Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, June 11, 2000

Persian Colonists

Such Christian scholars as Rudolf Otto, writing decades before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, noted that Jesus’s teaching of the kingdom of God had “intensive elements” from Persia. Otto refers to the idea of the “kingdom” as an eschatological end that Aryan priests and theologians used as a “technical term”.

Zoroastrian mythology explains all the elements of Judaism missing in the primitive Israelite religion—the same religion as the Canaanites. The subsequent myth was that the grandchildren of the original rulers, that were taken into exile beside the Rivers of Babylon, returned and re-wrote the Jewish myths to incorporate the new features they had discovered from Zoroastrianism. In fact, insomuch that this myth is true at all, they returned with a new religion—Zoroastrianism for Jews!

Several hundred years before Jesus, Darius II, an otherwise undistinguished Persian shah, sent officials to Judaea under the supposed mandate of the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus, to set up a temple state for Abarnahara, unite the people under a common syncretistic religion and to keep order as a Persian provincial government. The devotees of this new religion were called Yehudim—Jews. Jews who ”returned” to accomplish this task were sent by the administrators and officials of the most successful empire and one of the most sophisticated civilisations that had ever existed on earth. Darius pretended to the people he sent that they were returning to their homeland, and conceivably some were, but primarily they were people chosen by the Persian chancellery officials and sent on a mission. They accomplished it wonderfully well and these “chosen people” led to the foundation of three world-wide religions!

On ”returning,” they had to contend with the descendants of the Canaanite peasants who had been left behind when their rulers were deported by the Babylonians. They had held to their old Canaanite myths and traditions, yet found these “exiled” Jews coming back, hobnobbing with foreigners and telling everyone that they did not understand their own religion. The unworldly native Jews, dubbed the “Men of the Land” or “Am ha-Aretz”, were attached to their traditional ideas of religious worship. The ”returners” would have nothing to do with their old-fashioned ideas. They rejected them and consistently turned the native Judahites away. This was the moment in history when Judaism was born, but its birth also gave birth to a tradition of schism which lasted for centuries. The old-fashioned Jews were later to be called the “Lost Sheep of the House of Israel” and were considered as apostates, though they preserved the original traditions of Israel.

By the time of Jesus, Greek influence had become so strong that there were indeed many apostate Jews and the term was also applied to them.

Asuras

Now the idea of the kingdom of God goes back to the Aryan group of gods called Asuras. In the Aryan religion at one stage Asuras were important gods but in India their roles were taken by other gods and they declined in the Indian Pantheon to mainly minor positions. Among the Asuras were Varuna, the foremost one, Mitra, Bhaga, Amse and Aryaman. Originally they seem to have been identical, so far as we can now tell, so their names could be simply different tribal names for the same god, a manifestation of the sun. Tribal alliances that eventually led to federation will have brought the Asuras together on a par, then Varuna emerged as the Asura who could declare:

I am all the Asuras.

In India, the sun god is called Surya. Curiously, all the Asuras are sun gods. In Egypt, the great sun god was “Ra”, and a popular suffix denoting a son was “su” suggesting the speculation that “surya” or “asura” is really a word that means “son of the sun god”, the suffix being used here as a prefix. Such speculation might seem far fetched, but philologists have good reason to believe that much more widely dispersed words than these have common roots in an ancient prehistoric language.

In Persian, mazda is taken to mean “wise” in the title of the Zoroastrian Almighty God, Ahuru Mazda. It is the same word in effect as magi or “medhi”. medhi-ra corrupted to Mazda seems to say “wise-sun”, but since Ahura is a variant of Asura we seem to be getting the sun in twice in the name of the Zoroastrain God. Probably medhi-ra was renderd in Aryan as Ahura Mazda with the Ra replaced by Ahura and the medhi replaced by Mazda, the vowel denoted by “i” changing to that denoted by “a” for reasons of assonance—but both names mean the same, “Wise Sun” or “Wise Lord” since the word “Asura” came to be a secular title meaning “Lord”. Varuna is designated in the Vedas as “the Wise”. Finally, Ahura Mazda was abbreviated to Ramuzd and Ormuzd.

The god, Asura, in the Vedas is also called the king, raja, and is praised as such in many “royal psalms” akin to those in the Hebrew Psalms. His kingdom is heaven which he rules as the “Divas Asura”, the Lord of heaven (literally, the sun of heaven). The Canaanites had a Lord of the heavens called Baal Shamaim literally, Lord of the suns.

In antiquity, the sun was personified as a sun god whose origins are later forgotten, and he is abstracted as a transcendental god of the cosmos who actually puts the sun in its place at the creation. Varuna, Ormuzd and Yehouah fit this pattern. Zoroaster depicted Ormuzd as the power beyond the sun, but he seemed to have two aspects from the start, the Holy Spirit or Spenta Mainyu, and the Evil Spirit or Angra Mainyu. The basis is the sun as temperate, sustaining life, and the sun as too hot or too weak, when life is lost. The idea of one god with two opposite principles embodied within is two subtle for simple folk so Ormuzd quickly became identified with Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu obtained an independent personality as Ahriman, an old Asura reanimated as an Evil One.

Even as far back as the Vedas there was a spirit called “Ahi Budhnya”, a dragon of the earth, equivalent to the Greek god, Pluto. So, although a sinister figure, he has not, in the Vedas, evolved into a principle of evil as he did in Zoroastrianism. Ahriman was considered a dragon, and was depicted as a serpent, the earthly equivalent of a dragon.

The transcendental god finds himself opposed by an opponent who is in practice just as powerful.

But how could an Almighty God like Ormuzd find himself with such a strong opponent? The Zoroastrian theologians explained it by having Ormuzd too distant from this world, whereas Ahriman took a great interest in debauching poor mankind. When Ormuzd found out what was going on, he would correct the oversight. So, the faithful had to pray for the oversight to be corrected and for Ormuzd to right the wrongs of the world caused by the evil Ahriman.

The trouble was that Ormuzd was too far away, up there beyond the heavens, so what good was praying to him? No good at all! That is where Mitra comes in. Mitra was another old Asura who became the mediator between the two opposing gods. He was therefore more accessible than Ormuzd because he visited earth to see what Ahriman was up to. Poor humans could pray to Mithras (Mitra) because he is on the side of Ormuzd, the absolute good and is sure to tell him what is going on. Thus, Mithras became a Mediator and Redeemer of mankind before Jesus did—but the parallels are clear.

Of course, the evil spirit had to be defeated by the perfectly good Almighty God whom the Judaeo-Persian priests returning from “exile” called Yehouah, the tribal god of the Israelite nation, rather than ostenibly more powerful and longer established gods like El or Baal. Yehouah would ultimately achieve victory over the Evil One at the End of Time. Then, those who had been righteous would be resurrected into a renewed and perfectly uncorruptible world, to live forever in bliss.

Shahthra

The concept in all this in the New Testament is that of the “kingdom of God”. In the Persian myth, it is that of the “Shahthra”. In the Persian, this word signifies all of the kingdom, the power and the glory, just as it does in the Lord’s prayer. Shahthra was to come at the end of the evil world—it was the perfect world that replaced it, a continuation of the familiar world but perfected. To the righteous, resurrected into it, it is the natural world, but it is supernatural because it is perfect and incorruptible. Christians should note though, because it is the source of their belief in resurrection, that it is not somewhere else. It is not transcendental.

Soderblum, quoted by Otto, tells us that in the Avesta, when ”Shahthra” arrives there is no longer any difference between heaven and earth. The Essenes believed exactly the same thing and sincerely believed that they were bringing a little bit of heaven to earth by behaving as perfectly holy people, or saints!

In 1 Chronicles, God is the king of heaven and earth. All of this is His kingdom, and Christians have taken His kingdom to be all of this. But for Jews, Yehouah was specifically their king and Israel was the land and nation of His people. So we find, in 1 Chronicles 17:14, that Yehouah refers to His kingdom as being the kingdom of David—the kingdom of God is Israel. Then, again, the Jews came to feel that their king, Yehouah, had departed. He had been replaced by foreign princes, and they looked to the day when Yehouah would return to Zion as seemingly prophesied by the prophets (Isa 24:23; Zeph 3:15; Zech 14:16). Much of this was Persian propaganda advocating their new Yehouah, but it gelled, and was magnified in later times when Israel was ruled by Greek and Roman princes. Yehouah would become a king in His kingdom again in a sense which came to be eschatological.

We have then several senses of the kingdom of God in the Jewish scriptures, yet Christian scholars, defying all scholarship, declare that the idea of a kingdom of God was uniquely Jesus’s. They pronounce the “kingdom of God” as a “technical term” which does not explicitly occur in the Old Testament. Yehouah as an eschatological king does not invite the thought of the eschatological kingdom of God, and the absence of the technical term proves it! This is purely sleight of hand, in typical dishonest Christian fashion. The idea had obviously arisen and the idea must precede expressions that describe it. What made the expression ”kingdom of God” fashionable at the time of Jesus will have been its identification with the persistent Jewish unhappines with Roman rule and the concomitant revival by the Essenes of thoughts of restoration of the kingdom of Israel.

It is, in any case, false that the “technical term” does not appear in the Jewish scriptures. It appears in The Wisdom of Solomon 10:10 as the very place to which Wisdom guides the Righteous. It is the heaven on earth to which the perfectly righteous can aspire, and the perfectly righteous in Judaism are those who walk perfectly in the law of God—the Mosaic law.

The Christian Lord’s Prayer is quite explicit in inviting God to found His kingdom in earth:

Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.

This can only be achieved when earth becomes heaven—or joined to heaven, and when earth and heaven join together, the present world ends. The prayer is therefore a prayer for the present world to end as it is, and a new world joined to heaven to begin. Eusebius confirms this in Ecclesiastical History where he states:

Papias adduces strange parables and teachings of the Saviour, and other more mystical things. Among them he says there will be a millennium after the Resurrection of the Dead, when the kingdom of the Messiah will be set up in material form on this earth.

The idea of angels as lesser gods, subjects, emissaries and ambassadors of the great king in heaven is largely the result of Persian influence. It was a convenience for the priests of the reformed Israelite religion, because it allowed them to write the old legends with Yehouah the central figure where previously he had not been. The other gods of the old Israelite pantheon then became the angels of Yehouah, the courtiers of the heavenly court. Often they would actually convert an old god into Yehouah for the sake of the new religion. Thus the old High God, El, was considered as Yehouah whenever he appeared.

The Persian idea of a cosmic battle was also introduced into Judaism. It was apparent in the Essene outlook and was fully taken up by Jesus, since he was an Essene. The defeat of the House of Satan and his ultimate fall is a message of Jesus that came directly from Zoroastrianism. For Paul also, the real world was the world of Satan and his satraps, or Archons as the Gnostics called them.

Jesus begins his Ministry

Jesus did not automatically become the Nasi of the Essenes on his baptism. Matthew and Mark imply Jesus did not succeed John, as the leader of the Nazarenes, until John was handed over or cast into prison by Herod. Only then did he begin spreading the gospel. In Acts 10:37, Peter, addressing Cornelius, also implies that Jesus only began his ministry after John the Baptist was imprisoned. Jesus was the prince in waiting, crowned in preparation for John to stand down. The ultimate fate of John the Baptist is not told until later but he has no further role in the gospel story.

As successor to John, Jesus takes up the same message. Note it is the same message—Jesus had not changed it. It was exactly that of John the Baptist—the same task—not in the new one of God’s messiah. He makes no claim to be the messiah but simply continues John’s call to the misled Jews, simple of Ephraim—they should repent in preparation for the coming kingdom—the time had come, the kingdom of God was near, repentance was needed. God’s kingdom was on earth, though it would have been cleansed and renewed by God’s holy fire. It would be presided over by the messiah. His lieutenants would be “the Righteous” of the children of Israel—if they had died before the triumph, resurrected on the third day (Hosea 6:2). Faith was not sufficient to enter the kingdom as theologians later claimed—Jews who wanted to be amongst “the Righteous” had to repent. Salvation was the gift of God but it had to be earned by righteousness or sincere repentance.

“The kingdom of God is near” sounds pretty innocuous to us but to the Jews it was a call to arms. They expected God’s reign to be initiated by the messiah liberating the chosen people from foreign yoke. God would intervene but he only helped those who helped themselves.

No mention is made in Mark of Jesus baptizing, yet baptism was required of those who sincerely repented—a ritual cleansing to accompany the spiritual cleansing of repentance. Mark’s omission of baptism is deliberate. Christians wanted to distinguish themselves from the followers of the Baptist, who were still active when Mark wrote, as Acts proves. So they mostly deleted baptism by Jesus from the story, just as they disguised or deleted all occurrences of the Essene sacred meal until the last supper, to give a romanticized and spurious account of its origin. However, we learn from John 3:26 and 4:1 that Jesus and John were both baptizing at the same time. John the Baptist takes the news that Jesus was successful as proof that he was indeed God’s choice and it was time for John to step down (decrease)—all men come to him (Jn 3:26) and Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, an excuse for John to deny he is the messiah. Later (Jn 4:2), an editor saw a problem in John’s account of the Son of God behaving like John the Baptist and inserts a parenthesis that it was the disciples who baptized!

Note, in Mark 1:15, the phrase, “the time is fulfilled”, which implied that whoever was judging the nature of the time had reason to believe something was about to happen. The Essenes spent a great deal of energy in keeping time precisely, and in seeking clues to God’s intentions by comparing the scriptures with current events. The scrolls speak of the “End Time” as does Daniel 12:4 and 12:9. The Gospel of John speaks of the “Last Days”, and the Epistles use the same expression or the “Last Time”. If there were other apocalyptic sects at the time of Jesus besides the Essenes, it is odd that we should never have heard of them, and, if they were so small, what resources could they offer to the divining of times. The Essenes apparently had a well developed school at Qumran and a widespread organization. Only they had the resources. The conclusion must be that Jesus and John the Baptist, his predecessor, were Essenes.

The Greek translated, “is at hand”, is rendered by some scholars as, “has arrived”, which suggests that like, “the time is fulfilled”, the Nazarenes read signs which unmistakably proclaimed the kingdom in such a way that there was no stepping back. For Mark the temptation had started the cosmic battle which would terminate in the everlasting kingdom.

Mark uses the sickness convention to show that Jesus travelled widely to proclaim his message, gaining many converts and recruits for his cause (Mark 1:32-1:34):

And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all that were diseased, and them that were possessed with devils. And all the city was gathered together at the door. And he healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast out many devils; and suffered not the devils to speak, because they knew him.

Note the secretiveness. They met only after sunset so as not to attract the attention of the authorities, and casting out devils—the despair, defeatism and spiritual emptiness of a defeated people. It works! The kingdom is coming! People flock to join the band, and doubters who were ill or possessed by demons are won over. Luke 4:41 reads:

And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God. And he rebuking them suffered them not to speak: for they knew that he was Christ.

No one was allowed to suggest that Jesus was the Messiah, wherther he thought he was himself or not. If anyone were to cry out, ”Jesus, the Messiah”, they would have been potentially attracting the attention of the authorities. So, Jesus rebuked them and forbade them to speak and the disciples discouraged them with a beating. Such people were “unclean spirits”, “devils” or “demons”.

Power

The Essenes believed that God had ordained an End when he would avenge all wrong and judge the world. Did the Essenes have the idea of time ending at the End Time. No! Time ended for the present world but the new world of the kingdom of God then continued. Jesus never said that heaven and earth would pass away. He said that nothing of the law could be altered until heaven and earth passed away. He meant that the law could never be altered because heaven and earth would never pass away. The law was forever unalterable—it was given by God, so how could men change it? This was the Essene view.

Since the conquests by various foreign powers over several hundred years seemed to show that God had gone away and given up on His people, some Jews thought a clear and definitive step was needed to get God’s attention and prove to Him that His people were still worthy of His lovingkindness.

If Jesus considered the world the realm of the Devil, we can plausibly imagine that he thought the clearest manifestation of the Devil was the Roman occupation of God’s land and people—the Roman occupation of Israel. For Jews, Israel was in the clearest sense, the kingdom of God, but it had been usurped by God’s adversary, Satan. Jesus and Essenes like him can only have seen the defeat of Satan as synonymous with the defeat of Rome and this is proved in Revelations. Thus Roman defeat opened the gates of the kingdom of God. Yehouah could return to His rightful place as the king of Israel. God would be restored to Zion.

The idea of heaven uniting with earth was therefore intuitively linked with the nationalistic idea of Israel as God’s particular kingdom. Heaven and earth could only join when Israel had been freed from Satan’s earthly agents—the Roman occupiers and their allies the froward priests of Jerusalem. The messiah, the son of God, who led the Jews against Satan’s agents on earth was also the earthly king of the Jews. That is why Jesus was crucified. Those who hungered and thirsted for righteousness were precisely those who realised that fighting the Holy War against Satan in the natural world was an important part of God’s cosmic battle against the Evil One, and would serve to show the Jews as still worthy despite their history of backsliding.

So, God’s kingdom had to be a “power”, as the Lord’s prayer states:

Thine is the kingdom,
The power and the glory.

So, those pious Jews who wanted the restoration of the kingdom to its rightful ruler felt they had to demonstrate this “power” or “dynamis” to prove that they were still worthy. They would defeat the Romans then God would inaugurate His kingdom in its full power and glory. Jesus was teaching the kingdom of God as a political as well as an eschatological entity—the state of Judaea as a polis or a civitas.

Jesus was not interested in speculating about the nature of the kingdom when it came. He was solely concerned to bring it about. The rest was up to God. The kingdom of God was obviously desirable for Jews and they expected to be the new archons of the world in it, but they did not speculate unduly about what it would be like. Plainly it was a shiny and rose coloured world because it was pure, perfect, incorruptible, free of sin and free of wickedness, but otherwise it was indescribable. The point was how to bring it about, and in the gospels, when Jesus is asked about the kingdom, he does not describe it but describes how it arises. The surprising answer in the light of popular apocalyptic ideas was that the kingdom was already beginning to grow on earth.

The Essenes did not believe the world was irredeemably evil. They thought that although the world was wicked, men could try to make it perfect. God had shown what had to be done. People had to obey God’s law then they would be perfect. The Essenes tried to be perfect as God had commanded, and believed that be so doing they brought a little bit of heaven to earth.

The trouble was that most Jews did not properly follow God’s law. Many were apostates, living life according to Greek customs not Jewish one. Jesus and the Essenes tried to prove to God that there was the will among the righteous of this world to bring about heaven. It was possible for the kingdom of God to grow on earth, if healthy seeds were planted:

The kingdom of God is among you.

Rudolf Otto writing more than 20 years before the scrolls were uncovered says it is a “secret power” “working secretly and quietly” “in the germinating faith of the first community”. Otto sounds as though he is describing the secretive and undercover nature of the Essene sect for whom defeat of the Kittim (Westerners who propagated Greek culture—Romans) was a necessary requirement of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.

This is most obvious in the parables of Mark 4 where the growth of the kingdom is described in similes. The kingdom of God is likened to a seedling plant, beginning small and eventually encompassing everthing. The seed was the Essenes movement, from which the kingdom had come, and which itself had grown as a protection for God’s law, which was the ultimate spore of the kingdom, and the sense in which God’s kingdom was already on earth. Like a head of water building behind a dam, the kingdom grew almost unseen until it burst forth in a torrent when God deemed the time right. But it grew in secret first.

If the kingdom began as seeds, in God’s law and the remnant of Israel that followed it properly, then it is true to say that the kingdom was a power of God already at work. Furthermore, the Essenes considered themselves the foundation of the kingdom of God in this world. With a change of metaphor a foundation is a seed. So these “mystereia” of the gospels are explained naturally and historically without invoking any supernatural “power” of God. B W Bacon, in 1929, wrote that the parables of the kingdom in Mark express a power “already at work”, “unseen by dull or hostile eyes”, “silent, omnipotent, overtaking unawares”.

The Essenes were like the Maquis in France in WWII. They were a body of guerrillas secretly conspiring against their enemy, the occupying power. That meant, of necessity, secretly organising to bring about the kingdom of God by defeating the Romans. Only when their uprising was successful and the Romans evicted could the kingdom of God break in. Paradoxically, the “newness” of Jesus’s teaching for Christian commentators turns out to be precisely the revelations of the working of a secret organisation that would sweep away the wordly princes of Satan to inaugurate the kingdom of God. This is the sense that the kingdom was already at work.

The Imminence of the Kingdom

And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.

Mark 9:1

Jesus’s most important prediction—that the kingdom of God would be seen by this generation—is still untrue today. Christian scholars have fought with this difficult verse but for the impartial observer the meaning is clear.

When Jesus repeatedly says that the kingdom of God is nigh, he means exactly that—it was due at any time. And the kingdom of God was assuredly not some fourth dimensional kingdom or mysterious kingdom only entered by faith in the resurrection. He meant that the kingdom would be here on earth within the lifetime of a mature adult. It is clearer in Mark:

I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

Mark 13:30

The other two synoptic gospels also contain this formula (Mt 24:34; Lk 21:32). The Essenes believed the battle would take forty years, a Jewish generation, so Jesus felt sure that some of his followers, repentant and baptized as they were, would not have died before the eve of the kingdom.

If the kingdom means everlasting life for the Righteous, then those who do not die physically before it comes, never die at all, but Jesus actually says…

…they shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come,

implying that the coming of the kingdom will kill them. The day of God’s vengeance meant that everyone would physically die, but the Righteous would be resurrected on the third day of the kingdom to live for ever after. In this case, Jesus is actually saying to everyone:

The kingdom is due within a generation, so some of you will be still alive when the kingdom comes, but like everyone else, sinner and righteous, will die on its arrival in the terrible day of God’s vengeance, but only the Righteous will be resurrected in the general resurrection on the third day.

Admittedly, the author of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 does not mention the deadly effect of the coming of the kingdom:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord,

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

but nor does he exactly deny it. He would not have wanted to scare off potential converts, and this seems to show that Christians had forgotten the idea of the general resurrection on the third day.

If Jesus expected, like everyone else to die before the general resurrection on the third day, then all of his prophecies of rising on the third day are explained as a general belief and not a singular prediction.

The Mission of the Disciples

The signs of the times are portentous. The kingdom of God is imminent. Jesus gets concerned that many Jews will not hear his message before the kingdom dawns. He will be unable to reach all Jews before judgement day and he decides to speed up the recruitment process by sending out disciples.

The fashion in which the disciples were sent out is revealing. They followed the practice of the Essenes who always succoured brother travellers passing by. Jesus tells them to carry only the minimum with them—though they were allowed a staff, as were the Essenes largely for defensive and hygienic reasons—and to depend upon voluntary assistance. Josephus in The Jewish War writes:

They carry nothing with them on a journey except arms as a protection against brigands. In every city there is one of their order expressly appointed to attend strangers, who provides them with clothing and other necessities.

The message is the urgency of repentance for the coming of the kingdom:

And they went out, and preached that men should repent.

Mark 6:12

and Matthew states it explicitly:

And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Matthew 10:7

The message, in Luke 10:9, repeated in 10:11, is:

The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.

In Matthew 8:22 and Luke 9:60 the urgency is such that Jesus says:

Let the dead bury the dead.

It was too late for funereal nostalgia, too late for the physically dead to repent. The living had to be persuaded to repent. Then as the Righteous, they would be resurrected into everlasting life. Jesus expected the kingdom of God to come with a vengeance at almost any time soon. His message was urgent! That people can still be waiting 2000 years later proves their gullibility and the power of the priesthood to control people’s thoughts. As an Essene, Jesus knew the signs of the times—those times! They told him that the day of judgement was nigh! Then! He was wrong but is still believed now!

The warning to those who did not welcome or listen to the messengers, even whole households or cities, was severe:

It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgement, than for that city.

Jesus is saying that at the appointed time of God’s vengeance the judgement on cities which reject the disciples will be worse than the Old Testament judgement on Sodom and Gomorrha. If they did not listen and repent, then that was their punishment.

Jesus’s message was specifically for Jews and not gentiles. Jesus’s command (Mt 10:5-6) was not to go into the way of the gentiles or into any city of the Samaritans but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Luke’s creation (Lk 10:1-16) of the mission of the seventy—which he bases on the mission of the twelve in Mark—is a Christian invention to retrieve the situation and include gentiles. Luke was writing for gentiles and finishes up cursing Jewish cities because of their failure to repent and praising gentile cities like Tyre and Sidon. In Matthew 11:20-24 this cursing happens in a different context casting doubt on it.

However, comparing Mark 6:11 and Matthew 10:15 with Matthew 11:22 and Luke 10:14, shows that Tyre and Sidon should really be Sodom and Gomorrha. Indeed it is clear even within Luke (Lk 10:12 and Lk 10:14). A gentile has altered the original comparison in Mark of the faithless cities with Sodom and Gomorrha to one with the gentile cities Tyre and Sidon to make it sound as though Jews were less worthy than gentiles. It is patently nonsense because the Jewish yardstick for sinning was the law of Moses. How could a gentile repent of sins of which he was not aware? So the woes on the cities seem like edited Nazarene tradition—a bewailing of hard-hearted towns that had rejected the disciples. It therefore all belongs when they return.

Matthew glaringly contradicts himself in Mt 10:8 and 10:10. In verse 8, the disciples were to deliver their message freely as it was received, but, in verse 10, the implication is that they should be paid. Jesus as an Essene would have expected no payment, nor accepted it, but only food and shelter. He was an Ebionite, one of the poor. Paul it was who taught that missionaries should expect to be paid. It has been the justification of every evangelical quack ever since—and don’t they get rich!

The anointing with oil in verse 6:13 is probably wrong. Essenes did not use oil which they considered defiling, though they would have used ointments to cure physical ailments. These people were not physically sick but spiritually sick, though Mark thinks or pretends they were physically sick. Spiritual sickness is cured by repentance and baptism not by oil. The evangelist changed the sacrament by baptism into anointing with oil to maintain the pretence that physical ilnesses were being cured.

Mark has Jesus dispatching the twelve to preach when elsewhere in his account they show little understanding of Jesus’s message. Either they are not as stupid as Mark depicts them or they were not sent out in this way. The twelve is Mark’s convenient way of indicating the selected twelve but it does not come from the original tradition where it would have been simply disciples. Disciples, not the twelve, were sent out to the surrounding villages to garner support.

In Matthew, Jesus’s mission speech goes on for another 26 verses after it ends in Mark, but some of it turns up in Mark’s mini-apocalypse in his chapter 13. Mostly it is not genuine Nazarene tradition but Christian additions. However, we find (Mt 10:23):

Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come,

which—if the Son of man meant Daniel’s one like unto a Son of man—means the appointed time of the Lord was due soon. And then we find:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword,

Matthew 10:34

which can only be interpreted in a non-peaceful sense since Jesus plainly says so! In Luke 12:51, it is toned down to a division, but Luke says also:

I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I if it be already kindled.

Freely rendered Jesus is saying, “I didn’t start the trouble, it had already started”.

A Speech for the Kingdom

Jesus makes a speech for the kingdom in Mark 8:34-8:38, urging people to join him if they wanted to save their lives. Apparently anachronistically he says:

Let him take up his cross.

If the cross here meant the cross of the crucifixion, then the expression must have come into common usage after the crucifixion. Who would have understood it beforehand? None of the moronic disciples say at this point:

Er, what is this “take up your cross” boss?

What is more likely is that Jesus spoke of the baptismal cross mark made in sanctified water upon the forehead of the Righteous according to Ezekiel’s prescription (Ezek 9:4). Interestingly, Luke has:

take up his cross daily,

supporting the link with the Essenes and baptism because the Essenes believed in daily lustrations. Jesus must have said:

take the cross of repentance and be baptized.

The expression, “and the gospel’s”, is omitted in all three other gospels and must be a late addition to Mark. Moreover, Jesus would never have put himself in the foreground by using “my” and “I”. Such passages are Christianized. Jesus the Essene would have considered everything God’s, even the words in his own mouth. The euphemism “son of man” was intended to avoid “I” and we can be sure too that “my” would also have been avoided. At stake was the everlasting life of the kingdom. A man saving his physical life would lose everlasting life, but those willing to give up his life for God would gain everlasting life.

If it reflects Christian experience rather than the original tradition, it implies that Christians had lost their lives for their faith even at the early date at which Mark wrote. Many Nazarenes died during the Jewish War, but earlier they had died in the temporary liberation of Jerusalem.

If the passage has any basis in Nazarene tradition, it seems to be a rallying speech in Essenic language urging the Nazarenes not to fear for their lives in the coming battles, since the kingdom was nigh and their reward would be everlasting life.

“Adulterous and sinful generation” is an Essene expression. Here Jesus unmistakably uses “son of man” in the messianic sense of Daniel. In Mark though it is not absolutely clear that he means himself, though the other synoptics leave no room for doubt. Jesus would have believed that the Daniel figure was the heavenly messiah, the archangel Michael, leading in his heavenly hosts, as the Essenes believed. The role of the earthly messiah, himself, was to capture the city of God from the heathen.

The use of “his Father” implies that Jesus expected to become the archangel Michael, the one like unto Son of man, but it is possibly a Christianization. Originally it was probably simply God, though the Essenes might have understood that the earthly and heavenly messiahs became the same when heaven and earth joined.

Receiving the Children

For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward. And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.

Mark 9:41-9:42

Jesus had no special interest in children, that is, in immature adults. When he received a child in Mark 9:36-37, conceivably he dramatized his saying by using a child as a prop, but the little child is simply a personification of the children Jesus was interested in—the Children of Israel. The child was not a gentile child—Jesus was not sent for gentiles. Jesus is simply pointing out that any one of the Children of Israel can receive God. The conditions were that they should repent sincerely and be baptized. Mark sees that it ties in with the rejection of precedent and includes it here though it might not have been here originally but in his instructions to the disciples departing on their mission of recruitment. This is where Matthew puts it (Mt 10:40-42).

Mark 9:37 has been Christianized by making Jesus and his name central. Originally it was more modest. He was deliberately playing down his role as Nazarene leader:

Whosoever shall receive one of such children receiveth not this son of man but God alone.

And since he was giving the disciples instructions for their mission, he was really saying to them:

When you recruit someone, make sure they understand that God is leader of the Nazarenes not me.

The narrative in Mark is interrupted by the insertion of Mark 9:38 to 9:40 but continues in 9:41. Mark 9:41 has been changed because originally it referred to baptism, and Mark wanted to distinguish Jesus from John the Baptist. Originally it read:

For whosoever shall mark them in baptism with the cross of water in God’s name, because they belong to Him, they shall not lose their reward.

But anyone abusing a Nazarene convert (“these little ones who believe in me”) will be lost to the coming kingdom. Nonetheless the vigorous words used seem to be threatening. In other words he is saying to the disciples:

you don’t have to wait any longer to mete out appropriate treatment. The End Time is now. If you punish those who are attacking you then it is God’s will.

Forbid the Children Not

Mark 10:13-10:16 is the famous passage, much loved by Christian illustrators, in which Jesus says:

suffer the little children to come unto me.

Unfortunately the children referred to by Jesus are the Children of Israel not kiddy-winkies, though the saying might have arisen from an occasion when little children were present.

The original reference was too explicit for Mark, who had made the Jews the enemy of Jesus, and he changed it into a homely little episode. Luke 18:15 eliminates any possible confusion by turning the children into infants. But the meaning is transparent—it is a re-wording of Jesus’s perennial message that he had come only for the children of Israel. As we have seen, the kingdom was of this earth, and included righteous gentiles coming in supplication to the Jews. But only righteous Jews could bring it about. This is crystal clear in Matthew 18:10-14 where a warning not to despise these little ones is followed by the parable of the lost sheep. The little ones and the lost sheep are the simple of Ephraim of the scrolls—lapsed and sinful Jews, but Jews nonetheless and entitled to the chance of God’s mercy as His chosen of the covenant with Abraham.

The original would have read:

Suffer all the children to come; forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily: Whosoever is not one of the children shall not enter therein, save who the Lord taketh unto him and blesseth.

Jesus was not excluding gentiles from the kingdom, if they were righteous, but they came in the second phase to pay tribute to the Most High in Jerusalem when the kingdom was set up. In the Talmud the same idea is expressed:

into the Jerusalem of the world to come they only may enter who are appointed thereto.

Thus the little children of this passage were not children but children of Israel—adult Jews wanting baptism into the sect. The baptismal litany of the primitive church included the call: “What forbids?” prior to the baptism echoing Jesus’s injunction: “Forbid them not”, confirming that the passage concerns entry into the kingdom via baptism.

At the beginning of this passage, Jesus rebuked the disciples for turning away potential converts. It must have happened early in the ministry when some disciples might have regarded Hellenized Jews as undesirable converts. Jesus tells them otherwise.

The sense of the passage is:

And they brought backsliders to him, children of Israel who had turned away from God to the gods of the Greeks, for they now sought the kingdom of God. And his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them: “Suffer all the children to come; forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Truly: Whosoever is not one of the children shall not enter therein, save who the Lord taketh unto him and blesseth”.

Rewards for the Loyal

Mark has had to include what were surely extremely popular stories among the slaves and poor citizens of the Roman Empire who were such fertile soil for the growth of Christianity. But he, or an editor, sees the problem introduced by his inclusion of Jesus’s categorical denunciation of wealth. Mark (Mk 10:27) has an undoubtedly genuine saying which came to him in isolation—“with God all things are possible”—and wants to use it as an escape clause—a let out for wealthy Christians who would not give up their wealth. So he has the disciples, who are patently aware that righteousness is the way to get into the kingdom, absurdly saying: “Gosh! How do you get into the kingdom then?” To which the answer is the saying Mark wishes to use, a paraphrase of Job 42:2 and Jeremiah 32:17, respectively: “Lord, Thou canst do all things” and “Lord, There is nothing too hard for thee”. His problem is solved—God can find a way to get the wealthy into His kingdom, after all, but it is plainly contrived.

Mark (Mk 10:29—31) concludes with the equally patently genuine speech of Jesus telling the repentant followers who abandon everything for the battle for the kingdom that they will be rewarded a hundred times over. The words after hundredfold to the end of verse 30 are Mark’s pious construction, as few scholars will disagree.

Mark 10:31 also evidently circulated as an isolated saying because it appears in various settings in the different gospels. In its previous setting it seemed a possible rejection of Essene rules of precedence but it is not. If it circulated as a separate saying, whatever its origins, it seems to have been taken to mean that the normal hierarchies of earth would be reversed in the kingdom. That seems to be the sense of it used as a conclusion to these tales. Here it did not refer to individuals but to the Essene order as a whole, the poor and the meek who expected to be honoured in God’s kingdom.

God’s Kingdom not of this World

On entering Jerusalem, the gospels tell us, Jesus is immensely popular. The Pharisees observe:

Look, the world has gone after him.

John 12:19

He is widely acclaimed as a king, the heir to the throne of David and now Jesus does not refute these acclamations according to the gospel writers. Beginning the descent from the Mount of Olives we find people shouting (Lk 19:38):

Blessed is the king that cometh in the name of the Lord!

Even after the crucifixion the disciples express (Lk 24:21) their former hopes in the same terms:

We had hoped that it was he who would deliver Israel,

and meeting the resurrected Jesus they still believe it, asking (Acts 1:6):

Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?

All of the expectations of the Jerusalem crowds were of a restored Jewish kingdom, a new kingdom of David and Solomon on earth, a Jewish state strong enough to expel the invaders and establish a new world order.

But the clergy tell us that the disciples were mistaken. It was never Jesus’s intention to introduce a Jewish kingdom of God on earth, and cite John who says Christ taught:

My kingdom is not of this world.

They ignore that Jesus himself, explaining to the apostles how they should pray, tells them in Matthew and Luke to say the Lord’s prayer:

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

The prayer was for God to inaugurate the messianic age of God’s kingdom on earth. It clearly says in earth yet the argument of the gospel writers is that the kingdom referred to is not of this world but in heaven, and John has Jesus himself saying so (Jn 18:36). Jesus’s followers did not understand this because they were certifiably stupid and, following Mark’s lead, the gospel writers go to some trouble to depict the apostles as complete morons even though they had been personally selected by Jesus. This is manifest rubbish. We can be sure that the apostles, as well as the Jerusalem throng, knew exactly what kingdom Jesus meant. And the deceitful Christian interpretation is plainly refuted in the principal prayer of Christendom.

The word commonly translated as ”daily” in the Lord’s Prayer is ”epiousios”. Even the Christian apologist, Origen, thought ”epiousios” was made up. In some of many scholarly articles trying to make sense of it, the authors believe it best conveys a future sense rather than ”daily”. This is best expressed as ”forthcoming” and ties in much better with the prayer’s eschatological implications. In Essene symbolism, bread was eternal life or immortality, so the ”forthcoming bread” prayed for was eternal life in God’s kingdom. And the Christian prayed for it today!

The Mount of Olives

Having entered Jerusalem because they had captured it, having defeated and driven out the Romans giving the Nazarenes yet another meaning as the “victors” from nasach, the disciples are beginning to get anxious. Having taken the city and cleansed the temple they—and Jesus too—were expecting God to begin to act. So far nothing. Mark uses their anxiety to give Jesus an excuse for making his long apocalyptic speech to hide the tragedy of the defeat of the Nazarene guerrillas. Mark makes the reason for this his prediction that the temple would be destroyed, but it must really have been an explanation of the signs of the End Time. The disciples were not concerned about the temple but that the day of the Lord had arrived with no appearance of God’s miracle. They were impatient and asked Jesus to review the signs for them. They wanted reasons to feel encouraged. Jesus would have been explaining why he had come to the conclusion that the day of the Lord was due.

The association of the mount of Olives with the speech describing the apocalypse is not coincidental. In Zechariah 14:4 the prophecy is that the miracle of God inaugurating the kingdom will occur on the Mount of Olives. Jesus and his band would have spent time each day waiting and watching there. Indeed that is what they are doing when Jesus is arrested. At some point, probably the first occasion, the band arrived at the Mount of Olives and Jesus made a speech describing what was expected to happen in the cosmic conflict for the kingdom. On another occasion, the final trip to Olivet, with the Romans back in control of the city, it was an impassioned speech appealing to God to respond to their act of faith in capturing Jerusalem. Mark uses bits of both and also possibly bits of the speech made when Jesus first took the city because there is a further reference to the fig tree.

The Mount of Olives is of apocalyptic importance to the Essenes because it lies in direct line between Jerusalem and Qumran. The prophet Ezekiel saw God leave the polluted city of Jerusalem (Ezek 10:19) and hurry away to the east directly over the Mount of Olives (Ezek 11:23). Later God returned along the same route (Ezek 43:2). The Essenes, who seemed to regard this as history not prophecy, deduced that the New Jerusalem must be to the east, beyond the Mount and they founded it at Qumran, as far east as you could get without crossing the Dead Sea, and conveniently close to several springs in the limestone that bubbled out into the Dead Sea allowing plants to grow. On God’s return, the Mount of Olives would split asunder as Zechariah describes, God sending his power along the east-west axis of the New Jerusalem to the Old Jerusalem.

Olives of the Mount of Olives seems to be a misunderstanding and mistranslation of an Aramaic proper noun meaning the Most High—Elion, the same root as Allah. Because it was a proper noun, it was not translated into Greek but some readers nevertheless took it to be a Greek word—elaion, an olive, and so thought that was the name of the mountain (Olivet). Now the Mount of Olives is not very high. The name Elion therefore does not refer to the height of the place itself. It is obviously called the Most High because of its association with the Most High God.

Signs of the Apocalypse

Mark 13 is one long, long discourse by Jesus known as the little apocalypse. It has been put here to pull a veil over a tragic event which cannot be told—the Roman counter attack on Jerusalem in which the legionaries from Caesarea on the coast arrive and savage the Nazarenes and their admiring throng into submission in a few hours. Mark hints at the counter attack with his gloomy prognostications but no more. He obviously could not be explicit. He either has to omit the counter attack altogether or disguise it as something else.

An apocalypse is a prophecy of the end. Often it is disguised history written to encourage oppressed people who could not write openly for fear of further persecution from their oppressors. It is coded history with a moral message—the encouragement that God would bring them through their crises. The historical prophecies of the prophet proved true—naturally, they were actually history—so then should their victory and their salvation at the hand of God with which the apocalypse ended. The Book of Daniel is the best biblical example. It is a history of the Jews from the exile until the time of the Seleucid Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century BC.

The author of an apocalypse writes history as if it were a prophecy by pretending to be from an earlier time. Here Mark writes the apocalypse as if he were Jesus. Even then the imagery is necessarily obscure. It is not surprising that an apocalyptic sect like the Essenes took to believing that all scripture was coded and that they began to use code among themselves in everyday life, as Jesus did with his parables. The parables therefore are an extension of the idea of apocalyptic writing—both apocalypses and parables are allegories, both might get slightly garbled in transcript making them harder to decipher, but both are unmistakable in form.

Mark must have had an Essene explanation of the signs of the End Time possibly Peter’s, and he combined it with snippets of the history of the years between the death of Jesus and the time when he was writing. In reconstructing the Essene discourse, the history has to be omitted and what remains checked against Essene teaching.

Since Jesus’s expectation of the arrival of the kingdom was never fulfilled, Mark had to improvise with what he knew had happened while cutting out what he knew had not happened. Mark begins the serious business of apocalypse writing by issuing warnings in the name of the Christ that Christians will be persecuted and divided. Dissension in the Christian camp, we know from the Epistles, occurred. The famine, which scourged Palestine in the forties, and the Jewish War are similarly prophesied. But such is the stuff of apocalypses—it could have been said by Jesus in the general sense that the approaching day of the Lord is preceded by such happenings.

Jesus expected God’s miracle at any moment because he had cleansed the Jerusalem temple. Quite what he expected to happen afterwards is not clear, but the miracle would have followed the prophecy of Zechariah. He expected the cosmic battle to begin and continue for forty years reflected in warfare and tribulations on earth. Then the sons of light would have their victory and the gates of the kingdom would open. If he was writing less than forty years later, Mark might still have believed this. In any case he would surely have begun Jesus’s discourse with him explaining the Essene idea of the cosmic battle as we find in the War Scroll. It would act as a suitable veil for the unacceptable truth that the Romans fought the Nazarenes as insurgents, and defeated them.

The bulk of Mark 13:9 to 13:13 is late but there are elements here such as the idea of strife within families that might have come from Jesus’s speech based on scriptural ideas of the End Time. Parts of it are poetic and hint at a hymn of encouragement during Roman official oppression. Verses 9 and 10 are definitely late additions. In other gospels verse 11 is part of Jesus’s speech to the disciples beginning their mission and perhaps that is where it belongs, Mark having plucked it out and used it here because he needed material. Betray in verse 12 should be deliver.

The second half of Mark 13 is clearly genuine Essene tradition provided that some qualification in terms of righteousness is introduced. Verses 14, 15, 16, 19, 20 and 24-27 reflect Jesus’s speech. Verses 21-23 might be another indication of early divisions in the gentile church but might also be a reference to other false messiahs like Simon Magus, known by Mark, and particularly Bar Kosiba who claimed to be the messiah in 132 AD and was followed by Jews and Nazarenes alike, an insertion by a later editor.

In Mark 13:14, the abomination of desolation spoken of in Daniel 9:27 was the pollution of the temple with an image of a pagan god (Zeus) under Antiochus Epiphanes. The Emperor Caligula almost repeated the crime when he ordered his own image to be erected in the temple in about 40 AD. King Herod Agrippa I persuaded him to change his mind. Mark and his readers would have known this and interpreted it nevertheless as fulfilment of Jesus’s prophecy.

Jesus himself had witnessed the abomination of desolation. It was a similar misdeed by Pontius Pilate who allowed the legions to display their standards in Jerusalem at the start of his prefecture. Josephus does not say they went into the temple, but the relevant parts of Josephus’s works have been censored by clerics. Pilate was certainly being provocative because he brought in his troops by night, so when the citizens found out in the morning it was a fait accompli. For the legionaries, their standards bearing Caesar’s effigy were gods, and, if it was the tenth legion, they carried banners depicting swine—an even viler depravity. Any graven image in God’s house was an abomination to a Jew, especially if it stood for another god. The Essenes must without doubt have regarded this provocation as a sign of the times.

Mark uses the circumlocution “where it ought not” when he meant temple. He refrained from using the word temple as being too vexatious since he was writing about the time when the destruction of the temple was a bone of contention, but adds a note to draw the reader’s attention to it. (It was not Jesus’s aside because he was not expecting what he said to be read.)

Mark has no obvious reference to a provocative act but in Luke 17:37 in a passage that ends another apocalyptic speech by Jesus (or the same one misplaced) Jesus says: “Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together”. Though a paraphrase of Job 39:29-30 Jesus is plainly meaning the standards of the Roman legions which were called eagles. The eagles here and in Job are plainly not eagles but vultures, which is just how the Nazarenes, indeed most Jews, will have seen the Romans.

It was probably Pilate’s profane act which led the Essenes to conclude that the appointed time had come, and everyone had to flee to the mountains to become barjonim. In Matthew 24:28 the quotation about the eagles seems totally misplaced being apparently bizarrely associated with the coming of Daniel’s one unto the Son of man, the glorious messiah. In fact however it is used as a closing bracket, effectively referring back to the abomination of desolation which is the opening bracket (Mt 24:15) of his lengthy description of the day of the Lord.

Mark 13:15 and 13:16 seem cryptic but are fully reconstituted in Luke 17:26-32 and are apparently part of Jesus’s speech. The reference is to the flood of Noah and the destruction of Sodom when God rained judgement on the people, only the elect being spared. In one case, the flood, it was sensible to take refuge on the roof and in the other, fire and brimstone, it was sensible to take refuge in the mountains and not to look back! Verses 17 and 18 seem to be historic, referring to famine and war in Judaea.

Mark 13:19 is anticipating the end of the world. It echoes Daniel 12:1 where appears the archangel Michael who the Essenes associated with Melchizedek and perhaps the messiah. Verse 20 is obviously Essene—note Mark’s use of the Essenes’ name for themselves, the elect, with the explanation “those he had chosen”. Verse 21 to 23 are Mark’s composition, though the Essenes must themselves have been concerned with false prophets and messiahs.

The remainder becomes purely apocalyptic with few appended phrases or historical material. Verse 26 recalls Daniel 7:13:

Behold there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto the Son of man, and he came even unto 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 nations, peoples and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

In Daniel, the one like unto the Son of man receives the kingdom to replace a world crushed by a mighty and cruel king depicted as a beast with iron teeth. This expresses perfectly the core of Jesus’s message—a Jewish kingdom of God would replace Rome as the world power forever. The rulers of the new kingdom are the saints of the Most High which means the elect, the Essenes. Mark goes on to explain this in verse 27. The clouds of this passage might well be translated princes (nesiim).

Watch for the Coming

Jesus concludes his speech with a promise that the kingdom will be here within a generation, the forty years of the cosmic battle.

Bible commentators have seen a contrast between the first part of the speech and the end. Initially certain, Jesus finishes not sure, but the two halves are perfectly compatible. The first part answers the question: “What shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled?” Jesus, as an Essene has read the signs of the times and is certain that the kingdom is imminent. “Tell us, when shall these things be?” the disciples had also asked. As depicted by Mark, having taken some time listing the signs, Jesus finally gives his answer. It consists of verses 30 to 37: the kingdom will have arrived fully within the present generation but no one except God knows precisely when it will all begin. It could be anytime—everyone should be vigilant—everyone should Watch—should keep alert—it will not be long!

Jesus makes it plain that he is not talking about an unlimited time, the interpretation the clergy use, because he gives a little story to explain it. The master of the house may come in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning—but not next year or in 2000 years time! While one can grant that the times in the illustrative tale are metaphorical up to a point, they have been chosen to show that he was not talking about long. In Luke 12:35-40, the story is modified, but significantly the man is attending a wedding—again the metaphor of Israel being reunited with her husband God (the necessary preliminary being the defeat of the Romans who had usurped God’s position). One of the names of the Essenes was the watchers for the kingdom—plainly these verses of Mark are reflecting that.

At this point, Luke 21:37-38 tells us that Jesus taught in the temple by day but, at night, he did not go to Bethany or lodgings anywhere else but he went to the Mount of Olives! The reason for this strange behaviour was to watch for the coming of the archangel Michael, which Zechariah 14:4 had prophesied would be when the Mount of Olives split east and west.

Matthew 25:1-13 gives us the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, the message of which is the same: be alert for the coming of the kingdom. Do not relax. The foolish virgins were not prepared—they had not brought oil for their lamps. When the message came that the bridegroom was arriving, their sisters, the wise virgins, would not share their oil with them. The foolish virgins departed to buy oil for their lamps and while they were gone the bridegroom arrived. On their return the door was shut and they were forever excluded. As always the bridegroom is God—not Jesus—and his arrival is for the marriage with His people, Israel. Those who are prepared—the Righteous—are admitted to the wedding but not those who are unprepared. The parable makes it clear that the watchers for the kingdom are not merely look-outs. The point of their alertness is not to see the miracle, but to be sure not to transgress in the slightest way. The kingdom might arrive that very instant, and a transgression would mean you are locked out.

Those unsure of the later pagan elaborations of Christianity should note that in verse 32 Jesus again distinguishes himself from his father, God. If Jesus and his father were one and the same Jesus must, like his father, have known the precise time of the apocalypse. The Trinity concept leads one to conclude that if the gospels are true then Jesus (and therefore God) is a liar! But the reference to the Son in verse 32 does not sound genuine. It has probably been added by the early church.

Mark, because he is hiding it, says nothing unequivocal about the Roman counter attack, though broader hints of it appear (misplaced) in Luke’s gospel. The Romans had made a strategic withdrawal to await reinforcements. When they arrived a few days later, they counter-attacked. The success enjoyed by the irregular in the countryside cannot be enjoyed in set battles. The Nazarenes were beaten—probably relatively easily—by the well drilled and disciplined Romans. Mark’s gloomy apocalypse records trials and tribulations to stand for something which could not be related—defeat! From this point on Jesus is a dead man.

Watching for the Miracle

In Mark 14:32-14:42, in a tremendously moving scene, we have the climax of Jesus’s hopes—God’s miracle fails to happen and Jesus expects to be despatched by a sword thrust in his chest as a false prophet. Many Christians hate this scene because Jesus is manifestly distraught and appears to be weak—in other words, human. This suggests the tradition is genuine.

The remnants of the Nazarene band are at the end of their tether. They are exhausted and fearing capture at any time. Jesus selects his three high priests, Peter, James and John as he always did for ritual occasions. He is expecting God to split open the Mount of Olives, to take him up, to call in “the elect” and send forth the archangel Michael with the hosts of heavenly angels. Matthew and Luke have fossils of this in their parallel accounts. In Matthew 26:53, Jesus boasts that should he wish it his prayer would call down more than twelve legions of angels. In Luke 22:43, a single angel actually does appear. Luke also has Jesus apparently sweating blood, another possible allusion to the cosmic battle that was expected at this juncture. The idea was probably to imply to those converts who had some knowledge of Essene philosophy, that the cosmic battle actually mystically occurred within Jesus. In Revelation 12:7-9 Michael and the angels did fight a battle against Rome—the dragon—and Michael prevailed, the archangel Michael taking on the role of the messiah. Plainly this is a Christian expression of the brief victory that Jesus and the Nazarenes did experience against the Romans in capturing Jerusalem.

Jesus becomes sore troubled, an expression which is not too strong, the Greek having connotations of indescribable anguish. Nothing is happening. Could he have been wrong all along? He hopes desperately for a miracle but is beginning to lose faith himself. “My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death”, he says meaning he is wondering whether his destiny might be eternal death rather than eternal life. There must be a sign somewhere. “Watch”! he tells Peter, James and John, echoing his advice in verse 13:37. He prays that the miracle will come because God can do anything:

If it were possible the hour might come for me. Father, Abba, all things are possible unto thee.

Conventionally translators write the hour might pass away from me and remove this cup from me both constructions of the later church. For clergymen the hour came to mean the hour of Jesus’s suffering, atoning for the sins of mankind. The cup similarly became a church term for suffering. But Jesus could only have used “the hour” in an absolute way like this in the sense to which he was accustomed—the sense in which it was so used before the church invented new meanings. For Jesus it meant the hour of fate—the hour at which the miracle to open up the kingdom was to occur. The proper sense is “the appointed time”. “Pass” is properly “arrive” or simply “come” and “from him” should be “for them”, meaning the children of Israel.

Returning from prayer to see whether the disciples have seen any signs of the miracle he finds them asleep. He comments on the weakness of their flesh—the fact that they have collapsed exhausted—though this is possibly a statement meant to be of himself when he realizes his fate is that of the worthless shepherd not the glorious messiah. Interestingly Jesus calls Peter by his proper name, Simon. Talking tough was no longer appropriate. He rouses them; urges them to watch again and repeats his prayers. The same happens—they are again asleep.

Jesus’s prayers are heartwrenching, pleading and tearful prayers of supplication, as Hebrews 5:7 clearly reveals if it is not clear enough here, but not for his own life—for the kingdom to come. After a third prayer Jesus gives up, saying to God: “Not what I will but what thou wilt”. The glow of the dawn sun can be seen. His prayers have not been answered. He has misinterpreted the signs of God’s will. The disciples are again asleep. “Sleep on now; take your rest. The hour has come; the end is yet far”, he says admitting his error, the phrase “it is enough” being properly translated “the end is yet far”. The kingdom is not imminent. Verse 41 should be omitted. It adds nothing that is not instantly clear and has been retained only because it has been read as a supernatural perception. It looks as if a marginal note, serving as a title or signpost for some diligent bishop has been mistakenly incorporated into the text by a copyist.

The story has been stylized into a typical threefold tale but it probably signifies that they waited in the Garden overnight. In that time Jesus could have found the exhausted disciples asleep several times, as the story indicates. Eventually, Passover night came to an end, and with it Jesus’s hopes of a miracle—the new visitation would have corresponded in time to the previous one. Once dawn had come, once the hour had come—the prophesied hour—with no result, the Essene has to return to his calculations and interpretations. But Jesus had committed himself. He was now a false prophet and had to submit himself to the false prophet’s punishment, to offer himself as the worthless shepherd in atonement for his presumption of knowing God’s will.

Notice that Jesus seemed to consider the day to have ended at dawn whereas a Jewish day normally ends in the evening. This suggests that Jesus was reckoning on the basis of the Essene solar calendar.

Evasions

The teaching of Jesus is summarised by Christian scholar, Rudolf Otto (OTT-KOGSOM).

The time is fulfilled. The end is at hand. The kingdom is near. In some senses it is even already present.

Yet, it is not fully present and only the Father knows when it will be.

Christian commentators examining this question never give serious consideration to whether some of Jesus’s prophecies of the End might have been altered by the evangelists or the early church to account for the failure of the kingdom to appear.

In several places, Jesus seems to say that the kingdom would come within the lifetime of the members of his audience, or within this generation—forty years to a Jew. If Jesus was expecting the End soon, how could he be telling his followers to expect beatings in synagogues, hatred by men and trials before councils and kings, implying a delay of a considerable, if indeterminate time, before the kingdom manifested itself.

The crucifixion of Jesus should have been the end of his movement, but it turned out not to be, and so the evangelists of the continuing Jesus movement had to extend the time horizon for the coming of the kingdom. They had to give another reason for the anguish of Jesus in the Garden, to disguise the truth that he expected God’s miracle, so made out that Jesus simply struggled over the personal sacrifice he was about to make as mankind’s saviour.

It is all constructed later from the original which is given away by the concern with time, the expectation that whatever was to happen had to happen sometime that night, the reference to an angel or angels in Matthew and Luke (all that remains of the angelic hosts Jesus expected) and that Jesus concludes saying: “It is yet far” or distant (not, “it is enough”). He plainly meant the miracle was yet far. As day dawned, he resigned himself to the fact that the heavenly host would not appear.

Christian commentators say that Jesus taught righteousness, so he could not have been expecting the world to end soon. It must have been going to last long enough for people to show that they were living righteous lives. The answer is simple. Even if the world was to end in the next second, it was sufficient time for a righteous person to sin mentally. Jesus declares that even a lustful thought would be sufficient to debar an otherwise righteous man from the kingdom of God. The message of Jesus and John the Baptist was that Jews should sincerely repent and be baptised. Then they could enter God’s kingdom. But they could not if they went around being sinful again. They had to repent then remain righteous until the kingdom came. Repentence was not some sort of immunisation against sin. It was a confession of previous wrong and a commitment not to sin again, whether the commitment was for a second until the kingdom came or a generation.

Despite the plain intensity of Jesus’s belief that the Day of God’s vengeance was imminent, Christians have constantly suited themselves by believing that nevertheless Jesus intended to found a new religion. Proof of it, they claim, is his promise to build in three days a temple not made by hands.

For these Christians, the temple stands for the old Judaism that would be replaced by Christianity after Jesus’s three days in the tomb. Jesus meant the three days of the kingdom before the righteous were resurrected and God’s perfectly holy temple was miraculously made not by hands as was prophesied. Jesus, like any other dead righteous Jew, would have lain “asleep” while this was happening, so he was not speaking specifically of his own residence in the tomb but the three days delay expected by all the righteous before they were resurrected into paradise. The perfect temple was not made by hands—not made by humans—because it was made by God!

That Christians to this day, and clever ones, still scratch around in the New Testament for evidence that Jesus was aiming to found a new religion when his clearest desire of heralding in the end of the wicked world ran counter to any such project, is pitiful.

To judge historical events correctly, they have to be judged in their historical context. Christian scholars persist in refusing to do this. Though the country of Judaea was in a turmoil of revolutionary unrest and Jesus was hung as a rebel, they persist in depicting him as a misunderstood and falsely condemned advocate of peace with the Roman enemies of the Jews.

If this were really his policy, then he would have been a valuable ally of the Jerusalem priests—who were also friendly with the Romans as the gospels make clear—not their enemy. If this were his policy, he would also not have been abandoned by Pilate so easily. The Romans knew the priests were unpopular among the masses and a friend who could beneficially influence the multitude in favour of Rome would hardly have been crucified because a few priests did not trust him. Christians ought to be asking why the early gentile followers of Jesus sought to disguise the truth in favour of a tortuous myth.

Another obfuscatory tack is to claim that Jesus drew upon “ideas belonging to the sphere of the apocalyptic” (OTT-KOGSOM) but went beyond them with his message “entirely new and peculiar to him” of a “supramundane future in a new era stretched from the beyond into the natural world as the power of salvation”. Christians will believe this because it suits them and because they believe anything that a Christian authority tells them even if it is self-evidently false. This message supposedly new and peculiar to Jesus was the standard message of the apocalypticist to the righteous. One might quibble about the word “supramundane” because Essenes saw the kingdom of God as being in this world. Yet it was not the world as it is because it had joined to heaven and become perfect. It was this world but no longer this world. It was a supernatural world of necessity because perfection is impossible in reality.

Christians want us to believe that it is understanding this fantasy that is the mysterion spoken of in the gospels. In fact, the word refers to the “hidden things” of the Essenes and these seem to be ways of reading the scriptures as coded prophecy of the apocalypse and the events leading to it. The mysterion of Jesus is the reading of signs that the kingdom is about to break on the world.

Jesus began convinced the kingdom was imminent because Essenes had read the signs, signs that Jesus would not reveal to others because they were secrets of the sect. The signs were clues that the sinful world was reaching its final stages, but although all the signs were in place, Jesus was never sure exactly when the great event would begin, and he told his disciples so.

However, by defeating the Romans, the principle requirement had been achieved and Jesus expected the miracle to follow quickly. The Romans must have been defeated before Jesus could enter Jerusalem as a king and clean out the temple. The fact that he was able to do these illegal acts in the main city of the province at the height of an annual festival proves that the authorities were no longer in control. The Romans had been defeated but the Nazarene victory has been disguised in the gospels. God had to act quickly thereafter because the Romans had withdrawn only to re-group and get reinforcements. If God did not act, Jesus knew he was a dead man.

The Romans recaptured Jerusalem before Passover and Jesus had to go into hiding to avoid capture and enjoy a final messianic meal with his remaining followers. It was the eve of the Passover, an auspicious occasion for God to act. Plainly by this time Jesus knew the miracle had to that very night or it would be never. He had played his own role and captured Jerusalem. The Romans had returned and recaptured the city putting all of the surviving Nazarenes in mortal danger, but that was of no consequence. The point had been made. God’s Chosen People had shown to Yehouah that Satan’s princes were undesirable. It was now up to Yehouah to send His general, the archangel Michael with the heavenly host of angels and saints to finally overwealm Satan. The miracle would occur at the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus went there certain that the heavenly host would arrive. This was the one occasion when it was plain that Jesus knew within a night time that the miracle was due. But it never came!

Other references often seem to show knowledge of the seige and destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans. Christians will believe that Jesus prophesied it but it was an easy prophesy to get right when the gospels were written because it had happened. Jesus certainly will have spoken of the destruction of the polluted temple of the froward priests but he meant when the kingdom came. He could not have been prophesying the Roman conquest of Jerusalem because he was not expecting the world to last until 70 AD.

These instances show that the first Christian bishops were making the story fit their own requirements. They were not recording history, they were telling lies.

Jesus and Mythology

The heart of the message of Jesus is the kingdom of God. During the nineteenth century, Christians understood the kingdom of God as a spiritual community of men joined by obedience to the will of God. By obeying they sought to expand God’s rule in the world. The kingdom of God was slowly being built as a spiritual realm but active in this world and effective in the history of this world.

“The Preaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God” by Johannes Weiss was published in 1892. Weiss refuted the generally accepted interpretation. The kingdom of God is not immanent in the world and does not grow as part of the world’s history, but is eschatological. It has little to do with human moral example, but comes when God is ready. God will renovate the wicked world as an uncorrupt world that is part of heaven.

Jesus did not invent the idea. It was already well known. Jewish apocalyptic literature described it, and Daniel is the earliest extant example. Jesus declared the kingdom of God was due, and Jews must prepare to face the coming judgement, but otherwise he shared the eschatological expectations of his contemporaries. Jesus expected that this would take place soon, in the immediate future, and that its dawning could be seen in signs and wonders. That is why he taught his disciples to pray:

Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

It would be a tremendous cosmic drama. The Son of Man will come with the clouds of heaven, the dead will be raised and the day of judgement will arrive, for the righteous the time of bliss will begin, whereas the damned will be delivered to the torments of hell.

Johannes Weiss scared both theologians and lay Christians. Rudolf Bultmann, in “Jesus Christ and Mythology”, says his teacher in dogmatics in Berlin, Julius Kaftan, said:

If Johannes VVeiss is right and the conception of the kingdom of God is an eschatological one, then it is impossible to make use of this conception in dogmatics.

But Weiss was right. Albert Schweitzer went further to say that not only the preaching and the self-consciousness of Jesus but also the day-to-day conduct of his life were dominated by an all-pervading eschatological expectation. Today there are few scholars who do not accept it. Only the lay Christians are kept in the dark because they will not read anything without permission.

Eschatological expectation and hope is the core of New Testament preaching throughout. The earliest Christian community understood the kingdom of God in the same sense as Jesus. It expected the kingdom of God to come in the immediate future. Paul thought that he would still be alive when the end of this world came and the dead rose. This conviction is confirmed by tones of impatience, of anxiety and of doubt which are audible even in the synoptic gospels and which echo a little later and louder in 2 Peter. Christians have held the hope that the kingdom of God would come in the immediate future ever since its inception, and have waited in vain.

Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.

Mark 9:1

Is the meaning of this verse unclear? The hope was that the kingdom of God will still come in that very generation. Even this was a dilution. Jesus expected the miracle on the night of his vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane. This hope of Jesus and of the early Christian community was not fulfilled. The corrupt world still exists and history continues. History has refuted Christian mythology.

The eschatological drama and the kingdom of God are mythological. That means the presuppositions of the myth, the theory that the world, although created by God, is ruled by Satan, and that demons cause all evil, sin and disease are also mythological. Heaven, earth and hell, the intervention of supernatural powers in events, miracles, the intervention of supernatural powers in the inner life of the soul, that men can be tempted and corrupted by a demon called the devil and possessed by evil spirits, all are mythological! These concepts are mythological because they are not what we have found by careful scientific enquiry. Modern science rejects the belief that nature can be interrupted by supernatural powers.

History is the same. God or the devil or demons have no role in history. History is complete in itself and can in principle be known and understood. Nothing happens without a reason, though the reason might be someone’s idea. Some people are superstitious but generally people take it for granted that nature and history, like their own life, is not interrupted by supernatural powers.

The early Christian community regarded Jesus as a mythological figure. It expected him to return as the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven to bring salvation and damnation as judge of the world. To have been begotten of the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin are mythological conceptions that were accepted about Jesus. In Hellenistic Christian communities, he was understood to be the metaphysical Son of God—a great, pre-existent heavenly being who became man for the sake of our redemption and took on himself suffering, even the suffering of the cross. Nobody hesitates to call the conception of the pre-existent Son of God who descended in human guise into the world to redeem mankind mythological. This mythology was widespread in the mythologies of Jews and gentiles and transferred to the historical person of Jesus. What then can be the significance for humanity of Jesus and of the New Testament if they are simply mythological?

The mythological conceptions of eschatology, of redeemer and of redemption, are over and done with. Why should anyone make a sacrifice of intelligence to accept what cannot sincerely be considered true just because the Bible says so? Can the mythological parts of the gospel be eliminated and still leave any message of value? Various wisdom sayings are attributed to Jesus, though mainly they are not original to him, and he proclaimed the will of God—that people should be good. Jesus demanded truthfulness and purity, self-sacrifice and love of others. Christianity has violated all of this throughout its history, and the fact that Christians can be found who followed these principles means nothing because many who are not Christians have the same principles of life. These principles do not carry Christian copyrights.

One can ask whether the eschatological preaching and the mythological sayings of Jesus contain a deeper meaning which is concealed under the cover of mythology. Rudolf Bultmann thought it was possible and called it “demythologizing”. Its aim was not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.

Myths express the knowledge that humans do not control the world or even their lives. The world and human life, despite the discoveries of science, remain full of riddles and mysteries. Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. It personifies human desires and psychological foibles. It makes gods responsible for what we cannot control in the world and ourselves. Gods act like human beings but with powers that can explain what we cannot control.

This is true of the mythology in the Bible. God lives in heaven. What does this mean? It says in a way that simple people can understand that God is beyond the world, that He is transcendent. Not one of us can imagine tarnscendence. It is an impossible thought and one that is probably meaningless, but most people can look into the sky and imagine some fantastic being living where human beings cannot, far above the world in the world of the stars. What is evil is put beneath the earth in the dark and damp, where we shall all plainly finish, unless we strive for the stars according to the myth. Such a simple moral tale is sufficient for priests to establish their power.

Because these mythological ideas are no longer acceptable because of the discoveries of science, priests have reformulated the easy concepts in the form of impossible concepts—the transcendence of God and of evil. The fact that no one can conceive of these impossibilities becomes a boon, because it shows the superiority of God. Believers shrug them off as incomprehensible, and the priests smile.

Tthe idea of Satan and the evil spirits into whose power men are delivered rests upon the experience, quite apart from the inexplicable evils arising outside ourselves to which we are exposed, that our own actions are often so puzzling. People are carried away by their passions and are not in control of themselves, and then do unimaginable things. Yet the failure of the concept is that it places human responsibility elsewhere. Wickedness is beyond us, the result of these devilish powers, so every evil that humanity can imagine is theologically excused. If wickedness is allowed in human society then it will become self-sustaining. The consequences of people’s crimes become a social power dominating them. But it is the people who are at fault not any mythological master demon—or even a minor one. Mythology is metaphor, and taking metaphor literally is the Christian error.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History