There has always been and there will always be for ages yet to come, one religion for the masses and another religion for the scholars.

Richard Ingalese, Occultist

The Defeat of the Jerusalem Garrison 2

The Gadarene Demoniac
The Entry into Jerusalem

Abstract

The miracle of the fig tree preceded the entry into the city but it was not a miracle. It was not the season for figs so why should Jesus expect to find sustenance on it? For those with ears to hear it shouts out that the story is a parable. The fig tree was the Roman Empire. Jesus says the fig-tree would be barren forever, Rome would be impotent. Jesus goes on to say that they could throw “this mountain” into the sea if they had faith. What was “this mountain” other than the might of Rome. A mountain is a common metaphor for an empire and is so used in Revelation. Jesus was about to attack Jerusalem. He reassured his followers with a morale boosting speech using a fig tree as a metaphor for Rome that they would succeed in defeating the gentile if they had faith in God. Later, he Roman fig-tree had withered! How Jesus and his band of Nazarenes defeated the Roman garrison of Jerusalem.

The Gadarene Demoniac

The most bizarre event in the gospels is the curing of the Gadarene Demoniac. It is bizarre because it is a crucial event distorted beyond recognition. It could not have been recognized without giving the game away about Jesus and the Nazarenes. First, the gentile bishops were not sure whether to call the demoniac, a Gadarene demoniac, a Gerasene demoniac or a Gergesene demoniac. All of these names appear in different manuscripts casting doubt on the situation of the miracle which, on the face of it, was Decapolis. Having performed this miracle Jesus and his men immediately return across the Sea of Galilee, making the whole round trip pointless. Mark had a pericope about a trip in a flotilla across the sea but did not know what happened then so he brought them back.

Nazarene convention is that those who wish to oppose Jesus or expose him as the messiah are called unclean spirits. That applies here—the demoniac is an unclean spirit because he names Jesus as the messiah (Son of God) and, in normal fashion, Jesus drives out the demon but in this story there is a mass of puzzling detail. The lunatic is naked (Lk 8:27), he came from behind tombs, he had often been bound with chains and had broken them, the spirit begs not to be tortured, suddenly there are many of them (there is a“ host of us”) and their name is Legion, indeed there were 2000 unclean spirits. They were driven in the form of swine over a cliff into the sea and were drowned.

The lunatic seems to have been a superman who could not be bound by fetters or chains. From this it should be obvious that he is not an actual man but a metaphor for something immensely powerful, uncontrollable and defiled. He is a metaphor for the might of Rome. Jews abhored nudity, often a euphemism for sexual exposure as Leviticus 18 and 20 makes clear. Essenes felt the same way. The Community Rule prescribes a penance of thirty days for a man who accidentally exposes himself while urinating, and a penance of six months for a man who deliberately goes naked. At the time of the Maccabees, to the prudish Jews such practices as exercising naked in the gymnasium, as the Greeks did, was considered a disgusting violation of the law. Romans were identified with the Greeks—both were from across the Great Sea, the People of the Sea, the Kittim of the scrolls, and had in common the Greek culture. For Jews, tombs and swine are unclean. They signify gentiles—the Romans. Thus many of the identifying features of the demoniac label him a gentile and therefore a Roman.

And why the name “Legion” which, together with the actual number mentioned, screams out Roman Legion, the equivalent of a modern military regiment. Was it a Roman legion?

When the demon first introduced himself as “Legion”, any ancient hearer must immediately have thought of Roman troops. What historical events underlie all this is now quite impossible to discover.
John Bowden

J Bowden, a chief executive of the Student Christian Movement, who is mainly an honest enquirer into the problems of Christianity, ignores his hero, Ernst Troeltsch, here. Probability, analogy and correlation suggest that the passage indeed concerns Roman soldiers, but most Christians do not care to look too closely.

2000 seems a peculiar number of devils but a legion was normally 6000 strong. There are, though, reasons and occasions why fighting units might not be up to strength. The 2000 mentioned might have been those killed or captured, the remainder having withdrawn. Or Legion might have just been a way of denoting that the soldiers were Roman—part of a legion—because the governor of Judaea only had 2000 legionaries at his disposal, about three or four cohorts. The biblical scholar J Jeremias has pointed out that the Aramaic word which meant no more than soldiers might have been translated Legion, and so we are not bound to be talking about a full legion. Whatever the truth of the number, if the Greek of Mark is based on an Aramaic original we still have the curiosity that the unclean spirits evidently were soldiers.

The Greek used in describing the demoniac and his cure is violent in the extreme though toned down in translation. The words are—dismembered or pulled in pieces, completely crushed or shattered, mangled or chopped down and tortured. On the face of it they refer to actions of the madman but no one so violently lunatic could survive at all, so one can guess that Mark has changed a few subjects and objects. The steep place that the swine run violently down is really a cliff that they plunged over. The hints here are of a violent event perhaps involving the capture (chains), torture (the legion of demons begged not to be tortured) and death by falling over a cliff, drowning or garroting (the Greek translated drowning means choking in general) of 2000 soldiers.

Graves and Podro in The Nazarene Gospel Restored felt obliged to explain the obvious allusion to Roman soldiers in this miracle and did so by speculating that, by a scribal error, a reader’s annotation referring to a Roman defeat had been mistakenly adopted into the text of the gospel at the time of the Jewish War. They were too cautious.

The boar was a potent symbol, especially in Judaea

Was there really a battle between Nazarenes and Romans in which a Roman Legion was defeated and 2000 prisoners captured, tortured and choked or driven over a cliff? If there were Roman records of this event they would have been destroyed long ago by the Christians when they achieved power in the fourth century. We do know the Roman Tenth Legion (the one called “Fretensis”—there was another Tenth Legion) was based in Syria, which included Judaea, and its standard carried the image of a boar, a pig. From about the time of the Jewish War this legion seems to have been permanently stationed in Jerusalem with its camp on the site in the Upper City where earlier Herod’s palace and the Upper Room of the last supper were believed to have been situated. The Fretensis legion might have been assigned to Judaea before then—as early as 20 AD! The Gadarene swine perhaps referred explicitly to this legion and not just generally to gentiles.

It might seem incredible that Jesus’s band should have been strong enough to defeat a Roman legion though remarkable victories occurred only a few decades later during the Jewish War, and had occurred before in the time of Archelaus when the Roman legate of Syria, Quintillus Varus, had to come into Judaea with three legions, four troops of cavalry and Syrian and Arab auxiliaries to put down extensive uprisings. Conceivably the 2000 defeated by the Nazarenes were not Roman professionals but poorly motivated conscripts—raw troops inadequately trained and equipped. Perhaps too they were badly led.

Now if our interpretation is correct and swine was an insulting reference to Romans, the incident need not have been set in a gentile country—it could have been in Judaea. If it were in Judaea, the reference to the Romans as swine was too transparent because the Jewish aversion to swine was well known, so for credibility’s sake the scene had to be set in a gentile country. Mark apparently set the scene deliberately in Decapolis, the gentile country facing Galilee across the lake, using his knowledge that the Nazarenes had crossed the lake at some point.

The ten Greek cities of the federation of Decapolis, which included the cities of Gadara and Gerasa, were set up by Pompey in 63 BC as a customs union and as frontier territory, a Roman buffer against the Arabs and the Parthians. Decapolis was under the protection of Rome and was accordingly taxed as a Roman province just as Judaea was. Mark having placed the incident in Decapolis, the Roman demoniac became one of its citizens.

However, a mistake made throughout the gospels is to assume that words like Gadarene and Gerasene are Greek names when they are often Greek renderings of Semitic words. Gadarene or Gerasene might be a distortion of an Aramaic word describing the event, to disguise its real meaning. Mark does this elsewhere in his gospel as in the case of Capernaum. If the mention of the cities of Gadara or Gerasa is bogus, it readily explains a problem which has puzzled scholars—neither is by the edge of lake Genesaret. Gerasa was forty miles inland!

Gerasene comes from “qara” which refers to tearing one’s garments to bare grievous sorrow of the heart, as at the news of a death or disaster. In the gospels Caiaphas does this when he takes Jesus to be blaspheming. More significantly, when the people had forsaken God, He proved He was the true king of Israel by sending Elisha to perform miracles, after the human claimant to the kingdom had torn his garments in impotent rage. Evidently the Nazarenes had given qara messianic associations from these and other scriptural precedents.

In Joel 2:13, God tells his people to repent and rend their hearts rather than their garments. In 1 Samuel 15:28, it is used figuratively of tearing a kingdom from a bad ruler when David was chosen as God’s successor to Saul. The sense that comes over is that the Gerasenes are those who have made Israel rend her clothes in sorrow, those who are not God’s chosen as ruler of Israel, those whom God will remove if the children of Israel rend their hearts and repent. The Gerasenes are the Roman oppressors!

However Gadarene might be closer to the truth. Gadarene might be a Hellenization of the word, “qidron”, meaning a dark or black place—none other than the brook Kidron which flows in a deep valley between the temple and the Mount of Olives! Another name of this valley is the valley of Jehoshaphat (meaning Jehovah judges), the scene of the final judgement in the passage from Joel quoted above. It was therefore (and still is) lined with the tombs of those hoping to be judged as righteous and resurrected into the kingdom.

Now if Jesus and his band of Nazarenes had destroyed a Roman legion on the way to Jerusalem why would the citizens of the city have wanted him to depart (Mk 8:17). The Jews who had been eager for a saviour messiah should have been delighted, yet they were not grateful that Legion had been driven out—they were frightened and begged the Nazarenes to leave. The answer is given by a more careful reading of Mark. He says:

they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city.
Mark 8:14

He is speaking about the Jews who made a comfortable living out of providing for the Roman soldiers—the collaborators, and we can be sure it was the chief collaborators, the Sadducees, that came back with them from the city and begged Jesus to depart. They were the ones who stood to lose. That is just the behaviour you might expect of collaborators in a dependency faced with the possibility of retribution against themselves by the dominant power. The Pharisees would have had the same attitude. They would have been glad to be permanently liberated but distrusted Jewish princes, realized it could not last and feared the consequences, especially if the guerrilla army remained in the area.

Jesus refused to accept the cured maniac as a follower, implying that some soldiers had offered to change sides and support him. This might suggest that some at least of the Legion were allies, not native Romans but opportunists ready to fight for whoever was likely to win, and not soldiers of the highest morale. If Jesus released any and sent them on their way, to proclaim the great things the Lord hath done, it could only be because they had offered to support him. But Jesus wanted only Jews. These were gentiles and there was no time for them to be circumcised as proselytes, recover and join God’s soldiers. With this victory the gates of kingdom had begun to open! However the last three verses are in the unmistakeable style of Mark the editor and have been composed by him for his gentile readers.

The conclusion to all this is that here we have the Nazarene victory over the Romans which made them withdraw from Jerusalem to get reinforcements from Caesarea on the coast or even from Syria. The skeptic might wonder, if our reconstruction is correct and the incident was so embarrassing to the first gentile Christians, why the passage should have been included in the gospels at all. The answer is that it is genuine tradition. Those who knew the truth were repeating the story and it could not be ignored. Instead it was re-written and reinterpreted, as other difficult instances were. The bishops told the gentile converts who had been hearing stories from Palestinian Jews:

It wasn’t quite like that. This is what really happened…

What we have in the gospels is the attempt of the bishops to render acceptable stories of an astonishing military victory by their God over their rulers, the Romans.

The Entry into Jerusalem

Mark 11:2 to 7, in which Jesus sends two disciples to gather an ass, are verses considered by Christian scholars difficult. The reason is that they do not want to accept the obvious—Jesus had already arranged for a suitable ass to be available. Jesus looks to be devious, the miraculous is removed, and the implication is that he had other followers in or around Jerusalem—they were of course the Essenes. Christians also like to think that the colt of the ass signifies humbleness, but unless they are really stubborn they cannot deny that Jesus was deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9, which in turn stems from Jacob’s testament to Judah:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy king cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt, the foal of an ass… And he shall speak peace unto the nations: and his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.
Genesis 49:11)

This passage is purely messianic. It states unequivocally that the king will ride into Jerusalem on a foal. For what purpose? It is worth quoting succeeding passages in Zechariah:

When I have bent Judah for me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a mighty man.
Zech 9:13

And they shall be as mighty men, which tread down their enemies in the mire of the streets in the battle: and they shall fight, because the Lord is with them, and the riders on horses shall be confounded.
Zech 10:5

These two passages prove that Jesus’s intentions were not peaceful when he ordered a foal of an ass to enter Jerusalem. He intended to destroy the enemies of Israel and institute a Jewish kingdom—only then would he bring peace to the world. When Jesus enters Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of an ass, he is stating, “I am the king!”

Zechariah is thoroughly apocalyptic, and indeed the second part of Zechariah is purely Essene in its sentiments. It goes on at length about God fighting the nations and restoring Judah and Jerusalem to introduce the kingdom of God. In Zechariah 14:4, the miracle on the Mount of Olives which will precede the coming of the Lord of hosts is predicted. It is followed by the nations of the earth being punished. Peace is spoken unto nations only when the kingdom is established. Note that Zechariah declares the king a just man and one having salvation. A just man is a righteous one, a zaddik, a name used by the Essenes of themselves. And having salvation is the very meaning of Jesus, suggesting that Jesus was a messianic title rather than a name.

In Mark 11:3, when Jesus says, “the Lord has need of it”, by “Lord” he meant God not himself, as Christians always think. Jesus would have called no one Lord but God, and Matthew 21:3 supports the rest of the reading, although Matthew has the impression that Jesus rode on two animals simultaneously, so refers to “them”. It seems a mistake the literate Essene would not make, so it might be a later insertion by a Greek, or it shows Matthew, if Jewish, was a Hellenized Jew, and probably not an Essene. One could speculate that the Essenes of Qumran permanently kept a foal ready for the messiah.

By deliberately entering Jerusalem on a foal, Jesus publicly declared himself king of the Jews, and declared his intention of following the prophecy of Zechariah. No Jew could have mistaken the symbolism and the crowd call out:

Hosanna and Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Blessed be the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.

Mark also says the crowd waved branches as he entered the city, more symbolism—in Zechariah 6:12-13 the messiah is the branch—but possibly also hiding the fact that the crowd was armed. The branches were staves and swords.

Lest anyone should accuse me of being too free with Mark in my interpretations, when it comes to justifying the unjustifiable, the clergy do not hesitate to throw Mark out of the window. By one Christian explanation of the branches, the entry was not at Passover but at the festival of booths when branches were waved. So Jesus was teaching in the temple for a period of fully six months before the Jews got rid of him!

Remarkably, in view of the sequel, one can read in Christian commentaries discussions of why the authorities took no action against this messianic demonstration! The Christian is so blinded to the blazingly obvious, it defies understanding. The authorities did indeed take action for this and other violations of the civil law and the result was that their instigator paid a felon’s price for them. Perhaps they mean, “Why did they not take immediate action?”. Exactly! If they could have taken immediate action they would have done. The reason they did not is that Jesus and his Nazarenes were de facto in control of the city, because the Romans had withdrawn.

Mark 11:9 and 11:10 have been garbled somewhat. The first cry is from Psalms 118:26 but the second and third would seem nonsensical to a Jew. The hand of the censor might have been at work because Mark’s original account was too obviously revolutionary. Mark, scared of offending his Roman audience, does not want to say that Jesus was literally acclaimed king, merely admitting:

Blessed be the kingdom of our father, David.

He tries to remove anything suggesting a challenge to Caesar whilst making the entry suitably triumphal and messianic. Matthew puts simply:

Blessed be the Son of David,

which, to a Jew, identifies Jesus as a king, though a gentile would not know it. Later writers were less concerned because the Jewish War was now in the past and because Christianity was now better known, not as a revolutionary, but as a mystical movement or superstition, as Roman historians called it. Luke and John therefore had no qualms about it, writing respectively:

Blessed be the king that cometh in the name of the Lord,

and:

Blessed is the king of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.

Luke adds a revealing detail in his gospel (Lk 19:39-40). Some Pharisees in the crowd tell him to rebuke his followers for acclaiming him a king. Jesus replies with a reference to Habakkuk 2:10-11, saying, “the stones would cry out”. The subject of the Habakkuk quotation is the priesthood, as the Commentary on Habakkuk makes clear. The Essenes’ interpretation of this passage is that the priests will be judged by God and found guilty in the midst of many people, and would be chastised with brimstone. If the reply was to be appropriate, the inquisitor was not a Pharisee but a Sadducee. To get the correct assonances in the Aramaic, Jesus’s reply must have been, “Should not these children (banim) proclaim, then would these stones (abanim) cry out”, “za’ak” being “to proclaim” or “cry out”. Again his followers are children.

Now “hosanna in the highest” means nothing. Christians have come to believe that “hosanna” means something like “hurrah” or “greetings” so that the crowd are saying, “sincere greetings, Jesus” or “three cheers for Jesus”. The crowd actually shouted “osanna”, an Aramaic word which means “save us” or “deliver us”, meaning from the Roman oppressors, and perhaps best rendered in this context, “free us”. Jeremiah 2:27 indicates, logically enough, that it is shouted in times of trouble, and the Jews had long been held captive in their own homeland by the Romans. The crowd are calling to the man who signals he has come as their king:

Free us, Son of David, Free us, Son of the Most High.

The correct expression was used in the Gospel of the Hebrews, an Aramaic version of Matthew, and in the Nazarene Gospel as Jerome writing in the latter part of the fourth century tells us.

Mark 11:11 and the following passage are added by the author to separate the entry from later events in the temple to give an impression that the entry into Jerusalem was peaceful. Like tourists sightseeing, they have a brief look round then go back to their digs for the night. Matthew and Luke, writing later, are more honest—the cleansing occurs immediately.

Luke concludes his version (Lk 19:41-44) of the entry into Jerusalem with Jesus weeping over the city because it would be sieged and razed—prophesying with hindsight the Jewish War. That Jesus wept on entering the city seems quite likely. No doubt most of the multitude did too.

Christians make the entry a peaceful demonstration of joy that Jesus, the spiritual messiah of God, had arrived. Though the bishops tell us the aim was peaceable, Jesus undertook to ride into the city according to the prophecy of Zechariah, a prophecy that announced the coming of a warrior messiah ready to destroy the nations and initiate the world rule of the Children of Israel. Was God aware of what his son was doing? Could either god, father or son, be so stupid? A more likely explanation is that Jesus intended to be seen as a victorious messiah in the mould of king David. Could he have initiated such a demonstration without a victory?

Page Tags: Temple, Cleansing, Entry into Jerusalem, Jerusalem Garrison, Fig Tree, Gadarene Demoniac, Authority, Wicked Husbandmen, Jesus, Fig, God, Israel, Jerusalem, Jesus, King, Legion, Mark, Nazarenes, Parable, Roman

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.