Category: essays

Being an alternative perspective on the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.
A long time ago, I read a book. I spent a little while this afternoon trying to recollect, and I think it was The Gospel of the Essenes by Edmond Szekely, that my roommate Chris had loaned me. But I’m not sure.
I do remember the author struck me as a little kooky.
But in any case, the topic was an alternative view of the life of Jesus, as informed by a newly translated gospel discovered at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late forties, but mysteriously kept secret by the official translators for reasons that are still not clear.
In the intervening thirty or so years, I’ve had the opportunity to read a lot more on this topic from a variety of sources. I especially loved Gibbon’s treatment of early Christianity for its refreshing skepticism and dry humor, as well as Will Durant’s deep and erudite series The Story of Civilization, and to the current subject, the volume Caesar and Christ. Of course I’ve read a lot more of the New Testament and the Torah, and as they’ve trickled out, I’ve read as many of the Qumran Scroll translations as I can, as well as those found separately, but by coincidence almost simultaneously, at Nag Hammadi, including the famous and formerly banned Gospel of Thomas — at least one of very books that had been enshrouded in such mystery back in the day.
The Gospel of Thomas is really just a collection of some of the sayings of Jesus, not tied together into any narrative, or any discernible order. That format itself gives it a kind of purity, and the document’s antiquity (Thomas probably preceeds the previously oldest known gospel by sixty years or more), gives it additional authenticity, at least to some.
Many of the sayings will be familiar to us all. Many scholars now think the canonical Gospel of Mark was at least in part based on something like Thomas, the hypothesized source called “Q”, and that Matthew and Luke were in turn based on Mark. But the unfamiliar quotes attributed to the teacher are most interesting for their peculiar character and subject. I recommend the interested reader research this subject on your own. Its a mind bender, that’s for sure. Start with a clear distinction between the two revolutionary finds, coincidentally both made in the late forties — that at Nag Hammadi in 1945, and the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947.
So, all that said, the following is not an attempt at a representation of anyone’s views, including my own. Its just a weird idea I had one time, perhaps inspired by a book like Szekely’s, but you have to admit, it kind of makes sense, when you think about it.
The first thing to know is that then, as now, Palestine was a contentious place. It was not considered particularly valuable real estate by the Romans, except maybe for its location. The locals were always quarreling and revolting. There had been continuous wars, civil and otherwise, and rebellions, since before Jesus’ birth, and more after his death, ultimately resulting in, among other things, the destruction of the temple.
As you might imagine, this was a catastrophic event and had many long-lasting practical as well as profound psychological consequences that reverberate in the world today (see the Roman-Jewish wars and Jewish cultural nationalism).
Another thing to know is that then as now, there were several strands of sometimes mutually hostile Jewish civilization and culture active simultaneously. As always, most folks were just trying to get by. It was hard times, and Roman rule chafed as you might imagine. Everyone hated the tax collector, who is viewed as the worst kind of traitor. But some folks decided it was best to just play along. These are maybe best represented by Herod Antipas (there are three different Herods in here, Herod the Great, appointed “King of the Jews” by the Roman senate after the Roman conquest of Syria and Judea, served essentially as a procurator of the province under the Roman general Pompey. The other two, his sons, Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas, tetrarchs or nominal kings of Judea and Galilee, respectively, but in fact more or less figurehead puppets of the Romans).
The Herods were Jews, but relatively secular, especially compared to some we will meet in a moment. They were versed in the scriptures, aware of the traditions and so on, and sensitive at a surface level at least, in a political way, to the mores and taboos of their people.
It was Herod the Great who rebuilt the second temple, but he is known in the Christian tradition mainly through his part in the story of the Magi and the massacre of the innocents [Matthew 2:3], oft retold at Christmastime. Most modern historians do not regard this as a historical event. Like many other stories in the New Testament, it is clearly a construction designed to reinforce a particular point of view by echoing stories of the prophets, like those from the Egyptian captivity, the plagues and the passover, etc.
But it is his son, Herod Antipas, by all accounts a relatively weak character, highly constrained by his situation vis-a-vis the Romans, who crosses paths with Jesus at the peak of his mission, or rather, unwittingly initiates it, through his involvement in the death of John the Baptist. Many of Jesus’ early followers had been followers of John, as Jesus himself was. And John’s death created a leadership vacuum that thrust Jesus into the fore, it would seem against his wishes, or at least prematurely.
It is actually John the Baptist who frames many of these issues and is really a more important figure than most modern readers can possibly ascertain from reading canonical Gospels alone.
John forms the bridge for us to another group, or actually set of groups, one of which we now know more about than any other, that is the Essenes. These were radical traditionalists, who so hated the Romans and more or less despised their secular counterparts, that they dropped out and hid in caves in the desert, living under a strict traditional interpretation of the scriptures, similar to a monsatic lifestyle. They longed for an end to Roman oppression and a return to the golden age, perhaps the era of king David, or more likely the theocracy we might find from the time of the Book of Judges, or the more recent Hasmonean period, for example.
John disappeared for long periods into the wilderness. It was remarkable how he could survive alone out there. But as we now know, he was not alone.
Remember, it was the Sicarii, a Zealot sect similar to the Essenes, who overcame a Roman garrison at Masada, a former redoubt of Herod the great, and held it against the Romans during one of the many uprisings of the era. In the end, they committed mass suicide rather than surrender, as we have seen many radical sects do in the succeeding millennia, up to recent times.
The third strand of Jewish culture at the time is what we today call “Hellenized Jews.” Such was Saul of Tarsus, a former persecutor of Christians, who changed his name to the more Greek sounding Paul, had never met Jesus, and had never even been to Jerusalem until after Jesus’ death.
It is known that Paul had a Greco-Roman grammatical education, he spoke and wrote Greek (poorly, according to Gibbon), and he used a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures. There is no evidence that he knew either Hebrew or Aramaic, although the doctrinally correct position is that he did. Durant sometimes confutes tradition with fact and this is one of the areas where he, like many another good Christian, errs. Paul was, like his father, a Roman citizen — a fact he used at more than one critical juncture to escape legal trouble. He identifies himself as having been a Pharisee, which was more of a political party than anything else. In particular, the Pharisees favored hellenization and stood in opposition to traditionalists such as the Essenes, Sicarii and Zealots.
As Gibbon points out with great substantiation, much of what we now consider Christian teaching has absolutely no basis in anything Jesus or any of his apostles ever said or any other Jewish tradition for that matter, but seems to have been invented by Paul and his followers. Thus Gibbon says, what we today call Christianity should more properly be called Paulism. If you study traditional Christian dogma closely, Paul the so-called “apostle” stands not coequal with Moses, the prophets, or even Jesus. He supersedes them all. Where there is conflict, Paul’s words carry the greatest weight.
Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ teaching may not have been invented in a complete vacuum, though. As Frazier and others have pointed out, there is much in Paul’s interpretation of the passion, death and resurrection, the tradition of the Eucharist, and much else, that seems to have its origins not in Jewish tradition, or Jesus’ teachings, but rather in Greek mystery traditions, themselves based independently on Egyptian mysteries such as that surrounding Osiris.
In deprecation of the Law of Moses in favor of the new covenant, as defined by himself, in declaring the supremacy of faith over deeds, in the definition of the sole standard for salvation as faith specifically in Jesus, Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ message has dominated and to a large extent defined Christian dogma. Paul said “Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified.” [Romans 10:4]. But Jesus said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. ” [Matthew 5:17]
Good food for thought, but all that is preface.
The thesis of this proposed alternative view of the life of Jesus is that intentionally or not, Jesus’ teaching was viewed by the Roman occupiers and many secular and Hellenized Jews in as much a political context as a spiritual one.
There is evidence now that Jesus had some exposure to the ideas of the Essenes, and a number of the very earliest gospel texts surviving today were discovered in caves at Qumran, written, read and preserved by revolutionaries against the Roman occupation.
Imagine an undercurrent in the events of Jesus’ life and teaching informed by the presence of one or more secret societies of radical fundamentalist Jews.
Imagine the concern the authorities would have as gatherings of thousands flocked to hear the words of a rabbi, a natural and charismatic leader, knowing that uprisings were continuously breaking out, leading to a full blown revolution at any time. In fact, as we now know, one was imminent.
The arrest and trial are all performed under Roman auspices, and the mode of execution especially speaks to this thesis. Stoning was the traditional punishment for blasphemy, and some other religious crimes, and the Romans clearly had no problem with that, as Jesus himself saved a woman from death by stoning. By contrast crucifixion was a terrorizing mode of punishment used throughout the empire by the military, reserved particularly for the worst criminals — and revolutionaries. The most compelling argument of all is right there in the gospel. The crime for which the criminal is to be put to death was traditionally inscribed over the head of the criminal. Jesus’ crime: INRI. The Latin abbreviation meaning: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).
This form of execution was a terror and a direct challenge to any who thought they could rise up against the Roman occupation. The story on the face of it is plain: Jesus was put to death by the Romans for inflaming nationalist aspirations, inciting sedition and possibly revolution. Perhaps even Joseph of Arimithea, the mysterious wealthy character who “loaned” Jesus the use of his tomb was, like others, secretly a follower of Jesus, and like him was involved with such an underground movement, though he kept his involvement secret in order to maintain his income and a front for the organization. (Another possibility is that Joseph was a relatively well to do uncle, who had pity and affection for his unfortunate nephew.) Maybe the whole tomb episode was a ruse, and that members of the underground rolled away the stone in the night, rescuing the gravely wounded Jesus from the cave, spiriting him away to some secret place such as Qumran, to be nursed back to health or to die with as much dignity as possible. Maybe he even lost consciousness up there on the cross, and for all the world seemed dead. For a small bribe, he could easily have been pulled down, near death, and a burial could even have taken place. It was ancient times, after all, and being dead was kind of a gray area. Maybe he did survive for a little while, allowing visits from a few trusted souls, maybe as much as forty days or so. Its an expression, after all, meaning “a while.”
If you go back and read the story of the preparations for the last supper in the light of such an interpretation, some of the characteristics of an underground organization kind of stand out: “When you go into the city, a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house that he enters and say to the master of the house, ‘The teacher says to you, “Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”‘ He will show you a large upper room that is furnished. Make the preparations there.” [Luke 22:10]
And it was only a hundred years later, after the failure of three separate uprisings, the destruction of the temple, and in the context of a campaign to convert large numbers of gentiles of all races across the Roman empire, and after the break between Paul and his followers and the traditionalists, including all the actual apostles like Peter who continued to evangelize after Jesus’ death, but who maintained the supremacy of the Mosaic law, when the story as we now have it was revised to shift the blame to the Jewish religious leaders of the time. You can hear this in third person phrasing throughout the gospel, such as John 7:15, “The Jews were amazed and said, ‘How does he know scripture without having studied?’” It just doesn’t sound like a phrasing that a Jewish person himself would use, does it?
This editing was intended to redefine Jesus’ teachings to try to make sense of his death in the context of three failed revolutions and ultimate destruction of the temple, in order to remove barriers to evangelizing among gentiles, and to justify the centralization of authority and purging of dissent characteristic of what we now call the established church.

I was driving in the car with my daughter and got to talking about another graduate degree, and she said I should think about history. She said her history professor reminded her of me or vice versa, and she said I would be really good at it, because I was so well read.
I told her I knew a number of people with undergaduate degrees in the liberal arts, like history, who had gone on to earn graduate degrees in a technical field like computer science, for practical reasons, mainly, but I knew of no one who had done it the other way.
But after a while, I started to think it over, and one thought that came to mind was, “why bother with a graduate degree in history?” Why not just write a history?
The answer came that with say a Phd in history, I could then conceivably teach at a university, which might be a nice way to wind down into a second career, different from the first, and maybe an interesting thing in itself.
But the options are not mutually exclusive. So I thought I would consider writing some history myself, just to kick things off. What would I write about?
First off, my touch stone on the subject is a quote from Barbara Tuchman, probably my favorite modern historian: “all history is biography”
History is not about timelines or abstract concepts. It’s about people.
My second principle is perhaps a commonplace, but to me was a personal discovery. In high school, I spent some time in detention, for reasons that don’t matter. There I met a fellow who became my good friend, and we had many engaging conversations. one time he said “it’s interesting how the atom, with a nucleus and electrons, looks so much like the solar system, with the sun and the planets and I said, “and it makes no sense that we study the atom in chemistry class, and maybe we study the solar system in physics class, or whatever, and we study the war which drove so much of the research into the atom maybe in history class, and it’s all really part of the same thing.”
And he said something like “yeah, man.”
And many years later, reading biographies of Einstein and Bohr and Oppenheimer, and those cats, I learned that it’s no accident that the so called “Bohr model” for the atom looks like the solar system, it was quite conscious, and controversial. It’s a simplistic conception that’s helpful only up to a point, and they knew it at the time. And it’s interesting that closer examination seems to very disturbingly indicate that people find whatever they are looking for in the universe, that our will somehow exerts influence over the quantum field, or some crazy stuff like that. Go on and read some of the modern writings in quantum field theory, if you don’t believe me, it will blow your mind.
And that brings me to the history and philosophy of science, or “natural philosophy” as they used to call it, and people like James Burke, who did a couple of TV series and books called “Connections” and also “The Day the Universe Changed”, as well as the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, which has profoundly influenced my view of the world.
And I would love to drill down into how and why these two men were so influential, not just to me, but to so many people, whether they know it or not — one broadly and the other deeply, but I must rush on to list so many other human beings whose contributions are all interconnected in a vast, hyper dimensional web of thought and perception.
So many of our modern western commonplaces of thought, even assumptions about the world, were revolutionary insights derived from Locke, and before him, Hobbes, and arguments against Roman Catholic interpretations of Christianity, itself so deeply fundamental to western thought that it is just given, like air, like gravity. But Christianity is itself based on, or perhaps embedded in another cultural context, Judaism, or more specifically a form and view of Judaism as practiced by Hellenized Jews such as Paul the Apostle, and so we find themes of Greek philosophy and mysticism cropping up in Christian theology, fusing with the Judaic themes in exactly the same way that the colonies of the new world became an amalgamation of various European cultures, translated into a new context. So we can think of these Judaic memes being transplantated from the levant into (or perhaps invading) the fertile soil of the European mind. And to complicate matters further, the rich and complex web of Judaic thought before and since the time of Christ has had a kind of parallel development, profoundly influencing and subtly influenced by the development of Christianity. So nothing ever stands alone in this world, everything is influenced by everything else to one degree or another.
So, for example, I could talk about Spinoza and Newton, or the book of Ecclesiastes and Nietzsche, or for that matter, Christ and Osiris and Buddha. And that bring to mind Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”, and all that, and that’s a whole rabbit hole if ever there was one. And Frazer’s brilliant and original study of comparative folklore, magic and religion brings to mind Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and Gibbon’s uniquely witty, skeptical and insightful perspective on the development of Christianity based on an objective study of original sources. If you haven’t read these things, you should stop reading these words, right now, and go off and read them, Frazer and Gibbon in their entirety, and I guarantee, you’ll come back a different person, if you come back at all.
But history involves not only the history of what we call “The West”, but so much more that is neglected by or even unknown to so many of us, that it is disturbingly sad to the point of shocking. I could talk about the vast tracts of time encompassed by the Chinese empires of the Ming, the Han and the Chin and other dynasties and the Ch’un Ch’iu periods, reminiscent of monarchical western Europe, fertile and innovative and war prone, the era of the great general Sun Tzu, and his classic “The Art of War“. Or the parallels of Feudal Japan to Medieval Europe, or the mysterious millennia encompassed by the Egyptian dynasties of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms, or the vast literature and scripture of what we call India, they themselves call Bharat, and its great tales, comparable to and in some ways exceeding those of Homer or Shakespeare, gathered into the Mahabharata, which includes as only one of its numerous volumes the Bhagavad-Gita. But the “Great Bharata” is itself embedded in a vast and ancient scriptural tradition including the Vedas and the Upanishads, all of which are worlds unto themselves.
But history involves not only the history of thought, but so much of human history involves conflict: and military history is a noble and worthy specialty in its own right. So many innovations were forced by war: so many examples are present in our minds from the modern era, but as just one example from history, consider that Galileo’s telescope was once thought so strategically valuable in the military context that it’s invention was held a state secret. Think about it.
Let us ponder the hundreds or thousands of wars men have wrought upon one another, the countless untold battles of the nations of pre-Columbian America, or the tribes of the central Asian steppes, of the Mongol hordes, of the Celts, the Norse, tales told in the Icelandic sagas, or now forgotton tales of the Germanic peoples of Gaul, of the Aryans in India, each embodying values and world views so very different from one another and our own, that we are shocked to learn how despite their differences in time and place, that all people are the same: we all experience love, and jealosy and pride. Even the Chinese, somehow lived parallel separate histories just the same in their own world (中, the ideogram for China, is a rectangle representing the four corners of the world, with a vertical stroke through its center, indicating the center or axis of the world, that is, “Chin”).
Or consider another path, so to speak, through the history of the traditional martial arts, wushu (武術). For example, the development of Te (手 “open-hand or weaponless martial arts”) in secret on Okinawa while under occupation by Japan.  Open hand, because Okinawans were forbidden from carrying weapons by the occupying Japanese.  According to legend Te was derived from Kung-Fu (功夫 “skill learned through great effort”), itself brought to Okinawa from China by itinerant Buddhist monks. And consider the relationship of Kung-Fu to Buddhism, itself an export from India to China, and transformed as it spread through southeast Asia and Japan to Korea and beyond. And then how the Japanese codified and renamed it Kara Te Do (空手 “the way of the open hand”), as we now know it.    Or comparing and contrasting all the many different schools of martial arts, Tae Kwon Do (태권도 “the way of the fist and foot”), and Ju Do (柔道, “the gentle way”), and Ju Jutsu (柔術 “the flexible way”), and so on, and how they are all rooted in Yoga (control), and how isn’t it interesting that there is no martial art particular to India?
Or again, the rich, manifold, and to most westerners of European descent, the mysterious, almost alien world of Islam, yet in so many ways it’s a reflection, or alternative distillation of influences, and not at all unrelated mixture of Judaic, North African, and Western Asian thought and culture.
And again back to the crossroads of history, culture, philosophy, business and science, and the fascinating story of Leonardo di Pisa, known as Fibonacci, how he brought the Hindu-Arabic counting system from North Africa to Europe. And ask yourself, how profound an influence has zero-based arithmetic had on the development of western science and technology, and how has it changed the world? And consider the transit of the concept of zero from the Ashrams of India through the Madrasahs of Baghdad to the school in Algeria where Leonardo learned of it, and brought it back to Medieval Italy and put it to great practical use in his father’s trade business, and its history from thence throughout Europe.
And maybe you can begin to see what I mean when I say everything is connected.
Or travel back with me to Elea, a Greek colony in Italy, and to the early fifth century before Christ, and contemplate the origins of western philosophy Or consider the origins of the Ottoman Empire in the relics of the Caliphate, and modern Turkey and its unique relationship to Islam, and the peculiar origin of the phrase “Young Turks” and the involvement of the leaders of Young Turk party in the first world war, and the calamitous outcome thereof, and the influences on western Asia and the Arab world of the treaty of Versailles, the reverberations of which we are still dealing with today. That is a topic for an entire book in itself.
Oh, I could go on and on, drilling ever deeper, and roving ever more broadly, but to what end? Is there anybody out there?