Christianity
Galileans: Supporters of Judas of Galilee - Zealots
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 19, 1998
Galilee
John was baptizing by the mouth of the Jordan and was held in prison in the fortress of Machaerus to the east of the Dead Sea but Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee. Judaea is inaccessible. Galilee was accessible, had been more influenced by the worldly, successful Canaanites called the Phœnicians in the past, and was still more open to travellers and merchants whether from Syria, Greece or Rome. At the time of John and Jesus, Galilee was wealthy and well populated with industrious people of mixed race, though many had been turned off their land to become day labourers and resentment was high.
Galilee was ruled by a tetrarch, a Roman title for a minor king—Antipas (4 BC-39 AD), a son of Herod the Great—but, since 6 AD, when Antipas’s brother, Archelaus, ruler of Judaea, was banished to Gaul, Judaea had been ruled directly from Rome under a prefect, a Roman governor.
The Maccabees had forcibly converted the people of Galilee to Judaism over 100 years before the gospel events. So, Galileans by religion were Jewish in the first century. Josephus (Life 17) said Galilaeans “were ever fond of innovations, and by nature disposed to changes, and delighted in seditions”. Were they politically fragile and subject to rebellion? They were given the reputation of being fanatical but their ruler, Antipas, unlike his brother Archelaus, ruled 43 years without notable internal incident except for the trouble with John the Baptist.
Why should Galileans have been disliked and held in contempt by their co-religionists of Judaea and thought of as fanatics by Christian historians? Christians have been taught a romantic view of the Galileans, but these citations often meant a band of religious bandits called Galileans, rather than the people of Galilee in general. The truth is that “the Galileans” were rebels, members of the gang of Judas the Galilean, and many Jews were sick of the trouble they fomented.
In Matthew 26:73 Peter is recognized by his accent as being a follower of Jesus. The regional accent of Galileans was strong and their gutturals almost disappeared making it difficult to distinguish certain words. Lazarus (Lazar) is the Galilean dialect pronunciation of Eleazar. But since this scene is fictional, so too is the focus on Peter’s accent. It is part of the pretence that Jesus’s Galileans came from Galilee. No doubt some did, but that is not why they are Galileans! Almost every reference to Galilee in the gospels is false. They all stem from Mark’s gospel and were introduced to hide the truth that Jesus was an active opponent of the Romans. He was a Galilean because his philosophy was that of Judas the Galilean, the outlaw.
If this is not true, we have one of those strange misfortunes in the gospels that always signal a pious lie. The notable Galileans of the time were a gang of nationalist rebels and yet God, apparently unaware of this, sends His son from Galilee with a band of pacific disciples also called “Galileans”. The confusion is not God’s. It is the attempt of the gentile bishops to cover the truth that Jesus was a Galilean—a rebel!
Judas the Galilean
Judas Galilaeus, a scribe, protested against Roman rule and taxation, aiming to be a messianic king and placing the Jews at the head of the world. His followers accepted he was the messiah. He set up his base at Sepphoris, just three miles from the supposed village of Nazareth. Judas was an inspiring public speaker who attracted vast numbers to his standard because of the popularity of his doctrines.
Scholars are fond of calling Judas the Galilean, Judas of Galilee. It is an equivalent choice of translation to that they use of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is not “of Nazareth” but “the Nazarene”. Judas is not “of Galilee” but “the Galilean”, in the Greek, ho Galilaios. You might think this is being picky but it is not. “The Nazarene” only means “of Nazareth” because Christians tell us it does. Paul MacCartney, the Beatle, is not Paul MacCartney of Beatle. Ron Hubbard, the Scientologist, did not come from some place called Scientology. Such qualifications are as likely, if not more likely, to have something to do with what a person has done than where they lived. Often they signify an affiliation.
In the gospels, despite Matthew’s story about the little town of Bethlehem, a pretence has been made that Jesus was born in Nazareth and he is described occasionally as apo Nazaret, “of Nazareth”, though most frequently he is called “the Nazarene”. However, we know from Josephus that Judas was actually born in Gaulonitis, yet was called “the Galilean”. The point of the pickiness is that Jesus was also called “the Galilean”, and Judas was a known rebel. What then was Jesus and his disciples? Both Jesus and Judas can have been “from Galilee” but what if they were really both “Galileans”? By pretending that “Galilean” only meant from Galilee and not a member of a gang of rebels, attention is deflected from the true nature of Jesus.
Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews describes the philosophy founded by Judas the Galilean as the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy but does not give it a name, merely saying it accepted Pharisaic notions and that its sectaries accepted the slogan:
We have no Lord but only God.
Jesus had exactly the same slogan (Mt 4:10). So, Judas was a pious man whose motives, like Jesus’s, were religious and not merely malice or greed. It seems probable that Christians have struck out of Josephus the name of the gang led by Judas. The Rev Matthew Black writing in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible concedes that Judas’s gang were called “Galileans”, perhaps because they were based specifically in Galilee, because they were in general a provincial group based outside Judaea—Galilee simply means “region”—or because Galilee was the place where they initally revolted against Herod. Judas and his Galileans called for an uprising, breaking into Herod’s arsenal in 4 BC.
Judas was also the leader of a popular revolt a few years later in the “Days of the Taxing”. When Roman rule was declared in Judaea in 6 AD after the banishment of Archelaus, Quirinius, the legate of the Roman province of Syria which included Judaea, carried out a census to assess the population for taxes. Since the followers of Judas believed the only master of the Jews was God, it was improper to pay taxes to a gentile and it was improper to acknowledge false gods—the Emperors were beginning to claim divinity. Furthermore the law of Moses forbade not only foreign rulers, it forbade numbering the people. For some this was the final straw.
Yet was there one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty.Josephus Antiquities of the Jews, Whiston 18:1:1
Judas the Galilean and a mystery man called Sadduc combined to resist the numbering of the people by the Romans and formed a religious and political movement of fanatical nationalists. They urged the Jews to rebel and not to pay taxes to Rome, and…
…men received what they said with pleasure, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to a violent degree such that one violent war came after another.Josephus
Since the Essenes called themselves the sons of Zadok, this association of a Galilean and Sadduc (a variant spelling of Zadok) in founding of the Fourth Philosophy links “the Galileans” with the Essenes.
Judas the Galilean was born in Gamala in Gaulonitis, the present day Golan Heights. The site of the city was found in 1967 as ruins on a hill protected by steep cliffs, near the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. Gamala seems only to have been occupied after the return from Babylonian exile, although it had been occupied in prehistoric times. No depictions of the human form were found, all decorations being simply geometrical suggesting that the people of the city were zealous for the law. A place of assembly was also found and some sumps for ritual lustrations like those at Qumran and Masada.
Josephus makes Gamala sound like a fortress and that is how the ruins look. The side and the front are deep valleys. At the back, abutting the mountain, the drop is not precipitous but fortified by a ditch. Houses were built on top of each other and seemed to be suspended from the mountain. On one side was an unassailable height like a citadel.
This was the city of Judas the Gaulonite. If it was the base of the Galilean band, it might have been the city of Jesus—Nazareth. Jesus’s city, according to Luke, should have been on top of a hill by a steep cliff. Modern Nazareth is not, but Gamala is. Unusual coins were found, inscribed with: “Jerusalem the Holy” and “salvation”. Although Gamala was over 100 miles from Jerusalem, its people were apparently minting their own coins calling for the freeing of Jerusalem.
Judas’s revolt was massively successful for a time but ultimately the power of Rome prevailed and Judas perished. Not the Galilean movement however, which evolved into the Zealots who fought the Romans even more vigorously and fanatically in the Jewish War. They preferred torture and death to calling any man Lord.
Both Jesus and Judas led a movement called “Galileans”. Both Jesus and Judas were considered as “sons of David” and the whole of Christendom continues to believe it, though Jesus denied it in Mark’s gospel. Perhaps this brotherhood called themselves the sons of David just as the Qumran sectarians called themselves the Sons of Zadok. Jesus was surely a follower of Judas the Galilean and his successor.
Galileans
The word “Galilean” became for the Romans a synonym for a Jewish rebel. Galileans had an inviolable attachment to liberty, holding God to be their only ruler and Lord, and refusing to call any man Lord even though threatened with death or torture. Jesus would not be tempted by Satan, saying:
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve,Mt 4:10
just what Galileans believed. The Galileans believed they had to formulate plans for successful exploits and tirelessly pursue them or God would not help them—in short God only helped those who were united and showed initiative, boldness and persistence. Galileans endured pain with resolution and were ready to suffer any manner of death.
The Galilaeans have never been destitute of courage.Josephus, Wars of the Jews 3:3:2
The Talmud says of them, just like the Poor Ones, they put honour before wealth:
They were ever more anxious for honour than for gain.Jerusalem Talmud, Kethuboth 4:12
In Life 9, Josephus describes a speech by Justus of Pistus to the people of Tiberias in which he urges them “to take arms and join with the Galilaeans as their confederates and they would assist them out of their hatred of Sepphoris”. Both Tiberias and Sepphoris were cities of Galilee. Though they had become strongly Hellenized, both were Galilean cities in the regional sense used in the gospels, and their citizens were too. Josephus seemed not to be using Galileans in a regional sense, but to mean the band of men dedicated to “innovations”—rebellion! Similarly, in Life 12, Josephus briefly mentions a Jesus, son of Sapphias, who led a rebellion of “mariners and poor people” together with “certain Galileans” to burn Herod's palaces and murder foreigners and collaborating Jews in Tiberias. In these cases, we are hearing of a sect not an ethnos—and isn’t Sapphias a name curiously like Joseph?
By proclaiming the kingdom of God, John the Baptist and Jesus were proclaiming an end to foreign rule—an uprising—just as Judas the Galilean had. Naturally, this would not have been to the Romans’ liking so Jesus had to take care about his claims. Jesus, according to Mark, consistently denied that he was himself the Messiah and indeed sought to silence those who said otherwise. The pious lie is that this is the messianic secret—Jesus, for some reason unknown to theologians wanted to keep his messiahship secret. If Jesus really was the Messiah as the clergy claim then he was lying when he denied it and covered it up. The Christian theory of the messianic secret makes God, in His aspect of the Son, into a liar.
It must be far more convincing, and more acceptable to Christians, to believe that Jesus, at this stage of his ministry, either was not yet the messiah or did not realize that he was the messiah, and would have wanted to keep his activities secret anyway because his aim was to prepare the way for a Jewish king—an enemy of the Roman state. Charismatic itinerant preachers were not unknown at the time. Under the guise of such a man Jesus could call upon people to prepare for the uprising while claiming to be no threat to Rome. There was not the contradiction here that there might seem to us. To the Jews politics and religion were at one. The Nasi was a political leader, a prince, and a religious leader, a priest or prophet. Jesus could use the guise of prophet though in reality a prince.
In John 7:41 the Jerusalem crowd whisper among themselves:
Surely the messiah is not to come from Galilee?
If the tradition here is genuine it must have been:
Surely the messiah is not a Galilean?
When Nicodemus, a Pharisee, defends Jesus to the Chief Priests and Pharisees, they say:
Are you a Galilean too? Prophets do not come from Galilee.Jn 7:52
The meaning of the question was:
Are you an opponent of the Romans?
An editor added the assertion about the prophets not coming from Galilee to pretend that “Galilean” in the question meant, “from Galilee”, rather than a rebel. The gospels pretend throughout that Jesus is from Galilee when he was really a Galilean—an outlaw like Judas the Galilean.
Scholars regard the Galileans as Zealots. In the Jewish War, when Josephus tells us that Judas the Galilean was a teacher of a peculiar sect of his own, he proceeds to describe at length the Essenes, implying that the Galileans were a branch of the Essenes. Elsewhere he maintains they held the notions of the Pharisees, but it seems unlikely because Pharisees had traditionally preferred to accomomodate the foreigner rather than fight them. Hippolytus confirms the Zealots as Essenes.
The word from which we get Pharisee means, “separated”, a description which would apply perfectly to the Essenes. So it is conceivable that Josephus wrote in Aramaic, “the notions of the separated ones”, meaning the Essenes but his amanuensis mistook him to mean the Pharisees. His description of Judas’s ally, Sadduc, as a Pharisee in the same chapter seems to repeat the error. Ellis Rivkin has shown that the word for Pharisee in the Tannaitic literature can also mean “ascetics” in a pejorative sense and also “heretics.” Either could have meant Essenes and not the sect called the Perushim (Pharisees). An alternative is that Christians changed the original to implicate the Pharisees so that Jesus could not possibly have been thought of as being one of these rebelious Galileans, a variety of his mortal enemies. Josephus seems far from consistent in his approach to the Pharisees in his various works, suggesting either transcription errors or deliberate Christian editing. In Antiquities 17:2:4, the plotting Pharisees sound more like Essenes.
Despite the decline of the Zealots into banditry, Judas the Galilean continued to be respected, for later we find his sons also leading rebellions against Roman rule. Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Romanized Jew, procurator of Judaea from 46-48 AD and the nephew of Philo of Alexandria, crucified two of them, James and Simon, for subversive activities. Some “brothers” of Jesus, also curiously James and Simon, were arrested for subversion. Was Jesus related to Judas? Following the Semitic custom of speech, “sons” in Josephus will have meant followers not literally sons. It is more likely that these people were sons in this sense than that they were actual blood sons of Judas of Gamala. Those who are sons of some founder are also, of course, brothers of each other, so here was a brotherhood, just like the Essenes and the Christians.
A third “son”, Menehem[†]Menehem, an important name, or rather title, in this context. An Essene leader called Menehem was murdered at an earlier date and left dead in a public place. It means “comforter”! In John, Jesus promises to send a comforter! Click the link for a page on it., who in 60 AD must have been an old man if he was literally a son of Judas, declared himself Messiah in Jerusalem during the Jewish War and captured the stronghold of Masada from the Romans. But in faction fighting among the rebels, the High Priest’s men murdered him. Eleazar, a nephew of Menehem, with only a few hundred Zealots, held Masada against the Romans for three years after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
That Essene texts were found among the Zealot debris in the ruins of the fortress of Masada is evidence that Zealots were Essenes even if all Essenes were not Zealots. The classical authors have misled us into believing that Essenes were pacifists because they would not serve as soldiers—they would not fight in any war. But once they had decided a war was a just war called by God against the men of darkness—a holy war—they would fight with unrestrained ferocity and the bravery possessed of all those who believe that dying for God means eternal life. Their whole purpose in life seems to have been to prepare for God’s holy war against the gentiles and unrepentant sinners.
Letters written by Bar Kosiba in 135 AD found at Murabba’at, about 12 miles from Qumran, complain about the lack of support he is getting from the Galileans and yet he warns one of his generals:
Not to wrong any of the Galileans who are with you.
Why should Galileans be specifically mentioned among the rebels by the Dead Sea unless they were freedom fighters, a type of Zealot—a type that evidently did not wholeheartedly support Bar Kosiba? These Galileans—like the Galileans of the gospels—were not necessarily from Galilee but people who supported the aims of Judas the Galilean. They supported Bar Kosiba’s stand against the Romans but could not accept Bar Kosiba as the messiah because they recognized Judas or Jesus as their messiah.
Father de Vaux who excavated the ruins at Qumran accepts that the reference here to “Galileans” is to a sect, not a group of Galilean nationals. But de Vaux considers them early Christians still known by their gospel name, “Galileans”, and pacific and therefore refusing to fight. Why should peace loving Galileans—meaning Christians—be expected to support Jewish rebels? Indeed, if they were peace loving why should they be with the Bar Kosiba rebels? Because “Galileans” still supported the aims of Judas the Galilean and were still freedom fighters, a type of Zealot, a hundred years after their former leader Jesus had been crucified.
Another letter from the same source speaks of the purchase of a heifer. It seems bizarre that a rebel group, sought by twelve legions of Roman soldiers, should be entering into commercial contracts and sending letters to seal them when, as the letter says, the gentiles were so close. These were desperate men hiding in the wilderness from the conquering legions. The letters are obviously not what they seem but are coded messages. Moreover, the letter was written in Hebrew, a language which was already dead in everyday use and only preserved for religious purposes. In short, the letter was doubly coded—disguised as a bill of sale and written in a dead language that the gentiles would not know. A heifer, from Numbers, represented the covenant, and the sense is perhaps that of an apology for failing to render needed assistance to those of the covenant. The point however is that these anti-Roman rebels used ways of encrypting their messages. The Nazarenes did the same.
Jesus’s ministry was to all Jews, so he could have been operative in any of the Jewish countries of Palestine, Judaea, Galilee and Iturea. In Acts 10:37, Peter tells us that Jesus preached throughout Judaea not only in Galilee:
That word, I say, ye know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached.
At the start of his ministry, Jesus escaped to the north because Herod was busy rounding up troublemakers in the south—Matthew says so:
Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee,
but he would have been safer still in Judaea, a separate country outside of Herod’s jurisdiction, intimating that the escape to Galilee might be an interpolation or alteration. In John, Jesus recruits disciples immediately after his baptism, and therefore in the region of the Arabah, by the mouth of the Jordan near the Dead Sea not in Galilee. Here he goes to Galilee after a few days. Again, we are told that the disciples come from towns in Galilee to cover the fact that they are “Galileans”.
If later Christians could be known by the name “Galileans”, then why should we assume with certainty that the original Galileans of the gospels were Galileans by birth and not by some sort of affiliation? Yet, over 300 years after Christ, Roman writers like the Pagan emperor Julian the Apostate described Christians as Galileans and called Christ “The Galilean”.
Christians want us to think that Jesus came from Galilee and to that end Mark spends a large part of his gospel describing a long ministry in Galilee before Jesus decides to go to Jerusalem, apparently as a pilgrim, and meet his destiny. The whole Galilean ministry was invented because, when Jesus was charged before Pilate, the word “Galilean” told everyone that he was a revolutionary. Mark hopes to counter this by suggesting that Jesus and his friends were simple peasants from Galilee. The other gospels follow suit.
The Confusion of Coinage
Both Jesus and Judas were accused of refusing to pay tribute to the Romans. Because Judas opposed Roman rule and taxation, he denounced the payment of tribute to the Romans, a marked difference from Jesus, say Christians. But the Christian interpretation of Jesus’s attitude to the tribute money is a blatant falsehood as any modern Jew who reads the gospels must know.
The Prefects of Judaea had the right to issue low denomination coins in copper, Vincent Cook of the Epicurus website explains to us, and vast numbers of them were stamped. They can now be bought from dealers for only a few dollars each. This denomination was called the prutah (plural, prutoth), and almost anyone even today can own one if they want a souvenir that might have been handled by Jesus and the disciples themselves. They were not stamped with images of the emperor, we are told because the Jews were sensitive about images on their coinage. So these mites or farthings were stamped with neutral images such as cornucopia, wreaths, palms or ears of barley.
Coins from years 2, 3, 4, 5, and 11 of Tiberius’s reign fall, on the conventional understanding of the tours of duty of the prefects, into the category of Gratus issues. Gratus coins had the images mentioned, as did some pre-Roman Herodian coins and coins issued during the later Jewish uprisings. The coin faces were completed usually with an inscription referring to the emperor and Julia, his mother, and a date stamp that indicated the number of years the emperor had reigned. So, prutahs were minted annually in the first four years when we can suppose Gratus was undoubtedly prefect, and dated appropriately LB, LG, LD and LE, L simply denoting a year and the letter standing for the number in the sequence of the Greek alphabet. Another seems to be year LIA, unless it is made from a faulty LD die.
Coins from years 16, 17, and 18 (LIS, LIZ, LIH) of Tiberius’s reign (29-31 AD) are considered Pilate types. The point about these is that they carried on them stylised images of implements that were used in the Roman Pagan rituals of the time—a “simpulum” in 29 AD, and a “lituus” in 30 and 31 AD. These were respectively a ritual ladle and a priest’s symbol of office, the very one still carried by Christian bishops, a fancy shepherd’s crook. Engraving coinage dies with pagan implements is always considered to have been a deliberate insult by Pilate, and it looks as if it was. Yet the coins seem to have been accepted without any resistance, if we are to accept the Christian reading of history.
Christians say the coins stopped being issued after 31 AD because Sejanus fell out of favour as Tiberius’s Viceroy in that year, and Pilate did not have a free hand from then on to do as he liked. Even though his protector had lost favour, however, and Pilate was supposedly a monster, he was not actually sacked! Nor were the coins he issued withdrawn from circulation, which is why they are still so common that we all can afford one. In subsequent years, different Procurators, like Felix, did overstamp some of them but they neverthless remained in circulation, offensive as they were, for decades.
Prutahs are only low denomination coins, doubtless necessary for ordinary dealing in a small poor country but hardly inflationary. Why is the minting history of them so sporadic? Coponius and Ambibulus apparently also minted coins but Rufus did not. One would have thought that proper coinage needed a regular mint with properly trained engravers and diesmiths. Coins made only in occasional spates will tend to have a lot of mistakes in their dies, as the Pilate varieties do.
Was Gratus a competent administrator and Pilate was not? Or is there a scam here? By minting copper coins could the Prefect pocket silver? Or were these coins used for the daily pay of soldiers? Did coining them imply that there were more soldiers to be paid and therefore that rioting or rebellion was going on? After Pilate the minting of these coins was moved to Antioch, perhaps because of a scam or because the workmanship was so abysmal. Perhaps the one implied the other. Anyway, was it to prevent abuse of it by prefects of Judaea? Kenneth Lönnqvist says in the context of Agrippa II coins minted about forty years later at the time of the Jewish war:
The enormous series of small bronze is probably to be considered as Agrippa II´s contribution to the cost of participating in the First Jewish Revolt. The coins were likely the primary pay-money to the Agrippan troops. This may also explain the high frequency of the coin types in certain contexts (Jerusalem and Masada), which are known to have been sacked by the Roman army and its allied troops. That King Agrippa II started minting in AD 66/67 with one of these large series of small bronze (the denomination was small, but the bulk value enormous) is very logical…
So, the questions are whether Pilate was printing copper money to replace silver money that he pocketed, or was he printing copper money to pay soldiers because he had a rebellion on his hands. In conventional chronology, the rebellion looks likely to have been that led by Jesus. Professor Stauffer, who generally likes to Christianize the truth in his historical essays, admits that:
In the eyes of his opponents, Jesus is a new Judas of Galilee.
The opponents of the Christian God were, of course, mistaken, as they were in every particular of the Christian myth, though no honest examination could accept it. Galileans were the supporters of Judas of Galilee, the people whom Josephus soon was calling Zealots. Jesus was also always called a Galilean and led a band of Galileans! But this simply meant they came from Galilee—Christians say. They had the same motto too. They were plainly the same movement. This brings us to the question of the tribute money. “Shall we give or not?” Jesus was asked. The same question had incensed the original Galileans so much they had replied, “Never!” Judas had therefore rebelled and set up his revolutionary movement—the Galileans.
Jesus in the bible story tells his inquisitors to bring him a penny—a Roman denarius. Now, in the light of the discussion above, here is an immediate problem that some historians have highlighted. The denarius had upon it the image of the Roman Caesar, the image that was supposedly so grossly offensive to Jews that they would not have the image printed on to their farthings. If the copper prutoth could bear no image of the emperor, then the higher denomination, the denarius cannot have either, surely? Er, no! Denarii “were circulating in Palestine at that time in great quantities!” None other than Ethelbert Stauffer, who was a numismatist as well as a professor at the University of Erlanger, assures us of this even though he has earlier assured us (Jesus and the Caesars) with lengthy arguments that the Jews would just not tolerate faces of Roman kings on their coins. Large numbers of these denarii have been found in confirmation, but the New Testament itself confirms it, explicitly mentioning them in several places (Mk 6:37, 14:5; Mt 18:28, 20:2; Lk 7:1, 10:35; Jn 6:7, 12:5; Acts 6:6), and so does the Jewish Talmud. Stauffer categorically states:
In no country did so many kinds of money circulate as in Palestine.
The besotted Christian cannot seem to notice that these new words contradict his previous arguments about Jewish sensitivity to images on coins. The denarius was effectively the standard coinage of the empire, rather like the US dollar or the UK pound. So, taxation was paid in it, and evidently Jesus did not have one himself, obviously as a matter of principle.
The emperor Augustus had issued hundreds of types of denarius in his long reign, but Tiberius, conservative and tidy as he was, struck only three, and only one of those in large numbers. He could see no point in change for its own sake, and stuck to the design he liked, minted at Lyons in Gaul with only minor stylistic changes for twenty years. It was forged within the empire and was copied as local coinage beyond its boundaries in Persia and India. The strong balance of probability is that, if the story of the tribute money is historical, then this was the denarius that Jesus spoke about.
The obverse has a bust of Tiberius wearing a laurel wreath and the Latin inscription: “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the august God”. The august God meant Augustus, his father by adoption. The reverse has the image of the joint ruler, Julia Augusta (Livia), the wife of Augustus and mother of Tiberius, holding a spear and an olive branch representing the Pax Romana. On this side the superscription was “Pontifex Maximus”, meaning High Priest, a function and title of the emperor. These coins were of obvious cultic significance, Tiberius openly recognising both Augustus and Livia as gods, Augustus in words, and Livia in imagery. It is hard to see how this could not have been offensive to Jews, if we are to suppose that a crook and a ladle, stylised at that, and common enough objects in themselves, should have been found so offensive.
There is no doubt that coinage symbolised power and new rulers usually marked their reigns with an issue of new coins. In 1 Maccabees 15:6, Antiochus writes to Simon, the Jewish High Priest giving him authority to coin money with his own stamp. Bar Kosiba had the Roman denarii collected, the Roman images beaten out, and stamped afresh with acceptable images of temple ware. Yet the Talmud says that Jewish money changers, whose place of work was the temple, wore a denarius as an ear ring to denote their business. Millions of denarii must have passed through the court of the temple. The overthrowing of the tables that Jesus undertook in the temple court was obviously to throw down this Roman money.
The point is that despite the false Jewish and Christian arguments, most Jews were tolerant of the Roman coinage despite their Pagan images. Those who were not were the “Galileans”, the gang of fanatics, probably Essenes, who later broadened into the Zealots. Jesus overhtrew the tables of the money lenders in the temple courts showing he was among the fanatics, and the Christian interpretation of his answer about the tribute money blatantly ignores its true and only conceivable interpretation. He refused to pay it! See The Trial—Refusing Tribute.
Barjonim
If the references to Galilee and Galileans in the gospels mean the province of Galilee it is strange that Galilean cities are hardly mentioned. Sepphoris, the main city in Galilee, is never mentioned in the gospels even though it was only a few miles from Nazareth. If Nazareth existed, it must have been so small that it would have been only natural to refer to the nearest large town to indicate its locality—no one ever did. Tiberias is hardly mentioned even though it was a magnificent new town built in honour of the reigning Emperor. The town that is mentioned is Capernaum, a custom post which was little more than a village. Indeed Josephus, who as a general in the Jewish army fighting in Galilee ought to know, does not even describe it as a village but merely as a highly fertilizing spring. Luke calls Nazareth a city but Mark calls a city, Bethsaida, a village. In Greek there is no word for a town, so that intermediate sized habitations had to be judged as either villages or cities, but the confusion suggests that these places are not places in Galilee.
On the face of it Jesus and his disciples moved around villages. Judas the Galilean and his followers were called barjonim—we would say guerrillas. Judas the Galilean was explicitly called Judas Barjona. Jonah is a word that means a sacrificial animal (possibly but not necessarily a dove), so the barjonim were “sons of sacrifice”—suggesting they were ready to die for their cause.
The Talmud names the leader of the barjonim in Jerusalem during the siege as Abbas Sikari, implying that the barjonim were knifemen or deliverers and were allied to the Zealots—barjonim and Zealots were in effect synonyms. The barjonim avoided towns, preferring wilderness and mountains, and only visiting towns and villages to commit robberies or political murder.
In Mark 1:35-1:39 Jesus gets up in the night and goes to a lonely place—Luke 4:42 calls it a desert or deserted place—where his disciples have to find him. In the Greek, their following him is not welcomed because the word used implies enmity or harassment. Plainly Jesus is escaping from someone or something and in hiding. His disciples say:
All men seek for thee.
The word used for “seek” in the Greek is not neutral in tone, it implies harassment and is so used elsewhere in Mark. Following as it does the mass healing the impression given by the English gospel is that Jesus is in demand because he is popular but the translation is dishonest. His furtive behaviour and the implications of the Greek belie it. Whoever is seeking him does so to persecute him. Also belying it is the detail that Jesus was praying. A Christian might expect God’s Son to pray but on the other two occasions when Jesus is described as praying in Mark’s gospel, he is under severe stress. The furtive escape suggests that is true here also.
The collaborators did not like to see the common people gathering together in large crowds and so Jesus was under suspicion. But, ostensibly Jesus had done nothing wrong as long as he had not openly claimed a kingship that could disturb the Herodians or the Romans. He was still simply urging people to repent. So, the pericope is misplaced and should follow one in which Jesus is exposed, so that Herod’s police get on his tail, such as the one about the leper who betrays him. He decides the circumstances necessitate him to move on, in Mark to continue his preaching elsewhere but in fact because it was too dangerous to linger.
In Mark 3:7, Jesus had escaped again, “withdrawn to the sea”, implying the Sea of Galilee. Jews are arriving not only from Galilee but from Judaea, Peraea and Idumaea confirming that Jesus had been further afield than the gospels admit—in the whole of Herod the Great’s former kingdom. Curiously, Jesus has a boat waiting, sensibly, as it turns out. Jesus seems to be hugely popular, but a closer inspection tells a different story. The throng turn out not to be admirers but avengers. The Greek translated “plagues” is literally “scourges” which completely changes the sense of the sentence. The crowd go after Jesus with whips to punish him. He has to withdraw—again implying flight—and the purpose of the boat becomes clear.
His enemies, the “unclean spirits” had revealed him as a Son of God, that is a king and therefore a pretender to the throne. The passage actually says that “unclean spirits” exposed him, hailing him as a king and messiah. Jesus sternly ordered them to remain silent, and the spirits “screamed” possibly in fear as in previous so-called exorcisms but possibly now with anger.
A further oddity is that the sea to which they withdrew was not the Sea of Galilee but the Mediterranean. The action takes place in Phœnicia. The Nazarenes were apparently pursued to Phœnicia by a vengeful throng. Herod, having discovered them, sent his soldiers forcing them to flee. Herod’s soldiers could not enter Tyre and Sidon willy nilly but a gang of “demons”, opponents who had been forcibly silenced by the disciples, followed on seeking retribution.
Christians will try to say, Jesus was in Phœnicia to preach to gentiles but, whatever Christianity has tried to say about Jesus having a message for gentiles, the truth is that he pointedly avoided them. Gentiles and their allies, Hellenized Jews, lived in towns—most Pharisees and Sadducees lived in towns. Jesus stayed in desert places or villages. Josephus writes that the Pharisees were influential in the cities, leading one to infer that they had little influence in the countryside. The Pharisee Party had little support in Galilee suggesting again that the clashes between Jesus and Pharisees in Galilee are false. Either they did not occur or they did not occur in Galilee. Pharisees in conflict with Jesus are twice described as visitors to Galilee in Mark, as if to forestall any criticism. The countryside was the place of the Essenes (though some did live in towns, and among gentiles, and the community provided strict rules for them—the Damascus Rule).
Satan casting out Satan
As a leader of the barjonim, Jesus did not always get unanimous support. Hints of this occur in the gospels. The antagonism of the crowds at this stage in Jesus’s campaign raises dissension in the ranks of the Nazarenes themselves. In Mark 3:20-35 is a garbling of a passage in which disputes with Pharisees have been introduced to suggest that they wilfully accused Jesus of being possessed by Satan so focusing attention on the Jews’ wilful misunderstanding of his status and intentions. There were no Pharisees. The dispute was among the Nazarenes.
And they went into an house. And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.
When his friends heard of what? The multitude? Why then should they think he is beside himself because a multitude gathered? The gospel is skating over a great deal here. The truth is that the multitude is not friendly. The word in Greek means a rabble or even a riot. What does it mean that they could not so much as eat bread? It cannot be the mob outside that could not eat bread but the Nazarenes trapped inside with no provisions for the messianic meal!
The discussion was not with Pharisees but among the followers of Jesus themselves. The Greek is not literally friends but “those of his own”. Some of them accuse Jesus of being mad—“beside himself” means mad—and they try to take hold of him. The Christian Jesus never does anything but good and yet his followers think he is mad. Jesus is even accused of being an opponent of the band. They say he has an “unclean spirit” which hitherto has meant an opponent. Some of them are scared and worried that Jesus’s strategy is failing. Those who have repented are perhaps not forming themselves into a very reliable force, and indeed many who have been intimidated are rallying against the Nazarenes. The implication of the criticism is that the many converts have not been sincere—Jesus has not been casting out devils at all!
Beelzebub is the Philistine Baalzebub, the Lord of the House, disdainfully called the Lord of the Flies, Baalzebul, by the Jews. Jesus defends himself with his stirring speech punning heavily on the “house” part of Beelzebub’s Philistinian name. He denies that Satan can cast out himself and rebukes the dissidents for dividing the band.
The address by Jesus is spoken, the gospel tells us for the first time, in parables, though they are not normal parables but simply a coded argument. In the first of the three short “parables” given here Jesus answers those who call him mad and possessed by saying that he has been winning people over to the nationalist cause (casting out devils) which is God’s cause. How can it be the work of the devil to cast out devils thus helping God’s cause? He then turns the point on to his accusers, pointing out that divisions only weaken and that would be just as true of the devil as it is of those who were seeking the kingdom of God—his own band. The devil, like any divided institution, would have an end, or collapse, if it continues divided. Yet sin still prevails and the devil has not ended. His domain remains united and so too should God’s. Jesus is arguing that the band should have an end to its divisions.
From Mark 3:27, the next “parable” indicates to us the cause of the dispute. Jesus wants to use force against Rome! The strong man (Rome) has to be bound before he can be robbed. The object they wish to rob him of is the kingdom of Israel. Jesus is really saying here that he has come to the conclusion that he has to take what is God’s before God will finish the job by bringing in the kingdom. Isaiah 53:12 explains it:
Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,
and Isaiah 49:24-26:
Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? But thus saith the Lord, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children. And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood.
The strong man of Mark’s parable is the mighty, the great and the strong of Isaiah. The strength or might of the oppressor are meant.
At this point in Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23 we get:
He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth,
confirming that the speech is a unity speech. Later, in Mark 9:40, the sense appears to be different:
Those who are not against us are for us.
Here Jesus is arguing within the Nazarene band where opposition could be disastrous and mere acceptance would be insufficient. Jesus wanted wholehearted support. In the later context, the reference is to those outside the band where only outright opposition could not be tolerated. Jesus would not have used the words “me” or “us” but “God” in these expressions because it was God’s will that had to be done.
And indeed the final “parable” or argument is explicit on this point. Jesus warns those of his opponents who accuse him of madness as deliberately opposing the will of God and therefore blaspheming against the holy spirit. For it is God’s will that the kingdom should come and it is Jesus’s duty to effect its inauguration on earth. Those who have been baptized into the sect, yet are not with God, will be denied the kingdom. Opponents or even doubters of God’s message cannot be saved, cannot be one of the elect, cannot enter the forthcoming kingdom. The Community Rule says:
Whoever has slandered the congregation shall be expelled from among them and shall return no more. Whoever has murmured against the authority of the community shall be expelled and shall not return.
The word used for “community” is “yahad” which more strongly embodies the idea of unity and being united than our word “community”. Unity was essential to success. Jesus’s speech is urging unity and strength in preparation for the battle to come.
Quite possibly Jesus concluded this speech with:
For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and sister,
emphasising that those of the Chosen who do the will of God are united in brotherhood. They are the children of Israel therefore necessarily brothers and sisters in the forthcoming kingdom.
The mention of brother and sister gives Mark or an editor a link with an phony dispute between Jesus and his family (Mk 31-35). The objective is to distance Jesus from the Jews by showing that even his family were against him. Jesus derides his mother and brothers, a most un-Jewish thing to do—the basis of Judaism is the family and respect for parents—and, one would imagine, quite ungodly. If true, the story confirms that Jesus had brothers and sisters, contradicting the idea of Mary being a virgin. It makes no mention of Joseph.
Now Mark has no nativity narrative as do Matthew and Luke. The myth of virgin birth had yet to arise in the context of Jesus, although it was widespread in other religions. Yet the questioning of him by his family in Mark is carried over into other later gospels contradicting their nativity stories. If Jesus’s parents knew from his birth that he was the pre-existent son of God, because of the plethora of angels, kings and wise men that went out of their way to make it clear, why had they forgotten by the time he was actually getting on with the job? The birth narratives can be totally discarded as additions from a later stage when the Christians wanted to impress convert s with a few of the trappings of orthodox gods and with the realization of a few more prophecies scratched together from the Old Testament.
Note that Mark (Mk 3:28) uses “sons of men” to mean men in general not legions of Jesuses.
At this point in Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10 comes the miracle of the healing of the centurion’s servant. It is pure propaganda—aimed at a Roman audience—in which Jesus heals at a distance, and the soldier is depicted as one of Jesus’s followers—a total absurdity whatever interpretation of the gospels you prefer. Jesus even says:
I have not found such great faith, no, not in Israel.
The servant, like Levi, was paralysed—enfeebled in the law, in our understanding—a backslider, probably a Hellenized Jew. The only way the story could make any sense is if it were the servant really addressing Jesus and expressing his newly found faith, not the centurion. The real mystery is how his pleas get into both gospels in similar but not identical form without being in Mark. Being narrative it should not have been in the document Q which was a book of sayings.
It seems that an early editor of one of the gospels saw the miracle in the other one and felt it was so important to gentile audiences that he must make use of it. Since it seems as though the story of the curing of a leper has been curtailed in Matthew to fit in the centurion’s servant, and because it says the Jews will never enter the kingdom (Mt 8:12) which cannot have been Matthew’s original intent in writing the gospel, we conclude that an anti-Jewish gentile editor has transferred the story from Luke into Matthew.
In Mark 9:38-40, a pericope about an exorcist casting out devils in Jesus’s name begins with an answer to no apparent question suggesting that the start of the passage has been suppressed. Of course, the man was not an exorcist as Christians believe. If he were then Jesus’s response as the Son of God would be incomprehensible to a Christian. Would he seriously have allowed a quack to use his Father’s name, or even his own, for his quackery? Does God condone confidence tricksters? (Christianity proves that he does!)
John has seen someone, though not a Nazarene himself, apparently punishing a vocal opponent of the Nazarenes. The disciples were concerned. Perhaps the man had a reputation as criminal or a thug—who knows? He is casting out devils not in God’s name but in Jesus’s, whereas Jesus would have cast out devils in God’s name—it was God’s will that the kingdom would come. Jesus is not bothered because he says (quoting a well known maxim even at that time):
He that is not against us is for us,
a perfectly pragmatic attitude to take in a rebellion. Unlike the apparently contradictory earlier instance the question is not one of internal unity. Any help from outside was helping to fulfil God’s will which was the objective. Indeed the very act of supporting God’s warriors will reap its own reward.
The initiating question was omitted because it would have made it clear that the exorcism was a beating.
Plucking on the Sabbath
The incident of plucking corn on the sabbath, interpreted properly, is further evidence that Jesus was an outlaw. The Pharisees supposedly question the actions of Jesus and his men who are plucking corn. Their action involved nothing that any pious Jew would regard as wrong. Deuteronomy 23:25 allows a hungry man to pluck someone else’s corn as long as he does not take a sickle to it, and plucking corn could hardly have been considered harvesting to make the act a violation of Exodus 35:21 which defines the sabbath. The questioners therefore could not have been Pharisees who were familiar with the detail not only of the law but also the supplements to the law which they had devised. Nor would Pharisees have been travelling with Jesus especially on a sabbath when only very short journeys from home were permitted.
The questioners must have been members of his own following, but the author of Mark saw another opportunity to illustrate a dispute with orthodoxy and so introduced some non-existent Pharisees. Really they were either ordinary Jewish converts to the Nazarene cause who had sincerely repented and, as Jews, knew some law, but not the detail of it, and who took it to be a violation of the sabbath when Jesus began to pluck the corn. Or they were followers who were devout village Essenes, expecting the kingdom of god to be inaugurated imminently. Essenes had very strict rules against breaking the sabbath which they observed with fervent rigour.
An Essene was expressly forbidden by the Damascus Rule to eat anything lying in the fields on a sabbath, and he could not walk more than a thousand cubits away from home. He was not allowed to fill a vessel so could only drink away from home whenever he came to free standing water. He could not even lift a child. Nor could he be near a gentile or indeed willingly mingle with any man on a sabbath. Their aim as Essenes was to be perfect, and perhaps even minor infringements of the sabbath distressed them. But the Damascus Rule allowed an exception when a man was in danger of his life. This is the situation Jesus invokes in the incident of the sabbath plucking.
Jesus explained to them the practical justification for his action using the example of David and his men when he was in need and hungry. David entered the temple and handed out the showbread for his followers to eat, a much worse crime. The implication is that Jesus and his disciples were in a similar predicament. They were on the run from Herod’s police and plucked the corn out of sheer hunger.
The parallel passage in Matthew 12:1-8 supports this interpretation. There, having given the speech in Mark, Jesus points out that the priests work in the temple on the sabbath handling the sacrifice of two lambs prescribed in Numbers 28:9-10. Then Jesus says:
If ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.
He is paraphrasing Hosea 6:6. This tells us that the act of plucking on the sabbath was an act of mercy. It would not have been an act of mercy if the group were taking a Saturday afternoon stroll—it was an act of mercy because the Nazarenes were hungry. The rest of the quotation from Hosea tells us that the band were Essenes. In the Community Rule we find:
when the land is honoured more than the flesh of the whole burnt offerings and the fats of sacrifice…
The Essenes were more interested in securing God’s country than in the polluted temple worship of the Sadducees.
The verbal formula, “and he said to them”, in Mark is used to link independent sayings. We conclude that the final verses were originally independent of the earlier ones. The Pharisees had a similar teaching to,
The sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath,
which has come to us in the rabbinical writings:
The sabbath is given unto you and not you to the sabbath.
It was a common Jewish sentiment of the time. This saying is omitted in Matthew and Luke leaving the apparent assertion of the authority of the Son of man over the sabbath. They left out the commonplace saying to leave the emphasis on Jesus’s apparent messianic claim.
Here the expression the “son of man” simply means man, but Mark uses it as if it meant Daniel’s “Son of man”. It can only have had the first sense because Jesus gave a legal justification for his action—a justification that a messiah would not have needed. Since the two final verses mean the same thing, Mark might have known of two versions of the story, one of which ended with the matter of fact verse 28 whereas the other ended with the more proverbial 27. Mark saw the chance to combine them both with the implication for the ignorant that Jesus was claiming messianic authority. Note that all of these apparent claims to be the messiah belie the theory of the messianic secret proving that these conflicts are at least misplaced.
“Have ye never read”, is the very way that any Jewish teacher would introduce his answer or argument. He would quote from scripture then comment or interpret it. But Mark remembered scripture wrongly for, according to 1 Samuel 21:1, the High Priest was Ahimelech not Abiathar.
The passage in Luke 6:1 begins:
And it came to pass on the second sabbath after the first,
an apparently meaningless expression that has not been explained. The Essenes were careful keepers and recorders of the passage of time, basing it on the solar calendar of Jubilees. This is signified in the scrolls in many ways, one of which is a book of hymns which have been called Songs for the Holocaust of the Sabbath. These have titles like:
For the Master. Song of the holocaust of the seventh sabbath on the sixteenth.
The phraseology is strikingly like that of Luke suggesting its Essene origin.
The Twelve Apostles
The appointment of the twelve apostles in Mark 3:13-19 tends to confirm the suspicion that Jesus was an outlaw leading a band of tough guys. Jesus has again withdrawn into the mountains, acting apparently as a guerrilla. He is expecting the kingdom of God which required appointments of leaders for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, whence the number twelve.
However, the list of the twelve is an uncertain list when various New Testament books are compared. Even in Mark there is no mention here of Levi who was called earlier. Does this support our contention that he was the same as Matthew? Paul makes James (Gal 1:19), the brother of Jesus, an apostle. He also seems to imply this in 1 Corinthians 15:7 and just previously (1 Cor 15:5) he distinguishes Peter from the twelve. This is evidence that there were actually more than twelve apostles but that some of them like Peter, presumably the Pillar Apostles, were regarded slightly differently.
In Luke-Acts we find a Judas of James who is one of the twelve, and are the various Jameses the same or different people? The actual number of disciples is uncertain in view of these discrepancies and the fact that the Essenes had twelve plus three priests. One can guess that altogether there were fifteen as in the Essenes, the twelve plus the three pillar apostles, but that by the time Mark wrote the belief among gentiles was that the twelve covered everyone in the inner circle, a reflexion of the dominant gentile belief in the sun god. Thus Peter, James and John the sons of Zebedee were the priests and the rest, some of whom are lost in Mark, were the twelve—with Jesus standing separately as the prince.
These men were to be Jesus’s chief lieutenants in achieving the kingdom. What is revealing is the way Mark describes many of them. Mark’s gospel was written about the time of the Roman triumph in 71 AD when the captured leader of the Jewish Zealots was led in chains through the streets of Rome. Zealots were particularly unpopular but so were Jews generally and Mark was faced with a few problems. Describing the apostle Simon, he deliberately uses the obscure Aramaic expression, the Cananaean, (wrongly Canaanite in the Authorized Version) without explaining it, though Mark normally explains Aramaic words for the benefit of his gentile readers. The Aramaic for “Zealots” was “Canaim”. Luke, writing at least ten years later when feelings were running less high, openly uses the Greek equivalent, understood by all—the apostle is Simon the Zealot!
Judas is Iscariot, said to mean “of Kerioth” but no such place seems to have existed at the time, though there had once been a town “Kiriathim” in Moab across the Dead Sea. The Latin word “sicarii” meaning “knifemen”, the curved dagger they used being called a “sica,” seems more identifiable with Iscariot. Judas would therefore have been a member of the assassins branch of the Zealots. S G F Brandon, in his study of Jesus as a revolutionary, notes that a few early manuscripts reveal that Judas Iscariot was Judas Zelotes! In Acts 21:38 even Paul is mistaken, by the Roman captain of arms, as the leader of a gang of knifemen:
Art not thou that Egyptian, which before these days madest an uproar, and leddest out into the wilderness four thousand men that were murderers?
The word translated murderer is “sikarios”, a Greek word derived from the Latin “sicarii”. However, a Syrian word “skariot” meaning “deliver up” could be an equally appropriate root. Were the Sikari the deliverers of Israel whose knives they thought of as “deliverers” in a black comic way, a branch of the Essenes—both words meaning the same, deliverers or saviours—or even an alternative name for them? Incidentally, “that Egyptian” known by the Tribune as an earlier bandit was most likely to have been Jesus. Matthew’s story about the escape into Egypt will have been to explain this nickname, and, judging from the mass feedings, he led a total of about 4000 people. Essenes were, of course, linked with Egypt, and the Tribune will have known Paul’s trouble had something to do with Jesus.
There was the other Simon called Peter (or, in Aramaic, Cephas), a nickname that today would be rendered as “Rocky”, another tough sounding name, but one which also resonates with the Essenes’ conception of themselves as masons. When Jesus reveals to Simon Peter his messiahship in Matthew 16:17, he calls him Simon Bar-jona as if Bar-jona were Simon’s surname. In John 21:15 this is given as bar Jonah, as if it were a patronymic, son of Jonah. It is beyond a coincidence that Judas the Galilean and his followers were, as we saw above, called barjonim—guerrillas. If “barjona” denotes a guerrilla or bandit, what was meant in the gospels? Later in the story Peter slices off a man’s ear and in the Acts of the Apostles he murders a man and a woman for holding back money. He is ruthless.
The two Sons of Thunder, John and James, already sound menacing enough but the expression, “Boanerges”, a meaningless word, is probably “bene reges” meaning “sons of tumult” or “bene regaz” meaning “sons of wrath”. Or another reading is “bene rehem”, “sons of the wild ox”, which in Job 39:10, where it is wrongly translated unicorn in the King James Bible,
Canst thou bind the unicorn “(wild ox)” with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?
signifies untameable wildness. Patently these were not boy scouts. One suspects that the word “Boanerges” only survives because in his original gospel, Mark used it without translation like the word Cananaean used of Simon the Zealot. A few years later an editor felt able to explain it and so it comes down to us today—serving no purpose except as a clue to the nature of the Nazarene band. Significantly, in some old manuscripts it seems all the apostles were called Sons of Thunder! What of them being called sons of Zebedee, as if Zebedee is their father. In 1 Maccabees, the Zabadaeans are Arabians!
In The Acts of Philip, when Philip goes to Greece preaching the new gospel, the Greeks send to Jerusalem for confirmation. Ananias, described as High Priest of the Jews, arrives in Athens with a body of men and says:
Thou sorcerer and wizard, I know thee, that thy master the deceiver at Jerusalem called thee son of thunder.
Later a voice from heaven says:
Philip, once son of thunder but now of meekness,
proving that this is not a metaphorical phrase or mistakenly used. Philip is a son of Thunder, besides John and James of Zebedee, implying that all apostles were. Ananias explained that Jesus was crucified but the disciples stole his body and now went all about the world deceiving every one.
In the caves at Qumran some scrolls have been found that the scholars call “brontologions” because they are books of interpretations of the sound of thunder when it is heard on any day—a form of astrology. Plainly, Essenes associated thunder with the voice of God and His comands, and Jesus by calling his band “Sons of Thunder” implies they are doing God’s bidding.
Bartholomew means Son of Tholomaeus (Ptolemy) and we know from Josephus in Antiquities that there was a notable Tholomaeus—he was a robber (Josephus’s name for a Zealot) chief. If the Nathaniel of John’s gospel is identified with Bartholomew as many biblical scholars suggest then the identification looks even more assured. John describes Nathaniel as of Cana meaning he was one of the Canaim, like Simon in Mark 3:18 above—he was a Zealot.
Finally, five of the apostles had previously been with John the Baptist. According to John’s disciple, Mark (not the gospel author), John taught that to seek God people had to leave the towns. He was urging them to become barjonim! It has been suggested that the Sadduc who teamed up with Judas the Galilean to form the Zealots was none other than John the Baptist.
These men do not sound like pacifists—they sound like what they were, tough insurgents. They were to go out to cast out demons, that is persuade people to join the body of the elect—those who would secure and rule the kingdom of God. Largely from the gospels themselves we learn that more than half of gentle Jesus’s twelve leading disciples were tough guys. Is all of this simply to be regarded as bad luck? Can anyone seriously deny that the band of Jesus the Nazarene seem more like the band of Jesus the Zealot?
Further Reading
- More on Jesus as a social bandit
- More on the meaning of Nazarene
- More on Jesus crucified
- More on the Star prophecy
- More on the Jewish idea of resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, or spiritual or bodily resurrection, and some more, and more on Jesus is Risen, and belief in the resurrection.
