaron is a thirteenth century version of a now-lost very early Syriac text
that retained many readings from Tatians original second century diatessaron, the text of
which is, but for a couple of fragments, known only in part from quotations in later writers.
(A diatessaron is a single work that draws together the four canonical gospels into one
narrative.) With at least one link in the chain of copies lost, we cannot know whether this
version of 15:1 comes from Tatian or a later scribe of unwontedly unusual and
inappropriate inventiveness in his handling of what was by then sacred scripture not to be
edited. Yet there is a chance that this Persian version preserves an extremely ancient
member of the Csarean family of manuscripts, even earlier than the Syriac Sinaiticus,
one close in time and text to Tatians Diatessaron in short a very early text originating in
the nearest circle to John the Presbyters original manuscript.
And both the Syriac Sinaiticus and the Peshitta seem to support the Persian (the
only other early Syriac manuscript, the Curetonian Gospels, is missing the final chapters
( I I the vine of truth). The repeated I (pronounced en or n) is usually
understood as signifying I AM in Aramaic. But there is a very high probability of a scribal
error here, since the Aramaic word for fruit, ( eb), easily could have been misread
and miswritten as the pronoun . If this probable error is repaired, the phrase reads I
am the fruit of the vine of truth, which is so close to the Persian version that the presence
of vine instead of tree could be just an accident in the shift from Aramaic to Persian.
The word for fruit is also a homonym in pronunciation and spelling of , ABA, the word
;my father is the laborer), so an early scribe may have misunderstood as
meaning not fruit but father, making the sentence seem to read I am the father of truth
and my father is the laborer, and he then corrected the apparent dittography of father.
Strengthening this analysis is the fact that in verse two an entirely different word from
is used; though this word, ( pery) is usually translated as fruit, its meaning is closer
to the English noun produce. As noted above in reference to the Greek, the Aramaic of
15:4 also speaks of tree branches that cannot bear the fruit of the vine by themselves, but
only indirectly, by holding up the fruited vine. The meaning is clear: these texts have Jesus
saying that we must lift up Jesus and his teaching, just as the trees lift up the fruit-bearing
vine in Horaces image; if we fail to do so, we will be taken away by the husbandman, the
father.
If the original reading was Jesus calling himself the tree of the fruit of truth or the
fruit of the Tree of Truth, then note that frequently in Jewish writing (and also in antecedent
Sumerian and Babylonian sacred texts; cf. P. Dhorme in R. Bibl., XIV, 1907) the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil is also called the Tree of Truth. And if Jesus was referring
to the fruit of the vine, then his words may have sprung from the traditional blessing at
,
' ( Blessed are
Passover over the wine: ,
You, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.)