Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, November 27, 1998
Wednesday, 10 August 2005

A Tradition of a Field of Blood

So, after the crucifixion the disciples still expected a miracle and Israel to be liberated “soon”, as Luke-Acts proves, and Peter continued to preach that God had promised to king David to put a son on the throne of Israel. In Acts 1:15, Peter made a speech apparently having just returned from the Mount of Olives, but the inclusion of the phrase “and in those days” implies time had passed to allow the disciples to emerge from hiding. The speech really was later when the hue and cry had died down.

The address, “men and brethren”, implies that the speech was made to a crowd that included people who had not yet been recruited to the Nazarene cause, unless there were Essenes present and he is distinguishing the true brotherhood of initiates from the Nazarenes who had merely been baptised and instructed. The speech begins by explaining the fate of Judas.

Now this man (Judas) purchased a field with the reward of iniquity, and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem, insomuch as that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood.

A Catholic commentator, Ronald Knox, has described Peter’s explanation (New Testament Commentary: Acts, Epistles, 1954) as “of baffling obscurity” which means that a proper interpretation is incompatible with the traditional Christian myth. Knox suspects errors or omissions in the text which might have been considerable. He adds:

We cannot even be certain that the author is describing the death of Judas.

An observation precisely to the point!

Whoever died in the field had made loud noises, fallen prone, been gutted and received a just reward for acquiring land to which they had a guilty entitlement only. The passage could easily have been plural, originally—“their bowels” rather than “his bowels.” It was not just one man but men—Roman soldiers—and the land was not just a field but the land of Israel. The field was the place in the Qidron valley where the Roman Jerusalem garrison had been massacred by the advancing Nazarenes and the thousands of pilgrims marching with them.

Stories circulated about this victory and the Field of Blood where it had occurred. The Christians had to invent an explanation of the tales and why a field of blood was associated with the followers of Jesus. The death of Judas is offered as an explanation as it is in Matthew 27:3-10, although the story is quite different. Matthew describes how Judas tries to return the reward of thirty pieces of silver in exchange for Jesus’s release, fails and hangs himself. The priests, not wishing to taint the Temple treasury with the returned blood money instead buy the Potter’s Field in which to bury foreigners. This field was therefore called the Field of Blood.

These explanations are incompatible attempts to explain a mysterious legend among the early Christians of a Field of Blood—or perhaps of sleep, a euphemism for death—in which foreigners lie dead. Bishops attempting to explain this came up with various answers, two of which we have preserved. Luke’s (there is no scholar who believes it is Peter who gave this explanation) is quite false, being an adaptation of the death of Nadhan, the wicked nephew of Ahikar, from the Book of Ahikar which circulated amongst the semitic races since the fifth century BC, and was popular among the eastern Christians.

Either explanation is in any case inadequate since such a rumour must be based upon a far more substantial event than that of a man tripping up and spilling his innards, or guiltily hanging himself. The gore must have been considerable to leave such an impression.

Matthew admits more of the truth in calling the field the “Potter’s Field” and that foreigners were buried in it. Furthermore the field was considered from at least the fourth century AD to have at the junction of the valleys of Hinnom and the brook Qidron.

In Acts 1:20 Luke has Peter quoting Psalms in explanation of the death in the Field of Blood. The psalms quoted are 69:25:

Let their habitation be desolate and let none dwell in their tents,

and 109:8:

Let his days be few and let another take his office.

The scriptural quotations in Acts are given in typically Essene fashion—freely altered to suit the author’s purpose. The first is inappropriately plural in reference to a single man, Judas, and the second has nothing to do with the way he died but sets the scene for appointing an apostle in his stead. Another hint of Essene influence is the word for “office” in Acts 1:20 which correctly means “overseer.” It is the word which came to mean “bishop” in the church but which came from the Essene rank of “mebaqqer” (J Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1964 112). The true source in the Psalms which explains the reference to Potter and the dashing of innards is Psalms 29:

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron. Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

The psalm refers to the enemies of Israel, expressing the actions expected of a warrior messiah, and, in this context in Acts, relating the wish to some real event that happened at the “Field of Blood”, just outside Jerusalem! The “Field of Blood” or “Sleep” reserved for foreigners is obviously the site of the Nazarene victory over the Jerusalem garrison in the Qidron valley. The reference to the “potter” makes it certain. It would have been quite natural after the victory for the Nazarenes to have called the field of victory the “Potter’s Field”, referring to this psalm. The Gadarene swine falling over a cliff in the gospels might imply that Romans soldiers were thrown from high places, an effective way of “dashing” them and accounting for the gory account of the death of Judas.

Appointment of New Apostles

Peter’s speech in Acts turns to the appointment of a successor to Judas, showing that the twelve apostles were actually offices as the normal translation suggests. They had the post of mebaqqer.

Wherefore of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, Beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection.

Luke tries to make out that Jesus begin his ministry at his baptism by John the Baptist, whereas, in the synoptic gospels, he only began to recruit when he got to Galilee some time later. Since Luke speaks of Jesus being taken up and the “baptism of John” in the same sentence, it seems that he means the baptism of Jesus by John. Only disciples of John the Baptist would have been present at Jesus’s baptism, implying that the longest serving followers of Jesus were previously followers of John, and indeed that is proved in the fourth gospel. The corect interpretation makes it certain because the “baptism of John” is the baptism administered by John. Disciples of John helped him with the “Baptism of John”, the name used of pre-Christian baptism elsewhere in the New Testament when referring to those baptised by John. It proves that Jesus was a disciple of John and there was a single movement of Nazarenes. The followers of both Jesus and John were called Nazarenes.

Jesus was John’s successor as the Nasi and local followers of John would naturally have transferred allegiance to Jesus. There were Jews who preferred to follow John in his own right. There are several possible reasons for this. One is that diaspora Jews on a pilgrimage to Palestine might have been baptized by John, departed and not heard of subsequent events. Also, local converts who transferred allegiance to Jesus at first, later abandoned him, when Jesus seemed to falter and had to flee to Phoenicia.

Last were those who did not accept the resurrection, seeing Jesus simply as a false prophet and abandoning his band. These latter cases might well have turned back to John, who evidently outlived Jesus and became himself to look legendary, so that he was thought of as a messiah.

The Nazarenes had two candidates for the overseer’s job left by Judas, Joseph Barsabas, surnamed Justus, and Matthias. Though the Nazarenes are seeking a successor to Judas to fill the vacancy in the ranks of the twelve apostles, the “brother” of Jesus, James, is not put forward as a candidate. This offers difficulties for Christian commentators because James is soon revealed as the leader of the Jerusalem church! Either James automatically succeeded his brother and Luke is avoiding the issue for the sake of his romance, or James is the head of a different organization, or different branch of the umbrella organization which encompasses both the bemused group of Jesus’s converts and a long established church of evangelic Essenes.

When Luke wrote, all the main protagonists were dead but, for the gentile Christians, Paul and Peter were the principle figures not the staunchly Jewish James. The puzzle only occurs therefore if James is assumed to have been a follower of Jesus when really they were equals or James was the superior as leader of the Essenes. Either James was the newly appointed Nasi, the successor of Jesus, or the successor of John the Baptist as the priestly leader of the Essenes.

In Peter’s speech (Acts 1:15) “brethren” has a wider meaning than brothers in a kinship sense, leaving a doubt whenever it is used. The scrolls use the word “brethren” in the same sense of a brotherhood rather than siblings. If Jesus and James were really brothers by kin and not simply in a social sense then some of the confusion can be explained which occurred if James appeared calling himself Nasi. He looked like Jesus! It is not necessary to believe this, however, because he probably looked like Jesus anyway simply because both were Nazarites accustomed to wearing their hair long, habitually dressed in pure white linen and used similar Essenic mannerisms and manners of speech.

Of course, James might have been the choice of successor to Jesus but Luke is simply attributing to Peter acts that belonged to James, but denied him here because, for Luke, James was not one of the apostles whose acts he wished to record.

One of the two candidates as apostle to replace Judas was Joseph Justus, called Barsabbas. This is a revealing combination of names. “Justus” suggests Joseph was an Essene because it means “righteous” and although there were righteous people who were not Essenes, it is the latter who used the expression of themselves explicitly. A man in our society might be called Singh and not be a Sikh but it is a justified assumption that he is. When “just” or “righteous” is used in the New Testament as a description of someone, it is likely that he is an Essene.

Joseph’s other name, Barsabbas, could mean “son of the sabbath” or “son of the aged”, but we find confusion about the name in the ancient manuscript called the Western text which has at this point Barnabas, and at 15:22, where the Alexandrian text has another Barsabbas, Judas Barsabbas, one of the chief men of Jerusalem, the Western text has Barabbas! The names were obviously not accurately recorded and, indeed, the suspicion is that they are deliberate misrepresentations of “Barabbas.”

Barabbas was a rebel but the church was trying to avoid any association with Jewish rebellion at a time when it was a sensitive issue. Barabbas was therefore replaced by less emotive names, Barnabas and Barsabbas. Possibly these men were called Barabbas as the top rank of the Essenes, Hasidim who called God “father” and therefore were given the appellation, Barabbas.

Nothing more is known of Joseph the Just. Tradition has it that he was one of the seventy evangelists appointed in Luke, but few will give the seventy any historicity, so the tradition about Joseph is invented. A Jesus Justus appears in Colossians 4:11 and some have suggested that he is the same man as Joseph, the man who, Papias said, drank snake venom unharmed, but it seems most likely that they were simply different Essenes.

Schism in the Jerusalem Church

Nazarenes practised circumcision and accepted food prohibitions. They were accepted by other Jews as a Jewish sect and taught in the synagogues just as Jesus had. They were not persecuted by orthodox Jews, except the Sadducees, quite the opposite, the Nazarenes were considered as defenders of Jewish religious and patriotic ideas. None of this would have been possible if they thought that Barabbas was a god.

Unlike the Essenes of the Qumran monastery they attended the Temple as village Essenes did, probably to teach rather than worship. Their attitude to the Sadducees had not changed but Barabbas had symbolically purified the Temple anyway and would soon return to finish the job. Astonishingly James is reported to have been permitted to enter the Sanctuary. This can hardly have been true. The confusion possibly arises because James was a High Priest in waiting, trained at the Essene alternative Temple at Qumran and ready to serve when Barabbas established God’s kingdom on earth. Eusebius, the Father of Church History, confirms that the Jerusalem Church continued to sacrifice in the Temple and to keep the Law even after the gentile churches had split away.

Like the monastic Essenes and unlike the village Essenes, the Nazarenes held goods in common as Acts makes clear. They were expecting the present world to end—and soon! So there was little point in keeping individual wealth. Converts had to turn over their belongings to the community when they joined. Josephus tells us Essenes who held anything back were severely punished. According to the New Testament, Nazarenes were also severely punished—God murdered them! Acts tells us God murders two such people, a man and his wife, Ananias and Sapphira, after Peter had demanded to know why they were holding goods back. It sounds harsh for a god of love. If Ananias and his wife were killed by God, for the trivial sin of withholding some of their possessions, one wonders why God is so lenient when much worse crimes are committed. No good god could have such warped standards. The New Testament avenger was Peter—not God.

After these deaths “a great fear came upon the whole Church”. But why? Had they all been holding something back and thought God might finish them too? No, the incident can better be understood if it happened in the period when the Nazarenes were still underground and Peter’s wrath was because the two had received money from elsewhere. They were informers! The members of the Church would then be naturally fearful for their lives, not knowing whether they had been betrayed or whether others were also ready to inform. Naturally the true story could not be told in the gospels without revealing that the band were outlaws so it was appropriately disguised.

Peter and John, the son of Zebedee, are twice arrested. Twice they are released. On the first occasion for fear of the people and on the second occasion because Gamaliel, the leading Pharisee and rabbi of the cautious and liberal school of Hillel, argued that the Sanhedrin should exercise restraint in case these men truly had the support of God—if they had not it would be evident soon enough. In his speech to the Sanhedrin Gamaliel compares the actions of Jesus’s supporters with the uprisings led by Judas of Galilee and Theudas, the leader of another gang of 400 rebels. In this context the New Testament itself clearly identifies the disciples of Jesus with revolutionary gangs.

Two hundred years before, the Greek king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, believing himself to be Zeus, had his statue erected in the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews were appalled and outraged, calling the incident the Abomination of Desolation. It began the long period of Jewish resistance to foreign oppression. Another Abomination of Desolation occurred when Caligula insisted on erecting his statue in the Temple in about 40 AD. Tacitus says disturbances erupted in Judaea and food producers went on strike. Josephus, who would have been expected to give a full account of these events as important factors in the build up to the Jewish War, surprisingly mentions only protests when riots would have been expected. Was this the work of Christian censors? Had rioting actually occurred?

To the Nazarenes, for whom Barabbas had started the purification of the Temple and who expected him to return on a cloud, this second abomination would have been seen as a signal that the return was imminent. Were the Nazarenes the fomenters of the new tumults? Perhaps the tumults were of ecstasy or were strikes of workers seeing no point in labouring when the world was about to end. Though not violently revolutionary such actions would be disturbing enough to the authorities. But no mention is made of any of this in Acts, though the mini-apocalypse in Mark 13 possibly records it indirectly as Jesus’s prophecy of hardship and tribulations to come.

By the time of the trial of Stephen, the Nazarenes had already split into two factions. Mainstream Nazarenes were Jews admitted to the Temple and subject to the Laws of Moses contrary to the impression given in the New Testament. Stephen was one of the Hellenised members of the community of Nazarenes, Jews who spoke Greek rather than Aramaic and used the version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. Many were Jews of the dispersion, like Paul, and had a more liberal outlook than the Jews of Palestine, having integrated much more into the Greek culture that from the time of Alexander had dominated the region.

Closer contacts with gentiles made some of them more willing to consider changes to the Mosaic taboos. Gentiles had long been accepted into association with Judaism as “godfearers” who accepted the Jewish God, and indeed many Jews were not averse to having them as associates since they added to the Temple contributions. But actually to become a Jew, to convert, they had to undergo circumcision and accept the food taboos. Gentile women were willing to be converted but the idea of circumcision scared off many men. Stephen’s blasphemy was to decry the Laws of Moses as outdated, outraging orthodox Jews. Stephen claimed Jesus had abolished the tedious Mosaic Laws so godfearers could become converts. Jews who remained orthodox objected to the message he was preaching and Stephen was called to account before the Sanhedrin.

Stephen put his liberal views at his trial. In his oration he refers to Jesus as The Righteous or Just One who they betrayed and murdered. In the Dead Sea Scrolls the expressions The Righteous One (Zaddik) and The Teacher of Righteousness occur frequently. Josephus speaks of a man called Sadduc who instigates revolt with Judas of Galilee at the time of the census of Quirinius in 6 AD. Sadduc (Zadok or Zaddik) might also be rendered The Righteous One.

The speech incenses the Sanhedrin and they order his stoning, and apparently the suppression of the church—Acts reporting: “they were scattered… except the Apostles”. The new religion is hounded by the stubborn and malicious Jews—but not its leaders? Not the Apostles? Surely the leaders would be the first to be persecuted. The explanation is that the Apostles and their followers were not advocating a split with the Laws of Moses—they had done nothing wrong and could not be punished for anything. Only the Hellenist faction was persecuted. One of its oppressors was a young man called Saul. Saul later has a vision of the Christ, is converted to Christianity and adopts the name Paul.

In an interlude between Roman governors, the puppet king, Agrippa, murders James, the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’s chosen Apostles and far more important than Stephen, yet nothing is said in Acts except that it “pleased the Jews”. Peter is again imprisoned but again escapes by a miracle, though it seems more likely that Agrippa had to release him because the people were so outraged by the murder of James that he was obliged to release Peter. It is at this point that Peter disappears and the narrative passes on to Paul. The Acts of the Apostles completely ignores the remainder of Peter’s career, the fate of the Jerusalem Church and the rest of the original Apostles! They pass into total oblivion. Why do we know so little about them?

It is natural, of course, to write history from your own viewpoint and the truth is that the stories the other Apostles had to tell have not survived. Some died, some did not have their personal experiences transcribed, perhaps some who did failed to have them accepted into the canon. And, if our reconstruction is true, it is likely that most of Barabbas’s chief lieutenants died with him. Many evidently died in action. We know of the two crucified at the same time but we don’t know who they were except that they were in the same condemnation. The Romans would have rounded up and crucified as many of the conspirators as they could. The surviving Nazarenes, we have noted, had a lot of widows to provide for. The truth is probably that neither Peter nor the other Apostles who founded the Jerusalem Church were Jesus’s chief confidants. They might have owed their survival to the fact that they were not at the top of the hierarchy. We only have their accounts of what happened and, since they were not of the inner circle, they were not in the best position to know.

This would, of course, explain why, in the gospels, they were so often in the dark about what was going on; why they often appeared so stupid—they were not privy to plans at the highest level. Thus they seemed not to know about the foal on the entry to Jerusalem. Jesus had had it already arranged—but by whom? It seems odd that these people did not know if they were really his chief confidants. They also did not know about the secret room in Jerusalem where the last supper was held or the man with the pitcher who led them there. The senior but not top ranking lieutenants of Barabbas who survived told the tale as if they were more senior than they were—human nature! In any event the momentum of the plot moves out of the hands of any of the original survivors because the story in Acts is now switching from Peter to the self-appointed Apostle, Paul.

Paul’s enemy, James, was the “brother” of Jesus. This might have been literally true but, even if brother was a form of address among the Nazarenes, it is plain that James knew Jesus intimately and would have known in detail the nature of his message. James was leader of the Jerusalem Church. Christians maintain that James, a non-Apostle, suddenly appeared as head of the Church because he was miraculously converted by the resurrected Jesus. One would have thought that he would therefore, like Paul, have been in great demand as a preacher of the power of the new faith. But, apart from the one epistle which many Christians hate, sounding as it does very much like Jesus and very little like Paul, his testimony did not suit the Pauline church so he was virtually erased from history.

James was called Zaddik, the Just One, in Greek “Oblias” or in Latin “Justus.” Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) called James Zaddik. It was a title applied to those who were immovably attached to the law of Moses because such people were “Righteous”, an alternative translation. It seems it was a title especially used by Essenes because their very “raison d’etre” was to be perfect—to obey the law and be righteous. It could not have been used of a man who accepted the abrogation of the law by his hero, Jesus. In Josephus, the Zealots were so named because they were “zealous for the law”, and so the title “Just” or “Righteous” could have applied to them. Some have suggested that the Greek word “oblias” really means “one who defends the people”, an interpretation that perfectly fits the Nazarenes, one meaning of which is “protectors”, and Jesus which means “saviour.”

According to Hegesippus, James drank no wine, ate no animal food, did not have his hair cut, took no baths and did not use oil. He wore priestly robes and was the only one allowed into the Holy of Holies. He must have been the High Priest. Epiphanius confirms that James wore the mitre of the High Priest. It seems odd that early church historians should not find it peculiar that a leader of the church was also a High Priest of the Jewish Temple. He must have been an opposition High Priest. That he “took no baths” is plainly an error: a scribe will have lost “never” in an expression like “never failed to bathe”. He is obviously an Essene. He is explicitly described as never wearing woollen but only linen clothes, a characteristic of the Essenes.

Hegesippus, in “Memorials”, also gives an account of James’s death. Its source might have been an Ebionite work called the Ascents of James, an account of James’s discourses of which traces are found in the Clementine Recognitions. It is anti-Pauline, so plausibly from the Jerusalem Church. James the Just was told by the “rulers”, probably meaning the priesthood rather than the Sanhedrin, to denounce Jesus before the people from the Temple steps. James stands up and declares Jesus to be on the right hand of power in heaven and ready to reappear on the clouds. The priests stoned him, but as he died James prayed:

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Annas, the priest who was responsible, the son of the Annas who had been High priest before Caiaphas and was his father-in-law, was deposed for the murder, so following in the footsteps of his father who had also been deposed—by Gratus, who subsequently appointed High Priests for only a year at a time.

In the Recognitions of Clementine an attack on James in the Temple by an “enemy” and a mob is recorded. James is beaten with a club and thrown down a flight of stairs in the riot. James is rescued by friends and flees to Jericho to recover. Eisenman, quoted by Baigent and Leigh, claims that this event is the same as the attack on Stephen in Acts. Luke or later editors changed the name because the account could not record that Paul had assaulted the leader of the church. Jericho is quite close to Qumran, the headquarters of the Essenes. Later in the story in the Recognitions it transpires that the “enemy” has a commission from the High Priest to travel to Damascus with letters to arrest the followers of Jesus!

There is no need to disbelief the core of this story. James probably declared that salvation would come on the clouds, meaning the archangel Michael, but that sounded like “Jesus”, or the Jerusalem Church might have come to believe that Jesus was the archangel Michael, now that he was in heaven—the archangel being the fravashi or heavenly double of Jesus. His arrival would complete the cosmic war raging between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. When he arrived, wicked Jews (collaborators or publicans) and the gentiles would be forced out and the kingdom of God would begin.

With war getting nearer, the tension was palpable and that is why the priests would have wanted James to calm the situation by denouncing the popular belief that Salvation (Jesus) was soon to come. A generation after Jesus had been crucified, James will have read the signs that the final act of the cosmic battle was about to begin. He continued to proclaim it and was stopped by the fuller’s club.

This brutal act can only have served to exacerbate the tension, but even so, it seems it was several years before the uprising occurred. Using a technique of many early historians, the church historian, Eusebius, quoting Hegesippus, links by association the siege of Jerusalem with the death of James. James died immediately before Vespasian’s invasion to put down the Zealot uprising of 66 AD, but if Jesus died in 21 AD, the year must have been 61 AD. Josephus says it occurred in the interval between the death of Festus and the arrival of his successor, Albinus, around 62 AD, but in a passage in Josephus now lost there is also a reference to the war being a direct consequence of the death of James the Just, “who was the brother of Jesus known as Christ, for though he was the most righteous man the Jews put him to death”. James seems to have been a more important person in first century Jerusalem than Christianity acknowledges.

Eusebius, says that the Nazarenes, like the Pharisee followers of Hillel, refused to join the rebels in the uprisings of 66 AD and 132 AD. But Pharisees like Josephus did fight in the Jewish War, and it seems unlikely that Nazarenes would have remained aloof. Nazarenes would have seen the War as a further act in the return of their Messiah to conquer the sons of Shem. Titus apparently destroyed the temple because it was an inspiration to Jews and Christians! These must have been the Christians of the Jerusalem Church. Closure of the temple left the priesthood redundant, and the sect of the Sadducees lost their reason for existing. As Hellenized Jews they would have found a natural place in the gentile religion just being formed by people like Paul of Tarsus and must have influenced the anti-pharisaism of the early church.

In Ecclesiastical History Eusebius relates that the Zealots drove the Nazarenes across the Jordan to Pella, a gentile city, at the start of the revolt in 66 AD. Pella will not have been a refuge for the Jerusalem Church but for Hellenist Christians still remaining in Palestine at the outbreak of the war. Pella was in Decapolis, a gentile country, so would have been safe for Jews that had adopted Greek ways. Yet, if those escaping were Hellenized Christians opposed to the Jewish nationalist cause they, cannot have remained there long because Pella was sacked by the Jews early in the campaign. Those who survived will have seen the fall of Jerusalem as revenge and fulfilment of the apocalypse recorded in Mark 13.

If, on the other hand, the orthodox Nazarenes, who had been involved in the rebellion, had fled to Pella when the cause seemed lost, they would have fled into the path of the advancing armies of Vespasian. Vespasian will not have been sympathetic to any Jews whatever their designation, so it looked to be an unwise choice of escape route. Pella fell in 68 AD.

The Jewish Christians must have fought to defend Jerusalem. The Essenes fought, holding out at Masada until 73 AD when they committed mass suicide rather than surrender. They would have seen the Jewish War as the last battle of the cosmic conflict, to be followed by the victory of the archangel Michael, and once again expected the opening of the gates of the kingdom. Jewish Christians will have had the same belief except that the archangel would have been Jesus. Like Jesus in Gethsemane, they will have daily expected God’s miracle, but it never came, so they decided to wait for it in death rather than submit to the Sons of Darkness.

Jesus was crucified in 21 AD, so he should have made his appearance as the archangel by 61 AD. The War was festering but had not erupted when it should have done, but the death of James the Just must have been seen as the ultimate sign. Nevertheless the war did not start for another four years and Nazarenes must have been confused. Forty years is an adult lifetime and doubt must have arisen about when the crucifixion occurred. Later Luke wrote his gospel to say exactly when it was but he made it fit the prophecy, not history. The start of the War must have fulfilled Nazarene expectation, but they must have been faced with despair when the archangel never appeared and the war was lost. The surrender of Masada ended the last vestige of hope. From then on God’s kingdom increasingly became a virtual kingdom in heaven.

Nazarenes who escaped will have escaped into the hills and the desert wilderness, and thence in to Arabia. They became the Ebionites or the Poor Men, and survived until the fifth century, revering Jesus as a man not as a God and rejecting the heresy of Paul. Their leader was chosen from among the heirs of Jesus, as the Jerusalem Church had done. The Ebionites accepted Jesus as their Messiah and expected him to return. They would not therefore have been willing to accept anyone else as the Messiah. In 132 AD, Bar Kosiba claimed a Messiahship which Nazarenes would have considered as false. The Ebionites refused to support him and were persecuted for their stand. Bar Kosiba’a failure led to the Jews being banned from Jerusalem, but so were the Nazarenes though they had not admitted Bar Kosiba as the messiah. Plainly, they were still seen as Jews and rebels! The gentile church however set up a bishopric there.

Jewish Nazarenes escaping the victorious Romans would sensibly have fled south to Egypt alongside other Jewish militants and found refuge in the sprawling suburbs of Alexandria, a largely Jewish city. Acts does not mention who founded eminent churches at Alexandria and Rome, though there are Christians at Rome when Paul arrives there and the Church of Alexandria was a major rival of Paul’s churches. Nazarenes in Alexandria had established a church, with different views from Paul’s. But as time passed with no heavenly hosts appearing, Jewish Christians came to accept Barabbas as a failed Messiah and reverted to Phariseeism or Rabbinic Judaism as it now was, while gentile believers accepted the Pauline heresy. Matthew illustrates this transition. It preserves much of the Palestine tradition, being the most overtly Semitic of the gospels but, like the others has as its hero a divine Son of God rather than a mortal Son of David.

Paul’s teachings were heretical in that they opposed the leader of the Church at Jerusalem, James the Just. Paul only knew Jesus through his visions but arrogantly he claimed to know him better than Apostles that knew him in the flesh. He formulated his own eclectic theology and reflected it from the figure of Jesus crucified that he preached. The drift of the New Testament is strongly in favour of Jesus being the pre-existent Son of God, divine in his own right. This was Paul’s intention though even Paul hesitated in claiming outright divinity for Jesus. To achieve his ambition Paul wanted the requirements of the Mosaic Law to be eased for his gentile converts. James refused. Non-Jews could already enter into the Jewish religion as “godfearers” but to become Jews they had to obey the Law. Paul had a vision of a universal religion but the Mosaic Law was an obstacle which had to be removed. He failed and was obliged to undergo an orthodox purification ritual proving to his own followers that he was subservient to the Jerusalem Church leaders.

Paul was probably not a Pharisee. Indeed he was only a first generation Jew, the son of godfearer parents who had become Jewish proselytes. But he realised the advantages of being thought a Pharisee and he adjusted his biography accordingly. He didn’t miss a trick, pursuing whatever he thought might be useful to him, and always having something up his sleeve. He was all things to all men. He was a combination of mountebank and genuine evangelist. The era was noted for them—men like Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana. He taught that the Torah had been superseded by the death on the cross of Jesus, the Son of God, in atonement of men’s sins. Faith in this was the only way to be saved. Paul reached these ideas from a synthesis of Essenism (with its dependence on the Jewish Scriptures) and mystery religions, convinced himself that they were true and propagated them with gusto.

Asia Minor, Paul’s birthplace, was the source of several of the mystery religions that had entered the Empire and Paul could hardly have avoided their influence. Having heard from the Nazarenes about the death and resurrection of Barabbas and been impressed by their conviction, Paul equated Barabbas with the dying and resurrected Gods of the East. The theme of these religions were immensely popular and Paul realised that the idea of Barabbas had the added advantage of having occurred in real life in apparent fulfilment of the age old prophesies of the Jewish Scriptures. Paul could usurp the history of the Jews to use its long tradition as prophetic of his concept of Christianity with its dying and resurrected god of the mystery religions and its Heaven descended redeemer of the Gnostics.

The apparently simple message of Barabbas began being distorted by his image as the Paschal lamb, tortured to appease God. Pagan converts brought in their expectations of sacramental suffering, death and resurrection introducing aspects of the mysteries of Adonis, Hyacinth, Attis, Osiris, Orpheus, Mithras, etc., the gods who died for the sins of mankind. Since the women in the Christian story were unimportant or were introduced later, they began to attribute to the mother of Christ the characteristics of many of the great pagan goddesses, Isis, Cybele, Demeter, Diana. For their sacraments they took the Essene baptism by water and the Persian—Mithraic and Essene—communion by bread and cup. No Nazarene would have believed Paul’s synthesis. Barabbas’s message, acceptable to a Jew but seditious to a gentile, was twisted into Paul’s message, blasphemous to a Jew but acceptable to a gentile. Through Paul, the strict apocalyptic Jew, Barabbas, was rejected by his own people and became Jesus Christ, a heathen god.

Schisms and Heresies

Paul and the other writers of the epistles constantly refer to the schisms and heresies which already existed in Christianity. Even then the facts of Christianity were disputed.

I hear that divisions exist… among you… there must be also heresies among you.

I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him (Paul) that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel, which is not another. But there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.

Who these “false brethren unawares brought in” is not certain but they taught a less high flown doctrine.

Oh, foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you? …Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye perfected in the flesh?

But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with me.

Is this other Jesus the Jesus described by the sect founded by his own immediate followers? Is it the Jerusalem Church led by James? Were the heresies of which Paul speaks absorbed into later orthodoxy?

After my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you… speaking perverse things?

Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies… some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling.

Some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils.

…false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies…

Christianity was already divided up into various sects teaching different doctrines from each other, when these selections were written. Who were these heretics? In this category are we to include the author of 1 Timothy, who might be the person referred to by the writer of 2 Peter as a “false prophet?” Or are we to include the author of 2 Peter, who might, as the teacher of some newly arising primitive gospel story, be the person denounced by the author of 1 Timothy as a “seducing spirit”, who taught “fables and endless genealogies?”

Paul was always engaged in controversy with some other teachers or preachers of Christianity and the Jews. According to tradition and to orthodox theory, it was Peter with whom the “Apostle to the Heretics”, as Paul was often called, quarrelled. The causes of their quarrel were matter of the eating of meat, the preaching of the gospel to gentiles or to Jews alone, and the need for circumcision. Tese disputes in the earliest Roman Church are undeniable, but the epistles testify to most heated recriminations over them? Or were there more fundamental divergencies of opinion? Examining the epistles in the light of the later gospels and other doctrines of the time, suggests Paul was disputing with the teachers of a form of Christianity different from that taught by Paul.

Since the gospels were unknown in Paul’s day, that form of Christianity will not be the oldest. Primitive Christianity was either Pauline or some form of Christianity that might be glimpsed by subtracting Paul’s conceptions from the gospels. Doing so leaves a fairly straightforward history of a man hung as a Jewish rebel by the Romans.

In one of the apocryphal works the schisms are explained by a story of the devil having, immediately after his unsuccessful temptation of Jesus, sent out “false prophets, false apostles, and false teachers, who should speak in the name of Christ indeed, but should perform the work of the demon.” Paul himself claims to teach a new religion, a religion which was being contradicted by others. Was he one of these false apostles, and a false teacher so far as the original Nazarenes were concerned?

Paul was evidently not a Pharisee and his parents were godfearers, but he saw the advantages of being thought a pious Jew and he adjusted his biography accordingly. He taught that the Torah had been superseded by the death on the cross of a divine being, Jesus, in atonement of men’s sins. Faith in this was the only way to be saved. These were the ideas of the mystery religions and Gnosticism. Paul reached this synthesis of ideas from paganism, the Essenes and from the Jewish scriptures. Paul could usurp the history of the Jews to use its long tradition as prophetic of his concept of Christianity with its dying and resurrected god of the mystery religions and its heaven descended redeemer of the Gnostics. Paul’s stories were incredible—except to people influenced by paganism. And the Nazarenes had a lot of such people among them—the publicans and sinners—Jewish backsliders and apostates receptive to Hellenistic culture. They had flocked to John the Baptist and Jesus contrite and repentant as sinning Jews when they were expecting God’s kingdom at any moment. When the kingdom failed to appear they were easily persuaded that their dead leader was the latest of the dying and resurrected gods of the mystery religions. Such thoughts, represented by Stephen and Philip, were anathema to orthodox Jews but were eagerly grasped by Paul.

Barabbas had no thoughts about founding a church. Paul, who never knew Barabbas in person, actually founded Christianity. He considered his visions of the resurrected Christ to be superior to direct experience of the living Jesus.

According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon.

Upon his foundation were to be built up by degrees Catholicism and all modern Christianity, in which the superstructure is far more conspicuous than the foundations. The originators of the Catholic form of Christianity disliked Paul and his epistles, whether genuine or pseudepigraphic, as shown by the way in which Tertullian refers to him as the “apostle of the heretics.” Justin Martyr, Hegesippus, and others whose works have come down to us as orthodox, ignored the teaching of Paul, and founded their Christianity upon apocryphal or lost gospels which were the precursors of our canonical gospels. Their neglect of the Pauline epistles was evidently not upon grounds connected with the authority of the “Law and the Prophets”, the need for circumcision, and so on, but upon more definitely Christian doctrinal grounds.

These early Fathers of the Church, these men who first speak of the gospels, were the ones who disdained Paul as one admired by heretics, and did not use his books in their churches. The Pauline books were however in high repute with those Christians who were afterwards to be branded for ever as heretics by this then budding Catholic sect. Marcion, the leader, in the first half of the second century, of a large and important body of Christians, based his doctrines upon Pauline writings, and, even as early as the middle of the second century, is found to be accusing the orthodox Christians, as they became, of making interpolations in the epistles of S Paul so as to bring them more into accord with the newly-published gospels.

The leaders of Gnostic Christianity were among the first to call the Pauline epistles authoritative. Basilides, Valentinus, and other founders of Gnostic sects, or leaders of Christian communities subsequently labelled as Gnostic heretics, are followers of Paul, and readers of his epistles. Basilides was teaching the Gnostic form of Christianity at Alexandria in the middle of the first half of the second century, before there is any definite evidence of the gospels. Marcion, the son of a Christian bishop in Asia Minor, was teaching in Rome a form of Christianity which was subsequently labelled as a heresy, before the middle of the second century. Valentinus, who came from Alexandria, was in Rome teaching a Gnostic brand of Christianity in the middle of the second century. Not until comparatively late in the history of Christianity is Pauline Christianity welded with gospel Christianity into orthodox Catholicism.

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