JESUS WAS A REVOLUTIONARY WHO BETRAYED HIS CAUSE

So here’s the story on Jesus, according to Michael Baigent in The Jesus Papers. He also co-wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Jesus Paper’s is an addition to the latter book and further explains Jesus’s mission (which changed in mid stream according to Baigent) his marriage to Mary Magdalene and their disappearance into France with the help of Roman authorities after a faked crucifixion.

Let me admit, however, that Michael Baigent writes in a very circuitous manner, in such a way that one wonders why his narrative does not travel in a straight line. It leaps back and forth in time. Is this a fault in his method? Is this the only way he can work his thesis in a satisfactory manner, or is it that a more straightforward methodology would make his case appear weaker? Frankly, I think the case for Jesus being a revolutionary rather than the son of God, as the Catholic Church claimed and passed on to the Protestants, is very strong. After that, I don’t know, but if those two letters (read on) are true, wow, what a smack to the senses of anyone raised in our modern world so much dominated by the “People of the Book” (Muslims, Christians and Jews). Another point, after reading this book and several others, I and no objective person can believe in the facts as presented in the Bible, the Koran or anywhere else. Baigent and others have clearly revealed just how much empty supposition goes into every line of the Bible and its interpretations. When you finish reading The Jesus Papers, you should realize that everything is a chimera, created by people who had a political motive to interpret everything just as they did rather than a spiritual one.

According to Baigent, Jesus (because he descended from the house of David) was chosen at an early age by Zealots to fulfill the Old Testament mission of a promised Messiah who would lead them on a political war against the Roman authorities. Thus Jesus consciously fulfilled the many prophecies of the Old Testament, but he had spent part of his undiscovered youth in Egypt where he came across the sort of mysticism which informed early Greek and Egyptian religions. He became an initiate of those mysteries by which people learn to have visionary experiences in caves and dark underground places in Egypt. The Greeks called this inward journey visiting the Netherworld, the Egyptians called the underground journey going to the “Far-world”, and Christians called it, and still do, the “Kingdom of Heaven within”. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Not out there >>>. We modern people, of course, understand that people from everywhere have always sought these transcendent moments through the use of drugs or sensory deprivation in deep caves or in modern chambers that are much like wombs or in groups full of music and shouting. We recognize them as self-induced psychological experiences rather than spiritual experiences. Baigent points out the many passages in the New Testament and in the scrolls from Nag Hammadi and in the Dead Sea scrolls where it is clear that the mystics of those days, one of which Jesus became, believed they could journey to these places of death and return by initiations that only the initiate knew how perform.

Baigent further claims that there is a written message that Paul took for his own purposes that split the Jewish tradition between the political Zealots and James, Jesus’s brother, and the messianic Jews who eventually became the Christianity of the Roman Church which is based on the unsubstantiated claim that Jesus arose from the dead and is, essentially, God. The Vatican to this day is trying to suppress and hide the fact that there is much evidence that shows that Jesus never claimed to be God and, of course, never was God, that all he spoke of were these mystical moments when an initiate could think he had personally experienced the realms of the gods. Baigent claims that Jesus revealed his changed course when he was asked if the Jews of Jerusalem ought to pay their taxes to the Roman Emperor. The Zealots felt double-crossed when Jesus said that they should pay those taxes. That’s why Judas Iscariot (sicarii = knife bearer and, thus, Zealot) betrayed him to the Roman authorities. Jesus was no longer useful to the Zealots.

Of course you must read this book for yourself because Baigent must work long and hard to tie all the loose ends together. The kicker to the book, coming at the very end, is that Baigent saw with his own eyes two letters (circa 32CE that he could not translate to read) which were in the hands of a wealthy private Jewish collector of antiquities. He believed they were authentic and written by a “bani meshiha—the Messiah of the Children of Israel”. The letter writer is defending himself to the Sanhedrin against charges that he had called himself the “son of God”. He explains that he did not mean that he was physically the son of God but only that he is spiritually adopted as a son of God, and that anyone who is filled with a similar spirit can also, in that sense, call himself a son of God. Thus, Jesus is not God and never was. As you can see, if these letters are authentic, they can change the course of history, but, as of yet, in the murky world of antiquities, they have not yet been surfaced by this collector or by anyone he sold them to, if he did sell them, if they are, indeed, letters written by Jesus in his own defense. Interesting, eh? Much more interesting than that hanger in dry dusty Southwestern America.