Who Was Jesus?

 

Who Was Jesus? This is a question that has interested theologians as well as lay men and women all over the world ever since reports of that unusual person were spread abroad. Many have wondered why there isn’t more historical ‘evidence’ and biographical detail about a man who has meant so much to so many. However, according to Middle East tradition, in which the message is always more important than the messenger, it isn’t at all strange.

Jesus was first and foremost a Semite, or shemit, son of Shem, a word that has the same root as the expression for the creative principle, SHM. Shem was the oldest son of Noah. The meaning of the name Shem is: upright; righteous; renowned; brilliant; shining; splendor; dignity; sign; monument; memorial; name.

Jesus’s Jewish name was Yeshua which, directly translated, means YHWH saves. Yeshua’s parents Mari and Yoasaph were both Essenes and that meant that they both possessed insight into the scriptures as well as an understanding of the overriding meaning of life. The Essenes dressed in white, lived as vegetarians, practiced an economy whereby everything was held in common, opposed the custom of animal sacrifice, took ritual baths, tilled the land, studied and copied the holy writings, interpreted dreams, were familiar with astrology and the prophetic sense, knew about herbs and crystals, and were also outstanding healers. Two historians of the time wrote of them: ‘A race apart, more remarkable than any other in the world’ (Pliny) and ‘They are truly masters of belief, truth and uprightness … true servants of peace’ (Josephus).

Approximately 100 years before Yeshua’s birth, the Essenes had expected their true Teacher of Righteousness, a Messiah/Melchizedek-like identity, to be re-incarnated in Israel. Messiah, in Aramaic m’shiha or mashiach, means, in direct translation, The Anointed, exactly like the Greek Christos.

The Messiah archetype has many parallels with the Avatar archetype of the Far East. An Avatar, according to the Vedic tradition, is an enlightened Soul that descends from the higher planes of consciousness in order to help its less-developed brothers and sisters. Lao Tzu, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Krishna and Mohammed are just some of the better known of such Avatars.

It is worth remembering that Christianity had not yet been invented in the time up to Yeshua’s birth. Another tradition was current; a tradition from which Christianity later sprang. From their captivity under the Egyptians and later the Chaldeans and Babylonians, the Jews brought religious traditions back with them that influenced their own cult and perception of God. The Essenes in particular took up the esoteric aspects of these traditions. It was most probably from the Zarathustra tradition in Persia that the anticipation of a coming Avatar/Messiah came.

In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the world’s oldest scriptures and certainly one known to the Essenes, we read: ‘When goodness ceases to exist and injustice seizes power, I incarnate myself as Avatar. In every age I reveal myself in order to protect the good, destroy all evil and establish the truth.’

When stars appeared in the heavens in a manner anticipated by the Essenes (the constellation of Melchizedek), the three oldest and wisest of the congregation were sent out from their university on the western shore of the Dead Sea (Asphaltites), east of Bethlehem, to find the new Melchizedek incarnation (melchi = king; zedek = just). In exactly the same way, new lama incarnations are found in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Isaiah 52:13 to 53:1–12 is almost a handbook for Yeshua’s mission and destiny, not as the suffering Messiah, which is a mistaken interpretation, but as a true Bodhisattva, who by His example shows how one, even at the moment of death, can transform fear into life-giving hope and healing. By taking the pain of the world upon Himself, Yeshua made His barbaric, and seemingly meaningless, death deeply meaningful: ‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we were healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ (Isaiah: 4–6)

The prophecies of a coming Messiah, exemplified by Yeshua, are many:

a ‘But thou Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come forth unto me one who is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.’ (Micah 5:2)

b ‘The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.’ (Proverbs 8:22–23 and 31)

c ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation: lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.’ (Zacharias 9:9)

d ‘And I said unto them, if you think good, give me my price: and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.’ (Zacharias 11:12)

e ‘And the Lord said unto me, cast it unto the potter: a goodly price at which they valued me. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord.’ (Zacharias 11:13)

f ‘And one shall say unto him, what are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’ (Zacharias 13:6)

g ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7)

h ‘And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:9)

i ‘For the dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.’ (Psalms 22:16)

j ‘Moses said: “The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet. From your brethren as he raised up me. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. And it shall be that every soul that does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.”’ (Deuteronomy 18:15) 

According to the American seer Edgar Cayce, Yeshua was the incarnation of Amilius (an etheric spirit-identity in Atlantis), Adam (the first incarnated man on Earth), Enoch, Hermes, Melchizedek, Yoasaph (Joseph), Yehoushua (Joshua), Asaph and Zarathustra. But he was also Iao, the Elect One before the beginning of time; Shem, the son of Noah; and later the prophet and healer Elisha, the pupil of Elijah the prophet, who later became Yohanan the Baptist. This incarnation-line of Yeshua is the true Order of Melchizedek, an incarnation-line of the first soul, our elder brother who took upon himself to incarnate again and again as an example for us to follow. The secret motto of this order is: ‘One who saves but one soul is as if he preserves an entire world.’

From the scrolls found outside the Essene University at Qumran by the Dead Sea we know that one of the Essenes’ most revered books was The Book of Enoch. In 1 Enoch 48:1–6, Enoch the Prophet has this vision: ‘And in that place I saw the fountains of righteousness, which were inexhaustible: and around it were many fountains of wisdom; and all thirsty drank of them, and were filled with wisdom, and their dwellings were with the righteous and holy and elect. And at that hour the Son of Man was named in the presence of the Lord of Spirits, and his name before the Head of Days. Yea, before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of the heavens were made, his name was named before the Lord of Spirits. He shall be a staff to the righteous whereon to stay themselves and not fall, and he shall be the light of the Gentiles, and the hope of those who are troubled of heart. All who dwell on earth shall fall down and worship before him, and will praise and bless and celebrate with song the Lord of Spirits. And for this reason hath he been chosen and hidden before him, before the creation of the world and for evermore.’

‘For wisdom is poured out like water, and glory faileth not before him for evermore. For he is mighty in all secrets of righteousness, and unrighteousness shall disappear as a shadow, and have no continuance; because the Elect One standeth before the Lord of Spirits, and his glory is for ever and ever, and his might unto all generations, and in him dwell the spirit of wisdom, and the spirit which gives insight, and the spirit of understanding and of might, and the spirit of those who have fallen asleep in righteousness. And he shall judge the secret things, and none shall be able to utter a lying word before him; for he is the Elect One before the Lord of Spirits according to His good pleasure.’ (Enoch 48a:1–4)

Yeshua himself said: ‘All things must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.’ (Luke 24:44) There were three schools of religious thought in Israel in the time of Yeshua: the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes. Both the Sadducees and the Pharisees were rigid, militant and conservative in the practice of their faith. The Sadducees and Shammai Pharisees didn’t believe in an afterlife, whilst the Bet Hillel Pharisees were less fundamental, more inclusive and believed in more than one life.

Luke 2:41–46 tells the story of Yeshua who, during the Easter Festival in Jerusalem, becomes separated from his parents who later find him in the Temple with the learned men. When we look at Yeshua’s later ministry it is clear that He has been influenced by the Pharisee Hillel, who could very easily have been amongst those who had been amazed by the 12-year-old Yeshua’s supernatural charisma. At any rate, Yeshua’s principle, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ (Matthew 22:37–40) and ‘Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’ (Matthew 7:12), is quoted directly from Hillel and the Golden Rule, formulated in Leviticus 19:18, and before that in Taoism, Brahmanism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.

Yeshua was born in a cave between Jerusalem and Bethlehem in today’s Talpiot, but grew up in the Essenes’ colony east of Mount Carmel where present day Nazareth lies. The Essenes’ oldest university, the School of the Prophets, was on Mount Carmel, originally established by Elijah, who was a Nazarene – that is to say, a hermit who lived as a strict vegetarian, preached the Law of Moses, prophesied, and performed healing works. Nozrei means Initiated in Aramaic, or the One with insight. After Essene initiations in Heliopolis in Egypt, Yeshua was also initiated into the Nazarene branch of the Essenes’ tradition when Yohannan the Baptist baptized Him in the River Jordan. At that point Yeshua Ben-Yoasaph became Yeshua the Nazarene, Yeshua the Initiated.

Yeshua was, therefore, the Messiah long anticipated by the Essenes, according to Melchizedek’s Order, but he wasn’t God’s ‘only begotten son’, as the Aramaic expression yeheeday was mistakenly translated in John 1:14. In reality the word means the firstborn, the unique, the Elect One or the chosen, and that is something quite different and much more in keeping with Yeshua’s pronouncement in John 10:34, ‘You are all God’s children,’ and in 14:12, ‘Follow my example and you will be able to perform even greater wonders than I.’ So, you see, Yeshua was not the only, but the first Soul on Earth, the archetypical human being Adam. Adamah means earth; dam means blood. Ben-Adamah means, therefore, son of the earth, or plainly and simply, human being.

The Essenes were convinced that Yohannan the Baptist was an incarnation of Elijah, whilst Yeshua was the return of Elisha. In Exodus we read how Elijah, just before his journey in the Chariot of Fire, Kaleska d’Noohra, hands over his mantle and his prophetic abilities to his pupil Elisha, at exactly the same place by the River Jordan where Elijah, in the form of Yohannan the Baptist a few hundred years later, baptizes Yeshua (Elisha). Elisha was, just like Yeshua at a future date, a Nazarene prophet in the manner of the Melchizedek Order, who healed the sick, raised the dead, produced food out of thin air and similar miracles.

According to the New Testament, Yeshua was a rabbi – that is to say, a teacher with knowledge of the Torah (the books of Moses), the books of Wisdom, the Prophets (especially Enoch, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel), together with many of the writings found in 1947 at the old Essenes’ university at Qumran by the Dead Sea. Yeshua is the Messiah for our age, the Elect One, the Chosen One, the Ultimate Messenger of God, who came to Earth to show us why we are all here, and how we learn to love unconditionally.

by Lars Muhl from The Law of Light, pp. 20-28