Chapter 8: Learning Who He Is

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

---

Book I: Early Years
Part Two–Young Man
                                      

After Joseph, his family, and Josi returned to Nazareth from the Temple in Jerusalem, they sent a message to Judy on Mount Carmel asking her to come soon.

When she came, Joseph took her out in front of the house and told her what Jesus had done during Passover in the Temple. He also told her what Jesus had said afterward.

She nodded her old, grey-haired head as passersby looked at her curiously on the sunny street. “Mary is right,” she said. “He must be told about his birth and the cause of it. But it must be gradual.”

From inside the mud-brick house, from in back, came the loud crying of a baby waking suddenly from an uncomfortable nap.

“How do you mean, ‘gradual’?” Joseph asked.

“It is time to teach him the real truth about the prophecies,” she answered.

“You mean, the prophecies the Essenes used in deciding when Jesus should be born?” He rubbed his chin.

“Yes.” Her eyes sparkled. “We will tell him the truth about the prophecies as we understand them. But we will not tell him exactly how we used them. We will let him figure that out for himself. When he gets the answer, that he is our chosen one, then I will be there to help him accept it.”

Joseph’s eyebrows rose. “You will be there?” he asked. The brilliant sun danced off the white stucco house across the street ad into his eyes, half-blinding him. He put his hand edgewise to his brow.

Judy looked firmly up into his eyes. “Yes,” she said. “It is time Jesus moved to Mount Carmel.”

When Joseph and Mary first told Jesus he was going to stay at Mount Carmel with the Essenes, he became very excited. “The mountains!” he exclaimed. He jumped up from his sitting mat in the family room of their home.

“At least you’ll be able to come home for weekends,” Mary said.

Jesus let this idea pass. It was a grey cloud on what was otherwise a perfect adventure. Who wanted to be part of a family for even two days a week if he could live on a mountain?

Josi on her mat rocked baby James excitedly. He began to complain. “Oh, be quiet,” said Josi. She smiled down on him. “Jesus is going away to live with Judy!”

“Don’t forget,” Joseph said, “your purpose there is to study.”

Jesus nodded. His eyes sparkled. “I know,” he said. “Judy is finally going to tell me what the prophecies really mean.”

Joseph, Mary, and Josi exchanged quick glances across the room.

“Poppa?” Jesus asked.

“Yes?” Joseph asked.

“Yes?” Joseph looked at his son.

“Why is it I don’t like to play all the time like I used to? Why have you not had me working with you all day long like other fathers have their sons helping?” He looked through the open doorway of his father’s carpenter’s shop.

Mary quickly turned her head away. Her eyes misted.

“Son, one of your jobs is to study,” Joseph said. He smiled gently. “Don’t you like it?”

“Oh, very much!” Jesus exclaimed.

“Don’t let Judy’s wonderful talk make you forget where your parents are,” Mary said. Her voice was trembling. “Come home every weekend, my son.”

Jesus nodded. “Yes Momma.”

Three days later he was gone.

The mountains of the Carmel chain, though really just great hills in a string, were tall to Jesus. He had visited the Essenes before, but he had never felt during those visits that there was enough time to properly explore everything in these mountains.

His favorite place was the top of Mount Carmel. Here among the wind-stirred fruit orchards and wide, evenly spaced vegetable gardens of the Essenes was the temple that later was destroyed by the Romans. This temple was a combination of synagogue, house of healing, school, and library. It was large and long and made of great, heavy blocks of quarried stone. In this it was much like synagogues in other towns and cities.

In some ways, though, it was very different from other synagogues. The simple stone alter in it faced east and caught the rays of the rising sun, streaming between pillars, from across the green top of the mountain. The alter was surrounded by a series of open arches in front of it and to its sides. Steps both before and between the arches led up to it. Women and men alike approached this alter, for the Essenes allowed women the same priestly functions as men.

In fact, and this really enraged some of the Sanhedrin priests in Jerusalem, anyone could come to this alter, even children and foreigners. some of the priests in Jerusalem considered this practice a great and terrible blasphemy, a stain on all Hebrews that was both immoral and disgusting, especially when foreigners were allowed access to the alter. If Rome hadn’t been overseeing the Hebrew nation, this whole Essene temple probably would have been quickly destroyed by conservative Hebrew hotheads in the employ of Jerusalem priests.

At the rear of the Essene temple were small, cold rooms where students and scholars studied; and a large, long room filled with hundreds of book rolls. Here, every day between the sunrise and the sunset devotions at the altar, Jesus studied. He ate with everyone else three times a day in a big middle room near the center of the building. The foods were largely fresh or dried fruits and vegetables according to the season; grains and nuts; and smaller quantities of light meats.

At night, after supper and after a period when he was allowed to explore, he slept in Judy’s cave. Though some of the Essenes lived in goatskin tents on top of the mountain near the temple, many of the older or more important members lived in the nearby caves. The caves were natural, hollowed out of layers of limestone by water and wind. The deeper ones with small entrances kept their owners especially cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Jesus and Judy’s cave was divided into several parts. A small entrance room led into the main living area, and this is turn led to several smaller rooms. The floors had been carefully leveled and covered by straw mats. The walls and the passages between rooms were hung with goatskins, and a little hole had been dug from the ceiling of the main room upward, to the surface. This hole was an escape flue for smoke from the small, busy fire Judy kept in the winter. She was old, and her body sometimes needed this extra warmth.

In the winter Jesus slept in the same room with his aging teacher. In the warmer months he had his own little cave room. He decorated it with grasses and wooden poles his second year there, so that it gradually looked more and more like the inside of a shepherd’s temporary cabin. It made him feel closer to nature. He wanted this, for his studies made him feel he was in the middle of the most intellectual world possible.

As an Essene student, he studied subjects that many conservative scholars and priests found shocking.

In common with the Magi who had visited him as a baby, he learned the study of the stars, their movements and positions, and how they affected people and nations alike.

Like many of the Pharisees of the Hebrews, he studied resurrection–or reincarnation–of the soul. The soul, according to the Pharisees and Essenes, rose from the dead and could come again to earth at a later time.

As expected by Pharisees and Sadducees alike, when he was thirteen he traveled to Jerusalem with Joseph to take his initiation into manhood at the Temple.

Back on Mount Carmel, in common with the great prophet Daniel and many others, Jesus studied divination by dreams, in which dreams were used to foretell the future and understand the meaning of the past and present.

And as did soothsayers and sorcerers throughout the world, he studied the lesser arts of reading human bodies. This involved studying people’s hands, their faces and heads, and other parts of their bodies to learn their future, their past, and their present actions and health.

Many of these things were of questionable practice among Hebrews, and could even have been considered illegal. The Essenes, and many others, did not believe this. Even in Jesus’ boyhood, most Hebrew priests and people already were taking a more open attitude about such things. But still these ideas were scoffed at. For this reason, the Essenes avoided discussing them with most people.

Jesus especially studied the prophecies. He didn’t study just the prophecies in the old books. For the first time, Judy let him read some of the many dreams and visions of the Essenes, which were collected on book rolls in their library. Many of these dreams and visions concerned Israel’s Messiah.

It was more than a year before he discovered the truth about himself.

He was reading carefully from a book roll Judy had given him. The room was lit by an old earthen oil lamp. She was sitting across from him in their cave, rocking slowly back and forth.

Jesus suddenly lifted his eyes from the book roll. “But this says that twelve girls shall be chosen to dedicate themselves in the temple, and one of them will become the Messiah’s mother!”

Judy quietly nodded her head. The oil lamp behind her flickered.

“My mother once said she had been such a girl the temple! But surely that was a different group of girls. Surely the twelve for the Messiah haven’t been chosen yet?”

“They have been chosen, Jesus.”

“But they can’t have!” Jesus exclaimed. “I haven’t seen them anywhere.” He looked at the rocky ceiling as if he could see through it and up to the temple on the hilltop above them.

“It was before you were born,” she answered.

He looked at her numbly. “Before? But, then, that must mean….” He shook his head in disbelief. “Teacher, is the Messiah already born?”

She closed her eyes once and opened them. “We, here on Mount Carmel, believe so. He is a young man like you.”

Jesus took several shuddering breaths and shifted restlessly on his mat. Then he took a deeper, relaxing breath. “May I meet him?” he asked, more calmly.

A quick suspicion crossed his mind. “It’s not my cousin John, is it?” he half whispered, “John who I grew up with in Egypt and Capernaum? He is wise and strong.” He sat up straight. “John would make a good Messiah,” he said.

Judy shook her head. “He is the Forerunner, the man whom the prophets say will prepare the Messiah’s way,” she explained. She glanced across the room at the book rolls carefully stacked in their wood cubbyholes.

Jesus became excited. He had studied these prophecies until he knew them by heart. “I know the Forerunner!” he exclaimed happily. “I know John, who will prepare the way!” He looked toward the goatskin door as if he would go out and find his cousin.

Judy watched him quietly.

“You are the Messiah,” she said gently.

Jesus’ head snapped around, and he stared deeply into her eyes. No! he thought, his refusal to believe burning its way through their locked eyes and into her eyes.

“Yes,” she said. In the subdued light of the cave, she watched him carefully. She saw his breathing suddenly become shallow. His face was pale. His eyes, though they were still on her, were clouding over.

She reached out and touched his hand. It was cold. He was in shock. She knew there were times when people must be slapped to bring them out of shock. As a leader of the Essenes, it had bene her job to bring bad news to people, and occasionally to slap them out of this same kind of rigid reaction.

She also knew there are times when shock is a healing response to events too hard to handle. At such times it must run its course. This was one of those times. She slowly rose from her rush mat and found a blanket from her spare bedding in the corner, which she put around his still shoulders. She tucked in the blanket around his legs and bent to the fire in the middle of the room to build it higher. Then she sighed, an unusual thing for her to do. Feeling her age, she sat down beside Jesus near the fire to spend the night with him.

The next afternoon, with hardly a word, he walked into the mountains. He asked no questions. He didn’t need to. Because of his studies, he had all the important answers.

He just needed some time to accept them.

Jesus was gone for a week. Though many of the Essenes worried about him, Judy knew he would be all right. She had given him food, water, and a small tent before he left. She explained his absence to the older members of the community who knew about his birth. She cautioned them not to expect too much from him when he returned. Messiahs, she told them, aren’t made overnight.

When Jesus came walking back into the Essene community, he received a reserved but happy reception from the community members who knew.

He accepted it calmly and quietly, then left for Judy’s cave.

In the following weeks, though he continued his studies once more and resumed all his normal activities, it became obvious he had changed. He was now a man. The happy, unthinking boy was gone and someone older by years had replaced him.

He did not become, as some Essenes thought at first, a rock that never showed its feelings. They soon realized he had, if anything, become more sensitive and gentle. He answered the older Essene’s questions about holy books and languages, freely admitting there was much he didn’t know, yet. And he was especially kind to the Essene children, the young ones who came with their parents during the afternoons to study with the teachers.

He didn’t lose his spontaneous and fiery natures, either. He sought to control them. But they were still very much present.

“Are you sure!” he exclaimed one afternoon to Judy. They were in a small study room in the temple. She had been telling him in detail how the Essenes prepared for his coming.

She was as calm as ever, now that he knew the truth. Patiently she spoke of the years about which he knew little or nothing. “Your mother had no chance to be with a man,” she explained. “There were the visions and the dreams. Then you came, and there were more visions during your mother’s pregnancy and after your birth.”

Jesus angrily waved his hand downward. “What if I don’t want to be the Messiah!” he exclaimed.

She looked at him shrewdly. “Why don’t you?” she asked.

He turned his head away and looked out the small square window overhead. A bird was flying high through the blue sky.

“I’m not enough,” he said. “No one can do everything I’m supposed to do.”

“Don’t worry,” Judy told him. “You will do what you can. No one should ever ask for more than that.”

He still was not content.

After his discovery of how he had been conceived and born, Jesus did not go back to Nazareth for a month. Part of this was simply the need to be alone.

But part of it was fear of seeing his parents. He felt shy about talking this over with his father, who really wasn’t his father. And it was embarrassing to think of talking about such personal physical things as conception and pregnancy with his mother.

Yet he still loved them both, just as much as before. They had been told by a messenger from Judy that he knew everything. He needed to go t them himself, he knew, to show them he still cared and wanted them. The first day when he showed up at the house, on foot, Mary ran to meet him. She threw her arms around him and hugged him with all her strength.

“Oh Jesus!” she finally exclaimed. She drew back and looked at him, for he was the same hiehgt as she by this time.

“Hello Momma.” He smiled shyly. They were just outside the front.

His father strode up behind Mary and without a pause reached his strong carpenter’s arms out.

Jesus turned to him and also reached out. The two men clasped each other strongly.

“Poppa.” Jesus’ voice was husky.

Joseph smiled down on him.

“Hello, Jesus,” Josi said. She slowly stepped forward from the open doorway.

He looked up and saw her, quiet and shy for a change. But her eyes still looked excited. A spark of mischief came into them. “Can I be your head nurse when you’re king of Israel?” she asked.

Jesus stared at her and began frowning. Her eyes were dancing. He couldn’t resist her. A smile came to his lips. Then he started laughing.

“Oh Josi,” Mary said. “Hush!”

“Come on, Jesus.” Josi grabbed his hand shyly as several smaller neighbor children raced by, yelling. Come see your brother, James.”

“Come on, Son,” Joseph said. He was smiling widely. “Let’s go inside and have a meal before we divide the world among us.”

This was Jesus’ first homecoming as the Messiah.

As the months passed on top of Mount Carmel, Jesus’ studies changed more and more to languages. Judy set a pace for his lessons that even grown men would have had trouble keeping up with.

“But why do I have to study Sanskrit!” he exclaimed one afternoon. They were in the study room in the temple again. “I don’t even like it! And India is halfway beyond the edge of the world!”

Judy nodded. She picked up a green leek, which tasted like mild green onions, and offered another to Jesus.

“You need to know the language,” she told him, “so you can read their holy books.”

“Aren’t they translated into Greek in the library at Alexandria?” he asked. “Everyhting else is!”

“India is too far away for Greek scholars to bother with,” she answered.

He took the stalk of leek she was offering him. He bit a small piece off right away and tucked it in the corner of his mouth.

“Why can’t I just continue studying our own ancient holy books, and those of the Greeks?” he asked. “I don’t know enough about those, yet.”

Judy raised her finger and shook it at him once. “Don’t be falsely humble, my son. You must move to new studies. Your knowledge of Hebrew and Greek books exceeds that of most Teachers. You are already qualified to be a Doctor of the Laws, if you were old enough.”

Jesus stood up and began pacing across the stone floor of the small teaching room. “Then send me to Egypt. You told me I could go there and study at the library in Alexandria.”

“You will,” Judy answered. The corners of her mouth turned up in a half-hidden smile. “You may go to Egypt in several years. But we also want you to go to India. So come study the Sanskrit.” She pointed at the book roll lying open before her.

“India?” Jesus stopped pacing in front of her. “All the way to India? Why?”

“Because,” Judy said, “we want you to study the mysteries of their religion. They believe in one God above all others there, just as we do here. They know secrets of meditation, of inner control and quieting the self so that a person may approach God more closely. Shouldn’t a Messiah know these methods?”

Jesus flushed. “Of course. I thought, Teacher, that such things would come to me in dreams and visions like other Essenes have had.”

“They will. But don’t forget, Jesus, God works through human beings, too, in bringing knowledge. Even the most unimportant donkey herder may give you something you need to know, even if the donkey herder himself is unaware he is giving it.”

Outside the small, high window, a child laughed gaily. Jesus forcibly calmed himself and sat back down before her.

“There are many people,” Judy continued, “who know God. Not scribes or Doctors of the Law who teach just words and ideas. I mean people who know God personally here”–she touched her fingertips to her breast–“and here.” She touched her forehead.

Jesus nodded. He listened carefully.

“Do not forget that you are still learning,” she added. “And the most important knowledge you can get comes not from books. You still have most of this greater knowledge, this inner knowing of God, ahead of you.”

He sighed. “Am I too intellectual. Teacher?”

She smiled.

“No. Yours is not an intellectual nature. It is otherwise–but you still must discover this. Right now you really are too intellectual. It is a passing thing, though, a period you must go through.”

She picked up the Sanskrit book roll. “Come,” she said. “Let’s do our studies. It took me five years to master this language. But I’m sure you can do it in two.” she pushed the book roll toward him.

Wearily Jesus took it and translated out loud what was on it, pausing for her corrections whenever he missed a difficult word. His excitement about going to India quickly disappeared.

Languages, and foreign books by holy men and philosophers, occupied most of his days for the next several years. He got away to roam the mountain woods whenever he could. The rest of his time, he studied.

---

---
Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.