Christianity
The Messiah and the Star of Bethlehem
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, December 08, 1998
The Oppression of the Jews
Despite the impression given by the gospels, Palestine in New Testament times was not a rural idyll ruled by a benign foreign Emperor. The region was politically and socially unstable. Palestine was at the crossroads between Asia and Africa and its proudly religious Jewish inhabitants, who believed themselves the Chosen People of God, had been harassed by mighty armies moving in either direction at various times in history. As an important trade route between Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) the mighty empires that periodically arose in those countries plotted and fought incessantly over the land between. Add to that divisions within the nation, partly self-induced and partly fostered by foreign powers, and the sum was turmoil.
The land of the Israelites was originally known as Canaan. Far from being a place for captured Egyptian slaves to escape to, it was, for the period when Moses was supposed to be active, an Egyptian Asian colony. Only when the Egyptians weakened and were unable to keep a hold on its Asian territories did small kigdoms emerge in what later became called Palestine after the Philistines occupied its coastal areas to form one of the new kingdoms, Philistia. Vowels were omitted in writing the languages of the Middle East in those days so the two words are the same.
So, the Israelites were not a unified nation from Egypt as the Old Testament story states, though the superpower of Egypt always had a strong influence on its smaller neighbour. There was no conquest of Canaan that matches the biblical description. Mainly the Israelites, if they were not simply native Canaanites adapting to living in arid hills that previously had not been viable, were a mixture of Semitic tribes from Arabia where they kept goats. Josephus, the Jewish Roman historian claimed the Israelites were the Hyksos, for 200 years rulers of Egypt, but rulers are not slaves as they were in the bible. Joshua did not conquer Canaan in a swift campaign in which he knocked down the walls of Jericho. His exploits are an invention of the Jewish sages colonising Yehud from Babylon some seven hundred years later, then later magnified by the Egyptian Ptolemies to divorce Judah from Persia. In the earlier period, it seems, Arabian nomads who settled in the Palestinain hills adapted from a predominantly pastoral life to one which was largely agricultural, and largely adapting their culture to that of the locals, the Caananites who mainly lived in the valleys. Only in about 850 BC, when Egypt could no lobger maintain any rule over Canaan, did locals form the small kingdoms of Judah, Israel and nearby Amman, Edom and Moab.
When the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar conquered Palestine in about 600 BC, they used it as a source of slaves and skilled labour and many Jews were carried away captive to Babylon. The large empires of the time had a policy of deporting the ruling class of troublesome countries. They were sent somewhere else, not as slaves, but to rule the peasants of some distant country where they would have to concentrate on not being overthrown themselves by the local people. The bible says they were allowed to return when Babylon, in its turn, was defeated by the Persians under their king, Cyrus, in 538 BC.
In fact, the Persians had the same policy as previous imperial countries of deporting people. The Judahites who “returned” were culturally different from those who had remained in Palestine. They were really not the people who had left at all after several generations in a richer country, they could hardly have wanted to return, anyway but were some other people told to get on with the job of setting up a temple state in Yehud, as the Persians called it. The “returners” brought with them the sophistication and scholarship of a mighty civilisation, and assistance from the Persian chancellery. Then it was that Ezra brought the law, and the history in the Old Testament began to be set, drawing upon Mesopotamian records and myths as well as some Canaanite ones. It praised the kindness of the Persian monarch who had liberated them, calling him their messiah.
Then also began the idea that their tribal god, Yehouah, one of many Semitic gods, was the one true god, absolute and universal, who had entered into a Covenant with the Jews, his specially Chosen People—specially chosen by the Persian officials! Under the umbrella of the Persians, the exiles built a new temple in Jerusalem and set up a theocracy in Judah—the holy people were to be ruled by God through his recognized priesthood. Then the Greeks under Alexander the Great and his generals defeated the Persians and took control of Palestine from 332 BC. They set about removing Persian influence and substituting their own in a process of Hellenization, the imposition of Greek culture—Greek cultural imperialism. For the next few hundred years, especially when the Greek Ptolemies ruled Egypt, and Canaan again, the Jewish priests rewrote and reinterpreted their legends creating the scriptures, known to us as the Old Testament.
The Greek kings of Babylon and Syria, the Seleucids, got control of Palestine from the Ptolemies about 200 BC. One of their kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, wanted to hurry along the process of culturation by setting up a common religion. Abandoning patience and diplomacy, in 167 AD, he unilaterally set up statues of Greek gods in local shrines including one of Zeus in the temple at Jerusalem. The Jews, by now devoted to their own god, Yehouah, given to them by the Persians and like theirs, hidden, objected strongly to an idol in their holy place. The author of the Book of Daniel called the outrage the Abomination of Desolation. Thereafter the phrase Abomination of Desolation became a technical term for pollution of the temple by images of foreign gods, and a sign of God’s impending vengeance.
The Jews objected strongly to it and rebelled. A family nicknamed the Maccabees or “Hammers” after the Hebrew word for a mason’s hammer, successfully rose against their Greek masters and set up a Jewish state for a short time, but the kingdom divided again and fell under Roman domination first under Pompey in 63 BC and then under the Roman vassal monarch, Herod the Great, who reigned as a tyrant for 33 years from 37 BC. Herod was an Idumaean who defeated the Jewish opposition, successfully petitioned the Romans for the throne and sought popularity by becoming Jewish and rebuilding the Temple. After years of war and civil war, Herod kept the peace and put the Jews back to work, but they did not like him. Though he had adopted Judaism, they did not regard him as Jewish and, though he took decades to build a magnificent temple, he was not thanked for it. The building projects that provided employment and economic stability, the peace he imposed and the competent administration of his regime were the reasons for his title the “Great” but he was cruel and immoral and despite his greatness remained unpopular with his Jewish subjects.
With Herod’s death in 4 BC, the interlude of tranquillity ended. Before the birth of Jesus, history had not been smooth for the Jews for 200 years. The birth of the saviour was not going to make it any smoother. Herod’s death started a long period of civic unrest punctuated by rebellion and repression and ending in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD. Succeeding as Ethnarch to half of Herod’s kingdom, Judaea, Herod’s son, Archelaus, began by butchering thousands of his subjects. Iin every part of Palestine there were uprisings of the poor under a variety of leaders. The Romans deposed Archelaus in less than a decade and in 6 AD imposed direct rule from Rome under the governorship of military administrators titled Prefects. Later governors were financial administrators titled Procurators.
The Jews had tolerated Herod, who was a foreigner, because he had at least converted to Judaism, but to be governed by godless gentiles was impossible to tolerate. It violated the Royalty Law. The sages who had compiled the Old Testament, fresh from the years of exile under the Babylonians, had written in Deuteronomy 17:15 that Jews had to be ruled by a Jew and not by any foreigner:
One from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee; thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee, who is not thy brother.
The priests who returned from exile in Babylon and their successors had rewritten the Jewish traditional lore such that it supported the theocracy they sought to build. Conscious of the years of oppression under the Babylonians they hoped to prevent it in future by making it a command from God that the Children of Israel should refuse to accept foreign rule. Naturally, it would also give the hereditary priests a degree of security too!
But such a law is easier to write than to enforce and the Jews had grudgingly submitted to foreign domination for hundreds of years—but the Romans were particularly hated. In the first century AD a succession of Roman governors were put in charge of Judaea to quell the discontent of the population. God’s Law forbade the Jews to accept foreign rule, in the first century AD providing a constant spur to Jewish nationalists to rise against their Roman rulers even in the most adverse circumstances—God must be on their side, it was His command! Throughout New Testament times rioting and insurrection were commonplace in Judaea.
And so we come to the time of Barabbas, with Pontius Pilate the Prefect of Judaea, when the events of the gospel occurred. Uprisings had been occurring regularly for over twenty years and would continue to occur even beyond the destruction of Jerusalem forty years in the future. In the midst of this the gospels tell us that a gentle wandering holy man was falsely picked on by jealous priests, unfairly turned over to the Romans as a pretender to the throne of Judaea and unjustly tortured to death on a cross.
The Messiah
Though the idea of the Messiah, or in Greek parlance, the Christ, developed by Christian theologians is one of a divine spiritual saviour, from the time of exile in Babylonia, the Jewish idea of a Messiah was of a God-sent earthly saviour or deliverer, a warrior king who would save them from their enemies. Jewish religion led Jews to believe that they were God’s “Chosen People”, having a special role in His plans and being under his care, but God’s people felt violated by the oppression of foreign rulers. They dreamed that this saviour would free them from their enemies and institute a kingdom of God on earth in which the Chosen People would be the elite. The kingdom of God was a worldwide empire, centred on the land of Israel, the aristocracy of which would be God’s Chosen People, the Jews.
The word “messiah” is always said to mean “the Anointed One” (anointed is mashiach in Hebrew). “The anointed ones of God” were kings and priests who ruled through the divine will as the favourites of God. The implication is that the word “messiah” is derived from the anointing of kings and priests, at their coronation ceremonies in ancient Israel, as prescribed in Exodus 30:23-24, with the holy anointing oil of myrrh, sweet cinnamon, sweet calamus, cassia, and olive oil. Thus, “God’s anointed ones” really means “God’s appointed ones”. Anointing is therefore a technical term to describe someone who has been appointed by God into some senior position.
What came first, the anointing or the title, Son of God? In a diluted sense all of the Chosen People were children of God anyway, so all male Jews were sons of God, but anointment of ancient Jewish kings expressly made them His favourite “Sons of God”. The conventional view is that a ceremony was adopted involving anointing and from it came the word “messiah”. But messiah looks exactly like a composite word of Egyptian and Hebraic origins akin to the purely Egyptian, Ramesses, meaning “the son of Ra”. Since Ra was the Egyptian high god and mes was “son”, Ramesses means “Son of God”. The main change in the word “messiah” is only in the word for “god”. The Hebrew high god was Yehouah, or in a shorter form, Yah (Iah). The lesser change was that the word for son and god were exchanged in order. Ramesses therefore became messiah.
The Christian gospel writer Matthew identified Jesus Christ with Moses, whose name is also of course ”a son”. If Moses is the Egyptian word for a son who was he a son of? Was Moses also a messiah? He was!. Moses was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter who found him in the bulrushes. And a Pharaoh was a god!
Moses’s brother, the priest Aaron, died and was buried at a place called Moseroth, Moserah or Mosera, the site of the Israelite camp near Mount Hor. Curiously Mosera can be read as Egyptian for Son of Ra or Son of God, Ra being the Egyptian word for god. The father of Moses and Aaron, according to the Old Testament, was Amram interpreted as the Hebrew for exalted people when it is plainly a corruption of the Egyptian Amun-Ra. Amun-Ra was the high God—Amun meaning the Hidden One—of the Egyptians. From the time of the pyramid builder, Cephren in the IVth dynasty all Pharaohs were considered to have been Ra’s son, in other words they were Sons of God or messiahs. Mosera is the purely Egyptian word from which the compound word messiah was constructed. It is the same word, with roots in a different order, as Rameses, the name of several Pharaohs—Sons of God. One of the inscriptions of Rameses the Great records Amun-Ra addressing the Pharaoh with words familiar to a modern Christian:
I am thy father. I have begotten thee like a god.
The Pharaoh replies:
I am thy son. Thou hast given me the power of a god.
Thus both Moses and his brother were considered Sons of God, both were literally messiahs. Moses and Aaron combine the roles of king, priest and prophet. Later David was identified as the Great King and Moses took the single role of the prophet, but it is plain that, in leading the Israelites out of Egypt, his role was that of king as well as prophet.
Jochebed, Amram’s wife was also his Aunt. This ties in with the practice of the Pharaohs whose title came through the female line. Thus they usually married their sisters to become king but could marry their mother’s sister—their maternal aunt—or even their mother—to succeed to the throne. Plainly the Israelites led away from Egypt by Moses, a messiah, were thoroughly Egyptianised and ruled by a Pharoah-like king, if not an actual dissident Pharoah. It seems the word messiah, a Son of God, came into the Jewish religion from Egypt.
The mixing of the two languages might have occurred early in the history of Israel, when Israel was as an Egyptian colony. But the biblical account of the Exodus was written in the time of the Egyptians Ptolemies to mythically explain an ancient Jewish dependence on Egypt, Moses leading the Israelites away from Egypt. Moses is not a name but a title, “the Son”, meaning the “Son of God”, just as Jesus is called “the Son”. Thus, “Son of God” was possibly an early Israelute description of a leader, a king or a priest, but it certainly became one from around 300 BC. When the population wanted to declare these people formally as a Son of God, they invented the ceremony of anointing. The purpose of the ceremony, apponting a Son of God, gave its name to the procedure, anointing with oil. Modern Hebrew scholars have interpreted the word messiah back to front, assuming it meant “the anointed one” from the name of the ceremony of anointing which is reported far more often in the older scriptures (in the internal chronology) than the title that it conveyed.
The ritual of anointing required the priest, acting as God’s agent, to acknowledge his Son explicitly:
Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased.
So, by anointing in ancient Israel, the Children of Israel declared a man a “Son of God”—a special man appointed by God—a king or a priest. By the time of the Roman occupation, the Anointed One of the Jews, their Messiah was an ideal Jewish king sent by God, a Son of God. In the gospels this precise formula is applied to Jesus, and Son of God was a title held by Jesus as Messiah!. If this is to be believed Jesus was anointed as a king (anointed in the technical sense of appointed, not necessarily by application of oil). The pious lie is plain. The metaphorical Son of God of the Jewish Messiah was interpreted literally by the gentile bishops. Here was a sin of omission. The bishops failed to explain to their flocks that for the Jews a Son of God was not the product of a God’s intercourse with a mortal woman as it was for the Greeks. The ground was ploughed ready for the new doctrine of the virgin birth. The title Son of God had to be literally explained by yet another pious lie. The gospel writers say God spoke the words recognising His son, a very minor pious lie. God spoke them metaphorically through his earthly agent, the priest—just as today he speaks through books written by men! These ceremonies today would be called coronations.
The Jews deplored the idea of being ruled from abroad. Groups of Jews were constantly rebelling because they resisted the impositions put upon them by their foreign masters. They believed God had told them in the Royalty Law to rule themselves by setting one of their brothers, a fellow Jew, as king over them. Christians say Jesus did not claim to be a king of the Jews but they hail him as God’s Messiah—a king! Ministers of the church have told us at Sunday school that the Messiah was quite a different thing from a king of Judaea. The Messiah was a supernatural king—a king of Heaven, not of any place on earth. As children, we innocently accept what the fierce man in the black frock said and, as adults, we mostly don’t bother any more. It was a lie. Though the Christian faithful believe it now, it was not true when Jesus was condemned. The Messiah to Jews in the first century was a king—their king!
Their idea of a messiah is described in the Book of Daniel written about 160 BC at the time of the Abomination of Desolation when the Jews first felt the weight of Hellenistic cultural oppression. Even then the Jews were seeking for a saviour king:
Behold, one like unto the son of man came with the clouds of Heaven, and came even to the ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages, should serve him.Daniel 7:13-14
He was a superman to whom God gave a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages, should serve him. Furthermore:
His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.
The messianic kingdom of the Jews would last forever and all other kingdoms on earth would be its vassals.
Daniel is a favourite book of Christians because they take this “son of man” and the “everlasting” kingdom to be Jesus and either a transcendental kingdom of bliss, or the extension of Christendom throughout the world. The aspirations of the Jews for a warrior king and the Jewish kingdom he would establish have been hijacked by the Christians and applied to themselves. However since the Book of Daniel preceded Christianity, the idea expressed here is Jewish and the Jews must have known what precisely they meant.
In the non-canonical Psalms of Solomon, written not by Solomon, the king, but by unknown authors between 70 and 40 BC—only about 70 years before Barabbas, we get a detailed description (edited here for brevity). The messiah of the house of David shall gather the nation together, purge Jerusalem of nations that trample her down, and shatter unrighteous rulers. All nations would be in fear of him. The Jews would be righteous, a holy people, and neither visitor nor stranger would remain amongst them any more—they did not love gentiles. The messiah would shepherd the flock of the Lord faithfully and righteously and would suffer none among them to stumble in their pasture. They would be sons of God. He would judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness and would have the heathen nations to serve under his yoke. Note that the messiah’s flock would all be sons of God!
O God, raise up unto them their king, the Son of David that he may reign over Israel thy servant. And gird him with strength that he may shatter unrighteous rulers, and that he may purge Jerusalem from nations that trample her down to destruction. He shall destroy the godless nations with the word of his mouth. At his rebuke the nations shall flee before him. All nations shall be in fear before him.
Wisely, righteously he shall thrust out sinners from the inheritance. He shall destroy the pride of the sinner as a potter’s vessel. With a rod of iron he shall break in pieces all their substance and he shall reprove the sinners for the thoughts of their hearts. And he shall purge Jerusalem making it holy as of old.
And he shall gather together a holy people whom he shall lead in righteousness. And he shall divide them according to their tribes upon the land, and neither visitor nor stranger shall remain with them any more.
And he shall judge the tribes of his people which has been sanctified by the Lord. And he shall not suffer unrighteousness to lodge any more in their midst, nor shall there dwell with them any man that knoweth wickedness, for he shall know them that they are all sons of God.
And he shall be a righteous king, taught of God, over them, and there shall be no unrighteousness in his days in their midst, for all shall be holy and their king the anointed of the Lord. The Lord himself is king, the hope of him that is mighty is through his hope in God.
He will bless the people of the Lord with wisdom and gladness, and he himself will be pure from sin, so that he may rule a great people and relying on his God throughout his days he will not stumble; for God will make him mighty by means of his holy spirit, and wise by means of the spirit of understanding, with strength and righteousness.
His hope will be in the Lord: who then can prevail over him? He will be mighty in his works and strong in the fear of God; he will be shepherding the flock of the Lord faithfully and righteously and will suffer none among them to stumble in their pasture. He will lead them all aright, and there will be no pride among them that any among them should be oppressed.
He shall judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness. And he shall have the heathen nations to serve under his yoke/
You will note that a mendicant pacifist preaching goodwill to all men was not the Jews’ best idea of a leader suitable to free them from the yoke of their oppressors.
Here, the Son of David is another title of the Messiah as Christians agree. This messiah was not a pacifist. He had to shatter unrighteous rulers, purge Jerusalem from the nations that oppressed her and make it holy, destroy godless nations, instil fear in them and enslave the heathen. Ultimately peace would reign when the Messiah subjected the nations of the world. The heathen nation that plagued the Jews in the first century AD was the Romans. They were the ones who were trampling Jerusalem to destruction. The Jewish expectation was that the Messiah would purge Jerusalem and evict visitors and strangers, so the Romans would have to get out.
David was the model for the leaders of these revolutions against the foreign powers. He was the heroic king who united the disparate tribes of Canaan into the nation of Israel. In the first century, the country was again disunited. All of the region covered by Herod’s kingdom was considered by Jews to be their land, but now it had been split into a half ruled by the Prefects and two quarters (tetrarchates) ruled by Herod’s sons, Philip and Antipas. It certainly required uniting again as David had done originally but this time, when it was won from the enemy, pious Jews believed it would be purified by God. It was God’s land promised to His Chosen People and when his messiah won it back it would be sinless and uncorruptible. It would be heaven on earth! The Messiah therefore had some of the characteristics of Moses and Joshua, leading the Chosen People into the Promised land. The righteous people of God would enter the Promised land from across the Jordan to win it back as if in a new Exodus. Curiously, Joshua is the same name as Jesus, Jesus simply being a form of Joshua in Greek, the language of the Christian bible.
Jews had incessantly been humiliated by foreign rulers for centuries with only the Maccabees providing any hope. Submission had got them nowhere. A deliverer had become a fervent belief. The chief heathen nation was, by the time of Barabbas in the first century AD, the Romans. The political position of the Jews under the Romans seemed hopeless. Most Jews felt they had suffered enough. Popular Jewish hopes were still of their warrior king, born in the image of and of the line of, king David, a supernatural being sent by God who would overthrow the foreigners, impose Jewish authority over the world and institute a kingdom of God on earth which he would rule assisted by the Jews as the elite. The messiah was not a god or an aspect of God, but was entirely human, though backed by the supernatural might of God. Judaism was monotheistic—it had only one God and it was a heresy for Jews to think otherwise. Throughout New Testament times rioting and insurrection were commonplace in Judaea fueled by these messianic hopes. When Pontius Pilate was the prefect of Judaea, uprisings had been occurring regularly for over twenty years and would continue to occur even beyond the destruction of Jerusalem forty years in the future.
Leaders of varying degrees of credibility were to step forward from the death of Herod to the defeat of bar Kosiba in 136 AD claiming to be the Messiah of God, as the Jews yearned for an end to the trials and indignities of Roman rule. Josephus describes them all. Under such leaders local rebellions often lasted for month before the Roman legions were victorious. Each led an unsuccessful revolt and died. Gentle Jesus could not have fitted their preferred image—a warrior, a king David, a superman on the lines described in Daniel.
Messianic or revolutionary movements were led by Simon the slave, Athronges the shepherd and Simon son of Giora. When in 6 AD Judaea became a Roman province, the census mentioned by Luke in his gospel as happening at the time of Jesus’s birth was held so that appropriate tribute could be extracted from the new colony. Judas the Galilaean, son of Hezekiah, objected to foreign rulers and them counting the people and he rebelled. He was a Messiah but he was defeated and crucified. In 33 AD, according to Christian scholars, Jesus was crucified even though he was a sinless man who did not lead a rebellion. In 44 AD, Theudas the Pharisee, the new Moses, rebelled and was thought a Messiah (Acts contradicts Josephus in saying Theudas was active before Judas). He too was crucified. In 60 AD, Benjamin, “The Egyptian”, rebelled and was called Messiah. Since these latter failed messiahs appear in the Acts of the Apostles one wonders whether the author of Acts is making a subtle point regarding one of them. A curious isolated figure was Jesus son of John, who was not a Messiah but proclaimed woe against Jerusalem in the seven years preceding the Jewish War and was treated by the priestly class rather like Jesus in the gospels. Nor did the Jewish War end these messianic claims, several more arose until last came bar Kosiba who led a long rebellion of four years with disastrous results for Jews everywhere.
So for well over a hundred years beginning from the time of Jesus’s birth Jewish rebels were leading armed struggles against the Romans and claiming to be the Messiah, a king. Yet in the midst of this turmoil, the gospels tell us that God sent His son, a gentle wandering holy man who was maliciously picked on by jealous priests, unfairly turned over to the Romans as a pretender to the throne of Judaea and unjustly tortured to death on a cross. Among a Karno’s army of seditionists, mostly hailed as the Messiah, God choses to send Jesus as the Messiah, a king—but a king of heaven. God might have intended to sacrifice himself in the shape of His son but he chose a peculiarly confusing time to do it, a time when Jesus the true Messiah could not be distinguished from people deluded about God’s intentions, but suffering exactly the same fate—crucifixion. Uncomfortable coincidences like this point out pious lying. Jesus looks to be one in a line of messianic pretenders to the throne of Israel. If he was, then someone has deceived us. If he was not, God or His agent, the Holy Ghost, looks incompetent, for if He wanted to save mankind why did he do it isn such an unconvincing way?
Jesus was crucified as a king like lots of Jewish rebels around the same time. Christians say it was a mistake but the gospels give us quite a detailed account of Jesus’s actions in his last year or so of his life. It must contain proof proof one way or the other. If there has been pious deception, to disguise a Jewish rebel as a peaceful holy man, every trace of the true story could not have been expunged. Only if there has been no deception will the evidence be unambiguous.
Sadly for the truth of Christianity, strange coincidences and ambiguities abound in the New Testament. The rational inquirer cannot fail to be suspicious.
Judaism had become strictly monotheistic—it had only one god and it was a heresy for Jews to think otherwise—even their messiah could not be regarded as divine. A Jew proclaiming a messiah a god at the time of Jesus would have been stoned for blasphemy. But it was no blasphemy to claim to be a messiah, a man. Under the Romans most Jews felt they had suffered enough and were expecting a man of power backed by the supernatural might of God to lead the people to freedom. The idea of a saviour messiah spurred Jewish nationalism. From 4 BC to 135 AD several messiahs were proclaimed as the Jews yearned for an end to the trials and indignities of Roman rule. Each led an unsuccessful revolt and died.
In truth Jews were henotheistic. Their god was the Most High—so called because he was the highest god. He accepted angels and demons as lesser gods, his heavenly subjects, but a human who claimed to be a god, no! Even their messiah could not be regarded as divine. A Jew proclaiming a messianic claimant a god at the time of Jesus would have been stoned for blasphemy, but it was no blasphemy to claim to be a messiah, a man.
Failure fertilised the growth of another concept, the suffering servant. The despised and rejected servant of God in Isaiah would suffer to redeem the world in a spiritual rather than physical sense. The suffering servant was a personification of the sufferings of the Jewish people rather than a model for their messiah. But the messiah had to be demonstrably of the highest morals as the moral judge of mankind. Possibly some Jews thought that suffering ensured great virtue and gave supernatural power. A suffering messiah could have been part of God’s plan to save the people. They expected the messiah to suffer as the Jewish nation had. There is evidence of this in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The contradiction of Daniel which pictured a glorious messiah was resolved by the messiah’s glorious second coming when the world would end and the faithful would be saved. From this probably came the Christian idea of Christos meaning a divine redeemer, an incarnate God who deliberately suffers, dies and is resurrected to atone for the inherent sins of mankind. Certainly the importance of the suffering messiah concept largely emerged out of the events of the intertestamental years rather than before—many scholars believe it only reached prominence as a justification of Christianity.
The Star Prophecy
From several Qumran sources, it seems another name for the messiah was ”The Star”. Thus the Damascus Rule gives a pesher on Amos 9:11 which does not obviously relate to the scriptural quotation but is an arcane confirmation of the prophecy of the star in Numbers 24:17:
There shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.
This text in Numbers is one that the community was particularly fond of and is the true source of the Star of Bethlehem in Matthew. Confirmation is that the messiah is also referred to as a star in Revelations 2:28 and the Second Epistle of Peter 1:19. The Star prophecy of Numbers has an astrological origin and there was an astronomical sign close to the birth of Jesus sure enough but the “Star of Bethlehem” has nothing to do with comets, planetary conjunctions or supernovas. The “Star of Bethlehem” simply means “The Messiah”.
Following a quotation of this star prophecy in the War Scroll, the author explains what then would happen, referring to the sectaries by their name of the poor:
by the hand of the Poor whom you have redeemed by Your Power and the peace of Your Mighty Wonders… by the hand of the Poor and those bent in the dust, You will deliver the enemies of all the lands and humble the mighty of the peoples to bring upon their heads the reward of the Wicked and justify the Judgement of Your Truth on all the sons of men.
The poor were to conquer all the enemies of Israel. The Essenes were preparing for a holy war. Note that, if son of man was a messianic title as the theologians believe, the judgement here would be of lots of messiahs! It means nothing more than man, and sons of men simply means men.
The thrust of the War Scroll like many of the Qumran fragments is markedly apocalyptic. It anticipates a battle between the Kittim, the ”Sons of Darkness” and the ”Sons of Light”. We have the familiar expression, ”Sons of Light”, from Persian religion for the members of the Community but who are their enemies, the Kittim? At first, the Kittim were the people of Cyprus, but came to mean people from across the Mediterranean sea. They appear in Daniel:
For the ships of the Kittim shall come against him, and he shall lose heart and withdraw.Daniel 11:30
In this passage, it must mean the Romans coming against Antiochus IV Epiphanes when he tried to take Egypt. So, in the scrolls, it must be the Romans. But are the scrolls referring to the Romans of Pompey’s invading armies of Republican Rome in 63 BC or the Romans of the time of Christ, soldiers of Imperial Rome?
The War Scroll says the Kittim invaders had a king, which seems to count out the invasion of Pompey because Rome was a republic—unless they regarded Pompey as a king. The Habakkuk Commentary says that the Kittim offered sacrifices to their standards. Professor G R Driver of Oxford University tells us this was a practice of Imperial Roman soldiers but not Republican ones. They could not have been Pompey’s troops but must have been those occupying the country from 6 AD till the destruction of 70 AD. And these scrolls must have been written or edited during or after this period in the first century.
Elsewhere appears the ”slain of the Kittim” and the ”falling of the Cedars of Lebanon”. The Cedars of Lebanon mean the Priesthood or the Temple because the Hebrew root of Lebanon means white signifying the white linen of the priests (the same imagery is used of the Community itself who also wore white). These passages seem to be referring to the Jewish War and the destruction of the Temple.
Another scroll fragment ends with an explanation of Jacob’s blessing on Judah:
The sceptre shall not pass from Judah, nor the staff from between his feet until the coming of Shiloh to whom the people will gather.Gen 49:10
The scroll writer’s interpretation is that the sceptre is sovereignty and the staff is the covenant of the kingdom given to the branch of David in perpetuity because he kept the law with the men of the community! Shiloh is the messiah of righteousness and is the same as the branch of David. The sceptre and the star are embodied in the same man, the Nasi, the prince of the congregation who shall smite all the children of Seth, the enemies of Israel—Numbers 24:17 specifies them as Moabites and Edomites, signifying gentiles.
The staff is the law which has to be followed until he who pours out righteousness is resurrected at the end time. Thus the messiah of righteousness and he who pours out righteousness are the same—the branch of David. Nowhere in the scriptures is Shiloh used as a messianic name except here and modern scholars have sought other meanings, but for the Essenes its interpretation was plain. Though the messianic leader, the Nasi, will smite Israel’s enemies, here he seems not to be the messiah himself—though in Daniel 9:25 the messiah is identified as the Prince (nasi).
There are a plethora of fragments containing parts of Daniel which writings were among the most inspirational for messianic Jews at the time of Christ. Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews tells us that the Jews of the time considered Daniel as
one of the greatest prophets… for the books that he wrote are left and read by us still today… he did not only prophecy future events, like the other prophets but specified the time of their accomplishment.
Prophets were seen as diviners and soothsayers in the first century and the Essenes themselves had a reputation for reliable prophesy. They would certainly have been trying to divine the signs that the End was nigh.
Fragments of a letter in the Qumran caves explain the ”End of Days” which it mentions repeatedly, sometimes using the unusual description the ”End Time”. The letter also repeatedly mentions ”the Way”. It describes how at the ”End Time” a particular concatenation of events occurs by which it can be recognised. The people of Israel then had to return to the Law ”never to turn back” if they were to be judged as Righteous or Justified at the Day of Judgement.
At the start of the Jewish War readers of Daniel might have interpreted the 70 years of wrath (Dan 9:3) as beginning with the death of Herod (though hated enough himself, his building the Temple might have been seen as blessed compared with what followed) in 4 BC—the presumed date of the birth of Jesus—and lasting until 66 AD, the start of the ultimately failed rebellion. Furthermore the prediction in Daniel 12:7 of ”the time, two times and a half” which preceded the ”End Time” tied in with the three and a half years from the stoning of James the Just in 62 AD to the outbreak of the war. Thus the patriots had sufficient to convince them that the ”End Time” had arrived and the battle should commence.
But earlier, the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 BC might have been seen as the start of the 70 years of wrath and the uprising by Judas of Galilee against the Roman census been seen as their culmination. As each presumed sign failed, the revolutionaries returned to their scriptures to refine their dates.
Jesus’s mission according to John, lasted about three years and he had probably allowed the three and a half years of Daniel’s prophecy to build up to his revolution. We conjecture that Jesus considered the showing of Pilate’s standards in Jerusalem and possibly in the temple as the Abomination of Desolation—the prime sign of the times. If he timed his mission according to the prophecy of Daniel to correspond with the ”End of Days” or ”End Time” he got it wrong, but then so did the diviners at the time of the Jewish War, and at many other times.
In the scrolls, Moses, Aaron and David were to be paralleled by three messiahs, the prophet, the priest and the prince. The Essenes seemed to believe their founder, the righteous teacher, was the prophet—the priest and prince were still expected. The Cairo Damascus Document and the Community Rule seem to imply that there would be more than one messiah—a kingly messiah and a priestly messiah. The priestly messiah was higher in rank than their princely messiah. The righteous teacher was also a priest—all senior Essenes were priests anyway—and his enemy was the wicked priest.
But often the messiahs were considered to be embodied in one person as in Psalms 45:7 where the meaning of, anointed… above thy fellows, implies that the messiah had higher qualities than anyone else anointed—prophets, priests or princes—and so must have had the qualities of all. Interestingly the Cairo document indicates that the messiah had already come and later references to ”arising” and ”standing up” must therefore indicate resurrection. Daniel 12:13 uses the Hebrew for ”standing up” in just this sense.
The Qumran Damascus Document reads that there is one messiah ”of Aaron and David” and the Cairo version describes the messiah as ”the Root of Planting out of Aaron and Israel”. So, apparently there is one messiah out of the two lineages of Aaron and Israel, who is both priest and prince—the Melchizedek, the prince of righteousness, the name used for Jesus as the supreme priest in the Epistle to the Hebrews!
Fragmentary material at Qumran tell us that the Melchizedek is the judge on the day of atonement, but elsewhere the judge is the archangel Michael, the heavenly prince of light, who would lead the heavenly hosts in a cosmic battle against the forces of darkness. In the Apocrypha, the judge is the Son of God, the messiah. The implication is that the messiah was conceived of as an aspect of the archangel Michael, and the earthly prince and the heavenly prince would unite when heaven united with earth in the kingdom yielding the judge—Melchizedek.
This is confirmed by Epiphanius writing about the Ebionites. They believed that the messiah was not begotten of God the Father, and therefore not a literal son of God in the Greek fashion like the Christian Jesus, but was created as one of the archangels. He rules over the angels and all the creatures of the Almighty, and that he came and declared:
I am come to do away with sacrifices, and if ye cease not from sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from you.
It was the Essenes who wanted to get rid of sacrifices, further proof that the Essenes and the later sect the Ebionites were the same. Revealingly, the archangel Michael is the prince of Israel in the apocalypse of Daniel (Dan 12:1) and he fights for Israel against the angels of Israel’s enemies (Dan 10:13;21). In Exodus 23:20;23 God sends an angel before the Israelites to help them defeat their enemies in Canaan and another friendly angel appears to Joshua, no less, before the city of Jericho. This latter, the prince of the army of Yehouah, was assumed to be the same angel and was identified with Michael. So Joshua (Jesus) and Michael had become associated to the Essenes, the entering of the kingdom of God being a re-enactment of the entry into the Promised Land. The non-canonical Gospel of the Hebrews has the archangel Michael appointed as the guardian of the messiah and he actually appears on earth as mary to give birth to Jesus!
The descriptions of the two figures in Revelation convince us that they are the same. In Revelation 10:1-4 an angel is described which descended from heaven with a rainbow on his head and clothed in a cloud. His face was like the sun and his feet were like pillars of fire. In Revelation 1:13-16 one like unto a son of man is described as clothed in a garment completely down to his feet, whose countenance was as the sun, whose eyes were as fire and whose feet were like fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace. His voice roared as the sound of many waters while the angel’s voice roared like a lion. These entities are so similar that they must be the same. For the early Christians, the one like unto the son of man was an angel—the archangel Michael, matching Essene beliefs.
Bar Kosiba
Besides Jesus, as noted above, several others were thought messiahs. The Star prophecy, supported by other messianic readings, was the key to the persistent troubles in Palestine in the intertestamental period. Josephus in the Jewish War says the prediction that a world ruler would come out of Palestine was the inspiration for the Jewish revolt. Suetonius and Tacitus, apparently following him, make the same assertion. Josephus cannily gained favour with Vespasian, the invading Roman general, by telling him the prophecy had been fulfilled in his victory—he was the sceptre and would rule the Empire, which later he did.
Rabbi Akiba of the Jamnia School in 132 AD renamed Simon bar Kosiba as bar Kochba, punning on the similarity of his name to “Son of the Star”, because he saw in him the fulfillment of the Star prophecy. Akiba was the noted rabbi who set the canon of the Hebrew Bible and succeeded in including the erotic verses, the Song of Solomon.Akiba proclaimed bar Kosiba “messiah of the Jews”, the fact that bar Kosiba was not of the house of David was of no consequence to Akiba, the most learned rabbi of his day. Interestingly, a papyrus, found at Murabba’at near Qumran, describes bar Kosiba as Prince of Israel—Nasi. So bar Kosiba, was both Nasi and messiah as in Daniel.
Bar Kosiba was the last Jewish rebel against Rome, fighting a second Jewish war from 132 to 135 AD. The Romans had had enough and responded brutally and finally, butchering Jews everywhere, evicting them from their land and destroying Jerusalem as a Jewish city. Any Jew found in the city of Jerusalem was automatically killed, a curious reversal of the earlier death sentence on gentiles found within the outer temple court, the Court of the Gentiles, which even the Romans were ready to honour to respect Jewish religious scruples. The date 135 AD was the beginning of the Diaspora, an exile declaimed by God in punishment.
The Jewish War of 66-70 AD was a spontaneous eruption of anti-Roman feeling after decades of simmering discontent. According to Josephus, the tactics of the Jews in the Jewish War were to shut themselves up in a network of fortifications all over the country and wait for the Romans to attack. If they had provided for adequate support of one beseiged fortress for another the Jews might have been more successful but by concentrating against each strongpoint the Romans were able to capture each one in succession.
When Simon bar Kosiba revolted in 132-135 AD, the Jews had learned their lesson, and adopted a more flexible response, but ultimately the outcome was the same. The main Jewish forces were under the direct command of bar Kosiba and were deployed in the open according to operational needs until the penultimate phase of the war, when the Romans finally succeeded in forcing bar Kosiba into the fortress of Bethar. Independent were the regional or municipal defense forces. The supporters of bar Kosiba prepared for the conflict arming themselves cleverly. Jewish armourers purposely made weapons of poor quality for the Romans who were campaigning under Hadrian in Egypt. The Romans rejected the unworthy weapons. The smiths then secretly repaired the faulty weapons and supplied them to the rebels.
Their tactics were those of guerilla warfare, according to Dio Cassius. They did not attempt to meet Romans legionaries in field warfare but set up walled fortifications in favourable spots. These they linked, rather like the Vietnamese in their war against the Americans in the sixties, by digging extensive tunnels, even supplied with periodic air shafts. Thus the guerillas had places of refuge whenever they were hard-pressed, and places to meet in secret underground but were ready to abandon their permanent defenses and escape by stealth. They also gave access to sources of water.
Other caves and tunnels were better suited to surprise attacks against Roman bases, out-posts, and communications, and a rapid and mysterious method of retreating. Thus the bar Kosiba rebeles performed in the early stages of the war. Having different hidden entrances, they allowed anyone who discovered one to be trapped by men leaving by another exit and coming upon the unwary soldiers from behind. In these caves men and war materials could be assembled, undiscovered and unnoticed by the authorities.
The caves of Paran, which opened in the perpendicular rock face, had been a refuge for Jewish rebeles in the time of Hyrcanus II. The ambitious Herod had attacked these hideaways using ingenious methods to penetrate them, when making a name for himself as a maintainer of public order for the Romans. Josephus tells us in the Jewish War that Simon bar Giora elnlarged these caves to make them his base in 68 AD.
Eventually the Jews were forced into defence anyway. The caves were used as hideaways. Only after the Romans discovered these caves did it become clear how the rebels had achieved their objectives of surprising the Roman garrisons and cutting them off from the mountains.
Dio Cassius explains that the cause of bar Kosiba’s revolt was Hadrian’s desecration of the city of Jerusalem and the erection of a shrine to Jupiter in the temple of Yehouah. Jews thought it intolerable that the foreigners should settle in Jerusalem and godless gentile rites performed there. It was an Abomination of Desolation—a sign of the coming Messiah. When Hadrian departed from the region, they revolted but bar Kosiba did not specially try to defend the Holy City, preferring to keep his army mobile rather than embattled behind walls. Nevertheless he sought to revive nationalist fervour by issuing a coin commemorating the Jewish commander, Eleazar ben Jair and the heroes of Masada who had committed suicide rather than be captured by the Romans in 73 AD. Is it coincidence that the name Jair is the name of the president of the Council whose daughter Jesus putatively saved from death in Mark 5:22. Was he the forefather of Eleazar the Zealot?
Hadrian sent Julius Severus from Britain to take charge of the war. Severus also decided to refrain from open confrontation on the grounds that the Jews were dangerous fanatics fighting in their own country and might be hard even for the experienced Romans to handle in large numbers. Doubtless he was recognising the historical record. He contented himself with attacking small parties of rebels and mopping them up seige and pursuit. Slowly but effectively he was able to exhaust and exterminate them. Using roads for rapid troop movements, he cut off chunks of bar Kosiba’s territory, and sealed them off to giving the Romans a local numerical superiority. He then drove the Jews into defensive positions and starved them out. Severus razed to the ground fifty major strongpoints and nine hundred and eighty-five villages. The point however is that the Jewish network was so incredibly extensive.
About a million Jews were killed and nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate. The Romans also suffered severe casualties, despite their tactics as is shown by Hadrian deliberately not using the customary address when writing his victory letter back to the Senate that “I and the legions are well”.
