Christianity is Older Than We Think

So Aretas united the forces of the Arabians and of the Jews together, and pressed on the siege vigorously. As this happened at the time when the feast of unleavened bread was celebrated, which we call the passover, the principal men among the Jews left the country, and fled into Egypt. Now there was one, whose name was Onias, a righteous [Zaddik] man be was, and beloved of God, who, in a certain drought, had prayed to God to put an end to the intense heat, and whose prayers God had heard, and had sent them rain. This man had hid himself, because he saw that this sedition would last a great while. However, they brought him to the Jewish camp, and desired, that as by his prayers he had once put an end to the drought, so he would in like manner make imprecations on Aristobulus and those of his faction. And when, upon his refusal, and the excuses that he made, he was still by the multitude compelled to speak, he stood up in the midst of them, and said, "O God, the King of the whole world! since those that stand now with me are thy people, and those that are besieged are also thy priests, I beseech thee, that thou wilt neither hearken to the prayers of those against these, nor bring to effect what these pray against those." Whereupon such wicked Jews as stood about him, as soon as he had made this prayer, stoned him to death.

During his life on earth, he offered up prayer and entreaty, with loud cries and with tears, to the one who had the power to save him from death, and, winning a hearing by his reverence, he learnt obedience, Son though he was, through his sufferings; when he had been perfected, he became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation and was acclaimed by God with the title of high priest of the order of Melchizedek. -Hebrews, 5:7-10

Do not be led astray by all sorts of strange doctrines: it is better to rely on grace for inner strength than on food, which has done no good to those who concentrate on it. We have our own altar from which those who serve the Tent have no right to eat. The bodies of the animals whose blood is taken into the sanctuary by the high priest for the rite of expiation are burnt outside the camp, and so Jesus too suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people with his own blood. -Hebrews 13:9-11

The scene described in Hebrews 5:7-10 is usually interpreted as a reference to the Garden of Gethsemane. Although the description from this verse does provide an adequate description of the passion of the Gethsemane scene, it does seem a little out of place considering the great number of gospel traditions that one could choose from if the writer knew the entire biography of the historical Jesus but had decided in advance to only write one or two things about him. Given that this is one of the very few times that Jesus is given a historical context in an epistle, it does not meet the expectations of what we would think a generic description of what the gospel Jesus should be, such as healing the sick, telling parables to crowds, warning people about the scribes and Pharisees or about the coming apocalypse. In contrast to Jesus, the description fits in perfectly with the generic description provided by Josephus about Honi the Circle Drawer, as this was the typical activity of a Circle Drawer, praying to God to save himself and his people from drought by providing rain.

In the final Passion story that concludes the first three gospels, Jesus rides triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey surrounded by a crowd of people put their clothes and branches out for the donkey to walk on. In contrast to the Synoptic tradition, the Gospel of John instead says that he went to Jerusalem “not publicly, but in secret” (7:10), something very out of place for the aggressive personality and untouchable physical nature of his being as displayed in the fourth gospel, but well-suited to the description from Josephus of Honi.

John 13:2-7 also has a bizarre setup where it starts talking about how the devil had caused Judas Iscariot, son of Simon, to betray Jesus, but then digresses into a story of about Jesus washing Peter’s feet. The setup verse is actually the only time Judas’ father is ever identified by name, and a strange place to bringing up that seemingly unrelated fact given that the story that proceeds after the setup is actually about a disciple with the same name as his father. Jesus offers to wash the feet of “Simon Peter”, saying “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

John 13:2-7 also appears to be somewhat like the story of the Good Samaritan in that it addresses the superiority of helping those in need over that of ritual purity such as baptism. Peter misunderstands the water as a baptismal rite and so asks that if Jesus was going to wash him then wash all of him, but instead uses it as an example of how followers of Jesus should instead be following the more spiritual obligation of helping one another by washing each other’s feet. Yet aside from the main thrust of the story, there is yet another strange tangent when Jesus alludes to knowing “who was going to betray” him. Given the context of the pericope, the implication would seem to be that the traitor was the same person whose feet he had just washed. The final gospel editor, possibly Irenaeus or a predecessor of his, assures the reader that Jesus was talking about Judas, not Simon, but it leaves open the question of why Judas is mentioned in this episode at all.

The best explanation is that the story was originally about Honi washing the feet of Simeon ben Shetach shortly before Simeon betrayed Honi and had him executed. That would explain the need to give Judas the epithet “son of Simon” as a way to put down the objections of anyone who knew the original version of the story. It would then be easy to say that the editors of the other version of John’s gospel were just confused because Judas’ father was named Simeon. Since Hyrcanus II was on the side of the Pharisees, Simeon Ben Stetah would probably had been involved in Honi’s death as well. Both Honi and Yeshu are portrayed as being threatened with a ban from Simeon Ben Shetach, but only in the Toledot does he go through with it. In fact, if we work under the assumption that the original readers of the gospels knew the name Simon as an enemy or traitor of Yeshu, then the fact that Jesus named the fictional disciple Simon after the nonfictional apostle Cephas may have been meant to be an insulting historical correlation. This would insinuate that like Simon ben Shetach, Cephas sold out to the “Judaizers” just as the Epistle to the Galatians and the Toledot describe.

Josephus does not directly identify this Onias as a descendent of the earlier Onias priestly family, but the reference to his “righteousness” hints at a Zadokite connection. Although the Talmud and Toledot both agree that Yeshu was stoned to death and hung on Passover, they do contradict themselves on where he was at the time. The Talmud says that he was hung in the city of Lud, or Lydda, near Tel Aviv. The Toledot puts his death in Jerusalem. Another chronological problem is that Josephus dates the death of Honi after the death of Salome whereas the Toledot satirically portrays the queen as being tricked by the disappearance of Yeshu’s body. The most likely explanation for this is that the epilogue was expanded by one of the Jewish satirists and was not part of the original proto-gospel that the Toledot was lampooning.

The Talmud does not relate any story about Honi being stoned to death for refusing to curse the high priest, but there is a story that implies he died under a tree. Honi meets a man planting a carob tree who tells him it took 70 years to grow the tree and that even though he would not reap the benefit of it, he would do it for his children just as his forefathers had done it for him. After Honi was stoned to death, he would have been hung on a tree as part of Biblical law, and so Honi falling asleep alongside the carob tree must be symbolic of that death. Although most translations of the Toledot Yeshu describe Yeshu being hung on an impossibly large cabbage stalk, the Strassburg Manuscript version of the Toledot instead says that he was hung on a carob tree. An alternative translation of Mark 1:6 has John the Baptist eating carobs called “locust beans”, and although most scholars generally believe this appendium was invented to align John the Baptist with later sectarian vegetarian sensibilities, carob pods are also mentioned in the story of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke.

The Talmud says that Honi fell asleep under the carob tree while contemplating Psalm 126: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed”. The Psalm referred to the 70 years of captivity in Babylon and the dream-like state of being free and returning to Zion. Honi himself then slept 70 years and woke up to find the carob tree fully grown and the man’s grandson living nearby. Realizing how long it had been since he slept, he went to the study hall and heard the sages there saying “The laws are as clear as they were in the days of Honi. For when Honi entered the beit madrash [study hall], any question that the sages had, he would solve.” But when Honi announced who he was, the sages didn’t believe him. Honi was so distraught that he was unrecognizable that he asked God to give him death. The conclusion of the story implies that the sages did not recognize Honi but instead just erected a rose-colored ideal of him that most likely resembled themselves. In reality, the laws were probably never clear because Honi was not an interpreter of Torah Law. He was a charismatic rainmaker. The “Rip Van Winkle” element of the story has parallels in later Christian stories and Qu'ran such as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The story perhaps has more of an unwitting point than even its authors understood as even 2,000 years later, most of the followers of Jesus and the modern “sages” of today are unable to recognize the original Messiah that fostered the inspiration for the gospel myth.

Pompey conquered Jerusalem for Hyrcanus II but then committed a sacrilege by entering the sacred inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies. Josephus looked on the bright side and praised Pompey for not stealing the treasures within, leaving it for Caesar’s ally Crassus to later pilfer. Pompey restored the high priesthood to Hyrcanus II and allowed them to cleanse the temple and make offerings. The Romans then took control over the kingdom and knocked the walls of Jerusalem down. After Caesar and Pompey became rivals, Caesar released Aristobulus II from captivity and put him in command of two legions to take Syria. However, one of Pompey’s men lucked into poisoning Aristobulus before he left.

Pompey was then assassinated in Egypt, and Antipater the Idumean switched Hyrcanus’ allegiance to Julius Caesar. Caesar later found himself in a bad situation fighting Pompey’s forces in Alexandria. When Caesar’s ally in Anatolia, Mithridates of Pergamus, came to Caesar’s aid with extra troops, he was blocked by Egyptian Jews. Antipater led an army into Egypt and saved Mithradates. According to Josephus, the two then ran into Jews from the “country of Onias”. Strangely, Josephus says nothing about their relationship to the Onias that Antipater had executed. Not only did Antipater convince them to let their armies through, he even managed to get supplies and some soldiers from Memphis as well. Antipater showed his worth in battle, earning great wealth as well as many physical scars over his body. When the war was over, Caesar gave Hyrcanus II the title of high priest and ethnarch but it was Antipater who became chief minister of Judea, formally ending the Hasmonean Dynasty and beginning the one that would be named after his son, Herod.

Brutus and Cassius then assassinated Caesar and popular opinion forced Cassius to flee to Syria, which in turn gave Antipater no choice but to side with him against Octavius Caesar, Lepidus, and Mark Antony. Antipater even went so far as to collect emergency taxes on the Jews and helped Cassius enslave defaulters in order to save the Roman Republic from the imperial Second Triumvirate. Soon afterwards, Antipater was poisoned, and his son Herod became king. Herod convinced Octavius and Mark Antony that his father had been forced to help Cassius and he was made tetrarch of Galilee in 42 BCE. Although Herod claimed to follow the Jewish religion, this was highly controversial since the cultural affinity of his Idumean family was Hellenistic. Both Justin and the Talmud attest to legends that Herod was not even half Jewish but a pure-blooded Philistine.

The son of Aristobulus II, Antigonus, rebelled against Herod twice. During the first rebellion in the year 40 BCE, Hyracnus II went to negotiate a peace treaty with him, was captured, and had his ears mutilated. This was done so that he could no longer be high priest since Biblical law prohibited anyone with a physical defect to offer food at the altar. According to Josephus, Antigonus bit them off personally. The theme is paralleled by the gospel story of one of Jesus’ followers cutting off the ear of the servant to the high priest, Caiphas, the first-century CE equivalent of Hyrcanus II. Consider if the story of the priestly ear being cut off was well known among the earliest gospel readers, it would inspire an acidic innuendo to the oft-repeated catchphrase expressed by Jesus, “Let those who have ears hear...”

During the second rebellion, Herod fled to Rome and managed to convince the Senate to elect him “King of the Jews”. With Roman troops provided by Mark Antony and money lent from Cleopatra, Herod returned with from Rome, defeating and executing Antigonus in 37 CE. One of the first things Herod did upon installing himself as king was ordering the execution of 45 Sadducees of the Sanhedrin for their support of Antigonus. Herod then used the money confiscated from them to pay Mark Antony. He took away the secular powers of the Sanhedrin and made it a religious court only. He also broke the tradition of the title of priest being a permanent position determined by family, making it an office to be conferred and purchased. This eventually led to the position being phased out every year or so by wealthy Sadducee priestly families.

With Antigonus, Aristobulus III, and Hyrcanus II gone, the Hasmonean dynasty came to an end and Herod became the sole ruler of Judea for 34 years, with power, stability, and prestige unlike anything since the time of Alexander the Great. Herod also oversaw momentous building projects that would secure his fame. Not the least of these was the massive rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, which doubled as a massive jobs program that drove a large part of the economy. But most Pharisees and Essenes saw themselves as being under the yoke of an Edomite or a Philistine, who was himself a puppet of Rome. Mara Bar Serapion had said that the abolishment of the Hasmonean kingdom had been precipitated by the execution of the “wise king”, just as Epiphanius said that “the succession of the princes from Judah, who reigned until the Christ Himself, ceased.”

The Talmud contains stories of both Honi and Yeshu because it has inherited two different traditions on the same person: a “Good Honi” tradition and a “Bad Yeshu” tradition. The “Good Honi” tradition tried to save the legacy of the charismatic rainmaker by harmonizing him within a rabbinic context. The “Bad Yeshu” tradition tried to villainize him as a magician and an idolater while trying also to save the legacy of his teacher, Yehoshua ben Perachiah. Yehoshua ben Perachiah was likewise posthumously converted him to a good rabbi even though he appears to have come from the same charismatic tradition as Yeshu. After the Oniad dynasty died out, its legacy was absorbed not only by Christianity but also Rabbinic Judaism. The apocryphal book, 2 Maccabees, was written from the perspective of the Hasmonians who kept the Temple rights away from the Oniads and yet like Josephus, even this text has nothing but good things to say about Onias III, even appearing to cover for his use of violence. Clearly there was a very strong desire to appeal to Oniad sympathizers as there were multiple bids to maintain a respectful acknowledgement of their Zadokite legacy even if they did not want the Oniads to resume the stewardship of the Temple rights.

There is an episode in the Synoptic gospels that implies that Jesus had not just an assumed right but a particular undisclosed legal right to the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus is asked by the Jerusalem Temple priests what right he has in stopping the sacrifices. Rather than answering them, Jesus asks them in turn if the baptisms by John were human or divine. The priests refuse to answer out of fear of displeasing the crowd, so Jesus in turn refuses to answer them as well. The interaction implies a secret authority given to Jesus regarding the Temple. Jesus then tells the Story of the Wicked Tenants, an allegory in which the evil landlords temporarily take control of the vineyard of a king and out of greed they decide to kill each of the king’s messengers, culminating in the murder of the king’s son. In this parable, God is the king, Jesus is the son and the vineyard is the Temple. But following the parable’s logic, why would a peasant have inheritance rights over the Temple? Were the high priests really supposed to just recognize some Galilean newcomer as the Son of God by the miracles they never themselves witnessed? How does “turning the other cheek” and “loving your enemies” hold up against Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers? How would any non-Essene Jew who read the gospel react to the idea of a Galilean peasant preventing the sale of sacrificial animals deemed necessary to fulfill the Torah laws?

The answer is that following the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition of Qumran, which decried the Jerusalem priesthood as illegitimate, the fictional peasant Jesus of the gospels was imbued with the Holy Spirit of the Onias dynasty. The evangelist wanted the reader to understand that God had allowed the Jerusalem Temple to be destroyed because the chief priests had conspired to murder the last heir of the original legitimate Zadokite priesthood. Shortly after Honi’s death, Pompey completed his conquest of Jerusalem. When the fictional Jesus was betrayed by a man with the same name as the Messianic leader who founded the Zealot rebellion and then crucified, it was meant to foreshadow the fall of Jerusalem to Titus in 70 CE and his mass crucifixion of its inhabitants, just as the death of Honi the Circle Drawer had foreshadowed the fall of Jerusalem to Pompey in 63 BCE.


The Christ Myth Theory

What is it about the first century CE Jesus that makes him a historical person? How does he compare to other legendary figures? The afore-mentioned author of Did God Have a Wife?, William G. Dever, who wrote that Yahweh had originally been connected to Asherah in a polytheistic setting, nevertheless wrote another book called What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It?, in whch he complained about the overly skeptical nature of progressive analytical movements like the Copenhagen School towards Biblical history. In it he accused Hebrew Bible minimalists like Thomas Thompson of “erasing history” in their “assault” on Ancient Israel. Dever added anecdotally that a similar assault was happening on New Testament scholarship. Dever has stated that “the overwhelming scholarly consensus today is that Moses is a mythical figure”, although it is possible there was a “Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C.” One of the reasons many scholars have discounted Moses is because there are traditions in the Bible that describe the Exodus without referencing Moses. Biblical archaeology has completely discounted the conquest story passed down in the Book of Joshua and now agree that the vast majority of Israelites were actually the same people as their hated enemy, the Canaanites, and that the Yahweh religion appears to have migrated in, as suggested by Friedman, either by Levites coming from Egypt or Arabian Midianites from the Trans-Jordan, as posited by Dever.

So according to scholarly consensus, Moses is a legend and Jesus is a historical figure. Yet Moses was referenced by the Greek historian Hecataeus of Abdera (300s-200s BCE), the Egyptian priest Manetho (200s BCE), The Jewish-Egyptian historian Artapanus of Alexandria (200s-100s BCE), the Greek Lysimachus (100s BCE), the Roman historian Pompeius Trogus (0s BCE), the Greek geographer and historian Strabo, Nero’s tutor the Egyptian priest Chaeremon (0s CE), Tacitus (100s CE). A great deal of the material contradicts what is in the Torah. Many of the accounts say that the Egyptians forcefully ejected the Hebrews out of Egypt because they were the ones who were plagued. All of these historical references are still around a milennium away from their supposed events and the names given for the Egyptian king are not ones that are identifiable with the known kings, but a historian wanting to write a biography based on secular records at least has a lot more to work with. The combined information of Mara Bar Serapion, Celsus, Tacitus and Lucian of Samosata do not amount to very much. Sigmund Freud suggested that Moses was a conglomeration of two different historical figures, one who was a priest of the monotheistic or henotheistic god Aten who led a group of slaves out of Egypt but was then killed, and another Moses who worshipped Yahweh as a volcano demon. One could say that anyone who took part in an event that inspired even part of the story could be considered a historical Moses if not the historical Moses. But then the same be said of Jesus, as many scholars believe that a story from Philo of rioters dressing up and mocking a madman named Carabas as well as a story from Josephus of a man named Jesus ben Ananias who prophesized the doom of Jerusalem, was tortured by Romans and then killed during the siege, may have also contributed to some of the elements of the gospels stories. If both figures can so easily be labelled a combination of myth and history, then why is there so much more certainty for the historicity of Jesus?

The Quest for the Historical Jesus has been ignored by the vast majority of Biblical Literalists because the gospel Jesus is the historical Jesus to them, but those who would like to make common cause with non-Christians in forming the basis for a common secular record of Jesus are more often Biblical scholars than historians. A lot of Biblical scholars in general start with a Literalist bias and work their way through education towards acceptance that there are contradictions, so when outsiders, many of them in the atheist movement, came to the field with the idea that Jesus may not have existed -- the Christ Myth theory -- they are largely dismissed as amateurs and cranks. But in fact, Biblical scholars almost never spend more than a few paragraphs actually trying to prove that a historical Jesus actually existed. Rather, they dedicate all of their effort into trying to figure out what exactly he said as opposed to what other people put in his mouth. Those who criticize the Christ Myth Theory and the “mythicists” who believe it typically cite an overwhelming consensus among scholars that a historical Jesus existed rather than the actual hard evidence. The vast majority of Biblical scholars either go to one extreme and never cite the Talmud references, presumably assuming they are historically worthless and so not worth mentioning, or go to the other extreme of assuming without debate that Yeshu is the gospel Jesus without explaining the chronological problems, thus leaving the reader to assume that the Talmud corroborates the historicity of the first century CE Jesus. The few attempts that have been made to criticize the Christ Myth Theory often descend into confusion. The premier example of poor scholarship is Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?, which was far more error-prone than the misquoted authors attempted to correct.

More importantly, the “consensus” of Biblical scholarship’s understanding of Jesus is an illusion. Just as there are many different sects of Christianity and many different religions adopted by different people based largely on the bias of location, so too are there many different yet brilliant paradigms of the historical Jesus, each one pulling into its own orbit whoever has the time and energy to read those particular theories. There is Jesus the apocalyptic prophet, Jesus the Zealot, the “Liberal Jesus”, the “Kerygmatic Jesus”, Jesus the Cynic sage, Jesus the “New Perspective” Jew, and of course, the Biblical Literalist Jesus. The so-called “consensus” works the way that the believer can claim a consensus over the unbeliever: by counting all the different theories, whether it be of God or the historical Jesus, as being equal or at least equivalent to one another. A famous quote from atheist author Richard Dawkins is that “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” Likewise, Biblical scholars are atheists about most of the historical Jesuses that scholars have ever believed in. Mythicists just go one Jesus further.

There are many different forms of mythicism. Although the most popular forms of the Christ Myth Theory focus mostly on the dying-and-rising god aspects that Christianity has inherited, there is really no reason why the same conclusion could not have been reached following the connection Crossan, Mack and many of the Jesus Seminar scholars made between the sagely wisdom sayings. These sayings of Jesus coming from Cynic and Stoic philosophy that are found in the Synoptic gospels and the Pauline epistles were first canonized by the Marcionites, who were themselves accused of adding Stoic philosophy into the scripture. This would indicate that some of the earliest Christian beliefs had a Hellenistic origin. That is how Bruno Bauer, the first mythicist, came to his conclusion that Jesus never existed. By the same token, believing that the dying-and-rising god mystery religions were the primary influence on Christianity, as postulated by Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle and Freke and Gandy’s The Jesus Mysteries, does not necessarily prove there was no historical Jesus. The famed twentieth-century liberal Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann accepted the influence of the mystery religions and yet he said those who denied the historical Jesus were crazy. But it is really the kerygma of the Apostolic tradition that Jesus was a historical person, as opposed to the Docetic view that he was a man from the sky, that coerces an intolerance against the possibility.

In that sense, the Christ Myth Theory is not so much a rationale as a conclusion. The various rationales that are used to justify the conclusion are not really radical in themselves. The controversy of the Christ Myth Theory is its conclusion that there was no one founding figure that created Christianity, because as ever-evolving memetic structures, it is always possible that a religion can simultaneously have many founders and no founder. The structure of how religion forms and spreads is sound enough that we can take away any historical person, even the cornerstone, and it can still stand.

If the Nazoraeans, who believed Jesus was the rightful Judaean king following Alexander Jannaeus, are not the earliest example of the Nazarene sect that fathered Christianity, then who were? If one were to write a history about the foundation of Christianity without a historical Jesus, where would it begin? Some say Paul, but he suffers from the exact same problems as Jesus. No one talks about him until the late second century. Even Justin mentioned Marcion but not Paul. The general picture provided by the Marcionite canon that Chrestianity was founded by a single itinerant preacher almost single-handedly sailing from city to city across all the Roman provinces and then preaching on the streets is not only improbable, but also strikingly close to what Marcion himself was believed to have done. As described earlier, all of the Pauline epistles appear to be pseudographical. Just as with Jesus, there is nothing to prove he was historically relevant until a full century after he was said to have lived.

The Toledot corroborates the narrative hinted at in the Epistle to the Galatians that Peter, Paul and James were not just factions in the same religious sect but different religious sects in the same religion, in stark contrast to the harmonious Golden Age of the Apostles pseudo-history described in Acts. In mentioning them, the Toledot hides the names of Paul and James using placeholder labels, probably to ensure that their real names remain forgotten. Paul (or Peregrinus) was referred to as the Hellenistic rabbi Elijahu ben Abuyah. James was referred to as Nestorius, named after a later Assyrian heretic who was against calling Mary the “Mother of God”. The Jewish Life of Jesus confirms that James contended against Paul and adds that James tried to bring back circumcision among Christians. It even accused James of getting women to side with him by outlawing divorce. In both versions of the Toledot, Simon Cephas is identified with the fifth-century Christian Simon Stylites, although it is uncertain whether the association with another Christian figure named Simon 300 years later was meant as satire or honest confusion. The Toledot’s description of Peter as a man caught between the Jewish and Christian worlds, just as he is portrayed in Galatians, definitely shines through. Cephas is threatened by a mysterious “Ancient of Christians” who tells him that all of Israel will be destroyed unless he converts to their religion. According to the Jewish Life of Jesus, the threat worked and Cephas pretended to convert to Christianity for the sake of his people. His later writings were nevertheless said to have been sent to the late second century Babylonian rabbi Nathan ha-Babli for inclusion in Jewish worship, indicating that he remained an important figure in rabbinic Judaism. This early Jewish perspective of Cephas is entirely consistent with Mark’s allegorical depiction of Peter being caught by authorities while following Jesus and being forced to deny Jesus three times.

Most of the named apostles and church fathers, with the important exception of the fictional twin of Jesus, Judas Thomas, were probably real people, but they are not necessary to explain Christianity. There are no historical witnesses to validate any of the personas from the gospels. Even the earliest epistles are completely silent on the vast majority of the characters introduced, with the exception of James, John and Cephas/Peter. Even if we were to assume James was the literal brother of Jesus, we would have nothing other than the all-too-generic Epistle of James to interview him with. Even if there was a Paul who really met the literal brother of Jesus, it would have done him no good since he openly boasted that nothing that James said was added to the message he had received directly from God. The four gospels are often described by non-scholars as four different witnesses. While different witnesses would use different words to describe the same events, the gospels use the same words to describe very different events, because they were changed to reflect the theology of the various Jesus sects that used them. Nothing from scripture offers a direct witness. The Epistles describe Jesus alternatively as a dying-and-rising god or a desert-praying charismatic slain by Jewish rather than Roman authorities. No historical works that mention Jesus offer any knowledge independent from those gospels. All the dates given to scripture — canonical and apocryphal — are hypothetical. If there was a historical first century CE Jesus, then he has been completely cut off from any verification system. As analysis moves forward identifying gospel stories as Old Testament rewrites and allegories invented to justify later Church doctrine, the light that is cast upon the historical Jesus only makes him dimmer.


The Four Core Identities of the Historical Jesus

The identity of Jesus gradually moved from being a first century BCE “wise king” to being a first century CE peasant who instigated a brief revolt against the Temple priests and paid for it with his life. Epiphanius said that the Nazoraeans believed that Jesus was from the first century BCE. We get the impression from him and Irenaeus that most of the other heretical Jesus sects after them believed in a first century CE Jesus, and yet when we look at claims in 1 Thessalonians, parts of the Gospel of Peter, Burkettt’s Sanhedrin Trial Source describing Jews executing Jesus without the assistance of the Romans, Mara Bar Serapion’s dating of the wise king, the numerological allegory referencing Yeshu’s five disciples in Mark, the reference to two sets of twelve prophets of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, and the vestiges of Judas being associated with a garden or field in the last three gospels, it becomes clear that some of these Jesus sects may have simply employed a literary Jesus while hinting at his connection to the historical Yeshu. The historical Yeshu may have been kept a secret as a part of an inner mystery or a conceit to hide the origin of the religion from Romans who associated the earlier Messianic figure with political insurrection as opposed to the sectarian conflict against Pharisees as portrayed in the gospels.

The first gospels were made up of oracular sayings that gave no historical context to when Jesus lived. The first known sayings gospel identified by Eusebius, supposedly using a source from an Anatolian bishop in the 140s, was named after a disciple of Yeshu. Eventually these sayings gospel were constructed into narrative gospels in which Yeshu was portrayed as a first century Galilean peasant, but whether this story was originally meant to be read as fiction or history is unknown. The gospels were rewritten and reinterpreted over and over again into many different versions of the sayings gospels and Proto-Marks. As time went on, new Jesus sects compiled all of their old sources in such a complicated fashion that all three Synoptic evangelists were switching back and forth between four or more now-lost sources. Although these literary models were always relegated to anonymous sectarians in the first century, the latent story elements in the gospels better fit the Christological conflicts of the second century in which each Jesus sect constructed a gospel that was to be used as their particular theological platform.

Mark was written by the Adoptionists to downplay the importance of the most popular Jesus teachers of his time, Peter, James, and John, emphasizing that the first would be last and the last would be first. The Ebionites then constructed a more Jewish gospel that made Jesus defend the Laws of Moses. It was adopted first by the Cerinthians and then the Peterine Christian Church in Antioch. In trying to adapt itself to the conflict between the Ebionites and the Marcionites, the Antioch Church also edited a version of Luke similar to Marcionite Gospel of the Lord, as well as adopted Marcionite epistles credited to Paul, then added Hellenistic interpretations of the Jewish scripture to meet the Ebionites half way. After that, a presbyter of the Ephesian Church took an Antioch version of Luke and an Antioch version of the Acts of the Apostles and edited them into two-part letter, making it the first gospel to provide a statement of the author’s intent to write a history to correct some of the misconceptions of the past. Another presbyter from the Ephesian tradition, Irenaeus, also cited epistles written in the names of Paul and John that propagated a historical interpretation of the gospels. The Cerinthian Signs Gospel was rewritten into a Valentinian Gnostic gospel and then rewritten again into a more literal Apostolic gospel. Irenaeus then combined it with the Adoptionist Mark, Peterine Matthew and Apostolic Luke-Acts into the first four-gospel canon.

Other sects like Justin’s follower Tatian continued to combine the gospels into a single gospel harmony but Irenaeus’ decision to keep the four gospels separated as different perspectives allowed converts from heretical sects to read a version of the gospel they were most familiar with. Although most of the later Coptic sects constructed spiritualized literary gospels that were meant to be taken symbolically, the interpretation of reading the gospels as history persisted with the Apostolic Church until Constantine chose it to represent all of Christianity. It is Irenaeus’ historical interpretation, where the gospels were named after apparently random apostles, two disciples and two non-disciples, that prevailed. The gospels were to be treated as different perspectives of the same historical event instead of reading them as fictional narratives with contradicting theologies. This was established by a massive library of falsified texts forged under the name of various historical building blocks during the time of Irenaeus. Like all of the dying-and-rising god mystery religions than had preceded it, Christianity needed to be reformed to make it more monogamous, more monarchial, and more monotheistic. Irenaeus defined what books the Biblical canon would consist of and how they were interpreted. It was this new historical interpretation of the gospels that would provide the context for the history of Christianity as remembered by the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.

Religious leaders of the past can be and were invented. There is plenty of room for doubt when Epiphanius says that Cerinthians were founded by Cerinthus and the Merinthians were founded by Merinthus and the Ebioniotes were founded by Ebion. The Five, the Twelve, the Seven, the Four, Paul, James the Just, all of these figures have become literary constructs even if they once represented real people. There is a massive host of pseudographical documents masquerading as ancient Christian correspondence and scholars still puzzle over where their true origins come from. Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, and Papias of Heirapolis, are all just names put to scripture. Most of the early epistles Barnabas, are surprisingly disinterested in the historical details behind Jesus. They make almost no mention of any gospel personalities or events. Dig a little deeper into whom any of these figures and there are nothing but contradictions and mythology and more questions. Take away all of the epistles of dubious origin and there is little left to work with in the first- and second-century CE that would separate it from how we understand the first century BCE.

A comprehensive list of first- and second-century references to a Jesus who lived in the early first century would include James, Jude, Paul, the author of Hebrews, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Peter, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Josephus, Tacitus, Theophilus, the author of Shepherd of Hermas, the author of the Didakhe, Barnabas, Polycarp, Papias, Justin, and Irenaeus. Although James is called “brother of the Lord”, the epistle ascribed to him makes no such claim and the lack of a defense from the Epistle to the Galatians as to why Jesus’ brother should not have had more authority than Paul implies that the author did not think an explanation was needed. The author of the Epistle of Jude also claims to be the “brother of James”, which should also make him the brother of Jesus, yet he too makes no such claim, referring to himself as a “servant of Jesus”. Two references to a historical Jesus are ascribed to Paul: the first from 1 Thessalonians says that Jesus was killed by Jews, not Romans, and the second, from 1 Timothy, is generally accepted as a late second century forgery. The author of Hebrews says Jesus was executed outside the city but fails to say when. Given the fictional nature of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, it is difficult to know whether the original authors meant them to be read as fiction or biography. Luke-Acts and the Gospel of John both claim that Jesus was a historical Person, yet both authors had no problem using their own fictional creations. Assuming Luke-Acts was addressed to Theophilus of Antioch, that would mean the earliest uncontested historical biography of Jesus as a first century CE peasant was written sometime in the 170s, just 30 years before Tertullian wrote gave witness to a Toledot story of a gardener hiding the body of Yeshu in De Spectaculis and some 50 years before the Talmud was compiled. The condemnation of Docetists or Gnostics who did not believe Jesus had come “in the flesh” in the epistles of John suggest that the epistle itself was written (or forged) for the sole purpose of discrediting the interpretation that the gospels were fiction. The first epistle ascribed to Peter says only that Jesus suffered and second is a defense against the idea that the gospels were just “cleverly invented stories”. The second epistle, written by a different author, tries to corroborate that interpretation that Peter was a literal disciple of Jesus who physically witnessed his miracles. The epistles ascribed to Clement of Rome imply that Jesus was a symbol for the Church. The epistles of Ignatius also make the case for a first century CE historical Jesus, but it tells an unlikely story of Roman soldiers allowing correspondence to his followers as he is being dragged across the empire to be executed in Rome, indicating they are late forgeries, probably created during Irenaeus’ time in connection with the “ignited” Peregrinus. The overly short Testimonium Flavian of Josephus is shown to be a forgery due to a reference in the next paragraph citing the paragraph preceding the Testimonium and the lack of references by Christian apologists familiar with Josephus. Evidence that Tacitus originally wrote of “Chrestians” suggests that the next line referencing “Christ” may have been a later addition. Even assuming the uninformative passage mentioning Christ is authentic, it may have ultimately derived from the opinion of neophytes uninitiated into the deeper mysteries of Chrestianity or even Tacitus’ own rationalist interpretation of the opening line in the Marcionite version of the Gospel of Luke, which said that Jesus came down from heaven in the time of Tiberius. Theophilus taught a “Christianity without Christ” indistinguishable from Diaspora Judaism. The author of the Shepherd of Hermas exceeds even Theophilus in vagueness by only saying that someone was once inhabited by the spirit of God somewhere. The author of the Didakhe gives the name Jesus Christ but reveals nothing more than that he was a servant of God. The Epistle of Barnabas refers to Jesus only as a spirit who rose from the dead. Polycarp was most likely a Valentinian or Marcionite teacher whose entire biography appears to be a fictional combination of Peregrinus the Cynic and Polemon the Sophist, forged in the time of Ireaneus.

That leaves Papias, Justin and Irenaeus as the most definitive voices for a historical first century CE Jesus. Papias was “a very stupid man”, who, judging by his story about Judas becoming a bloated monster, would believe anything. Justin’s belief in a historical Jesus appears to be based on a supposed Memoir of the Apostles that was actually a gospel combining Synoptic sources. But even Justin seems to acknowledge that faith that Jesus existed was equivalent to faith in Jesus being the Messiah. The literary traditions of Polycarp, Papias, and Justin appear to have come to us through Irenaeus. Stephan Huller suggests that Irenaeus ran a forgery mill that retooled the writings of Polycarp and Justin into Irenaeus’ own theology.

Gathering together all the various ancient sources that could possibly be referencing Jesus, I would divide the data the into four core historical identities:

1) Exorcist / Magician (Chrest cup, Talmud, Toledot, Synoptic gospels)
2) Apocalyptic Prophet (Q2, gospels)
3) Cynic Sage (Q1, Thomas, Synoptic gospels, Mara)
4) Martyr / Passover Scapegoat (Tammuz, Mara, gospels, epistles, Talmud, Toledot, Honi)


1) Exorcist / Magician

In the book Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God?, Morton Smith describes Jesus as a polytheist who enacted magic spells for healings and exorcisms in opposition to the scribes who followed the Torah law. Later higher class friends would attempt to rehabilitate such legendary figures by differentiating them from magicians by calling them “divine men”. A prime example from Smith is Apollonarius of Tyana, who was called a “divine man” by his defenders and a magician by Christians, just as Christians called Jesus a “divine man” while Celsus and the Talmud referred to Jesus as a magician. Although Jesus performs exorcisms and magical feats in all of the gospels, this aspect of him is best emphasized in the Gospel of Mark. Many other scholars emphasizing other aspects of Jesus’ historical identity nevertheless believe Jesus performed some kind of shamanistic rites that meant to provide psychological healing. John Dominic Crossan associates the increased necessity for such ancient therapists with the sociological stress that comes from being a peasant repressed by a foreign imperial occupation.

Jesus as Magician is backed by the best historical evidence there is, archaeological evidence. Written evidence handed down to us by sectarian winners can always be censored, edited or forged, but the Chrest cup attests to the oldest Christian/Chrestian tradition that Jesus was a magician. Despite the fact that the cup does not bear Jesus’ name, the Talmud and Toledot associate him with Yehoshua ben Perachiah, whose name was used on similar magic cups. This is a strong indication that the exorcist tradition of Jesus originates from Alexandria. Even if there was a first century CE Jesus, he would most likely have inherited this tradition from Egypt. The story of Yeshu escaping to Egypt may have been a fictional attempt to prove that Yeshu was using foreign magic. If that is the case, then the mini-stories in Matthew and Luke of Jesus making a short trip there as a baby would have been a way to accept some details as much-needed historical background for Jesus while changing enough of it to head off any accusations of Jesus learning anything while he was there.

The Toledot also includes a story about Jesus and Judas flying at each other in a magician’s duel, a trope found in myths going back to Sumerian times. During the fight, Judas defiles Jesus, causing the spell to abort and Jesus falls to the ground. The same kind of magic contest is described in apocryphal Acts of Peter as being utilized by Simon Magus until it is broken when Simon Peter dispels it with his anti-magic praying, causing Simon to fall. The Synoptic gospels also continue the tradition depicting Jesus as an exorcist and using folk magic for curing people. The mysteriously unexplained fall that kills Judas in Acts of the Apostles may have originally been the ending cut from a similar magician story in which Judas fell. Simon Magus also has an association with John the Baptist and an alternative date to the first century BCE, indicating that these roots stretch back to before the first century CE.

Honi the Circle Drawer is believed to have been the same kind of charismatic healer, providing magical rites that some Jewish elders believed constituted death according to the Law of Moses. This may be why a split mythological narrative of “good Honi” and “bad Yeshu” was necessary. The split presumably allowed Jews who inherited traditions favorable to the Oniads and anti-Nazarenes to reside in the same rabbinic circles.


2) Apocalyptic Prophet

The majority of Biblical scholars, including Albert Schweitzer, Paula Freriksen and Bart Ehrman, believe Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Most scholars may also agree that Jesus was an exorcist, gave sage advice, and was executed in Jerusalem on Passover as well, but they consider this to be the aspect that defined him. If Jesus had not wrongly claimed that he knew that the world was going to be ending sometime soon, no one would have given up their lives to spread his apocalyptic message and Christianity would never have gotten off the ground. All four gospels have apocalypticism in them, but Matthew, whose earlier versions sere used by Jewish sects like the Ebionites and Cerinthians, emphasizes the End Times in his parables the most. Most of the epistles have apocalypticism. The Book of Revelation is an apocalypse. Bart Ehrman has put forth the argument that if John the Baptist was an apocalypticist before Jesus and Paul was an apocalypticist after Jesus, then Jesus must have been an apocalypticist too. But while nearly every book in the New Testament has apocalyptic material in it, only the gospels portray Jesus himself as an apocalyptic prophet, and in the Gospel of Thomas, it is noticeably absent.

Jewish apocalypticism was nothing new. It had really started with the Book of Isaiah, promising that people would return from the dead, Israel and Judah would become one nation again, and the world would turn to the Jews for spiritual guidance. The details of the eschatology developed further as it moved from the earlier Hebrew scrolls of Isaiah 24-27 and Zecharaiah 9-14 to the later Aramaic books of Daniel 7-12 and Enoch 91-93. The prophecies took on the Proto-Christian structure of the New Testament apocalypse, predicting the end of the world shortly after the death of the Messiah, Onias III. The story of a dying Messiah causing the End of the World had already been done before. As an apocalyptic prophet, Jesus would have just been fulfilling a pre-established role that had already been set up for him by previous Messiahs and previous scripture, thus robbing him of being anything historically unique or relevant to our own time.

Following that model, Christianity would just be a reiteration of a strand of Jewish theology that happened to expand into its own sect and then its own religion. The name of Jesus would have had to have competed with the names of other Messianic figures like Simon Magus, Dositheus, Athronges, or Apollonius of Tyre, and it is quite surprising that his was the one that won out. This Jesus would have only had a small number of followers, who by word of mouth had to have managed to gain enough believers to become a self-sustaining phenomenon that would eventually multiply and spread to encompass nearly one-third of the world. As an old saying puts it: “Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise.” But in this model, Christianity would have had a very steep mountain to climb as people would be less inclined to be interested in the belief system as the cult moved away from the local circles of people who originally knew him or knew of him.

Unlike the peasant from the tiny unimportant village of Nazareth, the Oniads did not run a grassroots campaign to become famous and beloved around the world through their own actions alone. Being part of a much larger tradition that borrowed much of its legitimacy from the pre-Herodian Temple in Jerusalem would have meant that there would have been a much larger incentive for Jews to pass down the stories of Onias III and Honi the Circle Drawer. As heir to an important priestly dynasty, Onias III would have inherited historical credentials as a birth privilege, which before the printing press was invented, was one of the necessary prerequisites for becoming famous.

There is nothing from the Talmud or Josephus to suggest that Onias III or Honi the Circle Drawer were apocalyptic prophets themselves. Daniel and probably 1 Enoch used the tragedy of Onias III’s assassination towards their own apocalyptic scripture. The Jewish apocalyptic tradition of the Christian era most strongly represents itself in the Books of Daniel, 1 & 2 Enoch, Maccabees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Epistles of James and Jude, the Epistle to the Hebrews, Epiphanius’ account of the Nazoraeans, and the version of the Gospel of Matthew used by the Ebionites. Laying out all of the evidence from each of these sources we can the evolution of Messianic expectation, from: (A.) a large demographic of Jews who believed the apocalypse would be coming shortly after the death of the second century BCE Messiah Onias III, moving to (B.) a large demographic of Jews believing that Jerusalem had fallen to the Romans shortly after the death of the first century BCE Messianic “wise king” Yeshu, to (C.) a large demographic of Jews believing that Jerusalem had fallen to the Romans again because of the death of the wise peasant Messiah Jesus. From a demographic perspective, it makes sense that a sect focused primarily on apocalypticism would eventually ret-con their backstory to maintain relevance, eventually replacing Onias III, Honi the Circle Drawer, and the perhaps also the Teacher of Righteousness with the gospel Jesus. The continued acceptance of apocalypticism allowed them to funnel in last straggling believers in a future Messianic kingdom from the decline of Judaism’s “third party”, Essenism. Once apocalypticism gave way to historicism, the last adaption of the Jesus story became the official one. Certainly, a long-held belief system that is continuously updated is more realistic than the idea of a small fellowship of fishermen expanding into a major world religion.


3) Cynic Sage

John Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar believe the core documents that the gospels originated from are the Cynic wisdom sayings from the Synoptic gospels, especially sayings corroborated by the Gospel of Thomas since the Coptic text is considered by them to be the most primitive form of the gospel. Although Gnostic sayings were added to Thomas, there is no sign of an apocalyptic Jesus in the sayings source. If the historical Jesus was a first century apocalyptic prophet, then any talk about turning the other cheek, assuming those words could accurately be traced back to him, would have only been some temporary guidelines to follow for the short period of time left and not an actual philosophy to live by for many generations to come. But these wisdom sayings were hardly meant as temporary guidelines. The “turn the other cheek” saying from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is actually made in direct contrast to the laws of Moses, done in a way that implies these rules are the better way, not that they are special circumstantial rules for the End Times.

John Dominic Crossan hypothesizes that Jesus expanded on John the Baptist’s apocalypticism and changed the message from a future kingdom of God to a present kingdom of God that was “among you” (Luke 17:21). John Kloppenborg and Crossan also point to various signs in the Q source that the Cynic sayings formed the earliest layer, Q1, and the apocalyptic sayings formed the secondary layer, Q2. The Gospel of Thomas contains Cynic wisdom sayings as well as Gnostic anti-materialism sayings but no apocalyptic sayings. The Gospel of Thomas is believed by many scholars to have been revised by Sethian Gnostics from an earlier sayings source dedicated to James. It is possible the apocalyptic sayings were edited out, and which tradition is earlier in the Q source does not necessarily prove one tradition started before the other one did anyway, but the lack of apocalypticism in Thomas provides Crossan and the Jesus Seminar scholars a legitimate reason for identifying Jesus as a Cynic sage. Regardless of the origins of the traditions, the Cynic wisdom sayings are mutually exclusive to the apocalyptic sayings attributed to Jesus because the present kingdom of God did not foresee a world ending tomorrow. As the Cynic Jesus proclaimed: “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.” (Luke 17-20-21).

Mark, Matthew and Luke all contain elements from each of the three traditions referenced so far. Matthew, originally representing the Ebionites, better emphasized the future kingdom of Jewish apocalyptic tradition, and Luke, originally representing the Marcionites, best emphasized the present kingdom of the Cynic Sage tradition. The same Cynic tradition expressed by the Synoptic Jesus could also be found in the “when I am weak, I am strong” theology of the Marcionite Apostle Paul. While most Biblical scholars interpreted Paul as inheriting the theology from Jesus, most mythicists instead believed that the evangelists writing about Jesus were instead putting Paul’s message in Jesus’ mouth. Tertullian accused Marcion of mixing the Stoicism of Athens with the Christianity of Jerusalem, but never managed to explain how Marcion could have added a philosophical theme to Luke if all he did was cut parts out of the gospel. The future kingdom was best underscored in Jewish sects like the Ebionitess who used an earlier version of Matthew. The present kingdom was most pronounced in the Marcionites using a prototype of Luke. So the conflict between the two traditions attributed to Jesus in first century may have actually been a part of the conflict between the Marcionites and the Ebionites in the second century. This is why the Epistle to the Galatians presented a story of Paul fighting with James in Antioch a century earlier.

Stephan Huller makes the case that the Cynic-inspired Sermon on the Mount in the otherwise Jewish-flavored Gospel of Matthew are based on an earlier Marcionite source called the Marcionite Antithesis. This source sought to contrast the laws of the Demiurge with the traditions of Jesus from the Unknown God. The Gospel of Matthew tried to harmonize Jesus with the Torah by editing the Marcionite lines from Matthew 5:18, changing them from saying that Jesus’ words would not pass until heaven and earth disappeared (~Luke 21:33) to saying that the Law would not pass even if heaven and earth disappeared. The same verse regarding the Law is in Luke 16:17, and in fact, many of the differences between the Marcionite and canonical versions of Luke involve information giving Jesus a stronger connections to Jerusalem, John the Baptist and Judaism. After the conflict between the Ebionites and Marcionites, many later Jesus sects like the Cerinthians, the Antioch Church of Peter and the Apostolic Church had to discover different ways to harmonize the two traditions together.

One of the more arbitrary-sounding details provided from Mark and Matthew is the story of the names of Jesus’ brothers and the reference to his sisters, which comes from a tradition in which Jesus is teaching "wisdom" in the synagogue. But Jesus’ “brothers” listed each have names matching first century CE Messianic and zealot-like figures from Galilee. The reason the story lists the names is to make the point that Jesus is no more famous than his “brothers” in his unnamed hometown, which indicates that the names are probably symbolic as well. The two genealogies in Matthew and Luke are rightly dismissed by scholars out of hand. The biographical details of Honi are by comparison, more arbitrary and realistic than the biographical details listed for Jesus in the gospels. Honi had named grandchildren. References to Honi’s family have no noticeable symbolic meaning. His tomb is located today in Hatzor HaGlilit in northern Israel.

There are significant holes in the historical layout of the Cynic Sage tradition. The Greek philosophical themes of Cynicism and Stoicism present in the Greek-written Synoptic gospels are completely missing from the Hebrew and Aramaic traditions of the Talmud and the Toledot. They are also not discernible from within the Jewish Gnostic Signs Gospel that makes up the core of John’s gospel. There is no Cynic Sage tradition in Revelation. The complete failure of any of the epistles to identify Jesus as a wisdom sage has likewise lead mythicists to believe that the gospels themselves are the original source behind the idea that Jesus was a teacher. However, there is still one source completely independent of priesthoods and scripture that provides literary corroboration for Jesus as a wisdom-spouting sage. Mara bar Serapion refers to Jesus as the “wise king”, which identifies him simultaneously with the true king of the Nazoraeans and with a person known for his philosophical sayings. Of course, this may only mean that Mara had become familiar with Cynic sayings attributed to Yeshu before they were re-attributed to the first century CE Jesus. But it does provide a reasonable amount of evidence that the identity of Jesus as Cynic Sage was accepted by literary circles beyond the mystery cults dedicated to him.

The Cynic wisdom sayings attributed to Jesus do not have the same pedigree as Mara. They may have come from a Galilean sage or they could have been generic Cynic wisdom sayings that were later attributed to Jesus. There is just no way to tell. Maybe this first century CE sage was named Jesus and his name was then retroactively applied to Honi, or maybe the Toledot Yeshu’s explanation that Yeshu’s name came from the desire to purge his real one from history is true.


4) Martyr / Passover Scapegoat

The martyr role is the most important aspect of Jesus. Regardless of whether he was a historical figure or not, the fact that Jesus’ deified form took the role of the young dying-and-rising god who provides everlasting life through the consumption of his body and blood in the form of bread and wine was very likely an important aspect of easing various people throughout history into conversion. Whether in Babylon, Jerusalem, Greece or Rome, the counter-cultural mystery religions of the divine shepherd scapegoat were always despised, outlawed and reformed by the urban authorities, but they were immensely popular with the rural class, and as demonstrated by the Nabataean myth of Yanbushad and Tammuz, the dying-and-rising myth was naturally syncretic.

Regardless of how true to history the other three aspects of the gospel Jesus were, Jesus as the Passover Scapegoat would have been the most important aspect about Jesus to an outside historian writing about him. If a first-century Jesus had really marched into Jerusalem among fanfare and had managed to stop the sacrifices in a temple the size of six football stadiums filled with hundreds of thousands of people, as the gospels claim he did, Jesus definitely should have expected more than a few cameo appearances in Josephus or Tacitus. The martyr aspect of Jesus is found not only in the epistles and gospels but also the Talmud, the Toledot and Mara Bar Serapion.

Before there was Jesus, any mention of the Messiah would have brought up memories of Onias III, the wrongfully-slain Messiah in Daniel, and Honi the Circle Drawer, the Nameless King whose rightful inheritance was stolen from him by Simeon ben Shetach and the Pharisees. The next famous Messiah was the second-century rebel Simon bar Kokhba. The three temptations and washing of Simon’s feet better emphasize the details of the Passover death of Honi than they do the biography of the gospel Jesus. The story of Jesus splitting the loaves marks adherance to the older Messianic tradition from the first century BCE while the reference to Simon (of Cyrene), father of Rufus, “carrying the cross” acknowledges the Bar Kokhba Revolt of the second century CE.

The Gospel of Mark in fact repeatedly implies that Jesus is a secret Messiah who was known only to the people of the Galilean villages he visited while the vast majority of humanity did not understand the importance of what was going on, being instead transfixed on the famous and powerful people of their own period. Mark constantly reminds his readers that the last will be first and the first will be last and then ends with a peasant dying and rising as the Son of God. It underscores that the gospel belongs to long tradition of contrived “secret” texts, like in Daniel and 2 Enoch (also known as Secrets of Enoch). Daniel and Enoch were secret messengers whose autobiography had been lost in time when actually the writings were just a fictional indulgence. In contrast, Messianic figures such as Cyrus, Onias III, Honi the Circle Drawer, and Simon bar Kokhba all are said to have interacted with the important people in their lifetime.

If on one hand, the concepts of the Davidic Messiah and the High Priest of Melchi-Zedek came from pre-Christian Zadokite and Essene theology and on the other hand, the concepts of the Son of God and divine Redeemer came from the ancient dying-and-rising god mystery religions, then how much of Christianity can we really attribute to an uneducated Galilean peasant? Even if there was a man who started a movement in the first century CE, his name was Jesus, he was an apocalypticist and/or Cynic sage, and he really was crucified under Pontius Pilate, would he still be the founder of Christianity if he was just following in the footsteps of Onias III and Honi the Circle Drawer and the vast majority of religious traditions and popular interest actually derived from them? Even a historical death would not have fully been his alone because the only reason we would have known about it apart from the thousands of other crucified Jews is because the specific cultic interest in the Messianic figures who were executed before him.

Jesus is supposed to be the most historically important pre-industrial person in existence yet nothing he did made much of a difference for over a century. History was certainly changed after Jesus was killed, but if historians do not talk about the actions of a famous person during their own lifetime, then it is the story of the person and not the person himself that changed history and is thus historically important. The story of Jesus was fractured into many gospels among many different sects so that neither church historians nor modern scholarship could put the pieces back together again to agree on exactly which version is closest to the truth. The historical Jesus could not possibly have been the pivotal influence on history in the same way that the fictional Jesus has been because if none of the ideas about Christianity came from the historical Jesus then it does not really matter whether he existed or not. If there is no information about Jesus the Person outside of Jesus the Story, notwithstanding the wonderfully imaginative and completely reasonable paradigms that the many various Biblical scholars have postulated according to their own individual illuminative genius, the Quest for the Historical Jesus is always going to be a speculative endeavor, as fascinating and engrossing as that avocation may be.

The Apostolic sect that ended up being endorsed by Constantine was just one amongst many and it was they who immediately began to repress those who disagreed with them, even before the bishops left the councils. Critical information about Moses may have been over a thousand years old, but we can at least trust it wasn’t censored. Judging by who provided the first known canon that came down to us, the Apostolic sect appears to have been founded in the 170s-180s by Irenaeus. Although he, Papias, and Justin interpreted the gospels as biographies, the Docetic and Gnostic sects believed Jesus had come down from heaven and believed that the gospels were meant to be symbolic fictions. Adoptionists believed Jesus was inhabited by the Christ upon his baptism, but considering how vague and unimportant a concept this appears to have been for Theophilus and the author of Hermas, it could very well been a simple allegory describing the spirit of Onias III or Honi the Circle Drawer inhabiting a fictional character. In contrast to Jesus, Onias III and Honi the Circle Drawer actually affected the historical events in their own day so that Josephus and the Talmudic authors were still talking about what they did hundreds of years later. Many if not most Biblical scholars profess that the reason Jesus is not talked about very much in his own century is because he was not important historically until later. Yeshu made history. Jesus, whether he was real or not, was used by history.

The difference between the peasant martyr of the first century CE and the Oniad martyr from the first century BCE is that not only can we be far more certain that the righteous high priest martyr existed, but we can also be far more sure of the cultural legacy that the Zadokite priesthood brought to Christianity. Aside from the cultural parallels such as the Essene-like pesher interpretations of Old Testament scripture, the unique details of Honi’s death seriously throws into question the only historical event that can be reasonably associated with a first century CE Jesus. Honi’s story may have inspired the gospel but the gospel could not have inspired Honi’s story. It is possible that the whole Josephus story about Honi being stoned to death in Jerusalem is also completely fictional, but given the Rip Van Winkle story provided in the Talmud, the Toledot story of Yeshu, the quote from Mara Bar Serapion, and the Nazoraean quote from Epiphanius, there appears to be some adequate historical evidence that he was killed by the scribes of his time after which his body was hung according to Jewish law.

Honi the Circle Drawer is the first person to be identified in history as the Jerusalem Passover scapegoat, so the very concept of the Christian martyr really goes back to him, not Jesus. Of course his hanging does not disprove a later crucifixion. History does repeat itself. It could have happened again, but then which version mattered the most to cementing its historical legacy? Which one carried the idea through to the natural evolution from Nazarene to Christian? One had links to the original priestly family that controlled the Temple and literary connections to the historical legacy in Qumran. The other was an anonymous group of peasants with no political connections and no sociological explanation for why large numbers of people would have joined that little group instead of the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, or any other token rebel groups that got better coverage and more authenetic criticism from Josephus than Jesus did. Was it the story of this one villager’s crucifixion among the hundreds that lined the roads outside Jerusalem that inspired magicians in an Egyptian city over 300 miles away to be dedicating magic bowls to him within 20 years of his death? The connection between Alexander Jannaeus, Simeon ben Shetach, and the Zadokite background of the Oniads linking them to the Order of Melchi-Zedek, correlated by the Epistle to the Heberews, Epiphanius’ description of the Nazoraeans, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmudic writings proves beyond a doubt that the background of Christianity goes back further than a Galilean Jew from a tiny hamlet who was “nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change”, or according to another theory, that the Romans should just get out, or maybe that the world was about to end.

The history of religion is not made up of the biographies of people but the evolution of ideas. If there was an illiterate peasant who contributed to what would become Christianity, it could not have been more than the Cynic wisdom sayings and just another name to go on the list of martyrs. The delayed-blast popularity bomb that led to Jesusism was not set off by him nor could he have been the conduit from which the Zadokite concept of the “New Covenant” or the Order of Melchi-Zedek or any other high theological concept flowed through. There were no first-century disciples of Jesus to carry on such a tradition and no one would have been listening to them if there were. Jesus simply would not have been the fountainhead from which Christianity received its cultural legacy because everything about Jesus and Christianity was already there before Jesus was born, even his crucifixion on a “tree”. That legacy flows from the “Sons of Zadok”, the Oniads and the Nazoraeans. It was then taken up as a mystery religion after which many other Hellenistic traditions became woven into its fabric as well, until finally the historical Honi became confused with the first century CE “reboot” of the first century BCE myth.

Dever complained that revisionism erases history. Mythicism certainly recategorizes a lot of it. But whereas the Christ Myth Theory crucifies the historical Jesus of the first century CE, the Talmud, the Toledot, Mara Bar Serapion, the legends of the Nazoraeans, and the stories of the Honi family roll the tombstone away to reveal an older founder, one that helped define what it meant to be a first century BCE Jew. These alternative sources work in defiance of the Apostolic Church’s attempt to reinterpret Yeshu from the second century framework of the canonical authors who by imperial selection became the authorities of who Jesus is and what Christianity means today. Irenaeus, Constantine, Eusebius, our hidden framers, the architects of our fate, force-fed mankind a falsified history in order to maintain a consolidated cultural unity, and called it a brotherhood founded by an allegory. That is why it does not really matter whether Jesus of Nazareth existed or didn’t exist. The true founder of the “New Covenant”, Christianity and Chrestianity, the charismatic magician working Egyptian healing techniques, the high priest in the Order of Melchi-Zedek who was executed by Jewish elders on Passover in Jerusalem, is Honi the Circle Drawer. A Passover martyrdom of someone considered to be the true heir to the Jerusalem Temple is not something likely to have happened twice in two centuries. If the stories of Onias III being lured out of a sacred grove and Honi the Circle Drawer’s Passover execution had been found on a stone tablet in modern times instead of hidden in plain sight in Josephus and the Talmud, would there still be so little acknowledgment of these parallels in the scholarly world? If Honi woke up from his slumber beneath the carob tree today and started complaining about copyright infringement, would Biblical scholars be just as confident as the sages were in the study hall that they know the real teachings passed down by their master?