Abstract

Contents Updated: Saturday, 05 March 2005

I like the additions to the site. Good work. I found it very interesting. there is also a website by the author on this book:
http://www.jesuspuzzle.com/
As you know, I am Jewish and I found this controversy about Jesus quite absorbing. The book takes a different point than you do in the site (by the way, you could sell in printed form the material on Judaism and Christianity; I for one would buy it.) The book takes the view that Jesus was a myth and the later believers historicised him and invented a biography.

I have a page discussing Doherty at:
http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0630SilentJesus.php
I must say he is an ignoble, snobbish man. He sent me a copy of his book and I sent The Hidden Jesus to him. In the accompanying correspondence, he offered to review my book on his website where he has reviews of several others. He never did, and claimed a considerable time later that he had never said any such thing, and that he did not cover non-scholarly books. His site is interesting and fairly thorough on what it does, but G A Wells, a German scholar of London University had written most of what Doherty rehearses now, but several decades ago.

I am sorry to hear that, Mike. I thought differently about Doherty, but now I know better. I still enjoyed his book, but I am sorry to hear he pilfered his material from the work and research of other people. I would like to hear more about G A Wells and his work. Should you have some sites where he is referenced I would like to read some of his works on this subject. As for Doherty, I think he was just trying to do a little self promotion by raining copies of his book to anyone that could further advertise it.

However, I do not want to get into the argument between him and you, as I am older and I do not like to take sides in the arguments of younger, impetuous men as you two are. Still, I feel it is a pity he refused to cooperate or exchange views with you, since you are researching the same field he is. His loss.

Well, it is a loss—certainly mutual, and perhaps for others interested too. I do not want to disparage the work he has done which I thought was thorough. Nor do I suggest he merely pilfered. I am sure he acknowledged a debt to Wells and perhaps has gone further, but Wells had argued the whole case pretty well long ago, and wrote several books. The way to find anything about him on the web is to search for G A Wells and Jesus in conjunction.

And the progression of the Jesus image in Jesus though neatly paralleles and mirrors that of the evolving image of Jesus ion Christian writings! The only thing I can come up with is that we (Jews) have actually copied these portraits of Jesus from the Christian milieu itself. (later on, to prevent mass desertions/conversions to Christianity, the 63 Talmuds written from 200-499 CE included some nasty remarks and otherwise unappealing descriptions and comments on Jesus. But since this was done so late, they cannot be considered genuine reports, but later fictions, which were meant to keep Jews into the Rabbinical Judaisms fold by bad mouthing the opposition) The point is that Jesus is not mentioned by any Jewish source (for good or bad) before the 3rd century CE and that is strange. It does seem that the mentioning of Jesus by any Jewish source appears only long after the Christians adopt this figure head as a symbol for their evolving faith. (even more strange is the total absence of mentions of Jesus by Christians themselves for the firs century and a half after his supposed death). I would like your input on this if you dont mind.

As you are aware, Jews have been persecuted by Christians over 2000 years. To many Christians still, despite all the shamefacedness about the holocaust, Jews are deicides.

I am well aware of that Mike. I am 78 and I spent two years in Auschwitz as a teen. There is really nothing that I forgot of that period. Nothing. As for the long period of conflict between Christian authorities and Jews, I also am very, very aware of that. The claim of Deicide shaped the Jewish communities and made it impossible for us to integrate as a normal people in Christian lands, at least until the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It is the heights of irony and absurd that Jews should have been persecuted and blamed for centuries for the death at the hands of the Romans of another Jew, fighting for Jewish independence, who may not even have been a historical person at all!!. Imagine the French being persecuted for centuries by non-French, for the death of Joan D`Arch at he hands of the English! It is so nonsensical and absurd that we could not even conceive of such a thing. But in the case of Jesus and the Jews it did happen. Reality is indeed stranger than fiction.

There is a notable anecdote about some English noble woman not so long ago who discovered by accident, it seems, that Jesus was a Jew and refused to believe it! I have forgotten the details. Perhaps you know it. It is hard to believe that Christians could be so ignorant, but in some ways it seems typical.

In many of the pogroms in this period, Jewish books were burnt and were censored. Moreover my guess is that gentile Christians in the Roman empire only began to want to separate themselves from the Jews who began the religion from the Jewish war, and it was not really effected until Bar Kosiba’s rebellion.

I have some reservation on this point, Mike. Although I can see why the nascent Christian community would want to sever its Jewish roots, after Bar Kockhba`s failed rebellion, I do not see why they wouldn’t have started that severing process earlier, after the 66-70 war. Surely the Christians, which by this time must have been mostly Gentiles, would have wanted to distance themselves from the Jewish religion and heritage?

What are your thoughts on this point? Wouldn’t that process have started in 70 instead of 135 CE? It seems to me that by 135 the repudiation of Jewish roots and theological baggage should have been completed by then. In fact the deification of Jesus starts in earnest after 135. As I am sure you know, this thought, is totally against Judaic theological views and would have been possible only if the Jewish ethnic element in Christian communities would have been extremely low, especially in the top ranks.

I fear you have not read what I wrote closely enough. We are in full agreement. I wrote that Christians began to separate themselves from the time of the Jewish war, and it was completed about the time of Bar Kosiba. You say the same but more carefully!

This is when the self-censorship of mentions of Christianity began. I gather that the Christians were called the Minim, and you will be able to tell me more about the whole story than I can tell you, but between censorship and self-censorship, the noble Jewish hero disappeared and the gentile God appeared while being disparaged under various pseudonyms in Jewish literature to put a ditch of safety between Jews and Christians.

Exactly. The hostile references were an attempt by Judaic theologians to distance themselves from any association with Christian theology, to prevent losing numbers by conversion and to re-define Judaism as a non-Christian faith. It seems though that that was a reaction to Christian similar attempts of distancing from Judaism. It makes one wonder, though, why such references to Jesus in Judaism do not appear until long after Christians have already chosen Jesus as their new G-d. This seems clearly a reaction.

The subject always fascinated me. Perhaps your thesis and this are not so far away, and a synthesis is possible. (if I understood you correctly, you state Jesus was executed by Romans around 21 CE or perhaps even earlier, but the early Jewish Christians were shying away from acclaiming Jesus as a Galilean/Judean rebel, fearing Roman authorities and were sanitizing this part to the wider masses, but keeping the real picture to the initiated inner core? Or am I getting it wrong?)

It seems pretty good for a single sentence!

I therefore find it hard to believe that a Galilean sect could have set up shop in Jerusalem and continue to be dominated by Galileans. It would go against the habits and character of first century Jerusalem Jews. What do you think?

Too true. The Galileans were outlaws, rebels. Their connexion with Jerusalem, I think, was that they captured it forty years before the Jewish war, an event that has been scratched out of history.

It may well be, for many events have been scratched out of history. But in this case it would require that it should have been erased out of the history of the Jews AND of the Roman rulers. It is a bit more difficult than usual. Why would BOTH sides erase such an event? At any rate, the Jerusalem Jewish leadership could justifiably claim that this capture of the city was the doing of some half-Judean Galilean hillbillies and thus disassociated from them. Why the need to erase the events? And why the Romans would do that too? Also, if Jesus was executed for rebellion in 21 CE, why would his followers capture Jerusalem in 26 CE? (40 years before the 66-70 war) This puzzles me a bit.

Sorry, Rabbi, one should not take the 40 years too literally. As you know, it is meant to signify a generation. The followers of Jesus who saw him die in 21 AD will have expected the return in the forty years that signified a generation. This expectation might have been a factor in fomenting the Jewish war, but it came on a bit later than the expected forty years. When the rebellion failed, the association of the War with any Christian expectations will have been expunged, and might have been a reason for the fiddling of dates in Josephus. So, the capture of Jerusalem was also in 21 AD, just before Jesus was crucified as a rival to Caesar. It will have been triggered by the census due about that time.

The Christian alteration of history will have mainly happened after the Christians took power in 325 AD. Jewish changes might have begun earlier. Jews under the protection of the Parthians might have been felt to be free of Roman and Christian influence, but were they? Rome held Babylon in 112, and local Jews might have felt it wiser to get shot of any admiring references to the rebel against Rome. Though the country was won back and remained out of the hands of Rome, there might have been a fear that the Romans could return whenever Parthia was weak and so it was wiser to keep the Jewish records anodyne or disguised. Parthians and Sassanids were Zoroastrians, and there might also have been pressure on Jews not to give any credence to Christians claims—Christianity being a corrupted form of Zoroastrianism. Still, I wonder whether there is anything subtle in the Talmuds that might signify a capture of Jerusalem by Jews in the first century. You are better placed than me to judge.

Whether there are traces of the truth left in rabbinic works is beyond me, but perhaps not you.

As far as I know, no sources refer to Jesus until the third century. It may be possible that some material has been lost, but who can tell. Sadly we are limited to the material surviving and can only speculate to what may have existed and been lost. Even when the references are made to Jesus, it seems as though the Rabbinical commentators were using Christian material and legends. Even when hostile, the references do not appear original, but copies. This also puzzles me a lot. I have no answer to this.

The only suggestion I have is that the material was originally accepted as properly Jewish—in the period before the Jewish war when Jewish Christians were still accepted as Jews. Whatever got into the commentaries will have been from Nazarene (Essene) sources, and later when all forms of messianic Judaism were infra dig, they were diguised, and perhaps even erased.

For years, I have been meaning to write some pages based on Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth, but have never found time.

I am not familiar with this work. I did find many references in jesusneverexisted.com mentioning that archaeologists found that Nazareth was not inhabited in first century CE, but was cemetery. It appears that archaeology also does not back the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. This is strange. Why would Christianity base its faith on a man said to be born in Nazareth in the first century, when the town was not inhabited during that century? Why include such a big liability? It almost seems that the Christians didn’t have a clue about first century Palestine. That is indeed very strange and puzzling. It is even more puzzling (at least to me) that Jews of that time did not counter Christian claim with this simple fact. (of course it may be that they did but the record was erased, but that is speculation) But it lends support to the theory that Jews did not know about Jesus before they read or heard it from Christians. Or it may be that Nazarene referred to the sect of Nazarenes, not to the town of Nazareth.

Jesus of Nazareth: His Life Times and Teaching by Joseph Klausner, published originally in Hebrew, Jerusalem 1922, translated and published 1929. I am surprised you do not know of it, and would imagine you would enjoy and benefit from it. Klausner also wrote a multiple volume on messianism and a multiple volume Jewish history to the destruction of the temple.

The answer to your Nazareth questions are on the pages. Jesus was not “of Nazareth”. He indeed was “the Nazarene!” The Nazarenes were a pre-existing sect of Essenes, or a similar sect, and the Christians had to hide this because they had made Jesus the founder of Christianity. It is precisely because the gentile converts to Christianity, and probably many Hellenized Jews knew nothing about Palestine that the Christians could say whatever they liked. Christians always seem to argue as if the Roman empire, a place half as big as the USA was an English village where everyone knew everyone else’s business. That is why the claim that there were eyewitnesses convinces so many of them. If there were eyewitnesses, they were probably not Christians but Jews and lived a thosand miles away!

Jews probably did dispute the facts as Christians presented them, but one of my own contentions is that the first gospel was written to refute the stories of apostate Jewish Christians and Jews coming into the empire with the truth after the destruction of the temple. Naturally, therefore, the gospels are disguised truth. They could not be entirely false because the bishops depended on the story being verified by the expatriot Jews. it was a strength in that sense, but they claimed the Jews were maliciously changing the stories to denigrate their hero or god. So, they corrected the stories, and that is why we have some very strange stories in the gospels. The strangest of all is the story of the Gadarene swine, which I argue is the disguised destruction of the remnants of the Roman legion that guarded Jerusalem. It is the capture of Jerusalem by the Nazarenes led by Jesus the Galilean (the band founded by Judas of Galilee).

I do not know what archaeology disproves the historicity of Jesus, or what can, even, but would love to know it, if it exists. Please enlighten me.

As for accent, Dennic Potter, the UK TV playwright, wrote a version of the Jesus story forty years ago in which the Galileans were depicted as having north of England accents, like my own Yorkshire one, or Lancashire/Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire accents. He was shown as full of insecurity and angst, essentially sent on the Christian mission but utterly unsure of himself. Needless to say it was attacked by Christians!

Mike, you misunderstood me. I do not support discriminating people on the basis of accent. That is foolish. And besides, I also have a horrible accent in English. Face to face you might not even understand me, that is how pronounced is my accent. (thanks to written communication we can talk). I just brought this up to point out that Jerusalem snobbish Jewish elites would have easily spotted any Galilean as soon as he opened his mouth. Thus it would have been impossible for Galileans to establish any sect in Jerusalem for long. That was my point. Any such attempts would have been short lived.

That is right. I am not doubting that you are not interested in accents, but Potter was using just that feature to show that the Galileans were distinct. The Galileans were not just messing about in the city, they captured it, though they will have had people as fifth columnists inside the city, I expect, and they would have been accepted because it was Passover. I believe many of the pilgrims visiting Jerusalem will have helped, and the story of the two men hanging besides Jesus that the gospels make out he did not know, could have been true. They could have been arrested and hung by the Romans even though they were not in the Nazarene band, but helped in the insurrection.

PS—Take good care of your health. Fruit juices and natural foods should help improve your health.

Nice to hear from you. The pancreatitis has left me with marginal diabetes, and pure fruit juices send my sugar levels soaring, but I am sure you are right about the fruit, though even then, my diabetes nurse said not more than ten grapes at a time! Porridge is my staple breakfast now, and plenty of wholemeal bread.

Keep up the faith and hang in there. There is a lot of work to be done. By the way, in small doses, considering your sugar problems, royal jelly does wonders. That is the substance on which queen bees are fed. It tastes not bad and a few grams a week do wonders. Perhaps pharmacies or natural food outlets sell it in England?

I reckon so, although it is very expensive, and I always thought was a bit cranky. Perhaps I should put it to the test.

The NT mentions Nazareth (“polis Natzoree”) in the following chapters—Luke 1.26,27; Luke 2.3,4; Luke 2.39,40; Matthew 2.22,23; (in the Mark Gospel, which is commonly accepted as the first of the 4 Gospels, I have not found any such mention, though I could have missed one, since I am not an expert in the field)

My contention on the pages is that Mark’s gospel has to be followed as the earliest and most reliable, and the other synoptic gospels used only as secondary sources. John’s gospel is late and has to be used very judiciously and much with the Essenes in mind. As you say, the earliest gospel does not mention a Nazareth. A Greek polis was not necessarily a town but a populated region. The Natzoree you mention is actually Genneseret, a name for Galilee itself.

What follows in your letter is a nice summary of what is partly onsite and partly in the Klausner book I always meant to summarize myself. I shall put this online if you do not object, under a pseudonym, if you prefer, say Rabbi R.

I do not object. No pseudonym is necessary. I only ask that you correct my English errors. ;-)

Outside the NT, we do not find any such mentions to a city of Nazhareth until much later:

• Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament. The Book of Joshua (19.10,16)—in what it claims is the process of settlement by the tribe of Zebulon in the area—records twelve towns and six villages and yet omits any “Nazareth” from its list.

• The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth, nor does early rabbinic literature.

• St Paul knows nothing of “Nazareth”. The NT documents atributed to Saul/Paul mention Jesus 221 times, Nazareth not at all. Is this not strange? The man converts to Christianity yet never mentions the city in which Jesus was born?

• No ancient historian or geographer mentions Nazareth. It is first noted at the beginning of the 4th century. Christians could reject my point, since I was born a Jew, as nothing but propaganda. But how come the archaologists did not find such traces of Nazareth? Did they miss an entire city? Even if they did, why did the Christians miss it also? Could it be because it was not there at all?

A nearby city of Sepphoris existed and archaologists have found solid, material remains, such as bath houses, villas, theatres. In the case of Nazareth—nothing. You may find more about it here:
http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/archaeology/Zippori/index.htm
The NT claims, that Nazareth was a city, not some insignificant hamlet. It claims it had a synagogue and that a multitude chased Jesus out of his home town. A multitude needs serious housing, and no traces of that have been found. Some Christians might say the Israeli government impedes such archaological research, but that is not true. The site has been extensively explored by Christians for a long time, and they have full access. Yet nothing is known about a city in the first cen CE.. The only evidence of human touch are tombs. If anything, the place was a cemetery.

Since you researched this topic quite a bit, you are familiar with the Jewish ritual cleanliness and the avoidance of dead things, (like in the Zoroastrian mother religion of Judaism) and you know that it would have been impossible for Jews to have inhabited among tombs. That was never done in the entire history of Jews, in or outside Palestine. Some may claim that a special exception could be made for Nazareth. Fine, but where are the remains of the city of Nazareth in the 1st cen CE?

The sole water source is a small well, which has been later named Marys Well. Today a church is built on top of it.

In the NT, Jesus is referred to as “Jesous o Nazoraios”, which means Jesus the Nazarene, not Jesus of Nazareth.

Nazara means the truth, so we may conclude that what it should read is perhaps Jesus the truthful, or the true one, not a reference to a place. But the Hebrew NZR could mean also other things, depending on context.

The references in the Jewish theological works that Christians imply refer to Jesus are as follows: Mishnah Yevamot 4.13

“Simeon ben Azzai has said: I found in Jerusalem a book of genealogies; therein was written: That so and so is a bastard son of a married woman.”

The word “peloni” is used by which Rabbis meant so and so, a certain man, someone etc. It could mean anyone, but Christian antisemites use this as a justification of their hatred of Jews and claim it defaces their godman. It does not.

An addendum to the Mishnah—Baraitha Sanhedrin 43a—which records the hanging of a “Yeshu” on the eve of Passover for sorcery. It also adds that he had 5 disciples—Mattai, Naqai, Netzer, Buni and Todah. Now, this was inserted in the 3rd cen CE. Far too late to be a reliable account of historical events. Also, please note that Yeshu was as common a name among Judeans as Smith is among Englishmen. This also could mean anyone, though here too Christian antisemites imply Jews deface their godman. Frankly I do not know to which particular Yeshu the “Mishnah” refers to here, but there are no proofs it referred to the Yeshu the Christians deified. It could have been any other Yeshu. If it does refer to Jesus of the NT (though not proof exists for that), it still does not represent an independent confirmation of the Christian claims, because by then the Christians were already worshipping Jesus as G-d and this could have been copied from them. It does appear that Jewish references to any Yeshu appear only long after they appear in Christian literature. This seems more a reaction than a confirmation of Christian claims.

In Chullin 2:23, a 3rd cen Tosefta, which was a commentary on the oral law there is a mention to a certain “Yeshu ben Pandira” whise name was invoked to cure a rabbi of a snake bite. this also could hardly refer to the Christian godman, since no Rabbi would invoke the Christian Jesus name for a cure, in the 3rd cen CE, by which time the complete separation of Judaism and Christianity has been completed. And such a reference could hardly have passed the Judaic theologians censorship and be included in written Judaic theological works if the reference did in fact refer to the Jesus of NT, for the simple reason that it would have been a blasphemy and a heresy. And Jews as all other theological establishments did guard their orthodoxy with great zeal. At any rate, the reference is 2 cen after the death of the Christian godman, hardly a contemporary.

Talmud Shabbat 104b, Sanhedrin 67a, says Yeshu is apparently the son of an adulterous hairdresser (“Miriam Megaddela”) and is executed in Lud. Talmud Sanhedrin 107b, Sotah 47a, has a magician Yeshu worshipping a brick during the 1st century BC reign of John Hyrcanus. The Talmuds hace been compilled between 200-499 CE. The Jerusalem Talmud is shorter and less authoritative than the Babylonian Talmud and is though to have been finished about 50 years earlier. these references to a Yeshu in the Talmuds have been interpreted by Christians as yet another attack on their godman, but they do not fit the profile at all. First the reign of John Hyrcanus was far too early to be of relevance to the NT. Second, the writing of these stories occurred 3-6 cen after the supposed events. Hardly a contemporary or accurate method of maintaining reliable information. That of course does not prevent Christian from reading and seeing imaginary slurs against their godman. Third, the Yeshu of Shabbat 104b does not tie this particular Yeshu to Jerusalem, so it clearly refers to some other Yeshu.

Also in the 3rd cen, Origen Contra Celsum 1.28 mentions a rumor Celsus read in Jewish sources that the Christian Yeshu was the illegitimate son of a young heirdresser with a Roman legionaire called Pantheras. This seems to be a misinterpetaiton by Celsus of the Chullin 2:23 I mentioned above. Here Pandera was Latinised as Pantheras. Please note that it was not Jews themselves who made the claim that Yeshu of the Christians was illegitimate, but Celsus, who was a great ideological opponent of Christianity. He may have missread the account or may have changed it to streghten his case. OR perhaps he hasnt read it at all but only heard rumors, which have a tendency to distort the source material. My understanding is that Origen wrote those account around 170 CE, so at the time the Chullin 2:23 was not even written in Jewish theology. Could it have been present in an oral form? Certainly, but it may also have been written AFTER, taking Origens work as source, since it appears in written form later than Origens work. IF this is indeed so, it would once again have been a reaction to Christian apologia, and not an independent confirmation to Christian claims. (This is admitedly difficult if not impossible to verify, given the paucity of remaining sources from the period).

Another way Chullin 2:23 could be seen (though this is pure speculation) is that indeed a Rabbi Yeshu has some relation to the Yeshu of the Christians beyond the simple name coincidence (as you know Yeshu was very common name) and he did maintain trace residual respect and reverence among Jews even at this late stage, but even so the reference is to the calling upon the name of a man, holy though he might have been, and not a godman. Obviusly this does not refer to a Jesus that was G-d. (I admit that even with this caveat, this calling upon the name of a human is not exactly what you would expect a Jewish theological work to contain, conflicting with Judaic precepts of monotheism and against deification of humans. And that even after the fine tooth-combing by censors that went in before any part of the oral law was codified into writing! Who knows how much was left out/expunged! This might actually back your points very well, but it remains a supposition. Intriguing to say the least.)

Another source which was a bit more spicy (personally I think it was very silly and self-endangering) is Toldoth Jeshu (Life of Jesus). It appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages, most probably as way of digging a deeper ditch between Judaism and Christianity. I refrain from quoting from it, but it is rather nasty. In the great tradition of Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) I believe such things are foolish, unnecessary and ultimately hurt us more than they help us. As a source it takes the varius passages I mentioned above, plus some oral traditions of European Jews. This source however is aanything but historical confirmation of Jesus of NT, because it apears a millenium and a half after the life and death of Yeshu of the Christians. This can hardly be a reliable source. It simply takes for granted the Christian story and adds a silly, nasty spin on it. But it is not an original source.

These, Mike, are all the sources that I am aware of. Pretty scant.

Scant and unclear, though I would consider “such and such a man” as being a deliberate avoidance of the name Jesus for several reasons that you have suggested. My own thought is that the Jewish hero was quite likely to have been in such Rabbinical archives as were kept at the time, and from which the Talmuds are the survivals, but the later need for care in the face of persecution, and the Jewish dislike of the Christians for distorting Judaism, stealing the Jewish scriptures, and denigrating the Jews necessitated the references to be disguised somehow, and the guises might have been different in different sources used by the Talmuds. It is speculation, but speculation has to be used sometimes as educated guesswork or interpolation to figure out how history got from A to B.

This is possible. It is internally consistent. But as you say, this is an educated guesswork. We cannot be certain that what transpired, even if we have worked out a logical and consistent theory. As you mentioned, the Church appropriated the Jewish Scriptures and there was nothing the Jewish priesthood could do. The Church was now free to reinterpret them any way it wanted. Therefore from this point, all Jewish sects had to tread carefully (even the Messianic ones), since any statement could (and unfortunately was) misinterpreted and that could (and unfortunately did) result in attacks, oppression and persecution of the Jewish community.

Your theory that the Galileans would have been accepted in Jerusalem and been able to carry out their capture with the help of others unrelated to their group is sound and logical. The pilgrimage would have helped them. As today people from all over the Muslim world flock to Mecca, so did Jews in those days flock to Jerusalem from across the Roman and Parthian Empires. Accents would have been tolerated without a wink at that time of the year. Also the large numbers of pilgrims in religious fervor would have provided the dry wood for insurrection, and in the heat of events, a relatively small number of determined fighters could have electrified the crowds and carried them along with them. Jerusalem was known to have experiences many such instances during pilgrimages in Roman times.

History at this distance can rarely be certain. When it seems certain perhaps we ought to look carefully to see that we have not been fed someone’s propaganda! History usually has to be detective work, and can rarely be “proved” as fundamentalists like it to be. We have to have the best synthesis of the data based on the best hypothesis about what transpired. If we are sane, we do not let “supernature” into it. Better to stick to nature, including human psychology. The hypothesis I am suggesting here hangs on to much of the Christian story, and since it turns out to be a history about an unrecognized Jewish hero, it ought to be acceptable to all liberal Christians and Jews.

Since the 4 Gospels do mention an insurrection at the same time, I find your theory that much more plausible. There is one thing though that I cannot understand. Granted, the Galileans were only marginally Judean in ethnic terms, but they (as relatively new converts usually are) were among the most faithful to Judaic theology. Granted also that there were many splinter groups in Judaism at that time, with much infighting. Granted also that Galileans were regarded as second hand Jews by the Jerusalem elites. Granted also that their sect was frowned upon and even much discriminated by Jerusalem elites. With all that I admit an utter failure in comprehending HOW the separation and repudiation of Judaism has occurred. I will elaborate below…

It is important to remember that the Galilaeans were a gang—the followers of Judas of Galilee—no doubt largely actually Galilaeans but many might not have been. It is this that the gospels are really hiding in pretending that Jesus and his followers were all natives of Galilee. They needed an innocent explanation of the fact that they were known as Galilaeans, and having the Nazarenes as bucolic yokels suited the gentile church who were having to deny the accusation—from Jews chased out of Jerusalem—that Jesus and the disciples were rebels against Rome.

Well, I think that you have a good point here. It is possible that it was so, but we need to dig deeper and answer some questions that are likely to be asked by people unconvinced by this line of thought. Such as—how could Jews fleeing the Roman legions (or expelled by them) accuse anybody, even gentile Christians of rebellion against Rome, when they were themselves dodging and defending against the same accusation? Would anybody have cared that 40 years+ earlier a minor Judean rebel inspired their sect, a man who might have killed up to 2000 Roman auxiliaries, when the 66-70 and the 132-135 Jewish rebellion caused the Romans loses far, far greater than that? It would have been like the pot calling the kettle black. The Jesus rebellion/riot of 21 CE (if indeed it was a real historical occurrence) was by comparison a drop in the bucket. (I do not take this view, but some fellow Rabbis I discussed this with do take this view. It would not surprise me if Christians and also people who take the view that Jesus did not exist at all, will come up with this line. Make sure you have an adequate answer to them.) I can only suggest that the 70 and 135 CE refugees would have used the accusation that Christians were worshipping a Judean rebel and would have used this only as a counter-blackmail in case Christian sectarians would have tried to out them as former Judean revolutionaries/insurrectionists, since I assume most would have wanted to blend in the civilian populace to avoid detection. But I am sure you can bring some more solid answers to them.

We have to remember that the Jews leaving Judaea in 70 AD sought refuge in the Jewish communities abroad, and these communities were the communities in which the “Christians” (the Hellenized Jews impressed by the message of the kingdom given by the rebel Jesus) still lived. They were still Jewish. They had been, until then, nominally under the leadership of the Jerusalem Church, led until 66AD by James the “brother” of “the Lord”. The dispersed Jews from Palestine will have been incredulous to find that here was a sect that was already thinking in terms of a son of God! The birth narratives must have been in the air around this time! So, there would have been name-calling and finger pointing from both sides, but it was all essentially in a Jewish environment. Most gentiles would not have cared, the only ones bothering being the Godfearers, and the bishops used this very dissension among the Jews to help divorce Christianity from Judaism. They rewrote the history of the rebel to mystify it, and accuse the Pharisees. Another speculation I have offered is that many Sadduccees, now out of work, actually found a new home in Christianity and were happy to widen the gap between their newly adopted sect and the Pharisaic sect that still held on to the loyalty of many Jews. By exacerbating the division at this time, and with the publishing of the gospel of Mark, the gentile godfearers, who had also been discouraged by the Jewish rebels in Palestine until then, now felt easier about joining. As we have agreed, the movement was essentially gentile by the time of Bar Kosiba—in the diaspora! In the wider empire! But the remnants of the Jerusalem church remained Jewish up until the time of Bar Kosiba, and Kosiba even mentions Galilaeans who would not fight, presumably because they accepted Jesus and not The Star as their messiah.

True, by the time of the wars against Rome, most Jews lived outside Judea; some put the Diaspora at over 75% of the population. I think it might have been in fact much higher than that. The total World Jewish population at the time is estimated at 16 million (incidentally, this number is the same today) and Judea could not have sustained more than 1/2 million. It follows that the vast majority of Jews did not reside in Judea. In all likelihood most of the Diaspora was formed from converts and very mixed Judeans who left many generations earlier. The pilgrimage was an important part of their connectiveness with the mother land.

You are right, and your figures suggest even more. When I said that many Jews might not have originated in Judaea, I did not just mean converts or people born to pious Jewish families in the diaspora. It goes back to my pages on Judaism being formed by the Persians. Jerusalem was made as the Temple State of Abarnahara, but the people of Abarnahara who were made to pay allegiance to that treasury were all Jews. Indeed, all of those conquered peoples of the Persians in the west whose gods were acceptable to Ahuramazda because they had not fomented trouble for the conquerors, I suspect were moulded into the lesser form of Zoroastrianism that became Judaism. You have to admit that 16 million people is too many to have come, even indirectly from a small country, even in 500 years. Many of the 16 million were in Babylonia, Asia Minor and Persia itself. Ea is Iah!

…we both agreed in the last email that it must have been because by then (post 135 CE) the Church had become mostly gentile. But why did that happen? How/when/why did the gentiles come into this outlaw Galilean Jewish sect and how did the Jews who found it and run it lose control of this institution? The theories that I have read saying that this was because of the Christians having been first Hellenised Jews and thus half assimilated is not the most logical. That is because the Hellenised Jews were the least likely to have embraced the extremist messianic sect of the Galileans. They were even more assimilated and accomodating to Greco/Roman views and ideas than the Jerusalem establishment the Galileans opposed, not the kind of people that would have taken up an extremist view of a marginal Galilean sect, especially given the low regard of the Galileans, their poverty and yes, their not being ethnically real Judeans. It cuts the other way too. Galileans would not have associated with the cosmopolitan, religiously lax, Hellenised Jews, and even less so with Gentiles. The Galileans did not even accept their neighbouring Samaritans as their own brethren, much less the Gentiles. It is very strange that this should have happened. I find this most unlikely.

It is always tempting to see things in black and white, omitting the shades between. Hellenised Jews, for example, are always thought of as completely Romanised Jews, but then they were not Jews! The diaspora was already large long before the Jewish War. Jews had lived outside of Palestine for generations, and many might never have been from Palestine anyway. They were Hellenised in that they spoke Greek, and were lax in obeying the Mosaic law. But they still felt a loyalty to the religion, and particularly to the need to attend Jerusalem for Passover, even if it was only once in a lifetime. These are the Hellenised Jews whom we must consider, not ones who had lapsed all together. They felt guilt over their neglect of the law, so that when a Jewish leader came along telling everyone that the end of the world was nigh, they were desperate to get back on to the right side, and this leader offered them the chance.

Of course, if they lapsed completely they would have been assimilated and thus no pilgrimage, nor ties with the Diaspora or mother land communities.

These are the very people that Jesus was speaking of when he told parables about the kingdom, not gentiles. The prodigal son was the Jew who had lapsed in his attendance to the law. The lost sheep was the same, and so on, for all the essentially similar parables he told. One Jew who returned to the hypothetical fold was to be celebrated. There was no need to celebrate all the observant Jews. They were saved anyway. They would enter the kingdom of God, but the lost sheep would have stayed lost forever.

The Many Jews who had effectively lapsed but still had undergone the pilgrimage to Jerusalem were those whom Jesus aimed his appeal at. And, by joining the Nazarenes (in my guess—though this is merely tentative—the name of converts to the Essene cause who had not undergone the full initiation because there was no time for it before the end), Jesus was recruiting an army!

This has internal consistency, but there is also a weakness here that must be addressed, before anyone builds further conclusions on it—if Jesus was building an army, it is not very likely that he was going to include outsiders coming on pilgrimage. In your last email you had a better and more logical theory, that Jesus and his followers carried them along in the heat of the religions fervor. It might have been a spontaneous joining of the rather few but determined Jesus fighters. But the idea that the Hellenised pilgrims were recruited deliberately and leisurely is stretching it a bit. The detection possibility (by Romans and their spies and informers) would have been too great. It is more consistent with crowd behaviour that Jesus and his group would have taken some bold action with their own group of Galileans and other pilgrims would have joined them spontaneously. Also these pilgrims would have been the least likely to stick around in case of hardship. Remember that when the rebellions of 66 and 132 CE began, since they were properly prepared and planned, the Judeans as well as the Diaspora fought with great fervor and did not scatter like the NT says the Jesus group scattered. (the garden scenes and the arrest).

Concerning the army, you are right that he was not recruiting for any sort of formal war or even a guerilla one. The war he was to fight was the origin of the Islamic jihad—it was a holy war! The hosts of heaven would burst out of the Mount of Olives and defeat evil in the world. Jesus needed righteous men to add to this mystical army. It could only consist of angels and saints or righteous men. There were two ways of being righteous. One, by living a righteous life. Two, by sincerely repenting one’s sins, and thereafter living a righteous life. This is the point of all of those parables like the prodigal son, and the last sheep. Those who had always been righteous men had no need of any further attention. Those in need were those who had sinned. Apostasy was a serious sin. That is why the Hellenised Jews were prime targets. Having repented, they joined the holy army to fight God’s fight with all their might, so to speak. It is the origin, too, of all that militant Christian imagery. So, yes, in the urgency of the moment, many normally unobservant Jews attending the Passover will have “spontaneously” joined the rebellion. It was, if you like, the heat of religious fervour because Jesus was saying the end of the world was due at any time now!

The army took Jerusalem in the insurrection, an astonishing event, but were defeated only days later in a counter attack, and Jesus died on the cross, as he could expect. It seems from Luke, if his detail is to be believed, that the people he hung with, he did not know, presumably because they were converted Hellenised Jews not any of the disciples he had recruited directly.

So, the answer to your question of why the Hellenised Jews would join or be allowed to join the Galilaeans/Nazarenes is because they were invited to do so as lapsed Jews because the end was due soon, and Jewish recruits were needed for God’s army on earth!

We are left, regardless of my puzzlements above with the historical facts that the Church became more gentile and eventually the Jewish element was completely supplanted, and the Jewish theological baggage jetisoned (like dietary restrictions, circumcision, acceptance of unconverted gentiles etc). But HOw and WHY these things happen I do not know. I aslo find the traditional explanation hard to reconcile. We know it happened, but it is most unlikely it happened as the tradition would have us believed.

So, what then happened? Well, remember that Jesus was preaching the end time, and among the beliefs associated with it was the general resurrection of the righteous, spoken of in Hosea. The corpse of the dead leader disappeared (no doubt taken by the Essenes for proper burial), and the scattered remnants of the rebel band, meeting in secret, depressed and uncomprehending that the prediction of the end had failed, suddenly thought that Jesus must have arisen as the first of the dead saints. The rebellion had failed, but they thought that God must have been impressed by their determination to show him that Jews were not wedded to the Roman occupiers, but to Him, as they should be. He had responded by raising up Jesus as the first of the general resurrection, and the hosts of heaven would follow, to turn defeat into victory.

The Essene “prophets” who interpreted biblical texts in their idiosyncratic ways, had made a slight error. Jesus was to be the leader of the hosts, not an earthly leader or a spectator of the heavenly miracle. His alter ego in heaven was the archangel Michael (everyone had an alter ego, or guardian angel, the Zoroastrian fravashi) even Jesus, and the earthly Jesus had been misled into thinking the heavenly host would appear in the Garden of Gethsemane, when really he would lead the hosts himself.

Mike, we need to find out if the Essenes did indeed allow in their thinking that a man, even a Master would be Michael’s alter ego. It may be that Zoroastrianism and its immediate offshoots allowed for this, but Temple Judaism was a bit removed from pure Zoroastrianism. This would be more in line with Hinduism beliefs. (maybe this is a possibility overlooked?)

We are not talking about Temple Judaism. The Essenes rejected the temple, and, from their scrolls, had a special regard for Michael the angel. I agree it would be nice to have it specifically confirmed, but the Essenes need not have thought that the earthly leader would be Michael as long as the early Christians decided it. I don’t think that Jesus necessarily thought he was the angel Michael in any way, for he expected the hosts to arrive led by Michael while he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemene. But when the Nazarenes thought Jesus had been resurrected as the first fruit of the dead, and formulated the idea that he would return after an interval of forty years, they concluded that Jesus must then appear as Michael. It was one of the steps to his apotheosis.

The adjustment was a generation of forty years (from David). In this time, Satan would be defeated in a cosmic struggle which would culminate in the defeat of his cohorts on earth which Jesus thought he would see initiated in Gethsemane. The Nazarenes had not been defeated at all, and all the converts could still expect to enter heaven as long as they remained righteous and faithful until the forty years passed at the second coming.

These Hellenised Jews had come to Jerusalem from all over the empire, and returned with this amazing story to tell their fellow Hellenised Jews, who therefore were also persuaded to be baptised and await the coming of the Lord (God, not Jesus, in Jewish myth, but God was in the form of the archangel Michael, and that was the alter ego of Jesus—the Trinity was emerging).

This would actually be more in line with the milieu of the Diaspora than with the more strict Judean sects.

Exactly.

There were, though, in the empire, a large number of Godfearers—gentiles who admired the Jewish religion but who would not be circumcised. They too wanted to be saved by this new saviour before the end, and the story of Paul illustrates what happened when this request was made. Circumcision was dropped. In forty years, a lot of Hellenised Jews became Christian, and unknown numbers of gentile Godfearers.

Alright, there were some semi-converts called Converts of the Gate, meaning gentiles that did not undergo a full conversion and that were not obliged to follow all the restrictions and requirements of the Jewish faith. (There is one such category today also, called Noachides). But they were not the kind of people that would associate (or be accepted in the confidence of) Jewish insurrectionists. They were not making pilgrimages, nor did they ever fight against Rome.

Of course. I said they were in the empire and had the message from the Jews returning from that Passover. A wonderful prophet had shown by his resurrection that the kingdom of God would be on them in a few years time, when the hosts of heaven would destroy evil and only the righteous would be saved. These gentiles, already impressed by Judaism, now saw a chance to enter the Jewish kingdom of God, especially as a new fact had emerged. It was that the Jewish laws need not be strictly applied to soldiers in battle. Jews in battle had too readily in the past been defeated by enemies unscupulous enough to attack on the sabbath, and such underhand practices. All the New Testament stuff about Jesus breaking the sabbath is, in my opinion, simply that he abrogated the law for those with a pure heart when it was impossible to fulfil it strictly. He did not abrogate it, but the Hellenised Jews and Godfearers, considering themselves Christian soldiers, decided the abrogations applied to them. These people were not fighting against Rome. The Essenes/Nazarenes in Judaea had done that. The converts considered the war a holy war against evil, and it was only later when the Romans saw the Christians as subversive themselves that Rome as Satan emerged again.

That is assuming that the Noachides/G-d fearers were self governing and independent of Diaspora Jews. I mentioned above why this would have been difficult. The people that think Jesus didn’t exist at all will also bring up another rebuttal—the yearly pilgrimages and the extensive travels between Judea and Diaspora meant constant contacts, so this sect you assume would not have been unobserved for a whole generation. They would have been exposed immediately by travellers and/or pilgrims. As you know Jewish traders and priests were in constant contact with the mother land as well as one Diaspora community with one another. There never was a 40 year isolation.

Indeed not. The Hellenised Jews and the observant Jews were all together in the same community, and the bad feeling between them is described in the Acts of the Apostles. The only point about the end of the war was that a flood of Jews came into the diaspora communities, expelled by the Romans or fleeing from them. They arrived and were astonished to find so many Christians believing an earlier Jewish rebel was a son of God. Others might have made the case, but now a large number of Palestinian Jews who knew the whole story well could give the times and places of it. Some knew of this occurrence, and others knew of that one, from their own experience or from their parents’. These were the pericopes that make up the synoptic gospels. In a sense they were great for the bishops because they were confirming that Jesus indeed had lived, but they were telling an embarrassing story. So they kept the pericopes, but mysticised them. Do not ignore the fact that believers will believe despite the evidence. I do not doubt that it was true then. This new sect offered what the Hellenised Jews and gentile godfearers wanted. They would not give up their belief easily, and once the bishops explained that the expatriot Jews were misunderstanding the tales deliberately to discredit the new sect, they readily accepted it.

Nothing seemed to happen when the forty years were up, posing the bishops a problem, but the Jewish war then did happen, perhaps, they thought, the beginning of the final struggle of Good and Evil. When Evil, in the form of the Romans, again triumphed, Christianity should have been finished. Jews displaced from Palestine came to the big cities of Rome, to find this crazy sect who thought a bandit was a son of God—the archangel Michael. They began telling the truth about him being a bandit, and the bishops were in trouble. The truth seemed to be out.

Their response was the gospel of Mark, an account of the godly man the new sect admired. Now, the bishops took the chance to counter the true tales the expatriots from Palestine were telling by mystifying the tales. My contention is, for example, that the fall of Jerusalem is the story of the Gadarene swine, the gentile Roman soldiers being considered as swine, metaphorically, by Jews but made into real swine in the story (the likely legion had a boar on its banner).

There was indeed a legion that had on its banner a wild boar (I forgot its name), which returned from action in Syria (if memory serves right). It was rotated from Germany to the East under Hadrian and it had a stop in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The Jews were offended and rebellion erupted. But that is a bit late (a century late) to fit with Jesus’s rebellion of 21 CE. If this was at the root of the Gadarene story, I do not know. But if it did, then this complicates the story a lot, because the timing is all wrong. What do you think?

The twentieth legion had an emblem of a boar but so too did the tenth legion, the one you mean. It was called Fretensis, and was indeed stationed in Syria in 20 AD, according to H D D Parker, The Roman Legions, 1958. If there were trouble in Palestine at this time, or trouble was expected by the Roman spies, then the tenth legion could easily have been despatched there from Syria to qwell it. I suggest that the gospels story is a disguised account of the fact that it did (or part of it did), and suffered an embarassing defeat.

By changing the stories into supernatural events and miracles, the bishops made their man even more a son of God, and at the same time deflected the critics whom, they claimed, were trying to run down Christ and the Christians because they were the Jews who had killed him!

As for the Jerusalem Church, it was scattered by the Roman victory in the Jewish War, and what remained of it was probably wiped out by the Bar Kosiba uprising.

Wait, the Church was not barred from Jerusalem. They were allowed to remain. It was only the Judean sects that were barred from Jerusalem and the new city built on top of the ruins and colonised with Romans and Greeks. Obviosly the Christians were already not considered a Jewish sect anymore, and so were allowed to remain. So the break with Judaism was already completed by 135 CE.

But the Jerusalem church was a Jewish sect. You are speaking of the later revolt of Bar kosiba by which time—as you say—the Christians had distinguished themselves from the Jews in the wider empire, and, as noted above, would not accept Bar Kosiba as the messiah even in Palestine. Whatever remained of the original Jewish Christians were scattered as were the other Jewish sects to become the Ebionites, frowned on by Rome.

All except some mysterious sects like the Nazarenes, the Ebionites and such who seem to have survived for several hundred years by staying out of sight in Arabia. They influenced and were absorbed into Islam.

There were many Jewish and Christian (Nestorian?) communities in Arabia. Islam takes the view that Jesus was not crucified, but a substitute was used, or an illusion from G-d made it appear that he was crucified, but in fact he wasn’t. There are definitely many Jewish and Christian elements present in Islam. The Jewish sects of the Nazarenes and Ebionites accepted Jesus as a prophet, but not as a G-d. This is interesting, but it doesn’t explain why the Gentile Christians took a different view. More research is needed in this area. Perhaps the key is to be found here?

Well, there seem to have been two groups of Ebionites, the ones who decried Paul as a fraud, and another sect that accepted more of the Christian mythology. The Nestorians were later. It seems the Ebionites who indluenced Mohammed were the proper Jewish ones who did not accept Jesus as God. So Islam agrees with them that Jesus was a prophet. The gentile Christians between 70 and 130 AD separated from the ideas of the original Jerusalem Church. The original Essene idea was that the archangel Michael would lead the hosts of heaven. Then, for Christians, the hosts of heaven would be led by Jesus at his second coming, to end 40 years of cosmic battle between good and evil. What then had happened to the angel Michael? The answer to this conundrum is that Jesus was the archangel Michael, a view supported by the Gnostic sects which saw Michael and Satanael as the two sons of God. The archangel Michael is the Jewish form of Mithras, the face of the Persian transcendent god, Ahuramazda, so Michael is the visible face of Yehouah. So, Jesus is God—or an aspect of Him. It is a moot point whether any observant Jews can have gone this far. The general view is that they could not have, but Ahuramazda was also an exclusively good god who eventually became Mithras to the Zoroastrians of Asia Minor. Naive people cannot be stopped from believing what appeals to them most. Anyway, that is for experts like yourself to debate. It is not necessary for this hypothesis, though it might help it, if an Essene sect could have had such a view even inchoately before the Christian schism.

Your site does mention the many messianic sects and expectations of that time, Whether Jesus existed or not, which is irrelevant for the search of the cause of the Jewish/Chriatian split; but unlike all the other such Jewish sects, it was only christianity that did merge with the Gentiles, accepted them among its ranks and eventually became wholly gentile and even anti-Jewish. No other messianic Jewish sect that I know of had such a turn about from Judaic fanaticism to break away from Judaism, to anti-Judaism. This is the most spectacular change of all. (I accept in broad lines your theories, and I mention this not as a counter, but as a great amazement at the whole thing. Puzzling does not quite cover it.) How could this have happened? The Galilean sect was against the Temple establishment because it considered them too Hellenised and too lax in the faith (to put it frankly they considered them too gentile). How could it then turn around and out-Hellenise them? And do so to the point of completely being taken over by gentiles and erasing all Judaic theological remains? This is unique in all of Jewish history.

Well, there we are. They did not turn round and out-Hellenise them. They thought their messianic views were about to bear fruit, and all Jews that had lapsed had better convert or be lost forever. The whole point is that they then lost the war, and only the Hellenised believers around the empire remained in the end, thus effecting the turn around completely.

Could be, but the link of the Hellenised Jews of the Diaspora with the Essenes and the Jesus group must be proved. The naysayers would counter (with some credibility) that the Temple and not the Essene insurrectionists controlled the Diaspora.

Perhaps so, up to a point, but in those days absolute control was much more difficult even than today, when sects divide like rabbits. The spallated state of Jewish belief even in Palestine is utterly clear. “Where is the Jewish Liberation Front?” “He’s over there!” (Monty Python’s Life of Brian). It must have been the same in the Diaspora. As for proof, it is wonderful to have, but there is no proof that things are as they are presented by Christians. Since they had propaganda reasons for changing the story, one can guess with some confidence that their story is not true history, should it not be obvious anyway. I say again that the best hyothesis is the one that offers the best explanation of as many of the most important facts as possible, without having to stretch reality into the fantastic.

The more fanatical Essene sects had given birth and then died, leaving only Christian and gentile offspring…

The Essenes indeed came to a fiery end fighting the Roman legions. But Nazarenes and Ebionites remained around for centuries afterward, and were snuffed out by Christians after they got government control after 325 CE. But it still remains a mystery how/why/when the Church became a wholly gentile run organism. In fact “when” is already answered, because after 135 CE the Church was allowed to remain in Jerusalem whereas all other Jewish sects were banned from the city and its surroundings. The Nazarenes and Ebionites, which did maintain ties to Judaism, were also banned from the city.

I think it is explained by the antagonism between Rome and the Palestinian Jews which exploded in the Jewish War of 66 AD. This war brought out into the open what had been known only in some Jewish communities before—Jesus was an earlier Jewish rebel just like the latest ones, a Jewish troublemaker. The efforts of the bishops to hide this drove a wedge between the orthodox Jews and the Hellenised/gentile sect which eventually left the gentiles in charge.

…whereas the moderate Pharisees, dropped nearly everything about this dangerous messianism perpetually causing trouble for Jews after the Bar Kosiba revolt, and formed a new contemplative and family form of the religion so separated from the earlier sacedotal form that it too was a different religion.

You are right on this. The Pharisees gave birth to Rabbinical Judaism which we have today, but they also took an active part in the 66 and 132 CE Jewish wars. That was why they were banned from Jerusalem by the Romans. They were just as much taken up with the Messianic fervor of the time as the other Jewish sects. It was in fact the primary sect behind the 132 CE war. The sect that was least favoring the rebellion was the Sadducees, which were much maligned by the Pharisee sect. This sect disappeared from history, though some believe they formed later on the Ebionite communities.

I cannot see it. Some might have joined them to find an alternative home, but I think that many were scattered into the diaspora, and being disliked by the Pharisee led synagogues, they joined the Christians. Both Sadducees and Essenes were priestly sects, and had some things in common from that, even though the Essenes despised the Sadducees. Once the ties to the Jerusalem Church were severed or even weakened enough, the colonial churches could accept Sadducees into them.

You are very correct in this. Both Christians and Pharisees accepted the idea of resurrection and judgement, whereas the Saduccees did not. They were both apocalyptic sects, which despised Roman occupation. It is ironical that Christianity turned against Pharisees and Rabbinical Judaism with such ferocity later on. Once upon a time they fought on the same side. Very strange indeed.

24 hours is a long time in politics! It is a question of how principled these people were, or how committed to their beliefs. Influential and wealthy Sadducees given the choice of working by the sweat of their brow to earn a living when the temple closed, or becoming a Christian bishop, given the chance, would have chosen the latter, or enough of them would to help swell the Christian ranks. Essenic principles would have been watered down as the senior Essenes were left behind in the Jerusalem Church, leaving less committed people in charge. It is another reason why the early church was so protean. It was Jewish but not Jewish, Essenic but not Essenic, a Mystery Religion but not a mystery religion, and so on, until it was a new religion suited to wealthy Romans, and then it took over the known world.

A mistake that Christians have liked to make ever since, because it suits them, is to pretend that the Jewish religion of the time was like Rabbinism, and quite distinct from Christianity. My own guess is that Judaism was much more like Christianity in many ways—like Essenism, much more Zoroastrian—and both new religions, Christianity and Judaism, for different reasons, have obscured this important point.

Hope it helps.

Mike Yes Mike, it helped a lot. I hope my points also helped a bit. I think we are 99% in agreement. (I mentioned some small reservation above with regard to some details.)

I have thought long and hard about our discussions. I have ordered and read your books as well as read through most of the material on your site. (I found the email exchanges you had with Christian fundies very funny—also the exhange you had with a Jewish fundie was funny too. Just goes to shows that fundamentalism afflicts all religions.) I have also read through other material related to the period and found your points very cogent and well supported (to the extent that a hypothesis can be supported in face of so much loss of materila from the time period discussed). You made a good point that the Jews in the Parthian Empire could hardly afford to say anything about a rebel Jesus, since Trajan occupied Mesopotamia and the Romans later made it a buffer zone with puppet government/despots. So that part was clarified most satisfactorily. (Maybe you should consider writing another book on this, furthering your original thesis, and debunking the people who argue that Yeshu never existed). I would make myself available to assist if you should need it. (being understood that it is pro bono, as a volunteer, since we share the same interest).

Well, it would be nice to do, but who would publish it?

Some of the puzzlements I had you helped me with, and others I had untied on my own. Such as the moments of the split between Judaism and Christianity (here refering to the leadership split, because the lower ranks were more fluid, and some Jews continued praising Yeshu as a MAN, and great teacher long into Christian times, up to the 6-7 cen CE, like the Ebionites/Nazarenes) It seems that after the temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the final touches of this split were settled. It may be possible it occurred before 70 CE, since there were quite a few civil wars and internal brutal fights in Jerusalem itself even during the war against Roman colonialists. Jerusalem was split in at least 2 camps during the Roman siege and a lot of the killing was among the factions. A high priest was killed in this time. (A few groups had their own high priests). It was a mad house, which made the Roman task much easier. (Here some Jewish nationalists took the wrong view that it was the internal disunity that led to defeat; that is nonsense—Rome would have won but it may have taken 3-4 months longer, but the final result was never in question.)

Of course. It illustrates that the Temple had no overall control in Judaea, and many of the factions in Palestine will have had their supporters abroad. The Christiani mentioned in the early first century Roman histories were not Christians, as Christians always like to claim, but messianic Jews of various persuasions, some of whom might indeed have been Christians, but not all by any means.

Now, some Jewish factions were entirely gone as political force after 70 CE, one of them being the cautious Sadducees. These were the ones rejecting Resurrection and strictly adhering to the Torah (first 5 books). The hot headed ones like the Jewish Sicari, the Zealots were no longer seen. IT is possible that they were not independent groups but merely the muscle/enfocement guys for other militants Messianic groups, with quite a bit of overlap in ideology.

Yes, I can buy this with no trouble. Like the IRA and Sinn Fein in Irish republicanism.

The Pharisees were crucial for the 132 renewed rebellion. Rabbis nursed and led that struggle. It is not clear why the gentile followers of Yeshu later on dumped so much criticism on them for rejecting Yeshu (which may not have happened at all; it is more likely, and the NT lends support to this, that it was the Sadducees that rejected Yeshus militancy). It seems that the split between Gentile Yeshu followrs and other militant groups is most illigocal.

Perhaps you are trying to BE too logical! It was a great confusion, but essentially the gentile followers have to be thought of separately from the Jewish ones. Until the Jewish War, the Jerusalem Church was presumably in charge of the embryonic Christians, but since most of them were hundreds of miles away in Asia Minor and even further off in Rome, the Jerusalem Church did not matter much to them. They were influenced by people much closer at hand. People exemplified by the New Testamant Paul of Tarsus, a man ready to bend with the wind, to do in Rome what the Romans do, and to be all things to all men. They were opportunists ready to use the collections for the Poor in Jerusalem for their own aggrandisement. It was to their advantage to keep their flocks out of involvement in the geopolitics of the time to keep the funds flowing. Whenever have Christian Churches been different except when the geopolitics was to their own advantage, of course? They knew that they were causing a division in Judaism that would lead to a new religion, and some of them like Paul seemed to be acting consciously to do it. That is why the Jerusalem Church saw him as a rogue, and their successors, the Ebionites, always thought so.

You have explained to me in some detail how that could have happened, and I appreciate that. But it is still silly that it should have happened, though it did. Then again, many illogical things happen in this world.

Too true! The silly thing is that the Rabbis helped it, but then again, it seems they had little choice.

Going back to the topic of the gentilisation of the church—it seems that the Pharisee/Yeshu messianics split may have been exagerated after 70 and even more so after 135 and then projected backwards in time. Yeshu himself was called a Rabbi in NT, a title that was usually (cant remember any exceptions right now) denoting a Pharisee. IT may be that the Pharisee and the Essene/Jewish christians were the same group, but the Essenes being a slightly more extreme version of it. Obviously as the church spread in the gentile world in the 40 year generation before the resumed fighting in 66 it became more mild. Those Jews in diaspora were more interested in spiritual salvation than in political independence like their Palestinian brethren. In this scenario, the Jerusalem/Palestinian branch of the church/Essenes would have been actually the trigger of the 66-70 war. The Pharisees would have been allies, but a little more distinct from them by now, though still under the same umbrella. When the Romans demolished Jerusalem the Jewish element as well as the link between the Hellenised Jews/gentile members and the Jerusalem headquarters would have been severed, as well as the link with Pharisees.

The Pharisees had undertaken a function of being teachers, but I cannot see other sects not having the same function, and anyone with the function of teaching a doctrine would have been called rabbis. The ultimate Pharisaic domination of Judaism has perhaps left the deliberate impression that only Pharisees were rabbis. Pharisees and Essenes were distinguished by Josephus so it seems unlikely that they could have been the same, though the real point is that they were all Jews, and when it came to consideration of who should be in charge in God’s country, just like today, there would be little disagreement—the Jews not the Romans. Essenes seemed not to like the Pharisaic idea of having a law to protect the law, which seemed, to them, like backsliding. The Pharisees thought it was an excellent way of achieving holiness by making it harder to break God’s law. The ranting against the law in the New Testament might be ranting against this building of a wall of the law around the law not ranting against the Law of Moses per se. It has been deliberately confused to suit the Hellenised Jews and gentile godfearers for whom the Law was a tribulation and a bore. When push came to shove, though, the sects would join together against the common enemy, the Romans, and we know from Josephus that Pharisees and Essenes both fought in the Jewish war, even though Essenes claimed to be pacific and Pharisees claimed to be practical. What of the Jerusalem Church? It was a Jewish sect and would have fought with the Jews in general. It explains why some Romans claimed both Jews and the Christians fought against them in the war. As you say, the Diaspora Christians can have had nothing to do with it, though they will have raised money beforehand, and the war will have shocked them. It will be rather like the Irish Americans who recently discovered that the IRA kill people after all those years of giving money to them. No one minds terrorists who are on your side! As you say, when the Jewish sects were banned, the Jerusalem Church was, but the wider church could then carry on in its own different direction, and, by the time of Bar Kosiba, it was not primarily Jewish.

Neatly summarised. Fear of Roman persecution would have taken hold and the leadership in diaspora would have sought self preservation by distancing themselves from some of the more militant doctrines, perhaps by reinterpreting them as allegorical and not literal calls to arms against Rome. (A lot of that survives in NT) I think that the final break occurred soon after 70. The 132 rebellion had little to do anymore with the church because when Aelia Capitolina was built on top of former Jerisalem, the church was allowed to inhabit there, thus showing the Romans did not consider them Jews.

Dead right.

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