There was a mystic of the Middle Ages, Rav Avraham Abulafia who held that Jesus was the Messiah Son of Joseph who was mentioned in the end of the Gemara Suka. I used to learn the micro films of his writings before they were published by some fellow in Mea Shearim. [After they were published, I got involved in other studies.] At any rate, to gain some clarity about this particular figure, I asked Professor Moshe Idel at Hebrew University about him. [Moshe Idel published lots of books about him and that strain of mystic thought.]
The way I got interested in Avraham Abulafia was that he was quoted a lot by Moshe Cordovero and Rav Chaim Vital as for his system of unifications. But I see that his thought was really much more than that.
[This is not unconnected with Philosophy. The general approach of the mystics of the Middle Ages and the Ari (Isaac Luria) himself was Neo-Platonic. In fact, I had some difficulty in the problem of faith and reason until I discovered Dr. Kelley Ross of the Kant Friesian school [which is more or less based on Leonard Nelson]. Later I saw that Hegel also forms a kind of interface between these two approaches.]
Just because these strains of thought might be unfamiliar with people I think I should add one or two words to this note here to explain.
A basic problem about all of this is scientism. That is the doctrine that only what science measures can be true. There is a lot more outside of science than inside science. So there is a place for faith. But faith is not flawless. It takes reason to be combined with faith to know in what should faith believe in.
