Christianity
Post Crucifixion
Abstract
The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are Siamese twins joined at the crucifixion.
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, February 20, 1999
Mark’s Apocalypse and the Passion
A scholar called Theissen is quoted as saying the apocalyptic discourse of Mark 13 as well as the Markan passion narrative are based on written sources stemming from the Jerusalem church in the wake of the Caligula crisis in the early forties. Yet there was a similar crisis, an “Abomination of Desolation”, when Pilate had his soldiers entering Jerusalem secretly, during the night, carrying their standards.
We do not know for certain whether Pilate entered the Temple with these sacrilegious soldiers and their Pagan emblems, but it seems impossible to imagine he did not. It was bad enough taking Pagan gods into Jerusalem, as Pilate presumably knew. That is why he took them in secretly. If he wanted to assert his contempt for the Jews and his authority over them in this way, it seems inconceivable that he did not desecrate the Temple also. We know he stole the Temple Corban, the money donated by the Faithful, to build an aquaduct. Since this was money notionally given to God, it must have constituted just as serious a crime to the Jews.
The balance of evidence has to be that Pilate desecrated the Temple. Caligula, on the other hand, did not. He proposed to erect a statue to a Pagan god in the Jewish Temple but was persuaded against it. It was an “Abomination of Desolation” that did not actually happen. But the fait accompli of Pilate’s soldiers appearing with their standards in Jerusalem definitely did happen. So, if Theissen felt an “Abomination of Desolation” was necessary for the Markan apocalypse to be written, why should it and the Jesus story have not been triggered earlier by Pilate?
Pet theories of the historical Jesus have little bearing on developments after the crucifixion and resurrection. John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus was a yokel Jewish Cynic but his followers believed in “his continuing presence after the crucifixion”.
E P Sanders sees Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet and asks: “Without the resurrection, would his disciples have endured any longer than the Baptist’s? I would guess not”.
These clever men seem often to be remarkably careless in what they say. If there are any Mandaeans left in Mesopotamia, then the disciples of John the Baptist exist until today. Perhaps, Sanders does not believe that the Mandaeans are really followers of John the Baptist but are followers of a later gnostic sect. He therefore discounts their claims. But how do the Mandaeans differ from modern Christians in their claims? They claim it, and no one has any proof otherwise.
Christianity also might stem from a gnostic variant of the teaching of Jesus. The real founder of the gentile church was Paul, to judge by Christian legends, and he was strongly influenced by the Gnostics, according to many competent scholars. It is time that these so-called Christian scholars humbled themselves a little, as did their putative master.
Reasons for The Crucifixion
Sanders:
Whatever sort of teacher he is held to have been, it is difficult to move from “Jesus the teacher” to “Jesus, a Jew who was crucified”… It is difficult to make his teaching offensive enough to lead to execution.
It is difficult too to believe that some of these scholars can read their own bibles. The gospel stories explain precisely why Jesus was crucified. If his teaching had anything to do with it, it was incidental, because his actions in Jerusalem were sufficient. Crossan is more realistic:
Some form of religiopolitical execution could surely have been expected. What he was saying and doing was as unacceptable in the first as in the twentieth century, there, here, or anywhere.
Quite! Only thirty years ago, in the Great Society of the western world, students were being shot on campus for rioting. The authorities feared revolution. In the colony of Rome called Judaea, two thousand years ago, a man with the name Saviour, Jesus, called for a new kingdom to be set up, rioted in the colonial capital, disturbing peaceful merchants about their legitimate business, refused people entry into the Temple precinct and was hailed by the crowds as a king when he “symbolically” announced himself king of the Jews by entering Jerusalem on a donkey, as prescribed by Jewish tradition.
This is merely what is explicit in the gospels themselves, yet is sufficient for the perpetrator of these acts to be crucified under Roman law. As Crossan notes, these acts are still illegal today. It is treason, a capital crime, to claim to be the king. Admittedly most people making such a claim today would be destined for a lunatic asylum, but the Romans had cheaper solutions. Rioting has never been looked on favourably by any society and Jesus ran riot in the Temple. By refusing people to cross the Temple courts, Jesus made himself the de facto ruler, taking over the authority legitimately in the hands of the priests and the Temple police.
Finally, the Romans were not even ready to let anyone be acclaimed a king, whether they themselves made the claim or not. They took the safety first view that a seditionist is sure to deny the claim, because he knew the consequences, but if a crowd had been cheering for him, then the claim must have been made, for why else should the crowd believe it.
Besides these instances, Jesus’s followers were armed, although the gospels pretend that their arms were only one sword. Private citizens were not permitted to carry arms.
Now, it might seem horrid and cruel to Christians that their kind god was treated to crucifixion, but all of these acts carried that punishment. Whatever else it was, it was justice under Roman law. There should be no difficulty in the least for Sanders to move from Jesus the teacher to the Jew who was crucified, if his intervening acts are considered.
His Teaching Seemed So Innocent
Sanders comes to recognise some of this but still puzzles about why it is not more obvious in his teaching:
If all we had were his parables and related sayings, we would not expect this to have been the result of his career. Nothing about his teaching is adequate to account for his execution on the grounds of implied insurrection. The characterization of the kingdom as including a “reversal of values” and his inclusion of the sinners might have been offensive to some of the pious, but they do not explain the Roman execution. The call to follow him at great cost and to love one’s neighbor does not lead us to see him as a threat to the established order.
None of this seems any the less naïve to me, considering that Sanders is a famous New Testament scholar. First, does he seriously think that the first gentile bishops were so liberal in their views that they would circulate a book admitting openly that their god was a Jewish traitor to the Roman emperor? The idea is quite rightly risable. Yet no Christian scholar will allow that the first bishops might have indulged in sins of omission or commission in the furtherance of their breadpot.
Second, Judaea was an occupied and unruly country, and its Roman governors were in post to keep order and collect tribute. They were not likely to look happily upon a man who was advocating rebellion and refusing tribute (he was!), and any man who openly did so would soon have found himself hung. Jesus therefore did not advocate his seditionist ideas openly. That is the point of parables, which the gospels admit as being cryptic. That is the point of the call of Jews to the kingdom of God. Whatever Christians might have persuaded themselves since, the oppressed Jews of Judaea knew precisely what Jesus meant, and what they were letting themselves in for.
It is probably also the reason why he spent a lot of his time out of Roman jurisdiction, in Galilee mostly (according to the stories which have come to us), in Herod Philip’s kingdom, in Peraea (like Galilee ruled by Antipas) and in Phœnicia. The absence of a call to all Israel in his transmitted sayings was simply because he never addressed “all Israel”. He only ever addressed relatively small groups in public. Mark was prone to excess and the “mutitudes” were exaggerations, just as everything in Mark was done “immediately”.
The only large crowd, if it is to be believed, would have been the Sermon on the Mount, but the gospels admit that was deliberately in a desert place. Revolutionary teachers have to be cagey, and the gospel evidence is that Jesus was. Why then should Sanders or any other Christian teacher expect the rebellious words to shine brightly through the gospels. The muting of the seditionist message can only confirm that the message was revolutionary.
His Disciples were not Crucified
Sanders:
There was, at the time of his execution, no rounding up of the disciples, nor was it necessary to suppress crowds of rioters. It is likely that, during his lifetime, Jesus made a smaller impact than had John the Baptist. Often people who see themselves as acting for God do not worry much about numbers or about realistic strategy.
We see here again a scholar assuming that the texts he is examining are complete and true, despite one’s common sense protesting about it. There was no rounding up of his disciples at the time of his execution because most of them had been rounded up beforehand and executed with him! The gospels tell us that others were executed at the same time and in the same condemnation, the gospels tell us there had been an insurrection and the insurrection was in Jerusalem. The gospels seem to tell us nothing about this insurection even though it must have been happening while the gospel story proceeded.
It is blatantly obvious that the rebellion was led by Jesus and that is why he was executed. Whoever of his lieutenants were caught at the same time will have been killed or crucified alongside him. How many of the twelve apostles wrote an account of the episode? None, is the correct answer. Mark’s gospel is the nearest because according to a tradition that many scholars dispute, it is a second hand account of the apostle Peter’s story of these events.
The most famous “apostle”, Paul, never knew Jesus and never was one of his apostles. All the other apostles disappear. Either they never existed or they died or left the movement early. Their fates as told today are known to be fabrications to explain their absence. If Jesus really did appoint twelve, and again scholars are inclined to doubt it, then mostly they will have died when Jesus died.
Sanders nevertheless concludes:
No one regarded Jesus’ movement as posing an actual military threat. Thus some form of “otherworldliness” must be attributed to Jesus and his disciples even before the crucifixion, and it would appear that neither the Jerusalem aristocracy nor the Romans understood Jesus’ hope differently,
and
[The disciples’] expectation throughout must have been for a miraculous event which would so transform the world that arms would not be needed in the new kingdom.
Isn’t it astonishing how wrong you can begin to go, because you choose not to see or refuse to see the obvious. Doubtless Sanders will say, there is nothing obvious about it, and he has 2000 years and a billion Christians to back him. It is obvious to this extent—if it were possible to put the facts I present in the Hidden Jesus to a neutral jury, they would conclude that Jesus was manifestly a rebel. Christians, whether scholars or not, have scales on their eyes and simply will not see what is (or ought to be) obvious.
The indoctrinating of the Christian community began as soon as the new religion entered the gentile Roman empire. There were not many of them, then, but all of them grew with what the gentile bishops told them and taught it to others, placing scales on the eyes of each new generation. Any external evidence that told events as they were, was destroyed in the fourth century.
What remains is what the New Testament tells us together with whatever we can glean from classic and Jewish sources of the time, that survived Christian and Jewish expurgation. Curiously, though most of the external evidence has been destroyed, sufficient remains in the New Testament to explain what happened. It is simply that Christians have been taught not to see it!
Sanders is correct that Jesus and the disciples expected a miracle to inaugurate the kingdom of God, but Jesus evidently felt that God needed proof of Jewish commitment, which is why he broke the law of the Romans, led a rebellion and was crucified.
Merrill P Miller of Pembroke State University tells us that, for Sanders, the crucifixion could not have been just for the riot in the temple. This action could not have been more than a “symbolic” gesture. Otherwise, Jesus would have undoubtedly been seized immediately along with his followers. But the priestly aristocracy was not likely to feel that its control of the temple was in any jeopardy. What was crucial was “the combination of a physical action with a noticeable following” .
Again we have astonishing blindness. Sanders, if Miller is correct, thinks the Temple authorities, the priests, though backed by a substantial police force, would have ignored the riot, and the riot was merely a “symbolic” gesture. Only the blind hypocrites that are Christians, normally extreme conservatives and sticklers for law and order, can ignore the criminality of their god rampaging around a legal market turning over stalls.
The priests did not bother because their control was not in jeopardy? Of course, they bothered! The gospels tell us they bothered. They wanted to know what right Jesus had to do what he did. Still, they did not arrest him. This again is blindness. Do Christians ever wonder why the priests did not send their police to arrest a madman turning over tables? There is only one reason. They couldn’t! They were no longer in control! Jesus indeed had a notable following, and they had captured the Temple, if not the whole of Jerusalem.
It was all a Jewish Plot
Apparently, according to Miller, Sanders believes that Jesus did not encourage his followers to expect a miracle or indeed encourage a large following because, if either were true, then the Romans would have had sufficient reason to arrest him themselves, and his group of followers. The combination of “symbolic” demonstration against the Temple and a noticeable following would have given the chief priests in Jerusalem a basis to propose to Pilate that Jesus be executed.
There were enough followers, however, to make it expedient to kill Jesus, rather than simply flog him as a nuisance and release him.
The theory obviously treads an absurdly fine line between what was too many followers for comfort and what was acceptable. It is a wonderful theory for biblical “scholars” to hold, and typical of them, because it is quite meaningless. What number of followers constitutes too many? Sanders, like all of these so-called scholars, for two thousand years, is pussy-footing around to avoid the truth that Christianity cannot face. Its god was a Jewish rebel properly executed for his crime.
Sanders discounts what used to be commonly accepted by proper scholars namely that there was indeed no Jewish plot against Jesus because it was a construct of the gentile Church precisely to disassociate Jesus from the Jews whom Romans knew as trouble makers. By having Jesus murdered by his own people, the unspeakable Jews reject him. The corollary was that the Romans were relieved of the responsibility of the murder of the Christian god. That is why Paul never writes in his letters that Christ was executed by Roman authority in Jerusalem as a rebel. Paul keeps the circumstances of Jesus’s death quite hidden. Either he did not know them or he did not want to tell. Nor is the substance of a Jewish plot, in the gospels, even vaguely comparable with the extensive evidence that Jesus led an insurrection. Yet Christians stick by their tendentious Christian myth that led, via the pogroms to the Holocaust.
The basis for a Judas as a betrayer is so thin it disappears. The word “betray” is wrongly translated—the correct rendering being “deliver” or “hand over”, neither of which necessarily implies betrayal. And what does “Judas” mean? It means Jew! Judas is just the Jewish nation personified as a traitor to God! That any Christian, let alone a scholar, should still accept this in the face of all the contrary evidence and the trouble it has caused in the world to innocent people, is beyond any comprehension.
Jesus was crucified, not by Jews but by Romans, and he was crucified for a crime against the Romans. If Jews had any role in it, it was a role they could only avoid at their own personal risk, by refusing to co-operate with their Roman masters. It is unlikely that the priests would have entertained any such defiance, but that does not make them responsible for the acts of Jesus himself, or the Roman consequences.
“Why was Jesus executed as a king?” Miller asks. Sanders accepts that Jesus had entered Jerusalem as a king, though only as a “symbolic” gesture which his followers would have understood, but which would have involved no large public recognition or response.
It fits into Jesus’ last symbolic acts: he entered as “king”, demonstrated the destruction of the present temple, and had a meal with his disciples which symbolized the coming “banquet”.
Sanders, apparently, thinks Judas’s betrayal of Jesus to the priests was that his small band thought of him as king.
It was the final weapon they needed: a specific charge to present to Pilate, more certain to have fatal effect than the general charge “troublemaker”.
One wonders whether Sanders is deceiving himself or deceiving his gullible Christian readers. The sure evidence in the gospels that Jesus thought of himself as the king was the entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. Presumably, even Sanders cannot find a way to wriggle out of it, just as he cannot wriggle out of Jesus’s act of Laesae Majestae in assuming public authority contrary to the law in the Temple. His answer is therefore that these are only “symbolic” acts.
Can anyone believe that, if they started wrecking the counters at Macy’s or Marks and Spencer’s, their act would be seen as a symbolic gesture, or, if they rode a horse into the White House or into the Houses of Parliament while shouting they were the king, their act would be seen as symbolic? The authorities today might conclude the demonstrators were lunatics, but until they had been arrested and the authorities had satisfied themselves, they would be treated seriously. The Romans were less lenient than the authorities of today.
It is perfectly fatuous for anyone to suggest that the Romans would have seen these as “symbolic” gestures, but let us suppose they had done. Would Jesus have been let off? The answer is no. The Romans were not inclined to tolerate “symbolic” gestures. At the very least, for turning over tables, Jesus would have had a severe flogging and more likely would have been crucified anyway. For claiming, even symbolically, to be Caesar, he would have been crucified, definitely.
As for the public not recognising this symbolic act, Sanders must himself be insane or quite dishonest. What do his scholarly Jewish exegetes think about this slur. It was Passover, do not forget. Pious Jews from all over the world were attending Jerusalem for their most sacred pilgrimage. To suggest that a man could enter Jerusalem on a donkey, fulfilling the messianic prophecy of Zechariah, when the city was full of hundreds of thousands of Jews who knew their scripture much better then than Christians do now, yet without being recognised, is an insult to Jews then and now.
Such an act would have led to a messianic riot, which the Romans would have had to quell. Possibly such a riot occurred and the relatively small Roman forces were overcome by the Nazarene band and the crowds of pilgrims. If so, the gospels have watered this down to a demonstration with branches, a name of the messiah being “The Branch”. More likely is that the Roman garrison of Jerusalem had already been overcome and the entry was its consequence and therefore could be done by Jesus as a victor.
Sanders is correct that the Last Supper was a messianic meal.
Sanders follows that other “scholar”, Martin Hengel, in regarding Jesus as a leader of one of the “prophetic-charismatic movements of an eschatological stamp”, which would include John the Baptist, Judas the Galilean, Theudas, and the Egyptian, though, unlike them, he did not (sic) have a mass following.
Take care, the Christians are trying to re-write history yet again. They are, at last, accepting that Jesus was a rebel but only a leader of a “prophetic-charismatic movement of an eschatological stamp”, so that’s all right! All of these people led rebellions of one kind or another against the authorities and died for it. Admittedly, what we know of John the Baptist is that his revolution was nipped in the bud by Herod Antipas, but he was beheaded for it nevertheless and the other three all led open rebellions. Jesus, on these historical facts, does fall into this category, but by pretending it was merely “charismatic”, a word with positive connotations, they hope to give the impression that these people were, like Jesus, good men but misunderstood.
The Jerusalem Church
Miller ponders, since the threat which Jesus posed is not clear, the motivation for his execution is also not clear. But Sanders finally seems to settle on the “potential” threat of public disorder. The Romans regarded Jesus as dangerous as one who excited the hopes and dreams of Jews, but not as an actual leader of an insurgent group.
So now you know! Jesus was plotted against by the Jews as a threat to public order, but, in the Sanders/gospel scenario, only Jesus the charismatic prophet is the threat, not his band of followers, who are not molested even when they go on to declare that their dead leader was really alive. If Jesus was executed as a bandit leader and political threat to the stability of the state, why did the Jerusalem church remain unharassed? The movement survived, presumably because it posed no political or military threat.
The thesis of S G F Brandon ( Jesus and the Zealots, 1967 ) made the Nazarenes Jewish nationalists in an honest attempt to account for the Roman execution of Jesus, based on evidence rather than dreaming.
Ironic though it be, the most certain thing known about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was crucified by the Romans as a rebel against their government in Judaea.
Elsewhere ( The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, 1951 ) Brandon explains:
Whatever may have been the degree to which Jesus had become involved in the cause of Jewish freedom, it is certain that the movement connected with him had at least sufficient semblance of sedition to cause the Roman authorities both to regard him as a possible revolutionary and, after trial, to execute him as guilty on such a charge.
Miller notes that despite this, Brandon never seems troubled by the fact that the author of Acts gives no hint that the Jerusalem church was ever threatened by the Jewish or the Roman authorities.
The explanation is that, not just Jesus but many of his followers were also killed in his rebellion, either at the time of the uprising, when the Romans counter-attacked or when the rounded-up brigands of the gang were crucified. The proof of this fact is the Nazarenes’ need to provide for many widows in Acts 6:1. Christians have always thought that the followers of Jesus were like “General” Booth’s Salvation Army, a charity to help the poor on the streets, when in truth they were a defeated army, licking its wounds and trying hard to feed the widows of its dead warriors. The authorities, Roman and Jewish, will have considered the Nazarene movement so damaged, it was no longer a threat.
Another factor which Christian “scholars” always ignore is the time factor. The gospels give few accurate indications of time, and Acts is no better. The impression might be that the remaining Nazarenes were active in Jerusalem the day after the resurrection, but the truth is likely to be that a considerable gap of time intervened before the survivors came out of hiding. Indeed, they might have had to wait until Pilate and Caiaphas had been sacked as leaders of Judaea, before they could emerge safely. It might have been 15 years after the crucifixion.
Time is even more important insomuch as the resurrectionist believers in the coming of Christ accounted for Jesus’s mistake in thinking God’s miracle was due at Gethsemane by delaying it for a generation. Transparently Jesus expected the miracle on the night of his arrest and was bitterly disappointed it never came. Yet elsewhere he is shown predicting the kingdom within a generation (40 years).
While both could be true—he began cautiously perhaps, saying it might be within a generation, but later became more certain it was due soon—he eventually settled on the night of the Passover, as a suitably prophetic night and because he knew he would soon be arrested. His apocalyptic expectation was wrong. Possibly, however, Jesus never made such a long prediction. He will surely have begun his mission to raise God’s army expecting only a three year mission ( from the prophecy in Daniel ). So, he would never have made such a pessimistic prophecy as forty years until the coming kingdom.
The Jewish generation was the post-crucifixion revision of the Nazarenes. Jesus expected the miracle to end a forty year cosmic battle, assuming him to be an Essene. The revision was to make his baptism or his crucifixion, the beginning of the forty year cosmic battle that would end in apocalypse. Once the post-crucifixion followers had made this revision, they were no longer revolutionary. Like fundamentalist converts today, they were convinced the kingdom of God would come soon and had no need to make any further preparations except to keep upright.
So, as upright citizens awaiting the consolation of God, the early Christians were accepted both within Judaism and by the gentiles. Jack T Sanders shows mainstream Jews did not come into conflict with early Christians for any reason related to the proclamation of Jesus’s messiahship and there is no indication prior to the first Roman-Jewish war that messianism was the source of persecution of Christians in the cities of the western diaspora. The beliefs of the two groups however were not the same. The Jerusalem Church was still exclusive and quite uninterested in what the gentiles were doing. They remained Essenes and that is surely what the Jerusalem Church of James the Just was. They accepted Jesus as a great martyr and prophet. The Ebionites were their heirs, and evidently, under the influence of gentile Christianity, they too split into more Westernised and more Judaized groups.
Horsley suggests Jesus attempted a direct takeover of the temple by force in the manner of a popular messianic claimant, accounting for his arrest and execution as a revolutionary leader, but rendering Jesus’s actions “naïve and abortive”. So, Horsley establishes for us a sound basis for New Testament scholarship. Any proposal to account for the actions of Jesus must be rejected if they seem “naïve” or “abortive”! Presumably we have to conclude that no son of God and indeed God himself in one of the persons of the Trinity could be accused of naïvety or choosing abortive actions. This is Christian scholarship at its best!
It deserves no answer, but it does illustrate the idiocy of the Trinity, because if, as the son of God, God appeared on earth as a true and full man, then why shouldn’t this true and full man have had human failings? As in all matters to do with Jesus, he has to be a true and full man so that he suffered as a man on the cross and can understand human suffering. But any god who supposedly incarnates as a full human being but nevertheless can work miracles contrary to God’s own laws of nature is plainly not a normal human. Such a god could have left his skin before the pain started and simply manipulated what remained like a puppet. So, if God suffered as a human, the miracles must have been lies and the son of God cannot be taken to have been a perfect man. A perfect man, in any case, cannot be a man because no man can be perfect without being a god.
Let us return to reason and history. Jesus was a man, and had the idea that by taking Zion from the hated Roman usurpers, he would prove to God, who many Jews thought was dead or had left them, that they were still faithful to Him and the land He promised to His people. He therefore led a rebellion against the Jerusalem garrison. To Horsley that might seem naïve and abortive, but he is presumably not privvy to the way Jesus or any other Jew at the time thought, and unlike Jesus who believed that God would come to his aid, Horsley knows he did not. He is smugly wise after the event. He can vent his views with hindsight, and prove by so-doing that he hasn’t a whit of understanding of the times. When people are so unselfcritically prejudiced, how can they be called scholars?
Recent studies on the genre and literary history of “Q”, on apocryphal gospels, especially the Gospel of Thomas, and on pre-Markan gospel traditions have shown that there are early Jesus traditions that cannot be accommodated within the Easter kerygma and which do not seem to be apocalyptic. The perennial assumption of these scholars is that these shadowy documents refer to Jesus or were originated by him. These works that supposedly comprise the hypothetical “Q”, if they are not imaginary, might actually stem from a time before Jesus, the man. Such wisdom literature devoid of references to Christ might be a collection of Essene wisdom which has later become associated with Jesus, who was an Essene, as typical of his words.
Son of God
Christians consider it was an unique revelation of God that Jesus Christ was their “saviour”. The sign of the fish popular as the sign of Christianity in its early days before it became the cross was said to stand for “ichthys”, the Greek word for fish, and that meant “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”. The Greek word for “saviour” is “soter”. If Christ was unique, God seems careless about His use of terms because “soter” was a popular title of Greek gods and kings for hundreds of years before the Christian savious emerged in history. Or is it just His dimwitted and dishonest worshippers who are careless? Asklepios, Serapis, Isis, the Ptolemies, the Seleucidae and the Roman emperors were all fond of the title “soter”. Not only them, of course, but God, or His inept Ghost, must have forgotten about the saviours that had appeared in the Jewish scriptures long before the Christian Jesus claimed the title. “Joshua”, “Isaiah” and “Hosea” all mean “saviour”, but Joshua is supposed to have lived 1400 years before Jesus, according to the bible, and Isaiah 800 years before him. Even more curious, though, is that Isaiah depicts God as being adamant that only He is the saviour of humanity. Of course, in those days to be a saviour meant something more concrete than an empty promise of life after death. People were poor and oppressed and salvation to them meant being saved from this poverty and oppression. A king or God that offered salvation was offering something worthwhile. There is nothing unique in Christ being a saviour. It was what any respectable god and even a respectable ruler would claim to be.
Curiously, the same is true of the title “Son of God”, also claimed by Jesus Chirst. Junior gods, kings, priests, Roman emperors, and generally famous or accomplished men were all considered to be sons of gods. Being a son of God is how the ancients explained that some men had extraordinary abilities—they were half a god, a demi-god. In Greek and Latin where the endings signify case, the words “son” and “God” in the phrase “son of god” can be inverted, and the definite article can be included with either or neither of the nouns. Robert L Mowery notes that first century imperial “son of god” formulae normally had the word order “theou uios” rather than “uios theou”. “Son of god”…
- is a Roman imperial formula that occurred widely in first century imperial titulature,
- paralleled the christological formula, “theou uios”, of three passages of Matthew (Mt 14:33; 27:43.54),
- was echoed in various three-word Roman “son of god” formulae in the form “son of the god so-and so”.
The emperors of Rome started using the title “son of god” before Christians gave it to Jesus. Christians claimed they hated the imperial cult, and so it seems odd or even hypocritical to use in their writings a well known imperial description of the emperors. The christological formula “theou uios” occurs only three times in the New Testament, and all three are in Matthew, but in contexts taken from Mark:
- at the end of the story of Jesus walking on the sea (Mt 14:33) when the disciples in the boat worshipped him saying, “Truly you are the son of God” (theou uios), words which appear only here
- in the crucifixion narrative when priests, scribes and elders mocked Jesus for saying, “I am the son of God” (Mt 27:43), words which occur only here
- in the words spoken by the centurion and those who were with him (Mt 27:54), “Truly this man was the son of God”, where Matthew deliberately changed the word order in Mark 15:39.
The inverted construction is not typical of Matthew. Matthew’s “theou uios” exactly parallels the two-word son of god formulae of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Titus, and Domitian. Matthew seems to have been deliberately mimicking the imperial “son of god” formula.
Julius Caesar named Octavian as his adopted son and heir in his will. When Caesar was granted the title “divus” (the Divine) after his death, Octavian began to call himself “son of the Divine Julius”, but soon Julius was dropped leaving him “son of the Divine” (divi filius). Octavian was not claiming to be a son of God nor was Caesar proclaimed a God, but, when these words are translated into Greek, Divine became God, and Octavian was a “son of god”, the Greeks regarding a demi-god as a god anyway.
Local Greek speakers, like most of the Hellenized Jews who initially became Christians, must have thought that Octavian, who received the title Augustus in 27 BC, was a “son of god”, and it was in the east where Julius Caesar was hailed as a god, though that was not the claim. Augustus was honoured as a god in the East during his reign, and some Greek texts hail him as both “god” and “son of god”. He too was divinized after his death, and so his son Tiberius could take on the same titles. Tiberius reigned from 14-37 AD, and was the emperor at the time of the New Testament events. He is called “son of god” in inscriptions and coins, sometimes with Sebastos (Augustus) added, from Egypt to the Black Sea. Tiberius was not himself declared a divus by the Roman Senate.
Gaius Caligula was Tiberius’s adopted grandson and heir, but had to be content with being merely “descended” from the god Sebastos, Tiberius not being a divus. So, he was never called a son of god, but even so demanded in his insanity to be divine, before he was killed off. Claudius (41-54 AD), did not claim to be the son of a god but was acclaimed a god in the East during his lifetime, and he was declared a divus in Rome after his death. His adopted son Nero was therefore “son of the god Claudius”. Nero also traced his descent to Augustus. He was called “son of god” in inscriptions and on coins, but committed suicide and had no divinity conferred on him.
Vespasian (69-79 AD) started a new dynasty, the Flavians, and made no claims to be a son of god, but he was nevertheless called a son of god, and son of Ammon, in Egypt. He was made a divus in Rome after his death. His sons Titus and Domitian could therefore each claim to be a son of god. Titus was called son of the god Vespasian, and he was regarded as a god according to some eastern sources. He was a divus after his death. Domitian (81-96 AD) was often called son of the god Vespasian, and son of god appears on eighty coins from Tarsus, Alexandria, and other eastern cities. He was assassinated and the title of “god” never given. The five emperors whose titles included “son of god” ruled for nearly a hundred years.
There are parallels between the two-word Matthean formula “theou uios” (God’s son) and the imperial formulae. The imperial cult celebrated and promulgated the claims of Rome and her emperors. From 29 BC, when Pergamum buit a temple to the goddess Roma and the Emperor Octavian, the cult eventually extended to thirty-four cities in Asia Minor, and sixty-six locations throughout the empire. Paul went missionizing in Asia Minor, and Matthew was thought to have been written in Antioch in Syria. Christians in either place must have known about the imperial cult. Josephus reports that Herod erected temples for Augustus at Caesarea Maritima, Sebaste (Samaria), and Caesarea Philippi. Augustus was called “son of god” so it seems unreasonable to think he was not known by this title in these cities dedicated to him.
In 27 BC, Augustus received Syria, where Antioch was the center of Roman power and authority, into the empire. It was a large Romanized city, and the base of several legions guarding the east. Augustus was not the only emperor who received a cult. The cult of Tiberius, Livia, and the Senate was established at Smyrna during Tiberius’s lifetime, and priests of Tiberius were eventually found in eleven cities in Asia Minor. Gaius ordered the province of Asia to establish a temple for him at Miletus, and he wanted his statue to be placed in the temple in Jerusalem—the “abomination of desolation”.
Matthew was composed after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, in the reign of the Flavian emperors, when the cults of the earlier emperors will have been abandoned or lacked any significance. After being sent to Judea during the Jewish war of independence, Vespasian subjugated Galilee and most of Judea before being acclaimed emperor in 69 AD. His son Titus captured Jerusalem in 70 AD and returned to Antioch with his victorious legions the next year. Christians in Antioch cannot have missed all this or the commemorative statues and inscriptions erected. A colossal statue of one of the Flavians (Domitian?) stood in an imperial temple at Ephesus, another Christian center.
The inscriptions which made these claims were in prominent public places, on statues, dedications, steles, public baths, theatres, arches, bridges, boundary stones, and even milestones. They were also on coins. Coins provided another public proclamation of these imperial claims. Coins struck in Judea during Domitian’s reign, including by the last Herodian ruler, Agrippa II, proclaim Vespasian, Titus and Domitian as divus. Coins remain in circulation for years, preserving the claims of the emperors.
Most members of Matthew’s community would have known about this imperial formula through inscriptions located in prominent places and through legends on their coins, including coins struck in their own province. “Theou uios” must have put Jesus alongside emperors who already had this title. This use of the language of the Roman imperial cult seems to have been deliberate.
