Jesus represents a specific moment in the prophetic tradition, the moment when prophecy ceases to be exclusive and, potentially, becomes universally available.

          Prophecy and spirit are the two frames of religion, the difference, respectively, between ‘revealed’ and ‘natural’ religion. This is not altogether accurate, of course, because some shamans, both traditionary and spontaneous, as well as most teachers of major religions outside the traditions of prophecy, have touched prophetic awareness. But the difference is real and radical.

          Because Jesus represents this turning point, we call him ‘messias’, the anointed or chosen one.

          But the texts make it clear that he received this anointing at the hands of a teacher, a teacher who recognized that this transition was immanent, since he himself had felt or experienced it. In other words, this moment was transmitted to Jesus. And it is by this transmission that he became messias.

          The ‘instructions’ to the ‘disciples’ are obviously older than the lists of disciples themselves. The lists of disciples presumably name those who had begun to gather followings that persisted after the destruction of the temple. But the instructions are obviously given to trained healers who now have also experienced the prophetic ‘conversion’ given to Jesus. That is, they are doctors first, who have now added an objective understanding of the human condition to their craft.

          As soon as we understand this, we can see that Jesus was a doctor first of all, as the careful reading of the standard texts will also show. While a number of the healings have been ‘elevated’ into ‘miracles’, healings are endemic throughout the texts. Like his injunction, Jesus is always first of all ‘healing the sick’.

          So this is who Jesus was ‘originally’; this was his profession.

          We have the record that, after the transmission, Jesus underwent a powerful religious conversion as well. The ‘three temptations’ point more or less directly to the content of the change in his awareness. He refuses world historical knowledge, for example, as well as its correlated power. He renounces any pretension to godhead, or any special protection as messias. In other words, he accepts his life as given, moment by moment.

          And this, of course, is the new ‘level’ of the prophetic, the prophetic cogency of the individual life – that every individual life now has a prophetic potency and a prophetic value.

          Jesus was a doctor first. But, of course, a doctor at that time did not make the formal distinctions between ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’ so prevalent today. The healing and altering powers in herbs, for example, would have been considered no differently from what today would be classed as strictly ‘spiritual’ healing. In other words, Jesus already had a spiritual training. And, if we are to believe the Mary stories in the book, Jesus had trained himself in the scriptural traditions as well.

          But he begins as a doctor, and as a spiritual teacher only insofar as doctoring and training doctors would have required at that time. One hesitates to say that he is young and impetuous. But clearly he is following the vocational practice that is now the basis of prophecy as it comes to rest in the individual – the moment to moment light that points directly to the ongoing objective value of one’s life.

          Obviously, almost all of the traditions emerging after the fall of the temple require that Jesus be the summation of the Judaic tradition. Hence one could envision much of the royal paraphernalia of the tradition as self-conscious allegorical addenda, except, perhaps, for the cleansing of the temple.

          I suppose that, from the present retrospect, we could say that it is necessary for Jesus to absorb the whole tradition, insofar as we consider him to be messias. And no matter how critically we treat the standard texts, it seems clear that, at least by action, Jesus made that claim. And the expression of intentionality in those texts is strong enough to suggest fact.

          But, of course, his intent is precisely the issue.

          The Gospel of Thomas tells us that Jesus was fully aware of who he was and what he had brought into the world by the conversionary transmission of John’s experience. This tract points to science more than a millennia before its visible birth. And, of course, science is the corollary of vocation, the simultaneity of certified value.

          Therefore it is quite possible that Jesus engaged in the specific activity recorded at the end of his life.

          But one has the sense that only the full force of youth, as well as the impelling revelation handed to him by another, could project him through those final scenes.

          All of this, then, suggests the growth and change in Jesus, after he returned from the wilderness. Gradually, doctoring and the teaching of doctors are replaced by a more or less exclusively religious and spiritual message, as the nature of the validity he embodies now becomes more obvious to him.