Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus:Flavian Signature Edition

by Atwill, Joseph

The authors of the New Testament were well aware that the Messiah did not need be of the family of David. Jesus is quoted as stating exactly that:

  “How is it that the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David?

  “For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.’

  “David therefore himself calleth him [the Messiah] Lord; how then can he be his son?”

  Mark 12:35–37

  That Jesus stated that the Messiah need not be of the family of David should not be surprising, because Jesus himself was not of that family. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke trace completely different versions of Jesus’ “family of David” genealogy through his father Joseph, who, of course, was not his father at all – a fact well known to the authors of the Gospels because, according to them, he was born of the Holy Spirit and a virgin.

  Given the fact that the family of Aaron was considered messianic by many Jews of this era, and that the Maccabean dynasty was the royal Jewish family of this era and was of the house of Aaron, it is probable that Zealots would have seen the Maccabees as the family from which the “Messiah of Aaron” would appear. If this theory is correct, then the messianic movement of first-century Judea developed as a reaction against Rome, which had ousted the Maccabees and replaced them with their puppets, the family of Herod. The struggle of first-century Judea was akin to many in Medieval Europe, in that it involved an ousted royal family seeking to return to power, a foreign government propping up an unpopular king, and a dispute over religion.

  Jewish Zealots, hoping to restore the Maccabean family, focused on those parts of their scripture that they believed prophesied God’s sending a Messiah who would restore Israel to a sovereign Jewish state. The Book of Daniel, which does not specify which earthly family the Messiah was to come from, would have seemed especially apt because it foresees a “son of God” who helps to restore Israel after a series of tribulations. The Zealots applied these prophecies to the Maccabees.

  The Roman authors of Wars of the Jews, in order to transform the Maccabees from the messianic family of the Jews into the founding family of Christianity, created an “official” history, the Wars of the Jews, that contains an undifferentiated clump of individuals with Maccabean names. These individuals are described variously as robbers and false prophets. One of the purposes of Wars of the Jews, therefore, was to obscure the real history of the “five sons of Matthias.”

  Then, the Gospels graft Jesus and his four brothers, named Judas, Simon, Joseph and James, his father, named Joseph, and his mother, named Mary, as well as his followers, named Simon, Judas, John, Eleazar, and Matthew onto the history of the Maccabean family. By creating so many characters with Maccabean names, the authors of the New Testament and Wars of the Jews sought to fool the uneducated into believing that Christianity had originated from within the Maccabean family.

  This symbolic grafting of Christianity onto the messianic tradition of the Maccabees was mirrored by an effort to physically graft the Herodian family onto the Maccabees.225 Herod married Mariamme, a direct descendant of Matthias, the founder of the Maccabean dynasty. After she bore him four children, Herod executed her and her brother, thereby ensuring that only his Maccabean children would remain.

  Throughout his works Josephus is very careful to avoid making any mention of the Messiah. He uses the word only twice, both times in conjunction with Jesus, and never explains exactly what the term means. Josephus mentions numerous messianic figures without ever referring to them as a Messiah or a Christ, calling them instead false prophets, robbers, or charlatans. For example, Josephus uses these pejorative secular terms with a character named Theudas (c. 45 C.E.), no doubt the same Theudas mentioned in the New Testament, who promised to lead his followers over dryshod like Joshua before Jericho. In other words, he claimed to be able to “part” the water like Moses. Clearly he was an individual operating within a religious framework and not simply, as Josephus describes him, a robber.

  Josephus is reworking history again, this time excluding from it the messianic aspirants who had led revolts against Rome during the first century C.E. He uses the name-switching trick to transform Messiahs into robbers. He is again making it difficult to trace the lineage of the real messianic family. The only messianic lineage remaining after 70 C.E., according to the New Testament and Josephus, is that of Jesus, who, after endorsing Rome, left the planet.

  Even when Josephus applies a messianic prophecy to Vespasian he does not refer to the prophet directly, but rather to the vision of some “ambiguous oracle.” I would argue that Josephus’ avoidance of the specific prophecies that predict the Messiah, as well as of the term itself, is an example of how he deliberately blurs the history of Judaism so that Christianity can, in the confusion, claim the history as its own. In this case he has blurred the identity and intent of the Maccabean messianic aspirants of this era, leaving only the Messiah of Christianity visible.

  With his description of the death of Eleazar, a descendant of Judas the Galilean, at Masada in 73 C.E., Josephus hoped not only to wipe from history the truth of the family that had stirred such opposition to Rome, but actually to use its individuals and history as the “rock” upon which the new religion would be built. The transformation of Simon and John above is just part of a deception on a huge scale, encompassing not just the history of a family, but also of an entire religion, for more than a century.

  Christianity is the Sicarii movement of Judas the Galilean deliberately blurred and transformed. The Romans transformed the history of the cult of the militant Maccabean Messiah into the history of Christianity.

  Robert Eisenman has pointed out a number of overlaps between the Sicarii movement and Christianity during the second half of the first century C.E. Both were messianic movements, both were in Judea during the same period, and both have engaged in missionary activities. More important is Eisenman’s claim that the word “Sicarios” itself may be a “quasi-anagram and a possible pejorative in Greek for the word “Christian.”226 If true, this wordplay creating “Christian” from “Sicarii” would fit perfectly into the pattern of creating Christianity out of the Sicarii movement.

  Josephus describes numerous “Eleazars” in Wars of the Jews. I believe that attributes of these Eleazars, together with those of Lazarus in the New Testament, are intended to reveal the identity of the true Messiah. What is telling is that these Eleazars are so often described as the leaders of a messianic movement. Josephus begins this by stating that an Eleazar was responsible for the “true beginning” of the war.

  At the same time Eleazar, the son of Ananias the high priest, a very bold youth, who was at that time governor of the temple, persuaded those that officiated in the Divine service to receive no gift or sacrifice for any foreigner. And this was the true beginning of our war with the Romans; for they rejected the sacrifice of Caesar on this account …227

  In the passage below, notice that another Eleazar is described as the nephew of “Simon the tyrant,” who I have identified as the Apostle Simon. This supports the contention that a messianic family led the Jewish rebellion and the identities of those family members were transformed into the Apostles and Jesus.

  Of the seditious, those that had fought bravely in the former battles did the like now, as besides them did Eleazar, the brother’s son of Simon the tyrant.

  But when Titus perceived that his endeavors to spare a foreign temple turned to the damage of his soldiers, and then be killed, he gave order to set the gates on fire.228

  Josephus identifies a Simon and a Judas as the sons of “Jairus.” An Eleazar is also identified as a member of this family, the Eleazar who is a “tyrant” at Masada and a descendant of Judas the Galilean, and is also identified as a relative of Simon the tyrant (the Apostle Simon) above.

  A few there were of them who privately escaped to Masada, among whom was Eleazar, the son of Jairus, who was of kin to Manahem, and acted the part of a tyrant
at Masada afterward.229

  This establishes the family of Jairus as part of the family of Judas the Galilean, the true messianic family, and connects the Apostles to the family of Judas the Galilean, which connects the Apostles to the family of Jairus that is found in the New Testament.

  The hopelessly cross-connected genealogy described above is deliberately difficult to follow. The overly complex genealogies in the New Testament and Josephus serve both to prevent the uneducated from understanding them as parodies of the Jews, and to expand the general confusion over who the real members of the Maccabean family were—the confusion into which Christianity was inserted. While Josephus has purposely made the genealogies difficult to follow, they were constructed to reveal—to the alert reader—that the characters in the New Testament and Wars of the Jews are not only the same individuals but are all members of the same family.

  All the Eleazars in the works of Josephus and all the Lazaruses in the New Testament are lampoons of the real Eleazar, who was anointed as the Messiah by the Jewish rebels who defended Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The Eleazar who is “a son of Jairus” and a “descendant of Judas the Galilean,” and who was the leader of the Sicarii at Masada, is also part of this construct. Supporting this is the fact that in the New Testament, the daughter of someone also called Jairus, the “ruler” of a synagogue, is, like Lazarus, “raised from the dead” by Jesus. In the passage below, notice that Jesus brings with him only Simon, John, and James. As noted above, this “Apostle” Simon is in fact the Jewish tyrant Simon, who is described in Josephus as both a son of Jairus and the brother of a John and a James. The reader should appreciate just how small a circle we are dealing with here. It is a small circle because it is a single family.

  Knowing that the Apostles Jesus brings with him to witness the “resurrection” of Jairus’ daughter are her relatives, helps us to understand the real meaning of the passage. It is a lampoon of a belief in the resurrection of the dead, a belief held by the followers of the messianic family. It is possible that this lampoon was based on a real incident, in which the Romans discovered members of the messianic family hidden in the subterranean caverns beneath Jerusalem and Titus “restored” a young woman to life. Notice that in the passage Jesus instructs that the girl be given “something to eat,” good advice if the cause of the child’s illness is starvation.

  The daughter is another unnamed New Testament character. I suspect that Josephus intends for the “informed reader” to be able to guess her name, however. Since “Eleazar” is the son of Jairus and his sisters are named Mary and Martha, this suggests that the “resurrected” daughter of Jairus would have been yet another “Mary,” that is to say, a rebellious female.

  Josephus and the New Testament created a running joke about the many “starving Marys” during the war. The reader will recall the parallels I analyzed in Chapter 3, in which Josephus describes how famine “pierced through Mary’s very bowels”, and that the “Mary” in the New Testament who is Jesus’ mother was prophesied to one day be “pierced through.”

  Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name; and seeing him, he fell at his feet,

  and besought him, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”

  … And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James.

  … And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.”

  And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was.

  Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi”; which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.”

  And immediately the girl got up and walked (she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement.

  And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

  Mark 5:22-23, 37–43

  The passage from Josephus that describes Eleazar’s scourging and miraculous escape from crucifixion, which I analyzed in Chapter 6, is followed immediately in Wars of the Jews by Josephus’ description of the siege of Masada. In that story yet another Eleazar convinces the Sicarii defenders of Masada to commit suicide rather than risk being captured by the Romans.

  I regard Josephus’ famous passage describing the mass suicide of the Jewish defenders as complete fiction. Josephus was not interested in recording history but in creating effective propaganda. This is why, though there certainly were Sicarii who were besieged by the Romans at Masada, I do not believe that they slew themselves. I believe Josephus invented Eleazar’s speech exhorting the Jews to kill themselves to instill in the Jews and hoi polloi the belief that suicide is noble when one is confronted with Roman force majure. “Noble” suicides of Jewish rebels run throughout the works of Josephus and it was hoped, no doubt, that they would counteract the courageous custom of the Jewish defenders, who fought down to the last man, and thus cost the imperial family more of its troops. Notice that, as with the crucifixion of Jesus and the destruction of the temple, it is the Jews, not the Romans, who are again “responsible” for the slaughter at Masada.

  It is likewise for symbolic purposes that Josephus places the final Eleazar, the descendant of Judas the Galilean, in the final act of the Roman conquest of the messianic movement. It makes the conclusion of his fictitious history the completion of one era and the beginning of another—that is, the end of Maccabean Judaism and the beginning of Christianity.

  With the death of this final Eleazar, Josephus is bringing an end to the messianic family of Judas the Galilean and its messianic movement, the “fourth philosophy,” or the Sicarii.

  … There was but one only stronghold that was still in rebellion. This fortress was called Masada.

  It was one Eleazar, a potent man, and the commander of these Sicarii, that had seized upon it. He was a descendant from that Judas who had persuaded abundance of the Jews, as we have formerly related, not to submit to the taxation when Cyrenius was sent into Judea to make one …230

  Just as Eleazar’s death brings an end to his family and their “philosophy,” it also heralds the beginning of another family and another philosophy. Josephus concludes his description of the battle of Masada by claiming that, somehow, one group did survive the mass suicide.

  So these people died with this intention, that they would not leave so much as one soul among them all alive to be subject to the Romans.

  Yet was there an ancient woman, and another who was of kin to Eleazar, and superior to most women in prudence and learning, with five children, who had concealed themselves in caverns under ground, and had carried water thither for their drink, and were hidden there when the rest were intent upon the slaughter of one another.231

  As shown in the previous chapter, the date of the slaughter at Masada, the fifteenth of Nisan 73 C.E., is meant to be understood as the ending of Christianity’s forty years of “wandering” and thus the beginning of its dominion over the land of Israel and its replacement of Judaism. It is easy to see that within the symbolic landscape that Josephus has created, the “five children” mentioned in the passage above who are “kin to Eleazar,” are to be understood as the founders of the Christian dynasty.

  Josephus, who had begun Wars of the Jews with the description of the beginning of a dynasty, the Maccabees – “Accordingly Matthias … armed himself, together with his own family, which had five sons …”232 – ends his work with the beginning of another dynasty that starts with a woman who was kin to Eleazar and “five children.” Their names are not given. I am confident, however, that within the Flavian court they would have been known as Mary, her son Jesus, and his four brothers. They are the new dynasty, ready to enter the Promised Land that has been given to them by “God.”

  “Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mot
her called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?” 233

  Though Josephus symbolically converted the Maccabee family to Christianity at Masada, the Messianic rebellions centering on that family apparently continued until the defeat of Simon Bar Kokhba in 135 C.E. Bar Kokhba means “son of the star.” Simon was so nicknamed because of the “star” prophecy of Judaism that looks to a Messiah, the same prophecy that the New Testament claims for Jesus. On the coins minted by the Jewish rebels during their 132–135 C.E. revolt, only two individuals are celebrated. One coin is dedicated to Bar Kokhba and its inscription reads “Simeon, prince of Israel.” The other individual so commemorated is Eleazar. His coin reads “Eleazar the priest.”234 The coins present the same dichotomy that exists in the New Testament and Wars of the Jews—that is, between a military leader named Simon and a spiritual one named Eleazar. Rome’s struggle with “Simon” and “Eleazar” evidently continued even after the family’s “extinction” at Masada.

  Since Jesus’ ministry lampoons the Jews by drawing satiric parallels with Titus’ campaign through Judea, it seems logical that there would also be a lampoon of the twelve Apostles within Wars of the Jews. In this way the symmetry between the two works would be maintained. I assumed that the lampoon would involve a technique similar to the identity-switching used to transform the Jewish rebel leaders Simon and John into Christians. I discovered precisely such lampoons within Josephus’ description of the assaults by the Romans on the temple of Jerusalem. Within the passages, twelve Roman soldiers twice attempt to capture the wall that will lead to the temple.