Background to the novel. I wanted to answer many questions about Jesus and his cousin John in their childhood and teen years. For Jesus the Holy Family flight into Egypt to avoid Herods soldiers was taken from the written tradition of the Egyptian Coptic Church.  For hundreds of years the story of the Holy family fleeing for four years in Egypt from Herod’s soldiers was an oral tradition until the 13 century when a Bishop of the Coptic church sat down and wrote the entire story.

Another question about Jesus is how did he get all his knowledge about healing and medicine? The temple did not teach it. Who did? The answer is the Essenes had the best medicines and drugs they traded with India and all around the known world. They had a book of medicine and how to administer drugs that was the best in the world at that time. Jesus must have learned his healing skills and medicine knowledge from the Essenes on nearby Mount Carmel which was 30 minutes walking from Nazareth.  Both Jesus’ father and John’s father died when they were teenagers. Jesus had to take over his father’s building business with his brothers. John on the other hand could have become a Priest like his father but chose instead to go and live with the Essenes that lived in a closed community on the Dead Sea. It was here he learned about Baptism and it’s healing spiritual effects, since the Essenes baptized several times a day.

Jesus and a Essenes mentor who was an expert Essene healer and he taught Jesus how to become a healer. The Essenes were the children of the light and they prayed for a messiah or a righteous teacher to come again to save them. Jesus became their righteous teacher and spread their message without acknowledging that he learned all he knew from the Essenes. The Essenes are not mentioned in the New Testament for a reason. The church in the first century erased their references from the New Testament. The Christian church did not want anyone to know that Jesus learned his healing skills from the strange Essenes sect of judaism . Were it not for the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls from which I based my research, we might never have known that they invented the Lord’s Prayer or the blessings Jesus gave on the mount and their belief in Angels and the coming of the Messiah.