THE JESUS PAPERS
Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History
MICHAEL BAIGENT

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Introduction

1 Hidden Documents

2 The Priest’s Treasure

3 Jesus the King

4 The Son of the Star

5 Creating the Jesus of Faith

6 Rome’s Greatest Fear

7 Surviving the Crucifixion

8 Jesus in Egypt

9 The Mysteries of Egypt

10 Initiation

11 Experiencing the Source

12 The Kingdom of Heaven

13 The Jesus Papers

14 Trading Culture

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

May 28, 1291, The Holy Land: Acre, the Crusader Kingdom’s last city port, lay in ruins. Only the great sea tower of the Knights Templar remained standing.

For seven weeks the Arab armies of Khalil al-Ashraf, the young sultan of Egypt, had first besieged and then attacked the city. The last capital of the Christian kingdom was finished. Its streets, once crowded with warriors and nobles, merchants and beggars, were now filled with tumbled buildings and bodies. There was no sense of embarrassment over “collateral damage” in those violent days; when a city fell, slaughter and theft were freely indulged.

The Arabs were determined to force every last vestige of the Crusaders into the sea; the Crusaders were equally determined to survive with the hope, however forlorn, that they might be able to resurrect their kingdom. But this hope faded once Acre had fallen. Beyond the smoking, bleeding ruins of the city only the great tower of the Templars stood undamaged. Crammed inside were those who had so far survived, together with fifty or sixty knights—the last remnants of what was once a great fighting force, a standing army, in the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. They waited. There was nothing else they could do. No one was coming to save them. A few ships returned, a few more knights and civilians fled. The others waited for the end to come and for the next week fought off continual assaults.

Such had been the intensity of the fighting that even the Templars despaired. When the Sultan offered to let all the knights and civilians depart unharmed if they abandoned the castle, the Marshal of the Templars, who was directing the resistance, agreed. He allowed a group of Arab warriors led by an emir to enter the castle and raise the Sultan’s standard above it. But the ill-disciplined Arab troops soon began to molest the women and boys. In fury, the Templars killed them all and hauled down the Sultan’s standard.

The Sultan saw this as treachery and set about his own brutal retaliation: the next day he repeated his offer of safe passage. Again it was accepted. The Marshal of the Templars, together with several knights, visited him under a truce to discuss the terms. But before they reached the Sultan, in full sight of the defenders manning the walls of the Templar castle, they were arrested and executed. There were no further offers of an orderly surrender from the Sultan, and none would have been considered by the Templars: it was to be a fight to the end.

On that fateful day, the walls of the Templar castle, undermined by Arab miners, started to crumble: the Arabs began their assault. Two thousand white-robed mameluk warriors crashed their way into the breach made in the Templars’ tower. Its structure, compromised by weeks of assault, gave way. With a sudden roar the stones fell, tumbled down upon themselves, crushing and burying both attackers and defenders. When the stones stopped moving and the dust settled, the silence proclaimed that it was all over. After almost two hundred years, the dream of a Christian kingdom in the Holy Land had been quashed.

Even the Templars now abandoned their few remaining castles and withdrew from the land that had claimed some twenty thousand of their brethren over 173 years of often bitter fighting.

The Templars had long fascinated me. Not just their role as a professional army and their great but much ignored contribution to the beginnings of our modern world—they introduced the power of money over the sword by means of checks and safe financial transfers from city to city and country to country; they drove a wedge between the dominant aristocracy and the exploited peasantry that helped open a space for a middle class—but the aura of mystery there had always been about them. In particular, at least some of them seemed to hold to a type of religion that ran counter to that of Rome. Bluntly, they seemed to harbor heresy within their ranks, but little was known about this. I was curious, and I was determined to seek out some answers. I began to research the mysterious side of the Knights Templar.

One day while I was sitting in a bookshop in London, a friend of mine who happened to own the store came up to me and said that there was someone I should meet, someone who had information about the Templars that might interest me. And that is how I met my colleague, Richard Leigh. We ended up writing seven books together over the next twenty years.

Richard was certainly sitting on some interesting information—data that had been passed on to him by Henry Lincoln. Richard and I quickly realized that we should combine forces. A few months later Henry came to the same conclusion. We formed a team, and as they say, we went for it. The result, six years later, was the best-selling book Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Our major hypothesis involved an insight into both the Crusades and the Grail legends—two subjects rarely linked by historians. Behind both subjects, we discovered, lay an important bloodline, a dynasty: that of the Jewish royal lineage, the Line of David.

The Grail legends combined elements from ancient pagan Celtic tradition with elements of Christian mysticism. The symbol of a bowl or cup of plenty that ensures the continued fertility of the land derived from the former, while from the latter came the descriptions of the Grail in terms of mystical experience. But significantly for us, the legends stressed that the Grail Knight, Perceval or Parsival, was “of the most holy lineage,” a lineage stretching back through history to Jerusalem and the foot of the cross. Clearly, this was referring to the Line of David. This point had been missed by all commentators on the Grail before us.

We argued that the term for the Grail, the Sangraal or Sangreal, which was rendered as San Graal or San Greal—Holy Grail—had been a play on words: splitting them slightly differently, as Sang Real, gave the game away: Sang Real translates as “Blood Royal,” meaning, we argued, the royal blood of the Line of David. Truly, for medieval times, this was a “most holy lineage.”

That the Line of David existed in southern France in the early medieval period is not in doubt. It is a fact of history.

When Charlemagne was establishing his kingdom, he named one of his close companions, Guillem (William), Count of Toulouse, Barcelona, and Narbonne, as ruler of a buffer princedom between the Christian kingdom of Charlemagne and the Islamic emirate of Al Andalus—Islamic Spain, in other words. Guillem, the new prince, was Jewish.¹ He was also of the Line of David.²

The twelfth-century Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, in his chronicle of his journey from Spain to the Middle East, revealed that the prince at the head of the Narbonne ruling nobility was “a descendant of the House of David as stated in his family tree.”³ Even the Encyclopedia Judaica mentions these “Jewish kings” of Narbonne—but ignores their bloodline.⁴ Of course, no one liked to ask where this bloodline, mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela, might have come from. In fact, as we were to find out, the situation was quite complicated.

When looking at the genealogies of these princes of the Line of David in the south of France, we discovered that they were the same figures as the ancestors of one of the leaders of the First Crusade, Godfrey de Bouillon, who became the king of Jerusalem.⁵ There had been four great noble leaders of this crusade. Why was Godfrey de Bouillon alone offered the throne, and offered it by a mysterious and still unknown conclave of electors that assembled in Jerusalem to rule over the matter?⁶ To whom would these proud lords have submitted, and for what reason? We argued that blood took precedence over title—that Godfrey was reclaiming his rightful heritage as a member of the Line of David.

And what was the source of this bloodline? Well, from Jerusalem, from Jesus, the result of—we argued in Holy Blood, Holy Grail—a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.⁷ In fact, we wondered, was not the marriage at Cana that of Jesus and Mary? At the very least, that would explain why he was “called” to the wedding and subsequently had the responsibility over the wine! Naturally, with the publication of our book, worldwide controversy erupted.

“Mr. and Mrs. Christ,” wrote one commentator, searching for a smart sound bite. And as sound bites go, it was rather a good one.

That was in 1982. In 2002, Dan Brown published his novel The Da Vinci Code, which draws in part from our books’ theories. A media circus erupted once more. “Mr. and Mrs. Christ” were back in the news. It was clear that people still had a hunger for the truth behind the gospel legends. Who was Jesus really? What was expected of him? The world still clamors today for clarity about Jesus, Judaism, Christianity, and the events that took place two thousand years ago.

Since the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I have had twenty-two more years to reflect on these very questions, to do more research, and to reassess the history and implications of those events. In other words, two decades of research over and above what is explored in The Da Vinci Code. Here I endeavor to reconstruct my twenty-two-year-long journey of discovery, taking readers down each path with me—some paths leading to dead ends, others to great realms of possibility. All paths lead to a broader understanding of the life of the man we call Jesus, as history proves he lived it, not how religion says he did.

The data I present herein need to be read at your own speed. Each of the building blocks of my explanation should be considered in your own time. This is extremely important, for when long-held beliefs are being challenged, as they are here, we need to be able to justify each step taken along the way so as to be clear about why we have taken them. For that way, we can be confident in where we stand on the issues in the end. A questioning, contemplative read will allow you to wade through the new findings in such a way that you will ultimately make your own choices and hold firm your own beliefs. If you’re ready for that journey, let’s start now.

1 Hidden Documents

My telephone rang. It was about 10:00 a.m. I remember the sun dappling the wall before me. It sparkled. It was the perfect day to be in an English country village.

“Can you get the next train to London? Don’t ask why.”

I groaned silently: wall-to-wall cars. Scarce taxis. Noise, pollution, crowded subways. A day spent either inside rooms or traveling between them, the sun a distant memory.

“Sure,” I replied, knowing that my friend would never have made such a request unless it was important.

“And can you bring a camera with you?”

“Sure,” I replied again, vaguely bemused.

“And can you hide the camera?”

Suddenly he had my attention. What was up? My friend was a member of a small and discreet group of international dealers, middlemen, and purchasers of high-value antiquities—not all of which carried the required paperwork permitting them to be traded on the open market.

I put a camera and some lenses in a standard-looking briefcase, threw in plenty of film, and jumped in my car for the drive to the station.

I met my friend outside a restaurant in a famous London street. He was an American, and with him were two Palestinians, a Jordanian, a Saudi, and an English expert from a major auction house.

They were all expecting me, and after brief introductions the expert from the auction house departed, apparently not wishing to be involved in what was to happen. The rest of us walked to a nearby bank, where we were quickly led through the banking hall, along a short corridor, and into a small private room with frosted windows.

As we all stood around a table placed in the middle of the room, making desultory small talk, the bank officials carried in two wooden trunks and laid them down before us. Each trunk bore three padlocks. As the second was carried in, one of the officials said pointedly, as if “for the record”: “We don’t know what is in these trunks. We don’t want to know what is in them.”

They then brought a telephone into the room and departed, locking the door behind them.

The Jordanian made a telephone call to Amman. From the little conversation that ensued (which was in Arabic), I gathered that permission had been requested and obtained. The Jordanian then produced a set of keys and unlocked the trunks.

They were stuffed full of exact-fitting sheets of cardboard. And on each sheet, I was horrified to note, there were hundreds of pieces of papyrus text roughly fixed to the cardboard by small strips of clear adhesive tape. The texts were written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Accompanying them were Egyptian mummy wrappings inscribed in demotic—the written form of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I knew that it was common for such wrappings to bear sacred texts, and so the owners of this hoard must have unwrapped at least a mummy or two. The Aramaic or Hebrew texts looked, at first sight, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I had seen before, although they were mostly written on parchment. This collection was a treasure trove of ancient documents. I was very intrigued and increasingly desperate to let some scholars know about their existence, perhaps to secure access for them.

As the cardboard sheets were removed from the trunks, I was told that the owners were trying to sell the documents to an unspecified European government. The price asked was £3 million (approximately $5.6 million). Those present wanted me to take a representative selection of photographs that could be shown to the prospective buyer in order to move the sale one stage further toward a successful conclusion. I then realized which government was the most likely to be interested. But I kept my thoughts to myself.

Over the next hour or so, as the trunks were emptied, certain pages were pointed out to me, and standing on a chair, by the soft light filtering through the frosted windows, I took black-and-white photographs. In all, I shot six rolls of thirty-five-millimeter film—over two hundred photographs.

But I was becoming increasingly anxious that these documents might simply vanish into the limbo from which they had emerged. That they might be bought by some purchaser who would sit on them for many years, as had happened with the Nag Hammadi texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or worse, I feared that without a purchaser, they might simply disappear back into the deepest, darkest recesses of the bank, joining the many other valuable documents known to be locked away in safe-deposit boxes and trunks around the world.

It seemed likely that since I had taken a lot of photographs, and since no one would be counting, I would be able to hide at least one of the rolls of film so that there might be at least some proof that this collection even existed. I successfully slipped one into a pocket.

When the photography was finished and the cardboard sheets were being placed back into the trunks, I gave a handful of exposed film rolls to one of the owners. He looked down at them.

“Where is the other film?” he said immediately. He had been counting.

“Other film?” I said lamely, trying to present an image of abstracted innocence while ostentatiously patting my pockets.

“Oh. You’re right. Here it is.” I produced the film I was hoping to keep. I was irritated and rather depressed. I really wanted to have some proof of what I had seen.

At that point my friend realized what I was up to and, in an inspired move, came to the rescue.

“Where are you getting these films developed?” he asked innocently.

“At a photographic shop,” replied the man holding my film.

“That’s not very secure,” said my friend. “Look, Michael was a professional photographer, and he could do all the developing and print you off as many sets as you need. That way there is no risk.”

“Good idea,” the man said and handed back the films.

Naturally I printed a full set of photographs for myself. Later I arranged to meet the Jordanian—who seemed to be in charge—for lunch, where I was to give him the prints and negatives. During lunch I argued that if some scholars could look at the texts and identify what they saw, then perhaps their insight would be helpful in raising the value of the collection. I asked the Jordanian if he would give me permission to speak to a few experts on the matter—very discreetly, of course. After some thought, he agreed that this was probably a good idea, but he made it very clear that neither I nor the experts could talk about this collection to anyone else.

Several days later I went to the Western Asiatic Department of the British Museum with a full set of prints. I had dealt with the department before during the course of researching one of my books, From the Omens of Babylon, and I trusted the scholars there not only to give me an honest opinion but to maintain confidentiality as well.

The expert I had dealt with before was not there, and one of his colleagues came into the small anteroom and spoke with me instead. I briefly told him the story about the trunks of documents and about my photographs. I stressed that this was a commercial exercise for the owners and that I would be very grateful for his discretion, since large sums of money sometimes cause equally large problems. I requested that he find someone competent in the field to take a look at these photos to see if they were of any importance. If so, I would do my best to get the interested scholar access to the entire collection. I then passed over my set of prints.

Weeks passed. I heard nothing from the British Museum. I became concerned. Finally, after a month, I returned to the museum and made my way up to the Western Asiatic Department. I met with another expert there.

“I brought a set of photographs in a month ago, which I had taken of a large number of papyrus texts. I have not heard anything back from you. I wonder if anyone has had a chance to take a look at them?”

The expert stared at me blankly.

“What photographs?”

I went through the story again for his benefit. He seemed distracted, unconcerned. He had not heard of any such photographs being brought into the department; in any case, it wasn’t his field. They were most likely given to another specialist who was working there for a time and who had now left.

“Where has he gone?” I asked.

“I don’t know” was the reply. “I think to Paris. I am sorry about your photographs.”

I never heard any more about them. Without a written receipt for them, there was nothing I could do. Luckily I had a few reject prints still at home so I could prove that the collection did in fact exist, but not nearly enough to give anyone an idea of the range of subjects that might have been in it. An expert, looking at my few remaining prints, identified most of the texts as records of commercial transactions.

Ten or twelve years later I was walking down a street lined with expensive shops in a large Western city when I saw one of the Palestinians who had been present in the bank that day. I went up to him and asked if he remembered me.

“Of course,” he replied. “You were the colleague of…” and he gave the name of my friend.

“You know,” I began, “I have always wondered what happened to those ancient texts I photographed that day in the bank. Were they ever sold?”

“I haven’t heard anything about them,” he quickly replied, unconvincingly, and then, giving a good impression of being rather busy, he elegantly and politely excused himself and walked off.

I cannot say that I was surprised, for I have spent many years living in a world where potentially crucial keys to the mysteries of our past are simultaneously available and elusive. As we will see, these trunks of documents are not the only such examples of important evidence remaining, tantalizingly, just out of reach.

2 The Priest’s Treasure

Throughout my career I’ve enjoyed correspondence with other historians and researchers into the truth behind accepted history, but some letters demand more attention than others. This letter certainly did.

“May I advise you that the ‘treasure’ is not one of gold and precious stones, but a document containing incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was alive in the year A.D. 45. The clues left behind by the good curé have never been understood, but it is clear from the script that a substitution was carried out by the extreme zealots on the journey to the place of execution. The document was exchanged for a very large sum and concealed or destroyed.”

Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, and I simply didn’t know what to do with this note. It came from a respected and highly educated Church of England vicar, the Rev. Dr. Douglas William Guest Bartlett. By “the good curé” Bartlett was referring to the Abbé Béranger Saunière, the priest of the small hilltop village of Rennes le Château, nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Abbé Saunière was appointed priest at the village in 1885. His annual income was approximately ten dollars. He gained a notoriety that has lasted to the present day by obtaining, in the early 1890s, from mysterious sources, for equally mysterious reasons, considerable wealth.¹ The key to his wealth was a discovery he made while restoring the church in 1891. But the “treasure” he found, according to Bartlett, was not the glittering deposit we had at first supposed (perhaps the lost treasure of the Temple in Jerusalem), but something far more extraordinary—some documents concerning Jesus and therefore the very basis of Christianity. At the time this seemed too wild for us to even consider and so we left it “on file.”

We had certainly suspected that something odd was going on in the dark corridors of history, but while working on Holy Blood, Holy Grail we were discovering all manner of unexpected and highly controversial data that would take us far away from the concerns of this letter, so we tabled it for future scrutiny. Jesus’s survival was simply not an important issue for us at that time, as our focus had become fixed on the possibility that prior to the crucifixion he had at least one child—or had left his wife pregnant. So whether Jesus’s life ended on the cross or not seemed irrelevant to our developing story of his marriage, the survival of his bloodline down through European history, and its symbolic expression in the stories of the Holy Grail, stories that formed the backbone of our best-selling book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, first published in 1982.

Yet, intrigued by this bland, outrageous, but confident letter, we kept returning to it. “What,” we asked ourselves, “would constitute ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that Jesus survived and was living long afterwards?” “What, in fact,” we thought, racking our brains, “would constitute incontrovertible evidence of anything in history?” Documents, we supposed, but what sort of documents would be beyond doubt?

The most believable documents, we thought, would be the most apparently mundane, those with no agenda to serve, no argument to support—an inventory perhaps, a historical equivalent of a shopping list. Something like a Roman legal document stating in a matter-of-fact manner: “Item: Alexandria, Fourth year of Claudius (A.D. 45), report of Jesus ben Joseph, an immigrant from Galilee, formerly tried and acquitted in Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate, today confirmed as the owner of a plot of land beyond the city walls.”

But it all seemed a bit far-fetched.

After Holy Blood, Holy Grail appeared and the dust had settled, out of personal curiosity more than anything else, we decided to visit the author of the letter and see what we could make of him. We needed to know whether he was believable or not. He lived in Leafield, Oxfordshire, a rural county of England comprising idyllic villages with stone houses centered upon the ancient university town of Oxford. The Rev. Bartlett lived in one of the small villages set in the higher country to the northwest of the county. We talked to him one afternoon in his garden, sitting on a wooden bench. It was the normality of the setting that made the topic of our conversation all the more remarkable.

“In the 1930s, I was living in Oxford,” reported the Rev. Bartlett. “In the same street was a ‘high-powered’ figure in the Church of England, Canon Alfred Lilley. I saw him every day.” Canon Alfred Leslie Lilley (1860-1948) had been, until his retirement in 1936, Canon and Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral. He was an expert in medieval French and for that reason was often consulted on difficult translation work.

During their daily talks, Lilley and Bartlett became closer, and Lilley eventually trusted Bartlett sufficiently to tell him an extraordinary story. In the early 1890s, Lilley reported, he had been asked by a young man, a former student of his, to travel to Paris to the Seminary of Saint Sulpice to advise on the translation of a strange document (or perhaps documents—Bartlett could no longer remember exactly) that had appeared from a source that was never divulged. At Saint Sulpice there was a group of scholars whose task it was to comb through all the documents that came in—a task performed, Lilley suspected, at the request of a Vatican cardinal. The scholars asked for help on the translation because they couldn’t really make out the text. Perhaps it seemed so outrageous to them that they thought they were misunderstanding it in some manner.

“They didn’t know that it was so close to the bone,” Bartlett recalled Lilley explaining. “Lilley said that they wouldn’t have a long and happy life if certain people knew about it. It was a very delicate matter. Lilley laughed over what was going to happen when the French priests told anyone about it. He didn’t know what happened to them [the documents], but he thought that they had changed hands for a large sum of money and had ended up in Rome.” In fact, Lilley thought that the Church would ultimately destroy these documents.

Lilley was quite certain that these documents were authentic. They were extraordinary and upset many of our ideas about the Church. Contact with the material, he said, led to an unorthodoxy. Lilley did not know for certain where the documents had come from but believed that they had once been in the possession of the heretical Cathars in the south of France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even though they were much older. He was also sure that following the demise of the Cathars the documents had been held in Switzerland until the wars of the fourteenth century, when they were taken to France.

“By the end of his life,” Bartlett explained, “Lilley had come to the conclusion that there was nothing in the Gospels that one could be certain about. He had lost all conviction of truth.”

Henry and I were stunned. Bartlett was no fool. Not only was he a church minister with a master’s degree from one of the Oxford colleges, but he also held a science degree in physics and chemistry from the University of Wales, as well as a medical degree, also from Oxford. He was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians. To call him highly educated was something of an understatement. He clearly admired Canon Lilley and greatly respected his learning and had no doubt whatsoever that Lilley had been accurately describing the document, or documents, he had seen during that trip to Paris. We needed to study Lilley and see if we could glean any further information about the material concerning Jesus and determine who at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice and the Vatican might have had an interest in it.

The key to understanding Canon Lilley was that he considered himself a “Modernist”; he was the author of a book on the movement that was extremely influential at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Modernists wished to revise the dogmatic assertions of church teachings in the light of the discoveries made by science, archaeology, and critical scholarship. Many theologians were realizing that their confidence in the historical validity of New Testament stories was misplaced. For example, William Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was once asked to write on the life of Jesus. He declined, saying that there was not nearly enough solid evidence to write anything at all about him.

During the nineteenth century the Vatican was becoming increasingly anachronistic. The Papal States stretching from Rome across to Ancona and up to Bologna and Ferrara still existed, and the pope ruled like a medieval potentate. Torture was regularly practiced by the anonymous minions of the Inquisition in their secret jails. Those convicted in papal courts were sent as oarsmen to the galleys or were exiled, imprisoned, or executed. A well-used gallows stood in the town square of every community. Spies lurked everywhere, and repression was the rule; modernity was being kept at arm’s length—even railways were banned by the pope for fear that travel and communication between people would harm religion. And all this was occurring against a backdrop of a Europe where pressure for social change in the form of liberation movements opposing despotic power and encouraging parliamentary rule had become the norm.

Despite willful ignorance, the outside world was spilling over the crumbling borders of the papal domains. Change was beginning to seem inevitable. Democratic political philosophy, a growing social awareness, and the mounting criticism of biblical texts and their inconsistencies were causing religious certainties to buckle under the strain. And to the horror of Catholic conservatives, papal political power too was under direct threat. This was a real problem: in 1859, following a war between Austria and France that saw the defeat of the Catholic Hapsburg forces, the great majority of the papal lands joined the newly created kingdom of Italy. The pope, Pius IX, summarily demoted by events, now ruled over only Rome and a fragment of the surrounding countryside. And it grew worse: on 21 September 1870, even this small patrimony was taken away by Italian troops. The pope found himself left with just the walled enclave of Vatican City, where his successors continue to rule today.

Just before the loss of Rome, the pope, in what seems to have been considerable desperation, had called a General Council of Bishops to shore up his power. Yet by calling this council, the pope was implicitly recognizing the limitations of that power. The question of who held the reins had long been a festering sore at the Vatican. The uncomfortable truth was that the pope derived his legitimacy, not from the apostle Saint Peter, two thousand years earlier as he claimed, but from a much more mundane and worldly source: a Council of Bishops that had met at Constance in the early fifteenth century. At that time there had been three popes—a trinity of pontiffs united only in mutual loathing—all claiming, simultaneously, to have supreme authority over the Church. This ludicrous situation had been resolved by the bishops, who claimed—and were recognized in this claim—to hold legitimate authority. From that point on, the popes held their authority by virtue of the bishops. Accordingly, every pope was bound, when wishing to make a major change, to seek their approval.

It was Pope Pius IX, though, who wanted to make the most major of changes: he was determined to be declared infallible, thus receiving unprecedented power over all the faithful. But he knew that he would have to use guile to achieve this goal. Hence, the First Vatican Council was convened in late 1869. Its real aims were kept secret by a small group of powerful men that included three cardinals, all of whom were members of the Inquisition. No mention was made of papal infallibility in any of the documents circulated about the objectives and direction of the council. Meanwhile, the bishops gathered and found themselves subjected to strong-arm tactics. There were no secret votes, and the cost of criticism was immediately apparent: the loss of Vatican stipends was the least that a dissenting bishop could expect.

After two months the issue of papal infallibility was introduced to the council. Most of the bishops present were surprised, shocked, even outraged. Certain church leaders who stood and spoke against the move were “dealt with” by house arrest, while others fled. One leader was physically assaulted by the pope himself. Despite the intimidation, only 49 percent of the bishops cast their vote for papal infallibility. And yet, a majority vote in favor of the move was declared, and on 18 July 1870, the pope was pronounced infallible. Just over two months later Italian troops entered Rome and consigned the freshly “infallible” pope to the limits of Vatican City—a divine response, perhaps, to his lack of humility.

The desire of the pope and his supporters, of course, was that the doctrine of infallibility would buttress the Vatican against the challenges it was facing—in particular from biblical criticism and the discoveries of archaeology.

The aim of the Modernists, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. They sought to revise church dogma in light of their scholarly findings. The historical evidence their research produced was helping to unravel the myths the Church had created and perpetuated, especially the myth about Jesus Christ. The Modernists were also greatly opposed to the centralization of the Vatican. The Modernist movement at this time was especially strong in Paris, where the director of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, from 1852 to 1884, was a liberal Irish theologian named John Hogan. Hogan welcomed and openly encouraged Modernist studies at the seminary. Indeed, Canon Lilley saw him as the “greatest single influence” on what became Modernism.² Many of Hogan’s students also attended lectures by the Assyriologist and Hebrew expert, Father Alfred Loisy, who was director of the Institute Catholique in Paris and another prominent Modernist.

At first the Vatican seemed not to mind. The new pope, Leo XIII (who was elected in 1878 and served until 1903), was sufficiently confident in the strength of Rome’s position to allow scholars access to the Vatican archives. But he had not realized what scholarship would subsequently discover and the church doctrines these findings would call into question. It soon became apparent to him that this scholarship posed a serious threat to the very foundations of the Church. Just before his death in 1903, Pope Leo XIII moved to repair the damage. In 1902 he created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to oversee the work of all theological scholars and to ensure that they did not stray from the teachings of the Church. The Commission had close connections with the Inquisition, having been ruled by the same cardinal.

The danger, apparent to all, was expressed succinctly by Father Loisy: “Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom, but what came was the Church.”³ Loisy, among other Modernists, believed that the historical scholarship conducted during that time had made many church dogmas impossible to maintain, dogmas such as the founding of the Church by Jesus, his virgin birth, and his divine sonship—in essence, Jesus’s very divinity.⁴

The leading British Modernist George Tyrell opposed the unrelentingly autocratic authority of the Vatican. “The Church, he thought, had no business being an official Institute of Truth.”⁵ Of course, the Church considered that to be exactly its role.

The Modernists asked an uncomfortable and impertinent question: what should be done when history or science point to a conclusion that contradicts the Church’s tenets? The response of the Church in the face of these direct challenges was to withdraw further behind its walls of dogma: it resolved all uncertainty by ruling that the Church was always right, under all circumstances, about everything.

In 1892 Hogan’s successor at Saint Sulpice ordered students to stop attending lectures by the Modernist Alfred Loisy. The next year Loisy was dismissed from his teaching post at the Institute Catholique, and he was eventually excommunicated. In fact, the Vatican suspended or excommunicated many Modernists and placed their books on the “Index.” In 1907 Pope Pius X issued a formal ban against the entire movement, and on 1 September 1910, all priests and Catholic teachers were required to swear an oath against Modernism. Just to be sure that the ever-changing world outside would not intrude upon their delicate theological sensibilities, students at seminaries and theological colleges were forbidden to read newspapers.

But before the veil came down in 1892, the atmosphere at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice had been very heady. The center was a place of learning, stimulated by curiosity and discovery. Adding continuously to a great sense of excitement was a steady stream of new translations and archaeological discoveries. It was in this milieu that Canon Lilley was called to Paris to look at the document or documents that provided incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was alive in A.D. 45. Upon witnessing this level of analytical study, Lilley must have wondered how much longer the Vatican could maintain its rigidly dogmatic position. He must have guessed that it would soon react against these discoveries and shut the door on free scholarship. As he relayed to Bartlett, he believed that the documents he was working on ended up in the Vatican, either locked away forever or destroyed.

When we first heard this story about Jesus being alive in A.D. 45, we were reminded of a curious statement in the work of the Roman historian Suetonius. In his history of the Roman emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), he reports that, “because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from the city.”⁶

The events he writes about took place around A.D. 45. This “Chrestus” was evidently an individual present in Rome at the time. We wondered: could this individual have been “Christ”? We should remember that “Christos” was the Greek translation, and “Messiah” the Greek transliteration, of the Aramaic meshiha, which itself derives from the Hebrew ha-mashiah, “the anointed (king).” The Greek “Messiah” thus comes from the Aramaic word, which was the commonly spoken language at the time, rather than from the Hebrew.

Was there a messianic individual active in Rome? And if so, why would the Jews have been rioting? Would they have been attacking the Romans under this agitator’s encouragement, or would they have been attacking the agitator? Or, even more strangely, could this agitator have set one man against another in the Jewish community to provoke rioting among them? Suetonius does not give us any information on the aims of the rioters or who they might have opposed. But we wondered nevertheless, could Jesus, like Paul, have ended up in Rome?

Suetonius wrote his histories in the early second century A.D. and for some years was chief secretary to the Roman emperor Hadrian (117-38). He was official keeper of the Roman archives and controller of the libraries. He would obviously have had full access to all imperial documentation, and so his report can be considered accurate. Who truly was “Chrestus”? No one knows.

There was another visitor to Saint Sulpice in those provocative days of the early 1890s: the Abbé Saunière, the priest of Rennes le Château. The story—which has proved implacably resistant to verification—relates Saunière’s discovery of documents during the renovations of his church. After showing these documents to his bishop, he was ordered to travel to Paris, where a meeting with experts at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice was arranged. This occurred in or around 1891. Reportedly, Saunière stayed in Paris for three weeks. When he returned, he had access to considerable wealth, sufficient to construct a new road up the hill to the village, to renovate and repaint the church, and to build a comfortable and fashionable villa, an ornate garden, and a tower that served as his study.

Could Saunière’s documents have been those seen and translated by Canon Lilley? Could Saunière’s sudden wealth be due to his finding them? The Rev. Bartlett certainly thought so. And if this were true, then it would certainly explain a very curious image still on the wall of the church at Rennes le Château—an image that reveals something very heretical indeed about the beliefs of the Abbé Saunière.

Although the church at Rennes le Château is small, it is decorated inside like a Gothic fantasy, something more at home in a Bavarian castle for King Ludwig II than a Pyrenean hilltop village. It is bulging with images and color. Investigators have spent years trying to decipher the many clues Saunière embedded in the symbolism. But there is one image that is very clear—one image that does not take any great occult or symbolic knowledge to understand.

Like all Catholic churches, this one has, around its walls, plaster reliefs of the Stations of the Cross. They are a set sequence of images depicting the stages of Jesus’s walk along the road to Golgotha after his trial. They are used for contemplation and prayer, serving as a kind of map to the resurrection for the faithful. Those about the walls of the church at Rennes le Château are from a standard pattern of casts supplied by a company in Toulouse that can be found in a number of other churches. At least, the plaster-cast images are identical. They differ in one important respect, however: those at Rennes le Château are painted, and in a very curious manner indeed. One image, for example, shows a woman with a child standing beside Jesus; the child is wearing a Scottish tartan robe. Others are equally curious. But the most curious of all is Station 14. This is traditionally the last of the series illustrating Jesus being placed in the tomb prior to the resurrection. At Rennes le Château the image shows the tomb and, immediately in front of it, three figures carrying the body of Christ. But the painted background reveals the time as night. In the sky beyond the figures, the full moon has risen.

If the full moon has risen, it would mean that the Passover has begun. This is significant because no Jew would have handled a dead body after the beginning of the Passover, as this would have rendered him ritually unclean. This variation of the fourteenth station suggests two important points: that the body the figures are carrying is still alive, and that Jesus—or his substitute on the cross—has survived the crucifixion. Moreover, it suggests that the body is not being placed in the tomb, but rather, that it is being carried out, secretly, under the cover of night.

It is important to note that the Stations of the Cross at Rennes le Château were painted under the direct supervision of Abbé Saunière. He appears to be telling us that he knows—or at least believes—that Jesus survived the crucifixion. Could he have learned this on his visit to Saint Sulpice, we wondered? Did he meet there the same group of scholars who called Canon Lilley to Paris? If we accept the story as it has been relayed to us, then on the face of things the answer to both of these questions seems likely to be yes.

Whatever the answers—and we are hardly in a position to come to any definite conclusions just yet—Station 14 as it is depicted on the wall of this church serves as an eloquent testimony to a secret heretical knowledge that once lay in the hands of a priest in deepest rural France.

It seemed unreasonable for us to suppose that Saunière was alone in his belief. We thought surely there must be other clues in other churches, in documents, and in the writings of those who held the same convictions. Would finding them prove any validity to this story? We needed to know how the crucifixion could have been managed such that Jesus, or his substitute, might have survived. And we needed to know what this might mean. We thought it was time to look at the biblical accounts of the event from this fresh perspective.

3 Jesus the King

The idea of a rigged crucifixion has been around a long time; even the Koran mentions it.¹ But just how could a fraudulent crucifixion have been arranged? According to the gospel accounts, everyone except Jesus’s disciples seemed to want him dead, or at the very least, well out of the way. The Jewish authorities and the vociferous mobs gathered in the street wanted to be rid of him, as did the Romans, albeit by default. According to the common interpretation of the gospel reports—which we have seen in countless films—Jesus was tried in public before “the Jews,” the crowds cried out that he should be crucified, Pilate washed his hands of the matter, Jesus then had to carry his own cross to the place of execution through crowds of bystanders who wished him ill, and finally, he was nailed to a cross between two thieves in a public place of execution called Golgotha—the “Place of the Skull.”

Had he tried to escape, either from the trial or the trek to Golgotha, it would have immediately been noticed. There would have been plenty of volunteers who’d have quickly pushed him back onto his road of execution. The Gospels inform us that the Romans had abdicated all responsibility for him; they no longer cared what happened.

JUDAEA, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY

Before 4 B.C. | Birth of Jesus, according to Matthew’s Gospel (2:1).
4 B.C. | Death of Herod the Great.
A.D. 6 | Birth of Jesus, according to Luke’s Gospel (2:1-7). Census of Quirinius, Governor of Syria.
A.D. 27-28 | Baptism of Jesus (traditional date) in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius (Luke 3:1-23).
A.D. 30 | Crucifixion of Jesus, according to Catholic scholarship.
c. A.D. 35 | Following the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias in c. A.D. 34, John the Baptist is executed, following the evidence in Josephus.
A.D. 36 | Passover—crucifixion of Jesus, according to Matthew’s timetable.
A.D. 36-37 | Conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus.
c. A.D. 44 | Execution of James, the brother of Jesus.
A.D. 50-52 | Paul in Corinth. Writes his first letter (to the Thessalonians).
A.D. 61 | Paul in Rome under house arrest.
c. A.D. 65 | Paul supposedly executed.
A.D. 66-73 | War in Judaea. The Roman army under Vespasian invades Judaea.
c. A.D. 55-120 | Life of Tacitus, Roman historian and senator, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 61-114 | Life of Pliny the Younger, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 115 | Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, quotes from letters of Paul.
c. A.D. 117-138 | Suetonius, Roman historian, mentions “Chrestus.”
c. A.D. 125 | Earliest known example of a Christian gospel, John 18: 31-33, Rylands Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c. A.D. 200 | Oldest known fragment of Paul’s letters, Chester Beatty Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c.A.D. 200 | Oldest virtually complete gospel (John’s), Bodmer Papyrus, found in Egypt.
A.D. 325 | Council of Nicaea is convened by the Roman emperor Constantine. The divinity of Jesus is made official dogma by a vote of 217 to 3.
A.D. 393-397 | Council of Hippo, formalizing the New Testament, is finalized at Council of Carthage.

THE MACCABEES AND HEROD

401 B.C. | Rebuilding of the Jewish temple on Elephantine Island, Aswan, southern Egypt, is completed.
332 B.C. | Alexander the Great invades Israel and Egypt.
323 B.C. | Death of Alexander. His generals split his empire: after years of struggle, Ptolemy takes Egypt, and Seleucis takes Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Israel at first is ruled by Ptolemy.
170 B.C. | The Seleucid ruler of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, invades Judaea and Egypt. Onias III, high priest of the temple, flees to Egypt with many priests. Establishes a Jewish temple in Egypt.
169 B.C. | Syrians invade Judaea a second time. Temple is looted.
167 B.C. | Syrians again invade, massacre populace of Jerusalem, and rededicate the Temple to Zeus. The Temple priest, Mattathias (of the Hasmonean dynasty), and his sons begin a revolt against the Syrians.
166 B.C. | Mattathias dies. His son, Judas Maccabee, takes over command.
160 B.C. | Judas Maccabee is defeated and killed. His brother Jonathan takes command.
152 B.C. | Jonathan is appointed high priest of the Temple in Jerusalem.
143 B.C. | Jonathan is imprisoned. His brother Simon becomes high priest and ruler of Judaea.
142 B.C. | Judaea becomes independent under Simon, who forms an alliance with the Romans.
134 B.C. | Simon is killed. His son John Hyrcanus succeeds him as high priest and ruler of Judaea.
104 B.C. | Aristobulus rules and takes the title of King of Judaea (of the Hasmonean dynasty).
103-76 B.C. | Alexander Jannaeus is king and high priest of Judaea.
67-63 B.C. | Aristobulus II is king and high priest of Judaea.
63 B.C. | The Roman general Pompey takes Jerusalem.
37 B.C. | Herod marries Mariamne, granddaughter of Ju daean King Aristobulus II. Herod takes Jerusalem and becomes king.
4. B.C. | Death of King Herod.

But the Jewish authorities, representatives of the priestly Sadducees, did care; they wanted him dead. Those in Jesus’s small community of disciples were powerless to protect him and could only watch helplessly as the tragedy unfolded. So if his escape did not serve some purpose of either the Roman or Jewish authorities, who did have cause and power enough to make it happen, one would think that such an escape would have been impossible. And yet, there are enough hints in the gospel accounts to give one pause for thought. The situation is not as clear-cut as it is presented.

First, and importantly, crucifixion was historically the punishment for a political crime. According to the Gospels, however, Pilate gave Jesus over to the mobs, who then brayed for his execution on the basis of religious dissent. The Jewish execution for this particular transgression was death by stoning. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment reserved for sedition, not religious eccentricity. This contradiction alone illustrates that the Gospels are not reporting the matter truthfully. Could they be trying to hide some vital aspects of the events from us? Trying to blame the wrong people perhaps?

Jesus was, we can be certain, sentenced for execution on the basis of political crimes. We can also be certain that it was the Romans, not the Jewish authorities, who called the shots, whatever spin the Gospels might try to put on it. And the Gospels certainly spun the message to the point that modern Christians still find the suggestion of any political action on the part of Jesus to be outrageously, even dangerously, “off-message.” Yet it has been over fifty years since Professor Samuel Brandon of Manchester University in England drew attention to this critical theological distortion: “The crucial fact remains uncontested that the fatal sentence was pronounced by the Roman governor and its execution carried out by Roman officials.”² Brandon continued:

It is certain that the movement connected with [Jesus] had at least sufficient semblance of sedition to cause the Roman authorities both to regard him as a possible revolutionary and, after trial, to execute him as guilty on such a charge.³

In fact, in later years Brandon became blunter, perhaps exasperated with those who continued to ignore this important fact: “All enquiry,” he wrote forcefully, allowing little room for doubt on the matter, “concerning the historical Jesus must start from the fact of his execution by the Romans for sedition.”⁴

We will find that we are dealing not only with the intricacies of religion but with the machinations of politics. Even today not all the mines have been cleared.

Apart from the brutal mode of execution, we are left to wonder whether there is any other suggestion in the Gospels that the Romans were ultimately in charge and that the crime involved was sedition rather than contravention of Jewish teachings.

The answer: indeed there is. Jesus was crucified between two other men, described as thieves in the English translations of the Bible. However, if we go back to the original Greek text, we find that they are not called thieves at all there but are described as lestai, which, strictly speaking, translates as “brigands” but which was, in Greek, the official name for the “Zealots,” the Judaean freedom fighters who were dedicated to ridding Judaea of its Roman occupation (Matthew 27:38).⁵ The Romans considered them to be terrorists.

The Zealots were not just seeking some kind of political land grab but had a less venal motive: they were concerned, above all else, with the legitimacy of the priests serving in the Temple of Solomon and, in particular, with the legitimacy of the high priest—who was, at the time, appointed by the Herodian rulers.⁶ They wanted priests who were “sons of Aaron,” priests of the bloodline of Aaron, the brother of Moses, of the Tribe of Levi, who founded the Israelite priesthood and was the first high priest of Israel. “The sons of Aaron” had become the term used to describe the sole legitimate line of priests in ancient Israel.

The undeniable implication of Jesus’s placement between two condemned Zealots at Golgotha is that, to the Roman authorities, Jesus was also a Zealot. As was Barabbas, the prisoner released under what is described as a feastday amnesty by Pilate. The prisoner was described in Greek as a lestes (John 18:40).⁷ There really seem to have been a lot of Zealots around Jesus.

This observation also extends to Jesus’s disciples: one is called Simon Zelotes (Simon xeloten)—Simon the Zealot (Luke 6:15). Furthermore, a particularly nasty group of assassins within the Zealot movement were called Sicarii after the small curved knife—a sica—that they carried to assassinate their opponents; Judas Iscariot was clearly Sicarii (whether active or former we do not know). This suggestion of Zealot militancy takes on an added significance when we recall the events preceding the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. According to Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus and his disciples were gathering, Jesus told his immediate entourage to arm themselves: “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” He was told that they had two swords. “It is enough,” replied Jesus (Luke 22:36-38). Here Jesus is described in a context defined by the strong and often violent Judaean desire for liberation from Roman rule. To see it as anything but that is to ignore too much of the texts.

It is, in some way, as a representative of this anti-Roman faction that Jesus was sent for crucifixion. Pilate reportedly washed his hands of the entire business, but his insistence that the sign King of the Jews remain on the cross reveals that he had not washed his hands of Roman law, which was very specific. By its provisions, Pilate’s task was clear: he had to crucify Jesus. By placing the sign where he did, he signaled to all people that he knew the truth about the situation.

So we are still left to ask, if Jesus survived the crucifixion, whether by substitution or rescue, who was likeliest to have helped him? Certainly not the Romans—why should they have saved someone opposed to their rule over Judaea? And certainly not the chief priests of the Temple, for Jesus was highly critical, at the least, of their authority. Help, we assume, could only have come from the Zealots.

But as we press on we shall discover that we could not be more wrong.

In 37 B.C., Herod captured Jerusalem. He was not a native of Judaea but came from a southern region called Idumaea. Although he was a competent soldier and administrator, he was also a thug. His friend Mark Antony had provided him with a large Roman army to take Jerusalem, but even with this help it still took a five-month siege to destroy the city’s resistance. Immediately upon taking power, Herod executed forty-five of the Sanhedrin, thereby destroying all of its influence. He also arrested Antigonus, the last of the Jewish kings, and dispatched him to Antioch, where Mark Antony was in residence. There the Jewish king was conveniently beheaded. Herod was installed as king in his stead, ruling as “Herod the Great” and remaining a close friend of his backers, the Romans.

Herod remained deeply hostile toward all members of the legitimate royal Jewish bloodline. Although he married a royal princess, he nevertheless had her brother, the high priest, drowned in a swimming pool at the palace in Jericho. Herod later had his own royal wife killed as well. He also had his two sons by this marriage executed. In fact, during his reign he methodically executed all remaining members of the royal dynasty of Israel. He did ultimately rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem, but despite this largesse, he remained hated by most of the Jewish people in the region. When he died in 4 B.C., his final action was to order the burning to death of two Pharisees whose supporters had torn down the golden Roman Eagle that, by Herod’s orders, was fixed upon the Temple’s front wall.

The only chronicler of this period is the Jewish historian Josephus. He reports that, following the death of Herod, the “people” called for the high priest of the Temple in Jerusalem—a Herodian appointee—to be dismissed. They demanded that a high priest of “greater piety and purity” be appointed.⁸ This is the first indication that a significant part of the Jewish population had been deeply concerned about these matters, a point that will be of crucial importance to our understanding of the entire period. But who exactly were these “concerned people”?

Josephus describes three distinct factions in Judaism at the time: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Sadducees maintained the Temple worship and supplied the priests who performed the daily sacrifices. The high priest was also drawn from their ranks. The Pharisees were more concerned with the Jewish tradition, the collection of laws built up by sages past, and were less concerned with the Temple sacrifices. The Essenes, who lived communally, were variously and confusingly described as anti- or pro- Herod, peaceful or warlike, celibate or married, all depending upon which parts of Josephus’s works one looks at. This has led to considerable confusion among modern scholars and muddied the waters rather badly. The Essenes were typified, however, by their devotion to the Jewish law; as Josephus mentions, even under severe torture by the Romans, they refused to blaspheme Moses or break any of the law’s precepts.⁹ They also, Josephus writes, maintained the same doctrine as “the sons of Greece”; perhaps he has in mind the Pythagoreans or the later Platonists in that they too viewed humans as housing an immortal soul within a mortal, perishable body.

In his later work, Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus added a fourth group: the Zealots.¹⁰

Those who wanted a new high priest were not just concerned with intellectual protest. The clamor for the change came at the end of the weeklong mourning period for Herod. His son Archelaus had every expectation that he would become king in turn, but the decision was in the hands of Augustus Caesar.

Archelaus was in the middle of a grand funeral feast at the Temple prior to his departure for Rome when he heard the noise of an angry mob outside making their demands. The main focus of the clamor—the high priest—must have also been present at the feast. Archelaus was enraged by this noisy demonstration, but he did not wish to inflame the situation, so he sent his military commander to reason with the crowd gathered in the Temple. It was a crowd enlarged by the many who had traveled in from the outlying countryside in preparation for the approaching Passover. But those present stoned the officer before he could even begin to speak. He quickly withdrew.

Archelaus must have panicked, fearing for his own life, because after that point things turned very ugly, very quickly. Moving swiftly, Archelaus ordered a cohort of troops to enter the Temple and arrest the leaders of the crowds who were calling for the changes. This was a sizable force: in the regular Roman army it would have meant six hundred soldiers; for auxiliary forces, which these were most likely to have been, it could have meant anything from five hundred to seven hundred or more soldiers. It is clear that trouble was imminent and Archelaus intended to crack down fast and hard. But his plan didn’t work. The people in the crowd were outraged by the sudden appearance of armed troops and attacked them with stones as well. Incredibly, Josephus reports, most of the soldiers were killed, and even the commander was wounded, narrowly escaping death. This was clearly a major battle, indicating that these “people” not only wanted a high priest of “greater piety and purity” but that they were serious, organized, and prepared to fight and die for their beliefs.

Following their defeat of the troops, the crowds proceeded to perform the Temple sacrifices as though nothing untoward had happened. Archelaus took this opportunity to order his entire army into action: his infantry attacked the streets of Jerusalem, while his cavalry attacked the surrounding countryside. It is clear that this opposition to the high priest was far greater, far more structured, and far more widespread than Josephus is prepared to admit. For some reason, Josephus plays down the extent of what was evidently a major insurrection centered in the Temple followed by a major and bloody street battle throughout Jerusalem. Josephus is clear, however, about how he views the event. For him, it was “sedition.” Through his use of this derogatory term we can be sure that Josephus took the side of Archelaus and the Romans.

The battle ended with several thousand civilian deaths, including most of those who were in the Temple. Those who survived fled, seeking refuge in the neighboring hills. The funeral feast was promptly ended, and Archelaus, without further delay, departed for Rome. Meanwhile, his brother Antipas contested the will and claimed the throne for himself.

While Archelaus was arguing his case before the emperor in Rome, further revolt erupted in Judaea. On the eve of the Pentecost feast (Shavuot, the fiftieth day after the Passover Sabbath), a huge crowd surrounded the Roman bases, effectively placing them under siege. Fighting broke out in both Jerusalem and the countryside. Galilee especially seemed to be a breeding ground for the most serious organized discontent, and it was from there, in 4 B.C., that the first leader emerged, Judas of Galilee, who raided the royal armory to seize weapons. At the same time, Herod’s palace at Jericho was burned down. Could this act of political heresy have been revenge for the drowning of the last legitimate high priest? It seems very likely. Moving as rapidly as possible, the Romans gathered three legions and four regiments of cavalry, together with many auxiliaries, and struck back. In the end some two thousand Jews, all leaders of the resistance, were crucified—for sedition, of course.

Meanwhile in Rome, during that same year, Augustus Caesar had decided to divide Judaea among Herod’s sons, each of whom would rule with a lesser title than king. He gave the richest half of the kingdom, including Judaea and Samaria, to Archelaus, who ruled as an ethnarch; he divided the other half into two tetrarchies (from the Greek meaning “rule over one-fourth of a territory”), giving one tetrachy each to two other sons, Philip and Herod Antipas. Herod Antipas held Galilee and lands across the Jordan; Philip received lands north and east of Galilee.

Two points need to be noted here: first, while Josephus seems to suggest on the surface that the demands for a pure and pious high priest came from a loosely gathered, even impromptu mob that was simply part of the usual crowd in the Temple assembled for the coming Passover, it is clear, given the extent of the fighting and the opposition mounted in both Jerusalem and beyond, that this opposition group was well led and its network extensive. It was no accident that they had gathered at the Temple on the day of the funeral feast. They had come deliberately, prepared for trouble. In fact, they must surely have expected trouble. This begs two questions: Who were these people? And what if anything can we glean about their ideology from their deep desire to see a “pure and pious” high priest put in place?

It seems that these events provide an essential context for Jesus’s early life: in 4 B.C., when Herod died, Jesus was, according to the most widely held estimates, approximately two years old. Thus, we can be sure that his birth and life occurred against a background of agitation against the corrupt and hated Herodian dynasty. And though his birthplace was Bethlehem, in Judaea, Matthew (2:22-23) records that Jesus was taken to Nazareth in Galilee as a child. After a long period of silence in the gospel record, Jesus is said to have emerged from Galilee to be baptized by John the Baptist. And it is from Galilee that he gathered his disciples—at least two of whom were Zealots. Certainly he was commonly called Jesus of Galilee. As we have seen, Galilee was a hotbed of revolt, and it was from here that Judas, the leader of a large group of rebels, came. What then was the relationship of Jesus with these political agitators, these crowds bent upon sedition? Was he later to become their leader? Clues once again come from Josephus.

The opposition Josephus describes was reaching a wide movement that he takes great pains to play down while at the same time disparaging as “sedition.” Yet Josephus also records that the opposition did not end with the vicious slaughter in Jerusalem. In fact, he notes, it became worse with time. Archelaus proved so brutal in his rule that after ten years Caesar exiled him to Vienne in France. The lands of Archelaus were then ruled directly by Rome as the Province of Judaea. Since Philip and Herod Antipas were elsewhere, ruling their respective tetrarchies, a prefect, Coponius, was appointed and dispatched from Rome to rule Archelaus’s domains from his capital, the coastal city of Caesarea. Traveling with him was the new governor of Syria, Quirinius. Rome wanted a full accounting of the regions it now had to rule, and so Quirinius undertook a census of the entire country. This census was, to say the least, deeply unpopular. The date was A.D. 6. Trouble was inevitable.

Judas of Galilee led an uprising. He accused all men who paid a tax to Rome of cowardice. He demanded that Jews refuse to acknowledge the emperor as master, claiming that only one master existed and that was God. This question of the tax was the key means of knowing who was for Judas and who was against him. At the same time, Josephus reports, the hotheaded Sicarii first appeared. They were the faction behind all the violence. Josephus hints that Judas of Galilee either founded the group or led them, and it is clear from his accounts that Josephus hated them. He accuses them of using their politics as a cloak for their “barbarity and avarice.”¹¹

Amazingly, a mention of Judas in the New Testament corroborates this profile. “After…rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished” (Acts 5:37). Josephus further explains that Judas, along with another fighter, Zadok the Pharisee, was responsible for adding a fourth faction to Judaism after the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes: the Zealots, so called because they were “zealous in good undertakings.”¹² The term “Zealot” occurs only in the history of Josephus; no other Roman author mentions them, and even Josephus is reluctant to name them. Instead, he prefers to refer to them negatively as Lestai (brigands) or Sicarii (dagger-men).

This too finds a mention in the New Testament, within the Book of Acts. Speaking of a meeting between Paul and James in Jerusalem after Paul returned from many years of preaching in Greek and Roman cities such as Tarsus, Antioch, Athens, Corinth, and Ephesus, James and his companions mention the “many thousands of Jews” who were all “zealous of the law” (Acts 21, 20). Later in the same book (Acts 21, 38), another more sensitive term is used. Paul was accused of being the leader of “four thousand men who were murderers” by the Romans and then arrested. But when we look at the original Greek text, we find that “murderers” is not what the text says at all. In fact, Paul was being accused of leading four thousand sicarion—Sicarii.

Despite the labels—“Zealots” or “murderers”—or maybe even because of them, we are still left to ask: who were these Jews who were prepared to die rather than serve the Romans? Again Josephus would have us believe that they were a small band of hotheaded individuals bent upon sedition. Yet the revolts he chronicles suggest that they fought with fury and vigor and significant manpower. The inherent contradiction leads us to believe that he was not telling the truth about this faction. They were obviously more serious than he wished to admit. And this is crucial to our story and to our understanding.

So why did Josephus hate the Zealots so much? A look at his career makes it quite plain to us: Josephus had actually begun his career as a Zealot. He was even a Zealot military commander. Amazingly, he was in charge of all of Galilee—the Zealot heartland—at the start of the war against Rome. But after the loss of his base, he defected to the Roman side and became a close friend of Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus, the army commander. Finally, Josephus ended up living in Rome within the emperor’s very own palace, with a pension and Roman citizenship. But his treachery against his own people cost him dearly. For the rest of his life he had to watch his back because he was hated by even those Jews living in Rome.

In his first book, The Jewish War—written around A.D. 75 to 79 for a Roman and Romanized audience—Josephus blames the Zealots for the destruction of the Temple. Although he had access to all the Jewish records that survived the siege and the Temple fires and access to Roman records, we find that we cannot entirely believe what he says. Despite his excellent source material, he had joined the enemy and was writing for the enemy—a Roman Gentile audience. Josephus’s writing of The Jewish War is analogous to a Nazi writing a history of Poland that justifies the invasion of 1939. Since one man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot, we need to be careful with our use of his works. We must keep his reporting in perspective.

For now let us turn our attention to an extraordinary event that occurred in 1947. A Bedouin shepherd named Mohammad adh-Dhib was roaming on the northern end of the Dead Sea searching for some lost goats. Thinking that they might be in a cave he had come upon, he threw a rock in to frighten them and drive them out. Instead of the outraged bleat of a goat, he heard the shattering of pottery. Intrigued, he crawled through the small cave entrance to see what was there. Before him lay some large clay pots—one now broken—in which he found the first collection of documents famous ever since as the “Dead Sea Scrolls.”

He took them to an antique dealer in Bethlehem, who began peddling them to various parties he thought might be interested. Even so, there is something of a mystery over the full number of scrolls found. Seven were produced and eventually sold to academic institutions, but it seems that several others were found and perhaps held back or passed into the hands of other dealers or private collectors. And at least one found its way to Damascus and, for a brief period, into the hands of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

At that time, the station chief of the CIA in Damascus was Middle Eastern expert Miles Copeland. He related to me that one day a “sly Egyptian merchant” came to the door of his building and offered him a rolled-up ancient text of the type we now know as a Dead Sea Scroll. They were, of course, unknown then, and Copeland was unsure if such battered documents were valuable or even in any way interesting. He certainly could not read Aramaic or Hebrew, but he knew that the head of the CIA in the Middle East, Kermit Roosevelt, who was based in Beirut, was an expert in these ancient languages and would probably be able to read it. He took the scroll onto the roof of the building in Damascus and, with the wind blowing pieces of it into the streets below, unrolled it and photographed it. He took, he said, about thirty frames, and even this was not enough to record the entire text, so we can assume that the text was quite substantial. He sent the photographs off to the CIA station in Beirut.¹³ And there they vanished. Searches of CIA holdings under the provisions of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have failed to find them. Copeland recalls that he heard the text concerned Daniel—but he did not know whether it proved to be a standard text of the Old Testament book or a pesher, that is, a commentary on certain key passages from an Old Testament text, like the commentary appearing on several of the other scrolls found in the same cave. Somewhere out there in the clandestine antique underworld, this valuable text undoubtedly still remains.

The Dead Sea Scrolls that have been studied give us for the first time direct insight into this large and widespread group we’ve been contemplating here—this group who detested foreign domination, who were single-mindedly concerned with the purity of the high priest—and king—and who were totally dedicated to the observance of Jewish law. In fact, one of the many titles by which they referred to themselves was Oseh ha-Torah—the Doers of the Law.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, it appears, provide original documents from the Zealots. For it was from their community that they emerged. What is also interesting is that, according to the archaeological evidence, Qumran, the site where many of the documents were found and where, at first sight, a Zealot center seems to have been established, was deserted during the time of Herod the Great, who had a palace just a few miles away in Jericho—the same palace that was burned down by “Zealots” after his death. It was thereafter that the occupation of Qumran began.¹⁴

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written directly by those who used them, and unusually for religious documents, they remain untouched by later editors or revisionists. What they tell us we can believe. And what they tell us is very interesting indeed. For one thing, they reveal a deep hatred of foreign domination that verges on the pathological, a hatred clearly fueled by a desire for revenge following many years of slaughter, exploitation, and disdain for the Jewish religion by an enemy they term the Kittim—this may be generic, but in the first century A.D. it clearly referred to the Romans. The War Scroll proclaims:

They shall act in accordance with all this rule on this day, when they are positioned opposite the camp of the Kittim. Afterwards, the priest will blow for them the trumpets…and the gates of battle shall open…The priests shall blow…for the attack. When they are at the side of the Kittim line, at throwing distance, each man will take up his weapons of war. The six priests shall blow the trumpets of slaughter with a shrill, staccato note to direct the battle. And the levites and all the throng with ram’s horns shall blow the battle call with a deafening noise. And when the sound goes out, they shall set their hand to finish off the severely wounded of the Kittim.¹⁵

So dreamed the Zealots, who loathed and detested the Romans: they would sooner die than serve the Kittim. They lived only for the day when a messiah would emerge from the Jewish people and lead them in a victorious war against the Romans and their puppet kings and high priests, erasing them from the face of the earth so that once again there might be a pure line of high priests and kings of the Line of David in Israel. In fact, they waited for two messiahs: the high priest and the king. The Rule of the Community, for example, speaks of the future “Messiahs of Aaron and Israel.”¹⁶ The Messiah of Aaron refers to the high priest; the Messiah of Israel denotes a king of the Line of David. Further scrolls mention the same figures. Provocatively, from our perspective, some scrolls, such as the Damascus Document, bring these two together and speak of one messiah, a “Messiah of Aaron and Israel.”¹⁷ They are revealing a figure who is both high priest and king of Israel.

All these texts make much of the necessity for the line of kings and high priests to be “pure,” that is, of the correct lineage. The Temple Scroll states: “From among your brothers you shall set over yourself a king; you shall not set a foreign man who is not your brother over yourself.”¹⁸

Both king and high priest were anointed and were thus a meshiha, a messiah. In fact, from as early as the second century B.C. the term “messiah” was used to name a legitimate king of Israel, one of the royal Line of David, who was expected to appear and to rule.¹⁹ This expectation was not, therefore, unique to the Zealots but ran as a strong undercurrent to the Old Testament and the Jewish faith of the second Temple period. It is more prevalent than one might think: it has been pointed out that “the Old Testament books were so edited that they emerge collectively as a messianic document.”²⁰

The point is, of course, that the Jewish population of Judaea, at least, was expecting a messiah of the Line of David to appear. And with the hardships and horrors of the reign of Herod and the later Roman prefects, the time seemed to have come. The time for the messiah’s appearance had arrived, and that is why we needn’t be surprised when we discover that the rebel Zealot movement of Judas of Galilee and Zadok the Pharisee was, at its heart, messianic.²¹

Who then did they have in mind as the messiah?

The Dead Sea Scrolls provide a context for understanding the role of Jesus and the political machinations that would have featured behind his birth, marriage, and active role in this Zealot aspiration for victory. According to the Gospels, through his father, Jesus was of the Line of David; through his mother, he was of the line of Aaron the high priest (Matthew 1:1, 16; Luke 1:5, 36; 2:4). We suddenly get an understanding of his importance to the Zealot cause when we realize that because of his lineage he was heir to both lines. He was a “double” messiah; having inherited both the royal and priestly lines, he was a “Messiah of Aaron and Israel,” a figure, as we have seen, who was clearly noted in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it would appear that he was widely seen as such. We can take as an expression of this fact Pilate’s supposedly ironic sign placed at the foot of the cross: This is Jesus the king of the Jews (Matthew 27, 37).²²

As high priest and king—as Messiah of the Children of Israel (in Hebrew, bani mashiach)—Jesus would have been expected to lead the Zealots to victory. He would have been expected to oppose the Romans at every step and to hold tightly to the concepts of ritual purity that were so important to the Zealots. As the Zealot leader, he had a religious and political role to perform, and as it happens, there was a recognized way for him to perform it: the Old Testament prophet Zechariah had spoken of the arrival in Jerusalem of the king on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9-10). Jesus felt it necessary to fulfill this and other prophecies in order to gain public acceptance; indeed, the prophecy of Zechariah is quoted in the New Testament account of Matthew (21:5). So Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey. The point was not lost on the crowds who greeted his arrival: “Hosanna to the son of David,” they cried as they placed branches of trees and cloaks on the road for him to ride over in spontaneous gestures of acclaim.

Jesus had deliberately chosen his path. And he had been recognized as the king of the Line of David by the crowds of Jerusalem. The die was cast. Or so it seemed.

This deliberate acting out of Old Testament prophecy and its implications were discussed by Hugh Schonfield in his book The Passover Plot, which was first published in 1965; reissued many times since, it sold over six million copies in eighteen languages.²³ It was a best-seller by anybody’s standards, and yet is today almost forgotten. Recent books do not even mention Schonfield’s work.

The matters he raised are certainly controversial but important; the custodians of the orthodox story are constantly trying to keep these alternative ideas out lest they shake the paradigm, lest they cause us to change our attitude toward the Gospels, the figure of Jesus, and the history of the times. Such lessons as Schonfield’s need to be repeated, generation after generation, until eventually they are supported by a weight of data so substantial that the paradigm has no alternative but to flip, causing us to approach our history from a very different perspective.

So many factors in Jesus’s life—the Zealot revolt, his birth to parents who were descendants of the Line of David and the Line of Aaron, respectively, the Zealot members of his immediate entourage, his deliberate entry into Jerusalem as king—should certainly have ensured Jesus’s place in history as the leader of the Jewish nation. But they didn’t. So what went wrong?

4 The Son of the Star

Simply put, the Zealot cause failed, utterly and disastrously. It was probably inevitable since, at its heart, it opposed the domination of the Romans, who were the greatest military power the Mediterranean world knew at the time. Although the natural course of the Zealot movement led it to oppose this domination openly and with all the force it could muster, it could never have won. That much was clear to all who looked even a little ahead.

It was evident that there were more Romans than Jews, and Roman power was centered upon an army of disciplined and well-trained professional soldiers who were not averse to feats of creative brutality if the situation demanded it—or if the soldier at hand just happened to feel like it. All this force was backed up by a widespread and formidable command of logistics supported by wellmaintained roads and ships, all of which were integrated into a structure that ensured troops and supplies were delivered in strength and on time.

Since the open emergence of the Zealot opposition in A.D. 6, a series of rulers—Roman governors and Jewish high priests alike—had managed, one way or another, to keep a kind of stability in Judaea.

JUDAEA, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY

Before 4 B.C. | Birth of Jesus, according to Matthew’s Gospel (2:1).
4 B.C. | Death of Herod the Great.
A.D. 6 | Birth of Jesus, according to Luke’s Gospel (2:1-7). Census of Quirinius, Governor of Syria.
A.D. 27-28 | Baptism of Jesus (traditional date) in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius (Luke 3:1-23).
A.D. 30 | Crucifixion of Jesus, according to Catholic scholarship.
c. A.D. 35 | Following the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias in c. A.D. 34, John the Baptist is executed, following the evidence in Josephus.
A.D. 36 | Passover—crucifixion of Jesus, according to Matthew’s timetable.
A.D. 36-37 | Conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus.
c. A.D. 44 | Execution of James, the brother of Jesus.
A.D. 50-52 | Paul in Corinth. Writes his first letter (to the Thessalonians).
A.D. 61 | Paul in Rome under house arrest.
c. A.D. 65 | Paul supposedly executed.
A.D. 66-73 | War in Judaea. The Roman army under Vespasian invades Judaea.
c. A.D. 55-120 | Life of Tacitus, Roman historian and senator, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 61-c. 114 | Life of Pliny the Younger, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 115 | Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, quotes from letters of Paul.
c. A.D. 117-138 | Suetonius, Roman historian, mentions “Chrestus.”
c. A.D. 125 | Earliest known example of a Christian gospel, John 18: 31-33, Rylands Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c. A.D. 200 | Oldest known fragment of Paul’s letters, Chester Beatty Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c. A.D. 200 | Oldest virtually complete gospel (John’s), Bodmer Papyrus, found in Egypt.
A.D. 325 | Council of Nicaea is convened by the Roman emperor Constantine. The divinity of Jesus is made official dogma by a vote of 217 to 3.
A.D. 393-397 | Council of Hippo, formalizing the New Testament, is finalized at Council of Carthage.

THE FIRST CENTURY

4 B.C.
Death of King Herod.

A.D. 6
Zealot uprising, led by Judas of Galilee.

A.D. 26
Pontius Pilate appointed prefect of Judaea (until A.D. 36).

A.D. 36
Pontius Pilate recalled to Rome and exiled.

A.D. 38
Anti-Jewish riots and killings in Alexandria are encouraged by the prefect Flaccus.

A.D. 39
Herod Antipas exiled to the French Pyrenees.

c. A.D. 44
James, the brother of Jesus, is executed.

A.D. 46-48
Tiberius Alexander is prefect of Judaea.

A.D. 64
Burning of Rome under Nero. Arrest of Christians.

A.D. 66
Jewish general in Roman army, Tiberius Alexander, is prefect of Egypt. Sends in his troops to put down revolt in Alexandria. Several thousand Jews are killed.

A.D. 66-73
War in Judaea. Roman army under Vespasian invades through Galilee.

A.D. 67
Josephus, a Jewish military leader in Galilee, defects to the Roman side following a defeat. Writes Jewish histories (The Jewish War, A.D. 77-78; The Antiquities of the Jews, c. 94) while living in the imperial palace in Rome.

A.D. 69
Vespasian is proclaimed emperor. Places his son Titus in charge of the army. Titus appoints Tiberius Alexander his chief of staff.

A.D. 70
The Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed. Afterwards, Vespasian seeks out and executes all members of the royal Line of David. Jerusalem is renamed Aelia Capitolina, and all Jews are for bidden to enter the city. The Romans allow the Pharisee Johanan ben Zakkai to establish a religious school and the Sanhedrin at Jabneh, giving rise to rabbinical Judaism. (The school and the Sanhedrin will survive there until A.D. 132)

A.D. 73
Masada is destroyed, and 960 Zealots commit suicide rather than be captured. Jewish temple of Onias in Egypt is closed.

Both sides needed peace and the wealth that arose from it—conflict never plants seeds or grows crops, and idle land never produces food or money for the farmers, nor taxes for the rulers—and Rome relied upon Judaea for the forty talents it produced each year for the Roman treasury (the approximate equivalent of 3,750 pounds of silver).¹ Through careful political husbandry, this unstable balance had lasted for half of the century. And then suddenly it all fell to pieces.

A group of anti-Roman priests in the Temple in Jerusalem decided to stop non-Jews from giving offerings. This cessation of the customary daily sacrifices performed for Caesar and for Rome in the Temple was a direct and abrupt challenge to the emperor. There was no turning back. The Zealots and the anti-Roman priests had led their people across the threshold of the doorway to hell. As Josephus reports, war against Rome was inevitable because of this act. The Zealots, in their misplaced ambition, thought that they would recover control of their nation, but so great was their loss that all such hope was to vanish for nearly two thousand years.

Fighting first erupted in A.D. 66 in the coastal city of Caesarea. Attempts to calm the situation were futile in the face of the frustration and hatred that had fueled the attacks. The Zealots had been waiting for this day, and now they had it. For them, tomorrow had finally come. Thousands were killed: Zealots took the fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea; others took over the lower city of Jerusalem and the Temple, burning down the palace of King Agrippa and that of the high priest. They also burned the official records office.

Leaders emerged from within the Jewish ranks: in Jerusalem the son of the high priest had been in charge. Then Judas of Galilee’s son appeared in Masada and looted the armory before returning to Jerusalem like a king, clothed in royal robes, to take over the palace. The official high priest was murdered.

At first, unprepared for such a catastrophic outpouring of hatred toward them, the Romans were readily beaten. The governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus, marched into Judaea from his capital in Antioch at the head of the Twelfth Legion. After destroying many communities and towns, his army besieged Jerusalem. But he was driven off with very heavy losses, including the commander of the Sixth Legion and a Roman tribune. Cestius himself seems to have escaped only by the speed of his retreat. In the debacle, the Zealots seized a great deal of weapons and money. Despite this show of strength, many prescient Jews fled Judaea, as they knew the situation could only get worse.

Judea and Galilee

And they were right: the Romans withdrew, but only to gather their strength. They were to return with brutality and vengeance. Meanwhile, in the absence of the Roman overlords, the Zealots regrouped too. They elected commanders for the various regions, raised troops, and began to train them in Roman military techniques and formations. The first fighting was to be in Galilee, where Josephus—yet to become the historian and friend of the Romans—was commander of the Zealot forces.

The Roman emperor Nero was outraged by the eruption of revolt in Judaea and ordered a respected army veteran, Vespasian, to take charge of regaining control over the country. Vespasian sent his son, Titus, to Alexandria to get the Fifteenth Legion. Vespasian himself marched down from Syria with the Fifth and Tenth Legions, together with twenty-three cohorts of auxiliaries—around eighteen thousand cavalry and infantry.

Vespasian and Titus met in the Syrian port of Ptolemais (now Akko) and, uniting their forces, moved inland, across the border into Galilee. Josephus was caught in his stronghold, Jotapata (now Yodefat), midway between Haifa and the Sea of Galilee. After a forty-seven-day siege, Galilee fell. Josephus escaped but was soon captured, surrendering to a high-ranking Roman officer, a tribune called Nicanor. Josephus describes him as an old friend and in almost the same breath reveals that he was himself “a priest and a descendent of priests.”² In other words, Josephus was no Galilean hothead but rather a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy with strong links to the Roman administration.

Immediately after his capture, Josephus was imprisoned by the commander, Vespasian. But Josephus, in an action that clearly revealed his high-level association with the Romans, asked for a private meeting. Vespasian obliged, asking all but Titus and two friends to leave them. One of those two was probably Titus’s military chief of staff, Tiberius Alexander, who was Jewish and a nephew of the famous philosopher Philo of Alexandria.³ Tiberius Alexander had his own reasons for this meeting, which we shall see. What ensued was clearly a bit of well-contrived theater, with Josephus and Tiberius Alexander each playing a prominent part.

“You suppose, sir,” Josephus addressed Vespasian, clearly aware that this was a pivotal moment in his life and that the next few minutes would determine his future, “that in capturing me you have merely secured a prisoner, but I come as a messenger of the greatness that awaits you.” He explained, to give added importance to his words, that he was “sent by God Himself,” and then continued,

You, Vespasian, are Caesar and Emperor…you are master not only of me, Caesar, but of land and sea and all the human race; and I ask to be kept in closer confinement as my penalty if I am taking the name of God in vain.

Of course, with Nero still ruling in Rome, what Josephus was suggesting was high treason. But Vespasian, according to Josephus—and we should remember that he was writing this in Vespasian’s palace in Rome long after these events—was already thinking along these dangerous lines. Vespasian was reportedly skeptical of Josephus’s claims at first—and he should also have been outraged at the treason uttered against his emperor and should have ordered Josephus to be executed immediately. Yet he did not. In his book, Josephus provides a reason: “God was already awakening in him imperial ambitions and foreshadowing the sceptre by other portents.”⁴

This talk of “the sceptre,” meaning royal status, reveals a link to a crucial prophecy of “the Star”—referring to the expected messianic leader—which was, as stated earlier, the catalyst for the outbreak of war. References to “the Star” and the “sceptre” were contained in a prophecy made by Balaam the seer, as reported in the Old Testament. Balaam proclaimed his oracle:

I see him…I behold him—but not close at hand. A star from Jacob takes the leadership. A sceptre arises from Israel. (Numbers 24:17)

This “star from Jacob” clearly establishes that the messianic leader was expected to be born of the Line of David. Josephus states explicitly that this prophecy was the cause for the timing of the violence:

Their chief inducement to go to war was an equivocal oracle also found in their sacred writings, announcing that at that time a man from their country would become monarch of the whole world.

It was this prophecy that Josephus told to Vespasian. He also no doubt added—but didn’t reveal in the report of his meeting with the Roman commander—that the Zealots in Jerusalem took this “to mean the triumph of their own race.” They were certain that they would win in their war against the Romans because of this very religious oracle. But, Josephus adds later in his book, they were “wildly out in their interpretation. In fact,” he states bluntly and obsequiously, “the oracle pointed to the accession of Vespasian; for it was in Judaea he was proclaimed emperor.”⁵

Roman historians too were aware of this prediction: Suetonius writes that “an ancient superstition was current in the East; that out of Judaea at this time would come the rulers of the world. This prediction, as the event later proved, referred to a Roman Emperor, but the rebellious Jews…read it as referring to themselves.”⁶

Tacitus also mentions it: he explains that

the majority were convinced that the ancient scriptures of their priests alluded to the present as the very time when the Orient would triumph and from Judaea would go forth men destined to rule the world. This mysterious prophecy really referred to Vespasian and Titus, but the common people…thought that this mighty destiny was reserved for them, and not even their calamities opened their eyes to the truth.⁷

Then Nero was murdered. After him, two emperors came and went in quick succession. Finally, in A.D. 69, Vespasian was proclaimed emperor by his army. He called off the siege of Jerusalem in order to concentrate on his power base and shore up his imperial ambitions. He wanted, above all, to dominate Egypt. Luckily, his supporter and friend, the Jewish general Tiberius Alexander, was prefect of Egypt and in charge of the two legions stationed there. Vespasian wrote to Tiberius Alexander explaining his desire to seek the imperial throne; Tiberius Alexander read the letter aloud to all, then called for troops and civilians to swear an oath to Vespasian. Omens had foretold Vespasian’s reign, and he “specially remembered the words of Josephus, who while Nero was still alive had dared to address him as Emperor.”⁸ Josephus was immediately released from captivity. Vespasian put his son Titus in charge of the army, and Titus appointed Tiberius Alexander as his chief of staff.

As a Jew, Tiberius Alexander would have been well aware of the “Star” prophecy, so it is conceivable that he contrived to apply it to Vespasian. The Roman historian Dio Cassius reports that while Vespasian was in Alexandria he was said to have healed a blind man and another man with a crippled hand; both had been told in a dream to approach Vespasian.⁹ Long ago, the great scholar Robert Eisler suggested that only Tiberius Alexander, with his knowledge of Jewish prophecy and his desire to see the triumph of Vespasian, would have thought to manipulate circumstances so that the prophecy of Isaiah would come true—the prophecy that states the day when God heals the earth, the day when “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unsealed, then the lame shall leap like a deer” (Isaiah 35:5-6). Only Tiberius Alexander, Eisler noted, would have contrived to send the blind man and the cripple to Vespasian so that he could perform his “messianic miracle.”¹⁰

Tiberius Alexander would also have been aware of another part of the prophecies of Isaiah—the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Isaiah wrote that God said: “I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard…knock down its wall for it to be trampled on.” Two verses later, he explained, “Yes, the vineyard…is the House of David” (Isaiah 5:5, 7). For Tiberius Alexander, Vespasian was the messiah. Josephus agreed, writing, “In fact the oracle pointed to the accession of Vespasian.”¹¹ To both these Romanized Jews, Vespasian was the messiah who had been foretold long ago in their sacred scriptures. For both, the Line of David was as defunct as the Temple was soon to be.

Nevertheless, Vespasian must have felt that even if the prophecy were true, he had a shaky hold over the identification since he certainly hadn’t descended “from Jacob.” There was no blood from the Line of David coursing through his veins. So, after he had won the war and destroyed Jerusalem, he sought out all surviving members of the Line of David and executed them. Vespasian respected the power of the oracle and was not about to take any chances. He wanted “to ensure that no member of the royal house should be left among the Jews.”¹² But as history would later reveal, a number of the members of that ancient royal house had escaped his clutches.

With all this talk of stars, it is inevitable that we should address the Star of Bethlehem. The star is the messianic symbol of the Line of David. The Star of Bethlehem can also be termed “the Messiah of Bethlehem.” This would suggest that we need not look for astronomical supernovae or stellar conjunctions to explain the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem, a stronghold of the Line of David. It was a matter of dynasty rather than astronomy. And the Magi knew where to go to find their king.

But there has always been a mystery over the story of Joseph and Mary taking the infant Jesus from Bethlehem to Egypt to escape Herod—as noted by Matthew. Luke explains that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, having been taken there as a member of the Line of David for the census. The only census known was that of Quirinius in A.D. 6, after Rome had taken over Judaea. But this is always thought of as too late for Jesus’s birth because the Gospels put him at around thirty years old at his crucifixion.

However, these calculations do not work very well and do not match the data given in the Gospels. Hugh Schonfield proposed a very provocative alternative.

The usual date for the crucifixion is given, with the Vatican’s imprimatur by a chronological table at the end of The Jerusalem Bible, as on the eve of the Passover, 8 April A.D. 30.¹³ The reasoning is this: John’s Gospel contains some rather precise dating, citing the first Passover following Jesus’s baptism as that of A.D. 28 (John 2:13, 20).¹⁴ John mentions two more Passovers, the third of which sees the crucifixion, which thus must have occurred before the Passover of A.D. 30. Can this be correct?

We have only two sources of hard data beyond the New Testament. First, Tacitus states that “Christ had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor…Pontius Pilate.”¹⁵ We know that Pilate was prefect of Judaea from A.D. 26 to 36, so that gives us a range within which we must stay. Second, although Josephus mentions the same incident, there is no general agreement that his passages mentioning Christ are original rather than later insertions by Christian editors.

The Gospel of Luke (3:1, 23) states that Jesus was about thirty years old at the time of his baptism by John, and this was after the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (as calculated in Syria)—A.D. 27. But he was baptized not long before John the Baptist was executed, and after John’s death the Gospel of Matthew (14:13) describes Jesus as seeking refuge in the desert, perhaps fearing for his own life. What then was the date of the execution? It could not have been A.D. 27, for Matthew and Mark report that John the Baptist was arrested by Herod Antipas for criticizing his marriage to Herodias—the wife of his brother, whom she had divorced —a marriage outlawed by Jewish law and also by one of the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Temple Scroll.¹⁶ Following this public criticism, John was executed. So far as can be ascertained, the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias took place in A.D. 35. Hence, John the Baptist was executed in A.D. 35. So Jesus must still have been alive at this date.

The last Passover attended by Pilate was A.D. 36. In other words, since Jesus is said in the Gospels to have been executed after John the Baptist’s death and by the decision of Pilate, it must have been the Passover of A.D. 36 during which Jesus was crucified.¹⁷ This is later than most experts have placed the event, but if Jesus was born at the time of the census in A.D. 6, as stated by Luke (2:2), and if he was aged about thirty, A.D. 36 is just about the right time of the crucifixion—the crucifixion of the “Star of Bethlehem.”

In fact, early Christians were well aware of the connection between the messianic “Star of Bethlehem,” the prophecy of the “Star” as relayed by Balaam in Numbers, and Jesus. The Christian writer Justin Martyr, who taught and wrote in Rome and died in approximately A.D. 165, argued with a Jewish teacher, Trypho, that Jesus was the messiah. Justin explained that the rising of the Star of Bethlehem was the rising star predicted by Balaam; again we can see that the star was messianic rather than astronomical.¹⁸

Faced with the inevitability of total destruction, many fled Judaea. The Church historian Eusebius reports that the early “Christian” community—that is, the messianic community—after the execution of James around A.D. 44 and before the outbreak of war, left Jerusalem for Pella across the Jordan in Roman-controlled Syria.¹⁹ But this was probably the first stage on a longer journey north to Edessa, the capital of a kingdom that is described by Eusebius as being the first ever to convert to Christianity.²⁰ It is certainly true that by the second century A.D. Edessa was a strong Christian center. It cannot be a coincidence that the king of Edessa in the early second century was the son of a king of Abiadene (a state that lay a little to the east), part of a royal family with close links to the messianic Jewish cause. In fact, Queen Helen of Abiadene and her son converted to Judaism.²¹ Moreover, we know for sure that her son converted to messianic Judaism—in other words, to the Zealot cause.²² This alliance was maintained by others as well. At least two relatives of the king of Abiadene were prominent Zealots in the opening battles of the revolt against the Romans in A.D. 66.²³

Still, there were Jews who remained in Judaea who opposed the Zealots. In Jerusalem, Zealot factions began fighting other Jewish factions. Many deserted to the Roman side—according to Josephus at least, though we must remember that he had a strong reason to accentuate this fact, as he strongly believed the Zealots were responsible for the war and the destruction of the Temple. Despite his bias, he may well be right, given what we now know about the ruthless determination of the Zealots. Nevertheless, the fury of the fighting was such that we have to conclude that support for the Zealots was widespread and that Josephus was at pains to diminish it. For one thing, there was the business of the suicides.

Running constantly throughout Josephus’s accounts is talk of Zealots, soldiers and civilians alike, committing suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Romans. The most famous case is that of the mass suicide at Masada, where 960 people killed themselves. The ideology was widespread; armed resistance to Roman rule was a corollary. Even Josephus was involved in a suicide pact—which he managed, by treachery, to survive. But there were also accounts such as the one at Gamala, where five thousand people killed themselves. To kill yourself is one thing; however, to kill your wife, your children, and then yourself is something much greater. What was going on here?

The Zealots believed that if they died in a state of ritual purity, they would be resurrected together in accordance with the prophecy of Ezekiel: “I mean to raise you from your graves…and lead you back to the soil of Israel” (Ezekiel 37:12-14).²⁴ Further, they believed that those who died together would be resurrected together. So the Zealot warriors chose not just to die but to die in the company of their family. Had they been captured, they would have been separated, and the women and boys would have been dispatched to the brothels, where they would have lost their ritual purity, preventing them from any hope of resurrection.²⁵

Jerusalem was besieged by the legions of Titus. Little mutual respect or chivalry was evident on either side. All fighters captured were crucified, and when that became commonplace, the soldiers amused themselves by nailing up their victims in various strange attitudes. So many were executed that the Romans ran out of room for the crosses and ran out of wood to make them.

On 29 August A.D. 70, and in line with the prophecy of Isaiah, the Temple was destroyed in a display of butchery without restraint. Over the following days the rest of the city was taken. Once the Romans held Jerusalem, they burned the remaining houses and tore down the defensive walls. The city was completely destroyed. All captured fighters were slated to be executed, civilians over seventeen were sent to labor in Egypt, and those younger were sold. Great numbers of the fighters were reserved for death in the Roman arenas. Many were exported to the Roman provinces to die as gladiators or to be torn to pieces by wild animals, to the delight of idle crowds; others were taken by Titus on his leisurely march up the coast. At every town he held displays in the arena where his Jewish prisoners were set upon by animals or forced to die in large battles for the spectators’ entertainment.

During the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian had been traveling, showing himself as emperor. He returned after the fall of the city and shortly after his return celebrated his brother’s birthday with the death of over 2,500 Jewish prisoners in the arena. Later, in Beirut, he celebrated his father’s birthday with even more deaths. All the while he was planning his triumphal entry to Rome bearing treasures and prisoners, including some of the leaders of the revolt whom he would have executed. The times were harsh.

For the Jewish people, this was a disaster of such a magnitude that even they, having once stood amid the smoking ruins of their Temple, could not even begin to comprehend it. In a religious sense, it was a second exile; the Temple, the House of God, the central bulwark of their religion, was gone. Jerusalem itself was lost too; Jews were not even allowed into the city, which had been renamed Aelia Capitolina. It seemed as if God had abandoned them. All around the world anti-Jewish feeling mounted, and rioting and killing destroyed the influence, power, and respect that Jewish merchants, philosophers, and politicians had once held. Even well-established communities suffered a terminal decline as tens of thousands were killed, and so those who had managed to survive kept their heads down. Some sicarii were able to flee to Alexandria, where they foolishly tried to encourage anti-Roman strife. So determined were they that they murdered some prominent members of the Jewish community who opposed them. In retaliation, the Jewish community rounded up the sicarii and gave them over to the Romans, who tortured them to death.

A small flame flickered on, however, in the town of Jabneh on the coastal plains of Judaea. There, under Johanan ben Zakkai, a leading Pharisee who had escaped Jerusalem and had requested rule of the town from Vespasian, the Sanhedrin was re-formed and a school was established. It was there that rabbinical Judaism was born. This significant favor from the emperor reveals that Johanan, like Josephus, was prepared to reach an accommodation with the invaders—something the Zealots had refused to do. Furthermore, Johanan is reported to have also proclaimed that the messianic “Star” prophecy referred to Vespasian.²⁶

The scholars at Jabneh revived the halakhah—the legal side of Judaism comprising the law handed to Moses on Mount Sinai and the interpretation of the law that had been handed down through the ages—the study of which was crucial in a Judaism without the Temple. Between A.D. 70 and 132, after the destruction of Jerusalem, Jabneh served as the capital of the Jewish administration as well as the center of Judaism and Jewish scholarship. There the canon of texts in the Bible—the Old Testament to Christians—was fixed. This centralization of the faith helped establish some sense of national unity after the terrible destructions wrought by the war.

However, resistance continued, in small but important ways. Jewish prisoners were put to work as slaves, laboring on building projects, making weapons for the army, striking coins for the administration. The coins that were struck this time all emphasized the humiliation of Judaea. Some had iudaea capta—which means “Judaea Conquered”—on one side and a soldier, a palm tree, and a sorrowful figure representing Judaea on the other side. Other coins featured Vespasian with his imperial titles, including P.M. for Pontifex Maximus, or High Priest. And still others included the words victoria aug[ustus]—meaning “Victory of the Sacred Emperor.” They were a constant reminder for the Jewish population of their total subjugation. But one hardy Jewish slave working in the Roman mint had other ideas.

Once, while I was visiting a dealer in Middle Eastern antiquities, he said, with a slight smile, “Look at this,” and handed me a coin from one of his cabinets. It was a coin issued by the Roman mint of Vespasian, but this coin had one difference: on the palm tree side it had been struck iudaea august—“Sacred Judaea.” A brave or foolhardy Jewish slave had mixed the striking punches. I turned the coin over; it had been struck with the head of Vespasian as usual. But there was a difference on this side too—a prominent dent had been smashed into the temple of Vespasian’s head by a rounded punch. The point had very literally been made.

This is the only such coin ever found. It remains in a private collection.

In the summer of A.D. 115, the Jews outside of Judaea—especially those in Cyrene, Libya, and Alexandria, Egypt—rose in revolt. This insurrection then spread up the Nile to many other towns in Egypt. Vespasian might have tried to destroy all the members of the Line of David, but he had failed. Another descendant appeared in Egypt. His name was Lucuas, and he was described as the king of the Jews. He was the man who led the revolt.²⁷ This uprising too had a definite messianic orientation.²⁸ It implies that Lucuas very likely had, or claimed, a Davidic descent, but yet we know very little about the events because there was no historian equivalent to Josephus to write about them. It was a brutal two years of which we only know the outcome. This revolt entirely destroyed the position of Jews in Egypt. After this time they no longer had any power, influence, or even harmony. What’s more, the Romans took a very strong view of this revolt. Egypt was supremely important to the empire, and a successful coup there could have held Rome ransom. Ceasing shipments of grain to Italy from Egypt could have caused the Italian people to starve. Rome could never allow such a danger to exist. In response, the revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. At its end, in August 117, there had been a comprehensive destruction of the Jewish community in Alexandria.²⁹ And in all the rest of Egypt, the cost to Judaism was mounting.

But the Jews had not yet given up hope that they might regain their independence, either through military prowess or from divine intervention—or both. Almost sixty years after the destruction of the Temple, during the rule of the emperor Hadrian, a second attempt to buck Roman authority was made.

This attempt had been well planned over a long period of time. The strategy needed to be developed in great secrecy. So a network of underground bases was constructed in subterranean caverns both natural and man-made. At least six such sites have been found in the Judaean foothills; one at Ailabo in Galilee had a purposefully excavated cavern beneath the ground sixty-five meters long, with vents in the roof that let in light and air.³⁰ Places such as this served for both planning and training. Those in charge knew that they had to avoid the mistakes of the earlier war, in which the Zealots had allowed themselves to be trapped behind the defensive walls of towns and cities only to be picked off and destroyed, one by one, by Roman armies that were masters of siege-craft. This time they intended to attack the Romans fast and hard and then disappear back into their underground redoubts just as swiftly; they saw mobility as the key to victory.

It is important to note that this time the Jewish fighters were united under a single strong leader named Simon Bar Koseba, later to become known as Bar Kochba—“the Son of the Star,” revealing his messianic status. He too had the prophecy from Numbers 24 applied to him (“a star from Jacob takes the leadership, a sceptre arises from Israel”), and so, it would seem, he must also have carried the royal blood of David in his veins. Professor Robert Eisenman, a historian of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is intrigued by the possibility that Simon was related not just “figuratively but physically” to earlier messianic leaders in Judaea.³¹

Bar Kochba recruited military experts from overseas. Lists of names in Greek have been found, each name carrying the title Adelphos, or “Brother,” like the later chivalric orders such as the Templars or the Knights of St. John.³² Here were men with military experience who had come from the Jewish diaspora beyond Judaea where Greek was spoken and Aramaic or Hebrew unknown. These same men either served on the planning staff or, by virtue of their experience with the Roman forces, helped with the training of the secret Jewish army.

Bar Kochba knew that his men were facing the best disciplined army in the world with a potential manpower far exceeding his own: it has been estimated that the Roman standing army topped 375,000 well-trained men. There were two legions in Judaea, the Sixth and the Tenth, providing roughly 12,000 men together with an equal number of auxiliaries. Additionally, in the surrounding Roman provinces of Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, there were another five to seven legions and auxiliaries. The Jews could, at the most, raise 60,000 men, none of whom would have had military experience. Training was a necessity, and Bar Kochba devoted much time and effort to it.

He and his men needed weapons. So they devised an inventive way of ensuring a supply that is described by the Roman historian Dio Cassius, writing from A.D. 194 to 216. Because many or most of the workers in the arms industry in Judaea were Jewish, “they purposely did not forge up to standard those weapons which they had been ordered to furnish, so that the Romans might reject them, and they might thus have use of them themselves.”³³

The war broke out in A.D. 131 and was immediately successful. Roman civilians fled Jerusalem and the Tenth Legion retreated. The Twenty-second Legion from Egypt is unaccounted for in the military records of the time. It is assumed that it was rushed from its base in Egypt to Judaea but was there overwhelmed and totally annihilated. Jerusalem was recaptured from the Romans, its walls were repaired, and a Jewish civilian administration was established. For almost two years Judaea was free of Romans. But, of course, the Romans were gathering soldiers in order to return with overwhelming force.

This time Hadrian himself was in command. With him was the former governor of Britain, Julius Severus, whom he considered the finest of all his generals. In A.D. 133, nine, perhaps twelve, Roman legions and auxiliaries drawn from as far away as Britain—some sixty thousand to eighty thousand soldiers—invaded Galilee from the west and from across the Jordan river in the east. But they found it tough going. The Jewish fighters mounted a very flexible defense. The former high-ranking army officer Professor Mordechai Gichon wrote of Bar Kochba’s long-term strategy: “The tangible Jewish hope lay in drawing out the war long enough to bait hostile forces from within and without, to take up arms, and to exhaust the Roman will to win this war at any cost.”³⁴ But they lost. Simon Bar Kochba was killed in the summer of A.D. 135 while defending the town of Bethar. His great campaign was over.

Hadrian, wanting to eradicate Judaea from memory, changed the name of Judaea to Palaestina (now Palestine). But two generations later, the population was finally granted considerable autonomy—including being excused from “any duty that clashes with the observance of their religious rules and beliefs.”³⁵

It seems that the Romans still recalled the rivers of blood that their reconquest of Judaea had cost. And it still hurt.

I became friendly with Mordechai Gichon in Israel during a period when I was regularly involved in archaeological work with Robert Eisenman and his team from California State University in Long Beach. Gichon’s extensive knowledge of Bar Kochba fascinated me, and he was intrigued and interested by the thesis in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which he had read. He once took me—along with some of the students and volunteers helping our excavation efforts at the Dead Sea—to visit one of the last Bar Kochba fortresses to be taken by the Roman troops. It was a forlorn ruin near Emmaus in the Judaean foothills, halfway between Jerusalem and the coast. It had never been excavated, and Professor Gichon wanted the chance to do so. I was soon to find out why.

Under the stone-paved platform of the fortress was a warren of tunnels. After the fall of the fortress to the Romans, the defenders retreated to these tunnels, which we crawled along on our hands and knees. They would have been able to hear the Romans talking just a few feet above them. A curiosity of the site lay in the design of the cisterns: those supplying the fortress were accessible from above through a hole in the paved platform, rather like a well. But these cisterns were roughly circular and bulbous, that is, water stretched beyond the access hole for some yards underneath the paved platform. The tunnels beneath allowed the former defenders access to the edge of the bulbous cisterns out of sight of the Romans so that they were able to live beneath the fortress for some weeks, drawing water without the Romans suspecting their presence. But their main refuge was even deeper in the hill, in underground tunnels reached by only one entrance from the upper level of tunnels. The Bar Kochba fighters and their families would probably have come up only to draw water.

When the Romans finally discovered what was happening beneath their feet, they filled the cisterns with stones, destroying the water source. Then they broke into the tunnel complex and crawled in seeking to destroy the Bar Kochba fighters who had fled down to the deeper levels.

Gichon asked me to follow him as he crawled along ahead of me through the claustrophobic tunnels. We then reached one that turned down into the rocky hillside at a steep angle. It had been sealed up with stone and mortar.

“The Romans sealed this up permanently,” he explained to me. He paused for a moment. “This tunnel has never been opened. All the defenders are still down there.”

It took me a moment to realize the magnitude of what he was saying. And then I was struck by the scene of tragedy and horror that would await the first archaeologist to remove the stonework and crawl down into the tunnel. I have never forgotten that small bricked-up entrance to the refuge that, in a few minutes almost 1,900 years ago, became a sealed tomb for the living.

This, then, was the world within which Jesus, his followers, and at least the first of his later biographers lived. It was also the world out of which Christianity emerged. And it is the connection between these two parts of that world that is so contentious. It was, as we have seen, a time when belief was everything and the wrong belief in the wrong context could bring a sudden death, either from the Romans via crucifixion or from the zealous Sicarii via lethal dagger.

Few of these events have found their way into the Gospels. Instead of history, our New Testament gives us a sanitized, censored, and often inverted view of the times. But even those who brought us the New Testament were unable to entirely cut away the world in which their characters moved. Jesus was born and spent his formative years in the era of the early Zealot movement. When he began his ministry around the age of thirty, some of his closest followers were known to be members of this messianic movement, a movement in which Jesus was born to play an important role. In the New Testament, we can see the arguments against the Romans, and we can pick up a dulled sense of the violence that permeated the era—a sense that sharpens, of course, when we reach the end of the story with the crucifixion of Jesus.

But this crucifixion in their telling has quite deliberately had its political context expunged. This is proof that later censors made a concerted attempt to separate Jesus and his life from the historical times in which he was born, lived, and died—however he eventually met his death. In so doing, these later censors did something far more pernicious: they removed Jesus from his Jewish context. And today a large number of Christians remain completely unaware that Jesus was never a Christian; he was born, and lived, a Jew.

A generation after the crucifixion of Jesus—or, at least, the removal of him from the scene—Jerusalem and the Temple were lost to Judaism. The faith was instead centered upon the rabbinical school at Jabneh. At the same time began the manipulation of Jesus’s story that ultimately created a tradition centered upon Jesus rather than upon God. This was a point upon which many early chroniclers did not agree but one that would eventually take over all alternative explanations. The Jewish origins of Jesus became subsumed within an increasingly influential pagan context introduced by converts to Christianity from among the Greeks and Romans. This pagan influence drew Christianity and its view of Jesus a long way from Judaism in the succeeding centuries.

The audience for the Christian message had clearly changed: it was no longer intended for Jews but rather addressed pagans—believers in gods and goddesses like Mithras, Dionysius, Isis, and Demeter—and as such it needed to be presented in a new package, one laced with an anti-Jewish flavor. The field was ripe for the reinterpretation of history and the beginning of the triumph of the artificial “Jesus of faith” over the true “Jesus of history”—a man who spoke of God, who expressed a divine message, but who did not himself claim to be God.

In what is probably a true miracle, one of the Gospels, while creating a distance between Jesus and his Jewish context, still maintains elements of the Jesus of history and the inclusiveness of his teaching on divinity:

The Jews fetched stones to stone him, so Jesus said to them, “I have done many good works for you to see…for which of these are you stoning me?” The Jews answered him, “We are not stoning you for doing a good work but for blasphemy: you are only a man and you claim to be God.” Jesus answered, “Is it not written in your Law: I said, you are gods? So the Law uses the word gods of those to whom the word of God was addressed.” (John 10:31-35)

Between the time these words were spoken and committed to writing, perhaps near the end of the first century A.D., Jesus had been made a Christian. And to be a Christian meant to follow teachings far removed from those of Judaism. This is clearly evident in a recorded dialogue between the second-century church father Justin Martyr and a Jewish teacher named Trypho. The latter makes the very reasonable point that “those who affirm [Jesus] to have been a man, and to have been anointed by election, and then to have become Christ, appear to me to speak more plausibly.”³⁶ To further his point he poses a challenge to Justin: “Answer me then, first, how you can show that there is another God besides the Maker of all things; and then you will show, [further,] that He submitted to be born of the Virgin.”³⁷

Leaving aside the particulars of the debate and Justin’s responses—ambiguous and weak, according to Trypho—what is clear is that a distance had evolved between the two religions that was now unbridgeable. There was little point of compromise left among those who were marching resolutely into that horizon that would become Christian orthodoxy. For Justin, only belief in Christ mattered, and such belief could bring salvation to anyone, “even although they neither keep the Sabbath, nor are circumcised, nor observe the feasts.”³⁸

As we can see, the Jewish law had been left far behind—along with the true history of Jesus.

JUDAEA, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY

Before 4 B.C. | Birth of Jesus, according to Matthew’s Gospel (2:1).
4 B.C. | Death of Herod the Great.
A.D. 6 | Birth of Jesus, according to Luke’s Gospel (2:1-7). Census of Quirinius, Governor of Syria.
A.D. 27-28 | Baptism of Jesus (traditional date) in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius (Luke 3:1-23).
A.D. 30 | Crucifixion of Jesus, according to Catholic scholarship.
c. A.D. 35 | Following the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias in c. A.D. 34, John the Baptist is executed, following the evidence in Josephus.
A.D. 36 | Passover—crucifixion of Jesus, according to Matthew’s timetable.
A.D. 36-37 | Conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus.
c. A.D. 44 | Execution of James, the brother of Jesus.
A.D. 50-52 | Paul in Corinth. Writes his first letter (to the Thessalonians).
A.D. 61 | Paul in Rome under house arrest.
c. A.D. 65 | Paul supposedly executed.
A.D. 66-73 | War in Judaea. The Roman army under Vespasian invades Judaea.
c. A.D. 55-120 | Life of Tacitus, Roman historian and senator, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 61-c. 114 | Life of Pliny the Younger, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 115 | Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, quotes from letters of Paul.
c. A.D. 117-138 | Suetonius, Roman historian, mentions “Chrestus.”
c. A.D. 125 | Earliest known example of a Christian gospel, John 18: 31-33, Rylands Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c. A.D. 200 | Oldest known fragment of Paul’s letters, Chester Beatty Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c. A.D. 200 | Oldest virtually complete gospel (John’s), Bodmer Papyrus, found in Egypt.
A.D. 325 | Council of Nicaea is convened by the Roman emperor Constantine. The divinity of Jesus is made official dogma by a vote of 217 to 3.
A.D. 393-397 | Council of Hippo, formalizing the New Testament, is finalized at Council of Carthage.

THE SECOND CENTURY

c. A.D. 55-120 | Life of Tacitus, Roman historian and senator, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 61-c. 114 | Life of Pliny the Younger, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 115 | Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, quotes from letters of Paul.
A.D. 115 | Revolt in Alexandria is led by Lucuas, the “King of the Jews.” The Jewish community in Egypt is destroyed.
c. A.D. 117-138 | Writing years of Suetonius, Roman historian, who mentions “Chrestus.”
c. A.D. 120 | The Gnostic teacher Valentinus is educated in Alexandria.
A.D. 131-135 | Simon Bar Kochba leads revolt in Judaea.
A.D. 133 | Nine to twelve Roman legions invade Judaea from the north.
A.D. 135 | Jewish forces are defeated. The Roman emperor Hadrian changes the name of Judaea to Palaestina (now Palestine).
c. A.D. 135 | The Christian theologian Justin Martyr argues with the Jewish intellectual Trypho.
c. A.D. 140 | Marcion arrives in Rome and begins teaching. He rejects the Old Testament and uses only Luke’s Gospel and some of Paul’s letters.
c. A.D. 150 | First Christian writers begin to condemn the Gnostics.
A.D. 154 | Justin Martyr names Simon Magus (mid-first-century A.D.) the source of all heresies.
c. A.D. 180 | Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, writes against the Gnostics. Produces the first list of texts for a canonical New Testament.
c. A.D. 195 | Clement, bishop of Alexandria, writes about the secret Gospel of Mark and against the Gnostics, but maintains a sympathy for the secrets, mysteries, and initiations within Alexandrian Christianity.
c. A.D. 197 | Tertullian converts to Christianity; is militantly opposed to heresy and to women in leadership roles in the Church.

5 Creating the Jesus of Faith

Modern Christian illustrations depict the popular image of Jesus wandering around ancient Israel—the sun gilding his blond hair yet never burning his fair skin. They portray him as a Christian missionary accompanied by his disciples, some of whom were already scribbling down their Gospels in order to record the sacred words of a living god.

We have already pointed out the obvious flaw in this picture: Jesus was a Jew. He was a dark Palestinian, not a fair northern European. But there is another profound error in this image, one equally significant but less well known: there was no such thing as a gospel at the time, let alone a “New Testament”; there was no “Christianity.” The sacred books that Jesus and his disciples used were those of Judaism—as is immediately apparent to anyone who reads the New Testament and notes how familiar Jesus was with the Judaic scriptures, the ease with which he quoted from them, and the assumption of familiarity on the part of his audience—presuming, of course, that the events depicted in the Gospels actually happened.

Because we’ve always been told with such confidence that the various Gospels had been written by the latter part of the first century A.D., it is a surprise to discover that there wasn’t a New Testament in existence at the beginning of the second century A.D. Or even by the end of that century, although by that time some theologians, nervous about what they considered to be the “truth,” were attempting to create one. Despite these theologians’ best efforts, Christians had to wait almost two more centuries for an agreed-upon text. So what was it that they were really waiting for?

This delay in arriving at an official collection of Christian texts calls into serious question the widespread Christian belief over the last 1,500 years that every word in the New Testament is a faithful transmission from God himself. To an independent observer, it seems more likely not only that the New Testament was deliberately imposed upon a god who was actually quite happy with a wide expression of teachings, but that it was deliberately imposed by a group of people who wished to control the divine expression for their own profit and power.

The delay, as it happens, occurred while the theology was catching up with the demand for a centralized orthodoxy. Until key decisions were made with regard to the divinity of Jesus, the leaders of the Church lacked the officially sanctioned criteria by which to choose the texts designed to represent their newly created religion.

Even more crucially, many people today consider the New Testament texts sacrosanct. They believe them to be the divine words of God written as the only means by which we might be saved, words that cannot be changed or taken in any other way than literally. No one has ever told them that this was not the intention of the early compilers of the traditions about Jesus that make up the collection. In fact, for the first 150 years of the Christian tradition the only authoritative writings were those books now called the “Old Testament.”¹

A good example of the early attitude toward scripture is given by the second-century Christian writer Justin Martyr. For him our so-called Gospels were simply memoirs of the various apostles that could be read in church and used in support of the faith but were never considered as “Holy Scripture.” The term “Holy Scripture” was reserved for the books of the law and the prophets—that is, the Old Testament. Bluntly, Justin Martyr “never considers the ‘Gospels’ or the ‘Memoirs of the Apostles’ as inspired writings.”² Justin reached the pinnacle of sainthood, but his position would be considered radical if held by any member of the Christian Church today.

It is certainly true, however, that during the later first century and the entire second century A.D., traditions about Jesus began to be recorded. Sayings and stories about the events of his life were collected, but none were deemed the official or authorized collection at that time. It is also true that the texts that now appear in our New Testament were written in that span. During the late first and second centuries A.D., the whole concept of “Christianity” crystallized out of messianic Judaism, and this leads us immediately to a number of logistical challenges, some of them quite radical.

A curious phenomenon began in the second century B.C.: the Aramaic word meshiha—messiah—which is otherwise devoid of any explanation, began to be used as the name of the true ruler of Israel. In particular, it denoted the expected king of the royal Line of David.³ A general hope that a descendant of King David would arrive found expression in the books of the prophets in the Old Testament. Thus, the Christian use of the term christos, or “Christ,” a Greek translation of the Aramaic meshiha, along with the transliteration into Greek Messias—now “messiah”—came from a Jewish context and usage that was already well understood by Jesus’s day.⁴

The most radical logistical challenge is answering a charge that has regularly been made, particularly over the last 150 years: that Jesus didn’t exist at all and the stories about him are simply tales of various messianic leaders that were later gathered together in order to justify, first a Pauline position, and later, a Roman-centered tradition wherein the Jewish messiah was turned into a deified imperial figure, a kind of royal angel. William Horbury, reader in Jewish and Early Christian Studies at Cambridge University, recently noted, “A cult of angels…accompanied the development of the cult of Christ.”⁵

Can we really be sure that Jesus existed? Is there any proof of his reality beyond the New Testament? If not, if the New Testament was put together long after his time, how do we know that the whole concept of Jesus Christ is not just an ancient myth given a new spin? Perhaps it was some rewriting of the Adonis myth or the Osiris myth or the Mithras myth: all three were born of a virgin and raised from the dead—a familiar story to Christians.

There is considerable reason, according to Horbury, for seeing, within early Christianity, “a cult of Christ, comparable with the cults of Graeco-Roman heroes, sovereigns and divinities.”⁶ And as mentioned earlier, this cult was accompanied by a cult of angels. Horbury explains that it appears likely that the title given to Jesus, “Son of man,” linked him with “an angel-like messiah.”⁷ In fact, “Christ, precisely in his capacity as messiah, could be considered an angelic spirit…It seems likely that messianism formed the principal medium through which angelology impinged on nascent Christology, and that Christ, precisely as messiah, was envisaged as an angel-like spiritual being.”⁸ So are we dealing solely with an ancient myth revisited for the purposes of Christianity?

We have seen that the word “Jesus” derives simply from the Aramaic Yeshua, which can mean Joshua but also can mean “the deliverer,” the “savior.” Therefore, it could just be a title. We’ve also noted that “Christ” comes from christos, the Greek translation of the Aramaic meshiha, meaning “the anointed one.” So we are dealing with a double title: “The deliverer (or savior), the anointed one.” In that case, what was his name? We really don’t know—someone “ben David” we would assume, but that is all we can glean.

We cannot appeal to the New Testament for evidence because we have no idea how much history and how much fantasy is incorporated into the texts. And in any case, the earliest fragments we have are from the second century A.D.—around A.D. 125 for some pieces of John’s Gospel. But what about the letters of Paul? After all, they were written before the first war against the Romans. The earliest—Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians—was written while he was resident in Corinth from the winter of A.D. 50 to the summer of 52.⁹ The rest of his letters were written between A.D. 56 and 60, perhaps even later when he was in Rome and supposedly executed around A.D. 65—although no one knows the truth about this since the Book of Acts, our only source for details of Paul’s travels, breaks off with him under house arrest in Rome.

Unfortunately, we cannot be sure about the authenticity of all Paul’s letters within the New Testament either, since the earliest copies we have date from the early third century.¹⁰ In the letters written in A.D. 115 by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, on his way to Rome, he quotes from various letters of Paul, so we know that some were in existence by this time, but we do not know whether they might have been edited, before or after. In any case, Paul did not know Jesus, and unlike the Gospels, he did not show any great concern about what Jesus may have said or done. We get no information about Jesus from Paul, whose letters proclaim the gospel of, well, Paul: that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus marked the beginning of a new age in the history of the world, the most immediate practical effect being the end of the Jewish law—quite a different stance to that taken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17).

No records from Pilate have survived either; there are also no records from Herod, and no records from the Roman military or other administrative bodies. But this is not surprising, as the records office of the Herodian kings in Jerusalem was burned during the war. The official Roman records would have been in their administrative capital, Caesarea, and it too was caught up in the fighting. Copies and reports would have gone back to Rome, but even if they survived the various destructions by later emperors like Domitian, they would have been lost in the sack of Rome by the Goths in A.D. 405, when so many official archives were destroyed—those that had not been taken to Constantinople. Of course, by that time Rome was Christian, and so we can be certain that any documents that compromised the developing story of Christ would have already been extracted and destroyed. And there is good reason to think that Pilate’s reports would have been among such documents.

But all is not lost: Josephus certainly had access to Roman records, and if Jesus had been mentioned, he would have been able to read of him. In fact, Josephus does mention Jesus, but in such a manner as to lead everyone who has looked at the text to consider it a later Christian insertion, although there is probably a kernel of truth in his discussion somewhere. But Josephus cannot help us entirely, for he has proven to be an unreliable witness and chronicler. Our other Jewish chronicler and philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, who died around A.D. 50, does not even mention Jesus. This is a curiosity for which there is no good explanation beyond taking it as evidence either for the lack of Jesus’s reality or for his irrelevance to the lives of educated Jewish Alexandrians.

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