No, Rabbi Kaduri did not write a note saying Jesus is the messiah

Photo by Carol Lee on Unsplash

Mystical death-curses, Messiah identification, cryptic mystical notes, and the like. All of which sounds like something from Dan Brown. But unlike a Dan Brown novel, `The Rabbi Who Found Messiah: The Story of Yitzhak Kaduri and His Prophecies of the Endtime’ is erroneously labeled as non-fiction.

While billed as non-fiction, in numerous places author Carl Gallups writes a narrative, and only in the endnote explains that the story was in truth fictional and a product of his imagination. That plus the dependence of Wikipedia as a primary source makes the book much closer to fiction than reality.

The book is based on the assertion that Rabbi Yitzchak Kaduri wrote a note to be opened a year after his death which would reveal the name of the Messiah. The existence of the note itself is in dispute, with many of Kaduri’s closest disciples stating it’s an outright forgery. The note was written a few months before he died, and the Rabbi’s son said that his father’s physical state at the time made it impossible for him to have written it.

Even assuming that it’s authentic, the note itself isn’t conclusive. The note does not have the Messiah’s name on its name explicitly; instead, it contains a verse with the acronym for the Hebrew name for Joshua. Rabbi Kaduri died in 2006, and that year…