The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History

Roman historians too were aware of this prediction: Suetonius writes that “an ancient superstition was current in the East; that out of Judaea at this time would come the rulers of the world. This prediction, as the event later proved, referred to a Roman Emperor, but the rebellious Jews…read it as referring to themselves.”6

Tacitus also mentions it: he explains that

the majority were convinced that the ancient scriptures of their priests alluded to the present as the very time when the Orient would triumph and from Judaea would go forth men destined to rule the world. This mysterious prophecy really referred to Vespasian and Titus, but the common people…thought that this mighty destiny was reserved for them, and not even their calamities opened their eyes to the truth.7

Then Nero was murdered. After him, two emperors came and went in quick succession. Finally, in A.D. 69, Vespasian was proclaimed emperor by his army. He called off the siege of Jerusalem in order to concentrate on his power base and shore up his imperial ambitions. He wanted, above all, to dominate Egypt. Luckily, his supporter and friend, the Jewish general Tiberius Alexander, was prefect of Egypt and in charge of the two legions stationed there. Vespasian wrote to Tiberius Alexander explaining his desire to seek the imperial throne; Tiberius Alexander read the letter aloud to all, then called for troops and civilians to swear an oath to Vespasian. Omens had foretold Vespasian’s reign, and he “specially remembered the words of Josephus, who while Nero was still alive had dared to address him as Emperor.”8 Josephus was immediately released from captivity. Vespasian put his son Titus in charge of the army, and Titus appointed Tiberius Alexander as his chief of staff.

As a Jew, Tiberius Alexander would have been well aware of the “Star” prophecy, so it is conceivable that he contrived to apply it to Vespasian. The Roman historian Dio Cassius reports that while Vespasian was in Alexandria he was said to have healed a blind man and another man with a crippled hand; both had been told in a dream to approach Vespasian.9 Long ago, the great scholar Robert Eisler suggested that only Tiberius Alexander, with his knowledge of Jewish prophecy and his desire to see the triumph of Vespasian, would have thought to manipulate circumstances so that the prophecy of Isaiah would come true—the prophecy that states the day when God heals the earth, the day when “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unsealed, then the lame shall leap like a deer” (Isaiah 35:5-6). Only Tiberius Alexander, Eisler noted, would have contrived to send the blind man and the cripple to Vespasian so that he could perform his “messianic miracle.”10

Tiberius Alexander would also have been aware of another part of the prophecies of Isaiah—the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Isaiah wrote that God said: “I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard…knock down its wall for it to be trampled on.” Two verses later, he explained, “Yes, the vineyard…is the House of David” (Isaiah 5:5, 7). For Tiberius Alexander, Vespasian was the messiah. Josephus agreed, writing, “In fact the oracle pointed to the accession of Vespasian.”11 To both these Romanized Jews, Vespasian was the messiah who had been foretold long ago in their sacred scriptures. For both, the Line of David was as defunct as the Temple was soon to be.

Nevertheless, Vespasian must have felt that even if the prophecy were true, he had a shaky hold over the identification since he certainly hadn’t descended “from Jacob.” There was no blood from the Line of David coursing through his veins. So, after he had won the war and destroyed Jerusalem, he sought out all surviving members of the Line of David and executed them. Vespasian respected the power of the oracle and was not about to take any chances. He wanted “to ensure that no member of the royal house should be left among the Jews.”12 But as history would later reveal, a number of the members of that ancient royal house had escaped his clutches.

With all this talk of stars, it is inevitable that we should address the Star of Bethlehem. The star is the messianic symbol of the Line of David. The Star of Bethlehem can also be termed “the Messiah of Bethlehem.” This would suggest that we need not look for astronomical supernovae or stellar conjunctions to explain the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem, a stronghold of the Line of David. It was a matter of dynasty rather than astronomy. And the Magi knew where to go to find their king.

But there has always been a mystery over the story of Joseph and Mary taking the infant Jesus from Bethlehem to Egypt to escape Herod—as noted by Matthew. Luke explains that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, having been taken there as a member of the Line of David for the census. The only census known was that of Quirinius in A.D. 6, after Rome had taken over Judaea. But this is always thought of as too late for Jesus’s birth because the Gospels put him at around thirty years old at his crucifixion.

However, these calculations do not work very well and do not match the data given in the Gospels. Hugh Schonfield proposed a very provocative alternative.

The usual date for the crucifixion is given, with the Vatican’s imprimatur by a chronological table at the end of The Jerusalem Bible, as on the eve of the Passover, 8 April A.D. 30.13 The reasoning is this: John’s Gospel contains some rather precise dating, citing the first Passover following Jesus’s baptism as that of A.D. 28 (John 2:13, 20).14 John mentions two more Passovers, the third of which sees the crucifixion, which thus must have occurred before the Passover of A.D. 30. Can this be correct?

We have only two sources of hard data beyond the New Testament. First, Tacitus states that “Christ had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor…Pontius Pilate.”15 We know that Pilate was prefect of Judaea from A.D. 26 to 36, so that gives us a range within which we must stay. Second, although Josephus mentions the same incident, there is no general agreement that his passages mentioning Christ are original rather than later insertions by Christian editors.

The Gospel of Luke (3:1, 23) states that Jesus was about thirty years old at the time of his baptism by John, and this was after the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (as calculated in Syria)—A.D. 27. But he was baptized not long before John the Baptist was executed, and after John’s death the Gospel of Matthew (14:13) describes Jesus as seeking refuge in the desert, perhaps fearing for his own life. What then was the date of the execution? It could not have been A.D. 27, for Matthew and Mark report that John the Baptist was arrested by Herod Antipas for criticizing his marriage to Herodias—the wife of his brother, whom she had divorced —a marriage outlawed by Jewish law and also by one of the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Temple Scroll.16 Following this public criticism, John was executed. So far as can be ascertained, the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias took place in A.D. 35. Hence, John the Baptist was executed in A.D. 35. So Jesus must still have been alive at this date.

The last Passover attended by Pilate was A.D. 36. In other words, since Jesus is said in the Gospels to have been executed after John the Baptist’s death and by the decision of Pilate, it must have been the Passover of A.D. 36 during which Jesus was crucified.17 This is later than most experts have placed the event, but if Jesus was born at the time of the census in A.D. 6, as stated by Luke (2:2), and if he was aged about thirty, A.D. 36 is just about the right time of the crucifixion—the crucifixion of the “Star of Bethlehem.”

In fact, early Christians were well aware of the connection between the messianic “Star of Bethlehem,” the prophecy of the “Star” as relayed by Balaam in Numbers, and Jesus. The Christian writer Justin Martyr, who taught and wrote in Rome and died in approximately A.D. 165, argued with a Jewish teacher, Trypho, that Jesus was the messiah. Justin explained that the rising of the Star of Bethlehem was the rising star predicted by Balaam; again we can see that the star was messianic rather than astronomical.18

Faced with the inevitability of total destruction, many fled Judaea. The Church historian Eusebius reports that the early “Christian” community—that is, the messianic community—after the execution of James around A.D. 44 and before the outbreak of war, left Jerusalem for Pella across the Jordan in Roman-controlled Syria.19 But this was probably the first stage on a longer journey north to Edessa, the capital of a kingdom that is described by Eusebius as being the first ever to convert to Christianity.20 It is certainly true that by the second century A.D. Edessa was a strong Christian center. It cannot be a coincidence that the king of Edessa in the early second century was the son of a king of Abiadene (a state that lay a little to the east), part of a royal family with close links to the messianic Jewish cause. In fact, Queen Helen of Abiadene and her son converted to Judaism.21 Moreover, we know for sure that her son converted to messianic Judaism—in other words, to the Zealot cause.22 This alliance was maintained by others as well. At least two relatives of the king of Abiadene were prominent Zealots in the opening battles of the revolt against the Romans in A.D. 66.23

Still, there were Jews who remained in Judaea who opposed the Zealots. In Jerusalem, Zealot factions began fighting other Jewish factions. Many deserted to the Roman side—according to Josephus at least, though we must remember that he had a strong reason to accentuate this fact, as he strongly believed the Zealots were responsible for the war and the destruction of the Temple. Despite his bias, he may well be right, given what we now know about the ruthless determination of the Zealots. Nevertheless, the fury of the fighting was such that we have to conclude that support for the Zealots was widespread and that Josephus was at pains to diminish it. For one thing, there was the business of the suicides.

Running constantly throughout Josephus’s accounts is talk of Zealots, soldiers and civilians alike, committing suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Romans. The most famous case is that of the mass suicide at Masada, where 960 people killed themselves. The ideology was widespread; armed resistance to Roman rule was a corollary. Even Josephus was involved in a suicide pact—which he managed, by treachery, to survive. But there were also accounts such as the one at Gamala, where five thousand people killed themselves. To kill yourself is one thing; however, to kill your wife, your children, and then yourself is something much greater. What was going on here?

The Zealots believed that if they died in a state of ritual purity, they would be resurrected together in accordance with the prophecy of Ezekiel: “I mean to raise you from your graves…and lead you back to the soil of Israel” (Ezekiel 37:12-14).24 Further, they believed that those who died together would be resurrected together. So the Zealot warriors chose not just to die but to die in the company of their family. Had they been captured, they would have been separated, and the women and boys would have been dispatched to the brothels, where they would have lost their ritual purity, preventing them from any hope of resurrection.25

Jerusalem was besieged by the legions of Titus. Little mutual respect or chivalry was evident on either side. All fighters captured were crucified, and when that became commonplace, the soldiers amused themselves by nailing up their victims in various strange attitudes. So many were executed that the Romans ran out of room for the crosses and ran out of wood to make them.

On 29 August A.D. 70, and in line with the prophecy of Isaiah, the Temple was destroyed in a display of butchery without restraint. Over the following days the rest of the city was taken. Once the Romans held Jerusalem, they burned the remaining houses and tore down the defensive walls. The city was completely destroyed. All captured fighters were slated to be executed, civilians over seventeen were sent to labor in Egypt, and those younger were sold. Great numbers of the fighters were reserved for death in the Roman arenas. Many were exported to the Roman provinces to die as gladiators or to be torn to pieces by wild animals, to the delight of idle crowds; others were taken by Titus on his leisurely march up the coast. At every town he held displays in the arena where his Jewish prisoners were set upon by animals or forced to die in large battles for the spectators’ entertainment.

During the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian had been traveling, showing himself as emperor. He returned after the fall of the city and shortly after his return celebrated his brother’s birthday with the death of over 2,500 Jewish prisoners in the arena. Later, in Beirut, he celebrated his father’s birthday with even more deaths. All the while he was planning his triumphal entry to Rome bearing treasures and prisoners, including some of the leaders of the revolt whom he would have executed. The times were harsh.

For the Jewish people, this was a disaster of such a magnitude that even they, having once stood amid the smoking ruins of their Temple, could not even begin to comprehend it. In a religious sense, it was a second exile; the Temple, the House of God, the central bulwark of their religion, was gone. Jerusalem itself was lost too; Jews were not even allowed into the city, which had been renamed Aelia Capitolina. It seemed as if God had abandoned them. All around the world anti-Jewish feeling mounted, and rioting and killing destroyed the influence, power, and respect that Jewish merchants, philosophers, and politicians had once held. Even well-established communities suffered a terminal decline as tens of thousands were killed, and so those who had managed to survive kept their heads down. Some sicarii were able to flee to Alexandria, where they foolishly tried to encourage anti-Roman strife. So determined were they that they murdered some prominent members of the Jewish community who opposed them. In retaliation, the Jewish community rounded up the sicarii and gave them over to the Romans, who tortured them to death.

A small flame flickered on, however, in the town of Jabneh on the coastal plains of Judaea. There, under Johanan ben Zakkai, a leading Pharisee who had escaped Jerusalem and had requested rule of the town from Vespasian, the Sanhedrin was re-formed and a school was established. It was there that rabbinical Judaism was born. This significant favor from the emperor reveals that Johanan, like Josephus, was prepared to reach an accommodation with the invaders—something the Zealots had refused to do. Furthermore, Johanan is reported to have also proclaimed that the messianic “Star” prophecy referred to Vespasian.26

The scholars at Jabneh revived the halakhah—the legal side of Judaism comprising the law handed to Moses on Mount Sinai and the interpretation of the law that had been handed down through the ages—the study of which was crucial in a Judaism without the Temple. Between A.D. 70 and 132, after the destruction of Jerusalem, Jabneh served as the capital of the Jewish administration as well as the center of Judaism and Jewish scholarship. There the canon of texts in the Bible—the Old Testament to Christians—was fixed. This centralization of the faith helped establish some sense of national unity after the terrible destructions wrought by the war.

However, resistance continued, in small but important ways. Jewish prisoners were put to work as slaves, laboring on building projects, making weapons for the army, striking coins for the administration. The coins that were struck this time all emphasized the humiliation of Judaea. Some had iudaea capta—which means “Judaea Conquered”—on one side and a soldier, a palm tree, and a sorrowful figure representing Judaea on the other side. Other coins featured Vespasian with his imperial titles, including P.M. for Pontifex Maximus, or High Priest. And still others included the words victoria aug[ustus]—meaning “Victory of the Sacred Emperor.” They were a constant reminder for the Jewish population of their total subjugation. But one hardy Jewish slave working in the Roman mint had other ideas.

Once, while I was visiting a dealer in Middle Eastern antiquities, he said, with a slight smile, “Look at this,” and handed me a coin from one of his cabinets. It was a coin issued by the Roman mint of Vespasian, but this coin had one difference: on the palm tree side it had been struck iudaea august—“Sacred Judaea.” A brave or foolhardy Jewish slave had mixed the striking punches. I turned the coin over; it had been struck with the head of Vespasian as usual. But there was a difference on this side too—a prominent dent had been smashed into the temple of Vespasian’s head by a rounded punch. The point had very literally been made.

This is the only such coin ever found. It remains in a private collection.

In the summer of A.D. 115, the Jews outside of Judaea—especially those in Cyrene, Libya, and Alexandria, Egypt—rose in revolt. This insurrection then spread up the Nile to many other towns in Egypt. Vespasian might have tried to destroy all the members of the Line of David, but he had failed. Another descendant appeared in Egypt. His name was Lucuas, and he was described as the king of the Jews. He was the man who led the revolt.27 This uprising too had a definite messianic orientation.28 It implies that Lucuas very likely had, or claimed, a Davidic descent, but yet we know very little about the events because there was no historian equivalent to Josephus to write about them. It was a brutal two years of which we only know the outcome. This revolt entirely destroyed the position of Jews in Egypt. After this time they no longer had any power, influence, or even harmony. What’s more, the Romans took a very strong view of this revolt. Egypt was supremely important to the empire, and a successful coup there could have held Rome ransom. Ceasing shipments of grain to Italy from Egypt could have caused the Italian people to starve. Rome could never allow such a danger to exist. In response, the revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. At its end, in August 117, there had been a comprehensive destruction of the Jewish community in Alexandria.29 And in all the rest of Egypt, the cost to Judaism was mounting.

But the Jews had not yet given up hope that they might regain their independence, either through military prowess or from divine intervention—or both. Almost sixty years after the destruction of the Temple, during the rule of the emperor Hadrian, a second attempt to buck Roman authority was made.

This attempt had been well planned over a long period of time. The strategy needed to be developed in great secrecy. So a network of underground bases was constructed in subterranean caverns both natural and man-made. At least six such sites have been found in the Judaean foothills; one at Ailabo in Galilee had a purposefully excavated cavern beneath the ground sixty-five meters long, with vents in the roof that let in light and air.30 Places such as this served for both planning and training. Those in charge knew that they had to avoid the mistakes of the earlier war, in which the Zealots had allowed themselves to be trapped behind the defensive walls of towns and cities only to be picked off and destroyed, one by one, by Roman armies that were masters of siege-craft. This time they intended to attack the Romans fast and hard and then disappear back into their underground redoubts just as swiftly; they saw mobility as the key to victory.

It is important to note that this time the Jewish fighters were united under a single strong leader named Simon Bar Koseba, later to become known as Bar Kochba—“the Son of the Star,” revealing his messianic status. He too had the prophecy from Numbers 24 applied to him (“a star from Jacob takes the leadership, a sceptre arises from Israel”), and so, it would seem, he must also have carried the royal blood of David in his veins. Professor Robert Eisenman, a historian of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is intrigued by the possibility that Simon was related not just “figuratively but physically” to earlier messianic leaders in Judaea.31

Bar Kochba recruited military experts from overseas. Lists of names in Greek have been found, each name carrying the title Adelphos, or “Brother,” like the later chivalric orders such as the Templars or the Knights of St. John.32 Here were men with military experience who had come from the Jewish diaspora beyond Judaea where Greek was spoken and Aramaic or Hebrew unknown. These same men either served on the planning staff or, by virtue of their experience with the Roman forces, helped with the training of the secret Jewish army.

Bar Kochba knew that his men were facing the best disciplined army in the world with a potential manpower far exceeding his own: it has been estimated that the Roman standing army topped 375,000 well-trained men. There were two legions in Judaea, the Sixth and the Tenth, providing roughly 12,000 men together with an equal number of auxiliaries. Additionally, in the surrounding Roman provinces of Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, there were another five to seven legions and auxiliaries. The Jews could, at the most, raise 60,000 men, none of whom would have had military experience. Training was a necessity, and Bar Kochba devoted much time and effort to it.

He and his men needed weapons. So they devised an inventive way of ensuring a supply that is described by the Roman historian Dio Cassius, writing from A.D. 194 to 216. Because many or most of the workers in the arms industry in Judaea were Jewish, “they purposely did not forge up to standard those weapons which they had been ordered to furnish, so that the Romans might reject them, and they might thus have use of them themselves.”33

The war broke out in A.D. 131 and was immediately successful. Roman civilians fled Jerusalem and the Tenth Legion retreated. The Twenty-second Legion from Egypt is unaccounted for in the military records of the time. It is assumed that it was rushed from its base in Egypt to Judaea but was there overwhelmed and totally annihilated. Jerusalem was recaptured from the Romans, its walls were repaired, and a Jewish civilian administration was established. For almost two years Judaea was free of Romans. But, of course, the Romans were gathering soldiers in order to return with overwhelming force.

This time Hadrian himself was in command. With him was the former governor of Britain, Julius Severus, whom he considered the finest of all his generals. In A.D. 133, nine, perhaps twelve, Roman legions and auxiliaries drawn from as far away as Britain—some sixty thousand to eighty thousand soldiers—invaded Galilee from the west and from across the Jordan river in the east. But they found it tough going. The Jewish fighters mounted a very flexible defense. The former high-ranking army officer Professor Mordechai Gichon wrote of Bar Kochba’s long-term strategy: “The tangible Jewish hope lay in drawing out the war long enough to bait hostile forces from within and without, to take up arms, and to exhaust the Roman will to win this war at any cost.”34 But they lost. Simon Bar Kochba was killed in the summer of A.D. 135 while defending the town of Bethar. His great campaign was over.

Hadrian, wanting to eradicate Judaea from memory, changed the name of Judaea to Palaestina (now Palestine). But two generations later, the population was finally granted considerable autonomy—including being excused from “any duty that clashes with the observance of their religious rules and beliefs.”35

It seems that the Romans still recalled the rivers of blood that their reconquest of Judaea had cost. And it still hurt.

I became friendly with Mordechai Gichon in Israel during a period when I was regularly involved in archaeological work with Robert Eisenman and his team from California State University in Long Beach. Gichon’s extensive knowledge of Bar Kochba fascinated me, and he was intrigued and interested by the thesis in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which he had read. He once took me—along with some of the students and volunteers helping our excavation efforts at the Dead Sea—to visit one of the last Bar Kochba fortresses to be taken by the Roman troops. It was a forlorn ruin near Emmaus in the Judaean foothills, halfway between Jerusalem and the coast. It had never been excavated, and Professor Gichon wanted the chance to do so. I was soon to find out why.