From Yahweh to Zion Read online

  The scene where Pilate offers the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas is hardly credible to historians. One is tempted to explain it by the rewriting of an original narrative in which Jesus and Barabbas were one; indeed, Barabbas means “son of the Father” in Aramaic—Abba is the expression Jesus used to address his God, for example in Mark 14:36. Additionally, some manuscripts designate him as “Jesus Barabbas.”111 So according to a plausible hypothesis, the crowd really clamored in vain for the liberation of Jesus, but a secondary editor transformed the scene by duplicating “Jesus son of God” into Jesus and Barabbas. The same editor nevertheless absolved the “crowd” from responsibility by declaring that it was manipulated by the “high priests.”

  In any case, the main responsibility for the death of Jesus is still imputed to the priestly elites of Jerusalem. Matthew, it is true, incriminates the entire people, who together shoulder the whole responsibility for the murder of Christ: “Let his blood be on us and on our children” (27:25) ; and there is undoubtedly a clear Judeophobic trend in the Gospel of Mark—a trend that is all the more significant because Matthew deeply Judaized the message of Christ, as we shall see.

  Historical-critical analysis of the Gospels is a perfectly legitimate field of scientific inquiry. It submits the Gospels to the same tests of credibility as any other historical source, with the added advantage of having four interdependent versions (three if we limit ourselves to the Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke), which enables us to separate the successive layers of redactions. It is clear that the Gospel of Mark is the oldest and has served as the basis of the two other Synoptic Gospels. But it is also believed that its lost first version (the hypothetical Urmarkus or Proto-Mark) has been revised in an attempt to harmonize it with Matthew.112 Given this complex redactional history of the Gospels, it is legitimate to question their historical reliability. The question, regarding Jesus’s crucifixion, is whether the evangelists’ story of a Jewish conspiracy against Jesus is basically true, or whether it is a cover-up of the Romans’ responsibility. We have to choose between two theories: a “conspiracy theory” today considered anti-Semitic (though the evangelists were themselves Jewish), and a politically correct revisionist theory that shifts the blame entirely to the Romans—thereby implicitly admitting that Jesus was the seditious anti-Roman agitator that the Jerusalem priests said he was.

  From a historical point of view, the evangelists’ narrative is perfectly plausible in its broad outlines. It offers no obvious reasons to turn it on its head. Neither the conspiracy of the local elite nor the treason of Judas are implausible; on the contrary, they seem quite realistic. Paul himself twice fell victim to the same methods. It was the Jews who, at Corinth, seized him and dragged him before the proconsul Gallion under the accusation: “This individual is trying to persuade people to worship God in a manner contrary to the Law.” Gallion washed his hands of the affair after the manner of Pilate, but did not yield to Jewish pressure: “Listen, you Jews. If this were a misdemeanour or a crime, it would be in order for me to listen to your plea; but if it is only quibbles about words and names, and about your own Law, then you must deal with it yourselves—I have no intention of making legal decisions about these things” (Acts 18:12–14).

  An even closer approximation to Jesus’s situation took place when Paul arrived in Jerusalem after his third voyage in Asia: “Some Jews from Asia caught sight of him in the Temple and stirred up the crowd and seized him” (Acts 21:27). When the Roman tribune Claudius Lysias intervened, the crowd loudly demanded that Paul be put to death. But the tribune excused himself from the case and “gave orders for a meeting of the chief priests and the entire Sanhedrin; then he brought Paul down and set him in front of them” (22:30). He then withdrew Paul and surrounded him with Roman guards. But forty conspirators convinced the Sanhedrin to ask the tribune for the right to question Paul again, secretly intending to kill him. The tribune learned of their intention and had Paul escorted to Caesarea with a letter for the governor of Syria, Felix, in which he explained: “I found that the accusation concerned disputed points of their Law, but that there was no charge deserving death or imprisonment” (23:29).

  The high priests also went to Caesarea with a lawyer named Tertullus to plead their cause against Paul: “We have found this man a perfect pest; he stirs up trouble among Jews the world over and is a ringleader of the Nazarene sect” (24:5). Felix dismissed them and “gave orders to the centurion that Paul should be kept under arrest but free from restriction, and that none of his own people should be prevented from seeing to his needs” (24:23). Paul, as a Roman citizen, “appealed to Caesar” (25:11), and Felix’s successor, Festus, granted him the right to be taken to Rome to plead before the emperor. He first gave Paul an opportunity to plead his case to King Agrippa II. After having heard it, Festus and Agrippa deliberated: “‘This man is doing nothing that deserves death or imprisonment.’ And Agrippa remarked to Festus, ‘The man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar’” (26:31–32). And so Paul was escorted to Rome, and the Acts of the Apostles tell us no more.

  Not being a Roman citizen, Jesus did not receive the same consideration as Paul. Aside from this difference, the methods used against Paul and against Jesus were the same. Unless we challenge the credibility of Paul’s story, there is no reason to challenge that of Jesus. It is all the more credible that it corresponds to a situation that was often repeated in the first two centuries of our era. According to the testimonies of Tertullian, Justin, Origen, and Eusebius, it was the Jews who incited the Romans to persecute Christians, denouncing them with slanderous accusations, such as allegedly eating children slaughtered in nocturnal gatherings: “The Jews were behind all the persecutions of the Christians. They wandered through the country everywhere hating and undermining the Christian faith,” affirms Saint Justin around 116 CE. The Martyrdom of Polycarp (second century) underlines the importance of the Jewish participation in the persecution of the Christians of Smyrna.113 It seems therefore very likely that Jesus was a victim of the same methods.

  Moreover, to suppose that the evangelists have falsified this aspect of the biography of Jesus obliges us to suppose that they have totally distorted the meaning of his message. For never, according to the Gospel stories, did Jesus attack the Romans or the authority of Rome. When the Pharisees and Herodians questioned him, hoping to trap him, on what he thought of the tax exacted by Rome, Jesus showed them the portrait of the emperor on a Roman coin and replied: “Pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar—and God what belongs to God” (Mark 12:17), which was a way of distancing himself from the protest against Roman taxation. In this scene, it is actually the Jewish authorities who conspire against Jesus by searching for a pretext for denouncing him to the Romans. The scene is as credible as Jesus’s reply was memorable.

  This episode may be profitably compared to another, also having money as its central theme: Jesus’s overthrowing the stalls of the money-changers and merchants of the Temple, accusing them of transforming the Temple “into a bandits’ den” (Mark 11:17). The money-changers’ business consisted of converting the various coins into the only coinage authorized to purchase the sacrificial animals and to pay the religious tax: the half-shekel. This highly lucrative financial traffic profited from money trading as well as usury, and gave rise to many abuses. Thus the only time Jesus behaved violently was not against the Romans and their taxes, but against the financial practices of the Jews. And it is again “the chief priests and the scribes” who, seeing this, “tried to find some way of doing away with him; they were afraid of him because the people were carried away by his teaching” (11:18).

  To understand the context, one must know that the earliest safe-deposit banks known in history were religious temples, because they were well guarded and therefore safe. Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus whose brother Alexander was director of customs and banker of the king of Judea, evoked such a “temple deposit” in his book Agains
t Flaccus.114 As the only authorized (and obligatory) place of religious sacrifice in Judea, the Jerusalem Temple had become, by the time of Jesus, a massive money magnet. But Yahweh’s vocation of amassing riches had begun long before that: “All the silver and all the gold, everything made of bronze or iron, will be consecrated to Yahweh and put in his treasury” (Joshua 6:19). In a very real sense, it is as much the bank as the Temple that symbolically destroys Jesus. His message was often directed against the love of money that festered in the Jewish society of his time: “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:23) ; “But store up treasures for yourselves in heaven, where neither moth nor woodworm destroys them and thieves cannot break in and steal. For wherever your treasure is, there will your heart be too” (Matthew 6:20–21). The idea of “storing up treasures in heaven” is totally foreign to Yahwism, as is the idea of “saving one’s life while losing it” (Matthew 16:25).

  The message of Jesus was also directed against the obsessive legalism of the Pharisees, the founding fathers of rabbinical Judaism. Jesus’s vision of the reign of God among men is the opposite of both the reign of money and the rule of law; it is the reign of the Spirit descended among men, and unconditionally welcomed by them. His disciples later explained that his death was necessary for him to send down the Holy Spirit (Paraclete), more or less confused with the risen Christ who had become “a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). But it is unlikely that Jesus would have rested this hope on his own sacrifice. The Holy Spirit was for him a reality blossoming in the hearts of men, to be realized socially in a conviviality that breaks down the barriers erected in the name of purity by the Law: “What goes into the mouth does not make anyone unclean; it is what comes out of the mouth that makes someone unclean” (Matthew 15:11).

  To conclude, the number one enemy of Christ is Judaism, in its sacerdotal-financial, Pharisaical-Puritanical, and anti-Roman zealot components (in that order). An abundance of evidence concurs in confirming that Jesus was the victim of a conspiracy of the Jewish elites in Jerusalem, arranged through lying witnesses and quotations taken out of context (Matthew 26:59–61) to use the Romans to eliminate a pacifist opposed to anti-Roman and anti-Samaritan chauvinism (see Luke 10:29–37). In denouncing Jesus as an enemy of Rome, these Jewish elites implicitly pledged their loyalty to the Roman authorities with a Machiavellian hypocrisy. But at the same time, having the Romans crucify a beloved prophet of the people meant exacerbating the anti-Roman sentiment that Jesus had tried to appease. In their arrogant confidence in Yahweh, they would eventually draw upon themselves the destruction that Jesus foresaw. Two centuries of biased historical criticism cannot erase this Gospel truth.

  Anastasis

  Christ is, in many ways, the culmination of the Greco-Roman heroic ideal: Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection are perfect manifestations of the heroic paradigm. And it is quite natural: the Gospels were written in Greek in one of the urban crossroads of Hellenistic civilization—Antioch, Rome, or Alexandria. And as we can imagine from the New Testament, the worship of Jesus instituted by his disciples “in remembrance of [him]” (Luke 22:19) is essentially a heroic cult of the Greek type. A generation of exegetes immersed themselves in the Hebrew tradition in search of antecedents for the idea of the salvific death of Christ; they found only the obscure “suffering servant” passage of Isaiah 53.115 The Greco-Roman antecedents, on the other hand, are legion: The sacrificial death of a man who then breaths his spirit into his community is the essential idea of heroic religiosity. Of the founding hero of Rome, Romulus, Livy tells us that after being put to death by the senators, the Romans “began to cheer Romulus, like a god born of a god, the king and the father of the city, imploring his protection, so that he should always protects its children with his benevolent favor.” The heroizing of Romulus was encouraged by his apparition to a certain Proculus Julius, to whom he said: “Go and tell the Romans that the gods of heaven desire my Rome to become the capital of the world.” (History of Rome I.16).

  To compare the worship of Jesus with the cults of the Greco-Roman heroes is nothing new; the resemblance was obvious to the first Christians, as well as to their adversaries. Saint Justin, a Christian intellectual from a pagan family, conceded it: by saying that Jesus “was begotten without any carnal act, that he was crucified, that he died, and that after rising from the dead he ascended to heaven, we admit nothing stranger than the history of those beings whom you call sons of Zeus.” The difference, Justin insists, is that the story of Jesus is truthful, while those of the pagan demigods are lies invented by demons to “sow in the minds of men the suspicion that the things predicted of Christ were a fable like those related by the poets.”116 To set Jesus apart from the heroes by placing him above them, out of competition, was the main concern of the first apologists.

  Jesus is not the only Christian hero, he is merely the first. The cults of the saints, which mobilized Christian devotion in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, represent the prolongation of the heroic culture of classical antiquity. Until the tenth century, their cults were mainly spontaneous local manifestations of popular piety, centered on tombs or martyrs’ relics. The cults of the Christian saints developed parallel to the declining vestiges of pagan heroic cults throughout late antiquity, as Christopher Jones shows in his masterful book on Greco-Roman heroic religiosity. Many of the venerated tombs were those of men who did not die for their Christian faith; some were described as brigands by the authorities. Augustine himself conceded that only an “ecclesiastical form of expression” prevented the holy martyrs from being described as heroes (The City of God X.21).117 More than a century ago, Stefan Czarnowski demonstrated that saints belong to the hero category: “They bring together, in fact, the essential features. They are glorified men, who by their acts or by their death have merited a privileged position between the elect. The faithful live in communion with them. They see in the saints their advocates with God.”118 The cult of the saints, being strongly attached to their shrines, allowed communities to preserve a certain autonomy in their religious life. With it, Christianity successfully subverted Yahwist monotheism, whose tribal-universal god demands above all the extermination of any religious particularism.

  As for Christ himself, the title of “hero” is not applied to him in the Gospels. In Mark, Jesus is simply declared “son of God”: twice by a voice from heaven (1:11 and 9:7); twice by demons (3:11 and 5:7), who elsewhere called him “the Holy One of God” (1:24); and once by a centurion seeing Jesus expire (15:39). Mark gives the expression “son of God” an “adoptive” meaning: Jesus becomes the son of God by the descent of the Holy Spirit during his baptism. Mark knows nothing of any alleged virginal conception. The fact that Matthew and Luke reinforce the heroic pattern with their narratives of the Nativity, which give the term “son of God” a sense of “conception” (Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit descending on Mary), proves that they also understood the term “son of God” in Hellenic terms.

  As for the motif of heroic immortality, it is also perfectly recognizable in the Gospel of Mark, although the notion of “resurrection” deserves some clarification. The Greek term anastasis, as we have already said, literally means “rising,” and opposes “lying down,” which is a metaphor for death. Anastasis is thus the awakening after the sleep of death. The term can be understood in the sense of a physical return to life, but this is not the meaning that comes to a Hellenized spirit like Paul of Tarsus, who, to answer the question “how are dead people raised,” distinguishes “celestial bodies” from “terrestrial bodies,” and explains: “What is sown is a natural body, and what is raised is a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:35–44). The New Testament use of anastasis implies a metaphorical conception of death as sleep, which forms the narrative framework of many myths and tales in all the folklores of the world. Subsequent Christian doctrine introduced the absurdity of physical resurrection, directly derived from Jewish materialism, and reinfo
rced at the end of the Middle Ages by the iconography of decaying corpses emerging from tombs.

  Jesus himself clearly expressed his conception of anastasis when he was questioned by Sadducees hoping to confront him with contradictions in the doctrine. They presented him with the theoretical case of seven brothers successively married to the same woman (Mark 12:18–27). The Sadducees, faithful to the Torah, did not believe in any form of life after death, and opposed the Pharisaic conception of resurrection, born of Maccabean literature. But Jesus refuted both Pharisees and Sadducees, clearly expressing a spiritualist conception of the resurrection conforming to the most common Hellenistic view: “For when they rise from the dead, […] they are like the angels in heaven.” Then he added a very personal exegesis of the Torah: “Now about the dead rising again, have you never read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him and said: I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? He is God, not of the dead, but of the living. You are very much mistaken” (Mark 12:25–27). The aphorism “Yahweh is a god of the living not the dead” usually expressed the Yahwist rejection of any form of worship of the dead. But Jesus reversed its meaning to support the idea that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alive, that is, partaking of the angelic life that awaits man after death.

  There is no reason to suppose that Jesus expected for himself any other type of resurrection than this. But what of his disciples? How did they understand and describe the anastasis of Jesus? Consider first how Paul, our oldest source, explains to the believers of Corinth: “The tradition I handed on to you in the first place, a tradition which I had myself received, was that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried; and that on the third day, he was raised to life, in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas; and later to the Twelve; and next he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still with us, though some have fallen asleep; then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles. Last of all he appeared to me too” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). Paul uses the Greek term ôphthê to “appear” or “to be seen,” here clearly referring to a supernatural vision. He makes no distinction between the apparitions of the risen Jesus to the disciples and his own experience, which is described in Acts 9:3 as “a light from heaven [that] shone all round him,” accompanied by a voice.