Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus:Flavian Signature Edition (57 page)

In any event, Jesus’ advocacy of accepting one’s plight and of pacifism, were certainly principles that the Flavians would wish to have taught within rebellious Judea. If one separates from the words of Jesus the advice that was in the interest of the imperial family, all that remains are truisms, widely known philosophies, and snippets from previous Judaic writing.

My analysis suggests that what has been seen as most original about Jesus—his instruction to love one’s enemy—was the aspect of his ministry that was most evil. In particular, volumes have been written about the possible meaning of Jesus’ instruction to “give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God’s”, but since the authors of the New Testament considered God and Caesar one and the same, Jesus is, in effect, saying give everything to Caesar.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls were found fragments of a work entitled
The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs—
a work that had been previously known to scholars only in Greek, Latin, or Ethiopic translations, and had been assumed to be an apocryphal early Christian text. Its discovery among the Scrolls poses problems for Christianity, especially in light of the fact that whoever wrote the Pauline Epistles had clearly used it as a source. There are over seventy words common to the
Testaments
and the Pauline Epistles that are not found in the rest of the New Testament, a fact discovered by Dr. R. H. Charles and noted in his edition of the
Testaments.
The implication is, of course, that the authors of the Pauline Epistles were using earlier Jewish source material to create their work.

The most important parallel is between Matthew 25:35–36 and the passage from the Testament of Joseph 1:8-14. It appears that either the former is a copy of the latter or that both were derived from a common source. In the
Testaments
, the order of the common words is
hunger, alone, sick, prison
and in Matthew
hunger, a stranger, sick, prison.

I was sold into slavery, and the Lord of all made me free:

I was taken into captivity and His strong hand succored me.

I was beset with hunger, and the Lord himself nourished me.

I was alone and God comforted me:

I was sick, and the Lord visited me:

I was in prison, and the Lord showed favor to me:

In bonds, and he released me.

Testament of Joseph 1:8-14

For I was hungry and you gave me food,

I was thirsty and you gave me drink,

I was a stranger and you welcomed me,

I was naked and you clothed me,

I was sick and you visited me,

I was in prison, and you came to me …

Matt. 25:35–36

In the version in the
Testaments
, the Lord releases the person praying, after he is sold into slavery, taken into captivity, and placed in bonds. The version in Matthew does not include these words but adds
thirsty
and
naked
. In other words, the prayer in Matthew is a version of the passage in Testament of Joseph but does not include the ideas that Rome would not have wanted. Matthew’s version is completely compatible with the teachings of the pacifist Messiah who urges his followers to turn the other cheek and to avoid even anger, let alone murder.

If literature found among the Dead Sea Scrolls was actually the inspirational theology for Judas the Galilean and his rebel movement, when we compare the differences between the two works above we are actually witnessing the Roman transformation of Judaic theology into Christianity. We are seeing the transformation word by word.

I would also point out the moral issue involved in the editing of the passages above. Not to include the prayers of slaves beseeching God to release them from their bonds is to remove from the religion its humanity.

Another example of the authors borrowing theology found with the Dead Sea Scrolls is in their description of the Messiah.  In Luke 1:32–35 we read a description of the Messiah.

… Shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever;

and of his kingdom there shall be no end …

… He shall be called holy, the Son of God.

The scrolls found at Qumran also describe a Messiah.

… Son of God he will be called and Son of the Most High they will name him … His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom … he will judge the earth in truth … The Great God … will give people into his hand and all of them will cast down before him. His sovereignty is everlasting sovereignty.
²¹⁴

In the passage from the New Testament, Luke seems to have borrowed his description of the Messiah from the depiction of the Messiah found at Qumran. However, he did not borrow the militaristic, son of David nature of that Messiah, as per the following quote from the Damascus Covenant found at Qumran:

“Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered;

“but I will turn my hand upon the little ones”.

Zechariah 13:7

Now those who hear him are the flock’s afflicted,

these will escape in the period of [God’s] visitation. But those who remain will be offered up to the sword, when the Messiah

of Aaron and Israel comes, as it was in the period of the first visitation,

as he reported by the hand of Ezekiel:

“A mark shall be put on the forehead of those who sigh and groan”.

Ezek 9:4

But those who remained were given up to the sword of vengeance, the avenger of the Covenant …
¹³

The Jesus in the New Testament is a tax-paying pacifist. As the Messiah was defined in the New Testament he was a savior with Roman values, not the values of the followers of the militant Judaism found in the scrolls.  In fact, he called the Jews that he was purportedly preaching to, the “wicked generation” (Matt. 12:39, 45).

Christianity was created to be an alternative to the type of rebellious Judaism that swept across Judea in the first century C.E. At the time, there were individuals who were converting to the militaristic Judaism, and it was for them that Christianity was meant to be an alternative. Josephus has actually provided a description of these individuals. Notice he identifies them as the “wicked generation.”

… nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, from the beginning of the world.

… They confessed what was true, that they were  the  slaves,  the  scum, and  the  spurious  and  abortive  offspring  of  our  nation …
²¹⁵

Josephus describes the Jewish rebels as slaves and scum. Christianity was developed to compete with militaristic Judaism for the faith of these people, to prevent the militant brand of messianic Judaism from spreading to them. It is clear, therefore, that the religion that was the basis of Western morality was invented for the pacification of slaves.

CHAPTER 15
 
The Apostles and the Maccabees

My analysis revealed that the Apostles John and Simon in the New Testament were lampoons of Jewish militants described by Josephus, which turned these leaders of the Jewish rebellion into Christians. I therefore attempted to determine if other distortions of history, either in the New Testament or
Wars of the Jews,
had been used in the creation of Christianity. The first thing that struck me after beginning this inquiry, was that there were simply too many characters in both works with the names Simon, John, Judas, Eleazar (Lazarus), Matthias (Matthew), Joseph, Mary, and Jesus.

If you consult the Dictionary of Scripture Proper Names in
Webster’s Unabridged
, you will find hundreds of Hebrew first names. Notably, in both Josephus and the New Testament, the same few Jewish names proliferate. In
Wars of the Jews
there are nine Eleazars, three Jacobs (Jameses), six Jesuses, five Matthiases (Matthews), one Mary, four Mariammes, eight Johns, seven Josephs, ten Judases, and thirteen Simons. In the New Testament the same pattern occurs: there are seven Marys, nine Simons, two Johns, two Josephs, four Judases, two Lazaruses (Eleazars), two Matthiases (Matthews), two Jameses, and, at the minimum, three Jesuses. From the standpoint of probability, it is unlikely that this set of names would even overlap in two works that have so few named characters, let alone with this many duplications.

I suspected that the authors of the New Testament and the works of Josephus had deliberately used these particular names over and over. But if these particular names were used deliberately, what was the intent?

The answer lies in the fact that this same set of names was known to have been used by a third group, the Maccabees, the family that ruled Israel during the first and second centuries B.C.E., until they were replaced by the Romans with Herod. Within that family are found the same names that are so overused by Josephus and the New Testament. The founder of the dynasty was Matthias (Matthew), who had five sons named Simon, Judas, John, Eleazar (Lazarus), and Jonathan.

NOW at this time there was one whose name was Matthias, who dwelt at Modin, the son of John, the son of Simeon, the son of Asamoneus, a priest of the order of Joarib, and a citizen of Jerusalem.

He had five sons; John, who was called Gaddis, and Simon, who was called Matthes, and Judas, who was called Maccabeus, and Eleazar, who was called Auran, and Jonathan, who was called Apphus.

Now this Matthias lamented to his children the sad state of their affairs, and the ravage made in the city, and the plundering of the temple, and the calamities the multitude were under; and he told them that it was better for them to die for the laws of their country, than to live so ingloriously as they then did.
²¹⁶

Josephus also claims to be an ancestor of the Maccabees, by way of a daughter of Simon, son of Matthias, who is mentioned above. In charting his lineage, Josephus records that his branch of the family alternated the names of the males every other generation: Josephus’ father was named Matthias, while his grandfather had been named Josephus, etc. Therefore, the male names used multiple times in the New Testament are almost exactly the same as those Josephus says were used by the males of the Maccabee family. These names are Joseph, Judas, Simon, Eleazar (Lazarus), John, and Matthias (Matthew).

It is interesting that Jesus, like the sons of Matthias, the founder of the Maccabean dynasty, was also said to be one of five sons. Notice how some of the names in Jesus’ family are Maccabean.

“Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses (Joseph), and Simon, and Judas?”

Matt. 13:55

The Maccabees were the creators of the Judea that Rome destroyed. For 376 years, from Zerubbabel to Jonathan Maccabaeus (537–161 B.C.E.), there had been only a negligible Jewish state. Many writers of this era were not even aware of the existence of Judea. The Greek historian Herodotus, painstakingly exact in his documentation of the nations and peoples of the known world, refers only to the Syrians of Palestine (“Philistia”) when he describes the area. But the embers of a Jewish national identity were never completely extinguished and in the second century B.C.E. the Maccabean family became the leaders of a movement that brought Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) back into existence.

The Maccabees conquered the territories of Samaria, Galilee, Edom, and Moab, and the cities of Gadara, Pella, Gersa, Gamala, and Gaza. The inhabitants of any area the Maccabees conquered were forced to convert to Judaism and the males were circumcised. Those who refused were executed.

The reign of the Maccabees ended in 37 B.C.E. when Herod, with Roman support, defeated Matthias Antigonus, the last Maccabean king of Israel. The original Herod was not a Jew but an Edomite Arab. His authority was challenged by the religiously zealous Jews who believed in the maintenance of a separate racial identity. “Whoso marries an Aramean woman, the Zealots lynch him.”
²¹⁷

The people of Israel dubbed Herod “the Edomite slave,” referring both to his slavish relationship with Rome and to his non-Jewish background. To many Jews, Herod and his descendants were thus unacceptable as the kings of Israel. Josephus describes a messianic movement that he calls the “fourth philosophy,” which was begun by Judas the Galilean (in the same year that Jesus was purportedly born), who led a rebellion against the Herods and Rome that continued until the fall of the Judean fortress Masada in 73 C.E.