Jesus, James and John

There are many earth-shaking secrets hidden in the vaults of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of them can turn the Catholic Church on its head. Among them, is the pre-eminence of Jesus’ younger sibling, James, as the indomitable force behind the early Jewish Christian Church, and his stake on the messianic legacy.

In fact, Joseph had reserved the messianic legacy for his younger son, James. Jesus, his elder son, sought to rebel against Joseph’s predilection, and pre-empted that, by riding the ass into Jerusalem in fulfilment of the Biblical prophecy, that the messiah would come riding into Jerusalem on an ass.

Joseph was not a poor carpenter as the New Testament would have you believe. He was a craftsmason in the Masonic tradition. He was a custodian of the secrets of the divine knowledge, that are as old as humanity itself. Freemasonry is not a phenomenon that began in the eighteenth century as is recorded in prescribed literature on the subject. An unnamed tradition is known to have existed all the way back into the antediluvian world.

Coming back to Joseph, he was so wealthy, that he funded the Jewish insurgency against the Romans. It was for that reason that Joseph and his young family had to flee Judaea for Egypt. Not because Herod, fearing that the true King of the Jews had incarnated, had ordered the extermination of all newborns.

King Herod, who was very unpopular among the Jews and was called a half-Jew, a phrase which was invoked to cause a humiliating insult to any Jew, would have faced a rebellion in his kingdom had he ordered the massacre of newborns. A risk he would never have taken. In any case, there is no record in the history of the Romans, or the Israelites for that matter, that Herod had called for the killing of all newborns.

Joseph belonged to the Essene community, a mystical Jewish sect that was active during the Second Temple era from the 2^nd century BC to the 1^st century AD. But its origins can be traced back to the Hebrew community of Egypt during Moses’ times. Moses, in fact, was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned between 1353 and 1336 BC and was the tenth Pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty. Akhenaten was a monotheist, and was disliked by the Egyptian priesthood for doing away with the Egyptian pantheon. It was this Akhenaten, or Moses for the Jews,who gave the Jews their monotheistic tradition and their code of conduct.

The Essenes bowed in prayer towards Akhenaten’s capital of Amarna in Egypt, in vindication of their Egyptian roots. As a practice, the Essenes were devoted to poverty, and their priests were celibate. Jesus and his brother James, followed Joseph into the Essene community.

When Jesus began his mission, and started working his miracles, the Essene community, that was very insular in nature, was filled with much consternation on seeing their rituals being made public by the eager self-proclaimed messiah. Jesus’ so-called miracles of turning water into wine, healing the sick, making the blind see, and resurrecting the dead, were merely Essene rituals and not miracles as the New Testament and the Church would have you believe.

Jesus, himself, conducted the ritual of turning water into wine at his own wedding with Mary of Bethany at Canaa. Jesus was married to Mary of Bethany, but was enamoured by Mary Magdalene, who was a central figure in his ministry. Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were not the same person as is commonly believed.

Any disparaging of Jesus, however, should not take away the moral soundness of the man and his teachings. But he was simply not the Son of God. He was merely a prophet.

It was not the Jews or the Romans who killed Jesus. For if the Jews killed Jesus, they would have stoned him to death, as was the custom in the Middle East. Neither was Jesus crucified. Jesus deliberately undertook to hang himself from a tree for three days. It is an ancient ritual to hang one’s self upside down from a tree, so as to attain a passage to the underworld and become conversant with the secrets of the underworld. The tree, in mythology, is the axis mundi that connects the ethereal world with the underworld.

Jesus lived on, and travelled East. But that is another story.

It was not Jesus’ head that Herod Antipas wanted, but that of John the Baptist, for the latter’s vociferously criticising Herod for divorcing his wife Phasaelis, and then unlawfully wedding Herodias, the wife of his brother Herod Philip I.

Herod’s step-daughter Salome, who won his favour by dancing a spectacular dance at his court, asked for John the Baptist’s head. Following which, John the Baptist was incarcerated and beheaded. Salome was a friend and disciple of Jesus.

In the Grail legends, it was John the Baptist’s head that was paraded in front of the Grail hero Perceval, while he attended the court of the Fisher King, as an allusion to John the Baptist’s importance in Jewish Christian tradition.

The Knights Templar, an order that was founded in 1119 and headquartered at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, is believed to have had allegiance to John the Baptist, and not Jesus. This was probably one of the reasons why they were trampled out by Pope Clement V and Philip the Fair of France in the 14^th century. Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grandmaster, was burnt at the stake, in Paris on 18 March 1314, for heresy, and refusing to retract to the charges made against him.

The Mandeans, who exist till today, believe that John the Baptist was messiah, not Jesus.

In any case, John the Baptist is looked upon with great reverence in the Catholic Church, particularly, for his having baptised Jesus, at the onset of Jesus’ ministry. James the Just, in contrast, was relegated to religious insignificance in Christian tradition. First, the claim that Jesus was the only begotten of his mother, Mary. And second, that he was referred to as James the Lesser in New Testament chronicles. A slight to his dominating persona. For, it was not Jesus, but James who was the Father of the Jewish Christian Church. It was James who nurtured the Jewish Christian Church in its early days. And it was James who was the subject of a tragic death, having invited the ire of Paul of Tarsus, the Roman citizen, who hijacked Jewish Christian teaching and manipulated it to suit the taste of the Gentiles.

So acrimonious was the relationship between James and Paul, that Paul once flung James down the stairs of the Temple of Jerusalem, as a result of which James broke a leg. It was followed by Paul’s stoning of James to death, which brought an end to James the Just’s illustrious life.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert , on the northern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank, and that are dated as early as the 8th century BC and as late as the 11th century AD, allude to James the Just as the `Teacher of Righteousness’ and to Paul as the `Teacher of Lies’. A fact that escapes the Church-sponsored translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

After the stoning of James, there was a revolt in Judaea, and a Jewish mob attempted to lynch Paul, who only managed to get away because he had the protection of a Roman battalion.

Apart from the key figures of Jesus, James and John, there was a ragtag of claimants to the messianic legacy, in times when apocalyptic prophecy was the order of the day. Simon Magus, the alleged exhibitionist and adversary of Simon Peter, was one of them. The fact that Jesus proclaimed himself, while James was proclaimed, lends credence to the contention that James the Just was actually the chosen one.

The Church, perhaps, has done James the Just a singular injustice by consigning him to the far back bench of Christian tradition. It was characteristic of the litany of wrongs that the Church committed against illustrious individuals, and against humanity as a whole. It could also be that it was too late for the Church to retract once it discovered the truth about James and Jesus, and that it would do anything to keep its stranglehold on the masses, even if it meant exalting a false messiah.

Pope Leo X (1475-1521) aptly put it “It has served us well. The myth of Christ.” Indeed, the myth of Christ was the raison d’etre for the Church’s dominance. It abetted the Church in controlling the mindset of the masses, by telling them that salvation is only for the believers. It gave the Church the justification to decimate the recalcitrant, including Pagan cults that were prevalent before the New Testament era. It also gave the Church the confidence to believe that it was the sole authority on veracity. And to suppress all other material that held it in doubt.

It is about time the Church exhumes its archives for expeditious research; and recompense the truth, even at the cost of its own survival.