Was Jesus Crazy?

The New American Bible says at Mark 3:21: When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." So, what was it that made Mary and Jesus' brothers and sisters think that he was crazy. The answer to this question lies in a recollection of who Jesus was and what he believed. First, we have to remember that Jesus was a Nasorean. Matthew 2:23. The Nasoreans had been around for at least 100 years by the time Jesus was born and had a definite point of view. One of the points of view held by the Nasoreans as set forth in the Community Rule is the idea that there would be three pillars which would rule the Nasorean community. Jesus believed that the Priestly Pillar would be John the Baptist, the Kingly Pillar was be Himself, and the Prophetic Pillar would be his brother, Jacob (James the Just). 

Jesus had been raised his entire life to believe in the three pillars and he believed strongly in the importance of each member of the triumvirate. Matthew has the story out of proper chronology. The proper chronology was Jesus was baptized by John, John was arrested, and Jesus went into the wilderness to be tested. See Matthew 4. Why did Jesus go into the wilderness? The paradigm that Jesus believed had been shattered. John was gone and Jesus did not understand how he could be a King without a High Priest. He went into the desert to die. He was overwhelmed. His world was completely mixed up. It is reasonable to believe that Mary and Jesus' brothers and sisters believed as he did. They were committed to the idea of the three pillars. 

While in the desert, like Elijah in his faith crisis, Jesus was visited by the Archangel Gavriel. He spoke to Jesus and said: "Jesus do you remember the prophecies concerning Melchizedek." Jesus said that he did. For the record, let us review those prophecies: 

    Melchizedek will return as the Messiah who will declare a day of favor from the Lord, announcing good news, salvation from the Enemy, comforting the mourning, and freeing the captives. 11Q 13 in the Dead Sea Scrolls, called the Coming of Melchizedek. Again:

     The heavens and the earth will listen to His Messiah, and none therein will stray from the commandments of the Holy Ones. ... Over the Evyon (the Poor)  His spirit will hover and will renew the faithful with his power. ... He will liberate the captives, restore sight to the blind, straighten the bent. ... For he will heal the wounded, and revive the dead and bring news to the Evyon (the Poor). 4Q521 from the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

So Jesus believed that when Melchizedek returned he would do all these things. Now another name for the Nasoreans was the Poor or Evyoni. The Archangel then said to Jesus, you are Melchizedek returned, you are the Priest-King of Jerusalem. You are the Messiah that was to come again. Restore the ancient sacrifices and the ancient ways. 

Jesus returned from the Wilderness filled with new ideas about who he was and what he was to do. Those ideas were radically different than the ideas he had been raised with. Those ideas would seem like madness to his relatives and to the Nasoreans. Those ideas would split the Nasorean Movement into those who supported Jesus and saw John as the precursor and those who thought Jesus was Satanic and John was the Messiah. The split continues even today between the Christians and the Mandaeans. 

Jesus went to Capernaum, not home to Nazareth. He began to preach as the Archangel had reminded him. He began to cast out demons and heal the sick. His mother and brothers and sisters came to see what he was doing. It all sounded wrong, different. They at first rejected him and even the Pharisees claimed he was possessed by Baalzebul. But Jesus was not crazy. He was the most sane of men. And from that time on, he was Melchizedek returned aiming to return to Jerusalem. 

Jesus set out on a different mission than the one prescribed for the Davidic Messiah. Those who wrote later were not steeped in the literature of the Nasoreans, so they made up a Messiah that resembled the Messiah of  David, but they failed to realize that Jesus was a different Messiah entirely. The last act of that Messiah was to  change the Mosaic Sacrifice forever, to end the bloody sacrifice of animals and to restore the Melchizedekan sacrifice of bread and wine. In the Clementine letters we are told specifically that the early church understood that the Eucharist was the replacement for the bloody sacrifice and the Eucharist is a sacrifice of bread and wine. Jesus was the Messiah of Melchizedek and he did all that that Messiah was to do. He was the Christ, an Elohim that descended from Heaven, and returned to Heaven as the Eternal High Priest, just like Melchizedek had been. 

Saved From What?

When a Jew says that he is seeking salvation he means that he wants to be free from his sins under the Torah and be brought into peace with the Holy One of Israel. However, Jesus was a Nazorean and the Nazoreans, also known as the Essenes, believed that a Messiah would soon come to the world and He would bring warfare and mass destruction. Jesus promised his disciples that he must die and rise from the dead. He promised them that He would come again on the clouds and with him would come a huge army of angels. Salvation for him meant that those who followed the Torah and believed in Him would be saved during the coming war and destruction. Membership in the Church was therefore an insurance policy that when all the coming war and destruction overcame the world, you would be saved. However, Jesus promised that he would come again to fulfill these prophecies before the last apostle died. 

By 95 CE, the last of the Apostles, Jude Thaddeus, called Thomas, was the only one of the Apostles still living and the events had not occurred. Instead the land of Israel had been devastated by the Roman armies and no angels had appeared to protect the people and save them. The Church leaders who had removed themselves from Jerusalem after the death of James decided that they must have misunderstood what Jesus was saying. As a result, the Gospel of John was written and in it salvation was redefined. 

In John's Gospel, one will be saved from hell by belief in the Name of Jesus. The book centers not so much upon what Jesus did but rather on who he was and also on how He performed the signs that He performed. Jesus was going to send the Holy Spirit as a comforter to protect believers until the time came for Jesus to return.  The book of John did believe in the imminent return of Jesus, but it decided that there would be no signs that would give us a clue as to when that time would be. 

In 2 Peter, the author, writing the last of the canonical letters, argues that Jesus is not slow. After all, for G-d a day is a thousand years and a thousand years is a day. People were losing faith in this religion of Jesus because not only did the religion, now co-opted by Pauline heresy, not have a strong moral and ethical basis, but in addition the prophecies of Jesus had appeared to be false in that they had not come to pass in the time he had said they would. 

The Revelation of St. John was written by a disciple of a disciple of John according to Eusebius in his Ecclesia  Historia. Eusebius doubted that it was an inspired book but rather argued that it was a false prophecy and should not be admitted into the then incomplete canon of Scripture. However, in order to keep further erosion of the Church, the pagan Emperor Constantine the Great conspired and tricked the Council of Nicaea into accepting the book into the Canon instead of Enoch, a book which was considered sacred by the Nasoreans and by Jesus and his family as is demonstrated by the Letter of Jude. It was necessary to have Revelation in order to give Christians an imaginary something to be saved from even though Jesus did not mean salvation from an afterlife hell but rather salvation from a current everyday real hell on Earth. 

So what do we do with Christianity? First of all, we return to the Gospel of Matthew and to the Torah which Jesus left us with a command to do much better than the Pharisees. See Matthew 5:19-21. Second, we require Gentiles to be circumcised and to keep the Sabbath and kosher laws. Isaiah 56:1-7. Third, we start saying the Eucharist around a pot luck meal on Friday just after sundown. Fourth, we abolish Paul and everything tainted by him and restore the ancient books of the Nazorean faith. Then and only then will Gentiles and Jews be saved from hell and the destruction when Messiah Jesus returns.