The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History

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).

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) This uprising too had a definite messianic orientation.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”

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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.”

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”

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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.”

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”

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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.”