Amazing grace! how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
– John Newton (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1772)

We have witnessed a genuine miracle. And the fact that the miracle happened two thousand years ago and was planned as a personal gift to humankind, and we can see now how it was accomplished, we can peek behind the curtain and watch it as it happened makes that miracle even more wonderful. It was, in fact, a whole set of miracles, the last of which is the fact that Jesus has managed to preserve for us over the past two thousand years sufficient evidence of His life, death, and resurrection that even all these many years later we still can know with certainty that it actually did happen. The fact that we have the Shroud of Turin, and we now can document its miraculous nature tells us monumentally wondrous things about the extraordinary nature of Jesus as well.

Two years ago, I also experienced my own miracle. My spirit guide, Thomas, took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane because we were about to work together on creating a website for Him (although I didn’t know anything about this at the time). Jesus told me during that first visit that He wants the world to have His genuine backstory now, to replace all the religious myth-making. And He especially wants us to know that six thousand years ago, He was just a man in a human body who was working to perfect Himself spiritually, just as you and I are working, each toward our own spiritual perfection. Jesus told me that once He had perfected Himself and achieved the level of the Godhead, He was so troubled to see how difficult the struggle for perfection still remains for most people living on earth, especially since they still receive no guidance at all about why they are born on earth or how they might best achieve spiritual growth. Even now, most people continue to pointlessly drudge through lifetime after lifetime on earth, while making little or no spiritual progress.

So the entity who was later to be born as Jesus persuaded the Powers to allow Him to be born again on earth, directly from out of the Godhead. This sort of Godhead-level birth of a perfected being had never previously been attempted. And Jesus did not do it just so He could die for our sins. That bogus sin-offering concept was an old Hebrew religious idea, and entirely unnecessary now, since as Jesus Himself quite pointedly tells us, God never judges anyone (see JN 5:20-23). And for the record, Jesus doesn’t judge us either, as He tells us at JN 12:45-47. Jesus was born to teach us that we undertake lifetimes on earth in order to raise our own spiritual vibrations, and also to raise the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind, which He calls bringing the kingdom of God on earth (see e.g. LK 8:1, 9:2, 9:11). And Jesus also was born to teach us how to grow spiritually so rapidly that we can end the cycle of repeated rebirths and make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. So that was the reason for Jesus’s three years of teaching! His teachings are not just the make-nice platitudes that most people have long considered them to be. Instead, they are a beautiful spiritual lesson-plan so efficient that they can transform your life within months.  

The whole idea that Jesus had to die to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins, which modern Christians call “penal substitutionary atonement,” is not based in anything that Jesus said. Indeed, that Christian religious idea directly contradicts the truths that Jesus shares with us in the Gospels. And it is frankly altogether repellent. Try asking yourself which of your own beloved children you would most enjoy watching being horribly murdered so you can forgive the rest of your children for messing up your living room. God insists that you and I must forgive every wrong ever done to us, when at the same time we are told by our religion that the God that we worship is so unforgiving? Jesus tells us to forgive “not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven times” (MT 18:22). So apparently God insists that you and I must forgive, while at the same time God demands that we participate in the sacrifice of His own Son to Himself, or else God refuses to forgive us? This bogus idea that God is unable to forgive unless God first gets to watch His Son being murdered is such a terrible insult to the genuine God, and a complete humiliation of Jesus!

But if Jesus didn’t have to die as a sin-sacrifice, then why did He go to the cross on Good Friday? And was He still somehow doing it for us? Jesus’s reason for dying on the cross is something else that He explained to me on that amazing night when I first met Him in the astral plane two years ago. He told me that His death on the cross had not been any part of His original life-plan, but His plan instead had been that He would simply walk away from His companions when His teaching work on earth was done, and He would be subsumed back into the highest levels of reality. But the one thing that was severely vexing Him while He was on earth was that, try as He might, He never could convince most people that their lives were going to be eternal. After all, they knew better! The custom of the day was to lay dead bodies out in caves for several years to decay away, and then when there was nothing left of them but bones, their mourners would collect those bones into bone-boxes, called ossuaries, and then store the filled ossuaries marked with people’s names and re-use the caves. Everyone knew that people died and decayed away! No matter what Jesus said, He could not convince them otherwise.

So Jesus decided to give every one of us, both those alive back then and all the rest of us until the end of time, a demonstration that human life really is eternal. He told me on that night two years ago that He wasn’t even sure that He would be able to revive and re-use His body after it was crucified, but He had been experimenting with reviving small dead animals with some success. He could bring dead animals alive again after they had died, although not for long. Still, He was determined to try this. He said that He was protected during His lifetime as Jesus by invisible archangels, so He had to order His archangel guards to stand down in order for Him to even be arrested. (I found these little details so fascinating!) He told me that He never managed to get the Godhead’s agreement to this change in His life plan because it seemed to be a humiliation of an Emissary from  God, and the thought of that was insupportable. But once it was clear that Jesus was determined to do it anyway, with or without God’s permission, He did at least receive God’s promise that if He went through with it, He would die on the cross well before sunset on Friday. He would therefore (hopefully) die with unbroken and still usable legs, since it was routine for the Roman guards to go around and break the legs of people on crosses who were still alive when the sun was setting as the Saturday Sabbath arrived at sundown. Without usable legs, they would no longer be able to push up and breathe, and they would soon die of asphyxiation.  

Who really is Jesus? When my Thomas first came out to me in 2015, the first thing I asked him was whether Jesus really came to us as the Son of God, or whether He was only a wise prophet. Thomas told me that Jesus is much more even than just the Son of God. He said that Jesus entered that lifetime from the highest aspect of the Godhead. So since the evidence suggests, and both Thomas and our regular Seek Reality guest Mikey Morgan together have confirmed to us, that the God of this reality is a Collective of Perfected Beings, they are telling us that God literally walked the earth in the Person of the historical Jesus. Indeed, Jesus Himself suggests His own divinity in the Gospels, although those who heard Him speak and then passed His words down orally for a couple of generations before those words were written down may not have fully understood what He was saying. He would say things like, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:9-10). Jesus lived on earth in a fairly primitive time and place. It is important that we always keep that in mind! The fact that so few of Jesus’s listeners were able to grasp the reality that God had incarnated on earth in the Person of Jesus should not much surprise us.

I began researching death and the afterlife in the nineteen-seventies in an effort to understand my childhood experiences of light. It took me more than a decade to really understand that many hundreds of perfectly consistent communications from people that we used to think were dead, received on two continents over nearly a century, did make it pretty much statistically impossible for the afterlife that they all talked about so consistently not to be real. And although I was very familiar with the Gospels, and in the end quite frustrated about the fact that Christians mostly ignored Jesus’s teachings, it was only late in the nineties that I realized that the dead were actually confirming what Jesus had said when He was on earth, and in detail. That was when I was at last able to abandon the Christian religion altogether, and to give my whole heart to Jesus alone. 

But being confident that Jesus is a genuine historical figure, and understanding that He came to us as God on earth, is still a far cry from believing that His actual burial shroud might still exist. And for a long time, I doubted the claim that the burial shroud and sudarium (face-covering) of Jesus are with us to this day. But on these matters, I am a skeptic no longer. As was true of all that afterlife evidence, and the evidence confirming the Lord’s words in the Gospels that I have researched so diligently, the modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant, and it is irrefutable. Here is what has persuaded me:

• Both relics date to the time of Jesus. The linen of which the Shroud of Turin (Italy) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) are made can be carbon-dated to the time of Jesus. It is of a weave in common use at that time, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
• The blood on both relics is male and of the same type. That type is AB, which is so rare that only about two percent of modern people share it.
• The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s reported injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they both covered the same man, that He was Jewish and He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report were inflicted on Jesus.
• The Shroud carries an image of a man. That image is only smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed. There is no image on the Sudarium, but still those smudges on the Shroud can be seen. More obvious to a casual observer are smoke and burn marks from a fire in 1532 and another in 1997, together with efforts that were made over time to mend and patch the damaged Shroud.
• The image on the Shroud turns out to be a photographic negative. It was only when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898 that the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image.
• No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it doesn’t penetrate at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim happened well after the blood had dried.
• Something to think about… Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce them would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body roughly equivalent to or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge.

Jesus’s reanimated body was not made fully alive again. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated and its flesh was decaying, and those who knew Jesus did not readily recognize Him wearing that rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His body to be so fragile now that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could fully re-inhabit and re-animate the body to the extent that it could again walk and talk, and He could use it to demonstrate His own survival; then after perhaps a day or two, He apparently cast it away, and He used an astral body from then on until He ascended, some forty days later. That astral body was why He could so easily appear inside the enclosed and fortified room where His disciples had hidden themselves (see JN 20:19-20). And having created mimic wounds in His astral body, He invited doubting Thomas to probe those wounds and satisfy himself that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Jesus. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then He was tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists to this day, and laid in a tomb. Two days after that He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy from it that was at least equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on the earth generated at once. He then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and to us, that human life is indeed eternal and none of us will ever die.

One of the criminals who were hanged there was saying,
“ Save Yourself and us!” The other was saying,
“Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”
And He said to him, “Truly I say to you,
today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”
– Jesus’s Crucifixion, from the Gospel of Luke (LK 23:39-43)

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on through the light,
Take my hand, precious Lord,
And lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand Precious Lord” (1937)

One question about which there is much confusion is how Jesus might have spent what are called His “lost years.” After He was briefly left behind at the Temple in Jerusalem by His parents at the age of twelve, so they had to go back and fetch Him (see LK 43-50), there is nothing in the Biblical Gospels about what Jesus was doing with His life until much later, when He was baptized by John the Baptist at the age of thirty and He then began His public life. So, what was Jesus doing during those eighteen early years of his life? 

This has always been a puzzle. The notion that He might simply have been growing up, living as a carpenter during His teens and twenties, caring for His mother and His younger siblings, assisting His carpenter father, enjoying His friends and living His life, is impossible for most people to contemplate. So the theory has grown that He must have been traveling to the Far East and learning the wisdom of the ancient sages of that part of the world. Yes! That’s the ticket! A book is currently being written comparing Jesus’s teachings with the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching,  which dates to the late fourth century BCE. Some people firmly believe that Jesus journeyed to India, to Tibet, and perhaps even to China, and He studied under various sages along the way, so His teachings surely incorporate wisdom that He learned on those distant travels.

Let’s pause and consider this idea for a moment. Jesus spoke Aramaic. There is no Gospel evidence that He was fluent in other languages. Of course, He also could read the ancient Hebrew scrolls, and there is evidence that He had a good Hebrew religious education, but that is the whole extent of His literacy. So, how did Jesus communicate with people in India and Tibet and even perhaps in China, and with those who spoke all the many different languages that He would have encountered in the course of His long journey to the east, and then His similar journey back toward home? It Is more than two thousand, eight hundred miles from Israel to India. And if Jesus went as far as China, that would have been almost four thousand miles, and there are some pretty big mountains in the way. And how did he go? By camel? On foot? Jesus was poor. How did He purchase and transport provisions? Because it is hard to imagine what He might have managed to find to consistently eat on a journey like that, and never mind how He could have afforded to transport Himself.

And did He go all that way alone? I find that idea to be inconceivable. Jesus was always surrounded by companions, and especially as He went through the wild tribal lands of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, a man alone who didn’t speak the local language would have been slaughtered without a thought. And my dear ones, there is frankly no other way to get to India and China from Israel than through those hostile areas. All I can think is that Jesus has to have made such a trip as part of a trade caravan, if indeed He made it at all. But that would have cost quite a lot of money. Why He did it, without knowing what He might have encountered along the way, and what He could have hoped to find at journey’s end that would have been worthy of such a tremendous effort, and then how He might have calculated His odds of ever making it back home again, and also why He later never mentioned having undertaken such a long journey, are all questions which seem to demand some answers that are never even whispered about in the Gospels.

Now, I know what you are thinking. This is Jesus we are talking about here! He could probably speak every language on earth, and he could teleport himself right over the Himalayas. You see no problems for our Jesus at all. But, yes, this is Jesus we are talking about. And there is no Biblical evidence whatsoever that He ever spoke any other language, or used any magical powers at all in His lifetime as Jesus. No smiting enemies dead with a touch. No teleportation, either. In fact, whenever Jesus healed anyone, He always made a point of using the faith of the person being healed to effect the healing (see, e.g. MT 9:28; LK 8:50). There were no companions around Him in the Gospels who ever gave any evidence at all that they had traveled with him to exotic climes, and no turbaned or otherwise exotic fellows who seemed to have returned with him as trophies of His visits to far distant places.

There is no Gospel evidence at all that Jesus ever traveled beyond the bounds of what is now modern Israel. None whatsoever. Everything that Jesus taught was knowledge that He brought to earth from the Father. We have no reason to believe otherwise.

And in fact, there is a much better explanation for the so-called “lost years” of Jesus. While there is no evidence for the travels-to-the-east theory, and there is considerable evidence against it, this new theory so neatly fits so many details of the life of Jesus that until now were oddly inexplicable, from the fact that apparently He didn’t marry in His teens, as every other good Jewish boy would have done, to the oddity that His ministry didn’t begin until He reached the ancient age of thirty, that frankly I don’t know why it wasn’t noticed much sooner. I have to think that scholarly squeamishness about the word “slave” was the main reason why no one has raised this possibility until now.

I first learned of this alternative explanation during the summer before last. I was working on researching materials for Jesus’s website at the time, and meeting with Jesus in the astral plane on many nights to discuss what I was finding, So I brought this question up to Him during one of the almost nightly meetings that I was having with Him. “Is it possible that You were born into slavery?” I asked Him. And He just smiled His enigmatic half-smile. He wouldn’t give me a yes-or-no answer, but that is just the way He is. Jesus really won’t answer personal questions. So I researched the idea further, and the more I researched it, the more perfectly all the details seemed to fit.

I first blogged about this possibility last fall. And rather than asking you to follow a link, I will give you the key points here again. Let’s look together at the facts: 

• Slavery was common in that time and place. But slavery in the area where Jesus lived two thousand years ago was a milder condition than is our image of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil-War American South. For most of those held in bondage then, it was not even a permanent condition. People often sold themselves or their children into servitude for a period of time in order to pay back a debt, or even because they could not otherwise afford food and shelter. The Greek word translated as “servant” generally did mean what we would call a bondsman or a slave, but sometimes it meant just a person hired to do some task; and these people were often bound for a time, and not for life. There were, moreover, strict Biblical rules about how slaves were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16).
• Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave. She uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty.
• If Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, that very well explains both why Jesus was not married in His teens, and also why He did not begin His teaching ministry until He reached the age of thirty. He would have been Joseph’s bondsman working as a carpenter during all His so-called “lost years.” And even though Jesus may have been Joseph’s bondsman, it is clear that Joseph treated Him as His eldest son and gave Him a good religious education. Joseph received and heeded Gabriel’s announcement of Jesus’s impending birth, and he protected Him from the slaughter of the innocents when it happened and educating Him well in preparation for His free adulthood. We have no complaint to make against Jesus’s nominal father.
• A mere stable is considered to be sufficient shelter for a woman who is about to give birth. We fondly think that the “no room in the inn” story of Jesus’s birth is charming, but in fact it is a sign of Mary’s low status, especially in view of her late stage of pregnancy. Would a free woman of respectable rank have been shuffled off to give birth in a barn?
• Joseph may never have officially married Mary. Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
• Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry, and for calling Himself the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy. And his home-folks immediately try to throw Him off a cliff. Huh? Here it is:

¹⁴ And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. ¹⁵ And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

¹⁶ And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. ¹⁷ And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
¹⁹ To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

²⁰ And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. ²¹ Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ²² And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” ²³ And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” ²⁴ But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. ²⁵ But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; ²⁶ and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. ²⁷ And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸ And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; ²⁹ and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. ³⁰ But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30).

This reaction of Jesus’s childhood neighbors may be the greatest “tell” of them all. A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely not a local boy who had been freeborn!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that you and I know would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor, and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His life on earth. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to a very much better understanding of humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people when viewing us from the perspective of the very least of these (see MT 25:44-46)?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery, in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He became thirty years old. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been just a coincidence.

So I have come to accept the likelihood that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life as a slave, a bondsman, and He did so by strategic choice, so he could better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand people. He also did it by His personal choice. The Jesus that I have lately come to much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He also was going to be a slave Himself. Remember that Jesus has lived the past seventeen hundred years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain!

But of course, my dear ones, it doesn’t matter. You can believe this new wrinkle about Jesus or not, as you like. One thing is for certain, though. Jesus  did not travel to the far east during His “lost years”. Thomas has helped me to work through and accept that fact. He tells me that Jesus spent those years closely studying people and further refining what He was going to be teaching during His coming ministry, and whether He did this as Joseph’s bondsman or as a yeoman carpenter in Joseph’s shop really doesn’t make any difference. But the more I have lived with this slavery theory, the more I have come to rather like the idea. Whoever were the least of those around Him, we know that our so dearly beloved Jesus would always have been right there with them, and eager to share His closer walk with them.

When my way grows dreary,
Precious Lord, lead me near.
When my life is almost gone,
At the river I will stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand.
Take my hand, precious Lord,
And lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand Precious Lord” (1937