Christianity
Defeat and Capture
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 9 November 1998
The Roman Counter Attack
The gospels admit that Jesus was not as peaceful as the clergy like to make out but do so as quietly as possible. In Matthew 10:34, Jesus tells his followers that he had not come to send peace on the earth but a sword, plainly meaning conflict in the struggle for the coming kingdom and subsequently the judgement of God. In Luke, Jesus says he would cast fire on the earth and the kingdom of God had to be entered violently. This was certainly not a pacifist talking but Luke or an editor realized that sword did not match the desired image and toned it down.
Luke 22:36 also has biblical commentators thrashing around in discomfort because gentle Jesus, the pacifist Son of God, urges his followers to buy arms—though two swords turn out to be enough! This looks like a prime example of a difficult passage for theologians being toned down by Christian editors. Luke tries to make out that Jesus wants the weapons so that he will deliberately be breaking the law to fulfil prophecy (Isa 53:12), but since he had repeatedly broken the law, this is quite fatuous. It is an evangelical attempt to account for the band being armed, as Peter’s assault on a temple guard proved. Both instances belie the gentle Jesus image revealing instead some of the truth hovering beneath the extant text.
Elsewhere, in Luke 11:50, Jesus preaches in an impassioned speech that the blood of all the prophets which was shed from the foundation of the world, will be required of this generation. This sounds like Shakespeare’s Henry V rallying his troops, though as usual supposedly spoken to Pharisees. Is it coincidence that Luke is soon writing (Lk 13:1) of news arriving of Pilate’s troops mixing Galilaean’s blood with their sacrifices, and then of the death of eighteen men when the Tower of Siloam collapsed (Lk 13:4)? Though misleadingly placed in the gospel, these sounds like tantalizing references to a battle—a battle in progress, about which Jesus was receiving reports. Note that the men were Galilaeans. Why should Pilate have especially committed an atrocity on a group of pilgrims from Galilee? The meaning has to be that they were of the militant sect of Judas of Galilee.
Romans were military masters and it is likely that they would have deliberately attacked on the sabbath, guessing that Jews would be thrown into confusion. Had Pilate’s troops counter attacked and slaughtered Galilaeans in the temple while they were offering sacrifices? It had happened before. Pompey had seiged the Jerusalem temple in 63 BC and had been astonished that the priestly supporters of Aristobulus, probably Essenes, continued with their temple duties even while they were being cut down by the legionaries. Were those killed when the Tower of Siloam fell on them defending themselves by the pool on one of the aqueduct piers or in a tower of the city wall against an attack by Pilate’s soldiers using battering rams? Had the insurgents been attacked by a stronger force sent from Caesarea on the coast? None of this is mentioned in the extant works of contemporary historians—but the clergy had plenty of time to expurgate them.
If anyone should doubt that the followers of Jesus had been involved in bloody rebellion in which many had died, let them turn to the Acts 6:1-3 where the surviving Nazarenes have to appoint as many as seven men to ensure that no widows were neglected in the daily ministration. The Nazarenes had to make special provision for widows just after Jesus’s crucifixion because many women were left destitute when their husbands died fighting for the kingdom.
A Plan of Capture
After two days was the feast of the Passover, and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death. But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people.Mark 14:1-14:2
All four gospels agree substantially on the passion narrative showing that it had become accepted by the gentile church at an early stage and had been worked and reworked to suit one objective from the earliest time: it had to prove that the Jewish bandit was innocent, and that, as the Son of God, he must have suffered because God wanted him to—it was God’s will and had been so prophesied! With such strong motives for distortion the final parts are less reliable than some of the more casually related passages earlier in the gospel.
in the Passion narratives, Nazarene tradition is much more overlaid with later doctrine, so the original allusions are harder to recover. Post crucifixion Nazarenes and Christians looked in the scriptures to find anything relevant to the death of the Christ, and whenever they found a suitable instance alluded to it in their passion story. Very quickly we had a story that was centred on an almost obliterated core of truth and a mass of Old Testament prophecy. But though believers saw the Son of God as a holy sacrifice for the sins of men to atone for the sins of Adam, the prime villains could not be Romans. They had to be Jews if the religion was to prosper in the Roman Empire.
Mark seems to have the Chief Priests (Sadducees but not scribes most of whom were Pharisees) deciding not to seek Jesus’s arrest during the Passover festival. But according to the plot as it unravels that is precisely what they do. The truth is that there was no scheme to set Jesus up. It was unnecessary because he had already committed serious crimes in the eyes of the Roman governor. This is indisputably true even by Mark’s own evidence, so it is idle for anyone to deny it.
The Roman prefects left non-political matters to a council of senior Jews called the Sanhedrin. The principle force in it was the High Priest and his party of Sadducees and they controlled the temple guard which had the powers of a police force. The death sentence for purely civil matters could only be declared by the Roman Governor. The Sanhedrin could possibly have declared a sentence of stoning for a religious misdemeanor, but, if so, it rarely did. The Romans would have disapproved of and, most probably never allowed, a concession which might have been used against collaborators.
Some of the Sanhedrin shared with the Romans a distaste for rebel movements—they posed a threat to the whole Jewish nation from Roman reprisals. Centuries before the Romans had razed under the plough the great city of Carthage, an enemy of Rome. Later they were to raze Jerusalem. There was reason for Jews to worry if Rome became incensed. Josephus says that Herod Antipas killed John the Baptist, not because of the plottings of his wife, but because he saw a threat of an uprising in the large crowds that John was attracting. Herod’s fear of the multitude is declared in Matthew 14:5 but as a reason for not killing John, though this fear did not deter him from killing John when Salome requested it. Repeatedly in Mark, Luke and Acts the fear of the authorities for the people is expressed.
After the brief counter-attack, the Roman commander, probably Pilate himself, was back in charge, and he it was, not scribes, who discussed with the Chief Priest, as Chief of Police, how to apprehend the leader of the Nazarene gang who was still at large, and put him to death. Pilate was an ogre. Contemporaries, Agrippa I, the Jewish king, and Philo of Alexandria describe him as corrupt, violent, dishonest, cruel, tyrannical, inflexible, merciless, obstinate and an illegal executioner. In retaking the city he had killed and captured many of the Nazarenes, and many pilgrims too. The gospels mention two unknown men who were crucified with Jesus for their part in the uprising—there would have been many, many more, but the extent of the insurrection has to be played down. Pilate would willingly have butchered half of Jerusalem. But did not want to lose his job, so he first puts the burden of catching the leader of the insurrection on to the Jewish authorities. If they failed he would then have a carte-blanche to proceed in his own way.
Jesus in hiding was not easy to find because of the millions of pilgrims thronging the city. Caiaphas foresees riots and more innocent blood shed, if the Romans carry out a house-to-house search using the military. “Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people. We must take him by craft”, he advises Pilate. To avoid a bloody massacre, Caiaphas promises to use his network of informers to seek out the miscreants, and bring them in using the temple guard.
In John 11:49-51 and 18:14, Caiaphas, directly expressing the fears of the Jewish rulers, sums up his policy:
It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.
If the Romans murdered hundreds in a day, there was nothing to do about it, but the Pharisees had established a tradition that, in Jewish law, no more than one man should be condemned on one day. Even the Sadducee High Priests felt obliged to follow Pharisaic law in the courts, and preferred that only the Nazarene leader should die rather than the whole band and an unknown number of pilgrims for good measure. A general outbreak of rebellion would bring retribution on the whole nation by the Romans. If it could be nipped in the bud by disposing of the leader of the insurgents, the state would be preserved. They succeeded but a few decades later it happened anyway.
Note that “after two days”, if the Romans attacked on the sabbath, puts the Passover on a Tuesday. It might be a mistranslation of on “the second day” which would put the Passover on a Monday, but if Mark is using gentile or Essene days rather than Jewish ones, the seder of a Tuesday Passover is eaten on a Monday evening.
A Water Carrier
The incident of the water carrier is genuine tradition. One small factor showing it is genuine tradition is the references are to “the disciples” rather than “the twelve”, the latter being a later construct. Everywhere the expression the twelve occurs is in a connecting passage obviously composed by Mark just as it is at the start of the next pericope (verse 17).
Mark 14:13 to 16 prove that Jesus and the Nazarenes were in hiding, and Jesus feared he might be arrested. It is all cloak and dagger stuff. Elaborate precautions are taken to keep secure the location of the safe house—even the disciples did not know where it would be. Unknown to them Jesus has arranged for a room to be ready for the messianic meal. They are led to it in classic manner through a mysterious liaison—with an anonymous water carrier in the street. The man must have been disguised as a temple Levite because carrying water was a woman’s work except when it was for temple use. When they get there they have passwords. It all proves that Jesus had an organization behind him that went beyond that known to the disciples. It was the Essenes.
The date given here is wrong. The first day of the unleavened bread is the Passover itself, not the day before it. If this is not a glaring mistake it must reflect differences in the reckoning of time by Mark and the Jewish priesthood. The temple priesthood are thought to have used the same calendar then as the rabbis still use, and which reckons days from sunset to sunset, and normal Jewish practice was that a new day started at sunset. But for the Essenes who prayed to the rising sun, a new day might have started at daybreak and the gospel writers must have used sunrise to sunrise reckoning. For the Essenes the Jewish Passover meal must have been eaten on the day that the temple sacrifices were killed. The sacrifices were prepared in the afternoon and eaten in the evening of—to us and Mark—the same day, but to Jews, on different days, a new one having started at sunset.
This is understandable if the gospel writers, as we might expect, are using the reckoning of the gentiles—sunrise to sunrise—but if this reckoning was used also by the sect of the Nazarenes, it becomes quite important. It is further proof that they were Essenes, but it also shows, accepting Thiering’s assertion that Christians used what she calls the Northern Solar calendar, that the crucifixion happened before 29 AD but after 15 AD. Thiering’s chronological hypotheses might support 21 AD as the date of the crucifixion.
If the man carrying a pitcher of water, apparently a detail, delivered it to the safe house when he led the disciples there, it might be further circumstantial evidence that the Essenes used water in their ritual meal, not wine, when fresh grape juice, new wine, was out of season, as it was at Passover. Christian wine was originally Essene new wine, which in practice was water for most of the year.
A Prophecy of Betrayal?
If Jesus were really a simple mendicant preacher, during the period when he taught in the temple, the priesthood could have ordered the temple guards to take him with no more ado, as the gospel admits when Jesus eventually is arrested. There must have been more to it and it was that Jesus had control of the temple and the city. Mark says the priests were afraid of the crowds but the manner in which they arrested Jesus, immediately through force or later through betrayal, would not have affected the way the crowds responded. However, if the Romans had retaken the city and Jesus was in hiding, he could not have simply been arrested and a betrayal would make more sense.
If Jesus and his disciples were dressed like ordinary pilgrims, among so many people, it might have been difficult to find them—this presumably was the point of the betrayal—but there are huge difficulties about the whole story. The betrayer was taking an immense risk. He could easily have been captured and tortured by the guards into yielding his information at no cost to the priests, let alone thrity pieces of silver.
In the gospels, a piece of silver is a Roman denarius, a silver penny—the pay of a day labourer in Palestine. A navvy’s monthly pay was hardly worth taking the risk of being captured and tortured. The falseness of the betrayal is indicated by the accord of the sum with the scriptural reference in Zechariah 11:12 where it is the price of the worthless shepherd.
That a man whose calling was to the Jewish philosophy which treasured poverty should betray the group for money is absurd. But Judas was not only an Essene, traditionally he was the bursar of the Nazarenes, a responsible and honorable position. That he should be seeking paltry sums of money when, if he so chose, he had the accumulated possessions of the Nazarenes at his disposal is multiply absurd. Like the Essenes, Nazarenes were poor ones but each man’s individual wealth was given to the community—the bursar must have had money in the communal purse had he wanted to steal it.
What is more the Damascus Rule has a rule that forbids anyone to vow another to destruction by the law of the gentiles. The punishment was death, meaning excommunication—eternal death. If Judas betrayed Jesus he broke this rule of the community also. It is impossible to believe that anyone believing he was on the edge of eternal life would risk eternal death. Yet, we are invited to accept that Jesus’s teaching was so ineffective that Judas did not believe that God’s kingdom was nigh. Or did he only take this view since the Roman counter attack? Such a betrayal could only make sense after the miracle failed to appear on Passover night which had only just started.
The surviving senior officers of the Nazarene sect had come together in secret to eat the messianic meal because Jesus had done his job of capturing Jerusalem, albeit temporarily, and cleansing the temple, and still expected the miracle at any moment. The gospels take this chance of having Jesus prophesy his betrayal:
The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had never been born.Mark 14:21
It is not genuine Nazarene tradition. Jesus is made to say, “It is one of the twelve”, using Mark’s expression, the twelve, showing that it is composed rather than tradition. With its hindsight prophecy, it looks unhistoric, and the repetition in verses 18 and 22—“And as they did eat, Jesus”—suggests all of Mark 14:17 to 14:21 is added. The passage is typically early Christian, the curse of Judas being directed at all Jews, its purpose being to place the guilt of Christ’s death on the Jews.
If Jesus knew of the betrayal because it was part of God’s plan then the curse on Judas is ungodlike. Clergymen seem able to accept that a man following God’s plan to the letter can also be a traitor. If it were simply God’s purpose to sacrifice an innocent man, Jesus could have given himself up to the authorities making himself look even more innocent and humble. In reality many people had seen Jesus preaching and anyone of them could have pointed the authorities to the Garden of Gethsemene and the Mount of Olives where Jesus had been in the habit of watching for the miracle for the last week. The chief priests had argued with him face to face and knew Jesus in person so, having found the gang’s hideout, they could have identified Jesus themselves but Judas theatrically and unnecessarily kisses Jesus on the cheek to betray him. The betrayal has no purpose except to incriminate the perfidious Jew.
Though the Chief Priest promised to deliver only Jesus to Pilate for punishment, we can hardly believe that the Sadducees and the temple guard would not have arrested others of the gang even if they intended to release them only with a flogging. If the soldiers were Romans they would not have been satisfied with only the leader, whatever the deal, since they had been put to some trouble by the Nazarenes, and had probably lost some of their colleagues. They would willingly have arrested and crucified the whole gang using whatever force was needed. Yet if Jesus was merely a pacifist wonder worker and travelling preacher he could have been no threat.
In the betrayal verse in Mark, there seems to be an allusion to Psalms 41:9. Psalm 41 is Essene as its first line shows: “Blessed is He that considereth the poor”. The Essene Teacher of Righteousness had an enemy called the Wicked Priest or the Liar who had been one of the elect but split away. This psalm perhaps refers to this and it is this betrayal which has been echoed by Christians in the Judas story. Nowhere in the scriptures is there a son of man who is betrayed as verse 21 seems to say. If anything like this was spoken by Jesus it must have been when he was actually arrested in the Garden.
The False Prophet
In earlier verses Jesus does not seem to be making a prophecy but seems to be telling the disciples—commanding them—that one of them has to betray him.
And as they sat and did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, One of you which eateth with me shall betray me. And they began to be sorrowful, and to say unto him one by one, Is it I? and another said, Is it I?
They plainly understood what Jesus meant and asked, ”Is it I?” allowing Jesus to indicate who had to do the evil deed, but Jesus did not say. Mark reports it all in a matter of fact way with no expressions of amazement. If this is genuine Nazarene tradition, and yet Jesus was not expecting to be captured, what can it mean? Was he now beginning to doubt he own prophecies, and preparing to submit as the worthless shepherd of Zechariah, the punishment of the false prophet?
Essenes apparently understood that if the archangel Michael failed to appear as the Nasi prophesied then the false prophet would have to suffer. The reason for this comes from Zechariah 13, which significantly enough, Mark soon has Jesus quoting. It prescribes the punishment for false prophets!
Essenes were convinced they could read the runes but must have realized from experience that they could be wrong. God would not fool them—His signs were there—but they might misread them and get the calculation wrong, so they kept adjusting their arcane theories and trying again. This must imply that Jesus was only one Nasi of many that went forth to test whether the appointed time was nigh. If they decided it was, but led people falsely because they were mistaken and it never arrived, then each had to be prepared to take on the role of the worthless shepherd—they had prophesied falsely and had to suffer according to Zechariah 13.
If no miracle appeared, there was no future for Jesus—he had lost all credibility, leading his band to capture Jerusalem and to expect a miracle, which never came. Jesus therefore had to become the worthless shepherd. Graves and Podro believed Jesus always intended to force God’s hand by enacting the prophecies of Zechariah—becoming the worthless shepherd—and built their theory on this basis.
Later the first Christians, loath to have their God depicted as worthless, claimed that he was in fact the noble figure of the suffering servant of Isaiah. Steuart Campbell believes that Jesus plotted a bogus fulfilment of the suffering messiah prophecy, accepting the basic gospel story with opium replacing God. In fact, Jesus never expected to be either stabbed as a worthless shepherd or crucified as a suffering servant. He sincerely expected God’s miracle inaugurating the kingdom of God, but the command to the Master in the Community Rule was:
He shall freely delight in all that befalls him and nothing shall please him but God’s will.
When Jesus prophesied God’s will wrongly he had to delight in his punishment—to be stabbed in the chest.
Now all of this throws a fresh light on the story of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the worthless shepherd, in Exodus 21:32, the price of a slave—a word which also means son in Greek! Actually, Mark simply says the chief priests gave money. Matthew tells us that the sum involved was thirty pieces of silver. Judas’s reward is merely a literary device to show that Jesus became Zechariah’s worthless shepherd because the prophesied miracle on the Mount of Olives never happened. That Jesus prepared for this eventuality might explain the apparent lottery at the last supper. One of the disciples had to be chosen to be the executioner! The man chosen was Judas.
The word Iscariot is considered by some to mean that the alleged traitor was one of the sicarii or knifemen. In fact, this is what all the Nazarenes were. They carried swords under their robes, as the gospels admit, just as the knifemen did. But Iscariot could be related to the word sikari—deliverer. Now all the Nazarenes were deliverers—their duty was to deliver Israel from the hands of their enemies. That Judas is the only one for whom the appellative is retained suggests he is a paper character. The name Judas means Jew and it is not too much to believe that the name was deliberately chosen from among the main disciples by the gentile Christians to state unequivocally, as far as they were concerned, it was the Jews who sold out the Son of God. Judas Sikari is the Jew, the Deliverer, the Jew who delivered up the messiah. There is the further possiblility that Jesus chose Judas to deliver him to his maker.
Considering the vital role he has in the drama, we know nothing about him even though he is one of the twelve. As a betrayer, he was plainly an afterthought. In the Greek, Jesus was not betrayed he was handed over. The word is the same one as that used of John the Baptist when he was captured by Herod.
The truth is that Jesus’s habit of waiting for the miracle at the Garden of Gethsemane, where he would have had a good view of the Mount of Olives, must have been well known among the Nazarenes, and probably among a large number of the pilgrims in Jerusalem, after Jesus had been preaching there for several days. It is noteworthy that Jesus was not arrested in the safe house or anywhere that could have been construed as secret, as one would have expected of a betrayal.
Here we find one of those unexplained coincidences of the gospels. We have noted that Judas Iscariot was really Judas Sikari meaning Judas the Deliverer. The Greek verb translated “betray”, paradidomi, is translated as ”delivered” when Paul uses it but as ”betrayed” when Jesus was ”delivered” to the authorities—in Romans 8:32, God delivers Jesus and in Ephesians 5:2, Jesus gives himself up. Why not use the same translation?
Judas was not a betrayer but was chosen by Jesus to deliver him in judgement to God—to kill him!—as the worthless shepherd. If it was God’s plan, it was not Judas but God who betrayed Jesus. When Jesus realizes there is to be no miracle, in the morning of Passover, he is made to say:
Rise up, let us go; lo, he that betrayeth me is at hand.
But it should read:
Rise up, let us go; lo, he that delivereth me is at hand
Jesus was ready to suffer his fate as the worthless shepherd at the hand of Judas. Why then didn’t he? It seems the arresting party arrived first. The next sentence is:
And immediately, while he yet spake, cometh a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders.
All I have omitted in this sentence is what was inserted by Mark:
…Judas, one of the twelve, and with him…
Judas had been chosen as a reliable man to do the horrible deed but Mark labels him a traitor and so has western culture seen him since.
