It is our good fortune that in our time there have been breakthroughs and fresh discoveries that have helped change the old western paradigm to include fresh ways of seeing Yeshua in his own life and culture. One fresh way of seeing is not only to rediscover Yeshua’s Jewishness, but also his roots in a form of wisdom and Jewish mystical tradition that extended from the days of the first Temple into his own. Margaret Barker has helped uncover important discoveries about that ancient strand. Another new way of seeing things come from the Dead Sea scrolls and Qumran. Then there has been the discoveries in Egypt and at a site called Nag Hammmadi of the Thomasine, Magdalene and Philippian texts that shed new light on Yeshua’s life and mission that were particularly important to Eastern and Oriental Christians. These help us see him as a liberator from ignorance, a restorer of our own true nature, and as an enlightened fire (or energy) that sparks a metamorphosis of new being and consciousness in other humans. In the West at least, this has been a Copernican-like revolution.

Later, many of these same teachings went East into mystical Islam. When they went West, it was often underground in various forms of mystical Christianity. Through the centuries, they were also expressed in Kaballistic Judaism. We will never, of course, be able to perfectly comprehend Yeshua as he was (a mystical Jew of the first century and a practitioner of a form of ancient First-Temple Wisdom). However, these many centuries later because we too are seekers and practitioners of wisdom, we are also touched by the same sacred Spirit (the mother of all spiritual energies). Like him, we are intimately involved in the same kind of pneumatic and energetic exchanges of consciousness and being in which he participated two millennia earlier. All of these themes (though some are old) have become new again.