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

by Atwill, Joseph

  “Do not you therefore desert me, but persuade yourselves that God will be assisting to my onset.”46

  The Greek word that Josephus uses here, horme, means “onset” in English -- that is, either an assault or a starting point. From Titus’ perspective the moment can be seen as a starting point because it is his first battle in Galilee entirely under his command.

  To summarize, though there were thousands of other possible locations, both Jesus and Titus can be said to have had the onset of their narratives at Gennesareth, and in a manner that involved fishing for men—parallels that are unusual enough to at least permit questioning whether they were the product of coincidence. Further, the parallels are of the same nature as the typological relationship shown above between Jesus and Moses. The connections between Jesus and Titus are made up of parallel concepts, locations, and sequences.

  Moreover, these parallels must be viewed in conjunction with the historical parallels between Jesus and Titus. Jesus predicted that a Son of Man would come to Judea before the generation that would crucify him had passed away, encircle Jerusalem with a wall, and then destroy the temple, not leaving one stone atop another. Titus was the only individual in history that could be said to have fulfilled Jesus’ prophecies concerning the Son of Man. He came to Jerusalem before the generation that crucified Christ had passed away, encircled Jerusalem with a wall, and had the temple demolished.

  The overlaps between Jesus’ prophecies and Titus’ accomplishments make the “fishers of men” parallel more difficult to accept as random. And this is just the beginning of the uncanny parallels between the two men who called themselves the “son of God” and whose “ministries” began in Galilee and end in Jerusalem.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Myth for the World

  To understand the parallels between Jesus’ ministry and Titus’ campaign it was necessary to make a series of discoveries, with each new insight providing the capacity to make the next. This process began when I came across the following passage in Josephus’ Wars of the Jews and concluded that the parallels between the “son of Mary” described in it and the “son of Mary” in the Gospels were too precise to have been the product of circumstance.

  While readers can judge this claim for themselves, it should be noted that Josephus wrote during an age in which allegory was regarded as a science. Educated readers were expected to be able to understand another meaning within religious and historical literature. The Apostle Paul, for example, stated that passages from the Hebrew Scriptures were allegories that looked forward to Christ’s birth. I believe that in the following passage Josephus is using allegory to reveal something else about Jesus.

  The passage begins with Josephus telling his readers that he is about to describe an exceptionally grisly event caused by the famine that occurred during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Notice that he believes that his tale is “portentous to posterity”.

  But why do I describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates? It is horrible to speak of it, and incredible when heard.

  I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I might not seem to deliver what is so portentous to posterity, but that I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age … 47

  He then describes the event:

  There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary; her father was Eleazar, of the village Bethezob, which signifies the house of Hyssop. She was eminent for her family and her wealth, and had fled away to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude, and was with them besieged therein at this time.

  The other effects of this woman had been already seized upon, such I mean as she had brought with her out of Perea, and removed to the city. What she had treasured up besides, as also what food she had contrived to save, had been also carried off by the rapacious guards, who came every day running into her house for that purpose.

  This put the poor woman into a very great passion, and by the frequent reproaches and imprecations she cast at these rapacious villains, she had provoked them to anger against her;

  but none of them, either out of the indignation she had raised against herself, or out of commiseration of her case, would take away her life; and if she found any food, she perceived her labors were for others, and not for herself; and it was now become impossible for her any way to find any more food, while the famine pierced through her very bowels and marrow, when also her passion was fired to a degree beyond the famine itself; nor did she consult with any thing but with her passion and the necessity she was in. She then attempted a most unnatural thing;

  and snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, “O thou miserable infant! for whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and this sedition?

  “As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our lives, we must be slaves. This famine also will destroy us, even before that slavery comes upon us. Yet are these seditious rogues more terrible than both the other.

  “Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets, and a myth to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews.”

  As soon as she had said this, she slew her son, and then roasted him, and ate the one half of him, and kept the other half by her concealed.

  Upon this the seditious came in presently, and smelling the horrid scent of this food, they threatened her that they would cut her throat immediately if she did not show them what food she had gotten ready. She replied that she had saved a very fine portion of it for them, and withal uncovered what was left of her son.

  Hereupon they were seized with a horror and amazement of mind, and stood astonished at the sight, when she said to them, “This is mine own son, and what hath been done was mine own doing! Come, eat of this food; for I have eaten of it myself!

  “Do not you pretend to be either more tender than a woman, or more compassionate than a mother; but if you be so scrupulous, and do abominate this my sacrifice, as I have eaten the one half, let the rest be reserved for me also.”

  After which those men went out trembling, being never so much afrighted at any thing as they were at this, and with some difficulty they left the rest of that meat to the mother. 48

  While the passage may have been based on an actual event, Josephus seems to have invented the dialogue. There were no witnesses to the speech Mary gave before she killed her son. It is, of course, unlikely that a mother would have slain and eaten her son in the presence of others.

  To see the satire that lies within this passage one must first understand the phrase “Bethezob, which signifies the House of Hyssop.”

  Beth is the Hebrew word for “house” and Ezob is the Hebrew word for “hyssop,” hyssop being the plant that Moses commanded the Israelites to use when marking their houses with the blood of the sacrificed Passover lamb. This mark identified the houses that the Angel of Death would “pass over.”

  Then Moses called on the elders of Israel and said to them, “Pick out and take lambs for yourselves according to your families, and kill the Passover lamb.

  “And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin …” 49

  The phrase House of Hyssop, therefore, brings to mind the first Passover sacrifice. Another statement in this passage can also be seen as relating to the Passover sacrifice. After slaying her son, the woman roasts the body. In God’s instructions to Moses as to how to prepare the Passover sacrifice, God ordered the following:

  “Do not eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted in fire—its head with its legs and its entrails.” 50

  Josephus’ use of the word “splanchon” also builds on this theme—“splanchon” being the Greek word that was used to describe those parts of a sacrificed animal reserved to be eaten by sacrificers at the begin
ning of their feast. Yet another detail recorded by Josephus also links this passage to the New Testament. Josephus gives the name of Mary’s father as Eleazar, which in Greek is Lazarus, the name of the individual whom Jesus raised from the dead.

  Thus, in the passage from Wars of the Jews we are analyzing, Mary’s son can be seen as a symbolic Passover lamb. The “human Passover lamb” is established using the same method used by the author of the Gospel of John, who also denoted the symbolic Passover lamb by combining a reference to hyssop with an instruction to Moses about preparing the Passover lamb—that not one of its bones is to be broken in preparing it.

  Now a vessel full of sour wine was sitting there; and they filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on hyssop and put it to his mouth.

  So when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” And bowing his head, He gave up his spirit …

  Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with him.

  But when they came to Jesus and saw him already dead, they did not break His legs.

  John 19:29-30, 32-33

  Identifying Jesus with the symbolic Passover lamb at his crucifixion continued a theme begun at the Passover supper where Jesus asked the disciples to eat of his flesh.

  Also during the meal He took a Passover biscuit, blessed it, and broke it. He then gave it to them, saying, “Take this, it is my body.”

  Mark 14:22

  There is then a clear parallel between the New Testament’s son of Mary who asks that his body be eaten, and the “son of Mary” Josephus described who actually has his flesh eaten.

  Josephus connects the Mary described in his passage to the Mary in the New Testament with another of the details he records. He describes the famine—as Whiston translates it above—as having “pierced through Mary’s very bowels.” In the New Testament, being pierced through is predicted for only one person, Jesus’ mother Mary:

  Then Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary His mother, “Behold this child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which will be spoken against

  (yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also; that the reasoning in many hearts may be revealed.)”

  Luke 2:34-35

  The fact that the New Testament’s Mary and the Mary in Wars of the Jews both had their heart pierced has, to my knowledge, never been noticed by another scholar. The reason for the oversight is important. Scholars have not noticed the parallel between the two Marys because it is more conceptual than linguistic. In the New Testament, the Greek words making up the phrase are dierchomai psuche while in Wars of the Jews they are dia splanchon. Though the words that indicate the piercing through, dia51 and dierchomai,52 are linguistically related (the verb dierchomai having the preposition dia as part of its stem), the words used to describe the part of Mary that was to be pierced through—psuche and splanchon—are different.

  Psuche,53 the word translated in the New Testament above as “soul,” can also mean “heart,” or “the seat of emotions.” Splanchon, the Greek word that Josephus uses to describe the part of Mary that was pierced through, is translated above as “bowels,” but is in fact a synonym for psuche, and can mean either “inward parts,” especially the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys, or, like psuche, it can mean “the seat of the emotions.” Scholars have not seen this conceptual parallel between the two Marys simply because it was created using different words, even though the words mean the same thing.

  In other words, if a prophet predicted that “next week a dog will bite a mailman” and a historian recorded that during that week “a cur sank its teeth into a letter carrier” the prophecy, in fact, came to pass even though the prophet and the historian used different words to describe the event. The concept the prophet predicted was the same as the one the historian recorded.

  The “fulfilled prophecy” of the “bitten postman” cannot be seen through an analysis of the individual words that the historian and the prophet used. Likewise, the satirical system that exists between the New Testament and Wars of the Jews cannot be seen by analyzing their individual words and nuances of grammar. The system is made up of parallel concepts, not parallel words.

  Notice also that the parallel “heart piercings” of the two Marys are prophetically logical. This is to say that the Mary in the New Testament is the one predicted to have her heart “pierced through” in the future, and the Mary in Wars of the Jews, which occurred later, is the one who fulfilled this prophecy. If the New Testament had stated that Mary’s heart had been pierced through, then the logic of this prophecy would have been contradicted. And notice also that the statement in the New Testament, though innocuous, is a prophecy. One reason that the satiric level of the New Testament has remained unseen is because scholars have failed to recognize the many seemingly innocuous New Testament prophecies that are fulfilled within Wars of the Jews.

  To summarize, within this short passage Josephus has used a number of concepts and names that are parallel to those associated with the New Testament’s symbolic Passover lamb. These are a mother named Mary; the fact that this Mary was pierced through the heart; a son of Mary; hyssop; a son who is a sacrifice; a son whose flesh is eaten; a son who is to become a “byword to the world”; one of Moses’ instructions regarding the Passover lamb; an individual named Lazarus (Eleazar); and Jerusalem as the location of the incident. It is unlikely that there is another passage in all of literature that contains, by chance, as many as half the number of parallels with a concept as singular as Christianity’s Passover lamb. When I first recognized these parallels I felt that the simplest explanation for such an improbable grouping was that it had been deliberately created. Therefore, the passage was a lampoon of Jesus.

  To argue against this proposition one must accept this idea that Josephus unknowingly recorded these parallels in such detail within a passage of less than two pages. However, because Josephus wrote Wars of the Jews while living in the Flavian court, a place where Christianity flourished, and was one of the few historians to have recorded Jesus’ existence, he would seem to be among the authors least likely to have recorded a satire of Christ accidentally.

  For example, if the passage in question had occurred within a work by Tolstoy, there would be virtually complete agreement that it was a deliberate satire. And notice that when viewed from such a perspective the passage would certainly be seen as darkly comical, the irony being self-evident. The satire suggests that the Messiah who instructed his followers to symbolically “eat of my flesh” was actually eaten by his mother.

  If Josephus was lampooning Jesus, what was his purpose? An obvious explanation is that he wrote the passage to amuse a group by whom the grim joke would be understood. In other words, he would have created it to be enjoyed by the Flavians and their inner circle.

  This conclusion is especially plausible in light of the fact that there were individuals within the Flavian court who were aware of Christianity around the time Josephus published Wars of the Jews. Further, there were four colleges in Rome that were responsible for overseeing the religions within the empire. Because religion was an important tool of the state, these colleges had considerable political power. From Augustus on, the emperor was a member of all four colleges, one of which, the Quindecimviri Sacris Faciundis, was responsible for the regulation of foreign cults in Rome. All the Flavian emperors were members of this college and would have studied Christianity as a foreign cult during this era.

  Moreover, the most obvious reason to believe that the Flavians were familiar with Christianity is that so much of the New Testament is related to the family. The Flavians brought about the fulfillment of all of Jesus’ doomsday prophecies—the destruction of the temple, the encircling of Jerusalem with a wall, the towns of Galilee being brought low, and the destruction of what Jesus describes as the “wicked generation.” Titus’ mistress, Bernice, and Tiberius Alexander, his chief of staff during the siege of Jerusalem, are actually named within th
e New Testament. A cult whose canon prophesied the accomplishments of the Flavians, named individuals within its inner circle, and actually had converts within the imperial family, would certainly have been scrutinized during an era when the regulation of religion was so important that the emperor himself was involved with it.

  Titus is known to have reviewed Wars of the Jews. As noted above, Josephus wrote that Titus so wished that “the knowledge of these affairs should be taken from these books alone, that he affixed his own signature to them.” Thus, Titus certainly had read the passage describing the Mary who ate her son and, considering the traditions connecting his family to Christianity, could well have understood its ironic parallels with the mother of Jesus. Again, though Jesus seems to be speaking symbolically when he speaks of having his flesh eaten as a Passover sacrifice, in Josephus’ history we see a literal interpretation of Jesus’ words, which renders them blackly comic.

  If the passage was a satire of Jesus then a number of statements Josephus makes within it can be seen as double entendres. The reader need only read these statements from the perspective that the Flavians had invented Christianity, and their satirical meaning will become obvious. Some of these are found in Josephus’ narration:

  It is horrible to speak of it, and incredible when heard …