Holy Blood, Holy Grail (57 page)

On being carried to Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, Jesus would have required medical attention, for which an Essene healer would have been present. And afterwards, when the tomb was found to be vacant, an emissary would again have been necessary an emissary unknown to the “rank and file’ disciples.

This emissary would have had to reassure the unsuspecting “adherents of the message’, to act as intermediary between Jesus and his following and to forestall charges of grave-robbing or grave desecration against the Romans, which might have provoked dangerous civic disturbances.

Whether this scenario was accurate or not, it seemed to us fairly clear that Jesus was as closely associated with the Essenes as he was with the

Zealots. At first this might seem somewhat odd, for the Zealots and the

Essenes are often imagined to have been incompatible. The Zealots were aggressive, violent, militaristic, not averse to assassination and terrorism. The Essenes, in contrast, are frequently depicted as divorced from political issues, quietist, pacifist and gentle. In actual fact, however, the Zealots included numerous Essenes in their ranks for the

Zealots were not a sect but a political faction. As a political faction they drew support not only from the anti Roman Pharisees, but from the

Essenes as well who could be as aggressively nationalistic as anyone else.

The association of the Zealots and the Essenes is especially evident in the writings of Josephus, from whom much of the available information on

Palestine at the time derives. Joseph ben Matthias was born into the Judaic nobility in A.D. 3 7. On the outbreak of the revolt in A.D. 66

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he was appointed governor of Galilee, where he assumed command of the forces aligned against the Romans. As a military commander he seems to have proved signally inept, and was promptly captured by the Roman Emperor Vesnasian.

Thereupon he turned Quisling. Taking the Romanised name of Flavius Josephus, he became a Roman citizen, divorced his wife and married a Roman heiress, and accepted lavish gifts from the Roman emperor -which included a private apartment in the imperial palace, as well as land confiscated from Jews in the Holy Land. Around the time of his death in A.D. 100, his copious chronicles of the period began to appear.

In The Jewish War Josephus offers a detailed account of the revolt between

A.D. 66 and 74. Indeed, it was from Josephus that subsequent historians learned most about that disastrous insurrection, the sack of Jerusalem and the razing of the Temple.

And Josephus’s work also contains the only account of the fall, in A.D. 74, of the fortress of Masada, situated at the south-western corner of the Dead Sea.

Like Montsegur some twelve hundred years later Masada has come to symbolise tenacity, heroism and martyrdom in defence of a lost cause.

Like Montsegur it continued to resist the invader long after virtually all other organised resistance had ceased. While the rest of Palestine collapsed beneath the

Roman onslaught, Masada continued to be impregnable. At last, in A.D. 74, the position of the fortress became untenable. After sustained bombardment with heavy siege machinery, the Romans installed a ramp which put them into a position to breach the de fences On the night of April 15th they prepared for a general assault. On that same night the 960 men, women, and children within the fortress committed suicide en masse. When the Romans burst through the gate the following morning, they found only corpses amid the flames.

Josephus himself accompanied the Roman troops who entered the husk of Masada on the morning of April 16th. He claims to have witnessed the carnage personally. And he claims to have interviewed three survivors of the debacle a woman and two children who supposedly hid in the conduits beneath the fortress while the rest of the garrison killed

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themselves. From these survivors Josephus reports that he obtained a detailed account of what had transpired the night before. According to this account the commander of the garrison was a man named Eleazar a variant, interestingly enough, of Lazarus. And it seems to have been Eleazar who, by his persuasive and charismatic eloquence, led the defenders to their grisly decision. In his chronicle Josephus repeats

Eleazar’s speeches, as he claims to have heard them from the survivors.

And these speeches are extremely interesting. History reports that Masada was defended by militant Zealots. Josephus himself uses the words “Zealots’ and

“Sicarii’ interchangeably. And yet Eleazar’s speeches are not even conventionally Judaic. On the contrary, they are unmistakably Essene,

Gnostic and dualist:

Ever since primitive man began to think, the words of our ancestors and of the gods, supported by the actions and spirit of our forefathers, have constantly impressed on us that life is the calamity for man, not death.

Death gives freedom to our souls and lets them depart to their own pure home where they will know nothing of any calamity; but while they are confined within a mortal body and share its miseries, in strict truth they are dead.

For association of the divine with the mortal is most improper.

Certainly the soul can do a great deal even when imprisoned in the body: it makes the body its own organ of sense, moving it invisibly and impelling it in its actions further than mortal nature can reach. But when, freed from the weight that drags it down to earth and is hung about it, the soul returns to its own place, then in truth it partakes of a blessed power and an utterly unfettered strength, remaining as invisible to human eyes as God

Himself. Not even while it is in the body can it be viewed; it enters undetected and departs unseen, having itself one imperishable nature, but causing a change in the body; for whatever the soul touches lives and blossoms, whatever it deserts withers and dies: such a

superabundance it has of immortality. 14

And again:

They are men of true courage who, regarding this life as a kind of

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service we must render to nature, undergo it with reluctance and hasten to release their souls from their bodies; and though no misfortune presses or drives them away, desire for immortal life impels them to inform their friends that they are going to depart. “S

It is extraordinary that no scholar, to our knowledge, has ever commented on these speeches before, for they raise a multitude of provocative questions. At no point, for example, does orthodox Judaism ever speak of a soul’ still less of its “immortal’ or “imperishable’

nature. Indeed, the very concept of a soul and of immortality is alien to the mainstream of

Judaic tradition and thought. So, too, is the supremacy of spirit over matter, the union with God in death, and the condemnation of life as evil.

These attitudes derive, quite unequivocally, from a mystery tradition. They are patently Gnostic and dualist; and, in the context of Masada, are characteristically Essene.

Certain of these attitudes, of course, may also be described as in some sense “Christian’. Not necessarily as that word subsequently came to be defined, but as it might have been applied to Jesus’s original followers those, for example, who wished to join Lazarus in death in the Fourth

Gospel. It is possible that the defenders of Masada included some adherents to Jesus’s bloodline. During the revolt of A.D. 66 to 74

there were numerous “Christians’ who fought against the Romans as vigorously as did the Jews. Many Zealots, in fact, were what would now be called “early

Christians’; and it is quite likely that there were some of them at Masada.

Josephus, of course, suggests nothing of this sort -although even if he once did, it would have been excised by subsequent editors. At the same time, one would expect Josephus, writing a history of Palestine during the first century, to make some mention of Jesus. Granted, many later editions of Josephus’s work do contain such references; but these references conform to the Jesus of established orthodoxy, and most modern scholars dismiss them as spurious interpolations dating from no earlier than the time of

Constantine. In the nineteenth century, however, an edition of Josephus was discovered in Russia which differed from all others. The text itself, translated into Old Russian, dated from approximately

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1261. The man who transcribed it was not an orthodox Jew, because he retained many ‘pro-Christian’ allusions. And yet

Jesus, in this version of Josephus, is described as human, as a political revolutionary and as a “king who did not reign’. 16 He is also said to have had “a line in the middle of his head in the manner of the Nazireans.””

Scholars have expended much paper and energy disputing the possible authenticity of what is now called the “Slavonic Josephus’. All things considered, we were inclined to regard it as more or less genuine a transcription from a copy or copies of Josephus which survived the destruction of Christian documents by Diocletian and eluded the editorial zeal of the reinstated orthodoxy under Constantine. There were a number of cogent reasons for our conclusion. If the Slavonic Josephus was a forgery, for example, whose interests would it have served? Its description of Jesus as a king would hardly have been acceptable to a thirteenth-century Jewish audience. And its depiction of Jesus as human would hardly have pleased thirteenth-century Christendom. What is more, Origen, a Church father writing in the early third century, alludes to a version of Josephus which denies Jesus’s Messiahship:’8 This version which may once have been the original, authentic and “standard’ version could well have provided the text for the Slavonic Josephus.

The Gnostic Writings

The revolt of A.D. 66-74 was followed by a second major insurrection some sixty years later, between 132 and 135. As a result of this new disturbance all Jews were officially expelled from Jerusalem, which became a Roman city. But even as early as the first revolt history had begun to draw a veil over events in the Holy Land, and there are virtually no records for another two centuries. Indeed the period is not dissimilar to Europe at various points during the so-called “Dark Ages’. Nevertheless it is known that numerous Jews remained in the country, though outside Jerusalem. So, too, did a number of

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Christians. And there was even one sect of Jews, called the Ebionites, who, while adhering generally to their faith, at the same time revered Jesus as a prophet -albeit a mortal one.

Nevertheless the real spirit of both Judaism and Christianity moved away from the Holy Land. The majority of Palestine’s Jewish population dispersed in a diaspora like that which had occurred some seven hundred years before, when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. And

Christianity, in a similar fashion, began to migrate across the globe to Asia Minor, to Greece, to

Rome, to Gaul, to Britain, to North Africa. Not surprisingly conflicting accounts of what had happened in or around A.D. 33 began to arise all over the civilised world. And despite the efforts of Clement of Alexandria,

Irenaeus and their ilk, these accounts officially labelled ‘heresies’

continued to flourish. Some of them undoubtedly derived from some sort of first-hand knowledge, preserved both by devout Jews and by groups like the

Ebionites, Jewish converts to one or another form of Christianity. Other accounts were patently based on legend, on rumour, on an amalgamation of current beliefs such as Egyptian, Hellenistic and Mithraic mystery traditions. Whatever their specific sources, they caused much disquiet to the “adherents of the message’, the coalescing orthodoxy which was endeavouring to consolidate its position.

Information on the early “heresies’ is meagre. Modern knowledge about them derives largely from the attacks of their opponents, which naturally makes for a distorted picture like the picture that might emerge of the French

Resistance, for instance, from Gestapo documents. On the whole, however,

Jesus seems to have been viewed by the early “heretics’ in one of two ways.

For some he was a fully fledged god, with few, if any, human attributes.

For others he was a mortal prophet, not essentially different from, say, the Buddha or, half a millennium later, Muhammad.

Among the most important of the early heresiarchs was Valentinus, a native of Alexandria who spent the latter part of his life (A.D. 136-65) in Rome.

In his time Valentinus was extremely influential, numbering such men as

Ptolemy among his following. Claiming to possess a body of “secret teachings’ of Jesus, he refused to submit to Roman authority, asserting

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that personal gnosis took precedence over any external hierarchy.Predictably enough Valentinus and his adherents were among the most be laboured targets of Irenaeus’s wrath.

Another such target was Marcion, a wealthy shipping magnate and bishop who arrived in Rome around 140 and was excommunicated four years later. Marcion posited a radical distinction between “law’ and “love’, which he associated with the Old and New Testaments respectively; certain of these Marcionite ideas surfaced a full thousand years later in such works as the Perlesvaus.

Marcion was the first writer to compile a canonical list of Biblical books which, in his case, excluded the whole of the Old Testment. It was in direct response to Marcion that Irenaeus compiled his canonical list, which provided the basis for the Bible as we know it today.

The third major heresiarch of the period and in many ways the most intriguing was Basilides, an Alexandrian scholar writing between nD.120

and 130. Basilides was conversant with both Hebrew scriptures and Christian

Gospels. He was also steeped in Egyptian and Hellenistic thought. He is supposed to have written no less than twenty-four commentaries on the

Gospels. According to Irenaeus, he promulgated a most heinous heresy indeed.

Basilides claimed that the Crucifixion was a fraud, that Jesus did not die on the cross, and that a substitute Simon of Cyrene took his place instead.” Such an assertion would seem to be bizarre. And yet it has proved to be extraordinarily persistent and tenacious. As late as the seventh century-the Koran maintained precisely the same argument that a substitute, traditionally Simon of Cyrene, took Jesus’s place on the cross.z And the same argument was upheld by the priest from whom we received the mysterious letter discussed in Chapter 1 the letter that alluded to “incontrovertible proof’ of a substitution.