[2] His father, Elisha Hayyim ben Jacob, was a distinguished rabbinic intellectual who served as an envoy of Jerusalem, collecting donations for impoverished Jews.

Gershom Scholem, a 20th-century scholar of Jewish mysticism, wrote that Nathan was "…an extremely gifted student, of quick apprehension and a brilliant intellect.

His talents…[were] noteworthy for their rare combination of intellectual power and capacity for profound thinking with imagination and strong emotional sensitivity…"[3] At the age of 19 or 20, he married the daughter of an affluent Jew named Samuel Lissabona.

[According to the Talmud] he who wants to purify himself receives the aid of Heaven; and thus He sent me some of His holy angels and blessed spirits who revealed to me many of the mysteries of the Torah.

In that same year, my force having been stimulated by the visions of the angels and the blessed souls, I was undergoing a prolonged fast in the week before the feast of Purim.

Nathan purportedly experienced physical and mental changes, but a crucial aspect of his vision was his belief that Sabbatai Zevi was the Messiah.

The scent, mentioned in the Zohar, is thought to be linked to the aroma of the Garden of Eden, as well as to the prophet Elisha and Rabbi Isaac Luria.

This public recognition of Nathan of Gaza as a mystic and seer facilitated the subsequent acceptance of Sabbatai Zevi as a messianic figure.

The use of prophecies was central to the movement, with numerous predictions made by both Nathan of Gaza and Sabbatai Zevi contributing to the emergence of Sabbatean followers within the contemporary Jewish community.

(Scholem would later write that Zevi suffered from a psychological condition he identified as "manic-depressive psychosis" today called bipolar disorder.)

'"[attribution needed] Intensive discussions led to Nathan of Gaza persuading Sabbatai Zevi to accept a messianic mission.

Even after Sabbatai Zevi's apostasy, Nathan did not desert his cause, but, thinking it unsafe to remain in Ottoman Syria any longer, he made preparations to go to Smyrna.

Seeing that the credulous were confirmed anew in their belief, the rabbis excommunicated all the Sabbataeans, particularly Nathan (9 December 1666), warning everybody against harboring or even approaching him.

From Corfu he went to Venice (March, 1668), where the rabbinate and the council of the city compelled him to give them a written confession that all his prophecies were the production of his imagination.

The confession was published, whereupon Abraham ha-Yakini, the originator of the Sabbatian movement, wrote Nathan a letter in which he sympathized with him over his persecution and expressed his indignation at the acts of the Venetian rabbinate.

He composed a variety of letters and other written documents that promoted an entirely new kind of theology, one that merged the current notions of Kabbalah (of the time) with elements of Lurianic mysticism, a subject that he studied when he was younger.

In addition to creating a “new type” of mysticism, he also composed a document entitled Derush ha-Tanninim (“Treatise on Dragons”; published by Scholem in be-Iqvot Mashiah [Jerusalem, 1944]).

This became the basis for what Gershom Scholem later referred to as “Sabbatean antinomianism.” Not only did Nathan of Gaza publish documents that advocated for a change and a removal of the Jewish laws and commandments, but he also composed a variety of other texts that discussed concepts entirely different from these unorthodoxies.