Abstract

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

Luke’s Acts of the Apostles

For events after the crucifixion, the main canonical works are the epistles, and the Acts of the Apostles, traditionally written by Luke. Luke was supposed to have been a Syrian doctor from Antioch, where he might have been influenced by the Essenes. He is said to have accompanied Paul on some of his travels and these are reflected in some passages of Acts in which the author speaks of “we”. Yet when the accounts of Luke and Paul himself are compared they are not always compatible. Luke frequently composes speeches for his heroes, speeches which he cannot have heard and which cannot be accurate.

Luke’s main purpose in Acts is to show that Christianity is the fulfilment of Judaism. It depicts the spread of the gospel as under divine protection and accompanied by signs and wonders even though Jesus had said clearly that there would be no such signs. The particular sign of the miraculous conversion of Paul is repeated several times. A subsidiary objective is to show that Romans are friendly and sympathetic people except when Jews annoy them.

Although ingenious scholars think they can detect traces of Acts in the epistles of Clement of Rome, the book does not seem to have been regarded highly by early Christians until it was cited and ascribed to Luke by Irenaeus and discussed extensively by him, and thereafter everyone quoted it, casting some doubt on its authenticity. The Christian scholar G W H Lampe observes (M Black & H H Rowley (Eds), Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, London 1962) that:

Acts gives the impression of being written, from a developed theological standpoint, a very considerable time after the events which it records.

Historical events which date the document are the death of Herod Agrippa I (10 March 44 AD) and Gallio’s consulship. The famine of Acts 11:28 is probably that of 46-48 AD mentioned in Josephus and Acts 5:36-37, 21:38 and Luke 3:1 might also imply that Luke had read Josephus.

The “we” passages are in essentially the same style as the rest of the books suggesting that, if they are taken from a diary, as many Christians like to believe, the diary must have been the author’s own. They might, of course, have simply been Luke’s recollections or the recollections of someone interviewed by Luke, a seaman perhaps—the “we” passages only cover sea-voyages and events that occurred immediately the voyagers went ashore—and the uniformity of style is simply because the author has completely rewritten his sources. Much of Luke’s gospel is rewritten rather than edited, Luke even rewriting large parts of Mark often incorporated almost verbatim into Matthew and other parts of Luke.

In important sections, Acts and Paul’s Epistles are incompatible.

• In the accounts in his epistles, Paul tells us nothing of Ananias (Acts 9:10ff).
• Paul tells a different story about the escape from Damascus in 2 Cor 11:32-33 from that related by Luke in Acts 9:23-25.
• In Acts 9:26-29, Luke has Paul visiting Jerusalem longer than the two week visit Paul himself describes in Galatians 1:18-19.
• Luke’s account of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 cannot be reconciled with Paul’s in Galatians 2:1-10.
• Luke’s descriptions of the journeys of Silas and Timothy in Acts 17:15 and 18:5 conflict with Paul’s in 1 Thessalonians 3:1-6.

Some stories told by Paul in his epistles do not appear at all in Acts:

• All the trouble in the church of Corinth that necessitated the two letters by the evangelist to the gentiles.
• The sufferings of Paul at Ephesus (1 Cor 15:32; 2 Cor 1:8).
• The collection for the Jerusalem church (Rom 15:25ff; 1 Cor 16:1ff; 2 Cor 9). though hugely important to Paul, unless it is extremely tersely at Acts 24:17.
• The visit to Arabia (Gal 1:17).
• Some of the sufferings of 2 Corinthians 11:23ff.

A more serious problem is that Luke does not particularly express the Christianity of Paul. The doctrine of the sacrificial nature of Jesus’s death and its atoning power, distinctively Paul’s, is not covered and the contrasts of grace and law, and faith and works are not brought out. The short account of justification in 13:39 is not characteristically Pauline. The seeming narration of Paul’s own words that Christ’s blood was a covenant-sacrifice in 20:28 seems to be the exception.

Though Paul is the main character in Acts, it is no more a biography than the gospels. The omission of stories told by Paul might be excused as superfluous to Luke’s theme—the progress of the Christian message from Palestine to the whole world. On the other hand, Paul admits in his evasive way to being a liar, so some of his tales are likely not to be true, or to be, at least, exaggerated. Since Luke did not have Paul’s letters to work from, he could not have known how Paul related the incidents, nor could he have been familiar with Paul’s thinking. If he travelled with Paul at all, he must have been a distant companion not an intimate one. Luke seems to have drawn upon tradition and not upon anything that Paul said to him.

The story does not naturally divide as convention dictates into three missionary journeys by Paul. The episodic nature of the narrative indicates its origin as a collection of traditions probably from the different early churches. Chapters 1 to 5 seem to be from the Jerusalem church. Then follows a cycle of tradition about the Hellenists and their missionary activities centred on Antioch. Traditions about Philip and Peter are interdispersed. Switches from cycle to cycle seem to occur at 6:1; 8:4; 9:31; 11:19; 12:1 but, from the evenness of the style, Luke has not so much edited the stories as completely re-written them.

There are two groups of manuscripts of Acts, the Alexandrian and the Western, the latter being a refined version of the former, expanded with new material to magnify Peter among the apostles (5:39; 11:1; 15:2,5) and reduce the importance Luke had given women in his gospel.

Any analysis of the age of the apostles and the earliest Christians beginnings, depends upon Acts as a source. But, Luke cannot as easily be restored as Mark’s gospel because nothing or little was added to the gospel that was false, though it was disguised. Part of Acts however are likely to be false, forgeries added to give spurious fulfilment of prophecies which forty years or so later were still unfulfilled, and Munchausen tales from Paul. Still, these are in the main recognizable. Where explicit commentary on Acts seems particularly revealing in the next pages, it has been added, but otherwise general summaries give the reader a broader overview.

The Crucifixion

After only a short time on the cross Barabbas was given a drink and quickly expired. The others crucified with him had to have their legs broken to bring on a quick death. Joseph of Arimathaea asked Pilate’s permission to take him from the cross. Pilate was astonished that he had so soon died and asked the centurion to confirm it, which he did, and permission was given. Joseph and Nicodemus, both behaving as if they had an interest in the body, wrapped it in linen and put it in a new tomb cut out of rock in a private garden. The tomb was sealed by a large rock pushed against the entrance.

After the Passover the two Mary’s and others, or Mary Magdalene alone, came to the tomb early on the Sunday morning to wash and prepare the body. The stone had been rolled away and the tomb was empty. A young man (or two men) in pure white garments tells them that Jesus is risen and has gone to Galilee. At this point the earliest gospel ends (ignoring the final twelve verses which were added later).

The significance of the pure white garments is not that these men are angels of God but that they are angels (messengers) of the Essenes. Jesus had an important position in the Essene order. His body was removed so that he could be given a proper burial in a place approved by the community. The messengers from the sect give orders to the disciples—they are to escape to Galilee, out of Roman jurisdiction. Matthew says soldiers had been placed on guard to prevent the disciples from stealing the body but no other gospel mentions this and it is transparently an editorial addition to overcome the criticism that the body had been stolen by Jesus’s followers.

Immediately after the crucifixion the disciples had despaired and were incredulous to hear that the tomb was empty. This proves that Jesus cannot have taught his disciples to expect his bodily resurrection on the third day as the gospels maintain since otherwise they would have been expecting Jesus to rise, would not have despaired at his death and would have rejoiced to hear of the empty tomb. The five occasions Jesus spoke of his death and resurrection in the gospel stories look suspiciously like interpolations based on hindsight.

The Church’s attempt at accounting for the inconsistency of the Apostles’ behaviour was to accuse them of stupidity. Of course they were not stupid. If they were, Jesus must have been stupid to have chosen them. If they really did not understand when Jesus told them what to expect then his words must have been far more obscure than they are in the New Testament. The plausible explanation is that they were completely surprised by the news of the empty tomb. Jesus had made no prophecies about his personal resurrection. Their behaviour was therefore perfectly understandable. Their leader was dead, their rebellion had failed, God had not intervened—they despaired. Then someone had the temerity to steal the corpse! Tertullian, a Christian of about 160 AD, states that the body of Jesus was removed from the tomb by the man in charge of the garden wherein the sepulchre was situated so that his lettuces would not be spoiled by the crowds!

According to the verses added to Mark, it is Mary Magdalene who first sees the risen Jesus. As if to provide an explanation the author immediately tells us that Jesus had cast seven devils from her. It seems her madness was subject to relapses and further devils had then to be cast out. In short she was unreliable if not badly neurotic. Despite Jesus’s apparent prophecies, the disciples did not believe her.

Christian belief depends mainly on Jesus’s appearances rather than the empty tomb. Writing long before the gospels were written, in the earliest Christian works we have, the Apostle Paul never attempts to convince sceptics about the resurrection by quoting witnesses to the empty tomb. His evidence is Jesus’s appearances: to the women, to two disciples on the way to Emmaus, to Peter and others in Jerusalem, to the Apostles on a Galilaean mountain. Paul was not interested in the living Jesus but only in the resurrection and, as the first Christian writer, having heard of a hysterical woman’s reaction to Jesus’s crucifixion and abduction, he could have invented additional appearances to confirm it. He adds a remarkable appearance to a throng of 500 which even the gospel writers must have found stretched credulity too far.

If, as some suggest, Jesus did survive the crucifixion he could hardly have been making appearances all over the place within days. He had been horribly wounded in arms, feet and side. He must have been kept in a safe house for months to recover, moved only if necessary and when sufficiently fit would have been taken out of the Roman Emperor’s reach to Parthia.

The Quran says that Jesus survived because a substitute was crucified in his stead. According to the Basilidians, the substitute was Simon of Cyrene. Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels, from the point when Simon is mysteriously introduced into the account (Mt 27:32-44; Mk 15:21-32), are completely ambiguous about who was crucified. They could read that Simon was. Only at the point of death when they report that “Jesus” cries out is the doubt settled.

If these traditions hint at the truth, a lot could be explained. Simon had been substituted for Barabbas and had been crucified. But the Nazarenes did not want to risk the Romans finding out by leaving the wrong man hanging there. Most Romans would not have known Barabbas but collaborators would and the longer that Simon remained on the cross the more likely it was that the substitution would be noticed. So Simon was poisoned and whisked away by Joseph and Nicodemus after only a few hours on the cross when days would have been the norm. Of course, the problem was not solved because the Romans might want to inspect the corpse—so they disposed of it secretly! Jesus Barabbas was still alive but could only appear in disguise until such time as he could get away to the East. And so he does—there is a further tradition that Jesus eventually died in India.

If Jesus died on the cross, the disciples still thought that Jesus was alive and not just a vision. The author of Luke is at pains to demonstrate that Jesus was truly alive. In Acts he tarries for as long as forty days. But he was not recognised by Mary Magdalene nor by two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In his final appearance in John by the Sea of Galilee, the disciples again do not recognise him. If all this were true and not elaborations of a Pauline invention then it implies that Jesus was heavily disguised—or being impersonated! These people knew him extremely well, so why otherwise couldn’t they recognise him? If in disguise, he must have been hiding from the authorities! At his final appearance he behaves like a man about to depart quickly—to Parthia rather than Heaven—repeatedly urging his disciples to “take care of my sheep”—plainly meaning the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

The Jerusalem Church

Christians have usually assumed Peter, John, the son of Zebedee, and James, the brother of Jesus, founded the Jerusalem Church. But did they? There was an earlier organisation in or near Jerusalem because someone, apparently unknown to the disciples, provided an ass for Jesus’s entry into the city and also the upper room where the last supper was eaten. If a foundation existed during Jesus’s ministry, was it the Jerusalem Church?

There are only two explicit mentions of the Jerusalem Church in Acts, one at 8:1 and the other at 11:22. The word “church” is our translation of the Greek word “ecclesia” which literally means “the called”, a name that the Essenes gave themselves. In the Septuagint the words “ecclesia” and “synagoge” are used to translate words which mean “assembly” in Hebrew—words like “quhal”, assembly, “edah”, congregation and “yahad”, community. All are words popular in the scrolls to describe the institutions of the Essenes.

Supporting the idea that the church already existed is that it is led, not by Peter, Jesus’s supposed choice, but by James, called his brother. The epistles of Paul confirm that James was a pillar of the church along with Peter and John. Peter and John were already apostles but James was not (unless it could be shown he was James the son of Alphaeus). Why should he have been a founder of the Church? He was not one of the Twelve but must have been Jesus’s successor as practical head of a pre-existing Church.

The reason might have been that he was his blood brother and next in line—the royal line of David, the Sang Real, especially since, on James’s death, tradition has it that the son of another brother of Jesus, Jude, became leader. It is argued that the norm was for dynasties to head sects in Judaea at that time. The leaders of the Maccabaean revolt constituted a dynasty. The High Priesthood was partly dynastic. The Zealots seem to have been led by the dynasty of Judas of Galilee. If this is true, the clear succession of leadership suggests the sect was not newly founded at Jesus’s death.

Jesus’s family are depicted in the gospels as doubting Jesus, so it is mysterious that a brother should assume leadership on Jesus’s death. Acts fails to mention that James is Jesus’s brother, though Paul in a letter written much earlier openly admits it. Nor does Acts say anything about the martyrdom of James. Indeed Acts wrongly says Peter succeeded Jesus as the leader of the Jerusalem Church when all other evidence shows it was James. The lie was inserted later by the Church of Rome, traditionally founded by Peter, to give it greater authority.

A Brotherhood of Equals—a “koinonia”

The first supporters of the Church in the gentile world were women. Yet Jesus probably had no family other than his brethren in the Essene organization. Joseph is never mentioned in the earliest gospel and Mary is not called Jesus’s mother, though “the carpenter” is called the son of Mary in Mark 6:3. We have to assume that Jesus is the carpenter, although no one has so far said so. Elsewhere Mary is mentioned as the mother of James and Joses and Jude and Simon but not Jesus! The evidence that Jesus had a nuclear family is therefore flimsy in the first gospel.

How were the bishops to explain that no stories were emerging about his family life? Were Roman housewives to deduce that Jesus, the founder of their new faith, was from some sort of brotherhood like that of Mithras that admitted only men? The bishops first answer was that Jesus had rejected his family and they him, an argument that suited them because they wanted Jesus to have been totally rejected by the Jews—even his family—to make him acceptable to gentiles.

The New Testament treatment of the family of Jesus is an attempt by Christian editors to dissociate their god from his origins. After the quarrel reported in the gospels when Jesus leaves his family in disgust they are scarcely heard of again until the crucifixion. The initial situation was confused when the first Christians wanted to prove to doubters that Jesus was the messiah. They inserted genealogies which required him to have a known family. Later still, gentile Christians invented the virgin birth, confusing the initial certainty even more. From then on some of Jesus’s brother Essenes had to become his kin.

In Luke 14:26, Jesus advocates “hating” one’s father and mother, yet Jesus accepted the Law of Moses, for which honour of parents was a central plank. This is a difficult passage for Christians, but, if it is not a simple interpolation, there is a possible explanation. Most of Jesus’s followers were Hellenised Jews and collaborators with the Romans—sinners and publicans, respectively. Among them must have been Jews whose parents were also Hellenised—the Greeks had influenced Judah for four centuries. Unless they followed their children and accepted the Nazarenes, they were to be hated because they were unrepentant apostates who would never enter God’s kingdom. Essenes were to hate their enemies, even if they were parents, apostate ones.

The truth behind all this speculation about the “brethren of the Lord” of the New Testament is that all of Jesus’s brothers and sisters were simply colleagues in the Essene movement. It was a brotherhood and they called each other brother, a habit which they passed on to their successors, the Christian Church and which lasts until this day, in monasteries if nowhere else. The Nazarenes, like the Essenes, were a brotherhood, explaining why Jesus, putative son of a virgin, had so many brothers. Proof is that in the Acts of Peter and Paul, Paul is described as Peter’s brother(!), showing that sectarian brother might properly be understood when the word “brother” occurs.

S Jerome tried to explain this by saying cousins were brothers and sisters! He cited Paul:

Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days; but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother.

Galatians 1:18

From this, James was understood by Paul to have been one of the twelve apostles. The list of the twelve apostles (Mk 3:13-19, Mt 10:1-4) has two Jameses, one the son of Zebedee and the other the son of Alphaeus. James the son of Zebedee was killed and his death is recorded in the bible, so he could not have been James the “brother of the Lord” who is mentioned long after the death of the other James. So, James the son of Alphaeus must have been James, the brother of the Lord! Alphaeus is not Joseph, so the word “brother” in this usage cannot mean siblings.

Both Mark and John gave a list of women present at the scene of Jesus’s crucifixion:

There were also women looking from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the Less (Greek, mikrou) and of Joses, and Salome.

Mk 15:40

Meanwhile standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas and Mary Magdalene.

Jn 19:25

S Jerome understood John 19:25 to mean that Mary of Clopas was the sister of Jesus’s mother, also called Mary, but she need not have been “his mother’s” sister, because the passage is ambiguous and might refer to four particular women not three, though the natural reading is that Mary of Clopas was the sister of Jesus’s mother. Moreover, if brother does not necessarily mean blood brother, then neither does sister mean a blood sister, especially as it would require two blood sisters to have the same name, Mary! Therefore, these women were more likely to have been sisters in a community like nuns were in the later Catholic Church.

In any case, Mary of Clopas in John seems to be identified with Mary, the mother of James the Less and Joses given in Mark. James the Less and Joses seem the same as those given in Mark:

Is not this the carpenter (Mt, “carpenter’s son”), the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?

Mk 6:3: Mt 13:55-56

So, now Mary of Clopas is the mother of the brothers and sisters of Jesus the carpenter, or son of the carpenter, elsewhere identified with Joseph. If “of Clopas” means “wife of Clopas”, as many translators assume, Clopas must be Joseph. For Christians, Mary of Clopas has to be the sister of Mary to avoid this snarl up, but the suggestion that here we are using family relationships as signals of seniority in a fellowship like the Catholic monastic communities is more likely.

The word used for brother in the Greek New Testament is “adelphos” which means full blood brotherhood. Unfortunately, we cannot assume therefore that the brothers of Jesus were his blood brothers because the same word is used less accurately in the Septuagint to translate words which must have meant nephews—Lot and Abraham in Genesis 14:14,16 and Jacob and Laban in Genesis 29:12, 15—or cousins—in 1 Chronicles 23:22—are meant. S Jerome himself explained the word “brother”, giving examples from the bible. It can mean mean brother by kinship, race, or love, the latter suggesting a voluntary community of brothers and sisters. Jerome opts for the first choice in that they were cousins, and so related by kinship but not actually brothers. But much more convincing is the last, that they were voluntarily each other’s brothers and sisters in a “koinonia”, a community of equals. At a later date, the risen Jesus…

…appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time… then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

1 Cor 15:5-7

Here Paul confuses the issue, if the passage has not been edited later, by referring to the twelve apostles and all the apostles, as if they were separate groups, but he also speaks of 500 brothers! Are these 500 blood brothers of the Lord? Jesus had a very large family indeed for a man whose mother was a perpetual virgin. The natural interpretation is that here again the word “brother” means members of a fellowship, confirming that the interpretations from earlier in the New Testament mean the same.

If Jesus was a senior member of the order of pious Essenes who did not marry but took in waifs and strays, he might have been such an orphan himself, and his family would not have been known. Then, the references to Jesus’s family in the gospels are bogus. Indeed, they have no bearing on the story, are slight and look as if they could have been inserted, mainly because Jesus had brothers but they were his brethren in the brotherhood, not his natural brothers. The earliest bishops could not have tolerated the idea getting loose that Jesus was one of a brotherhood and not unique. So Mary and the brothers and sisters of Jesus were introduced in Mark to makes it seem that blood bothers and sisters were meant. Gentiles introduced Joseph and Mary.

Joseph, who is not mentioned in the earliest gospel, might have been introduced to get Samaritan converts because they had an idea of a messiah son of Joseph, so it was made literally true for their benefit.

Moreover, there were no women in the story yet women were the first recruits, the female proselytes of Judaism in the Roman Empire. They were glad to join this Judaism for gentiles because they would have more success in persuading their husbands to join, circumcision having been declared unnecessary. To further this idea, Jesus had to seem like an ordinary man whereas he had been brought up in the male oriented and dominated Essene society.

Sonship

The word “son” simply meant follower—Laurel and Hardy were Sons of the Desert, a spoof fellowship exactly derived from this Semitic practice. All this is as confusing to us as the Christian use of “son of Man” would have been to an Aramaean, for whom it simply meant a “man”, the real sense in which it is used by Jesus and others in the New Testament. James was therefore the brother of Jesus in the sense of being of the same brotherhood, and probably of the same rank—the leader. Both were the Bar Abbas, the son of the Father, and therefore notionally brothers. The gospel writers could not even suggest this having made Barabbas into a bandit.

Joachim Jeremias points out an increasing tendency for Jesus to call God “Father” as we move from earlier to later gospels. There are 3 instances in Mark, 4 in Q, 4 in L, 31 in M, and 100 in John! Instances of Jesus calling God “My Father”, are 0 in Mark, 1 in Q, 2 in L, 12 in M and 32 in John. The growth of the frequency of use might show the gradual deification of Jesus—only a god or demigod has a father who is a god. It is hard to understand why Luke, as a refined gospel, does not use it more often, if this is the case. The frequent usage is in the more markedly Jewish gospels—gentile sources avoiding it. Q then stands out as odd, but Q is an earlier document and the practice of calling god as Father might have been associated with a later imminent eschatology.

Galatians 4:6 makes it clear that baptism conferred a theological sonship on to the person baptised. Those who have received sonship may address God as “Abba.” That will show the origin of the title “Barabbas”, and its misquotations as Barnabas and Barsabbas. For the Essenes, righteous and repentant people were all “sons of God”, and as such were a holy priesthood. This might have seemed far-fetched to the gentiles at first. They thought being a son of god was unusual and to have everyone being declared one might not have seemed sensible. They were content though that the great man himself should have the title.

James was “the Just” and his reputation was that of a devout man. The letter attributed to him in the New Testament is reminiscent of the scrolls, and gives a feel of the original Palestinian fount of Christianity, the Nazarene Church. The Epistle of James the Just (or Righteous) was regarded by Christians as far removed as Eusebius and Luther as unsuitable for inclusion in the canon. Its language is much like that ascribed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels and its sentiments very much like those of the Qumran Community, for example in emphasising the spiritual benefits of poverty. It is a document of the style of a Qumran exhortation with no mention of a dead and resurrected redeemer and indeed scarcely a mention of Jesus at all, This also supports the idea that the Nazarenes were a sect which existed before the crucifixion of Jesus, and, indeed, that it was not originally a religion “of Jesus” but one of righteousness and correct living which Barabbas had served as an unusual leader.

Early tradition attributes to James the Nazarite vow, seemingly, in his case, permanent, he is shown as kneeling to worship daily in the Temple at Jerusalem until his knees became calloused and later dying a martyr’s death for his convictions. All icons of Jesus show him with uncut hair (although early ones followed Greek conventions and did not, showing Jesus like Orpheus as an androgynous youth—like an angel) suggesting he also was a Nazarite. James might have been the Nasi who succeeded Jesus.

The Church led by James, explicitly called the brother of Jesus, was a Jewish sect, orthodox in all respects except for their belief that the Messiah had appeared in the person of Barabbas who had died a felon’s death, hanging from a tree, but had been resurrected and would “soon” (within their own lifetime) return with the hosts of Heaven to free the Jews from persecution. Eusebius in his history of the church tells us that the Jerusalem Church continued to sacrifice in the Temple and to keep the law even after the gentile churches had split away. Soon we hear of the Ebionite Christians, who revered Jesus, accepted the Mosaic Law, and retained, as Jews, the practice of circumcision, contrary to the teaching of Paul.

The Jerusalem Church was an exclusively Jewish community, bound by the Law of Moses, and following the Mosaic Law in its worship and practice. It had its own assembly, and used the Temple. The Nazarenes knew Barabbas as a devout Jew, who had not repudiated the Torah, indeed who was zealous for the Law. His Sabbath cures were not against the Law. Even in Acts 5:34-40 the Sanhedrin continues to accept the activities of the apostles. They were still Jews.

The only difference in the two sets of beliefs was that the Nazarenes had put in an extra stage, that of the suffering and sacrifice of the Son of God before he returned on a cloud to inaugurate the kingdom, completing the victory already begun. They believed they were living in the End Time, the days just before the inauguration of the kingdom of God on earth when the pure would be selected to rule the world as the Psalms of Solomon makes clear.

Emphatically they did not regard Barabbas as divine. Not only would that have been blasphemous but his brothers and sisters in the Essene confraternity would have regarded it as absurd. They had known Barabbas all their lives and would have been aware more than anyone of his humanity. Since a Jewish messiah could not be divine, they regarded him as human even though God had revived him from the dead! In Acts 2:22 Peter does not describe Jesus as a god but as “a man accredited to you by God”—a special man, yes, but a man nonetheless. The evidence even of the gospels is that Jesus could not have contemplated the blasphemy of a man claiming to be a god.

Post-Crucifixion Activity

Curiously after Barabbas’s death, in many ways little was different for the Jews in the Jerusalem Church. They were Nazarenes, a variety of Essenes—not the monastic Essenes of Qumran but more like the village Essenes. As Nazarenes they had been Apocalyptic Jews—they still were, but now expected the messiah who would return on a cloud to be their late leader Jesus Barabbas. Before they had been the Elect preparing themselves through purity for the End Time—now the End Time had begun and the need for purity was absolutely pressing. Before they had had a set of complex Rules designed to ensure righteousness—the same rules applied. Before they had been certain they were the Chosen Ones of the New Covenant—now they were ecstatic with the certainty and wanted every Jew to join before Jesus returned to start the kingdom of God.

Considering the apparent failure of their Messiah, Acts tells us the number of disciples in Jerusalem greatly increased in response to the efforts of the apostles. They were surprised to find themselves enjoying such success in winning Jewish proselytes that even priests adopted the new faith. Few, probably none, of these new proselytes would have been gentiles though many may have been Hellenized Jews, considered as apostates or backsliders by the orthodox. Orthodox Jews feared that the whole population would be converted. A century later Tacitus writes that the death of Jesus was a blow…

…which, for a time, checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it broke out again, and spread with increasing vigour, not only in Judaea…but even in the city of Rome.

The Recognitions of Clementine, a third century work possibly based on Nazarene tradition, confirms this success.

What was the reason for it? Ordinary Jews were superstitious and demoralised. Why should a failed Messiah have posthumously appealed to them? He must have done something memorable.

Jesus had spread the word that the day of judgement was at hand. Indeed twice in Matthew (Mt 16:28 and Mt 24:34) he promised to his disciples the kingdom within a generation.

The converts of the simple of Ephraim thought that the Righteous would be raised from the dead after God’s day of Vengeance. At the inauguration of the kingdom, the righteous would all rise from the dead to look upon the face of God. When rumours circulated that the tomb of Jesus was empty, they jumped to the conclusion that Jesus had been resurrected as the first of the righteous. The early Christian writers prove this. In Revelation 1:5, Jesus is:

The first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth.

Here the author of Revelation also declares Jesus to be the Nasi (the Prince). Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:20: He is:

Risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept.

Both quotations show that the first Christians thought that with Jesus the general resurrection had begun. He is the “first” in both cases, showing that others were to follow. Matthew even says that other saints were indeed resurrected. In a religious hysteria maybe some of disciples thought they had seen the risen Jesus.

But even in those credulous times, stories of a man rising from the dead would not have been compelling enough to win over crowds unless there was something with which it was associated that was memorable. Barabbas was described as a notable prisoner (Mt 27:16) who had led an insurrection in Jerusalem. Jesus was notable because he led the Nazarenes to victory over the Jerusalem garrison, purifying the despoiled bride, Israel, bringing her back to life to meet God as his bride. The crucifixion of Jesus did not alter that fact, and his apparent resurrection proved that God had returned. So, the followers of Jesus continued to preach what Jesus had believed when he was alive—the kingdom of God was about to start—but now they had proof! The death and resurrection of the messenger proved his message—the bridegroom was at the door!

In the beginning of Acts (1:6), the apostles show that, even after the death of Jesus, they expected him to conclude his mission of the Jewish Messiah—to retrieve the Jewish kingdom from the enemy as a national saviour, asking the risen Jesus:

Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?

It is difficult to understand why this episode should have been included unless it was genuine tradition—it was not what the later church taught. In Acts 15:16, James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, was still expecting a Jewish superstate ruling the world. This was no other-worldly place and James argues that there is no need to convert gentiles because they would be judged on entry to the Jewish theocracy. He was still expecting the restoration of the kingdom and quotes Amos 9:11 to prove it. This passage in Amos concludes with the restoration of the Children of Israel to their land:

And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God.

Amos 9:15

Who then were the disciples asking to restore the kingdom? Jesus was dead but they took someone to be Jesus after the crucifixion. It could only have been the new “Jesus.” Jesus was an Essene title, perhaps that of the Nasi, and a new one had been appointed by the Essenes to succeed Jesus. The Nasi’s reply:

And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power,

shows that the apostles were not themselves Essenes but the Simple of Ephraim, Jewish converts to the Essene belief in the coming kingdom. Essene initiates would have been taught these things, but the Nazarenes had not been taught them. Yet Jesus, at the end, had seemed so certain.

They concluded the only mistake Jesus had made was to expect the angelic host immediately after the victory. The body missing from the tomb proved that Jesus had been resurrected—no one else was, despite Matthew’s imagination, and the disciples concluded the forty year cosmic battle between good and evil must follow before the general resurrection of the righteous into the kingdom. They were not at the end of forty years of cosmic battle but near the beginning of it. Now, Jesus would return as the archangel Michael at the head of the host of angels and the righteous would then be resurrected when the forty years was up.

So, the initial message of the apostles in Jerusalem was that the Nazarene victory (nasach) meant Israel would “soon” be freed. Jesus would “soon” return. Of course, he did not. Forty years later, when nothing had happened, the original tradition—now seen to be wrong—had to be garbled by the bishops. The definite promise of the kingdom within “forty years” was deformed by the bishops into a vague dalliance of Jesus on the earth for “forty days”, before his ascension.

He shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.

Acts 1:3

The common scriptural reading of days for years offered an explanation for their flock’s previous “misunderstanding”. “The things pertaining to the kingdom of God” meant the expectation of the miracle on the Mount of Olives. Luke, in Acts 1:12, belatedly reveals that these events took place on the Mount of Olives.

The bishops could now explain that the travellers from Palestine were “nearly” right about the miracle expected on the Mount of Olives. It was where Jesus had ascended into heaven to sit on his father’s right hand. Jesus had not expected an army of angels which did not come, but he would return with a host of angels at his Parousia, on the self same spot.

The ascension was composed to provide spurious explanations of Nazarene tradition. Jesus was depicted as being taken up into heaven where the Essenes expected the Archangel Michael to appear with a host of saints and angels in his role as the one “like unto the Son of man” of Daniel. A lonely pair of angels, served to explain the tradition of the angelic hosts, and they it is who announce that Jesus would return in the manner of the genuine tradition—at his Parousia, but no timescale is given. Now “parousia” really means “presence” not “return” and it obviously refers to the “presence of God”, called in Hebrew, “shekinah”. The presence expected at the miracle was that of God. It was God’s kingdom. The “presence” expected at the miracle had to be transferred to Jesus, assisting the elevation of Jesus to the godhead.

Only Luke mentions the ascension into Heaven—in his gospel where Jesus was “carried up” and Acts where he was “taken up” and “received” into a cloud. The words in Mark, probably written before the conclusion of the forty years, are simply that Jesus was received up into heaven, and even these are in the last twelve verses now considered to be added. Luke’s pious lies face us with an astonishing event, reputedly seen by many but recorded only by one. It simply is not credible that people seeing such an astonishing occurrence would not report it later. Plainly, it is a fiction and one in the nature of gods.

The two “angels”, actually described simply as men in white, addressed Jesus’s followers as “Galilaeans”, though after the entry into Jerusalem, Jesus’s followers must have been from all Jewish communities showing that “Galilaeans” was an alternative name for the band and not a description of their country of origin as Christians have always pretended. Though Christians always maintain that these men in white were angels, the men who always wore sparklingly white clothes were Essenes.

Jesus, before his ascension, insists in Luke 24:49 and Acts 1:4 that the apostles should not leave Jerusalem after the crucifixion, when the disciples will sensibly have escaped to Galilee, out of direct Roman jurisdiction, as the young man in white tells them to in Mark’s gospel (Mk 16:7). Luke’s purpose in this pretence is to disguise the fact that the followers of Jesus had any reason to escape anywhere, Christianity being purely innocent, and also his desire to show the spread of the religion as starting from the Holy city.

The truth is that, immediately after Barabbas had been crucified, his followers had indeed fled. Many had been killed in Jerusalem and more had been crucified by Pilate—they did not want to stay around to find out whether there would be more arrests. Peter, the gospels admit, cut off a man’s ear, the merest indication Barabbas’s gang used force resisting arrest. He was too scared to admit that he was a disciple and denied it three times.

Yet in Acts 1:13, Peter and the apostles, together with Mary and “the women”, are active again in Jerusalem shortly afterwards. The mention of Mary and the women is probably spurious—Luke introducing women to pander to the early gentile congregations—but reflects genuine tradition in that many Nazarenes had wives. Most of them were not Essenes, unless they were village Essenes. They were converts and perhaps the converts of the perfectly holy men ultimately became village Essenes.

The number of “brethren” or disciples present is about 120. The evangelist implies that each tribe of Israel, or each apostle, has a minimum of ten followers. This echoes the Essene rule which declares that each group of ten must have among their number a priest or a levite, and therefore implies that the apostles had a priestly function—the beginning of the “Apostolic Succession”.

They met in an upper room, perhaps one in which the Last Supper was held. That room was approached secretly because the apostles were being sought by the Romans. In Acts 1:13 the word used for “to abide” “(katameno)” implies in the Greek “privately” or “alone.” They did not abide there openly but privately. They were still in hiding!

The fourth gospel makes it clear they were in hiding, meeting only in secrecy, because doors were shut when they assembled. The apocryphal Gospel of Peter says explicitly that the apostles were sought by the authorities as malefactors who wanted to set fire to the Temple. How then were they able to continue to proclaim their messiah, only half-heartedly hindered by the civic authorities, as Acts maintains, after an uprising?

The answer lies in events in the Roman administration. Pilate was withdrawn to Rome in 36 AD and the executive of the Empire changed with the death of Tiberius in 37 AD. After an interregnum the new administrators would have taken office with new concerns. The remnants of Barabbas’s band then felt able to return from Galilee and tentatively to resume activity. The activity now was probably not revolution—the revolutionary act of capturing Jerusalem had been done—but persuading people that the messiah was Barabbas and that he was soon to return on a cloud with a heavenly host as in Daniel.

Most Jews believed in life after death, only the Sadducees did not, and talk of the recently deceased Nasi returning on a cloud with a heavenly host to realise God’s will, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Daniel, renewed their faith in the messiah just when it had apparently been frustrated. The message that had evidently been fitfully received in Jesus’s lifetime became compelling after the Nazarene victory and his death and the church benefited from apocalyptic hysteria.

At the beginning of Acts, Peter preached that Jesus had brought God home. Later, of course, new excuses had to be found, and since the gospels were written later, they already reflect them. The new excuse was that Jesus was not a warrior messiah nor a false prophet but was the suffering servant of Isaiah. Like Jesus, this scorned man was sentenced to a dishonourable death, remaining silent in his defence, and was killed but was rewarded with victory after death.

The message of John the Baptist referred to in Acts 1:5 was that “one would follow him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire (Mt 3:11), the point being that God’s cleansing fire would purify the earth, burning up sin and corruption, and yet spare the souls of the righteous to be resurrected in the kingdom of God. Luke revises this to prepare for his composition of the Pentecostal appearance of the Holy Spirit as “tongues of fire”.

For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.

Baptism with the Holy Spirit now meant the donation of spiritual gifts not the purification of the world by fire, further revision of the original message.

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