Who was the Historical Jesus?

There is simply no story about Western civilization that is not bound up with Jesus and Christianity. And in a sense, we're always asking ourselves, who was Jesus? What were his teachings? What does his fate mean? Indeed, this is true whether we're Christians or not, and even whether we even want to or not. And so, I want to ask those questions now and give you what I take to be reasonable historical and scholarly reasons to answer them. And I want to do so by exploring the historical Jesus from what I'll call a methodology of critical maximalism. That is, I can only discuss the Jesus of history using the scholarly tools available to me. The Christ of faith is simply beyond the scope of those tools. However, I would suggest that the Christ of faith must ultimately and always answer to the Jesus of history given the logical priority of the latter to the former. And as I've said before, allowing our faith to dictate our history, it betrays both. Further, I want to take the New Testament accounts and the Christian tradition as historically as seriously as I can. Again, using the tools available to me. Thus, I want to remain historically critical, but employ as much of those narratives as possible. Hence, critical maximalism. But in detailing this take on the Jesus of history, I'll be echoing the scholarship that strikes me as most reasonable along with contributing my own take when it makes sense and I'll flag those when I do that. If you're interested in topics like this, then make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other content mostly in topics in Western esotericism. Also, if you want to support work like this of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics like these here on YouTube, I'd hope you check out my Patreon or consider some of the cool merch that we have on the channel. That said, let's explore just those foundational questions of Western civilization. Who was Jesus? What were his teachings? And how did his fate ultimately transform the world? I'm Dr. Justin Sledge and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.

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The life of Jesus is often presented as a kind of pocket universe under little to no influence from the world around it or the history before it. But to understand the life of Jesus, to really appreciate his life and teachings, we have to place him in just that history. And to do so, I want to begin in the Galilee just before the time of his birth. Herod the Great, as impressive as he was, beastly frankly, dies sometime around 4 B.CE. And long simmering resentment explodes into that power vacuum. A certain Judas, son of Ezekius takes the initiative and breaks into the garrison palace at Sephorus. The tiny village of Nazareth is just within eyeshot. and alongside numerous other would-be bandit messiahs rampages through the region. Plubius Quintilius Varus, then the governor of Syria, but who would eventually go on to lose three legions in the slaughter and the Tutenborg forest, would take as many legions into the region to put down just that uprising. Still want my legions back. Virus Saporus is destroyed. Fires burn in the Galilean countryside is decorated with 2,000 or so crucified corpses left to rot. Those who would be Messianic kings and their followers now strung up naked, bloated, and picked at by birds. a girl of only 13 or 14 and the man that she's betrod to hurry past a crucified corpse to avoid the smell and the horror of it all. They've established tanim, but they've yet to have kaducin according to Jewish law. She's engaged to be married, but it's not just the dreadful reality around them that keeps them silent. She's missed her period, and their marriage is not fully legal, much less consummated. Tradition has it that Miriam, Mary, was raised in Sephoris. Her hometown is now a ruin. Her country is an open air tomb, and her pregnancy now threatens to doom her reputation forever. The wind shifts. The feted odor of demp slightly clears. Maybe Joseph and Mary removed the cloth soaked from spices from their face to begin to have what was no doubt a profoundly difficult conversation about what to do next. And about 40 km to the north, the situation was much the same. At Kalav, the Romans are rounding up entire families for exile into Asia Minor. One of those families, according to Jerome, would take their young child, Saul, into exile with them, eventually settling in the capital of Cissia at Tarsus. The young child Saul would grow up in a far more cosmopolitan world than he would have had access to in the Galilee. Tarsus even sported their own academy where Athena Doris, tutor to the emperor Augustus, would eventually teach and fix a haunted house over there in Athens. It's very possible that the lives of both Mary and Paul separated by about 15 years in age would have been bookended by messiahs and by the colonial violence done to them.

The tiny village of Nazareth was no place to have a baby out of wedlock. It would have destroyed Mary, her family, and her child's reputation and social prospects forever. suspicion that the child was a momser, a child born of forbidden sexual relationships, would have prevented them virtually any future marriage prospects. The father of Mary's child was unknown. Perhaps Joseph, apparently an older local craftsman, apparently agreed to marry her, maybe just to save her from the ruinous shame of it all. Mary and her child would never fully outlive the suspicion. The identity of the father of her child is just lost to history. But one ventures to imagine a distinct and a horrible possibility. The catastrophe of the uprisings in the regions no doubt made vulnerable populations like women and girls all the more precarious. Indeed, that the father of the child was a Roman soldier was a rumor already current by the second century. Celsus claims that the father was just such a Roman soldier named Panta or Pandera the panther and subsequent Christian, pagan and Jewish sources continue to forward this narrative as slander or to reject it as just that. Panta was however a Roman name and at least one Panta from Sidon is known from his tombstone which is now weirdly preserved in Germany. But we also know of another Jewish Pantheros along with his son Joseph from a burial just north of the old city in Jerusalem. Whoever the father was, he was clearly no longer in the picture later in the pregnancy. And Joseph and Mary seemed to have stuck it out regardless of the potential social stigma. That Mary and Joseph would travel south to Judea for a census with her child born in Bethlehem manger is known to all of us but mostly doubted by scholars interested in the historical Jesus. This skeptical position is usually considered because Mark has no such story and it seems to be basically contrived just to get Jesus into Bethlehem born in Bethlehem because he kind of had to to claim messianic authority. I'm sympathetic to this skeptical position to be honest, but I can also think of a perfectly good reason why Mary would have come south to Judea after all. Recall that she's illicitly pregnant in a small village and childirth and nursing a newborn baby was a villagewide affair. If she were a village pariah soon to give birth, a distinct and sad prospect, then her traveling to be around more supportive family perhaps during one of the several three pilgrimage festivals to Jerusalem that she would have made every year. This makes some degree of sense and it just so happens that she did in fact have such family, seemingly an aunt or a cousin living just over 6 km to the west of Jerusalem. Further, her relative Elizabeth was married to a priest named Zachariah, and thus the family would have had at least some degree of an air of respectability, something the illicitly pregnant Mary would have desperately needed. Elizabeth herself was already 6 months pregnant with a child that she would go on to name Yohanan. That child would become John the Baptizer. Perhaps here in Judea, Mary would give birth to her child, a boy that she named Yahushua, the English name for Joshua, but in Aramaic, probably Yeshua or Yeshua in Latin via Greek, as of course Jesus. And the two Jesus and John would have known each other growing up. Jesus visiting the pilgrimage festivals at least three times a year. They were kin, perhaps cousins. But the truth of the matter is that we know basically nothing about the early life of Jesus. The gospels are more or less only concerned with his preaching, his miracles, and his final days. Indeed, the bulk of the gospels primarily deal with his just his last hours. But of course, Jesus lived his life as a religious Jew in the Galilee. His family was unsurprisingly poor. When they came for the redemption of the firstborn or pigeon ben, they couldn't even afford the standard sheep sacrifice required, giving the substitute sacrifice of a pair of doves or two pigeons. He seems to have taken up the family trade of being a tecton. Traditionally, this is translated as a carpenter, but I suspect along with other scholars, he was probably something like a stonemason or a similar crafts person working on the various construction projects of Herod Antipas, such as the rebuilding of Sephoris in his teens or so, or Tiberius in his 20s. That man, Herod Antipas, would eventually murder John and be an accessory to the murder of his kinsman, Jesus. He was working for the person who would ultimately play a role in killing him. Indeed, his parables and teachings are filled with the images of the working poor like him and his family. He spoke Aramaic and the Galilean dialect that was often mocked by the elite southerners as oish and probably had some Greek and I'm sure knew what it was like to be talked down to in Latin. Jesus, like many great religious leaders, ironically, wrote nothing down, so far as we can tell. He had some religious education. He could read the Torah in Hebrew and debate matters of Jewish law or Halaka. Those debates would have largely been framed at that time by the two great legal houses of Hillel and Shemi. Both of those people passing away during the lifetime of Jesus and themselves being buried in the Galilee. I wouldn't be surprised if Jesus himself didn't attend one of those funerals. Many of Jesus's religious teachings make it pretty clear that his positions were closely aligned with those of the house of Hillel. At times, he even directly echoes Hillel himself. And like all Jews, he was strict on some matters of the law and lenient on others. His teaching on Sabbath observance was scandalously lax, but his teaching on divorce was scandalously strict.

But the truth of the matter is that Jesus lived in a world of Judaisms. There was the temple, pilgrimages and sacrifices. That institution was primarily ran by the wealthy traditionalist party known as the Sadducees. They represented the old money Israelite religion. They rejected the afterlife and angels and demons and much beyond the Torah as simply paganism. In many ways, they represent the religion of the Hebrew Bible more than any of their contemporaries. They were also closely aligned with the Romans, making them all the more unpopular with the population, even being seen as compromising the sanctity of the temple itself. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were largely the rabbitical faction, whose primary interest was in day-to-day Jewish life. Thus, living a life of justice and holiness according to the Torah and traditions was simply paramount for them. And while Jesus is often seen sparring intellectually with the Pharisees or the Pharisees plotting to do him some harm, what's often forgotten or just ignored is that Jesus himself was a kind of Pharisee, a rabbitical teacher fundamentally interested in ethical life and observing the commandments revealed to Moses by God. I suspect this is often missed by Christians primarily because they've just never read any of the literature actually composed by the Pharisees themselves. Texts like Pere much of which unsurprisingly align with the moral outlook of very early Christianity that grew out of that very rebbitical context.

But following the destruction of the Solomonic temple in 586, the subsequent Babylonian exile and period of the second temple period, another form of Judaism also emerged. What scholars now call the apocalyptic. This mode of Judaism was marked by an interest in cosmogyny, events in the primordial past, what is called exeventu prophecy, couched in very symbolic language. Exventu prophecy is prophecy that speaks critically about the present as if it's happening in the future. There's also anxiety in this religious mode about oppression and tribulation. There's talk of esqueological upheavalss, especially the judgment and the eventual fate of the righteous and the wicked are profoundly highlighted in this form of Judaism. There's other worldly journeys or vast journeys through the earth. a sense of good versus evil dualism, the intervention into history by messianic savior figures and anti- messianic characters. In the literature, it's interested in the structure of the heavens and hells, the hidden role of angels and demons in worldly affairs. And there's generally a kind of divinely deterministic attitude. That is to say, God is in control of everything and everything is going according to God's plan. Much of the literature is pseudo anonymous and allegedly ancient authorship of these texts. And of course, what gives its name to this entire genre, the revealing or apocalypsis from the Greek mind meaning to unveil or to uncover. All of this often to a human agent through an angelic emissary. This apocalyptic mode of Judaism was clearly popular. Dozens of such texts were composed in the centuries proximate to the life of Jesus and is perhaps best witnessed by the documents that we now know of as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These documents likely composed by the Essene faction display a deeply apocalyptic ideology whereby their messianic leader, the teacher of righteousness, was expelled or otherwise left his role as a higher priest in the temple in protest of its corruption. This group dedicated its existence to strict observance of the Torah, high degree of ritual purity, and understanding the prophetic text of the Hebrew Bible as describing unfolding events during their lifetimes. Specifically, they held that with the teacher of righteousness's death that a certain kind of countdown had begun, whereby they were going to be thrust into a final battle with the forces of evil, the sons of darkness led by Beliel and their earthly allies, the Kitim, a code name for the Romans. Following this decisive battle, they would be installed as the authentic religious leaders of the world with a messianic priest and a messianic king and perhaps a council of 12 ruling the world through those tribes as Israel ruling forever at that point. The world just comes to an end or at least history does. So far as we can tell, they did in fact go into battle with the Romans in the Great Revolt only to be largely wiped out in the genocide. and their literature lay hidden in those caves for millennia, giving us in many ways our best glimpse into something like the way that Jesus would have framed his own apocalyptic theology.

Finally, Judea and the Galilee were just alive with messianic fervor with an explicitly political agenda, the overthrow of Roman imperial colonization and the establishment of Jewish home rule. These factions, specifically the Zealots and their relatively fanatical branch, the Sakari, took a direct military approach to messianism. And rebellion after rebellion after rebellion would see would be Messiah rise, fight, and ultimately face beheading or crucifixion or some other form of complete annihilation. Messiah here from the Hebrew Messiach simply means to be anointed with oil as part of being inaugurated into a specific political or social office either as a priest or as a king of Israel. Aaron was Israel's first messianic priest. Saul the first messianic king of Israel. Even foreign kings such as the Persian Cyrus could be designated as the Messiah and were in the Hebrew Bible. However, by the time of Jesus, the concept of Messiah had taken on esqueological dimensions such that messianic characters would in some ways bring history itself to a close. However, from the point of view of Roman rule, any would-be messiah was by definition an insurrectionist against imperial Roman rule. And thus, simply claiming to be a messiah of basically any kind put one into direct confrontation with Roman power. But this, of course, didn't stop half a dozen or so known wouldbe messiahs revoling against the Romans around the time of Jesus. Further, Jesus himself had at least one brother that was identified as a zealot and several close followers in that camp.

Now, how to locate Jesus in the landscape of all these Judaisms is something I'll continue to do as he work through his life and teachings. But Joseph, perhaps much older when he married Mary, vanishes from the narrative before the time Jesus is grown. Thus, Jesus would have become the bread winner for his family as a young man, perhaps even as a teen. And it appears that Mary had at least four other sons. James, Joseph, this is a nickname for Joseph. Uh Judas, and Simon, along with apparently two daughters, Mary and Salame. Though the gospels and Christianity itself have done an excellent job of invisibilizing the actual family of Jesus. Only really in Mark is the family of Jesus on display and named as such. However, their eraser is nearly complete by Luke Acts. However, it isn't clear how many of these children were fathered by Joseph or perhaps his brother, sometimes known as Kofas or Alfaas. This is apparently the brother of Joseph. This would be possible because according to Jewish law, if Joseph himself died without producing any children with Mary, then his brother would have been obligated to marry her through the laws of yeoom or lever marriage, or they would both forego that marriage by the process of khalitza. While a strange custom to us, this did provide a social safety net for widows and it did perhaps provide that just for Mary. The family, especially the brothers of Jesus, are going to matter a lot in just a minute. So remember them. And while fanciful stories of Jesus's youth abound, him turning rocks into birds, killing and resurrecting teachers, being trained in Egyptian magic, going to India, those are all really interesting, but it seems like most of our really historical information likely occurs in the text around the time Jesus is 30.

But understand that in the eventual teachings of Jesus, we can't actually focus on Jesus even at this point, but on his relative, that cousin perhaps John. As I mentioned, John came from a priestly family and for reasons that are unclear to us, he seems to have abandoned that specific honor to dwell in the wilderness. Perhaps like the Essene teacher of righteousness, he just rejected the temple as somehow polluted or corrupt or otherwise compromised and wanted nothing to do with it. Perhaps he also had some kind of specific prophetic calling or theological or apocalyptic motivations or all of the above. But we find him near the time Jesus is roughly 30 years of age. Echoing the language of the prophet Isaiah. Prepare a way for Yahweh in the wilderness and into the wilderness he goes. Further, he was warning crowds that the axe was already at the root of the tree such that the end of the world was already imminent and that those who wish to follow in had or the way as a term he used in fact that term is the way the messianic movement seems to have identified itself as inaugurated by John and continued by Jesus. They should be ritually immersed for the remission of their sins. And while John's teaching sounds somewhat superficially like those of the Essenes, he's initially even down there by Kuman, there's a clear difference in their thinking. The Essen saw immersion or baptism in Amigva as a necessary step to maintain ritual purity, especially in order to join the camp of the angelic warriors of their war documents. But after the defeat of the Kitim and other Jews for that matter, the Essen seem to have believed that they would seize and rededicate a nearly purified temple such that the remission of sin via sacrifices via sacrifices could occur in earnest. For John, it seems immersion in the mikvah simply eliminated sin itself, wiping the slate clean, so to speak, clearly even sideststepping the need for the temple at all. Further, the Kumam sectarians were a more or less monastic sect, at least at that site. Unlike the attempt of mass appeal by preaching and immersions offered by John, part of what's going to get John killed is that he's incredibly popular. Similarly, Jesus and the Essenes would have not seen eye to eye either. Thus, while both shared apocalyptic worldviews, John and Jesus were very likely not Essenes and probably not connected to the Essenes. I think they wouldn't have frankly liked one another very much. But John would eventually move north near areas traditionally associated with Elijah the Tishbite prophet, a character at that time already associated with the end of times. And this was along also one of the major routes taken by northern pilgrims as they made their way south to avoid the impure zone of the Samaritans. Thus, John became an outstanding figure assuming the appearance of an ancient Israelite prophet perhaps himself taking the vows of the holy Nazir teaching a rather radical message of the imminent doom of the world and the need for the remission of sins through immersion. And it would be in this context perhaps on a pilgrimage journey to Jerusalem that John would immerse Jesus into the way.

Just as Christian history from the time of the Gospels has downplayed the reality and important role of Jesus's immediate family, it's also basically done the same thing with John, his teachings, and the movement he founded. The simple truth is that Jesus joins and seems to extend perhaps radically admittedly the John movement. Jesus is immersed by John, declares that John is indeed more than a prophet and that there was none born of a woman greater than John. despite those interpolations that try to correct that relatively odd statement. Further, even the most famous of Christian prayers, the so-called Lord's Prayer, was apparently developed by John himself. The earliest version of that prayer is recorded in the material shared by Luke and Matthew, what some people call the Q source at Luke 11. And it makes it clear that it wasn't the Lord's prayer. It wasn't the prayer developed by Jesus. It was John's prayer. Even the Gospel of John, which is admittedly much more interested in theology than history, though often it does contain historically fascinating memories, records that after Jesus baptism, he in fact goes on to make followers. He recruits people to join him, about half of which are actually taken from his own family before Jesus himself travels into Judea and begins his own wing of the immersion movement. He's baptizing people. Thus, before he was Jesus the Christ, he was Jesus the baptizer. But before becoming a Christ, he would also become Jesus the exorcist. But what did John's original teachings look like? It seems like in addition to Torah law, John taught a simple message of sedaka, supporting those in need, a classic Pharisee virtue. We find him saying that anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none and anyone who has food should do the same. But also to avoid future transgression even for classically unsavory professions. Even tax collectors came to be baptized. Rabbi they asked what should we do? He says don't collect any more than you're required to. There some some soldiers also detested at some level. What should we do? He says, "Don't extort money from people and don't accuse them falsely. Be content with your pay." Thus, given the remissions of sins via immersions, the logical idea is to simply avoid future sin given the imminent end of the world and the oncoming final judgment. John's preparing people for the end, seemingly both Jew and perhaps even Gentiles.

But why did John recruit Jesus into the leadership of the way? Because it seems there were going to be two messiahs. Yeah, two messiahs. When we ask ourselves, was Jesus the Messiah? Did Jesus think he was the Messiah? I think we're just asking the wrong question from at least a historical point of view. In the time of Jesus, the concept of Messiah was still very much in development. It's still very much in development. And even the number of messiahs people were awaiting wasn't exactly settled by any means. Certainly, people were awaiting a kingly warrior messiah descended from King David to wage military war against the Romans and establish some kind of permanent Jewish home rule. But that wasn't all. The Essenes and others also awaited a priestly teacher Messiah who would properly consecrate the temple or reconsecrate the temple, teach the world true religion and act as a kind of mediator between God and Israel or God and the world more generally. Thus, that two messiahs were expected to rule as co-regents was just as likely in the popular imagination of that time as the rule of one Messiah. And John clearly fit the bill of the priest Messiah from his family pedigree to his prophetic teachings. But what about Jesus? Was he a potential devidic kingly warrior Messiah? The problem is Jesus's parentage because being a ben Davided son of David was only possible as established through one's paternal lineage. Maternal lines made you Jewish, but it was paternal lies that gave you inheritance. The problem here should be relatively obvious. It's Jesus's father. Matthew's genealogy attempts to provide such a Davidic inheritance through Joseph through curiously mixing in women into the list. Tamar, Rahav, Root, and Uriah's unnamed wife are all women mixed into the genealogy who are marked by some type of sexual scandal. That sound familiar? Why in the world would it include them? Because it sets Matthew up for a wonderful slight of hand. Jacob begat Joseph, husband of Mary, and from her was begat Jesus called Christ. By including the women, Matthew is priming his readers such that when the shift is made, a shift that no Jewish genealogical tradition would allow, it seems more natural, even expected. Luke, on the other hand, attempts to fix this by tracing a Davidic lineage directly through Mary, perhaps to Natan, brother of Solomon, which is better than Matthew's connection to Yahona, who is just kind of cursed and not allowed to be a king. None of his offspring are allowed to be kings. Further, the lineage through Mary is attractive because it also contains plenty of Matthews and Levvis names associated with priestly lineages as well, which makes some sense given that Mary's relative Elizabeth married into a priestly family. But would such fishy genealogies have worked to establish Jesus as a potential heir to the Davidic throne? Well, yes and no. Maybe for the Jewish authorities of the time, just no. Absolutely not. Joseph isn't Jesus's father. Thus, he's at least a suspected mom, and no amount of genealogical slight of hand is going to fix that. Further, that very slight of hand makes Jesus all the more suspect. Why are you fudging things for the brother? But John and Jesus aren't appealing to that crowd. Indeed, their message is going to indict just that elite population. But by the time the gospels are written more than 30 years after Jesus's death, the movement itself had shifted audiences from a mostly Jewish audience looking for a literal kingly Messiah ruling over Israel to a largely Gentile audience expecting the return of a spiritual Christ to rule over the world.

Regardless, those early on adopted Jesus. Those early Jewish followers of the John movement were apparently happy to accept the message of Jesus. Indeed, it seems to be the case that Jesus took the message of Saddaka and the avoidance of sin as taught by John and radically deepened them. If the world was soon to end and the final judgment of all was at hand, then even more extreme measures might be needed to secure a place in the kingdom of heaven. And while Jesus clearly joined the John movement, Jesus also clearly seems to have radicalized its message. From the shared Matthew Luke document or Q, we can pretty clearly see the focus of Jesus's teaching. God will bless the poor, the hungry, the sad, the hated, and rejected. And in verse, he will scorn the rich, the full, and those who take joy in the world. Echoing John, Jesus commands his followers to share their clothing and food. But he also urges them to go further, to even love their enemies, to turn the cheek when struck, to loan with no expectation of repayment. And that last commandment is beyond even the pros bull of Hillel, which separates Jesus from the larger Pharisee movement. The rabbis as Pharisees were building a Judaism that might and did in fact survive the destruction of the temple. They were building a Judaism that could exist beyond the temple in which the sacredness of the temple was to be found in daily life, in family, and especially in the home. It seems that the rabbis had some sense that the world they know might come to an end, but it was the end of a world. Jesus and John expected the end of the world. All of it. And thus, Jesus urged a radical form of love, communalism, and selflessness.

But who was the audience of Jesus's teachings? We often imagine that Jesus's message was a universal one, but the evidence is that he was primarily concerned with his own Jewish community. He was a bit focused on the Jews like most prophets. In fact, when he eventually sends disciples, he strictly instructs them to only go among Judeans, not to the Samaritans and the Gentiles, and is only willing to allow scraps to the Gentiles like the Saphenician woman. Of course, the end of the world will be the end of the world for everybody, but Jesus's message remains, I think, rather parochial. Indeed, it would be another apostle, the 13th apostle, years after Jesus's death, who would ultimately be sent among the Gentiles to spread his gospel. But at least at first, the message of Jesus was simply a more radical version of John's teaching itself an apocalyptic extension of pretty typical Pharisee ethical ideology. Perhaps Jesus's more radical version informed by his own experience of coming up scorned around the working poor in the Galilean backwater, unlike the priestly John living near the more orbane and sophisticated Jerusalem informed him to radicalize this message. But in the first wave of the messianic movement, they seem to have positioned themselves as dual messiahs, preaching the imminent end of the world with the means to achieve forgiveness of sins beyond the sacrifices of the temple. And the gospels tell us that Jesus was gathering more followers than even John was at this point down perhaps in Judea. But it seems that John truly struck a nerve if Josephus is to be believed. Always in search of some kingly legitimacy, the Herodians would marry and remarry, always with a bit of debauchery and murdering in the middle. A really horrid lot, the Herodians. Here, Herod Antipas married his brother's wife, Herodiius. This was adultery bordering on incest for most pious Jews. The gospels, for their part, have John publicly condemning Herod Antipos for such a horrible lewd behavior. and Josephus has Herod alarmed at the size of the growing messianic movement. Both are probably right. The Herodians were never viewed by Judeans as really legitimate rulers, more as halfbred usurpers. And for their part, the Herodians answer was to build fortification after fortification after fortification, awaiting the inevitable reality of indigenous uprising. The most famous of those fortifications, by the way, is Msada, the ruins of which still tower over the Dead Sea. Herod Antipas clearly understood the threat of the John movement. If there were a singular target of John's teachings, it was the Romans and their comprodors, especially people like Herod Antipas. Whether John declared himself a messiah or not didn't matter. He was objectively acting as one. And Herod Antipas knew how to deal with such men. John was arrested and held at his fortress at Macccarius, literally meaning a sword. And for his part, Jesus got the message, at least at first, and suspended his own teaching and immersion program in Judea, retreating back into the Galilee.

But autocratic escalation of tensions has a curious effect on those with an apocalyptic mindset grindset and desperates from Herod Antipos in the Galilee to Janet Reno dealing with Waco or the United States dealing with the death cult that was Dash have yet to learn this lesson. A core concept in the apocalyptic is that everything happens because God wills it to happen precisely as part of the divine plan. And the apparently worse things become, the closer things are to the end. Truly, then thus we have apocalyptic paradoxical practice. Cracking down on the apocalypsis causes them to double down precisely on that apocalypse. Jesus the Baptist didn't just give up on the way inaugurated by John his teacher. Rather, it seems that he began to think to take the fight to evil itself directly. He became Jesus the exorcist. Jesus's response to the arrest of John was clear as he declared, "The time is completed. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in this good news." But again, Jesus is surprising to us. Most messiahs at that time would have taken their fight directly to those earthly evils. Herod Antipos, the Romans, even other Jews who rejected their message or they would have withdrawn from the world in some form of radical aestheticism as those did at Kuman. Jesus decided to do none of these. And it's this what separates Jesus from people like the Zealots. He had little interest in armed resistance to evil in this world. Thus, Jesus was no kind of ancient Gorea insurgent like the Messiah Barhoka would be a century later, whose rebellion would erupt a century after Jesus's death, proving quite effective until he was massacred and the population subject to genocide. But he's no pacifist either. Jesus, his plan seems to have been twofold. first to take the fight directly to the source of worldly evil to Beiel, the demonic powers infesting this world. And secondly, that the defeat of Belio or Satan would so undermine the powers of worldly evil, the rulers of this world, it would pull the rug out from underneath them and thus set the stage for the inauguration of the messianic age. Jesus was a militant, but he was primarily interested in combating metaphysical evil and probably did believe that the Romans and their comporor Judeian ruling class along with the temple would be overthrown and the kingdom of God established in that process. But it appears that Jesus thought that he would lead the former and that God alone would do the later. He didn't have to bring the fight to worldly affairs. He had to defeat metaphysical evil first. Indeed, I suspect that Jesus believed that by taking the fight directly to the forces of metaphysical darkness, it would so undermine Herod Antipas that John might just be released or freed somehow and that the two of them would eventually be revealed as Messianic rulers. And so Jesus retreated to Capernaum, gathered his forces, and began to lead a direct assault on none less than Satan.

Now combined with his radical social message, Jesus begins to drive the forces of evil from the world. Indeed, the lion share of his miracles are exorcistic in nature, he performs folk healings and has magic-like powers over nature. But again, historical and social context are key here. While Jesus's miracles do seem extraordinarily if we only read them in the gospel accounts, they aren't without precedent. Miracle workers were just a staple of the ancient world and exorcism was widely practiced. Indeed, it just was basically medicine in most of the regions of the ancient near east. Further, the Galilee produced so many miracle workers, there was even a technical Hebrew term for them, ane masa. Now, I've done a whole video on these extraordinary mane mas these miracle workers. You want to check that out. But suffice to say, we have people like the circlemaker who could force rainfall and heal disease at a distance. his miracleworking sons. We have Kina Bendoa who confronted the queen of the demons among many other miracles. In fact, it was said that miracles were just a common place for his wife. Shimonra Yohai who could incinerate the impious with his gaze alone along with numerous other exorcist and healers. Jesus the exorcist and miracle worker fit firmly within the world of other Galilean ane maset. However, it may not have been that all in the John movement preferred this shift away from immersion for the remission of sins toward miracle working. And the Mandian religion perhaps itself and in fact an offshoot of John's immersion movement still views John with awe and glory and views Jesus as basically a dangerous false prophet. And indeed to this day, daily ritual immersion is a core feature of Mandian religion, which is a truly heroic survival from late antiquity. But that's not to say that it wasn't surprising or perhaps even a shocking turn of events in this transition from Jesus the baptizer and follower of John the way to Jesus the healer and exorcist. Healing on the Sabbath was controversial. Other miracles were beyond the pale of the movement and the crowds were becoming simply overwhelming in size. Jesus was becoming a victim of his own success. Even the very family of Jesus were apparently, at least at first, so alarmed that they sought to seize Jesus because they thought that he had gone insane. A detail found only in the Gospel of Mark. But as the Q source makes clear, Jesus took it that if he could cast out demons, that was in fact proof that the kingdom of God was surely at hand. And it was his success, especially his success in confronting and defeating metaphysical evil that perhaps led him to further clarity on his own messianic importance.

But Jesus was no fool. He knew that being seen as a Messiah was a de facto death sentence. John was now rotting away in a prison and that was proof of that enough. Thus Jesus carefully proceeded with a great deal of subtlety. He curtailed discussion of his messianic character. He commanded silence of any such people that would be healed or make proclamations of his messianic character and he kept this messianic character a secret as much as possible. Yet he acted messianically enough, especially in electing 12 followers, three of which were his stuts, to act as a kind of provisional Israelite government. A move identically made by the Dead Sea Scroll community at least a century prior. Indeed, Jesus the baptizer became Jesus the Ishma, the exorcist or miracle worker, but he was now becoming something else. The miracle worker was settling into becoming a messiah. Given this initial success, Jesus quickly expanded his confrontation with the forces of evil, sending out the 12 to do exactly the same kind of miracles that he had been doing. Indeed, he even imagines that such a confrontation may prove decisive such that they might not finish going through the towns of Israel before the son of man comes. But who is he talking about? Who is this son of man? This apocalyptic trope emerges from the book of Daniel. Indeed, the timing of all of this Jesus movement may have been informed by the calculation of the weeks found in that very book. But for Daniel, the coming of this son of man from the Aramaic term Barnosh was the collective symbol for the leadership of the faithful Israelites to be given power over the beastly foreign nations. In some of the earliest gospel material such as in Q, Jesus will often refer to the son of man in the third person making it pretty clear that he didn't think that it was him. We see the same thing in Mark. But this gets conflated on by later Christians. Rather, it was a cosmic event accompanied by celestial catastrophes like the sun going dark, stars falling from the sky, and terrestrial cataclysms like earthquakes, etc. But clearly by this point in Jesus's career, he expected that the son of man might appear immediately, thus inaugurating the end of days. This idea was so core to Jesus, the idea of the son of man coming that it was among his last earthly pronouncements in his pre trial before the high priest. Jesus even sent word of such workings to John in prison of these miracles such that he had cured disease and confronted demons and talked to the poor and even raised the dead. Shockingly, almost this exact language can be found in the Messianic Apocalypse 452:1 written perhaps a century prior to the life of Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls such that the Messiah would do just that, heal the wounded, revive the dead, and bring the good news to the poor. There was no mistaking this message. And perhaps Herod Antipas actually intercepted this message because John the Baptizer, he was put to death. He was beheaded shortly thereafter. And the murder of John must have been completely devastating to Jesus and to the movement. After all, John was the teacher of Jesus, the founder of the way, and probably taken to be the priestly Messiah. you needed two.

In the wake of this disaster and fearing for their lives, Jesus and his 12 member provisional government just fled as far as they basically could far to the north to Kaiseria Philippi where the pivotal question had to be settled. Is Jesus still a messiah? Now perhaps the Messiah and if he is, what is to be done next? The execution of John was a disaster. But it wasn't a disaster without messianic precedent. The Damascus document written in the aftermath of the death of the messianic teacher of righteousness contended that his death was in fact the prophetic realization of the prophet Zachchariah's words that if you strike the shepherd that the sheep will be scattered just before the final victory of Yahweh in Jerusalem. And indeed that a messiah might die indeed must die was already a notion in development in Jesus's time. In fact, it seems to have been during this period of Jesus's career that he came to the conclusion that both he and his followers must go to Jerusalem and suffer some kind of ordeal before the appearance of the son of man. Again, the murder of John results in apocalyptic paradoxical practice with the vote of support from his followers that he is in fact the Messiah. Jesus doubles down. He's now sets his eyes on storming Jerusalem, effectively forcing the final unveiling. But did Jesus expect to die in Jerusalem, to be murdered there? My suspicion is that he felt that he would face some kind of final ordeal in Jerusalem, a confrontation with the ultimate forces of evil there, and probably suffer but still be saved in the last moment. A typical kind of apocalyptic cadence when we find in the War Scrolls, for instance. But following that salvation, some cataclysm would fall upon the earth, resulting in the final defeat of evil Rome, the corrupt temple, and the worldly authorities would crumble, and he would be crowned king. Perhaps with John the Baptizer even revived from the dead somehow, and the council of 12 ruling over the world, or at least ruling over a greater Israel. And as an opening salvo against those final forces of evil, Jesus sends his followers back into the countryside to confront evil, to heal the sick, and to proclaim the same message that he had sent to John in prison. Herod, Antipas, and the others must have just been flabbergasted. The movement, rather than sulking in defeat with the death of John, had returned with a vengeance. Their success put wind into the sales of Jesus's now truly messianic mission. Indeed, Jesus has one of the rare visions, a mystical visions that we have in the New Testament in which he sees Satan tumbling out of heaven like a bolt of lightning. He begins to make his move to Jerusalem, preaching, teaching, and healing, but carefully avoiding his enemies all along the way. All the while actively trying to keep the chatter about him being a messiah to an absolute minimum. Jesus clearly felt that his and his followers actions would then induce a chain of events which would inaugurate the coming of the kingdom of God and the coming of the son of man. Further, rather than seeing his actions and the actions around him as the completion of messianic prophecy, he was shifting gears. Rather than just witness fulfilled prophecy around him, passively seeing prophecy being fulfilled around him, Jesus would now actively seek to fulfill messianic prophecy in his Jerusalem quest. It was no longer that the end is coming and Jesus is to play a decisive part, but that Jesus's very coming to Jerusalem is bringing that very end. This is no longer the fulfillment of prophecy. This is messianic accelerationism. Jesus intentionally enters Jerusalem on a cult and messianic triumph. He arrives near Passover, the holiday celebrating Israelite deliverance from slavery, an annual period notorious for Jewish uprisings in the region. He brings his followers, especially his provisional government of the 12. His first direct action is to target the economic central nerve of the temple system, the money changers. Both a decisive strike, but also again further fulfillment of prophecy. He directly confronts Judeian religious leadership to their face in the temple. Everyone in Jerusalem knows exactly what this is. They've seen some version of this messianic drama play out time and time before. Further, the Judeian leadership knows exactly how this is going to play out. There's going to be a riot, maybe arm insurrection against the Romans, followed by brutal Roman suppression. But most of all, it will be a disruption to the tenuous status quo. The suppression of Jesus's messianic activity by the Judeian leadership actually has very little to do with Jesus specifically. There were even members of the Judeian leadership seemingly sympathetic to him and his message among the Pharisees and perhaps even in the Sanhedrin. Their problem was that his messianic pretensions, his rabble rousing, and his instigating might cause a situation where Roman power now led by the absolutely brutal prefect Pontius Pilate. One unleashed truly nightmarish bloodshed within a Jerusalem now bursting at the seams with pilgrims for Passover. Simply put, Jesus had to be dealt with and dealt with quickly and dealt with quietly. A public confrontation would likely spark at least a riot. Thus, it appears that he was alone or at least mostly alone when he was arrested by a significant attachment of Judeian and Roman security.

And they were right. Even when he was arrested at night, armed combat with Jesus's followers was joined. If this arrest had happened inside Jerusalem, inside the temple now swollen with pilgrims, primed with the message of Passover, it could have been a disaster. Jesus, however, pacifies his followers, is taken to be questioned by a hastily assembled Judeian Inquisition, apparently led by the Sadducee faction, those with the most to lose from a Roman crackdown during the Passover at the temple.

After all, Passover was among the most lucrative times for the temple finances. And the upper echelons of the priesthood along the most wealthy in the region from precisely those funds have absolutely no interest in a Galilean peasant upstart interrupting the foundations of the Jerusalem economy. The Sadducee high priest Anas and his father-in-law the high priest or former high priest Caiaphas would have found Jesus a threat to the social order from which their income from which their money came and socially theologically they would have found him to be a bumpkin heretic at most in general. They didn't care about Jesus. They cared about what he might cause. They simply wanted to get rid of him. And imprisoning him likely would have only deepened the potential crisis. They knew that he had messianic pretensions and that alone was enough for convictions by the Roman for sedition. Let him be the Romans problem. I imagine they thought and with Passover starting the following evening, people would be busy anyhow. Maybe they wouldn't even notice what had happened. Basically, if he didn't survive the next day, he wouldn't survive into Passover and cause any problems during the holiday. But they needed a confession. Was he the Messiah and therefore an insurgent? They directly asked him this in front of witnesses. Are you the Messiah?

And Jesus, for his part, saw this as his moment to directly confront the highest level of Jewish religious life face to face. And what he had tried previously to keep secret, he now made as clear as he possibly could. I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven. Both the high priesthood and the Galilean Messiah had both thrown down their gauntlets. For their part, the temple authorities had their confession and thus they punted Jesus to the Roman prefect.

Now, Christian history has long whitewashed Pilate, but the historical truth is that he was a brutal ruler. Pho denotes him as a mixture of willfulness and relentlessness, noted for being especially vindictive with a furious temper. Probably realizing the situation, I think that Pilate just didn't want to riot for killing the guy either. And realizing that Jesus was Galilean, Pilate punts him over to Herod Antipas. But at this point, Jesus has said all he's going to say, especially to the face of the man who murdered John. He's staring into the face of the man that murdered his teacher. I suspect that Jesus perhaps thought that Herod Antipas would get his comeuppant soon enough, perhaps even face to face with a resurrected John. Punted again back to Pilate, Jesus was quickly sentenced to torture and execution by crucifixion, the most wretched of deaths, as Josephus put it. After beating Jesus within an inch of his life, mocking him as the king of Judeans, around 9:00 a.m. the next morning, he was nailed to a cross with other insurgents. From a distance, some of his followers looked on in horror. His own mother, who had very well beheld crucified insurgents near her own home while pregnant with Jesus years ago, now beheld her own son, struggling for hours against blood loss. shock, struggling to breathe as the weight of his own body was suffocating him. I suspect that until the very end, Jesus and his followers anticipated divine intervention, the unveiling of the son of man, cataclysmic judgment on the sinful Israel, and the messianic redemption and elevation of Jesus himself, perhaps even the resurrection of John. At around 3 in the afternoon, just hours before the beginning of the Feast of Freedom, none of that had happened and none of it was going to happen. Jesus cried out in what could have only been an anguish that none of us can imagine. In his Aramaic language, he cried, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Another Messiah had become a corpse. First John, now Jesus. Messianic dreams tend quickly to become nightmares.

It seems that Jesus was hastily buried somewhere near Jerusalem given the onset of both the holiday and then Shabbat. And following the burial, the Jesus of history becomes the Christ of faith. We simply don't know what happened to the body of Jesus. I suspect that he was rearied probably by his mother and some female followers. It seems like virtually all of the men fled or were in hiding. And for good reason. They didn't want to share his fate, though some eventually would. Jesus's mother had family in the area, as did some of his followers, and the areas around Jerusalem are just honeycombed with tombs from that period. But a part of me has always hoped that his mother and followers took his body back to Ankare just west of Jerusalem where she had come pregnant with him all those years before. And there I kind of hope he was laid to rest in a family tomb perhaps not too far from the body of John, his kinsman, teacher, baptizer, and friend.

What is clear, however, is that the execution of Jesus did not stop the messianic movement. Following a return to the Galilee to regroup, James, the brother of Jesus, takes up the helm along with Peter and eventually seems to center the movement in Jerusalem. But the core teachings of Torah observance, radical saddaka, and the imminent end of the age persisted after the death of Jesus. The way founded by John, radicalized by Jesus, and continued by James, his brother himself now a contender for the Davidic throne would continue. But some years later, the glorified Christ was now beheld by a man who would transform the teachings of John and Jesus. Paul would develop a gospel in which Jesus was a pre-existent divine being through which creation itself came to be who then poured out his own divinity to become the sinless human Jesus who in turn was sacrificed as a sin offering for the redemption of all human beings. According to this gospel, Paul's gospel, Jesus was raised from the dead, attained a glorified angelic-like divine form. He co-ruled with God and was soon, very soon, to return in judgment so as to doom many and glorify those who had trust in the gospel developed by Paul. And to this day, the documents that we now call the New Testament contain the fossilized remnants of at least three distinct gospels. those of John, the founder of the way, those of Jesus and his brother James, and finally those of Paul. But it would be Paul's gospel taken to the wider gentile world following a mystical vision in Jerusalem that would triumph simply as Christianity. In effect, for James, the message of Jesus remained central. But for Paul, Jesus simply became the message. But let's save that story for a part two. Yeah. I want to come back to the emergence of the gospels in the primitive Jesus movement and explore this gospelcape, if you will, of James and Paul. So, I'll see you next time for that. I put some works that have informed my own thinking in this episode in the description if you want to check those out. But I want to say a special thank you to a scholar that has deeply informed my thinking on the historical Jesus and that's Professor James Tabore. I can remember being an undergraduate and reading some of this literature on the historical Jesus movement and a lot of it seeming to go way one direction and way the other. And I remember finding Professor Tabour's books and it really spoke to me. It really it really came to me as if this is a glimpse into what have actually happened historically. And if you've watched this episode, you can probably hear very much the influence of Professor Tabore on my thinking about the historical Jesus. So I want to say two things. First, thank you Dr. Tabore if you're watching. Your ideas have radically informed me and shaped my appreciation, my deep appreciation of the historical Jesus. So, thank you for your years of scholarship. And also too, I want to point people in the direction of Dr. Tabor's YouTube channel. If you're interested in the way that I presented the historical Jesus, then you can go to his channel and explore lots of these topics at a much deeper level. So, that said, Dr. Tabore, if you're watching this, thank you so much. But until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge. Thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion. [Music]