A new religion arose which syncretized mythologies from the Hellenic mystery religions with a re-interpretation of Judaic scripture. It drew on teachings by Yeshua of Nazareth, but went far beyond them. This wandering Jewish sage from Galilee came to be regarded as a threat to Roman rule and was executed for it. [Since he’s mentioned by his near-contemporaries Josephus and Tacitus, I take him as a historical person, although a much-mythologized one. See Tacitus, Annals XV and Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18. 3. 63]

    Yeshua and his followers were Jews who followed Hebrew tradition, holding to the Torah and the covenant of Abraham. He said: “Until heaven and earth disappear, not a jot or tittle shall pass from the law...” [Matthew 5:18] “But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the Law to become void.” [Luke 16:17] His sayings directly counter the claims of Paul, who hijacked the movement that Yeshua founded and crafted a gentile religion from it. His claims contradict Yeshua's declarations that he had no dealings with gentiles: “I was sent only the lost sheep of Israel.” [Matthew 15:21-28; see also Mark 7:24-30]

Modern scholarship views the first Christians “as religious movements within Judaism.” [Geger, 113, who also (15) cites Jules Isaac’s 1948 Jesus and Israel; Vermes, 140] Many Judaic sects existed at this time, including the Baptists, Pharisees, Zealots, Apocalyptics, and the Qumranites (sometimes called “Essenes”). [Schaberg, 262] The books of Mark and Matthew show Yeshua reciting the Shema, wearing tzitzot, discussing what size tefillin should be, attending temple, and teaching how to make offerings there. [Fredriksen and Irshai, 1006] He is addressed as rabbi “more than any other single designation,” though he is sometimes called a prophet. His signature Lord’s Prayer, with its sanctification of the divine name and invocation of a coming divine kingdom, shows influence from the Kaddish. [Chilton, 296; 21-22]

The core teachings of Yeshua, that attracted people to what later came to be called Christianity, were about love, forgiveness, generosity. Second to his admonition “to love the lord your god,” came “Love your neighbor.” [Mark 12:31-33] Show forbearance, not retaliation. Turn the other cheek. [Luke 6:29] Love and pray for your enemies. [Luke 6:27-28, 35] Judge not, lest you be not judged. [Matthew 7:1]

Yeshua and his disciples had a strongly communitarian ethos: “No one claimed any of his possessions was his own, but they all shared everything they had. There were no needy persons among them.” [Acts 3:32-35] Many sayings counsel altruism to an extreme degree: “Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted…” [Luke 12:33] More sternly: You cannot serve both God and Mammon [money].” [Luke 16:13] And, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” [Mark 10:24-25] These precepts would be comprehensively ignored by countless powerful men claiming to be his apostolic successors.

However, the famous verses about the lilies of the field tell people not to worry about where their food and drink and clothing wil come from. This did not work the same for an impoverished widow with children to feed as for an itinerant bachelor in his prime. And what to make of verses like this? “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.  They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” [Luke 12: 51-54]


Then there are the apocalyptic passages. Like many Jews living under the Roman yoke, Yeshua believed in a last judgment. Two gospels show him predicting that judgment and kingdom would come within his hearers’ lifetime: “This generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” [Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32] As it turned out, it was Rome’s kingdom that came. Many scholars have tried to parse how all this fits together, or if it does at all, and what did he really say or what was written in by men who never heard him speak.

Yeshua’s famous teaching “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is comparable to Hillel’s saying, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbour: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it.” [Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a. www.come-and-hear.com/shabbath/shabbath_31.html] So, this principle was current in Judaea. (Hillel’s formulation seems the better one, given what we have seen of ardent evangelism.) But this teaching is not uniquely Jewish; analogues are found in Thales, Epictetus, Confucius, the Mahabharata (5:18), the Buddhist Udanavarga, and in Tobit 4:15, a Jewish apocryphal scripture. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule]

Rav Yeshua does not appear to have claimed to be the Messiah who was awaited to deliver Israel from Roman rule. The earliest scriptures show him chiding followers who hailed him as Messiah. Later texts have him claiming godhood; but these interpolations conflict with the Jewish concept of Messiah, and indeed, with all of Torah. They also contradict Yeshua’s teaching that with faith, his disciples could do greater things than he had. [Armstrong, 83]

By the early 1900s, comparative textual analysis of the Christian Bible led scholars to the conclusion that the Gospels of Luke and Matthew had both drawn from an earlier common source. They dubbed this lost scripture the Book of Q (for Quelle, “source” in German). [Mack, 16-39; Powelson/Riegert, 14] This oldest identifiable layer of Christian tradition was based on Judaic wisdom sayings and literature. It  shows that Yeshua's original followers did not believe in a Hellenistic “christ” born of a virgin. Nor do these core texts describe him being baptized, tried, crucified, or resurrected.

Neither Q nor the very early Book of Thomas mention a Last Supper or a eucharistic sacrament. The blessing of bread and wine was (and remains) a central Jewish tradition, but utterly devoid of any idea of ritually consuming the flesh and blood of a god. [Crossan, 130] Bruce Chilton points out the implausibility of a Jew telling other Jews to drink blood, “even symbolic blood,” a substance whose consumption is utterly taboo under Jewish law. [Chilton 2000:252] It goes against the fundamental principles of kashrut (Jewish dietary law).

Similarly, in Judaic culture the term “son of God” had general application, but in the Hellenic culture it referred to specific characters literally sired by gods or demigods. The gap between the two is not just metaphoric, but also cultural and linguistic; as Aramaic teachings were rendered into Greek, they took on new associations. [Vermes, 81; 3; 46]

“Lying at the bedrock of the earliest traditions about Jesus and his followers, Q documents a Jesus movement that was not Christian.” [Mack, 4; 245ff] It bore the multicultural signature of its birthplace, the Galilee, a place that Jews called Galil ha-Goyim, “land of the nations” (meaning “gentiles”). Hellenic influence was especially strong in this region, since the conquests of Alexander of Macedon and his Seleucid successors. In Yeshua’s time, many Galileans spoke Greek. [Mack, 54-7] He himself grew up in walking distance to Sepphoris, a major center of Hellenistic culture—and of Roman rule.

   Many theories have proliferated to explain this wandering Galilean. Some relate Yeshua to the Zealots attempting to overthrow Roman rule. It is more than doubtful that someone who preached “turn the other cheek” intended to lead a military insurrection, but Romans felt threatened enough by the prospect of a Passover uprising in Jerusalem to execute Yeshua for sedition. That had been Herod’s motivation for executing John the Baptist, as Josephus spelled it out: “to get rid of him before his work led to an uprising.” [Vermes, 279, citing Ant. 18:117-19] It’s necessary to understand the background for this statement.

Roman-Occupied Judaea

Yeshua and his followers were Jews strongly affected by Roman colonization. The legions conquered Judah in 63 bce and installed Herod as a puppet king. [Kirsch, 82] As Marvin Harris pointed out, “Jesus spent most of his life in the central theater of one of history’s fiercest guerilla uprisings.” [Harris, 161] The revolt broke out in 4 BCE, upon the death of Herod, around the time of Yeshua’s birth. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus testified to popular unrest at this time. The common people suffered under a crushing burden of Roman taxes and debt that locked them into a sharecropper-like subsistence. [Carroll, 73; Silberman, 31-9; Chilton 2000: 80]

Roman coins of Judaea Capta (captured Judah), depicting as a mourning woman

Nazareth was close to Sepphoris (modern Tzipori), which was a center of the uprisings. The Romans burned the city, slaughtered many of its people, and sold the rest into slavery. Their vassal-king Herod Antipas rebuilt Sepphoris as an administrative center, renaming it Autocratoris. (Really!) [Chilton 2000: 91] The legions destroyed many Galilean villages during this rebellion. One of the rebel leaders was Judas of Galilee, son of Hezekiah—who had fought Herod in his own time. Judas would live to see his own sons fight in the Jewish resistance. The Romans captured and crucified two of them. [Harris, 165-166] 

    Rome used thousands of crucifixions, an imperial punishment for rebellious slaves and colonized peoples, to subjugate the Judeans. This death-by-torture was one of three forms of public execution under the Roman empire. The second capital penalty was pushing condemned people into the arena to be devoured by starved animals. Most people today think of these arena deaths in relation to Christian martyrs, but they were a minority of those who suffered this punishment. The third penalty was burning at the stake.

Among those who the Roman state burned to death were sorcerers, magicians, and (after Christianization) pagans, heretics, and gays. After the fall of Rome, feudal European kingdoms adopted burning at the stake as a penalty for witchcraft, although in time it came to be used against heretics, sometimes Jews, and wives who killed their husbands.

    Varus, the regional governor of “Syria Palaestina,” put down three messianic revolts, including the one in Sepphoris. Varus crucified 2,000 rebels in Jerusalem alone, according to Josephus. Barabbas, who was crucified with Yeshua of Nazareth, was an insurgent of this kind. The gospels call him lestes, a Greek word which is usually translated as "thief," but which signified rebel bandits that targeted Roman tax collectors and absentee landlords. [Crossan, 141-2; Harris, 163]

The Zealots, also named Sicarii for the daggers they used in assassinations, were guerilla fighters attempting to overthrow Roman rule. Two of Yeshua’s disciples belonged to this resistance movement: Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot (from Sicarius, “dagger”). Some manuscripts also call him Zelotes. [Harris, 187-8] The name of this most notorious apostle, broken down to its Hebrew and Latin parts—Yehudah Sicarius—means “Jewish Guerilla.”

Not all the resistance was armed. When Pontius Pilate set up military standards with insignia of the emperor, masses of Jewish commoners risked their lives in non-violent protest, prostrating themselves outside his house for five days and nights. Their numbers forced Pilate to back down. [Crossan, 138] More messianic rebellions arose and were brutally crushed in the generation after Yeshua’s execution.

The Passover rising of 50 CE was followed two years later by a general revolt, which the Romans crushed with crucifixions “too many to count,” in the words of Josephus. The Sicarii kept up their resistance and assassinated Roman collaborators in Jerusalem, including the high priest Jonathan. Another full-scale rebellion broke out in the year 55. Josephus lists “at least five Jewish military messiahs, not including Jesus or John the Baptist” who were active between 40-73 CE. [Harris, 168-71]

In the year 66, the guerillas began fighting in Jerusalem itself. Menachem, the last surviving son of Judas Maccabeus of Galilee, took Masada and then Jerusalem. The insurgents expelled the Roman army and killed the high priest Caiaphas, who collaborated with the empire. But the Romans recovered, captured Menachem, and inflicted a terrible death on him. The provincial governor Florus whipped and crucified 3600 men, women and children. Four years later, Titus crucified thousands more, most of them starving people searching for food outside beseiged Jerusalem. [Crossan, 125-8] Josephus testified that over a million died during this siege. [Harris, 171. Carroll (90), gives the figure of 600,000, citing Josephus and Tacitus.]

The legions broke through in 70 CE and destroyed the Second Temple (which Jews had rebuilt after the Babylonian Exile) and most of Jerusalem. They expelled Jews from the city and its environs, shipping many thousands off into slavery. Still, the Judaeans rebuilt their capital, to an extent. After the Temple was destroyed, Yohanan ben Zakkai comforted a rabbi who said the Jews were now doomed because they could no longer offer sacrifices as their ancestors had: “My son, be not grieved. We have another atonement as effective as this, and what is it? It is acts of loving-kindness, as it is said, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’.” [Kirsch, 88. The rabbi was quoting from the book of Isaiah] After many centuries of brutal foreign rule, the theme of compassion had its appeal.

The last Jewish revolt against the Roman empire began generations later, in 132 CE. It was led by Bar Kokhba, hailed as the Messiah by Rabbi Akiba. The rebels fought from hundreds of underground tunnels and caves, and wiped out an entire legion. This initial success led emperor Hadrian to call in ten legions from Britannia, Gaul, Libya, the Balkans, and other provinces—“nearly one third of the Roman army.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt ]

Bar Kokhba coin inscribed “to the freedom of Jerusalem," with the temple

Bar Kochba issued coins stamped with palm trees and other Jewish symbols. The insurgent Jewish state lasted for three years, after which the Romans sacked Jerusalem once more. They killed hundreds of thousands, as many as 850,000, and destroyed perhaps a thousand villages, enslaving countless people. [Harris, 172; figure from Carroll, 90]

In 135 CE the Romans crushed the revolt with a massacre. The Jerusalem Talmud describes the enormous death toll, as the legionaries “went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils.” [Ta'anit 4:5, op. cit.] They killed more than a half million Judaeans, wiping out many villages, and sold innumerable captives into slavery. The Roman historian Dio Cassius recounted, “Fifty of their most important outposts and nine hundred and eighty-five of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. Five hundred and eighty thousand men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out. Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate. [69.14. 1-2]

This time Rome expelled the Jews from Jerusalem and its environs. These historic events had massive consequences for the Jewish nation: multitudes were forced into exile in the Diaspora. It was during this traumatic period that most of the Christian scriptures were composed. [Carroll, 90]

Rome also executed members of the Sanhedrin, including Rabbi Akiba, for sedition. One of the Ten Martyrs was Haninah ben Teradion, who put to death for teaching Jewish law, as was his wife, while his daughter was “condemned to degradation.” (I shudder to think what that meant in real terms.) They burned Haninah at the stake, piled with green wood and wrapping wet wool around his body with a Torah scroll, to prolong his suffering. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt#cite_ref-64 ] Tradition said that when the flames started to burn him and the scroll, he said to his followers: “I see the scrolls burning, but the letters fly up in the air.” [www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7189-hananiah-hanina-b-teradion ]