Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus:Flavian Signature Edition
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CHAPTER 16
The Samaritan Woman and Other Parallels
The Gospel of John records an episode that does not appear in the other Gospels, the meeting with a Samaritan woman by a well. This account is a satire of yet another Roman battle recorded in Wars of the Jews. Though this battle took place before Titus began his campaign at the Sea of Galilee, the authors of the Gospels wished to make a comment about it. They therefore needed—in order to keep Jesus’ ministry and Titus’ campaign sequential—to identify it as having occurred before Jesus’ ministry began. They achieved this by having Jesus note that “my hour has not yet come” (John 7:6). In other words, that the event took place before Jesus had officially started his ministry in Judea.
At Mount Gerizzim, the Gospel of John provides an account in which Jesus describes himself as “living water.” As I have stated, Jesus’ self-designations are all darkly comic when juxtaposed with events from the war with Rome that occurred at the same location.
Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water?
“Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?’”
Jesus said to her, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again. But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst;
“the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”
“I have no husband,” she replied. “You rightly say that you have no husband,” said Jesus;
“for you have had five husbands, and the man you have at present is not your husband. You have spoken the truth in saying that.”
“Sir,” replied the woman, “I see that you are a Prophet.
“Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” 251
The New Testament symbolism that established Jesus as “living bread” was based on the famine that resulted from the siege of Jerusalem. The following passage from Josephus is the basis for the irony inherent in Jesus referring to himself as “living water,” which is based on the lack of water at Gerizzim during the Roman siege.
Nor did the Samaritans escape their share of misfortunes at this time; for they assembled themselves together upon the mountain called Gerizzim, which is with them a holy mountain, and there they remained;
… Vespasian therefore thought it best to prevent their motions, and to cut off the foundation of their attempts …
Now it happened that the Samaritans, who were now destitute of water, were inflamed with a violent heat (for it was summer time, and the multitude had not provided themselves with necessaries)
insomuch that some of them died that very day with heat. 252
The passage above from Josephus contains the only mention of Mount Gerizzim in Wars of the Jews. The only mention of Mount Gerizzim in the New Testament is in the passage I quoted where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman. It is also the only time Jesus refers to himself as “living water.” Because in the same passage Jesus foresees the dual destruction of Jerusalem and Gerizzim, a singular event in history, we can be sure of the linkage between this prophecy and the coming war with Rome. In other words, when Jesus says “the time is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the father …” he is clearly referring to the “time” of their mutual destruction. The only time when both cities were simultaneously destroyed was during the war with Rome. Therefore, we are logically on solid ground to understand that Jesus’ vision on Mount Gerizzim is related to the coming war with Rome.
If we accept the premise that Jesus’ prophecies regarding Gerizzim and Jerusalem are related to their coming destruction in the war with Rome, his claim to be “living water” for the inhabitants of Gerizzim can be understood as foreseeing their lack of water during the Roman siege. Such a self-designation by Jesus, in this context, may seem innocent enough. However, if we accept that Jesus’ description of himself as “living water” is related to the Samaritans dying of thirst on Mount Gerizzim, this verifies my premise regarding Jesus’ claim to be “living bread”—that is, that it relates to the practice of cannibalism during the siege of Jerusalem.
Consider how someone living in the Flavian court in 80 C.E. would have reacted to Jesus choosing Mount Gerizzim as the place to describe himself as “living water.” Clearly, such an individual, knowing that the Jewish rebels died of thirst on Mount Gerizzim, would have found Jesus’ self-designation “living water” on Gerizzim scornfully humorous.
In fact, it is self-evident that members of the Flavian court would have seen all of Christ’s self-designations—“fisher of men,” “living bread,” “living water,” “the stone,” and “the temple” as ironic because of the locations where he used them. It is unlikely that such a particular brand of humor would occur constantly by chance—and the fact that it does occur consistently supports the contention that the gospels were created to be understood, on one level, as a mockery of the Jews that specifically relates to Roman military victories in Judea.
I now want to broaden my analysis here and present a number of other parallels that I am not going to analyze in any detail. Some of these are as telling about the true relationship between Josephus and the New Testament as any shown in this work. Others are simply informational in nature. What these New Testament individuals and events share, is that their only other historical documentation comes from Josephus.
When one reads about early Christianity or first-century C.E. Judea, both the social background and the dating of events are derived solely from Josephus. Since the New Testament and the works of Josephus cover the same areas and time frames, there is nothing unusual in the fact that events and characters appear in both works.
However, if it can be shown that Josephus had a keen awareness of Christianity, this has implications. Much of the dark comedy the two works create is virtually self-evident. To demonstrate that Josephus was lampooning Christianity in the passage regarding the son of Mary whose flesh was eaten, for example, it is only necessary to prove that Josephus was aware of Christianity as he wrote the story.
During the time that Josephus was writing Wars of the Jews and Jewish Antiquities, the Flavian family was clearly involved with Christianity. This suggests that Josephus, both a historian and a theologian, would have been familiar with the religion and its symbols. In fact, the total overlap of individuals and events in the New Testament and the works of Josephus indicates that he must have known a great deal about Christianity.
The following is a list of individuals, groups, and events mentioned by both Josephus, and the Gospels or Book of Acts:
Simon the magician
The Egyptian false prophet
Ananias the high priest
Felix the procurator, and his wife Drusilla
Festus the procurator
Agrippa II and Berenice
The Widow’s sacrifice of a mite
King Herod
The slaughter of the innocents
Archelaus
The census of Quirinius
The fifteenth year of Tiberius
John the Baptist
Pharisees
Sadducees
James the Brother of Jesus
Judas the Galilean
The famine under Claudius
The Death of Herod Agrippa I
Jesus
In addition to these overlapping characters and events, the works share a number of conceptual parallels other than those I have previously presented. I want to briefly discuss some of these. The first actually predates Jesus’ ministry and Titus’ campaign. It consists of the parallel “slaughter of the innocents” that occurs in both the New Testament and Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews.
Though other scholars have noticed this parallel, I am not aware of anyone else having seen the unusual temporal correspondence between the two passages. The passages in the New Testament and Josephus dealing with the slaughter of innocents occur at the same time. Since both tales involve Herod this may seem unimportant, since both passages appear simply to reflect the same event. However, when this parallel is viewed in the context of the other New Testament/Josephus parallels, its real significance becomes clear.
From the New Testament:
… in the days of King Herod, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem,
asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”
When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him;
and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.
They told him, “In the Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet …”
… When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent for and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.
Matt. 2:1-5, 16
Josephus records a parallel event.
Now there was a certain sect of Jews who valued themselves highly for the skill they had in the ways of their fathers and who believed they best observed the laws favored by God—the sect called the Pharisees—by whom the women of the palace were guided. They were fully able to deal successfully with the king due to their prescience, but often fell into fighting and setting up obstacles to him.
For example, when all the Jewish people pledged their loyalty to Caesar and to the king’s government, these men, over six thousand of them, refused to swear; and when the king therefore imposed a fine on them, the wife of Pheroras [the king’s brother] paid it.
Now to repay this kindness of hers, being believed to have, by Divine inspiration, the foreknowledge of things to come, they foretold that God had decreed that Herod’s government would be taken from him and from his descendants, and that the kingdom would come to her and Pheroras and to their children.
These predictions, which did not escape detection by Salome [the king’s sister], were reported to the king, and also that they had subverted some others of the palace. So the king killed those of the Pharisees principally involved, as well as Bagoas the eunuch, and a certain Karos, who exceeded all of his peers in beauty and was his favorite boy. He also killed everyone of his own house who had allied themselves to the talk of the Pharisees.
Bagoas had been elated by their prediction that he would be hailed as the father and the benefactor of the one who would be their appointed king; for to this king would fall power over all things, and he would provide Bagoas with a marriage and the ability to sire children of his own line.253
The passage above from Josephus has clear parallels to the nativity story given in Luke and Matthew. Notice that in each we have wise men, who have the gift of prophecy, predicting that “the king who was to come” will end Herod’s reign. Herod’s reaction in both is to “slaughter the innocents.” Josephus describes the new king as someone who will have “the power over all things.” It is more important, however, that both stories involve a miraculous birth by someone normally assumed to be incapable of having children—in the New Testament it is a virgin, in Josephus a eunuch.
This parallel between the Virgin Mary and the eunuch Bagoas is the beginning of parallel sequences of events in the New Testament and Wars of the Jews. The authors switch a eunuch for a virgin to create a parallel “miraculous birth.” The story of Bagoas reveals the mindset of the authors of the New Testament in that it shows the contempt they had for those who believed in fables about virgin births.
Another interesting point is that this lampoon would indicate that the authors of the New Testament were indeed trying to create the impression that Mary was a “virgin,” that is, someone incapable of giving birth, a matter of some contention among scholars.
I wish to conclude my analysis with a brief comment on Revelation and the Pauline literature.
These works will be covered in depth in a subsequent book, but I want to assure readers that they are also Flavian documents, though not one produced by the circle that surrounded Titus Flavius. Like the Gospels, these works were designed with a veiled typological level that foresaw yet another “Flavian Christ” – Caesar Domitian. Therefore, as Titus had used the historian Josephus to link to the Gospels and create the typology that reveals that he was the “Jesus Christ” in John 21, so Domitian used his historian Suetonius to create a history of his life that linked to Revelation and the Pauline literature and thereby show that he, not his brother, was the final “Christ”. By winning a petty game of literary one-upmanship with his dead brother, Domitian sought to replace Titus as “Jesus” and make himself the “god” that Christians have worshipped for two thousand years.
Understanding Domitian’s typology begins by simply comparing the characteristics given to the “lord god” in Revelation with those that Suetonius recorded for Domitian. Such a comparison makes it clear that the “lord god” of Revelation was Domitian.
As an example of the analysis in my next work, I present the following list of the shared characteristics of the two “lord gods” below. In the list, Revelation’s characteristics of the “lord god” are given first, followed by the citation of Suetonius’ parallel descriptions of Domitian.
While some of the connections are simply historical facts that the authors expected their readers to be familiar with, and others are metaphorical or trivial, some of the parallels are so complex that they indicate a deliberate connection in and of themselves. Examples of these complex parallels are the “raised a ‘day’s wages’ by a third and increased grain and decreased wine” parallel (Revelation 6:6 and Suetonius, Domitian, 7), and the “gave a prophetess chance to repent then cast her on a bed of suffering and executed her lovers” parallel found in Revelation 2:20-22 and Suetonius, Domitian, 8. As is always the case, however, when attempting to determine if a designed pattern exists between works of literature, the parallels need to be judged as a collection. And when viewed as a collection, the parallels leave little doubt as to the identity of the “Lord God” of Revelation.
• Rode white horse (Suetonius, Domitian, 2)
• Inner circle were winged creatures with multiple eyes (Suetonius, Domitian, 3)
• Outer circle wore crowns (Suetonius, Domitian, 4)
• Congregation wore white (Suetonius, Domitian, 12)
• Both were called the “Lord God” (Suetonius, Domitian, 13)
• The “Lord God” as an archer (Suetonius, Domitian, 19)
• Throne room was encircled with a rainbow and was next to a sea (Suetonius, Domitian, 5&6)
• Raised a “day’s wages” of soldiers by a third at the point he increased grain and decreased wine (Revelation 6:6 and Suetonius, Domitian, 7 )
• Gave a prophetess the chance to repent then cast her on a bed of suffering and executed her and her lovers (Suetonius, Domitian, 8)
• Attacked sexual immorality (Suetonius, Domitian, 8)
• Opposed “those who claim they are Jews but are not” (Sue
tonius, Domitian, 12)
• Was the first and the last – the alpha and the omega – Domitian maintained that he was both the first of the Flavian Caesars and the last (Suetonius, Domitian, 13)
• Was the “morning star” (Suetonius, Domitian, 16)
• Had feet of bronze (Suetonius, Domitian, 18)
• Battled beast with two horns (Suetonius, Domitian, 19)
Among the historical parallels between the “Lord God” of Revelation and Domitian were the following:
• Was a “living god”