The Three Parts of Christ

There are times in a historical writer’s life when the slow unpeeling of ‘facts’ to get to a bedrock of plausible reality opens up a whole new, entirely unexpected, world view - and it doesn’t get more unexpected than the discovery of the three men who together make up the mythology/historiography of the man we now know as Christ.

Before we start, I have to declare myself a non-Christian. This is not to say that I don’t believe the Christian god exists - If we define gods as semi-autonomous entities that thrive - indeed, survive- on the attentions and intentions of humanity, then I’m pretty sure that it exists - I just don’t choose to follow its precepts.

But the god is not the man - that concatenation didn’t take place until much later than the first century AD which is the era of current interest - and the tales of Christ, however fictional they may be, would seem to have some grain of truth in them.

I don’t for one moment believe there was a virgin birth in a year that is simultaneously both 6BC (the year Herod the Great slaughtered his own sons by his first wife, thus giving rise to the myth of the ‘slaughter of the first born’) and 6 AD (the year of the census that followed Herod’s death), nor do I believe in the various tales of healing - they were essential in any god-myth of the time and are frankly ten a penny, but somebody at some point in the early first century gave the sermon on the mount and someone, probably, rode into Jerusalem on an ass proclaiming himself King of the Hebrews. The point - the very significant point - is that these were not necessarily the same person and nor were they necessarily the same as the man who was crucified for insurrection.

So - the details of how we arrive at the results we do would take a far, far longer blog post and perhaps I’ll get round to it one day — but at the moment, this is what makes sense to me as a plausible reading of history. Most of the detail comes from a reading of Josephus, taking into account other writers’ details of the time in question. I take Josephus at broadly face value except when either it has obviously been altered in later years or there’s some evident warping of history to cast Josephus himself in a better light. The description of the Fourth Philosophy doesn’t seem to come under either category and I can see no reason why it would be fabricated.

Thus: the first part of Christ is the man whose death (but not life; not a word of that) Paul of Tarsus - aka St Paul usurped: He was Judas the Galilean, aka Judas of the Sicarioi (yes, it is an anagram of Iscariot; no, Iscariot is not and never has been a Hebrew surname), aka Judas, leader of the Zealots. This man was a tireless anti-Roman activist, an armed insurgent who led his people in a highly effective campaign against Rome for several decades in the early first century. He first came to notice when he led his men in an audacious attack on the armoury at Sepphoris and looted it of enough weapons to arm his followers for several decades. The Romans flattened the city, crucified all the men over the age of 15 and sold the women and children into slavery, but he was long gone by then, carrying out a guerrilla war against Rome.

Judas was, in effect, the Osama bin Laden of his time - he fought against the world superpower of his era in an effort to win autonomy for his nation and with the intent of creating a totalitarian theocracy as the end result. His armed followers - the zealots or sicarioi - were ruthless killers who would walk into a crowded market place, slide their knife (the sicarius) into a pro-Roman sympathiser and walk away - they’d be gone before the body hit the ground. The quizlings of the Sanhedrin loathed them and did everything they could to suppress all support, up to and including the torture of their children. Not only could they not diminish their numbers, they couldn’t, by any torture possible, get them to name Caesar as foremost before their god. The wider ‘Fourth Philosophy’ which Judas led, was gathering tens of thousands of followers as his teachings of insurrection and holy war spread.

Josephus tells us nothing about his death, but crucifixion was the universal remedy for insurrection against Rome (at the end of the siege of Jerusalem, the Romans were crucifying 500 men and women a day -Judaea had been quite heavily forested until the legions cut down all the trees to make crosses). The timing of his death, though, probably in the mid-30s makes him the prime contender for Paul’s sophisticated pseudo-religion. To be fair, making up new cults was something of a popular pastime in this culture - Ptolemy Asul had made a new god for his city of Alexandria by fusing the Greek and Egyptian gods to create Serapis - and Paul simply took the Dionysian god-sacrifice, welded it to bits of the cult of Osiris and fused them both onto the useful, older, (almost entirely fictional) pseudo-history of the Hebrew people. Anything with ancient antecedents was highly popular and it helped if it was all written in Greek. Which it was.

In many ways, Paul was the Tony Blair of his age: he was a charismatic ego-maniac who heard messages from his god, which told him that everyone else who had heard messages from the same god (say, James and Peter - see later) were wrong and his version was uniquely right. Whether his new religion was based on self-deception or simply a particularly clever piece of fiction is unknowable, but for someone who had spent some years of his life trying to suppress the Fourth Philosophy and failing, it had three sterling points that recommended it to the men and women of the classical world.

First was that it didn’t require the ‘god-fearing gentiles’ to circumcise their sons or adhere to the Hebrew table laws - and since these two things kept them apart from the worlds of commerce they were willingly dropped.

Second, it didn’t distinguish between gentile and true-blooded Hebrew in the eyes of the new, polished-up, pro-Roman version of the Hebrew Yaweh.

Third, it was as rabidly pro-Roman as the man on which it was based was anti-Roman. In the eyes of those fighting for a free Judaea, Rome was the ultimate antithesis of all they fought for: to pay taxes to Rome was a sin, to honour Rome was appalling. Paul’s new version encouraged the paying of taxes and required that its followers honour Rome and the structure of Roman life.

What Paul never does in any of his attested letters (that is, the ones written largely by the same first century psychopath, not any of the ones written in later centuries under his name) is mention anything of the life of the man he calls ‘Christ’ (which is Greek for Yeshuah, which is the Hebrew word for ‘saviour’ - like Boudica (She who brings Victory) and Calgacus (Sword Wielder), it’s a title). When asked if his followers should marry, he cites Peter, the lieutenant of the man he worships, and James, his brother, as examples - and then cites himself as the ultimate model - but he never once mentions ‘Christ’ - which can only be, one assumes, because he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to draw attention to the distinction between the man he was creating and the one who actually existed. But there can be little doubt that Judas the Galilean was the first model for Christ - the clincher for me was the anagram of his name - Judas of the Sicarioi becomes Judas Iscariot. Paul didn’t do that - he doesn’t mention any detail of the crucifixion, but it must have been done in later years as the various stories were gathered into a whole. What better way to hide the antecedents of your hero than to cast him as his own destroyer: a particularly able piece of spin.

But - someone still gave the sermon on the mount, someone still rode into Jerusalem on the back of an ass proclaiming himself the true King of Israel.

The first of these, I think, is James, (Yacov), the brother of Judas. James was a Nazirite, given to the Hebrew god from birth. He was a vegetarian, celibate pacificst who spent his life in prayer and took cold baths six times daily to offset any inclination to think about sex or women (and we wonder that the Catholics have serious hang-ups about sex?). His knees were apparently as thickly horned as camels’ feet from kneeling in constant prayer. He was the most holy man the Hebrews had known - and I think he led the Fourth Philosophy from his brother’s death in the 30s to his own death in 62 AD when the Sadducees of the Sanhedrin condemned him to death by stoning essentially for being too popular. Josephus tells us it was ‘Christ’s’ death that sparked the revolt that finally took shape in 66 AD, but I think it’s far more likely that it was this man - the man still worshiped by the Ebionites as the true leader of their (voluntarily impecunious, communal-living, communal-sharing) Christian sect. They loathe Paul as an apostate, which would seem about right - he and James loathed each other - for full details, see ‘James, the brother of Christ’ by Robert Eisenman - it’s an eye opener.

So - I think James the pacifist gave the sermon on the mount, was the teacher of love and wisdom, when his brother was the warmaker (and yes, I will write their stories if I am ever given publisher-permission). James is the second part of our tri-partite creation.

and the third is Menachem ben Yehuda, son or grandson of Judas (Josephus says both at varying times, one has to assume we’re not talking about father/daughter incest so he’s not both and there’s either been a glitch in translation or a glitch in the original) At any rate, this man was one of the greatest generals the Hebrews ever had. His assault on Masada is written so simply in Josephus:

In the mean time, one Menahem, the son of that Judas, who was called the Galilean (who was a very cunning sophister (sic) and had formerly reproached the Jews under Cyrenius, that after God, they were subject to the Romans) took some of the men of note with him, and retired to Masada, where he broke open king Herod‘s armoury, and gave arms not only to his own people, but to other robbers also. These he made use of for a guard, and returned in the state of a king to Jerusalem; he became the leader of the sedition. (Flavius Josephus, Jewish War 2.7:18)

For nearly two thousand years, history has skipped past passage, this moving on to the more exciting moments of the siege, or the final assault by the Roman legions on Masada, five years later, when nine hundred Hebrews held off the might of Rome’s army until, finally surrounded, they drew lots and killed themselves.

And yet Menachem, had he succeeded in his greater task, would be one of the great heroes of history. Masada was a massive rock in the middle of nowhere and it was reasonably supposed to be impregnable. When Rome finally took it back, they required a three year siege and had to build a ramp – which can still be seen - to make their way onto the rock. In Menachem’s time, there was a goat path up which two men could struggle and a similar two men could have held it against an assaulting army. Nevertheless, he managed, somehow, to assault it, defeat the garrison, and thereby arm his men in a way that was a thousand times more effective than the method employed by his ancestor: when the Galilean took the armoury at Sepphoris, the Romans destroyed the town, crucified all the men and sold the women and children into slavery. The area didn’t recover for generations. After the first fall of Masada, by contrast, there were no specific reprisals: Menachem ‘returned in the state of a king to Jerusalem, and became leader of the sedition’, which makes Menachem, in my view the first likely contender for the title of Jewish Messiah, and the third of our three parts of Christ. Sadly, he was tortured to death in the main square by his cousin, who clearly didn’t recognise greatness when he saw it and thus the revolution died before it truly got off the ground, but nevertheless, it was a particularly audacious and intelligent use of armed force. The book, Rome: The Coming of the King is set around the taking of Masada and the removal of Rome from Jerusalem - one of the high points in any anti-Roman history.

Tagged as: christ, fourth philosophy, galilee, judaea, judea, lies, menachem, Paul, rome, St Paul, three parts of christ