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de Tocqueville

Lesser Puzzles of Jesus’s Ministry 1

Fishers of Men
Capernaum
Bethany, Bethabara and Bethphage

Abstract

Were the disciples of Jesus fishermen or were they appointed by him as fishers of men? The gospel explicitly says, “I will make you fishers of men”. It is code. The disciples were never fishermen but all were fishers of men whatever their jobs beforehand. Evidence that Jesus was homosexual, like the evidence for his being married, is circumstantial. Nazarenes were converts to Essenism mainly from apostasy, and might normally have become village Essenes. They accepted Essene teaching, but were not willing to put up with the hard celibate and monastic regime of the devout Essene leader. Pious Essene leaders like Jesus could not indulge in heterosexual activity, something impure given by God as a punishment. Homosexuality did not lead to procreation. Jesus’s circumstances as an Essene fit better with his being homosexual than with his being married. If he were one of the village Essenes that did marry, then plainly he could have done, but then he could not have been an Essene leader.

Tney were never fishermen, except metaphorically

Fishers of Men

Jesus has to start to assemble God’s army. He gathers disciples who apparently were fishermen, hardly surprising by the Sea of Galilee, you might think, but references to Galilee are not to be trusted. The phrase by the sea of Galilee in verse 1:16 reads very strangely in the Greek and is considered by many scholars to be an addition, whether by Mark or an editor is unknown. Nearly all of the little stories called pericopes which make up Mark have no indications of time or place other than what is required internally by the story and when they otherwise appear they have been added by the author to provide a spurious connection with a previous passage. Here the indication of by the sea of Galilee looks particularly odd and has evidently been added because the men being recruited were supposedly fishermen. Since this is probably a misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise by Mark, the recruitment might well have happened elsewhere. Again a reference to Galilee is probably false.

The code used by Mark should be read here, especially since the gospel explicitly says: I will make you fishers of men. The disciples were never fishermen but all were fishers of men whatever their jobs beforehand.

The imagery of people caught in a pit, a net or snare is common in the scriptures. The net is most often a fowler’s net—fish nets are less commonly used in this context—but the meaning is the same. In Ezekiel 32:3 and Jeremiah 16:15-16, God fishes for those he wishes to judge that He might bring them into His land:

Thus saith the Lord God; I will therefore spread out my net over thee with a company of many people; and they shall bring thee up in my net.

And I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers. Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them.

The people of Israel were already caught in the net of the oppressor. We find in Habakkuk 1:14-17 a little diatribe against colonialism using the simile of the people captured by foreigners as the fishes of the sea caught in a net:

And makest men as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no ruler over them? They take up all of them with the angle, they catch them in their net, and gather them in their drag: therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their drag; because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous. Shall they therefore empty their net, and not spare continually to slay the nations?

One of the scrolls is a commentary on Habakkuk. The oppressor, who in the original work was the Chaldaeans, becomes the Kittim, the imperial Romans, according to professor G R Driver, because they sacrifice to their standards and worship their weapons of war—the soldiers of republican Rome had not then had the idea of worshipping their standards. The sign that the Essenes took to inaugurate the end time might well have been the imperial standards that Pilate allowed the legions to bring into Jerusalem, especially if they were taken into the temple. Pious Jews of all denominations would have seen this as an Abomination of Desolation, the signal which started the Maccabaean uprising, and which in Daniel was a sign of the end.

In Ecclesiastes 9:12 the sufferings of the people in an evil time are compared to fish caught in an evil net—the evil net of Belial of the scrolls:

For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

The net in Essene code means profanation of the temple but the Essenes considered that the temple was profaned partly at least by the gentiles—the court of the gentiles and the polluted gifts which came from Jews of the Diaspora.

Looked at this way the disciples were called fishermen because Jesus had selected them as fishers of men. They were God’s fishermen saving the chosen people from the nets of the foreigner because the day of judgement was nigh. Luke dramatizes the fishing at this point (Lk 5:6) with an account of the miracle of the huge draught of fish representing all the children of Israel who would be saved from evil and foreign oppression—it was no miracle but part of Jesus’s apocalyptic speech, signifying the expected success of the mission of winning over the simple of Ephraim. Matthew’s parable about a dragnet, which exactly illustrates the point here, is left until much later (Mt 13:47-50):

The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind, which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

It occurs also in John but after the crucifixion in a gentile Christian context. In John 21:11 the number of fish caught is recorded precisely as 153, not because anyone bothered to count them but because that was the supposed number of nations in the world to a gentile (to a Jew it was seventy). John is saying allegorically that the Christians would convert the whole world not only the Jews.

Jesus’s fishers were always metaphorical ones.

There is a passage in Ezekiel’s vision of the temple where the prophet describes (Ezek 47:1-10) a wondrous stream of water flowing from the alter of the perfect temple eastward into the Dead Sea and as it flowed toward the Dead Sea it got deeper and deeper. The waters of this river were healing waters which eventually entered the Dead Sea and restored it to life—resurrected it!

And every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh. And the fishers shall stand upon it from Engedi even unto Eneglaim; they shall be a place to spread forth nets; their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea, exceeding many.

A river flowing east from Jerusalem would enter the Dead Sea at Qumran. The two places mentioned in the vision seem to denote the coast of the Dead Sea along which the Essenes had their wilderness settlements. Engedi, the spring of the kid, is in the south, a few miles north of the natural fortress of Masada where the Zealots held out against the Romans, and Eneglaim, the spring of the heifers—an unidentified place—seems to be near the mouth of the Jordan. Besides the coincidence that the stream flows out in Essene country, it is a stream of healing waters which would revive the Dead Sea, and the Essenes were great believers in the purifying power of water. Since they identified spiritual purification with physical healing in their metaphors, their baptismal waters have exactly the powers of Ezekiel’s magical river.

Engedi and Ain Feshka, close to Qumran, are both oases at the edge of the Dead Sea with bubbling fresh water supporting colonies of croaking frogs in season and even palm trees. It seems possible that the Essenes saw these springs as the first trickles of Ezekiel’s magical river.

The Essenes considered themselves the perfect priests, the Sons of Zadok, of Ezekiel’s perfect temple, and it seems that they identified themselves also with Ezekiel’s fishers of the magical waters. Sure enough in the scroll of the Thanksgiving Hymns we find, referring to the quotations above: Thou hast caused me to dwell with the many fishers who spread a net upon the face of the waters. The hymn writer goes on to tell us that he dwells with the fishers because God put him there for justice and to confirm the counsel of truth in his heart and the water of the covenant for those who seek it. The fishers are the Essenes!

The hired servants of Zebedee are mentioned to show that even wealthy people were willing to give up their material wealth to follow Jesus in his campaign for the kingdom of God. In our restoration we omit the mention of the ship as an unwarranted extension of the metaphor.

In calling people from their work to be disciples, Jesus was effectively calling on them to strike. Since the day of God’s vengeance was due, work had no further purpose to them, though we can be sure that their employers would have been displeased as wealthy employers always are when those who are not slaves exercise their right as freemen not to work. The first Christians were expecting the judgement day to be soon but, displaying his cynicism, Paul the apostle rebuked those (2 Thes 3:10-12) who believed they could give up work to wait for the coming of the Lord—if 2 Thessalonians is to be attributed to Paul.

Capernaum

Capernaum is considered to be the town where Jesus did his main work of preaching. Indeed, there are suggestions in the gospels that Capernaum was his home town. It is an important centre in the gospels; a customs post in Matthew 9:9, a garrison town in Matthew 8:5, and a place where noblemen live in John 4:46. Yet Josephus wrote that Capernaum was insignificant.

In a biblical atlas Capernaum is boldly marked near the Sea of Galilee, but the truth is that no one knows where Jesus’s Capernaum was. Franciscan monks have excavated a mound and found a third century synagogue which they claim is the one described in 385 AD as being at Capernaum, but the only evidence is that it was approached by many steps. The excavations revealed four steps at one end of a verandah and fourteen at the other. Is that many? The Franciscan idea of excavating was to discard anything that did not support their preconceived idea that they had the synagogue. No modern techniques were used, no proper startification sequence was recorded, and a find as important as a cache of thousands of coins was suppressed for forty years because they refuted their assumption.

In any case was the Capernaum of 385 AD the Capernaum of Jesus? If Josephus was wrong and Capernaum was a town and not just a spring then it was laid waste early enough to be recorded thus in Matthew 11:23. If it existed in 385 AD it must have been rebuilt after Matthew had written his gospel and later destroyed again so thoroughly that it was lost for another 1520 years. It is easier to believes that Josephus was right—Capernaum was always insignificant, Matthew couldn’t find it and assumed it had been laid waste and the Capernaum of 385 AD was probably a suitable site newly named, as Nazareth was, when pilgrims found it did not exist.

On examining the meaning of the word Capernaum we find that it does not simply mean village of Nahum as commentators claim but has a suspiciously appropriate meaning.

Kapar occurs frequently in the Jewish scriptures. It relates to “kippur” meaning atonement, as in the name of the Jewish holiday “yom kippur”, day of atonement, the only day of the year when the high priest could enter into the presence of God in the holy of holies to make atonement for the people of Israel. Literally, it means covering, but figuratively it means covering with the blood of a sacrifice to atone for a sin—from the ritual of sprinkling the sacrificial blood by the priest in atonement for a sin. The physical life of the sacrificial animal was required in exchange for the spritual life of the worshipper—an innocent life given for a guilty life!

Naum is “nahum” denoting a change of the heart or of purpose. It is found in scriptural proper names such as Nehemiah, Nahum, and Menehem. Nahum is often translated as to repent, but meaning God’s repentance not man’s. God repents—or relents as in Jeremiah 18:8:

If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.

God often only repented because His chosen had repented or a prophet had interceded on their behalf. Moses pleaded:

Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people.
Exod 32:12

Nahum also means to comfort or to be comforted—a word well known to every pious Jew living in exile as he recalled the words of Isaiah:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.
Isaiah 40:1

God indicated that He would comfort Jerusalem with the restoration of Israel, as a mother comforts her offspring (Isa 66:13). As a noun it means compassion.

Thus the connotation of the word Capernaum is that God will repent or show compassion for His people through an atoning sacrifice. John’s gospel seems to identify the Jesus of the Parousia with a comforter, evidently drawing upon the idea of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus making him a comforter from God, and Lo! this word is actually translated in some ancient Greek gospels as Paraclete. So by one of those miraculous coincidences of the gospels, the man who is a sacrifice to induce God’s repentance, carries out his ministry in a place called God will show compassion for His people through an atoning sacrifice! Now if this is intended as evidence of God’s plan, one wonders why it is never observed upon. Possibly it is because rational people would see in it not a real place but a poetic choice of name by the gospel writer.

Capernaum has either been given a spiritual or religious name by the evangelists or it is a holy name for some place of special note to the Essenes. If it is the same as the Capernaum described by Josephus as a spring, it seems fairly safe to assume it was a place chosen by Essenes for preaching to the simple of Ephraim and baptizing those who repented. In the Community Rule, the elect had to atone for the land and pay the wicked their due. By so doing they invited God’s repentance of the evil Israel suffered.

Origen, much closer to the events than we are now decided that these places were symbolic ones as their names showed. Though he was active at Caesaria, and made a point of walking in the footsteps of Jesus, he could not find Capernaum.

However since Matthew tells us that Capernaum no longer existed—it had gone down unto Hades—it seems possible that Capernaum was really a coded name for Jerusalem which had been destroyed by the Romans.

Bethany, Bethabara and Bethphage

The Bethany of the synoptic gospels is just outside Jerusalem, at 15 stadia, according to John 11:18. The stadium being the Roman furlong, it is about two miles distant. Yet, it is not mentioned in the Jewish scriptures, or by any classic commentator including Josephus. Moreover, John 1:28 says Bethany is much further away “beyond Jordan”, east of the river. To explain this biblical contradiction, even in early Christian times, Church authorities claimed John 1:28 meant a place called Bethabara not Bethany, but Bethabara is also mentioned nowhere except the New Testament.

Yet another town unknown to history except in the gospels is Bethphage, supposedly, like Bethany, a village on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho near the Mount of Olives. Bethany and Bethphage are places where Jesus, in Mark and Luke, intructs his men to pick up the colt he would use to ride into Jerusalem and fulfil the prophesy of Zechariah 9:9. Matthew, in its version omits Bethany at this point, so that Jesus gets the colt at Bethphage. In these gospels, Jesus lodges overnight at Bethany at the end of the day.

Bethany is a village near Jerusalem today, but Bethphage does not exist at all. In fact, they were probably the names for wayside inns that Essenes kept for travellers. Bethany supposedly means House of Dates and Bethphage means House of Figs. In Mark 12:13-14, it is when Jesus is leaving Bethany on the next day that he sees and curses the fig tree. These parallel passages are the only ones where Bethphage is mentioned at all, so the cursing of the fig tree might have been a cursing of the lodging house, Bethphage, Jesus evidently choosing to lodge at its rival Bethany. If so, it suggests that the Essenes were not united in their support of Jesus, some still considering him mad.

Even Origen only 200 years after the gospel events was unfamiliar with these places. He had tried to find them but could not, but noted that their names were curiously appropriate to their circumstances. He read Bethabara as House of Preparation, the preparation necessary being baptism, and Bethany he reads as House of Obedience, presumably because Jesus was obedient in doing his Father’s will. Origen thought these names had to be understood to understand the symbolism of the gospel stories.