Jesus and John

Copyright © 2013 by Dr. Pelham K. Mead III.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Rev. date: 11/27/2013

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1   In the Beginning… the Birth of John

Chapter 2   The Birth of Jesus (Jesua) of Nazareth

Chapter 3   The Flight into Egypt of the Holy Family

Chapter 4   Young Jesus at Age Six

Chapter 5   Young John of Hebron

Chapter 6   Jesus at Age Twelve

Chapter 7   The Secret Mount Carmel Essenes (Children of the Light)

Chapter 8   The Funeral of Joseph of Nazareth

Chapter 9   Jesus the Secret Essene Healer

Chapter 10   The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness

Chapter 11   The Baptism of Jesus

Chapter 12   John Questions Who Jesus really Was

Chapter 13   The Righteous Teacher

Chapter 14   The Sermon on the Mount

Chapter 15   The Beginning and the End

Appendix

Bibliography

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my friends Glenn Bornsen of El Cajon, California, Paul Renfrew of Boston, and George Schandel of Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York. And also to the memory of my mother, Doris Grace Mead, who taught me to read at age one and continued to support my reading adventures all my life.

INTRODUCTION

T HE PURPOSE OF this novel is to reveal secrets about Jesus and John the Baptist when they were infants until when they formally met again, when John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. This novel also seeks to answer how Jesus and John got all their formal training and how that became the basis of their ministry. I did a great deal of research into what happened when Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fled into Egypt for four years. My basis for research for the Egyptian flight of the Holy Family is recorded in the oral and written traditions of the modern-day Egyptian Coptic Church. The Egyptian Coptic Church places as much significance on oral tradition as they do in written tradition that might explain the many miracles they claim happened in the flight to Egypt of the Holy Family. Oral tradition passed down over two thousand years is bound to change.

I also researched extensive parallels in what John the Baptist taught, what Jesus of Nazareth preached, and how much can be traced to Essene ideas, prayers, and gospels. The monastic Essene community of Qumran near the Dead Sea was close enough for John to travel from Hebron and seek membership. Walking distance from Jesus’s house in Nazareth was the secret Essene community on Mount Carmel. It was all very convenient for both Jesus and John that Essene societies were close by at the time.

What Jesus and John revealed to the world was a philosophy of the Essenes, who were around more than one hundred years before Jesus and John. No one in the days of Jesus ever realized that both Jesus and John were secret Essenes. The Essenes were concerned with the coming of the Messiah and/or the return of the Teacher of Righteousness, who died 150 years before the birth of Jesus. Here in AD 15, when Jesus joined the Mount Carmel Essene community, was an opportunity to raise up another Teacher of Righteousness, Son of Man, or Messiah, by Simon the Essene leader. The Essenes learned not to get involved with the local authority when spreading its messianic word. It cost the original Essenes the lives of many of their beloved brethren when they attempted to interfere with local politics. As a result, they withdrew from the cities and fled to Qumran near the Dead Sea and otherwise became secret societies in Nazareth, Jerusalem, and other major Judean cities.

The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal much about Essene philosophy at the time of Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth and John of Hebron (the Baptist) were both secret Essenes, as I shall demonstrate later in this book. If you compare what John the Baptist taught in his ministry and what Jesus of Nazareth taught in his ministry with the Essene documents recorded on the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Qumran Essene community, it is easy to see how John’s and Jesus’s ideals imitate the Essene philosophy of praying for a Messiah or Righteous Teacher to come and save the Jews. Baptism and repentance were a way of life for the Essenes and the core of John the Baptist’s teachings. The Essenes were the best healers of the day, and it is no consequence that Jesus was a great healer who had many years of training and experience somewhere like the Essene community of Mount Carmel.

The Essenes looked upon these two men as a way of getting the temple in Jerusalem to reform and bring the people to salvation. Many things had to fall in place for the coming of the Messiah to happen, and the Essenes knew that and prayed about it daily. One of their missions in life believed in the coming of a Messiah who would deliver them from the Romans and other authorities. Another mission was to copy manuscripts, the Old Testament, secret religious documents, and secret healing documents. The question is, was the timing for the Essenes in the story of Jesus right?

Many religious scholars fail to point out that in the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. He was not as popular as John the Baptist. John’s charisma helped to attract thousands to be baptized; however, few if anyone had heard of Jesus yet when he was twenty-nine or thirty years of age. In this novel, I attempt to fill in the missing years of Jesus’s childhood and John’s childhood based on Bible references, gospels not included in the Bible, Essene gospels, Dead Sea Scrolls, and established academic research by scholars in biblical research. Sheer speculation fills in the gaps in this story where no direct evidence exists.

I tried to answer the questions, how did Jesus become a walking Bible? What preparation in the knowledge of the Bible did he get and where? Who trained Jesus to be so knowledgeable in the Torah and the Bible? That is the great mystery in the story of Jesus because the Bible has been edited again and again by the Church in the first and second hundred years to fulfill the dogma that the church wanted, and the church did not paid heed to the real facts about Jesus in his developing years.

Another question to answer in this book is, why is it that John the Baptist’s philosophy was so similar to the Qumran Essene community ideals of baptism, repealing sins, and the coming of the Messiah? John the Baptist used the proclamations of Elijah from the gospels of the Essenes to form the basis for his ministry. He never healed anyone in his ministry or attempted to convert anyone to the Essene community. His message was the same message that the Essenes were declaring, and that was the proclamation that the coming of the Messiah was at hand and that everyone should repent of their sins and evil ways.

Jesus’s philosophy was more liberal than John’s philosophy, but definitely Essene in origin. You have only to read some of the Essene books included in the appendix of this book to realize that Jesus’s philosophy and the Essene philosophy were the same, even to the point of become a vegetarian, using baptism on a daily basis, believing in the coming of the second Righteous Teacher, and learning to live a pure life.

Jesus must have been trained at the Mount Carmel Essene community that was a walking distance from Nazareth, where Jesus and his family lived. Jesus could read all the sacred Hebrew texts but, somehow, never learned to write or become a scribe. Why is that? Perhaps when Jesus was eligible to begin the Essene training for becoming a scribe at age twenty-one, he may have chosen to become a healer instead, therefore never learning how to write in Hebrew script.

Learning to heal people was like becoming a doctor in Jesus’s day, with no formal medical school or institutions to help in learning. Healing was a guarded skill by the Essenes in Jesus’s day. The Essenes were the best healers in Judea and Galilee because they studied cures from around the world and recorded their findings found on the Dead Sea Scrolls two thousand years later. They grew special herbs in their gardens and lived on honey and date palms. They traded for special potent seeds and powders to store in their collections. Essene men were known, at Jesus’s time, to live long lives into their sixties and seventies when the average age span at the time was thirty. Jesus could have trained with the Essenes of Mount Carmel to become a great healer and to also use the laying on of hands, which required a great deal of faith for the healer as well as the patient. All this shall be explained by the kind of training Jesus went through to become an Essene at age twenty and to be baptized into the Mount Carmel Essene community. After becoming a learned Essene leader in the scriptures and the philosophy of the Essenes, Jesus may well have spent the majority of his life in learning Essene healing techniques, drugs, and laying on of hands.

After extensive research of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I have included some samples of Essene gospels to give direct evidence that Jesus took his Sermon on the Mount from Essene prayers and gospels. He shortened the Essene Lord’s Prayer because it was too long for a common person to remember, and the average Jew did not pray to Mother Earth as did the Essenes, which was the first paragraph of the prayer. The blessings all come directly from the Essene texts as you can see for yourself at the end of the book in the appendix.

Of the one thousand Dead Sea Scrolls found, many in caves 4 and 11 are most useful in my research, especially with references to the Righteous Teacher. The Essenes prayed that the Righteous Teacher would be resurrected and return to lead them. This is why the Jesus of Nazareth story is so important following the Essene idea of death and resurrection. No direct mention is made of Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the image of the Righteous Teacher certainly is likened to the image of Jesus. It is possible that after the Dead Sea Scrolls were found and if there were references to Jesus being an Essene healer or becoming the Essene righteous leader, the Church may have destroyed these scrolls as they lie in storage for over forty years.

It is unfortunate that in AD 70 the Romans for the Jewish revolt against the Romans destroyed all the Essene communities across Judea and Galilee as well as the temple in Jerusalem as punishment. All the Qumran one thousand plus leather and copper scrolls were put in jars or, otherwise in a rush, just thrown in caves and boarded up with stones until an Arab child discovered them in the late 1940s. Whatever happened to the scrolls of the other Essene communities around Israel at the time in AD 70? There may never be an answer to that question unless someday a hidden cache on Mount Carmel or under the remains of the Jerusalem temple is discovered.

We may never know where the scrolls from the Mount Carmel Essene community, the Damascus Essene community, and other communities were actually buried or hidden in a cave. How many secret scrolls went underground in Jerusalem, were burned, or were destroyed during the Jewish revolt of AD 70, which ended so badly? We will perhaps never know. The end of time that the Essenes preached about came suddenly in AD 70, many years after they had originally predicted it. The Romans, in retaliation for the revolt in AD 68, crushed the rebellion and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and all the Essene communities in the desert and on Mount Carmel and other cities in Judea.

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we might one day discover more scrolls that might reveal more than what the Christian churches wanted to be revealed about Jesus and whether he was really an Essene healer or a rabbi.

CHAPTER 1

In the Beginning… the Birth of John

Bible: Book of Luke

1:5 THERE was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 1:6 And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. 1:7 And they had no child, because that Elizabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years. 1:8 And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest’s office before God in the order of his course, 1:9 According to the custom of the priest’s office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord. 1:10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense. 1:11 And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. 1:12 And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him. 1:13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for your prayer is heard; and your wife Elizabeth shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. 1:14 And you shall have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. 1:15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. 1:16 And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. 1:17 And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. 1:18 And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this?