Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, May 24, 1999

Barabbas

In the earliest gospel, Mark records the incident of Barabbas. This extraordinary incident gives us a glimpse through the distorting veils of time to the foundation of Christianity and the truth about its beginnings. All four gospels tell the story (Mk 15:6-15, Mt 27:15-26, Lk 23:17-25, Jn 18:39-40).

Jesus of Nazareth, a simple travelling preacher and healer, has been betrayed by the scheming Jews and stands before the Roman governor of Judaea on capital charges. The governor, Pontius Pilate, a just and kindly man, can find no wrong in Jesus, but is scared of offending the Jews. He tries to release him by invoking an old custom whereby, at festival time (in this instance, the Jewish Passover) a prisoner of the people’s choosing is released. He offers the crowd, who had only days before been hailing Jesus as a king, a choice—they could release Jesus, or a thief called Barabbas. The fickle crowd pick the criminal. Not wanting to be associated with sending an innocent man to a cruel death Pilate theatrically washes his hands before the crowd to declare to them he is not responsible for the death of a good man.

For Christians this is simply another callous event in the narrative of the unjust and cruel death of the Son of God in atonement for the sins of mankind. The tale proves that the Jews, by their rejection of Jesus, were no longer the Chosen People of God. Instead the followers of Jesus were.

So, Pilate releases a condemned prisoner, rejecting Jesus in favour of a rebel and murderer called Barabbas. Mark implies that both Barabbas and Jesus were condemned prisoners. Jesus had already been found guilty, though the gospel at this point does not say so. The mystery, though rarely remarked upon by Christian scholars, is this:

Jesus, as a king, was a Son of God, and so he had been named at his baptism and the transfiguration. Consequently Jesus always called God, my Father, using an affectionate Aramaic word for father, Abba. If God is my Father then the Son of God is the Son of my Father. Now Mark tells us the name of the rebel Pilate offered to the crowd for release instead of Jesus was Barabbas. By coincidence Barabbas, in Aramaic, means the Son of my Father. So the bandit’s name is a name which is singularly appropriate for Jesus. Some old manuscripts of Matthew, confirmed by the writings of the church father, Origen, reveal the full name of the criminal—it is Jesus Barabbas, and so it is written in modern versions of Matthew’s gospel.

The mystery is that this is too strange to be coincidental!

If we follow the gospel according to Matthew 27:17, Pilate asks the multitude—”Which Jesus will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas or bar Abbas?” The crowd replied, “bar Abbas”—or, as Christians would have it, “Barabbas”? The gospels ask us to believe that Pilate offers the crowd the choice of Jesus Barabbas, the crook, or Jesus ”bar Abbas”, the son of his father, God.

It is as if the governor said—”Who do you want me to release, your king, Jesus, God’s Son, or a criminal we just happen to have in the nick, Jesus Godson.” ”God’s Son,” they shout, so Pilate released Godson! Can we accept that God has such a sick sense of humour?

Now the thesis presented here is that Jesus the Son of God was Jesus, the king of the Jews, a man who believed that by capturing Jerusalem from the Romans and cleansing the temple, God would be induced to send a miracle to free his chosen people, the Jews. So both Barabbas and bar Abbas are revolutionaries! In Roman law, a man who is acclaimed king is a seditionist, so Barabbas and bar Abbas are both revolutionists even in Christian terms! Can we really accept that Pilate offers the crowd the choice of Jesus Barabbas, a seditionist, or Jesus bar Abbas, the son of his father, God, a different seditionist? Is this really historical as clergymen would have us believe?

That is not the only unbelievable aspect of the Barabbas incident.

First, Pontius Pilate appears in it as a most sensitive and understanding man. Yet the judgement of history is vastly different. He is known to have been an exceptionally cruel, greedy and callous man when, under the totalitarian regime of Imperial Rome, such men were common. He was so bad that the Romans eventually withdrew him in disgrace to Rome because of his excesses.

Second, even young children find it hard to accept that the Jewish throng, which had hailed and hosannahed Jesus as a king only a few days before, should have so completely turned against him that they now wanted him crucified. A man, who is a king leading his ecstatic people one day, does not suddenly become hated when the next day he is captured. His disciples and supporters, we are invited to believe, thought he was the Son of God. Would they have summoned God’s wrath by turning against his son in his hour of need? Surely they would have expected God to intervene with a miracle as long as Jesus were alive, and they would have clamoured for their leader.

Third, the habit of the Governor at festival time of releasing the prisoner begged for by the crowd is not recorded outside the New Testament and was unknown anywhere in the Roman Empire, let alone in Judaea which was at the time a hotbed of unrest. Even granted that there had been until then such a custom, it again stretches credibility that Pilate would release one such as Barabbas—he would have committed treason against the Emperor if he had! Pilate knew his duty, if only—according to John 19:12—because the priests had reminded him. Roman law could tolerate no rivals to Caesar.

For though John, the last gospel to be composed, describes Barabbas simply as “a robber”, he was no ordinary criminal. In Matthew Barabbas is “a notable prisoner”. We would say he was notorious. But both writers are being disingenuous. Mark, in the earliest gospel, frankly identifies him as:

a rioter who had committed murder during an insurrection,

and Luke adds that the

insurrection had occurred in Jerusalem itself!

The gospels are here skating over something remarkable. At the very time that gentle Jesus of Nazareth was entering Jerusalem hailed as a king, by coincidence a fellow called Barabbas was leading a revolution!

By fomenting an insurrection Barabbas had committed a political crime against the Emperor and against the Roman state. Pilate would have had to report such a serious crime, and his response to it, to the Emperor himself. He could have found no excuse for letting such a man off—he had no say in the matter. Rebellion was a capital crime requiring the lowest form of death—crucifixion. Yet the holy book of Christianity tells us it was gentle Jesus of Nazareth who was unjustly crucified while Pilate himself committed treason against the Emperor by releasing the leader of a revolution.

What does it all mean?

This confusion can only be intelligently untangled if Jesus Barabbas and Jesus the Nazarene were the same person! The gospels are hiding the fact that the man worshipped as a deity by Christian believers for 2000 years was a Jewish rebel punished horribly but quite properly under Roman law for attempting to overthrow the civic authorities in Jerusalem.

The gospels confirm that an insurrection with popular support had occurred in Jerusalem at the Passover festival. Its instigator, Jesus the Nazarene, nicknamed Barabbas by the crowd from his habit of referring to God in heaven as his father, had been caught by the authorities and promptly taken to Pilate with the Jewish crowds still milling around in a religious and nationalist fervour, expecting a miracle. They called out, Barabbas, Barabbas, asking for the release of the Nazarene, their leader, using their nickname for him. Pilate, who despised the Jews, realized the only way to curb the unrest was to dispatch the Jewish leader with no further ado… and that is what he did.

If, as the gospels say, Pilate did agree to release Jesus Barabbas, later known as Jesus Christ, then he deliberately duped the crowd. But that sounds more like the real Pilate, the rapacious, two-faced Pilate of history, and less like the kindly Pilate of the gospels. Faced with the excited and rebellious crowd, Pilate cunningly decides to give them their miracle—he agrees to release Jesus if the crowd would only disperse. Pilate has such a vile reputation that this really does seem like a miracle to the crowd—they disperse in wonder. Then Pilate crucifies Jesus as he always intended.

Mark would have got the idea for the nonexistent custom from the genuine Jewish custom that only one man could be condemned on one day. The disciples captured with Jesus owed their own lives to this rule and the fact that it was administered by the Jews not the Romans—it was a Jewish not a Roman rule. Pilate would have had no compunction at all about condemning and crucifying half of Jerusalem in one day, if he could justify it to the Emperor. In the battle to retake the city the Romans had captured Nazarenes and other Jews who had joined in its defence and they were crucified alongside Jesus as the gospels tell us.

Later, when Christians passed on the story by word of mouth, it included the scene of the crowd assembled outside the official building calling “Barabbas, Barabbas”. When the oral tradition of the first Christians was being recorded by the gospel writers this was one of the many difficulties that they had to hide or explain.

The Rebel

Uprisings had been occurring with alarming regularity. The gospels tell us there had just been one in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’s crucifixion. The freedom fighter specifically mentioned was Jesus Barabbas. Yet it was the Christian god, gentle Jesus, who was charged with treason! The conclusion is forced. There was one Jesus only—Jesus was a freedom fighter leading a revolution against the Roman occupiers of Judaea, just as Reimarus pointed out two hundred years ago. This was why Jesus was arrested by the authorities. No other interpretation even of the evidence in the gospels makes sense.

The evidence of the gospels, in summary, is this:

• Jesus invited suspicion by gathering large crowds which the authorities considered potentially subversive,
• he was described as a Galilaean, like Judas the Galilaean—a rebel,
• many of Jesus’s followers sound, from their nicknames, more like men of violence than men of peace,
• Jesus deliberately depicted himself as a king as he entered Jerusalem and his supporters greeted him thus openly,
• Jesus had committed the crime in Roman law of Laesae Majestatis by assuming the power of civic authorities to permit passage through the temple,
• an insurrection had occurred in which men had died and Jesus’s supporters had been armed and resisted arrest with violence, cutting off a man’s ear,
• when Jesus was charged as a rival to Caesar’s rule in Palestine, claiming to be the king of the Jews, he chose not to deny it unequivocally at his trial.

Jesus was Barabbas, the Nasi, one of the holy ones of God but a failed rebel. Christians wanted their incarnated god to be remembered only as a saintly man. Jesus was condemned and crucified by Romans yet, for Christianity to prosper, it had to seek respectability within the Roman Empire. But tradition showed Jesus, himself a Jew, being hailed by Jews, a race which was widely scorned within the Roman world when they rebelled in 66 AD. They were trouble makers or even terrorists just as some in the world today might regard Libyans, Basques or Irish. And so gentle Jesus was invented and his true nature hidden.

So the gospel writers pretended Barabbas was not Jesus and invented the story of the Passover custom to explain why the crowd called for the release of Barabbas. The just Roman prefect, Pilate, offered to let the mob have their choice of prisoner but the treacherous Jews picked the murderer Barabbas. The gospel writers could use the Aramaic word Barabbas knowing that few of their Latin or Greek speaking gentile converts would know its meaning and question the coincidence. The Romans were depicted as fair and just, the Jewish supporters of the Jew, Jesus, were shown as treacherous villains. A Jewish incident was de-Judaized and the Jewish religion simultaneously discredited within the Roman Empire as a rival religion to Christianity.

The Suspicions of the Authorities

Control of Judaea was vested by the Emperor of Rome in Prefects and later Procurators whom he appointed to govern the province on his behalf. They had to report to him all significant events that occurred. Imperial policy centred on raising revenue through taxation and, to do so effectively, maintaining peace, the Pax Romani. So a governor’s duties included keeping law and order and raising taxes. Since they were unpaid free lance agents, governors had to obtain their own income out of local revenue. By milking the province to get rich they created their own source of unrest. They had a small garrison of about 3000 soldiers based at Caesarea on the coast but some were deployed in Jerusalem especially when it was crowded with pilgrims at the Passover.

The governors left non-political matters to a council of senior Jews called the Sanhedrin. The principal force in it was the High Priest and his party of Sadducees and they controlled the Temple Guard which had limited powers. The death sentence for purely civil matters could only be declared by the Roman Governor. The Sanhedrin could possibly declare a sentence of stoning for a religious misdemeanor, but, if so, it rarely did. The Romans would have disapproved of, and most probably never allowed, a concession which could have been used by the national authorities against collaborators.

Some of the Sanhedrin shared with the Romans a distaste for rebel movements—they posed a threat to the whole Jewish nation from Roman reprisals. Centuries before the Romans had razed under the plough the great city of Cathage, an enemy of Rome. Later they were to raze Jerusalem. There was reason for Jews to worry if Rome became incensed. Josephus says that Herod Antipas killed John the Baptist, not because of the plottings of his wife, but because he saw a threat of an uprising in the large crowds that John was attracting. Herod’s fear of the multitude is declared in Matthew 14:5 but as a reason for not killing John, though this fear did not deter him from killing John when Salome requested it. Repeatedly in Mark, Luke and Acts the fear of the authorities for the people is expressed. In John 18:14, the High Priest, Caiaphas, directly expresses the fears of the rulers of the Jews when he says it is expedient that one man should die for the people. A general outbreak of rebellion would bring retribution on the Jews by the Romans. If it could be nipped in the bud by disposing of the leader of the insurgents, the state would be preserved.

Galilaeans

At the time of Christ, Galilee was ruled by a Tetrarch, a Roman title for a minor king. Antipas (4 BC—39 AD) was a son of Herod the Great. But from 6 AD, when Antipas’s brother, Archelaus, ruler of Judaea, was banished to Gaul, Judaea was ruled directly from Rome under a Prefect, a Roman governor. Galilee was a land of fertile soil and industrious people—it exported olive oil and had a thriving fishery on the Sea of Galilee. It was wealthy and well populated, though many people had been impoverished by being turned off their land to become day labourers and resentment was high.

The sayings of Jesus in the gospels reflect a rural background in agriculture and fishing—Galilaean city life hardly figures in them. Sepphoris, the main city in Galilee, is never mentioned in the gospels even though it was only four miles from Nazareth. Tiberias is hardly mentioned even though it was a magnificent new town built in honour of the reigning Emperor. The local town that is mentioned is Capernaum, a custom post which was little more than a village. Indeed Josephus described it merely as “a highly fertilising spring”.

The regional accent of Galilaeans was strong and their gutturals almost disappeared making it difficult to distinguish certain words. Lazarus (Lazar), for example, is the Galilaean dialect pronunciation of Eleazar. In the New Testament, Peter is recognised by his accent as being a follower of Jesus (Mt 26:73). Many in the more southerly state of Judaea saw native Galilaeans as ignoramuses or clowns.

Galilaeans’ ignorance or neglect of the Jewish laws of purity and decorum also offended devout Jews in Judaea. Even eminent Galilaean rabbis were not free of criticism. Galilee in gospel times was almost surrounded by pagan countries. Indeed it had been pagan itself not long before. The victory of the Hasmonaean king, Aristobulus I, over Iturea, and his threat to the Galilaeans that they should become circumcised and live according to Jewish Law or be dispersed, made Galilee a Jewish province about 100 BC. Anyone who had been forcibly converted could hardly have been the most devout Jews and a certain tradition of laxity must have emerged from them, and persevered even when their descendants had become otherwise Judaised.

By the time of Jesus, Galilaeans regarded themselves as thoroughly Jewish, if somewhat unorthodox, but their southern co-religionists were snooty about them. Judaeans would call the Northerners “peasants” not primarily because that is what they were but because they were thought to be ignorant. In the New Testament (Jn 7:14) the Jerusalem crowd whisper among themselves, “Surely the Messiah is not to come from Galilee?” and when Nicodemus, a Pharisee, defends Jesus to the Chief Priests and Pharisees, they say, “Are you a Galilaean too?…Prophets do not come from Galilee”. Jesus was just what the Jews of Judea expected of a Galilaean—he kept company with publicans and whores, he seemed to deride Levitical purity, he did not avoid defilement through contact with a corpse. Being a Galilaean, in practice, he seemed to flout the Mosaic purity laws.

The Pharisee Party had little support in the North. The only first century rabbi known to be a northerner was actually called “the Galilaean” suggesting that it was unusual. In Mark, Pharisees in conflict with Jesus are twice described as visitors to Galilee. Josephus specified that the Pharisees were influential in the cities, leading one to infer that they had little influence in the countryside. Thus, beside the political suspicion of Jesus, there were also some religious doubts and the snobbery of urban sophisticates toward rural simpletons.

Though, under Antipas, Galilee was generally peaceful, it was the source of much of the Jewish rebelliousness against Rome. To be a Galilaean was synonymous with being an agitator and the Herodian and Roman authorities often mistrusted them as potential rebels. Galilaeans were even quarrelsome among themselves according to Rabbinical sources. Galilaeans were linked with Jewish nationalism from the time that the brigand, Ezekias, was executed in 47 BC. Judas, considered the founder of the Zealots, was referred to as Judas of Galilee. He and his disciples broke into the king’s arsenal in 4 BC and instituted a reign of terror in the region. When Roman rule was declared in Judaea after the banishment of Archelaus, a census was announced to assess the population for taxes. It was carried out by Quirinius, the Legate of the Roman Province of Syria, which included Judaea, in 6 to 7 AD. The followers of Judas believed the only master of the Jews was God. It was improper to pay taxes to a foreign god—the Emperors were beginning to claim divinity. Furthermore the Law of Moses forbade not only foreign rulers, it forbade numbering the people. For some this was the final straw. Judas and his followers urged the Jews not to pay taxes to Rome, and eventually rebelled. Thus it was that Judas of Galilee teamed up with Sadduc to form a religious and political movement of fanatical nationalists.

Josephus in Book 18 of Antiquities of the Jews describes the philosophy founded by Judas of Galilee as the “fourth sect of Jewish philosophy” but leaves it to us to deduce he means the Zealots. As followers of Judas of Galilee it would have been quite logical to call them Galilaeans and that is the approach of Rev Matthew Black writing in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible. Josephus tells us Galilaeans endured pain with resolution, were “ready to suffer any manner of death”, and they put honour before wealth. They believed:

God would not otherwise be assisting to them, than upon their joining with one another in such counsels as might be successful, and for their own advantage, and this especially if they would set about great exploits, and not grow weary in executing the same.

In other words God helps those who help themselves through daring deeds and persistence.

To what extent the sect of the Galilaeans was Pharisaic as Josephus maintains is a moot point. Hyppolytus believed the Zealots were Essenes, In the Jewish War Josephus tells us that Judas of Galilee was a teacher of a peculiar sect of his own then proceeds to describe at length the Essenes, a hint perhaps that the one was a branch of the other. The word from which we get “Pharisee” means “separated”, a description which would apply perfectly to the Essenes. So it is conceivable that Josephus wrote in Aramaic “the notions of the Separated Ones” meaning the Essenes but his amanuensis mistook him to mean the Pharisees. His description of Judas’s ally, Sadduc, as a Pharisee in the same chapter seems to repeat the error. But whether Pharisees or Essenes were nearest to the Galilaeans’ general outlook, they added their own particular beliefs:

• having an inviolable attachment to liberty
• holding God to be their only ruler and Lord
• not calling any man Lord even though threatened with death or torture.

Judas’s Galilaeans became very large and active especially among the young who “were zealous for it”. Josephus blamed them for the troubles of the Jews leading up to the Jewish War, saying

The nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree and it had a great many followers, filled our civil governments with tumults and laid the foundations of our future miseries.

Many people, some of whom must have had allegiance to one or other of the other Jewish sects became attracted to the Galilaean sect as the troubles progressed. It had then factionalized internally. Ultimately, as far as Josephus was concerned, the Zealots became gangsters, killing for personal gain, killing Jews rather than gentiles and fighting amongst each other. And so it transposed, like the Mafia, from a liberation movement into gangs of criminals. Zealots indeed became robbers.

Judas of Galilee and his family nevertheless commanded wide respect for later we find his sons also leading rebellions against Roman rule. Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Romanised Jew, Procurator of Judaea from 46-48 AD and the nephew of Philo of Alexandria, crucified two of them, Jacob and Simon. A third son, Menehem, captured the stronghold of Masada from the Romans but subsequently died in faction fighting among the rebels. Eleazar, a nephew of Menehem, with only a few hundred zealots, held Masada against the Romans for three years after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. John of Gischala, also a Galilaean, was another leader of the Jewish revolt of 66 AD.

Jesus’s Followers

Judas of Galilee and his followers were barjonim, ones who live on the outside. We would say guerrillas or an underground movement. Barjonim and Zealots were effectively synonyms. The barjonim avoided the towns, preferring wilderness and mountains, and only visiting towns and villages to commit robberies or political murder.

The evangelist, Mark, wrote his gospel at about the time of the Roman triumph in 71 AD when the captured leader of the Jewish Zealots was led in chains through the streets of Rome. Naturally neither Jews in general nor Zealots in particular were popular and Mark was faced with a few problems. Describing the Apostle Simon, he deliberately uses the obscure Aramaic expression, the Cananæan, without explaining it, though Mark normally explains Aramaic words for the benefit of his gentile readers. Luke, writing at least ten years later when feelings were running less high, openly uses the Greek equivalent, understood by all—the Apostle is Simon the Zealot!

Other words are disguised by the gospel writers. For example there is another strange coincidence, like that of Barabbas. When Jesus reveals to Simon Peter his messiahship in Matthew 16:17, he calls him Simon Bar-jona as if Bar-jona were Simon’s surname. In John (Jn 21:15) this is rendered as bar Jonah, as if it were a patronymic, Son of Jonah. It is beyond a coincidence that Barjona as we saw above is a guerrilla or extremist. What was originally intended? Furthermore the nickname, Peter, in Aramaic—Cephas, given to Simon means “rock”. Today we would call him “Rocky”. Then as now it signified a tough guy. How tough? Well later in the story he slices off a man’s ear and later still murders a man and a woman for holding back money. He seems pretty ruthless.

Judas is named as Judas Iscariot, said to mean “of Kerioth” but no such place seems to have existed at the time, though there had once been a town Kiriathim in Moab across the Dead Sea. The word “Sicarii” meaning Knifemen seems more identifiable with Iscariot. Judas would therefore have been a member of the assassins branch of the Zealots. However, a Syrian word Skariot meaning “I shall deliver up” could be an equally appropriate root. Were the Sikari the Deliverers of Israel, a branch of the Zealots or even an alternative name for them? The Talmud names the leader of the barjonim in Jerusalem during the siege as Abbas Sikari, implying that the Knifemen or Deliverers were closely allied to, or a branch of, the Zealots.

The two “Sons of Thunder”, John and James, already sound menacing enough but the expression, “Boanerges”, a meaningless word, is probably “bene reges” meaning “Sons of Tumult” or “bene regaz” meaning “Sons of Wrath”. Or another reading is “Sons of the Wild Ox”, which signifies untameable wildness according to Proverbs. Patently these were not boy scouts. One suspects that the word “Boanerges” only survives because in his original gospel Mark used it without translation like the word “cananæan” used of Simon the Zealot. A few years later an editor felt able to explain it and so it comes down to us today—serving no purpose except as a clue to the nature of the Nazarene band. Finally, five of the Apostles had previously been with John the Baptist. According to his disciple, Mark, John the Baptist taught that to seek God people had to “leave the towns”. He was urging them to become barjonim! It has been suggested that the Sadduc who teamed up with Judas of Galilee to form the Zealots was none other than John the Baptist.

Is all of this simply to be regarded as trivial coincidence? Largely from the gospels themselves we learn that between five and ten of gentle Jesus’s twelve leading disciples were tough guys. Can anyone seriously deny that the band of Jesus the Nazarene sound more like the band of Jesus Barabbas, the Zealot?

The Crowd Acclaims Jesus as a King

When Jesus entered Jerusalem the crowd hailed him as a king:

Blessed is the King that cometh,

Luke 19:38

Blessed is the kingdom that cometh, the kingdom of our father, David,

Mark 11:9

Hosannah to the Son of David,

Matthew 21:9

as though the non-existent word “hosannah” meant something like “greetings” or “three cheers”. The crowd actually shouted “osanna”, an Aramaic word which means “free us”. The crowd was actually calling—“Osanna, Son of David”—”Free us, Son of David”. The correct expression was used in the Gospel of the Hebrews, an Aramaic version of Matthew, and in the Nazarene Gospel as Jerome writing in the latter part of the fourth century tells us.

On entering Jerusalem, the gospels say 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 as he had done earlier, according to the gospel writers. Beginning the descent from the Mount of Olives we find people shouting:

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

Luke 19:38

Even after the crucifixion the hopes of the disciples are expressed in the same terms:

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

Lk 24:21

and meeting the resurrected Jesus they ask:

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

Acts 1:6

There are other clues to Jesus’s kingship in the gospels but rather more subtle ones. Jesus is described often in the synoptic gospels as teaching “as one having authority”. We get the impression it means he knew what he was talking about. But reference to Ecclesiastes 8:4 gives the true meaning of this odd sounding phrase:

the king’s word hath authority, and who may say unto him, What doest thou?

Similarly the priests in the Temple ask Jesus by whose authority he had overthrown the tables, inviting him to admit he is a king. These passages are simply saying that people recognised Jesus as being a king according to the Scriptures. Those that had ears to hear would understand!

Explaining to the Apostles how they should pray, Jesus tells them in Matthew and Luke to say the Lord’s prayer. It includes the lines:

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 stupid. And, indeed, 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 Christian interpretation is plainly refuted in the principal prayer of Christendom.

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. We know this because it is exactly what Jews expected of their Messiah as described in the Psalms of Solomon.

Jewish religion led Jews to believe that they were God’s “Chosen People”, having a special role in his plans and under his care. Anointment of ancient Jewish Kings made them God’s appointed ruler. The Messiah of the Jews was an ideal Jewish king sent by God and those anointed as kings or priests became Sons of God. The ritual of anointing required the priest, acting as God’s agent, to acknowledge his Son explicitly. At his baptism and Transfiguration, Jesus becomes a “Son of God” (and therefore a king or a priest) when “God” (the acting priest) announces (Mk 1:11, 9:7; Mt 3:17, 17:5; Lk 3:22, 9:35):

Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased.

The gospel writers are not lying when they say God spoke these words. God had spoken them—but through his earthly agent—just as today he speaks through books written by men! These ceremonies were effectively coronations.

The gospels offer little evidence that Jesus claimed to be a divine redeemer, the Christian idea of a Messiah, rather than a human saviour. They are consistent with Jesus, a Jew, initially denying—but later accepting—the appellation Messiah, convinced he had been chosen by God to prepare The Chosen People for the kingdom to come, God’s kingdom on earth, and to lead them into it. As a Jew, he could have had no illusions about being a god or of being a divine world redeemer, nor would he have had any intentions of forming a new religion. These blasphemous thoughts were given to him later by the founders of the Christian church. Comment

The Insurrection

In Luke 23:40 one of the “thieves” crucified alongside Jesus, rebuking the other, says they are all in the “same condemnation” implying they had all been found guilty of the same crimes at the same trial. Of course they were not “thieves” any more than Barabbas was simply a “robber”. This is a cover up, the best rendering of the word being terrorists or rebels! They were members of Jesus’s rebel gang.

The gospels admit that Jesus was not as peaceful as Christians like to make out but do so as quietly as possible. In Matthew 10:34 Jesus addressing his followers says:

Think not I came to send peace on the earth—I came not to send peace but a sword.

Contrasted with peace, sword here plainly means conflict in the struggle for the coming kingdom and subsequently the judgement of God. In Luke Jesus says he would cast fire on the earth and that the kingdom of God had to be entered violently. This was certainly not a pacifist talking. But, in Luke, a later gospel than Matthew, “sword” is replaced by “division”. The writer or an editor had realised the words did not match the desired image!

Luke 22:36 also has Biblical commentaries thrashing around in discomfort because gentle Jesus, the pacifist Son of God, urges his followers to buy arms—though two swords turn out to be enough! This looks like a prime example of a difficult passage for Christians being toned down by Christian editors. Both instances belie the gentle Jesus image revealing instead some of the truth hovering beneath the extant text.

Elsewhere in Luke 11:50 Jesus preaches in an impassioned speech that the blood of all the prophets which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation. This sounds like Shakespeare’s Henry V rallying his troops, though supposedly spoken to Pharisees. Is it coincidence that Luke is soon writing (Lk 13:1) of Pilate’s troops mixing Galilaean’s blood with their sacrifices, and then of the death of many when the Tower of Siloam collapsed (Lk 13:4)? Though misleadingly placed in the gospel, these sounds like tantalising references to a battle.

Had Pilate’s troops counter attacked and slaughtered Galilaeans in the Temple while they were offering sacrifices? Were those killed when the Tower of Siloam fell on them resisting an attack by Pilate’s soldiers using battering rams? Since Roman troops were normally housed in the Antonia fortress adjacent to the Temple and would therefore have easy access to the Temple and the city it is possible that the Jerusalem garrison had been overpowered, or had strategically withdrawn, and the insurgents had been attacked by a stronger force sent from Caesarea on the coast. Neither of these incidents are mentioned in the extant works of historians of the time.

After the Roman counter attack when the Galilaeans were killed, the Temple was lost and the Tower of Siloam had collapsed, Jesus withdrew to take a meal with his closest associates similar to the messianic meal of the Essenes. We know it as the Last Supper. They had been beaten but were not yet ready to surrender. Jesus repeatedly urges the disciples to repent, obviously believing still that God would intervene if they were all sufficiently pure of spirit. They went, still armed, to the Mount of Olives overlooking the city to wait for God’s miracle, prophesied in Zechariah 14:4. Jesus Barabbas and his band had played their part and had temporarily freed the Holy City from its enemies. Now it was up to God to complete the task as he had promised. Barabbas wants his men to wait and watch for the signs of the miracle but they are exhausted.

The miracle never comes but instead soldiers, a detachment of Romans or some of the Temple Guard, arrive to capture him. God had forsaken him and the Jews.

In a non-canonical document purporting to be the trial of Pilate before Tiberius called The Giving up of Pilate, the author readily admits that Pilate had crucified Jesus because of the rebelliousness of the Jews. Pilate says:

O almighty king, I am innocent of these things…
The multitude of the Jews are violent and guilty…
Their nation is rebellious and insubmissive, not submitting themselves to thy power…
On account of the wickedness and rebellion of the lawless and ungodly Jews…

Praying to Jesus after he is condemned by Caesar Pilate repeats:

Lord, do not destroy me along with the wicked Hebrews, because I would not have laid hands upon Thee, except for the nation of the lawless Jews, because they were exciting rebellion against me.

Though the document can hardly be regarded as historic in general, it is typically Christian to blame the Jews rather than Pilate, who is depicted as a Christian himself, but the author repeatedly implies the cause of the trouble was rebellion, not something that Christians are thought willing to admit. Why should the defendant, Pilate, say repeatedly that the Jews were in rebellion if they were not?

Lest anyone should doubt that the followers of Jesus had been involved in bloody rebellion in which many had died, let them turn to the Acts of the Apostles 6:1-3 where the surviving Nazarenes have to appoint as many as seven men to ensure that no “widows were neglected in the daily ministration”. Did you ever wonder why the Nazarenes had to make special provision for widows just after Jesus’s crucifixion?

The Arrest of Jesus

The synoptics say Christ was arrested by a crowd of people sent by the High Priest. The fourth Gospel (Jn 18:3,12) says the crowd was a cohort, in Greek a speira, of soldiers under a tribune, telling us precisely the arresting party was a Roman military force of 600 men. A military response had been instigated.

Christians have a problem with the cohort of soldiers sent to arrest Jesus. Why should 600 Roman soldiers have moved in the night to arrest a mendicant travelling holy man whose only crime was saying he was a son of God? They puzzle that it seems “excessive” and urge that it should not be “taken literally.”

For anyone more open minded than the typical Christian scholar, this “excessive” force would be screaming out that Jesus and his band were not as harmless as the gospels would have us believe. Even with this show of force, the Nazarenes did not simply surrender, but fought in retaliation, though the holy books say only Peter had his sword drawn and he cut off the ear of one of the High Priest’s servants.

This minor injury is so blatantly a bishop’s excuse for armed resistance, that it is hard to accept that anyone believes it. The pacific band of Jesus armed only with a sword, take on a cohort of Roman soldiers and succeed in injuring one of them. Having to explain stories about the arrest coming to them from Jewishs sources, the gentile bishops pretended that only a dunce of a disciple caused any trouble. Only dunces can believe it. Jesus was not as pacific as they have been indoctrinated to believe.

The text in Mark reads perfectly well without verses 44 and 45 which must be considered as additions to the tradition to further the treachery of Judas. Indeed the introduction of Judas as one of the twelve again, having been so introduced already in verse 10, cries out that he has been added to the arresting party as an afterthought. In John 18:5,8 Jesus freely admits who he is, proving that the kiss was unnecessary.

There is a skirmish which must have been the immediate response to the arresting party, belying the fiction of the kiss. In John 18:6 the reaction of the arresting party on seeing the Nazarenes is that they retreated, and fell to the ground, virtually admitting the fight. Mark does not say explicitly that the guards coming to arrest him are Roman soldiers or temple guards. However chief priests, scribes and elders are mentioned, meaning the Sanhedrin, and in the clash someone described as a servant of the High Priest loses an ear. In John, the smiter is Peter, but oddly the servant’s name is Malchus which means king, possibly a veiling of a tradition that Jesus was wounded in the skirmish—a blemish that might have prevented him being the paschal lamb. The arrest must have been effected by temple guards. That of course is what we expect because Caiaphas assured Pilate that he would arrest the criminal by stealth, in other words not with a great show of Roman overkill.

When a disciple cut off the ear of the priests’ servant in the garden, why was he carrying a sword if the pacific nature of the Nazarenes propagated by the Christians is true? It was illegal to carry arms. Luke 22:35-36 tries to offer the explanation that Jesus told his disciples to carry arms—two swords suffice—deliberately to break the law so that he would fulfil prophecy and be numbered among the transgressors. Jesus already was a transgressor—it is transparently an attempt to explain that the gang were armed.

Mark answers a couple more objections that opponents of the Christians were raising by giving Jesus a short speech:

Are ye come out, as against a thief, with swords and with staves to take me? I was daily with you in the temple teaching, and ye took me not—but the scriptures must be fulfilled.

One objection was that Jesus could have been arrested in the temple. Jesus answers, “the scriptures must be fulfilled”, meaning for Jesus that he must become the worthless shepherd, or, for Mark, the suffering servant of Isaiah which is how the immediate successors of Jesus had reinterpreted his death. The other was to counter critics who remembered that he led an armed band of insurrectionists, and were reminded of it by the striking off of the guard’s ear. Thief in this context is a deliberate mistranslation—the word is insurrectionist. Today if we were opposed to the Nazarenes we would write terrorist, if we were in favour of them we would write freedom fighter. By showing Jesus indignant that he should be arrested as an insurrectionist, Mark hoped to suggest otherwise.

In verse 49, Mark suggests that Jesus had control of the temple longer than you might think—he taught there daily. Finally, verses 51 and 52 seem very mysterious but they are an unhistorical addition by Mark using Amos 2:16 where God punishes the Israelites for their iniquities so severely that even the courageous among the mighty shall flee away naked. It follows the fleeing of the disciples in verse 50 and is another amelioration passage. Disciples had to be denigrated as Jews but, as founders of Christianity they had to be respected. Here they are pictured as cowardly Jews, which is fine, but they had to be excused as Christians. Didn’t God say in Amos 2:16 that even their bravest would be made cowards by God’s will? For Mark, the disciples behaved just as you’d expect as Jews, but they couldn’t help it and the image of the youth fleeing naked conjured up the appropriate scriptural reference to excuse them.

Comment

from Stephen Ballard

Mike, although I agree with much of what you say in this article, I just hope by founders of the church you mean his disciples and apostles. It seems that even Paul (Saul) believed this to be true and even his brother James said as much even though he probably did not believe it.

This idea of ressurection of the martyred dead seems to have arose during the Maccabean period and Seleucid persecution. In Daniel 7:13 dating from the same period it also seems to be associated with the “coming of one like the Son of Man with the clouds to the Ancient of Days”. This of course would be a reference to the storm/rain god, Baal, appearing before his father, Bull El, who was called“ the Ancient of Days”. Baal was a god who went into the underworld during the summer drought and was ressurected (like the seed and sprouts from the underworld) with the coming of the rains. This idea of the ressurection of a god and of nature may very well have been carried over into the personal ressurection of the martyred insurgents during the Maccabean revolt, as in 2 Maccabees. It would be like a recruiting tool for the insurgency just as Paradise is for Islam.

These same religious beliefs would have been dusted off during the Roman occupation and Jesus would be the embodiement of this Son of God who his followers would await coming in the clouds to deliver them during the revolt of 66-70 AD. Even Josephus admits that this [2nd] coming of the Messiah was what most motivated these partisans of Christ to revolt against Rome. And Galilee [of the gentiles] as you point out was rather late in becoming converted to orthodox Judaism. Harpers Bible Dictionary points out that under the name of Tammuz/Adonis, that Baal was still worshipped in Galilee and Syria in the time of Jesus. And even Ezra 2:13 admits that the children of Adonikam [the risen Lord] were 666 in number when returning from the Babylonian exile. In other words the Baal worshippers also came back from Babylon along with the Jehovah worshippers, probably as a remnant of the northern Baal woshipping tribes who again settle in northern Palestine, their traditional homeland, just as the more orthodox Jews settle in Judea.

So the idea of Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God would have been quickly adopted after his death, even before the Great Revolt of 66 AD.

Further Reading

• More on the Galileans, and the Nazarenes
• More on the commital hearing before the Jewish authorities
• More on the trial before Pilate
• More on the crucifixion
• More on the resurrection

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