Did Christianity Begin as a Judaic Heresy?

If you read the Synoptic Gospels today, and then the most emphatically messianic, Gospel of John, even under the most accurate translation from the most authoritative Greek New Testament (and most especially one based on the recently discovered 5th century manuscript version formerly preserved at the Orthodox Christian monastery at Mt. Sinai), the reader can only conclude that, yes, Jesus' religious claims amounted to a heresy within the Jewish community into which he was born. But even then, this conclusion is based solely on his refusal to rebut the acclamation of his Disciples that he, Jesus, was indeed the long-awaited Messiah. His teachings themselves, moral, ethical, socially inclusive, all fell well within the spiritually reformist traditions of the Hebrew Prophets. He was indeed a rabbi in the ancient sense of the word (i. e., "teacher"), before the term became a formalized title of religious rank in the Jewish Community that crystallized after the fall of the Temple many decades after his death. Perhaps another argument could be made for Jesus being heterodox in his rejection of the dietary and Sabbath observance laws found in the Torah (e.g., if you would help one of your sick animals on the Sabbath, why not also administer to the sick; God cares more about how you treat your fellow human beings than whether you are fastidious about avoiding or mixing certain foods), but even there, he was merely appealing to accepted bounds of good sense and a proper prioritization of moral faith over mechanical ritual observance. But what belies the claims of the canonical Gospels was the discovery of the implicit existence of a "lost gospel" by Nineteenth Century German scriptural scholars, which they dubbed "Quelle" (i.e., "the source"), commonly known today as the "Q Gospel". This lost gospel is the source for the shared material found in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. In this shared material, no messianic claims are made, nor any supernatural claim of Divine Resurrection. The strength of argument for the prior antiquity of this lost written source (no doubt based on oral traditions once found among the nascent Christian communities) was strengthened by the discovery in the 1940s at the Nag Hammadi Oasis in Eqypt of another lost Christian Gospel, which was materially preserved in a buried clay jar by Coptic Christian monks (fearing reprisals from orthodox prelates, who were sniffing about for heretical writings preserved in monastic libraries). This is the now famous, so-called "Gnostic" Gospel of Thomas, not to be confused with an Old Church Slavonic apocryphal text, also called, "The Gospel of Thomas", which supposedly chronicles Jesus' childhood. The Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi is written in Coptic, a language directly descended from the language of the Pharaohs and the common tongue of Egypt up until its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the seventh century, CE. Scholars studying this manuscript have deduced from the idiomatic formations that it is a translation of an original lost Greek manuscript of this gospel, and that this missing Greek version dates back to a time before the canonical Gospels (i. e., from the middle part of the first century, CE). What is more, the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas bears a strong relationship both in content and phraseology to the theoretical Q Gospel. The difference bewteen them lies in the "Gnostic" qualities of the former. These are more implicit than overt to the modern reader of any given contemporary English translation. To the point: the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas makes no mention of Jesus as the Messiah or Resurrected Being. Nor does it describe apocalyptic prophesy or the Passion of Christ. It is all entirely constructed around a conversation of moral teachings between Jesus and his disciples, which include women (the "Salome" mentioned in the manuscript is not the same Salome who was the step-daughter of King Herod, who ordered the head of John the Baptist on a plate). Perhaps the most generally "Gnostic" quality of this manuscript is that it places the burden of spiritual revelation and salvation on each individual, with Jesus in this gospel acting more the part of a traditional rabbi of his times, teaching by word and example, but making no claims of "my way or the highway Godhood" such as one finds in the last written gospel, that of John. The Q Gospel as reconstructed by scholars of Christianity shows the greatest affinity with the Gospel of Thomas in terms of the great number of moral wisdom sayings they share. The Gospel of Thomas, for its part, has quite an original spin on these sayings ascribed to Jesus, making it quite apparent to scriptural experts that it is not merely a copy of Q, but a sibling version from an original body of oral tradition. So is there any other evidence that Jesus was not a heretic in the Jewish community while he lived? As a matter of fact, there is. There are two Arab Christian texts from the ninth century, CE, which quote a contemporary account of Jesus from Flavius Josephus' History of the Jewish People. It has long been established that the text that has come down to us in the Western Tradition is corrupt in its brief passage on Jesus' ministry. Here, in language and perspective completely alien to the writer Josephus, some busy-bodied Christianizing transcriber altered the passage so that we have Josephus, a Pharisee who remained a devout Jew all his life, triumphantly claiming that Jesus was not only the Messiah but also God! However, the two surviving Arab-language manuscripts, one from Medieval Egypt, the other from Medieval Syria, refer to on an evidently lost and uncorrupted version of Josephus' book, for the passages they preserve concerning Jesus, say exactly what was within the realm of possibility for a devout Jew who had lived in Jesus' time to have said about him. Further evidence of the veracity of these Arab Christian versions is the fact that they are neither of them perfect matches but otherwise substantially the same in content, showing that they derive from the parallel possession of versions of Josephus' manuscript in two separate communities. To paraphrase what they both say, this is essentially what they tell us: Josephus saw Jesus as a respectable and honest rabbi from the district of Galilee, who faithfully taught the holy scripture and the ways of moral choice, and healed the sick of mind and body. That's it! If you don't believe me, look up the neglected but revelatory research and analysis of Dr. Schlomo Pines, Professor of Arabic at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, during the 1960s.