This Man Thinks He's Jesus H. Christ!

All that matters is faith.

"What religion has done is, they've taught you otherwise," says Poessy. "They're still teaching you the old law, which actually expired 2,000 years ago."

Local believer Boris Martinez, who claims he was an alcoholic before discovering De Jesús 15 years ago, says he'd always had a problem with the way traditional churches didn't give Christ enough credit: "My mom used to take me to church and every time I had trouble with this one little thing, where they would say, 'Jesus died for your sins,' but right at the end of the sermon, they would say, 'Come up front, you sinners who need prayer.'"

Religion has used sin to keep people under submission, according to the gospel of De Jesús. It's a sentiment commonly expressed by atheists and agnostics -- the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously said, "Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine." -- but followers of De Jesús haven't rejected all religion; they've just found a new one.

"Religion came and lied to the world," says Poessy, "and all of a sudden God comes back to reveal those mysteries and show you what's happened."

Born to Catholic parents 60 years ago in Ponce, Puerto Rico, De Jesús says he was a drug addict in his teens, often stealing to feed his heroin habit. But he recovered with the help of a faith-based program called Teen Challenge and at the age of 20 moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he started up his own rehab program. His gospel was evangelical Baptist.

But one fateful night in 1973, he says, his young son came downstairs and calmly told him, "'Dad, I heard a voice that the Lord is coming tonight.'

"I said, 'What!?' I was scared, you know. So then I said, 'Are you afraid?'

"He said, 'No, no. I just heard a voice that the Lord is coming tonight.'

"So then I took him back upstairs and put him in bed and then I went to bed myself and when I went to my room, two angels appeared, two strong men. Tall. Strong. And they said to me, 'The King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, He is coming tonight to anoint you for the ministry.' So I was scared, I was happy, I thought He was going to give me a gift."

De Jesús expected to receive a healer's touch, but what he got was a voice in his head, a new way of looking at the Bible.

"All of the sudden He began saying things that I'd never heard in my life, and that's where this ministry began," he says. "The mysteries of the New Testament, especially the 14 letters of Paul, they became open, you know; like Romans 6.2 said that I'm dead to sin, and if I'm dead to sin, I'm sinless, because if you die, you can't sin as a dead person."

He began to think of the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as mere biographies of the life of Jesus of Nazareth; the writings of Paul became his only true gospel, and he began interpreting them like no one had before. In Galatians 2:7, Paul says he was given the task of preaching to the Gentiles, while Peter's lot was the Jews. "Paul was killed and Peter kept preaching the wrong gospel," says De Jesús, "and it's bad medicine to the whole world. Rome was defeated with the wrong gospel."

This wrong gospel, according to De Jesús, teaches us that we are still capable of sin, while Paul, and only Paul, knew the truth: that all sin died with Christ on the cross.

If you're wondering why you never heard any of this in Sunday School, that's because apparently no one except De Jesús and his followers thinks Paul believed sin was eradicated.

David Capes is a professor at Houston Baptist University and a noted Paul scholar, and he says he's never heard of such a reading.

"There's no credible New Testament writer, thinker, theologian or historian who would agree with that reading of Paul," he says. "If you look particularly in Romans 7, Paul continues to say, 'I struggle with sin.' Paul says it about himself. He says, 'The good I would like to do, I'm not able to do because sin is still working against me.' And this is the saved Paul, the converted Paul."

Capes says there's no way Paul could've taught his followers that sin died on the cross.