In the last 80 million years mammals have often entered the water, found it comfortable and stayed.

Who Lies Sleeping?

From Judaism to Christianity 1

Jews and Magi
The Christ Myth
Jesus Ben Pandera
The Christian Jesus

Abstract

Christians believe the Jewish scriptures prophesy Jesus, whom they call Christ, the Greek word for messiah. The Christ Myth of the Christians was devised to create a christ, necessarily Jewish, potentially acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudely refashioned for that purpose. What was its origins? As shown by the presence of Magi at the nativity, the Persian religion influenced the notion of a Saviour (Saoshyant) delivering the world from evil, and the shepherds at the nativity of Jesus copied the shepherds at the earthly birth of the Persian God, Mithras. Jewish prophets indeed pictured a God-sent warrior king leading the Jews to leadership of the world, but the Christian messiah is depicted as meek and pacific. Messianic prophecies, read them in their full context, either do not pertain to a pacific teacher or are not messianic!

Persian Magi with Phrygian Caps: Mature, Young, Old!

Jews and Magi

With the fall of the Persian empire, the Magi had spallated. By the first century BC and the following century, Egypt, Palestine, and adjacent parts of the Near East swarmed with itinerant mountebanks (“goëtae”) who practiced thaumaturgy, performing tricks of magic to make the yokels gawk and part with their money. They evolved a variety of speculations from the original Zoroastrianism, fusing with Greek and Jewish ideas but retaining a redeeming figure—the original Saoshyant.

They would validate his existence with “prophecies” culled from the sacred writings of the Jews, and they would promise to open the temples of holiness to everyone, including the unholy—thereby providing the masses with a broader-based creed than any existing in western Asia. They were in the salvation-business and promised some sort of posthumous happiness to generous contributors in the name of whatever deities the given set of dupes venerated. The more talented ones often succeeded in setting themselves up in a first-class business with numerous adherents. Many were Jews.

Jews were scattered throughout the ancient world long before 70 AD. The Hellenized aliens from the East spoke Greek and were the “Graeculi” of Cicero’s sarcasms and Juvenal’s satires. In 179 BC, P Cornelius Scipio Hispalus, the Urban Praetor, tried to expel Jews from Rome, who had not become Roman citizens, because of their numbers and because they were a bad influence—they were Syrians and Levantines—Canaanites in short—who could have been expected to favour the Carthaginians in the Punic wars. After his year of office, the decree was revoked. In Cicero’s time, Jews in Rome were taking advantage of economic crises and were influential enough to campaign effectively against provincial governors who tried to take action against them. They favoured Julius Caesar, whose revolution destroyed the Republic, but who had given the Jews privileges, and bewailed his death as a calamity. Strabo, writing in c 35 BC, stated that by 87 BC, the habitable world—the œcumene—was “full of Jews” who had “penetrated every city” and become so ubiquitous that:

It is hard to find a place in the œcumene that has not admitted this tribe of men and has not been possessed by them.

He also noted that they had privileges and were allowed to function as an enclave largely independent of the local government. Josephus in Antiquities was proud of the universal success of his fellow Jews.

The Christ Myth

There is no historically valid evidence for the existence of “Christians” during the first century AD:

There were no Christians, either Gentile or Jewish, living during the first century.
Nicholas Carter, The Christ Myth

The arsonists executed by Nero were Jewish messianists who tried to burn Rome to validate one of the prophecies in the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles. There were many would-be christs. Christianity is an Hellenized form of Judaism. Plying their trade among Jewish peasants, the Jewish Magi often took the logical step of representing themselves as christs (messiahs), divinely ordained to become kings of the Jews and over the whole world that Yehouah had promised his Chosen.

They often took the name “ysw”, Joshua, popular among Jews because it was the name of the hero of the scriptural stories about the conquest of Canaan and the slaughter of the Canaanites. The name, transmitted through Greek and Latin appears in English as Jesus.

The Christ Myth of the Christians was devised to create a christ (necessarily Jewish) who could be made acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudely amended and refashioned for that purpose. What can have been its origins? As shown by the presence of Magi at the birth of the non-Jewish christ, there was an influence of the Zoroastrian cult, which by that time had assimilated both astrology and the notion that a Saviour (saoshyant) would come to deliver the world from evil, and the shepherds who witnessed the nativity of Jesus were copies of the shepherds who witnessed the earthly birth of the Zoroastrian Son of God, Mithras.

Plainly the Zoroastrian concept of the Saoshyant was at its core, but what generated the specifics? The central character of the folk-tales that comprise the Jesus myth described in The Hidden Jesus was an otherwise forgotten man who led a Jewish revolt against Roman rule around 21 AD and was hung for being acclaimed the king of the Jews.

But Legendary figures like King Arthur are rarely single people in history but are coathangers on to which the coats of lesser heroes are hung. Sometimes, as in the Hans Anderson story, there are no coats but tales of various degrees of gaudiness.

Legends attributed to Judas the Gaulanite, to whose sect of Galilaeans Jesus belonged, might have been given to Jesus. The idea of the virgin birth might have come from Jesus ben Pandera, a Jewish magician who won, and then lost, the favour of Queen Alexandra Helene (Salome), the widow of Alexander Jannaeus, c 70 BC. Jesus ben Ananias was flogged by the governor of Judaea but continued to prophesy disaster until a Roman missile killed him during the siege of Jerusalem in 68 AD. Another agitator, whose name may have been Jesus, led his disciples into Jerusalem during the celebration of the Passover and was well received by the populace, but soon suppressed.

Jesus Ben Pandera

One at least of the figures that contributed to the composite hero of the Jesus Myth was an Essene, who denounced the Pharisees—Jesus ben Pandera, a thaumaturge and agitator. The actual biblical Jesus might conceivably have been this man misplaced by a century, though it seems unlikely. He, at first imposed on Alexander Jannnaeus’s widow, Shelamzion (Salome, Alexandra Helene). Her husband, Alexander Jannaeus (Yannai), had so disliked Pharisees that he crucified 800 of them, but this Jesus then fell out of favor when she switched her allegiance and began to support the Pharisees. In 70 BC, Jesus ben Pandera was hanged.

The hanging of Jesus ben Pandera probably meant he was bound to a stake and left to die slowly by desiccation in the hot sunlight. Conceivably, this Jesus was thought of as a messiah by his supporters after his death and became a model for the myths of Jesus who was crucified about a hundred years later.

The Jewish record of Jesus ben Pandera is hostile to him as are all Jewish accounts of christs who failed. It is preserved in a book called Sepher Toledoth Yeshu (Book of the Lineage of Jesus), extant in several recensions, which differ in various details. All versions of the romance affirm that this Jesus really performed miracles, because he had learned the secret name of Yehouah, which enabled him to raise the dead, but he lost his power when he was in some way deprived of either his recollection of the name or of the parchment on which he had laboriously copied its four letters and which he had inserted in an incision in his thigh.

The record of Jesus ben Pandera has mightily embarrassed professionals in the Jesus-business ever since it was rediscovered in the sixteenth century. One expedient is to feign ignorance of it and hope the customers will not have heard of it. The more common expedient is to claim that the story of Jesus ben Pandera was devised by the wicked Jews during the Middle Ages to undermine faith in the Saviour of the New Testament.

No one who intended to contradict a story about a Jesus who flourished when Palestine was a Roman province would transpose the story to an earlier period when Judaea was ruled by an historical Jewish King and Queen. Moreover, the holy men who made that claim were, if at all educated in their profession, consciously lying. One cannot suppose that students of theology would not read so important a Father of the Church as Origen, from whom they would necessarily learn that the story about Jesus ben Pandera was known to Celsus when he wrote, c 170 AD. Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers, a graduate of Cambridge, told everyone the story of Jesus ben Pandera was unknown to Celsus!

That this Jesus might have been the basis of the Jesus myth is suggested by some curious words of Justin Martyr. Justin says:

For of all races of men there are some who look for him who was crucified in Judaea, and after whose crucifixion the land was straightway surrendered to you as spoil of war.
1 Apol 32

The implication is that the Jewish War followed immediately (straightway) after the crucifixion. Conventional chronology places it over thirty years after the crucifixion. More important is that Judaea was not Roman as a spoil of this war. It was already Roman, and the Jewish War was a rebellion against them. So, Justin must have meant the crucifixion was just before the conquest of Judah by Pompey in 63 BC when Judaea really was a spoil of Pompey’s conquests. It would thus tie in better with the crucifixion of 70 BC.

Neither Pharisees nor Essenes were keen on women, and could not have been enthusiastic about being ruled by one, but the Pharisees must have favoured Shelamzion because the rabbis’ praised the queen in a midrash on Deuteronomy 11: 13-14 (Sifre Deut 42), admittedly composed years after the incident but illustrating a lasting and therefore strong tradition.

The Hosea Peshar was the Essene answer to the Pharisee propaganda, countering the idea of the Pharisees that Shelamzion’s reign was idyllic. It denies the queen’s reign was prosperous as suggested by the Deuteronomy midrash, and implied that the queen was the wanton woman of Hosea. They refer also to the wars between the Queen’s sons after her death and to the famine that followed. The Essenes plainly hated her, as did the author of the source used by Josephus—Nicolaus of Damascus, who wrote a long history and might have been an Essene, if Damascus is taken to be code for Qumran, and his dislike of Shelamzion suggests it.

Yet the Essenes and the Pharisees had a common root. Both were concerned with the same problem of purities, a major concern of Zoroastrianism which believed in an evil creation, and differences over it led to their split in the Hasmonean period. Yose ben Yoezer, an early Pharisee, in four of his halakhot in the early Hasmonean period agrees with the interpretations of the Damascus Document, the Temple Scroll and other fragments of the scrolls sect.

The Christian Jesus

So, we come down to the “time of” the Christian Jesus, when it seems another Essene leader was crucified. N T Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God writes:

I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus’s contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus.

The evidence for Jesus is a set of tendentious books and a movement that they seemed to generate. Jesus has several apparent biographies written by contemporaries or near contemporaries. Do they prove there was a historical man behind them? Was Wright right? He is a Christian, and contrary to his statement of faith, Frank R Zindler in The American Atheist argues that this Jesus never existed. Mythical figures obviously did not exist but they still have components. There was indeed probably a component at this time, but Christians have deliberately tried to obscure his real nature.

Of course, it is not up to the skeptical investigator to show Jesus was not historical but the burden of proof of the historicity of Jesus and his godly powers is on the believers. If someone claimed they were able to live far beyond their means because they had a spirit guide who showed them how to find pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, the police, judge and jury would be rightly skeptical. Why should anyone be less skeptical of the Christian claims which are even more astonishing? Unless uncontrovertible evidence for impossible claims are produced, the sensible person will be skeptical and treat the claim as false. No one who is not a fool would do any less.

N T Wright is happy to accept the historicity of Jesus simply because it would be hard for him not to. That is not a sound reason. It is hard to believe that particles can behave like waves and vice versa in modern science but it can be demonstrated to be so by experiment. It might be hard to believe that Santa Claus does not exist, if the thought has never been successfully countered by reason since childhood. Yet no sane person argues that there really is a Santa Claus. It is a child’s entertainment and fantasy to amuse them when winter days are short and dark. Jesus is in precisely the same category, and not in the category of being provable by evidence like the wave behaviour of particles.

N T Wright might accept that coins survive from the first century with the image of Tiberius Cæsar on them but none exist with Jesus on them. “Jesus was not an emperor!” we can hear the Christians protesting. Quite so. Tiberius Caesar was an emperor and has all the evidence we can expect from an emperor to prove that he existed—statues, depictions, accounts of his speeches and deeds, biographies, contemporary letters, inscriptions and citations, even his house and gardens. Coins exist showing him as a youth and then gradually getting older until he was succeeded by other figures, Caligula and then Claudius, on subsequent coins. None of the evidence for an historical Jesus is as compelling as this evidence for Tiberius.

Accepting the evidence for Tiberius is better than that of Jesus, would N T Wright accept that the emperor was a god, or became one, like Jesus, after death? During their lifetimes, emperors before the time of Diocletian, no matter how absolute their power, never claimed to be gods, only principes and imperatores—First Citizen and General of the Armies. But the first emperor, Augustus, who preceded Jesus, was deified after his death, amusing educated Romans. Deifying emperors, clever enough to die naturally, became customary. Vespasian died jesting that he was simply becoming a god. So there is contemporary and varied evidence that these men were accepted as gods after they had died. There is no such varied evidence that Jesus did. Were the followers of Jesus copying the Roman emperors in making a god of their own dead leader?

Christians believe the Jewish scriptures prophesy Jesus, whom they call Christ, the Greek word for the Jewish Messiah. It is true that some Jewish prophets thought that a God-sent warrior king would lead the Jews to leadership of the world. The Christian messiah is the very opposite of the Jewish concept, and it is easy to distinguish the messianic prophecies in the Jewish scriptures as not pertaining to a pacific teacher by reading them in their full context. Some prophecies of the Christian type of messiah are simply not prophecies at all, but personifications of Israel as in the suffering servant of God, or simply statements of current myth or history, such as the birth of the child called Immanuel. Thomas Paine, the theoretician of the American Revolution, demonstrated the irrelevance of supposed Christian messianic prophecy in his book An Examination of the Prophecies.