Introduction
“Jesus didn’t even really ever live“, an acquaintance recently said to me. I was baffled.
“Where do you get that idea?”, I asked him.
“He was just a good marketing instrument of the Church“, was his immediate reply.
This reply shocked me. Yes, many people doubt whether Jesus ever lived, and just as many have no idea what to do with the person of Jesus. Even I felt the same way until a couple of years ago, although I had always viewed Jesus as a historical personality and had to believe in his teachings. But he was simply too far away for me and my life. He was not tangible, a kind of Superman who could walk on water and turn water into wine. This huge distance between him and my normal life caused me to be afraid, and I felt small and unworthy. I still had so many faults, while Jesus was even able to raise the dead! How could God love me in my miserable condition? For years such thoughts and conflicts of conscience tortured me.
But this suffering also led to a source of motivation. A question arose in me: How strong must the personality of Jesus have been, how authentic must his teachings have been, that nearly 2000 years later around a billion people worldwide prayed to him?
But this too, was again problematic: people prayed to Jesus as a God. And this did not in any way help me to feel closer to Jesus. Just as one of my former, somewhat fanatically inclined neighbors had instructed me: “Martin, Jesus is God. And only if you accept him as your God will you ever have a chance at a window room in heaven.”
But for me Jesus was never God, though he obviously spoke of God and he always gave me the impression that he had a very good connection to God. So good, that he had special, often beyond human powers. But I did not know anything more than that about Jesus.
But how was Jesus as a person? There is hardly anything transmitted about him as a person. Who was Jesus really? How was he as a child? How did he feel? How did he live? And exactly for this reason, because I knew too little about the historical person Jesus, he fascinated me more and more with each year.
And one day, many years later, my wish came true: I wanted to truly understand Jesus. I wanted to understand his times, also the faith which is the foundation of today’s so-called Christianity. I wanted to describe the life of the human being Jesus, I wanted to get to know him better by recording his life from my point of view. I wanted to lose my fear and my pain. But I still was afraid that a miracle would have to occur for that to happen.
It took nine years until, from the idea of the novel and much research finally the printed work was completed. And the miracle happened: Christ the master became my pal, the high-flyer Jesus became my friend, the intangible hero became my friend, and Jesus became a normal human being. His vast soul now shows itself clearly to me.
May this novel bring you closer to the human being Jesus: Jesus, the most glorified and hated, in short the most misunderstood person in the history of humankind. A few connections and incidents may be unknown to you, perhaps even seem impossible or even ridiculous at first. But at the beginning of the twentieth century there also were not any computers, with whose help this book came to be.
May this novel bring you closer to the human being Jesus, in case he has not already won your heart with his naturalness. May this book also let the miracle happen in your heart, that closed doors may be opened in your life. May Jesus Christ also become your pal, friend and brother.
I wish you much joy in immersing yourself in a world which you certainly have not experienced like this before. God bless you and have a good time.
Your
Martin Fieber
In a few chapters of this book words occur which should not be chosen in your normal language use. However the times of old were very direct especially in the culture of the Greeks and people at times used vulgar expressions. I have already adjusted the language considerably, however wanted to maintain a certain authentic character.
The italic paragraphs at the end of the individual chapters express the thoughts that Jesus Christ entrusted to his diary.
Prologue
Between Khirbet Qumran and Jericho, sometime in the near future
It was hot. Even hell could not be hotter, he thought, shivering despite the heat. And it stormed, as if the world had had enough of humankind’s abuse and wanted to end. The beginning of the apocalypse could not be more abominable, he growled to himself. If he had stayed home, where he belonged, he would withdraw to the coolness of his apartment. But he was not at home, his skin told him, which had to deal with countless tiny stings of the sand which was flying about wildly all over the place. He was somewhere between the excavation site of Khirbet Qumran and Jericho and weakly gazed out onto the Dead Sea. Sweaty and tired his gaze sought out the cool freshness under him.
He was alone. His mouth dust dry. The only thing about him that still functioned was the carousel of thoughts which he for some time had not been able to stop. Like wild monkeys the countless thoughts sped about his confused mind. What in the world had driven him to travel to the West Bank at this time of year, to... yes, he truly had not been able to tell anyone this .. to look for records from one no less than Jesus himself? If only he had not had that strange dream a few months ago, then he would not be sweating like a dog in this desolate place now. No dream he had ever had before had remained as vivid in his memory. This sequence of images had a digital quality and each pixel shone in a color, the likes of which he had never seen. It was a color dream. Usually, if anything at all, he saw strange and nonsensical sequences in black and white. But this dream was beautiful. This dream illuminated...
Nonsense. He cursed this dream, for it had knocked over the thought construct which he had hitherto made about life. Even in his thoughts it was still embarrassing for him to think about this dream, for a figure had appeared to him that called itself Jesus. This figure had given him numbers and requested that he seek for personal writings of him.
The storm became even stronger, as if the spirits of the wind were mocking him. In the first weeks following that ominous night he still thought the dream was so ridiculous, that he did not even attempt to check the numbers, which turned out to be coordinates. But the figures stuck like chewing gum in side his head. The more he wanted to forget them, the more they stuck to his mind. The harder he tried to forget Jesus, the more the blue eyes of this dream apparition burned themselves into his memory.
He never wanted to care about such nonsense. Especially, since this nonsense had reached him in form of a dream. Already his father had told him ‘dreams are ten a penny.’ And besides – shouldn’t the dream figure have known that he, Michael, had very little interest in God or his son. This was even an understatement. Michael believed neither in God nor in Jesus Christ. Also not in the church nor, as had become fashionable recently, in the fat-bellied Buddha, who was appearing in more and more gardens in his neighborhood. He neither believed in eternal torments of hell nor in singing angels, nor in the possibility of reincarnation on earth, although it was not more logical to him, to only be born once rather than several times. He also simply had spent far too little time considering faith. He neither believed in a universal creative conscience, nor in a bearded father in heaven. And he did not believe in Jesus Christ. Not even now, even if his nose had just caught a salty whiff of the nearby Dead Sea.
But just this in the end convinced Michael, that he should look into that dream and those numbers a little more intensively. If a James Bond had appeared in his dream, passing along coordinates as he sat next to a blonde co-pilot in some futuristic vehicle, than he would have forgotten the dream quickly. But it had not been James Bond, but rather a Messiah.
And yes, after endless hours of critical inner dialogue with himself, he finally had figured out that those numbers were not dates, but rather coordinates. These numbers were supposed to communicate a specific place to him. And this place was somewhere in the West Bank, north of the modern day excavation site Khirbet and Qumran. How was he, a happily engaged twenty-eight year old industrial