Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus:Flavian Signature Edition (12 page)

“Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. So shall it be also with this evil generation.”
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Jesus’ linking of the “evil generation” to demonically possessed men who infected others, mirrors my interpretation of the New Testament’s Gadara passage, wherein I concluded that the “Sicarii” were demons who infected others with their “wickedness.” When Jesus referred to a “wicked generation” he appears to have been referring to the Sicarii who rebelled against Rome. This proposition is especially clear in light of the fact that to Jews of this era a “generation” was forty years, which was the exact time span between Jesus’ resurrection and the final destruction of the Sicarii at Masada.

The understanding that a “generation” lasted forty years comes from the Pentateuch.

And the Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation that had done evil in the sight of the Lord was consumed.
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Many Christians currently hold a different position regarding Jesus’ doomsday prophecies, believing that they do not refer to the generation of Jews that lived during his lifetime. Instead, they believe that Jesus was speaking about some unspecified time still in the future. I feel that this “futurist” understanding is incorrect and has the effect of obfuscating Jesus’ words, thereby making it difficult to understand the meaning they conveyed in the first century. No real understanding of the New Testament is possible without knowing what Jesus meant when he used the word “generation.”

The Greek word in the New Testament that has been translated as “generation” is
genea
. Early in the 20th century some Christian scholars began to posit that Jesus’ use of this word was meant to indicate not the “generation” of Jews alive during his lifetime, but rather the entire “race” of Jews, which would not pass away “without all these things having first taken place.”

It is easy to understand their desire for such a definition. If Jesus is referring to those Jews alive during his lifetime then his “Second Coming” must have occurred in 70 A.D. Such an understanding leaves Christianity in an awkward position. This is because if Jesus’ “Second Coming” had occurred during the war between the Romans and the Jews, why was it Titus and not Jesus who demolished the temple and destroyed the “wicked generation”?

The Christian theologian C. I. Scofield recognized this dilemma, and in his Bible reference switched the definition of the word
genea
to that of
genos
, an entirely different word meaning “race.” However, scholars showed that the New Testament’s use of
genea
could only be referring to the Jews of Jesus’ lifetime and not to the entire Jewish race, thereby debunking Scofield’s position.
⁶⁶

The understanding, that Jesus was specifically referring to the generation of Jews alive at the time he spoke the words, was certainly the understanding held during the Middle Ages. For example, the following notes were found written alongside Matthew 24:34 in a Bible dated 1599:

This age: the word
generation
or
age
is here being used for the men of this age.
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We are on solid ground in understanding that Jesus was referring solely to the generation of Jews who were alive during the 40 years between his ministry and the destruction of Jerusalem. However, if this is correct, then Jesus and Josephus were referring to the same group as the “wicked generation.” Notice in the following passages how similar Jesus’ and Josephus’ understanding was regarding “demons,” the “wicked generation,” and the Sicarii.

From Josephus:

… had the Romans made any longer delay in coming against these villains, the city would either have been swallowed up by the ground opening upon them, or been overflowed by water, or else been destroyed by such thunder as the country of Sodom perished by, for it had brought forth a generation of men much more atheistical than were those that suffered such.
⁶⁸

… And truly so it happened, that though the slayers left off at the evening, yet did the fire greatly prevail in the night; and as all was burning, came that eighth day of the month Gorpieus [Elul] upon Jerusalem,

a city that had been liable to so many miseries during this siege, that, had it always enjoyed as much happiness from its first foundation, it would certainly have been the envy of the world. Nor did it on any other account so much deserve these sore misfortunes, as by producing such a generation of men as were the occasions of this its overthrow.
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From the New Testament:

“Wicked and faithless generation!” He replied, “They clamor for a sign, but none shall be given to them except the sign of the Prophet Jonah.”

Matt. 12:39

Then he goes and brings back with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they come in and dwell there; and in the end that man’s condition becomes worse than it was at first. So will it be also with the present wicked generation.

Matt. 12:45

“O unbelieving and perverse generation!” replied Jesus; “How long shall I be with you? How long shall I endure you?”

Matt. 17:16

I tell you in solemn truth that all these things will come upon the present generation.

Matt. 23:36

I tell you in solemn truth that the present generation will certainly not pass away without all these things having first taken place.

Matt. 24:34

Somehow, the three-way connection between the “wicked generation,” Jesus’ “demons,” and Josephus’ “Sicarii” has not attracted much attention from scholars. For example, the Hebrew scholar Joseph Klausner completely missed the connection. He wrote:

At that time even educated people and those who had imbibed of the Greek culture such as Josephus, [thought of] such nerve cases and cases of insanity as cases of “possession” by some devil or evil or unclean spirit, and believed in cures and that certain men could perform miracles.
⁷⁰

In fact, Josephus did not believe that demons were “nerve cases” and gave a precise definition as to what they were. He stated that demons were the spirits of the
wicked
.

Demons … are no other than the spirits of the wicked.
⁷¹

This definition indicates that Josephus saw the Sicarii as “demons,” in that he constantly describes the rebels as “wicked.” Josephus also links the Sicarii with “demons” in another way. He describes the Sicarii as moving “with a demoniacal fury”
⁷²
as they went to kill their families at the end of the siege of Masada. Like Jesus, Josephus makes it clear who the “wicked” are. They are the generation of Jews that rebelled against Rome.

That neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, from the beginning of the world.
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Thus, Jesus and Josephus shared a narrow understanding and expressed it with the same vocabulary: that the generation of Jews who lived between 33 C.E. and 73 C.E. were “wicked” because they had been “infected” by a demonic spirit. This shared understanding is suspicious. Jesus could only view the “wickedness” of this generation by looking into the future, and yet he not only held the same opinion of the generation as Josephus, he used the same words in describing it.

Returning to the version of the story of the demoniac of Gadara found in Matthew, where Jesus meets
two
demons, in
Wars of the Jews
we learn that there were two “tyrants” or leaders of the Jewish rebellion, John, described above, and a Simon. Since my analysis suggests that the New Testament is satirizing John in the version that describes a single demon of Gadara, it seemed logical to ask whether the version describing two demoniacs was satirizing both leaders of the Jewish rebellion, John and Simon.

Experimenting with this premise I noticed that at the conclusion of the siege of Jerusalem in
Wars of the Jews,
Simon and John both take refuge in subterranean caverns beneath Jerusalem. Eventually they are forced by starvation to come out of these “tombs” and surrender to the Romans. This event struck me as a parallel to the description of the demon-possessed men “coming out of the tombs” in the New Testament.

The passage in
Wars of the Jews
that describes these caverns confirms that they are indeed “tombs.”

… the Romans slew some of them, some they carried captives, and others they made a search for underground, and when they found where they were, they broke up the ground and slew all they met with.

There were also found slain there above two thousand persons, partly by their own hands, and partly by one another, but chiefly destroyed by the famine;

but then the ill savor of the dead bodies was most offensive to those that lighted upon them, insomuch that some were obliged to get away immediately …
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As I have mentioned, the demon-possessed man at Gadara is described as “cutting himself with stones.”
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Cutting oneself with “stones” is, of course, unusual—a stone is not a tool someone would normally use to cut with. What is the author of this passage actually referring to? I realized that if the demoniacs of Gadara are intended to satirize the rebel leaders, then there was a satiric answer to this question.

The phrase in the New Testament where the demoniac is “in the tombs … cutting himself with stones” shares a darkly humorous relationship with the passage in
Wars of the Jews
that describes the “tombs” that John and Simon take refuge in. The scornful joke comes from the unanswered question in Mark 5:5 – this question being, what does one call someone who cuts himself with stones? In a passage in
Wars of the Jews
relating to the rebel leader’s hiding in the “tombs,” one can see an ironic answer. Someone who cuts himself with stones is “stone-cut,” and can therefore mockingly be called a “stone-cutter.”

This Simon, during the siege of Jerusalem, was in the upper city; but when the Roman army was gotten within the walls, and were laying the city waste, he then took the most faithful of his friends with him, and among them some that were stonecutters, with those iron tools which belonged to their occupation.
⁷⁶

The version of the Gadara encounter in Matthew does not describe the fate of either of its two demon-possessed men. However, if the demoniacs were spoofs of the leaders of the Jewish rebellion, then the version in Mark, which describes only one possessed man, must tell the fate of John.

I reached this conclusion because the passage concludes with the statement “Him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind … and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him.”
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If the New Testament was lampooning Simon and John, the leaders of the Jewish rebellion, then the individual who was restored to his “right mind” and who went to Decapolis could only have been John. This is because Josephus records that, after being captured, John was given life imprisonment while Simon was taken to Rome and executed. Following this logic, it could only have been John, then, who “began to publish in Decapolis.”

So my musings raised the question of whether John the Zealot, leader of the Jewish rebellion, had assisted the Romans in creating Christian literature while he was imprisoned in Decapolis. And further, I wondered exactly what literature this individual could have helped the Romans create? The only known Christian literature from this era is the New Testament itself. There was, of course, someone named “John” who wrote a Gospel.

While the premise, that the Apostle John was a lampoon of the John who was the leader of the rebellion, was based at this point in my analysis as much on imagination as evidence, it was consistent with the style of dark humor I felt was in play within the passages analyzed previously. Of course, if the Apostle John is a lampoon of the rebel John, then it would follow that the Apostle Simon is also a lampoon of the other rebel leader, Simon.

Since my analysis of the New Testament’s Gadara passages suggest that the Sicarii were lampooned as demons in the New Testament, I first attempted to determine if there were other New Testament passages concerning demons that might support the proposition regarding the relationship between Josephus’ messianic rebel leaders John and Simon, and the two Apostles. During this search I noticed the following passage from the Gospel of John, which states that the Apostle Judas was the “son of Simon the Iscariot.”