The passage above from Wars of the Jews describing the magical root “Baaras” is immediately followed by a passage regarding yet another “Eleazar” from an “eminent” family. This “Eleazar” is a transparent parallel to Jesus, as he survives both a scourging of his naked flesh and a crucifixion.
… the Romans when they came upon the others’ sallies against their banks, they foresaw their coming, and were upon their guard when they received them;
But the conclusion of this siege did not depend upon these bickerings; but a certain surprising accident, relating to what was done in this siege, forced the Jews to surrender the citadel.
There was a certain young man among the besieged, of great boldness, and very active of his hand, his name was Eleazar;
he greatly signalized himself in those sallies, and encouraged the Jews to go out in great numbers, in order to hinder the raising of the banks, and did the Romans a vast deal of mischief when they came to fighting; he so managed matters, that those who sallied out made their attacks easily, and returned back without danger, and this by still bringing up the rear himself.
Now it happened that, on a certain time, when the fight was over, and both sides were parted, and retired home, he, in way of contempt of the enemy, and thinking that none of them would begin the fight again at that time, staid without the gates, and talked with those that were upon the wall, and his mind was wholly intent upon what they said.
Now a certain person belonging to the Roman camp, whose name was Rufus, by birth an Egyptian, ran upon him suddenly, when nobody expected such a thing, and carried him off, with his armor itself; while, in the mean time, those that saw it from the wall were under such an amazement, that Rufus prevented their assistance, and carried Eleazar to the Roman camp.
So the general of the Romans ordered that he should be taken up naked, set before the city to be seen, and sorely whipped before their eyes. Upon this sad accident that befell the young man, the Jews were terribly confounded, and the city, with one voice, sorely lamented him, and the mourning proved greater than could well be supposed upon the calamity of a single person.95
The following part of the passage is notable as it is a satirical description of the rationale that led to the creation of Christianity. The Romans, seeing the love that the Jewish rebels held for their Messiah, decided to use this attachment to their own advantage. That is, they decided to create a Roman Messiah. This passage is directly linked to the New Testament’s story of Jesus’ capture on the Mount of Olives.
When Bassus perceived that, he began to think of using a stratagem against the enemy, and was desirous to aggravate their grief, in order to prevail with them to surrender the city for the preservation of that man. Nor did he fail of his hope;
for he commanded them to set up a cross, as if he were just going to hang Eleazar upon it immediately; the sight of this occasioned a sore grief among those that were in the citadel, and they groaned vehemently, and cried out that they could not bear to see him thus destroyed.
Whereupon Eleazar besought them not to disregard him, now he was going to suffer a most miserable death, and exhorted them to save themselves, by yielding to the Roman power and good fortune, since they now conquered all other people.
These men were greatly moved with what he said, there being also many within the city that interceded for him, because he was of an eminent and very numerous family;
so they now yielded to their passion of commiseration, contrary to their usual custom. Accordingly, they sent out immediately certain messengers, and treated with the Romans, in order to arrange a surrender of the citadel to them, and desired that they might be permitted to go away, and take Eleazar along with them.
Then did the Romans and their general accept of these terms …96
Another linking of Jesus and Eleazar (Lazarus) occurs in the New Testament. After describing Lazarus’ resurrection, the Gospel of John states that the high priests plotted against him. This parallel is transparent as it occurs within the same passage where the high priests plot against Jesus.
But the High Priests plotted to put Lazarus to death also.97
So Wars of the Jews and the New Testament both describe characters named “Eleazar” who have the Jesus-like attributes of having being born in Galilee, having the power to dispel demons, having been plotted against by the High Priests, having been scourged, having survived a crucifixion, and having risen from the dead. These “Eleazars” are the only individuals within these works with so many of Jesus’ attributes.
However, to learn that “Eleazar” was the real Christ, the authors of Josephus and the New Testament required the reader to first solve the following two puzzles. The first puzzle reveals that Eleazar was captured on the Mount of Olives. To solve the puzzle one must first recognize that the following passage, in which Josephus gives his version of a capture on the Mount of Olives, is parallel to the passage above that described an Eleazar who was scourged and escaped death from crucifixion.
The following is the complete text of Josephus’ Mount of Olives capture:
Now after one day had been interposed since the Romans ascended the breach, many of the seditious were so pressed by the famine, upon the present failure of their ravages, that they got together, and made an attack on those Roman guards that were upon the Mount of Olives …
The Romans were apprised of their coming to attack them beforehand, and, running together from the neighboring camps on the sudden, prevented them from getting over their fortification …
… and one whose name was Pedanius, belonging to a party of horsemen, when the Jews were already beaten and forced down into the valley together, spurred his horse on their flank with great vehemence, and caught up a certain young man belonging to the enemy by his ankle, as he was running away;
the man was, however, of a robust body, and in his armor; so low did Pedanius bend himself downward from his horse, even as he was galloping away, and so great was the strength of his right hand, and of the rest of his body, as also such skill had he in horsemanship.
So this man seized upon that his prey, as upon a precious treasure, and carried him as his captive to Caesar; whereupon Titus admired the man that had seized the other for his great strength, and ordered the man that was caught to be punished [with death] for his attempt against the Roman wall. 98
This incident took place on the Mount of Olives, the location the New Testament gives for Jesus’ capture. As I had seen that the New Testament and Wars of the Jews often shared conceptually parallel events at the same locations, I attempted to analyze the two passages to determine if they might also be related.
I first noticed that there is a parallel between the two Mount of Olive captures in terms of the relative time when they occur. The New Testament’s capture takes place immediately before Jesus, the symbolic temple of the New Testament, is destroyed. The Mount of Olives capture in Wars of the Jews likewise takes place immediately before the destruction of the temple. However, whereas the identity of the man who was captured on the Mount of Olives in the New Testament is well known, in Josephus’ version the captured individual is described only as a “certain young man.”
I wondered if it might be possible, as I had with the demoniacs of Gadara, to learn the name of this “certain young man.” It was during the effort to determine this, that the way in which the New Testament and Wars of the Jews use parallelism to identify their unnamed characters finally became clear to me.
This use of parallelism came directly from the Hebrew Bible and, in a sense, its use in the New Testament was to be expected. As the authors of the New Testament borrowed concepts such as the Exodus, the Passover lamb, and the Messiah, it was logical for them to copy its use of intertextual parallels as well.
The Hebrew Bible was structured as an organic whole and can be thought of as “a series of concentric circles with some interlocking rings,” as Freedman puts it.99 For instance, the Torah and the book of Joshua (which together form the Hexateuch) have an o
verall mirror-image literary structure, in which the main themes of books from Genesis up to Exodus 33 are then mirrored in parallel structures in the books from Exodus 34 to Joshua 24.
The creators of the Hebrew Bible also used structural parallels at a micro level. For instance, in a technique known as pedimental composition,100 two passages that contain many parallels are used to provide a literary “frame” by sandwiching a third central passage between them—for example, Leviticus 18 and 20 provide such a “frame” for the central passage in Leviticus 19. The consequence of these traditional literary techniques is that the Jewish reader does not read a text in what might be thought of as a rational, straightforward, and linear manner. On the contrary, the Jewish reading is intertextual. The use of similar phrasing, formulas, places, clothing, and so on are used to create layers of associative meaning, as contrasts, and to provide continuity and color. In some cases the authors create what Robert Alter has called “type scenes”101—so, for example, Abraham’s servant meeting a young woman by a well is then later paralleled by Moses meeting a young woman by a well, and the reader is invited to contemplate the similarities, differences, and continuities.
In Hebrew literature, these typological relationships are a source of open-ended speculation and debate. To the Romans this perhaps seemed part of the barbarous mysticism that provoked the Jewish Zealots to revolt. So they “improved” the nature of their parallels in the New Testament, from the open-ended types found within the Hebrew canon to ones that were very precise in their logical and chronological relationships, and in the identities that they reveal.
The authors of the Gospels were very aware of the typology in Hebraic literature and were, in effect, showing that they were able to produce a more perfect, more complex form of it. Moreover, there was a profound irony in the authors’ requiring the Gospels and Wars of the Jews to be read in the manner of Judaic literature in order to learn that they had created a false Judaism.
The insight, that Josephus was using typological parallels, occurred when I noticed that Josephus’ tale regarding the capture of the unnamed “certain young man” on the Mount of Olives is parallel to another passage within Wars of the Jews, the passage above, in which Eleazar is whipped and escapes crucifixion. Josephus identified the two stories as being parallel by having each passage tell the same story, their only differences being in location and that the “certain young man” is unnamed in the Mount of Olives version.
For clarification, I present the following list of the parallels between the two passages:
• In each, besieged Jews are encircled by a wall.
• In each, the Jews attack the siege wall.
• In each case the Romans foresee the attack.
• In each, a Jew is literally carried away by a single Roman in a manner that is physically impossible.
• In each, the man who is carried away is in his armor.
Within the works of Josephus there are thousands of passages. These are the only two that share these parallel characteristics. Josephus thus notified the “perceptive reader,” that is, the reader with a good memory, that the two stories are parallel. Further, there is a simple point of logic that the authors require the reader to apprehend, this being that since the passages are parallel, the unnamed “certain young man” who is carried away in one must have the same name as the “certain young man” named Eleazar who has the same experience in the other.
The passages are also the start of a satiric theme that Josephus and the New Testament develop regarding the Messiah who was captured on the Mount of Olives. This theme, which I refer to as the “root and branch,” begins with the last sentence in the passage above from Wars of the Jews. Notice that the translator (William Whiston) places brackets around the words that he uses to describe the punishment of the unnamed “certain young man” captured on the Mount of Olives “(with death).”
Whiston used this device to notify the reader that he was deliberately mistranslating the Greek words Josephus wrote in order to render what seemed a more coherent reading. The Greek words he is translating as [with death], kolasai keleusas, are translated literally as “commanded to be pruned.” “Pruned” is, of course, a word that describes a gardening activity. Thus, Titus did not order the “certain young man” to be put to “death,” as Whiston’s translation reads, but to be “pruned,” a word used quite logically on the Mount of Olives. “Kolasai” was used by the Greek naturalist Theophratus in the fourth century B.C.E. to describe the pruning necessary to cultivate wild plants. His work on plants was often referenced by individuals from Titus’ era such as Pliny and Seneca, and specifically covered the process by which wild olive trees could be transformed into cultivated ones.102 Theophratus was the scientific ancestor of Pedanius Dioscorides, the Roman scientist and physician who accompanied Vespasian and Titus to Judea and was a key part of the theme of dark comedy concerning the “root and branch.”
This use of the word “pruned” to describe the fate of the “certain young man” is part of a broad satirical theme within the New Testament. The leaders of the Jewish rebellion were used as the historical “tree” onto which Christianity was “grafted.” Paul’s description of Christianity being grafted onto Judaism below is part of this “root and branch” theme. Notice that Paul states that it is an olive tree that is to be grafted onto – the olive tree being, of course, the “tree” that would be “pruned” on the Mount of Olives.
For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee.
Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.
And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again.
For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?
For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.
Rom. 11:21–25
Josephus continued with this vegetive theme by making a bleak joke regarding “pressing.” Notice that at the beginning of his description of a capture on the Mount of Olives above, Josephus states that the Jews were “pressed” by famine. This use of the word “press” by Josephus satirically links his passage describing a Mount of Olive capture with the New Testament’s version of a Mount of Olives capture. The garden Jesus wanders into while on the Mount of Olives is called Gethsemane, an Aramaic word that is usually translated as “olive press.” However, as Klausner points out, the word is “difficult” and may also be related to wine. Beth-Shemanaya is a name used in the Talmud to describe a “hall of wine and oil.”103
And he said unto them, “This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.
“Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives.
And they came to a place that was named Gethsemane: and he saith to his disciples, “Sit ye here, while I shall pray.”
Mark 14:24-26, 32
We have shown that Jesus’ calling his flesh “bread” is satirically related to the cannibalism that the besieged Jewish rebels engaged in. Likewise, the description of Jesus’ passion in the garden of Gethsemane is a lampoon of his “giving of his blood,” which he described as “wine.”
Saying, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”
And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops o
f blood falling down to the ground.
Luke 22:42–44
Naming the garden “olive press” where Jesus’ sweat is compared to drops of blood, is also part of the satiric theme. However, the passage in the Gospel of Luke that contains the related darkly humorous image, that of the drops of blood that spill from Jesus being like the liquid squeezed from grapes or olives in a press, does not refer to the name of the garden. This must be gleaned from reading versions of the Mount of Olives tale in the other Gospels, in which the name of the garden is Gethsemane.
The derisive comedy of the four Gospels work together, regarding Jesus’ passion at Gethsemane, to show that the Gospels are not four separate testimonies of Jesus, but rather a unified piece of literature with nothing inadvertent in it. All of their seemingly irrelevant or contradictory details have a purpose at the satiric level. In this instance, the authors have kept the black comedy from being too obvious by placing the word for a wine or olive press, Gethsemane, into one Gospel’s version of the story and the image of blood dropping from Jesus in another. Josephus then expands the dark comic theme in Wars of the Jews by placing a play on the word “press” in that Mount of Olives story.
Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus:Flavian Signature Edition Page 19
