Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh argued at great length that Christ didn’t see Himself as most Christians see Him today. This is their point of view.

Nowadays, most Christian orthodoxies translate the ‘ben Genazareth’ part of Jesus’ name as “of Nazareth,” thus making Him Jesus of Nazareth. And they have good reason to do so, for the Bible said that Christ spent his early childhood in Nazareth. Matthew, chapter 2, verses 21-23 states quite clearly:

So he [Joseph] got up, took the child [Jesus] and his mother [Mary] and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: ‘He will be called a Nazarene.’

Sounds plausible. We know that there was indeed a city called Nazareth, and that it still exists today. Problem is, we have no archeological evidence that the town even existed until the Second Century A.D., some one hundred years after the Crucifixion. Noted archeologist, Father Bellarmino Bagatti (Franciscan Friary of Saint Saviour, Jerusalem) found that while the outskirts of town had been used for burial and agriculture during the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age, those settlements disappeared for some centuries before starting anew, sometime after the year 100 AD. Naturally, some religious scholars have attempted to disprove Fr. Bagatti by producing artifacts that were sent to Europe more recently, each bearing a date stamp indicating the item originated in the First Century, as far back as the year 50 AD. But as Bagatti himself explained:

...we are not certain that it [the earliest extant artifact reported to originate from Nazareth which dates to no later than 50AD—still well after the Crucifixion] was found in Nazareth, even though it came from Nazareth to Paris [in 1878]. At Nazareth there lived various vendors of antiquities who got ancient material from several places.

BLL maintain that Jesus never set foot in Nazareth “So why does His name, in the original Hebrew, say he’s from Nazareth?” you ask. They would tell you that it doesn’t. Genazareth means ‘of the Nazarenes,' an offshoot of the Essenes that incorporated gnostic tenets. It’s another title that Christ had picked up somewhere along His life, most likely to indicate that He had mastered certain esoterica, or little-known information/philosophy.

As St. Philip explained in his Gospel (one of the Gnostic Gospels), the term Nazarene comes from the word ‘Nazara’ which means truth.* Likewise, the word ‘Gnostic’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to know’. Those inducted into this arcana believed that salvation came about through an aggressive search for spiritual knowledge, which until the time of Jesus had only been availible to the elite.

For the sake of mankind, Jesus thus embarked upon a three-year teaching binge that stressed critical thinking and active engagement with subject matter, at the same time mocking traditional values and conventional wisdom while constantly challenging his disciples with odd hypothetical situations. In effect, Jesus attempted to democratize what had previously been off limits to the common person. The very parables we know Him for originated in the esoterica of the Nazarenes. Jesus used these to expand the mind of His followers, asking them to suspend their common sense in order to gain uncommon knowledge.

BLL repeatedly point out tacit references to Christ’s Nazarene influence in the Bible. When Christ received word from a messenger that his friend Lazarus had fallen gravely ill, for example, He nonchalantly mentions that He’ll go back to visit buddy boy when He gets a chance.

When he heard this, Jesus said, ‘This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God's glory so that God's Son may be glorified through it.’ Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days. (John, chapter 11, verses 4-6)

St. Thomas gets a little indignant about all this. One might even get the impression that the doubting one is more than a tad bit jealous, asking Christ why the Magnificent Twelve can’t go back with Him so “that we may die with him” (John, chapter 11, verse 16).

Huh? Are we to understand that Thomas is advocating a mass suicide?

Hardly, according to BLL. Tom knew that Lazarus’ sickness and death were ritualistically symbolic, and wanted Jesus to bless him and the others in the same way. This ritual, the transformation from death to life, signifies the end of one understanding of the world, and the rebirth of a new, enlightened perspective. We see Jesus referring to this again when He advises Nicodemus that he too must be born again.



*It's clear that there are numerous other etymologies for this term