I am here, Jesus:

I have already spoken to you about my meeting with Nicodemus, son of Gurion, the Pharisee, when I was teaching in Palestine. Nicodemus was the son of a rabbi who held religious discussions with groups, as was the custom of those days and before. He was not a priest and held no services in the Temple. As a matter of fact, the Pharisees were the ones who were most interested in the law, not only the written laws of the Scriptures, but the interpretations which the centuries and circumstances made necessary in those laws, and these interpretations were known as the Oral Law. They were discussed mainly by the Pharisees, the common people of Jerusalem, because they were the ones most interested in the religion of the Hebrews; they were poor; they were the artisans and tradesman, downtrodden by the rich and the aristocratic priests who cared nothing for the scriptures except as their own interests were therein protected. These Pharisees were deeply concerned with immortality of the soul, inasmuch as their own plight on earth made them seek for justice in an ideal world beyond the grave and they felt that God's righteousness had to, of necessity, embrace that Kingdom where justice and righteousness would be the established order. That is why the Pharisees were willing to listen to me and my mission -- the availability of immortality of the soul through prayer to the Father for His Love.

While they were intrigued, then, by my affirmation that the Kingdom of God had come with my appearance -- that is, that soul immortality was a fact and could be achieved, yet they were not capable of understanding the principle of the Divine Love and Salvation through the Divine Love. For some centuries they had battled stubbornly against the Saducees' denial of immortality, and had clung to the faith of man's entry into Paradise through keeping of the Ten Commandments and the Torah (the 5 Books of Moses) and the decrees, precepts and interpretations which stemmed from these Holy works, so that Divine Love and Salvation from it were alien to their thoughts and fundamental concepts of religion. This then, very briefly, is the background of their initial sympathy with me and later disagreements.

Nicodemus, however, had an intuitive feeling that I was right and since he was not able to fully understand my meaning, he came secretly one night to hear from me in private what he had only been able to glimpse in my public sermons in the market place. He felt, also, that my miracles of healing among the people must be due to great piety and that, therefore, I must be a man of God. He wanted to know about the Kingdom of God, and how to enter therein. Since he could not, as I saw, understand Divine Love, nor transformation of the soul from the human into the divine through the Father's Love, I had recourse to a parable, as I usually had in speaking to the people, "EXCEPT A MAN BE BORN AGAIN, HE CANNOT SEE THE KINGDOM OF GOD."

Nicodemus could understand a spiritual rebirth only through obedience to the laws of God, the doing of good, the practicing of mercy and charity, righteousness in conduct and piety for the widow and the orphan; in short, he understood repentence from evil and a return to God in the prophetic sense of the term, and thought this gave immortality of the soul. I had to show him that his practicing of the virtues purified the soul, and made it a perfect human soul in the eyes of God, but that to enter the Kingdom of God, the soul had to be transformed into a divine soul, through God's Nature, Love.

To his query, I showed that being born of the flesh was the work of the womb, and that here there was no possibility of rebirth, but that spiritually, the soul could be reborn; it was born as the human soul, but could be born again into a divine soul, the transformation -- or rebirth -- taking place as the individual sought the Father's Love through prayer and obtained that Love, which permeated the human soul and made it divine. It was this divinity of soul that rendered it immortal, and enabled one to see the Kingdom of God, and not the perfection of the human soul resulting from the doing of good works and practicing charity and righteousness.

If Peter and John, my most advanced disciples, could not readily understand the significance of Divine Love, then neither could Nicodemus ben Gurion in the talk I had with him, for I saw the conflict which Divine Love raised in his mind with his deep seated doctrines of the law and the precepts of the Torah, and his inability to accept my glad tidings immediately.

He asked, "HOW COULD THESE THINGS BE?" and so I told him that, inasmuch as there were many earthly things he could not understand, like the wind, and its movements, it was not strange that he should not understand these things of the spirit: "THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT LISTS, AND THOU HEAREST THE SOUND THEREOF, BUT CANST NOT TELL WHENCE IT COMES, AND WHITHER IT GOES; SO IT IS WITH THE SPIRITUAL REBIRTH." (St. John, Chapter 3, verse 8).

Since he could not understand the workings of the wind, a material phenomenon, neither could he understand an operation of a spiritual thing, the rebirth. And since Rauch (wind), also means spirit in Hebrew, I used this play on words and tried to show him that as both were of the Father, the Rebirth as well as the existence of the wind could be believed in and accepted.

I did not say, or mean, that Nicodemus had to be born of the spirit in the sense that Christians usually interpret the words attributed to John, that is, the Holy Spirit, for the soul is not reborn of the Holy Spirit, but of God's Love, which comes into the soul conveyed by the Holy Spirit, that manifestation of God which has as its function this great mission. Neither did I say that he had to be born of water, for this is simply a much later interpolation referring to baptism. This is all wrong, for baptism has no efficacy in the soul's obtention of the Divine Love. Certainly, Nicodemus would have understood these Christian interpretations much less than he did the Divine Love, which I insisted was now available to mankind because it was present in me.

Nicodemus left with an inkling of the Father's Love and heard me explain several times that the Kingdom of God had come; he was confused, because of the new concept of soul transformation and his ideas of a Messiah ushering in a new ideal Kingdom on earth, but he understood later at Pentecost, when mental concept was replaced by emotion, for Nicodemus greatly respected me, and his reverence was turned into love and sorrow, and brought into his soul the Divine Love. Nicodemus finally understood with his soul, and he now stands by me in the Celestial Heavens, eager with his love and influence to bring mankind into At-onement with the Father.

Jesus of the Bible
and
Master of the Celestial Heavens