I.

Crux Dissimulata

A t the center of Christianity, according to the first three Gospels, Jesus Christ seems to have made an impossible mistake.

While only God knew the precise date, Jesus proclaims that the Messiah, the “Son of Man,” in “great power and glory” would return within the lives of some of the people listening to him.

This strange misstatement has caused consternation almost since the expiration date of this prophecy passed.

But was it a mistake? What if we take Jesus Christ at his word?

In his prophecy, Jesus links the blessed event of his Second Coming with the destruction of Jerusalem and its famous Temple, which we know did in fact occur within his prophecy’s timespan. Both events are predicted by Jesus to transpire, definitively, within the living memory of those to whom he made these predictions. Jesus even accurately describes the future Jewish War that would begin in 66 CE and correlates it to the destruction of the Temple that was to signal his return in power and glory.

The verbal description of the war that Jesus renders in the Gospels eerily mirrors that given by the historian Flavius Josephus of the actual events 40 years later as the Roman general and future Emperor Titus fulfilled Jesus’s prophecy, right down to the “armies in the clouds” that Jesus foretold would appear in the sky before that brutal war’s final siege and the Temple’s destruction.

The Gospels were written after the Temple was demolished and the Flavian generals Vespasian and his son Titus rose from the East to become emperors of Rome and rule “the world” as a new era of peace did, in fact, return—a “Pax Romana.” In short, the Jewish prophecy of the messiah had been fulfilled—and so had the prophecy of Jesus.

Moreover, the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus openly proclaimed that they were the messiahs of Jewish prophecy, as part of their official propaganda and imperial cult. Few today realize that even important Jewish leaders at the time (officially if not always sincerely) recognized these pagan Romans as messiahs.

Was their arrival in power and glory as princes of peace the advent of Jesus’s prophecy? Or is it possible that Jesus’s prophecy was written while these Flavian emperors ruled in order to prove their messianic pretentions after they had conquered Judea? In either case, Jesus’s prediction in the New Testament may not be the mistake many assume it to be, after all.

For decades, based on the striking possibility suggested by this historical coincidence, we searched for further links between the Flavian dynasty and the formation of Christianity. In the process we found so many connections that they exceeded our most outlandish expectations.

At first, we were struck by the sheer quantity of what, in this light, appears to be Roman propaganda in the Gospels themselves. Not only does Jesus advocate peace with Rome in an age of Jewish rebellion—even calling for the payment of taxes—but he acknowledges the faith of a Roman centurion with his most lavish praise. Indeed, the New Testament thoroughly removes the special status of Hebrews as God’s Chosen People altogether and opens to the whole world the worship of the Jewish God.

Writing in the years just before the outbreak of the first Jewish War, St. Paul himself identifies political rebellion as a sin in the New Testament and proclaims that submission to the Roman government is obedience to God and his own appointed agents on earth.

According to the Gospels, Jesus not only calls for an end to the contemporary purity regulations that so alienated Jews from the pagan world (as does St. Paul), but Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor at the trial of Jesus, vividly washes the Romans’ hands of any culpability for his crucifixion. And, as readers will see, at every turn Christ’s own story seems to have been shaped by the Roman political agenda at the time.

Just how much of the New Testament comprises such pro-Roman propaganda? It soon became obvious while searching for an exception to the startlingly pro-Roman attitude in the New Testament that there is no exception anywhere to be found. 1

Most people today do not know that the writing of the Gospels has been dated to the era of the Flavian dynasty of Roman rulers, who rose to power after crushing the massive religion-inspired rebellion of messianic Jews some 40 years after the alleged death of Jesus. Most Christians are also unaware that close friends of these same Flavian rulers appear in the New Testament itself, or that the oldest Christian catacombs were the original burial site of the Flavian Emperor Vespasian’s granddaughter (the niece of the Emperor Titus, his son), or that her husband would be counted among the first “popes” of the first Christian church in Rome.

All of this evidence, when unflinchingly placed together in its historical context, suggests what is today considered completely impossible: that Christianity is somehow intertwined with imperial Rome.

And yet, actual physical evidence directly linking the Flavian dynasty to Christianity had never been shown to exist and continued to elude us during three decades of research. With all of the propaganda typically generated by Roman emperors, it seemed certain that, if such a radical hypothesis were correct, at least some physical link between Flavian emperors and Christianity must have survived, even after the many centuries during which evidence could have been lost or purposely destroyed. An imperial Roman form of Christianity may have been aimed at a specific audience, and it may have been only a single aspect of their propaganda, but, if the inference were correct, we realized that some visual trace should remain even to this day.

Of course, all of the Flavian temples have been demolished, and the vast majority of documents from that era have disintegrated. Surely, however, some coins , a leading device used by Romans to promote their political objectives, must have endured to reveal this connection if it in fact existed.

Unfortunately, scattered across museums and catalogs previously isolated in libraries and universities and in segregated collections around the world, a complete inventory of Roman coins was not readily available to us—until the advent of the Internet. It was then, after three decades of looking, without knowing in advance what the coin we were searching for would look like, we found it.

And this is it. It is a coin issued in the millions by the Flavian Emperor Titus, who conquered Jerusalem and sacked the Temple just as Jesus had prophesied. The symbol it bears, a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, is the very symbol Christians used to symbolize Christ for the first three centuries before the Emperor Constantine replaced it with the symbol of the Cross. On the left is the Roman coin of the Emperor Titus, and on the right is the original symbol of Jesus Christ:

Coin of the 1st Century Flavian Emperor Titus (left and middle); and the symbol of Jesus Christ used by Christians for the first three centuries (right)

We had to study the entire literary, historical, archeological and numismatic context of Christianity for three decades before we could even recognize this coin as the evidence we were looking for. This is the first time such evidence has been presented side-by-side.

As mentioned, this coin was the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place after years of research. It filled the final gap in a mosaic. That it would be so conclusive a link between the Flavians and Christianity as to be a literal match was astonishing even to us.

This book will fill in the rest of the mosaic of evidence that led us to this coin as we explore the startling truth that it reveals about the origins of Christianity.

H ow could Christians represent themselves with any symbol stamped on the coins of a Roman emperor while those coins were still circulating throughout Rome?

How is it possible that the first symbol they chose to represent Jesus Christ was used by a Roman emperor—the very emperor who fulfilled Jesus’s prophecy by destroying the Jewish Temple and who proclaimed himself to be the Jewish Messiah?

Let us assume, at the start, that Jesus was correct in his otherwise baffling prophecy. Let us assume that he did not make a mistake and that he meant exactly what is recorded in the Gospels.

If Jesus did indeed “return” to punish the Jews who unjustly rejected and killed him to sack their Temple within the lifetime of those who heard Jesus foretell it, then he must have returned as Vespasian and Titus. He did come back to rule the world, just as he foretold, as the Roman emperors who fulfilled both Jewish and Christian prophecy by bringing a new era of peace to the war-torn world. If a final End of Days is still pending, the glorious Second Coming predicted by Jesus has come and gone—nearly 2,000 years ago.

The simultaneous existence of more than one “messiah,” or indeed more than one manifestation of God, may strike some readers as strange. How can Vespasian and his son Titus both be the Jewish Messiah—and embodiments of the Jewish God—at the same time? How could the lives of Jesus Christ and Vespasian have overlapped, if they were incarnations of the same divine Being? 2

This question imports contemporary Christian ideas on the subject of Jesus’s divinity into this context where they did not yet exist, however. According to Hebrew scripture, Jews had already experienced multiple messiahs and, within the Jewish tradition, there is nothing whatever to prevent the existence of more than one (mortal) messiah at the same time. God’s messenger, Moses, named the “messiah” Joshua his successor, just as Elijah named Elisha, and just as the Maccabees, all of whom were messianic figures, could all be of the same family.

The sectarian documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls even suggest that at least some Jews of the period were expecting not just one, but two “messiahs,” perhaps a priestly (although hardly a pacifist) leader, along with a military/political figure. However miraculous their deeds and whatever communications they might receive from God, both were to be mortal, of course. 3

In the pagan context there is no problem with this, at all. On their coins, Romans identified multiple emperors as manifestations of the divine Apollo or Sol Invictus, for example. The problem we might have with two emperors simultaneously being the “Messiah” would emerge only later as Christians wrestled with the conflict between Christ’s divinity and monotheism. Early Christian documents implying Christ’s divinity also posit the simultaneous existence of more than one divine figure. Thus, the author of Colossians 1:15-16 (whether he was Paul or an early follower of his), wrote that Jesus, “the Son,” was the first of God’s creations and, at the same time, the image of the invisible God Himself. Although divine, Jesus is also the Son of God, and again, still within an allegedly monotheistic tradition.

This is not a problem in either a Jewish or pagan context for the theory we are testing, though it would be a major and logically insurmountable problem for early Christians. The concept of a “Trinity” in the three-fold identity of the single God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—was their somewhat ungainly solution to the fundamental paradox of what would seem to be the worship of more than one deity by a group still claiming to be monotheistic. 4

In order to test the theory that the Flavians were the validation of Jesus’s prophecy, or that Jesus’s prophecy was a validation of the Flavians’ rule, we must first take a closer look at the physical evidence we have just presented that directly links the Flavian Emperor Titus to those who worshiped Jesus Christ.

Where did this symbol, a dolphin and an anchor, come from? How common was it to both pagans and Christians? Was it specific to Titus, the man who sacked the Temple in accordance with Jesus’s prediction, or was it popular enough at the time that it could have been used by both Titus and Christians as a simple historical coincidence?

Where our journey ended is where we will now begin.

W hat were the first symbols used by Christians? Although the symbol of the Cross has been, by far, the dominant symbol of Christian belief for the last one-and-a-half-thousand years and remains Christianity’s most recognized emblem, it is widely understood that the most common symbol used by the earliest Christians was not a cross but a fish:

Ichthys

Some of the underlying reasons for using this symbol are also well-known. Spelled out in Koine Greek (the common language of the ancient eastern Roman Empire, the original language of the New Testament and an ancestor of modern Greek), the word for fish (“ichthys” or ΙΧΘΥΣ) forms an “acrostic”—that is, a word puzzle in which each letter is the first letter of the words “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

Another Christian adaptation of “ichthys” is a circle comprising the letters ΙΧΘΥΣ, which, when overlapped, make a wheel with eight spokes fusing both fish and Cross, as in this early example from Ephesus in Asia Minor:

The ichthys wheel

The symbol of a fish , therefore, comprised a name-game that referenced Jesus Christ with an abbreviation of his name and some of his titles.

There were other reasons for Christians to adopt a fish as their symbol. Fish allegories abound in the Gospels. Jesus recruits some of his first disciples from among the fishermen who work on the Sea of Galilee, including St. Peter. “Follow me,” Christ says to them, “and I will make you fishers of men.” 5

Jesus’s miracles and activities on the Sea of Galilee are also significant. The New Testament tells us that Jesus ministered near that “lake.” Jesus, we are told, taught his disciples while standing in a boat on those waters. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus facilitated a miraculously large catch of fish on the waters of Galilee early in his ministry. And he would do so again following his Resurrection, according to the Book of John. 6 Jesus is not only said to have walked on water on the Sea of Galilee 7 but also to have calmed a raging storm there that endangered his disciples. 8

In addition to healing miracles performed around this body of water 9 , the Gospels tell us that, having driven a multitude of demons from one man, Jesus allowed those malignant spirits to possess a herd of pigs that stampeded down a steep bank into the Sea of Galilee, where they all drowned. 10

When some question whether Jesus paid the famous “Temple Tax,” which all Jews were commanded to pay in accordance with the Torah 11 , another fish symbol appears in the Gospel of Matthew 17:24-27:

After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma Temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the Temple tax?”

“Yes, he does,” he replied.

When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”

“From others,” Peter answered.

“Then the children are exempt ,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” (Emphasis added.) 12

So a fish is seen providing the Jewish Temple tax for the followers of Jesus.

The Romans had repeatedly attempted to suppress the payment of the Temple tax, but it was not until the Flavians actually destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, about 40 years after the death of Jesus, that they abolished the payment of this tax altogether by faithful Jews across the Empire. Therefore, it seems that Jesus himself is predicting the demise of this tax within a generation—by exempting “the children” from it—just as he elsewhere famously predicts the destruction of the Temple itself will happen within that same period. (Referring to his second coming, Jesus states in the Gospel of Mark 13 : “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”)

There are many more fish references in the New Testament. Jesus transforms a mere five loaves of bread and “two fishes” into enough food to feed a multitude of 5,000 men plus women and children, with twelve baskets of leftovers, according to all of the Gospels 14 . According to Mark 15 , Jesus fed a multitude with seven loaves and “a few fish,” leaving seven baskets of leftovers. The Gospel of Matthew 16 specifies that 4,000 people were fed fish on that miraculous occasion.

The fish symbolism is significant in a number of ways. Just as early Christians considered Christ to be “the Bread of Life,” as Jesus describes himself no less than three times in the Gospel of John 17 , Jesus is also said to be the “Water of Life” according to John 18 . Just as Jesus is the fish that he feeds to the multitudes, so is he the bread and the water, the satisfaction for those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness.”

Jesus’s feeding miracles also foreshadow the Last Supper, where he feeds his disciples (at least symbolically) with his flesh and blood. Jesus claims of the bread on this occasion, “[t]his is my flesh (or body),” and of the wine, it is “my blood” 19 .

Although not a direct part of the Eucharist, as the bread and wine are, a fish became symbolic of Jesus himself. We can see the fish directly symbolizing the Eucharist in the Sacraments Chapel of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus (one of the very first artistic depictions of the Last Supper):

Eucharist depicting fish on the table, 3 rd Century

One of the earliest Christian writers, Tertullian (c. 160-225 CE) argued for baptism by saying (and here we can see all of the fish allegories brought together in one conceit): "But we, being little fishes, as Jesus Christ is our great Fish, begin our life [in Christ] in the water, and only while we abide in the water are we safe and sound." 20

The first historical naming of the fish as an official visual symbol of Christianity is by St. Clement of Alexandria (whose full name was Titus Flavius Clemens, c. 150-215 CE). In his work, Christ, the Instructor , St. Clement advises Christians to use a dove or a fish or an anchor among other symbols as their identifying “seal”:

And let our seals be either a dove, or a fish, or a ship scudding before the wind, or a musical lyre, which Polycrates used, or a ship's anchor, which Seleucus got engraved as a device; and if there be one fishing, he will remember the apostle, and the children drawn out of the water. 21

It is interesting that the “Polycrates” mentioned by St. Clement here was a pagan tyrant of the Greek island of Samos who flourished around 530 BCE and who especially revered the god Apollo, to whom the lyre was sacred. This tyrant’s execution by the Persians (probably by being impaled or crucified) was foreseen in a prophetic dream by his daughter, who saw him “washed by Zeus [rained on] and anointed by Helios [sweated out under the sun].” 22

Seleucus I Nicator (ca. 358-281 BCE)

The Seleucus curiously mentioned by St. Clement of Alexandria was a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great. As a founder of the Hellenistic “Seleucid Empire” following the division of Alexander the Great’s conquests, he chose to use the symbol of an anchor and fish , as on this 2nd Century BCE silver bowl (produced by one of his descendant-successors):

Silver-gilded Seleucid bowl with dolphin-and-anchor

We must ask ourselves: why would St. Clement recommend using symbols with pagan origins as Christian seals?

Fully aware of the Crucifixion, St. Clement of Alexandria instead nominates images closely associated with the Greek god Apollo and certain pagan rulers. He does not even mention the Cross at all in his list of appropriate Christian symbols, though he is writing in the late 2nd /early 3rd Centuries.

Of course, as a literary metaphor, at least, the Cross can still be counted in the earliest Christian symbolism. According to the Gospels, Jesus himself used it allegorically even before he was crucified: “Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up his cross and follow me.’” 23 Therefore we know that the earliest Christians were clearly aware of the symbolic importance of the Cross. And St. Clement himself refers to the Cross in a literary context. Yet he does not suggest using it as a graphic Christian symbol. 24 Why not?

Many symbols in the New Testament recur again and again: bread, water, wine, rocks/pillars, etc. Fish are among the most common. Why, then, would Clement refer to pagan sources like Seleucus for a fish symbol instead of sourcing his suggestions to the New Testament itself? While he is clearly aware of the Bible stories, St. Clement seems to cite the “fishing” of the “apostle” in order to justify using the earlier pagan precedent.

To explain why the first Christians used symbols like a fish instead of the Cross, Christians often suggest that a secret symbol—a so-called “crux dissimulata”— had been necessary in the first centuries because Christians were being persecuted by the Roman Empire.

According to this explanation, Christians used the fish as a means of recognizing a fellow Christian by quickly scratching it into the sand without any fear of discovery by Roman authorities. And, certainly, Christians who refused to worship Roman state deities could be subject to criminal prosecution and even execution.

Yet, while it may have been convenient at certain times to have a secret code, it is not clear at all that pagans would have recognized the Cross as a Christian symbol during the first two centuries of Christian history. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia , not more than 20 examples have ever been found of the Cross being used as a Christian symbol during the entire first four centuries.

It would seem that an outsider would need the same knowledge of an insider to recognize a cross as a Christian symbol at all considering how rarely it was ever used. An outsider had a much better chance of recognizing a fish as a Christian symbol at this time since it was far more commonly used. How could the Cross be so recognizable during this period that disguising it would be necessary? And were these early Christians really in danger of discovery and persecution by the Roman government?

We now know much more about the treatment of Christians by the Roman Empire. Recent scholarship, such as that of Candida Moss, has revealed that traditional claims about Christian persecution have been greatly overstated. 25 The first Christian catacombs in Rome, dated to the early 2nd Century, were burial sites—not hiding places—just as the Jewish catacombs in Rome were before them. The symbols used by early Christians at their gravesites do not appear to have been any secret, but quite the opposite. They were used to identify the occupants as Christians. And the symbols they used most predominantly were fish and anchors , the same symbols stamped on the Emperor Titus’s coins.

We will take a close look at these earliest Christian symbols later. First, we need to consider why our modern understanding of Christianity’s origins makes it so difficult to believe that Romans, let alone Roman emperors, could be involved in the creation of Christianity. Our modern impression of persecuting Romans and oppressed Christians has built in a natural aversion to any such possibility.

Christians fed to lions, “The Triumph of Faith,” by 19th Century painter Eugene Thirion

The new discovery of this coin’s link to Christianity proves that within a decade or so of Flavian rule, starting in the early 2nd Century, Christians were publicly memorializing their faith on tombs, with no fear of imperial persecution, even as they used symbols associated with the emperor himself. And prominently buried in one of these tombs, indeed the oldest Christian catacombs, was the granddaughter/niece of three Flavian emperors. Today they are named after her (the Catacombs of St. Domitilla, although her remains were later moved to the basilica of Santi Nereo e Achilleo in Rome).

Facts like these already cast extreme doubt on the idea that Romans were persecuting Christians in the 1 st Century. However, we know that some instances of Christian persecution by Roman authorities did in fact occur. According to our ancient sources, the late 3rd -4th Century Roman Emperor Diocletian and, later, Julian (the notorious “Apostate” from his family’s Christian faith) were explicitly and harshly anti-Christian emperors. Yet, before them, only Decius in 250 CE had enacted any law against Christians. And even under Diocletian, the evidence tells us that by the end of his second year of rule "the ferocity of the persecution [of Christians] had eased off again, and the earlier tradition of tolerance had begun to reassert itself.” (Emphasis added) 26

More and more, the evidence suggests that the persecution of Christians was not at all common before the Christian faith started to become the official state religion of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Constantine in the 4th Century. By the reign of Emperor Gratian (359-383) paganism would be vigorously suppressed by the Roman Empire. There is simply no evidence that Christians were driven underground, as commonly depicted in movies and novels—at least not for any extended periods of time.

The first and only existing documentation of official Roman policy on Christians, dating prior to the brief reign of the hostile Emperor Decius, is this correspondence between Pliny the Younger, governor of the Roman province of Pontus-Bithynia (in modern-day Turkey), and the Emperor Trajan in 111 CE.

Pliny the Younger, façade of the Cathedral of St. Maria Maggiore

Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan:

It is my custom to refer all my difficulties to you, Sir, for no one is better able to resolve my doubts and to inform my ignorance.

I have never been present at an examination of Christians. Consequently, I do not know the nature or the extent of the punishments usually meted out to them, nor the grounds for starting an investigation and how far it should be pressed. Nor am I at all sure whether any distinction should be made between them on the grounds of age, or if young people and adults should be treated alike; whether a pardon ought to be granted to anyone retracting his beliefs, or if he has once professed Christianity, he shall gain nothing by renouncing it; and whether it is the mere name of Christian which is punishable, even if innocent of crime, or rather the crimes associated with the name.

For the moment this is the line that I have taken with all persons brought before me on the charge of being Christians. I have asked them in person if they are Christians, and if they admit it, I repeat the question a second and third time, with a warning of the punishment awaiting them. If they persist, I order them to be led away for punishment; for, whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakeable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.

There have been others similarly fanatical who are Roman citizens. I have entered them on the list of persons to be sent to Rome for trial.

Now that I have begun to deal with this problem, as so often happens, the charges are becoming more widespread and increasing in variety. An anonymous pamphlet has been circulated which contains the names of a number of accused persons. Amongst these I consider that I should dismiss any who denied that they were or ever had been Christians when they had repeated after me a formula of invocation to the gods and had made offerings of wine and incense to your statue (which I had ordered to be brought into the court for this purpose along with the images of the gods), and furthermore had reviled the name of Christ: none of which things, I understand, any genuine Christian can be induced to do.

Others, whose names were given to me by an informer, first admitted the charge and then denied it; they said that they had ceased to be Christians two or more years previously, and some of them even twenty years ago . They all did reverence to your statue and the images of the gods in the same way as the others, and reviled the name of Christ. They also declared that the sum total of their guilt or error amounted to no more than this: they had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately amongst themselves in honor of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath, not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery, to commit no breach of trust and not to deny a deposit when called upon to restore it. After this ceremony it had been their custom to disperse and reassemble later to take food of an ordinary, harmless kind; but they had in fact given up this practice since my edict, issued on your instructions, which banned all political societies . This made me decide it was all the more necessary to extract the truth by torture from two slave-women, whom they call deaconesses. I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.

I have therefore postponed any further examination and hastened to consult you. The question seems to me to be worthy of your consideration, especially in view of the number of persons endangered; for a great many individuals of every age and class, both men and women, are being brought to trial, and this is likely to continue. It is not only the towns, but villages and rural districts too which are infected through contact with this wretched cult. I think though that it is still possible for it to be checked and directed to better ends, for there is no doubt that people have begun to throng the temples which had been entirely deserted for a long time; the sacred rites which had been allowed to lapse are being performed again, and flesh of the sacrificial victims is on sale everywhere, though up till recently scarcely anyone could be found to buy it. It is easy to infer from this that a great many people could be reformed if they were given an opportunity to repent. (Emphasis added.)

Emperor Trajan

What we appear to be witnessing in this correspondence between the emperor and his governor is the first formulation of a Roman response to New Testament Christians. Here is Emperor Trajan’s reply to Pliny the Younger:

You have followed the right course of procedure, my dear Pliny, in your examination of the cases of persons charged with being Christians, for it is impossible to lay down a general rule to a fixed formula. These people must not be hunted out; if they are brought before you and the charge against them is proved, they must be punished, but in the case of anyone who denies that he is a Christian, and makes it clear that he is not by offering prayers to our gods, he is to be pardoned as a result of his repentance however suspect his past conduct may be. But pamphlets circulated anonymously must play no part in any accusation. They create the worst sort of precedent and are quite out of keeping with the spirit of our age. (Emphasis added.) 27

Pliny’s ignorance of an existing policy concerning Christians is clear, along with his personal hostility toward them. Interestingly, Pliny thinks the Christians’ meetings are properly forbidden under Trajan’s ban on political groups. But Pliny clearly does not know what the emperor will think about this new problem.

Any sacrifice or prayer in the presence of pagan images would have been a form of idol worship forbidden in the Hebrew scripture, including the Ten Commandments’ famous prohibition against “making” or “bowing down” to the graven images of polytheistic deities. In this way, Gentile Christians could be detected immediately, Pliny presumes. Jews had been exempted from the requirement to worship Roman state deities. However, as such worship was required of Roman citizens and officials, the failure to do so restricted their social mobility within the Roman world.

It’s unclear, however, whether these early New Testament Christians would have had the same problem since we now know they were already using both symbolic representations of the divine and pagan religious images themselves, even images related to pagan gods like Apollo, as the examples of St. Clement of Alexandria demonstrate.

Trajan’s reply reassures the governor that he acted wisely by consulting him about the treatment of Christians and that he has ruled appropriately. He directs Pliny that Christians need only offer prayer with incense and wine to Caesar in order to acquit themselves. Emperor Trajan does not require Christians to recognize Caesar’s divinity but merely to make an offering to the divine for Caesar’s wellbeing. And, while the offensive images of pagan gods would be present, their official offering would not require an animal sacrifice of any kind. Above all, Christians are not to be hunted down, but ignored as much as possible. The official imperial attitude toward Christians, even as this earliest record shows, is actually rather benign and consistent with the policy of religious tolerance usually favored by the Romans.

Pliny’s letter also tells us that the Christian movement was at least 20 years old in 111 or 112 CE. This is most interesting because it dates the existence of Christianity in Bithynia to the time of the Flavian Roman emperors who preceded Trajan.

What else does this oldest surviving discussion of Christianity by Roman officials reveal? Pliny states that Christianity’s popularity seems to have waned since the Flavian era. He also mentions that the Christians he is dealing with, even at this early stage of Christian history, appear to come from all classes of Roman society. All of these facts challenge the conventional view of Christian history.

Pliny also reveals that the traditional or established forms of Roman worship became “entirely deserted” at one time in the recent past but that they were now staging a comeback. Even if this report is exaggerated, a great many people, it seems, had gotten over a “Christian phase” that had peaked and started fading during the reign of the Flavian Emperor Domitian, who succeeded his father Vespasian and brother Titus.

The archeological evidence tells us that the coin issued by Titus that mirrors the first symbol of Christ was discontinued by his brother Domitian only a few months into his reign. Titus ruled for only 2 years, 2 months and 20 days, yet he had managed to issue millions of coins bearing that symbol during this brief reign. His younger brother Domitian ruled for 15 years and was known to have conducted a harsh purge of the upper class, even executing and banishing some of his own family members who, as we shall see, may have been Christians— including his nephew-in-law Titus Flavius Clemens and his niece, the afore-mentioned Domitilla. He even adopted their children as his own heirs.

What is most vivid in this early correspondence between the Emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger is the contrast between imperial Rome’s careful policy toward the new Christian religion on the one hand and its violent suppression of militant messianic Judaism on the other.

Outside the New Testament itself (and, possibly, the writings ascribed to St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch and Papias of Hierapolis), this correspondence is the earliest primary evidence of Christianity that exists anywhere in the historical record with one controversial exception that we will examine in detail in Part II.

Among the earliest surviving mentions of Christianity we have an official statement of how the Roman Empire will not persecute Christians—written by the Roman emperor himself. The evidence from almost the whole of the two centuries that follow conforms to Emperor Trajan’s quasi-toleration of Christians. His approach seems to have become the standard operating policy of the Roman government toward Christianity, despite later fictional depictions of Roman mistreatment of Christians.

So what is the basis for the assertion that Christians were being systematically hunted down and slaughtered by Romans as early as the 1st Century, as we have been led to believe by tradition, books, movies and popular culture? The answer turns out to be a key to understanding what has been puzzling Christian scholars for centuries.

A ccording to the famous account of the 2nd Century historian Tacitus, Nero, the notorious 1st Century emperor, tried to pin the blame for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE on “Christians.” In The Annals , Tacitus writes:

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty ; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind . Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment , there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed. (Emphasis added.) 28

Such a characterization of Christians—criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment— by a Roman senator and historian like Tacitus makes no sense if we understand the term “Christian” in the sense of Gospel-believing, tax-paying citizens who render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and turn the other cheek while walking the extra mile for Romans. Who, then, are these criminals Tacitus describes Nero as vilifying?

We must remember that by the year 64 CE, when the Great Fire decimated the city of Rome, the Gospels themselves had not yet been written. They would not be written until the Flavian era that followed Nero. The great majority of mainstream scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, agree on this dating.

There is simply no reason to think that many people in Rome had ever heard of this kind of Caesar-friendly Christianity only three decades or so after the Crucifixion. So few in number could such Christians have been, especially in the city of Rome, that it is exceedingly unlikely that these ostensibly peace-loving followers of New Testament ideals could have made a convincing or useful scapegoat for Nero. So who could Nero have been blaming—and who could Tacitus be describing?

The mystery is resolved if Tacitus is confusing one group of devotees of a Jewish messiah with another group who were, indeed, creating very serious trouble for the Roman government and were, in fact, quite active in Rome at that time.

Rebellion had been simmering among Jews since the days of the first Roman census early in the 1st Century and the new imperial tax that this census was designed to impose on them. These are events that the Gospel of Luke associates with the birth of Jesus, and they also signal the birth of the Jewish rebellion according to the ancient historian Flavius Josephus. According to all ancient sources, it was the galvanizing concept of the Messiah—a warrior who would lead the Jews to salvation—that most motivated the revolt against their Roman masters, however unlikely they were to succeed.

Violent disturbances among the Jewish population were an enormous concern to the Roman government. By the 1st Century CE, about 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish, perhaps 7 million, of which only about 2.5 million lived in the region of modern-day Israel and Palestine. The rest, known as “Diaspora” Jews, were scattered within foreign countries following the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 8th Century BCE, the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 6th Century BCE, and the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th Century BCE. These Jews comprised a significant portion of the populations of Egypt, Africa, Greece, and Italy by the 1st Century, and they had also reached Gaul and Spain. There may have been another million Jews in the Parthian Empire in modern day Iran and Iraq. By comparison, the Jewish population of the United States in the early years of the 21st Century is between one and two percent—or about 5.4 million. 29

In addition to their significant numbers, the proximity of the Hebrews’ traditional homeland to Egypt made any potential breakaway state in the area a direct threat to the bread basket of the Mediterranean world. As its chief producer of grain, Egypt was indispensable to the Empire. Rome’s leading competitor in the East, the Parthian Empire, was thus already too dangerously close for comfort to allow any instability.

Unlike any peace-loving Christians who may have existed at this time, the unrest among the Jewish population, particularly among messianic militants, was a clear and present danger to the Roman state. Nero would certainly have had a political motivation to blame them for any attack on Rome. It is far more likely that the “Christians” he blames for the Great Fire in Tacitus’s history were, in fact, this hardcore group of messianic rebels.

Is there any other evidence from all of the historical record that might be the basis for the idea that Romans persecuted Christians in the 1st Century? One piece of evidence often referred to as such an example is a passage written by the 2nd Century Roman historian Suetonius, who reports that Jews in the city of Rome were causing disturbances at the instigation of a person named “Chrestus” as early as the 40s CE, and that they had to be expelled from the city by the Emperor Claudius around the year 50 CE. 30 But again, this can hardly have been the “Christ” of the New Testament since Christ never visited Rome. And the idea of Christians (by our meaning of the term) being such a problem in distant Rome only a decade or two after the Crucifixion, and long before the evangelizing missions of St. Paul and St. Peter, is simply not plausible.

In any event, Jesus’s advocacy of peace with Rome in the Gospels rules him out as a possible instigator of any such disturbances in the first place. This very fact is demonstrated over and over again in the New Testament, as not just Romans but Roman governmental authorities uniformly find no problem with the Gospel of Christ. Nor is there any reason for them to. We are left to imagine Nero as a mad man unjustly accusing the kind and pacifistic Christians out of his own wanton cruelty.

Nero had good reason to fear the militant messianic Jews in Rome, however. Anticipating their Christ would arrive to deliver them, these fanatics were smoldering with resentment against the Empire. Only two years later it is they who would launch all-out war with the Romans. They make much more plausible suspects for the disturbances under Claudius and a much more likely political scapegoat for the arson under Nero that ravaged the city. These messianic Jewish rebels are in fact more believable candidates for setting the Great Fire than Nero himself, since that disaster caused calamitous financial and political challenges for the emperor. Burning for six days, the fire reduced over 70 percent of the capitol city to ruins.

Nero had little reason to sing while Rome burned, though the ancient historian Suetonius reports that the emperor had exulted in the “beauty of the flames.” As the capitol was engulfed in fire he allegedly sang a lament about the fall of Troy. 31 “Fiddling while Rome burns” is a cliché about Nero, but contemporary historians question the objectivity of historians like Tacitus, Suetonius and Flavius Josephus, noting that their hostility to Nero reflected the political views of the emperors they worked under, as well as those with lingering republican sentiments who despised the absolute monarchy of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Nero sings as Rome burns, Henry Altemus (1897)

So, we have good reason to suspect that pagan Romans like Tacitus and Suetonius were confusing these new groups of messianic monotheists, making no distinction between the militant and peaceful varieties.

D uring this time of civilizational conflict, the Zealots and the Sicarii were the leading groups of “messianic” Jewish rebels, according to the 1st Century historian Flavius Josephus. He describes them as religious fanatics and terrorists, readily bringing to mind today’s jihadists. 32

Josephus was writing for the Romans, of course. A Jew himself who adopted his Roman name after being captured by General Vespasian during the Jewish War, Josephus relates that even under torture one contemporary Jewish sect called “Essenes” could never declare a man (Caesar) to be their Lord. Josephus also records how the rebels at Masada committed mass suicide rather than be captured by the Romans in 73 CE. He recounts a similar event involving himself years earlier at Jotapata, where as a Jewish general he had faced defeat by the Romans and participated in a similar suicide pact before arranging his own escape at the last moment. After narrowly avoiding death, Josephus turned against his countrymen and denounced them in his new role as, in essence, the Flavians’ court historian.

Whatever their exact dating, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm what Josephus relates, at least to some extent: the messianic Jews of this period were militant, xenophobic purists and strict adherents of the Mosaic Law. If the so-called “sectarian” documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls are any indication, they were not at all the peace-seeking, cheek-turning, enemy-loving, tax-paying, Roman-appeasing Christians of the sort who could possibly follow the New Testament. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that they constituted a religio-political powder keg about to explode—and that they would certainly have opposed Christ’s central message in the Gospels.

Today, these rebellious Jews are not normally called “Christians” even though they anticipated the arrival of a “christened” or “anointed” one (the Messiah or the Christ) to lead them in their holy war against Rome. To pagan Romans like Tacitus and Suetonius, who may have been ignorant of the finer distinctions between messianic Jewish groups, the term “Christian” may well have applied to messianic Jews as a whole. Suetonius’s confused mention of a Jewish “Chrestus” causing violence in Rome itself before 50 CE appears to confirm this conflation of terminology.

This confusion is important to keep in mind when reading the New Testament itself, especially when Paul clashes with a group of nominal “Apostles” who resemble militant rebels more than any idea of Christians today, as we will see.

The evidence suggests, therefore, that it was these messianic rebels and not Christians as we know them today who were martyred and persecuted by Romans during the first two centuries of the Common Era. There is ample evidence that the Romans crucified these followers of messianic Judaism by the thousands during this period. It is certain that they would refuse to acknowledge any Roman emperor as divine or in any way their master. The mystery of why Claudius and later Nero perceived these “Jewish-Christians” to be a military threat to Rome now makes perfect sense. They were not “Christians” as we understand the term today but violent insurgents.

Quite unlike these dangerous “christians,” another type of Christian seems to have immediately embraced pagan images among their first symbols, along with the dramatic modifications of traditional Jewish law this required, as well as adopting an accommodating attitude toward Romans themselves.

The troublemakers that Suetonius and Tacitus called followers of “Chrestus” or “Christians,” on the other hand, are far more like the oppositional orthodox Jews in the New Testament referred to by Paul as “apostles of Christ.”

The picture of Jesus’s followers portrayed in the New Testament makes it impossible to understand how the Romans could feel threatened by such mild and forgiving proponents of political peace. Indeed, they seem to be the fulfillment of a Roman wish-list for what messianic Jews in Rome would comprise.

The conflation of these two groups, along with the marked contrast between them, makes it easy to see why Pliny the Younger was in a quandary over what to do with what might be called “New Testament” Christians, with whom he was dealing only a few decades after the first Jewish War.

The rebellious “Jewish Christians,” as they can be designated, went to war with Rome one more time under Bar Kokhba in 132-136 CE (although violent disturbances started as early as 123 CE). They would continue to be a threat to the Roman Empire well after the first full-scale revolt. Throughout this time they were tortured and crucified in large numbers. The abundant evidence of their persecution by the Romans stands in stark contrast to the dearth of evidence that New Testament Christians were persecuted during Christianity’s first two centuries.

This distinction between “Jewish Christians” and Gospel-adhering Christians has been convincingly argued by the scholar Robert Eisenman in his books, James the Brother of Jesus and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians . 33 Eisenman, one of the important translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls, demonstrates that the first group of messianic Jewish believers may indeed be identified as a rebel sect similar to if not identical in religion and politics with the well-known Jewish Zealot movement itself. Professor Eisenman argues that the so-called “sectarian” documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that is, those specific texts that detail the lifestyle and history of a purist Jewish sect normally identified as “Essenes,” are likely to have been authored by the same ideological movement that instigated the revolt against Rome in the 1st Century.

Eisenman differs from the majority view of scholars here, who place the writing of some of the sectarian documents of the Scrolls as early as the 2nd Century BCE. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls were deposited in caves by messianic Jews at the time of the first rebellion even as war engulfed the region around 70 CE, however, Eisenman’s argument makes more temporal and logical sense. At the very least, and whether or not his dating is correct, these documents appear to have been important enough to the Jewish rebels to hide them in caves during their first war with Rome. Coins dating to that time were found in the same cache. The authors of these documents certainly shared with the rebels both their martial zeal and fervent messianic expectations. Their documents would be preserved until discovery 19 centuries later to much controversy.

Adding to that controversy, Professor Eisenman identified in those scrolls the early Christian leaders James the Just and the Apostle Paul, connecting them to figures referred to in the sectarian Dead Sea Scroll documents by the titles “the Teacher of Righteousness” and “the Liar,” respectively. (And it is curious how often Paul makes the special pleading that he is “not lying” in the New Testament, considering how often this bitter accusation appears in the Dead Sea documents recorded by the Jewish hardliners.)

However fascinating, such an identification is not required in order to see the wider point that the Scrolls community of purist messianic Jews was ideologically akin to the rebels who started the war with Rome—and to the “Apostles” Paul clashes with in the New Testament, as we shall see.

Professor Eisenman has also discovered numerous linguistic similarities between the Scrolls and the New Testament suggesting that a close and often hostile relationship existed between these two communities. This conflict appears to reflect the religious differences that erupt in the pages of the New Testament between the Apostle Paul and the early Christians led by James the Just—a conflict Paul bitterly describes in his famous letter to the Galatians.

One need not accept every conclusion that Professor Eisenman draws in order to be persuaded that the ideological dispute between the early Christian leaders James and Paul perfectly matches the differences between the militant and peaceful messianic groups of the 1st Century. In the work of Josephus, the Zealot movement is treated as a 1st Century innovation, like Christianity itself. And yet, even in the New Testament, both groups are called “Apostles” of Christ. One can hardly doubt that Romans like Tacitus also counted the hostile and messianic Zealots as “Christians,” as well.

P aul’s works are universally considered to be the oldest Christian writings even though they were penned about 20 to 30 years after Christ’s death. During his mission to establish the early Church, he recounts ongoing violent encounters and disagreement with Jews and, curiously, with fellow Apostles of Christ represented by James the Just.

The militancy of the Zealots’ ideology resembles that of both the Dead Sea Scrolls community and, in all likelihood, the earliest so- called Christian community led by James. Both groups were focused on the messianic prophecies contained in the Jewish scripture, the main inspiration for the Jewish rebels, according to ancient sources. The Dead Sea and James groups, whether they were one and the same or not, both believed in strict adherence to the Torah—the source of conflict that made it so difficult for Jews to assimilate with Romans and classical civilization, and the very target of both Christ’s scorn in the Gospels and Paul’s vigorous arguments in the Epistles.

Although such practices as male circumcision limited widespread conversions, Jews of the era welcomed proselytes to some extent. A category of Jewish convert who was not circumcised but who still worshiped the Jewish God started to emerge, known as “God fearers.” However, as with the worship of Roman state gods, if a man did not become circumcised, he was technically excluded from the House of Israel. He remained a mere onlooker, rather than a member among God’s Chosen People.

A rising pagan interest in Judaism was another factor Romans were managing. Paul attests that his mission was to convert Gentiles in the wake of previous efforts by “Cephas” (Peter) and others who aimed only at converting Jews to the rising new messianic fervor. Since messianics were the purists with the greatest devotion to the law, Paul was probably the first messianic missionary to encounter Torah observance as a cultural obstacle. The new challenges that came with proselytizing to Gentiles, who were unaccustomed to Kosher diet and, especially, to circumcision, lead Paul to reject strict observance of Jewish law altogether in his mission.

It was this rejection that supposedly precipitated the passionate dispute between Paul and James and the controversy that would separate the Torah-rejecting and more pacifist Pauline “Christians” from the Torah-adhering Jewish “Christians" of James.

Paul Writing his Epistles, by Valentin de Boulogne (17th Century)

Throughout his letters to his flocks, Paul emphasizes that Christ’s death and resurrection liberated Christians from the constraints of Mosaic Law, thus eliminating the need for such practices as Kosher diet and circumcision. In short, he proclaimed that Christians were now “free in Christ.” On the prickly issue of circumcising male converts, Paul inveighs:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. Indeed I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing . And I testify again to every man who becomes circumcised that he is a debtor to keep the whole law. You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace . For we through the Spirit eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness by faith. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but faith working through love. (Emphasis added.) 34

Paul suggests this new “freedom” will break down the wall separating Jew from Gentile, thereby eliminating any reason for future conflict.

This idea is fairly summarized in a letter to the Ephesians ascribed to Paul (but more likely written by a follower of Paul’s ideas a decade or two later during the Flavian era):

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances , that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the Cross, thereby killing the hostility . And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone… (Emphasis added.) 35

As the Apostle Paul famously proclaims to the Christians of Corinth:

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. (Emphasis added.) 36

Paul’s letter to the Galatians reveals that “Christians” said to have been Jesus’s original followers somehow believe, in contrast to Paul’s doctrine and only a couple of decades after the Crucifixion, that strict Torah observance is still mandatory, including Kosher diet and circumcision.

If the Gospels record history, this is impossible to understand since they quote Jesus announcing the end of Kosher dietary restrictions and his praising the faith of a presumably uncircumcised Roman soldier!

Christ’s message would be extraordinary, to say the least, and revolutionary for a “grassroots” Jewish leader of the 1st Century. It is all the more incredible that his oldest followers could have missed it. The Gospels famously depict the disciples ignoring strict Sabbath observance, as well as Jesus arguing in favor of violating the Torah with Jewish religious authorities. How can two groups depicted as “Christians” disagree over such a fundamental message of Christ’s ministry?

A closer look at Paul’s letter to the faithful in Galatia reveals an interesting detail. He complains that “not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. This matter arose because some false believers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves.”

Paul wrote in Greek, but in Hebrew literature the term “Kittim” might denote not only Greeks but any foreigners from across the Mediterranean Sea, including, according to some scholars, Romans. So, intriguingly, it is possible that “Titus,” Paul’s Gentile convert who famously avoided circumcision was a Roman. Since Paul does not cite any other examples of converts allowed to keep their foreskins, Paul’s friend “Titus” may have been a special exception for some reason we are not told.

Paul’s complaint about Christian authorities “spy[ing] on the freedom” of his own community makes no sense if the “freedom” he spoke of was not generally opposed by the earlier “Christians.” There was, therefore, a hostile division among Christians in the 1st Century.

The implication that spies could somehow make Paul’s followers “slaves” suggests these spies were backed by the Christian leadership who could enforce their position. Paul boasts, however, that he didn’t give in to them even for a minute. It is clear that he is establishing his own oppositional Christian leadership.

Indeed, Paul fearlessly belittles the existing authorities: “As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message.”

Paul cannot explicitly say that rival “Christians” agreed with him on the subject of circumcision, but he does write that “they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised.” (Paul does not tell us if it was ever agreed that they be allowed to stay uncircumcised, however.)

If Paul’s innovations had been acceptable, even theoretically, then his emotional objections and complex arguments would not have been necessary. Despite the fact that Paul himself boasts of his own chameleon-like behavior, he is frustrated that on the issue of Kosher diet, often put simply as “eating with Gentiles,” his fellow Apostles are inconsistent. Sometimes they lapse back into Kosher ways. In his letter to the Galatians, he chastises them for this:

When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belong to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. 37

Paul also admonishes Cephas for being cowed by James’s men (the circumcision advocates) to give up eating with Gentiles. Cephas feared them, Paul tells us. So, it seems, did the other “Jews,” including Paul’s associate Barnabas (Joseph).

While Paul does claim to have “presented” the “gospel” that he preached to James and the Christian leadership while “meeting privately” with them, he does not spell out precisely what he said. Significantly, Paul does not say that Cephas and James or anyone else ever agreed with him or backed down from their own positions, even after he confronted the Apostle (Peter) “to his face,” as the later Book of Acts claims.

When it comes to observing strict Jewish customs, James and Peter are clearly with the rebel Zealots’ camp and the “sectarians” who preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls at the end of the first Jewish War—the very same camp that Jesus himself denounces throughout the Gospels.

Two Old Men Disputing (St. Paul and St. Peter), by Rembrandt (1628)

How could this conflict among Christians arise so soon after Christ settled all those issues, according to the Gospels?

T he writings attributed to Paul have no symbolic references to fish, as would the Gospels and other writings in the New Testament written after the Flavians’ victorious prosecution of the Jewish War.

Paul was probably writing before the Flavian dynasty, during the rule of Nero and perhaps his predecessor, Claudius. The Gospels, written in the Flavian era, are equally filled with examples of Jesus criticizing traditional Jewish practice, however, from strict Sabbath observance to Kosher diet.

In the Gospels, Jesus displays contempt for contemporary notions of religious “purity” by publicly associating himself with “unclean” persons and objects, including prostitutes, tax collectors and Roman coins, all anathema to Jews at the time. He even famously declares, in direct contradiction of Jewish Law, “Listen to me, everyone. Understand this: Nothing outside of you can make you ‘unclean’ by going into you. It is what comes out of you that makes you ‘unclean’”—a direct challenge to Kosher laws. 38

Jesus even commends the faith of a presumably uncircumcised Roman soldier as exceeding that of any Jew . 39 And, just as in Acts’ accounts of Paul’s ministry, Jesus’s foils in the Gospels are invariably Jewish religious authorities, such as Pharisees, scribes, and priests—and never Roman authorities.

However, rather than citing any of Jesus’s words or experiences to make his point, or simply reminding his “Christian” opponents of Jesus’s own strong anti-Torah message (if it existed), Paul instead insists he learned his gospel from no man at all as he confronts the hardliner James, who, for his part, never seems to have heard of any of Jesus’s ideas on the subject, either. Paul claims to have received his own distinct “gospel” directly from personal revelation. He even goes on to stress how little contact he has had with any Christians before preaching this new radical message. 40

In the letter Paul writes to the Galatians describing his early travels he contradicts the account given in the Book of Acts in some important ways. As a first person narrative from correspondence, however, the Galatians account should be given more historical weight, even if Paul’s own credibility is questionable.

In any case, Acts itself, as we shall see in Part II, suggests that the apostles carried on a Kosher lifestyle well after Jesus supposedly renounced it.

H ad Jesus actually expressed the Pauline sentiments he is credited with saying in the Gospels, then James and the existing Christian community could never have disagreed with Paul in the first place.

Paul would not have needed to “oppose” Peter (Cephas) “to his face” 41 about such matters. Likewise, James, the Lord’s “brother,” would never have felt any need to “spy on” Paul’s “freedom in Christ,” as Galatians reports. 42 Paul would only have had to quote Jesus himself to settle the dispute. Yet he never does. Nor does his opponent, James, the supposed “brother” of Jesus, show any awareness of the revolutionary aspects of Jesus’s gospel.

Paul’s anti-Torah message is so pronounced that modern-day Protestants ascribe to the idea that faith by itself, whatever one’s sins, is enough to earn salvation, citing Paul as support for this fundamental interpretation, especially passages like this:

Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? 43

Before he converted to “Christianity,” Paul says that he “persecuted the Church and tried to destroy it.” 44 His zeal for traditional Judaism motivated him, he says, to attack what then must have been a “Christian” movement of observant Jews. Paul’s problem with them at that point was clearly not the Kosher lifestyle, but their messianic fervor. Following his famous vision of the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, when he claims the “scales fell from his eyes,” Paul was driven to join the movement he had once fought so bitterly—something of a public relations coup for these Jewish “Christians” at the time, no doubt.

Yet, observe that his later fight with these same Jewish-Christians over the issues of circumcision and Kosher diet soon made him their enemy once more. We are left to wonder: was his conversion and association with the group he once persecuted designed from the start as a means of infiltrating them, sowing division, and undermining their devotion to the cultural hostilities that made rebellion so attractive?

We had long considered this to be the likely reality before the publication of Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman Intelligence and the Birth of Christianity by Thijs Voskuilen and Rose Mary Sheldon in 2008, and here the reader is directed to this work for the complete case. These authors go so far as to argue that Paul was himself a Roman intelligence operative, an agent provocateur engaged in a dangerous psy-ops campaign against the rebel “Christians.” 45

In stark contrast to Paul’s message, his opponent James warns in a letter ascribed to him that the Father in Heaven “does not change like shifting shadows,” 46 and emphasizes that one must not “merely listen to the word” but also “do what it says.” 47

Lacking documents known with certainty to have been written by them, it is difficult for us to know the details of the ideology or ideologies of the contemporary Jewish-Christians. And yet, apart from the problematic work of Josephus that we will discuss in Part II, the sectarian documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls (whatever the date of their composition) and this letter ascribed to James may be our best sources.

James seems to retain the contemporary Jewish idea of purity, urging his readers “to keep from being polluted by the world.” 48 James also insists that, “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” 49 In what seems to be a direct contradiction of Paul, the author asks, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? … [F]aith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” 50

Icon of James the Just

James challenges less devout Jews with the notion that mere belief is not enough: “You believe that there is one God. Good! [But] even the demons believe that—and shudder.” 51

While James urges “peace,” it is not at all clear that he means more than an internal peace among fellow Christians. “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” 52 James almost seems to threaten the Jewish establishment itself, which was then cooperating with Rome: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you…” 53

We see in the authentic letters of Paul, written before the Gospels, that the New Testament records a struggle between two types of “Christians”—well after Jesus had settled these disputes, according to the later Gospels. 54 Like Paul, James faces ideological foes within Judaism. Yet unlike Paul, James’s conflicts seem to be with the “enemies” of the Scrolls community—not with the Scrolls community itself—starting with the Roman-collaborating Jewish establishment.

The dispute between Paul and James as recorded in Galatians disturbed St. Augustine so much that he wrote to the respected early translator of the New Testament, St. Jerome, asking: how could the Apostles be in such heated disagreement? 55 Even during the reign of the Emperor Nero, decades after the supposed death of Jesus, Paul is telling us that this same conflict is still raging. Paul’s group was amenable to the wider pagan world while James’s group was violently opposed. Why was this happening after the advent of Christ?

We can now see the answer to this enigma that seemed insoluble to St. Augustine: in the 1st Century there were two different kinds of Christians. One advocated peace that flowed directly from a lax view of the Torah’s requirements while accommodating Gentiles in harmony with Roman governance. The other advocated a hardline to preserve religious tradition and identity, and, in all likelihood, necessary opposition to Rome.

Now the references to troublesome “Christians” or to the followers of “Chrestus” by the ancient sources can be readily identified: they were not referring to the Christians we know today, requiring us to believe a bizarre scenario of irrationally sadistic Romans unjustly persecuting peace-loving Christians. Instead, these historical accounts refer to their religious rivals, who opposed Rome and who are shown clashing with Paul in the New Testament itself.

T he Church’s solution for why this amnesia about Jesus’s ministry occurred in Paul’s time has been to hypothesize that after the Crucifixion the disciples must have undergone a “Judaizing” retrenchment. Those who followed Jesus’s revolutionary mission reverted to previous ways. Other scholars ignore or minimize the heated quarrel between Paul and his “Christian” rivals, including Paul’s outright damnation of them.

Yet, if Christians had somehow returned to traditional Jewish practice, surely Paul could have just cited Jesus himself on these matters to settle the matter. But Paul does not. Instead, decades after Jesus’s alleged ministry, he repeatedly emphasizes that he received his own gospel from no man exclusively through personal revelation.

From all of this, it is far more plausible to believe that the relevant Gospel material did not yet exist. Paul’s adherents must have written it later as a demonstration of Pauline theology, giving his innovations the authority of Christ himself in order to trump Paul’s contemporary “Jewish-Christian” opponents. This is the only conclusion that explains all the evidence, including the fact that the writing of the Gospels is dated to the Flavian era, after Paul’s writings and after the first Jewish War. 56 As a direct result of that war, Paul’s ideological foes were dead or in hiding, leaving only “Pauline” Christians still standing.

Now we can understand why Christians who followed the Gospels never seem to have been subjected to much persecution by the Roman government. Why would they be?

According to the early Christian apologist Tertullian, who lived in northern Africa at the turn of the 3rd Century, certain Roman governors of Africa actually intervened to secure acquittals for charged “Christians” (who were by this time almost exclusively of the Pauline varieties; surviving Jewish-Christians by then had taken the sectarian name of “Ebionites”). Sometimes these officials refused to bring charges against Christians, at all. 57 While there were a couple of other local places and governors where we do know that New Testament Christianity was attacked, notably at Lyon and Vienne in 177 CE and later during the persecution that commenced under Diocletian in 303 CE, these appear to be brief exceptions to the Romans’ rule.

Therefore, we can be reasonably certain that there was no cause for early Christian iconography to disguise itself in order to avoid persecution by Romans in the 1st and 2nd Centuries. The true purpose of using the symbols we started our investigation with, the identical dolphin-and-anchor motif used by the Emperor Titus and the early Christians, may well have been exactly the opposite.

R oman persecution of Christians, rare as it was, would all come to an end with the “Edict” of Milan in 313 CE, when Constantine the Great began legalizing Christianity shortly before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

It was only at this point, as Christianity was officially instated by Rome, that the Cross finally emerged as the leading visual symbol of the faith.

We are told that the Emperor Constantine’s own mother, Helena, following her son’s famous vision of a Cross in the sky before a decisive military victory, traveled to the Holy Land in 325-328 CE and discovered the True Cross, thus helping to institutionalize the shift from the dolphin-and-anchor motif used by both the Flavians and the Christians to a new symbol that had no connection to the Flavians.

Let us now examine those first Christian symbols that came before the Cross and how such symbolism came to be used by both the emperor of Rome and early Christians. How common was this fish-and-anchor combination of symbols? Was it common enough to account for an overlap in its use, despite what we have been taught was total opposition between the groups using it? And, if not, what could account for this coincidence?

Apart from the fish or the Cross, at least as common and ancient a symbol of Christianity was the dolphin-and-anchor motif used by the Roman Emperor Titus. The crude image we have seen of a single fish drawn with two curved lines may strike one as the most primitive original, but at least as old, and perhaps even more widespread than the fish alone, was an anchor attended by one or more dolphins or fish. Here, for example, is a late Christian sample from an early 3rd Century catacomb with the inscription “fish of the living”:

3rd Century Christian inscription

Here is a much earlier example dated to the early 2nd Century found in the very oldest Christian site in the world, the Catacombs of St. Domitilla. As mentioned earlier, Domitilla was the granddaughter of the Emperor Vespasian and the niece of the Flavian emperors Titus and Domitian:

Christian inscription, 2nd Century Catacombs of St. Domitilla

Most ancients regarded the dolphin as a kind of fish, indeed, the King of Fish. Even today the dolphin is associated with Jesus Christ. This 2nd Century Christian ring shows the same variation found on Titus’s coins:

2 nd Century Christian ring

Here is another 2nd to 4th century example of the Christian motif:

2nd -4th Century Christian ringstone

Sometimes this symbol is surrounded by the letters that confirm its Christian nature:

We can also note this in this 3rd -4th Century example of a Christian insignia from the British Museum:

The same motif was apparently used in this artifact that predates any archeological evidence of Christianity (that has been acknowledged). It is a 1st Century cameo from the Flavian era in the Hermitage museum at St. Petersburg. Remember, no ruler had used this motif on coins since the Seleucid Empire four centuries before the Emperor Titus resurrected it for his coins:

Flavian era 1st Century cameo

Notice how the subtle rope depicted in the cameo above would later replace the dolphin entirely in this modern-day Christian version of the symbol:

In one of the very earliest examples of a Christian symbol from one of the oldest catacombs we can see that the first Christians sometimes represented themselves with two fish juxtaposed beside a trident instead of an anchor:

Early 2nd Century Christian catacomb

The Temple of Venus erected during the late 1st Century Flavian dynasty, again before all acknowledged archeological evidence of Christianity, was also decorated with a dolphin-and-trident motif repeated at the top of the pediment:

Dolphin-and-trident motif, Flavian Temple of Venus, 1st Century

We see this motif appearing on the very pagan 2nd Century basilica of Neptune in Rome, as well:

Dolphin-and-trident, Basilica of Neptune, 2 nd Century

Christians sometimes juxtaposed an anchor with a fish, as here in the Catacombs of St. Sebastian at Rome:

Here is another example from the Catacombs of St. Sebastian:

From the Christian Catacombs of Priscilla, this fish is facing an anchor:

An anchor alone or juxtaposed with a fish or dolphin is commonly seen on countless early Christian rings, like these:

Early 2nd Century legionary ring

Here’s a variation from a 3rd or 4th Century Roman Christian intaglio ring:

And another of the same age:

All of these images comprise a closely related family of symbols used by Christians during at least the first three centuries, almost to the total exclusion of the symbol of the Cross. While these anchor/fish Christian symbols have been found in abundance, only 20 instances of Christians using a cross as a symbol over the first four centuries have ever been discovered in Rome’s famous catacombs.

The anchor had long been a universal pagan symbol of safety, security and homecoming. The New Testament itself states of Christian salvation: “We have this hope as anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf.” 58 This passage refers to the annual Yom Kippur entrance into the Holy of Holies by the Jewish High Priest in order to supplicate God for the atonement of the sins of the people—and how Christ himself had supplanted this important religious observance.

Oddly, St. Clement of Alexandria did not cite this passage from the New Testament when recommending the anchor as a Christian symbol (in the list where he also recommends the dolphin). Nor does he cite any previous use of the anchor by Jews, who did use an anchor on some of their coins. Instead, he mentions only pagan precedents from the Seleucid Empire as a pedigree for his recommendation.

Some have observed that the anchor forms a kind of Cross (though not all of its representations suggest this). Thus, they speculate, this makes it an appropriate symbol of both Christ and Christian hope for redemption through the Crucifixion.

However, the anchor is referenced by St. Paul as a Christian metaphor before the Cross itself was used as a Christian symbol, as we have seen. When employing the anchor metaphor in their earliest literature, Christians associated it with hope , in Latin “spes,” or, Spes in Christo; spes in Deo; spes in Deo Christo , as rendered in the traditional Catholic formulation.

Above, we can see many examples of two fishes or dolphins facing or aiming at the anchor. This has been interpreted as the Christian’s quest for hope and redemption and the search for knowledge of Christ. When the symbol was depicted as a dolphin entwined around an anchor, it made the anchor an alternative to a cross with the dolphin representing Christ himself, as can be seen even on this pendant that is still offered to the faithful today:

Here is a modern-day Catholic pendant with Christ himself in the place of the dolphin on an anchor:

A distinction between Christians and Christ is suggested in the variations of the symbolism. The fish (or multiple fishes) juxtaposed with or aiming at an anchor seems to represent the Christian follower at burial sites, while the fish or dolphin entwined or superimposed on the anchor seems to represent Christ, especially on rings, seals, and even modern pendants.

The anchor can also be seen as a sort of fishhook with the approaching fish representing converts for whom the Apostles were “fishing,” while the superimposed symbol for Christ served as the bait on the hook, what the convert symbolically eats , the flesh of Christ that nourishes the spirit’s hunger. This first Christian symbol, therefore, seems to represent the act of evangelism more vividly than the Cross itself, illustrating missionaries as “fishers of men.”

Centuries later, the Renaissance printer from Venice, Aldus Manutius, would adopt this symbol as his own device, reputedly after observing it on an ancient coin of the Emperor Titus:

Today, this is also the logo for Doubleday Books:

According to the entry for “Anchor” in The Catholic Encyclopedia:

During the second and third centuries the anchor occurs frequently in the epitaphs of the catacombs, and particularly in the most ancient parts of the cemeteries of Sts. Priscilla, Domitilla, Calixtus, and the Coemetarium majus. About seventy examples of it have been found in the cemetery of Priscilla alone , prior to the 4th Century. In the oldest of these (2 nd Century ) the anchor is found associated with such expressions as pax tecum , pax tibi , in pace , thus expressing the firm hope of the authors of these inscriptions that their friends have been admitted to Heaven. (Emphasis added.) 59

So, there are no fewer than 70 examples of the anchor from just one of the ancient Christian catacombs. And these symbols inhabit the oldest parts of those sites. In contrast, we have scant few examples of the Cross, as the same entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia confirms:

The rare appearance of a cross in the Christian monuments of the first four centuries is a well-known peculiarity; not more than a score of examples belong to this period. Yet, though the cross is of infrequent occurrence in its familiar form, certain monuments appear to represent it in a manner intelligible to a Christian but not to an outsider. The anchor was the symbol best adapted for this purpose, and the one most frequently employed. (Emphasis added.) 60

Curiously, the anchor was by far the more common way to depict the Cross than the Cross itself during the first four centuries after Christ.

Despite its nearly universal use among the earliest Christians, the dolphin-and-anchor symbol was phased out in favor of the Cross after Christianity was instated as the Roman religion by Constantine. From the middle of the 3rd Century, the anchor’s use as a Christian symbol is found only rarely in monuments. By the early 4th Century, it virtually disappears. 61

In Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), which was constructed as a Christian basilica in the 6th Century, we still see panels adorned with dolphins and a trident that are strikingly similar to those we saw earlier in the oldest catacombs and in Flavian monuments:

Dolphin-and-trident motif, Hagia Sophia, 527 CE

The Catholic Encyclopedia refers to these dolphin-and-trident symbols thus: “To the same category of [dolphin-and-anchor] symbols, probably, belongs the group of representations of the dolphin and trident.” 62 The same may be said of the Flavian use of both dolphin-and-anchor and dolphin-and-trident symbols.

Of course, we can already begin to see compelling reasons for these earliest Christian symbols to be discontinued under Constantine.

T he dolphin-and-anchor or dolphin-and-trident motifs obviously have distinctly pagan roots and parallels, even according to some of the earliest Church fathers, to the exclusion of Jewish sources. This alone may have been reason enough for phasing them out in favor of a symbol that was unique to Christianity after Christianity had become the state religion of Rome.

And yet this in turn only begs the question: Why would the earliest Christians represent themselves with pagan and imperial symbolism in the first place—Christians who were even closer to their imperial source?

Emphasizing their alleged persecution in Roman times, Christians often venerate their saints for being unable to worship the Romans’ pagan deities. A true Christian could never sacrifice animals or even offer incense for the safety or well-being of the emperor, even on pain of martyrdom. Paganism was such anathema to early Christians, we are told, that they refused to eat food that had been sacrificed to any emperor or pagan god. It was this commitment to strictly exclusive monotheism that is said to have pitted the early Christians against Roman society and caused their alleged persecution.

By this understanding it is difficult to see why Christians would adopt a symbol directly imported not from Judaism or their own creative imaginations but straight from imperial pagan propaganda currently in circulation on Roman coins. Moreover, the fact that they chose the symbol of not just any Roman emperor but the very emperor who fulfilled Jesus’s prophecy about his Second Coming is impossible to reconcile with the traditional understanding of Church history.

Since these pagan symbols predate the use of the Cross, the traditional explanations for Christians using them make little sense. As we have already observed, the reasoning that they were adopted as substitutes or disguises for the Cross presupposes that pagans were aware of the Cross as a Christian symbol and might have reacted negatively to it. But, as we have seen, the Cross was not used before the anchor or the fish as a Christian seal. Something that had not yet existed would not need to be disguised as something else. And the policy of the Roman government was not negative toward Christians. There was no need to hide anything.

We shall now see evidence that, rather than being a ruse to cover their tracks from purported Roman oppressors, using these pagan symbols had the opposite motive. It is highly probable that Christians chose them not to hide their opposition to Roman authority but to advertise their affiliation with it, instead.

It’s time to take a deeper look at this symbol that the Flavians and Christians shared and where it came from.

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1 With the possible exceptions of the epistle credited to James, which we shall consider in some detail, and the Apocalypse of John which appears to contain a combination of elements.

2 The timing of Vespasian’s son and successor Titus’s own birth—so shortly yet clearly after the Crucifixion of Christ—is strikingly convenient to the purpose of suggesting their separate and successive identities. A widespread belief in some form of such “reincarnation” among Jews, moreover, can be seen in the New Testament, in which people ask whether John the Baptist, for example, was himself “Elijah returned.” Although reincarnation is alien to the traditional Jewish context, John 1:19-23, “Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish Leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ ‘They asked him, ‘Then who are you? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ He answered, ‘No.’” He then goes on to identify himself as the voice crying in the wilderness predicted by the prophet Isaiah, an idea certainly more consistent with the theology of the New Testament. However, simply asking if he believed himself to be Elijah suggests that there were Jews who did so regard the Baptist and therefore believed in a kind of reincarnation. Furthermore, at Mark 6:14-16, we are told that some thought the same of Jesus. “King Herod heard about this, for Jesus’ name had become well known. Some were saying, ‘John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him.’ Others said, ‘He is Elijah.’ And still others claimed, He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of long ago. But when Herod heard this, he said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised from the dead!’” Notice that among these notions is the idea that Jesus himself might be the Baptist “raised from the dead,” someone who was his alleged contemporary(!) This is an idea repeated again at Mark 8:28, and a concept toned down or explained in the Gospel of Luke in its prenatal prophecy about the nature of the Baptist, like this: “And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah , to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” (Emphases added)

3 For an excellent description of the views of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls “sectarians,” and a comparison of those views to those of the first Christians, see Eisenman, Robert, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians (1996, Rockport, PA: Element Books).

4 The concept of the Trinity is itself a pagan-flavored one. The three Fates, the three Graces, and the three-faced goddess Hecate are just some of the many precedents of a triple-natured or triple-formed deity in pagan religion.

5 Matthew 4:19

6 cf. Luke 5:1-11 and John 21:1-14

7 Mark 6:45-52, Matthew 14:22-33, and John 6:16-21

8 Mark 4:35-41, Luke 8:22-25, and Matthew 8:23-27

9 Mark 6:53-56 and Matthew 14:34-36

10 Mark 5:1-20 and Luke 8:26-39

11 Exodus 30:13

12 Matthew 17:24-27, emphasis added

13 Mark 13:1-30, cf. Matthew 24:1-39

14 Mark 6:31-44, Luke 9:10-17, Matthew 14:13-21, and John 5:6-15

15 Mark 8:1-9

16 Matthew 15:32-39

17 John 6:35, 48 and 51

18 John 4:14-15 and 7:37

19 Mark 14:22-24, Luke 21:19-20, Matthew 26:26-28, and 1 Corinthians 11:23-25

20 Tertullian, "De Baptismo,” 1

21 St. Clement of Alexandria, Christ, the Instructor, Book III, Chapter XI

22 Herodotus. The Histories with Introduction and Notes by John M. Marincola, 2003, Penguin, p. 224

23 Mark 8:34, cf. Luke 9:23, Matthew 16:24

24 Clement of Alexandria, Christ, The Instructor , Book I, Chapter III, “Isaac only bore the wood of the sacrifice, as the Lord the wood of the cross.”

25 See, e.g., Moss, Candida, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom , 2013, HarperOne.

26 Scarre, Chris, Chronicle of the Roman Emperors: the Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Rome , 1995, Thames & Hudson, p. 170.

27 The Letters of the Younger Pliny , trans. Betty Radice, 1963, Penguin Classics, Book Ten, 96, 97, emphasis added.

28 Tacitus, The Annals , in Annals and Histories , E. Cowan, ed., trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, 2009, Everyman’s Library (trans. orig. pub. 1876), Book XV, 44, emphasis added.

29 Pasachoff, Naomi E., and Littman, Robert J., A Concise History of the Jewish People , 2005, Rowman & Littlefield, p. 67; DellaPergola, Sergio, “World Jewish Population, 2012,” The American Jewish Year Book , 2012, Springer, pp. 212-283.

30 Suetonius, Claudius , 25, this and subsequent references to Suetonius are from The Twelve Caesars , trans. Robert Graves, rev. ed. 1979, (trans. first pub. 1957), Penguin Classics. NOTE: Suetonius’s actual language, impulsore chresto , may be rendered simply, “messianic insurgents.” This, in either case, would not alter the apparent confusion Tacitus, who obviously was talking about a person called “Christ,” exhibits with regard to the violent nature of Christians. Such a translation also still suggests that similar language was then used to describe both kinds of messianic adherents. Significantly, the original text of Tacitus read “Chrestiani” rather than “Christiani,” seemingly reflecting the same spelling used by Suetonius.

31 Suetonius, Nero , 38

32 Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews , Books XIX and XX, hereafter, “Antiquities,” Wars of the Jews , esp., Chapter 8, Book II, hereafter “Wars,” in The Complete Works of Josephus , trans. William Whiston, 1960, Kregel. NOTE: The Very names of the rebel groups are suggestive of religious terrorists. The first, the “Zealots,” were credited with being an entirely new ideology or school of philosophy within Judaism by the historian Flavius Josephus, and the name of the other major rebel group, the “Sicarrii,” actually means “dagger men.” Both groups can only be described as “terrorists.” The Sicarii, for example, hid daggers under the cloaks and mingled in crowds to disguise their assassinations. (See, Chaliand, Gerard, The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Queda , 2007, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 68.) These groups are associated with both assassinations and kidnappings by the ancient historians. Apart from disturbances in both Rome and Alexandria, these terrorists were even accused of arson. When a terrible fire destroyed much of the city of Antioch in Syria shortly before Vespasian arrived in the East, the locals believed it was arson and blamed the Jews. Although Josephus tries in his text to absolve Jews of any guilt, both the leadership and the populace of the city were still convinced that Jews had set the blaze. (Josephus, Wars , ante , Book VII, chapter 3, sec. 4, and see, Levick, Barbara, Vespasian , 1999, New York: Routledge, pp. 147-148.) The Great Fire of Rome would not be the only instance of a major urban fire that was blamed at the time on messianic Jews. Moreover, Tacitus himself provides clear evidence that the fire Nero blamed on Christians was arson, although Tacitus’s own implication is that Nero himself was to blame: “And no one dared to stop the mischief, because of incessant menaces from a number of persons who forbade the extinguishing of the flames , because again others openly hurled brands , and kept shouting that there was one who gave them authority , either seeking to plunder more freely, or obeying orders.” (Tacitus, ante , Annals , Book XV, 38, emphasis added.)

Josephus ultimately blames the burning of the Jewish Temple on the Jewish rebels themselves, but that instance of arson must surely be laid at the feet of the Romans. Writing around the year 400, the early Christian historian Sulpicius Severus, a historian normally given only little credit for the period before his own time, quotes Pliny the Younger as Pliny quotes from the missing volume five of Tacitus’s Histories . Being lost, only quotations from other authors who quote Tacitus’s work survive. In Pliny/Severus’s description of the siege of Jerusalem (which varies considerably from that of Josephus), Titus is said to have called a meeting in which he discussed the question of whether or not to destroy the Temple—and the reason cited in favor of doing so is stated to be the Temple’s inspirational power for both “the Jews and the christiani .” (S. Severus, Chronicle , chapter XXX.) Whether this means “Christians” or not is a matter of scholarly controversy. In any case, other instances of arson may well have been part of the Jewish war effort.

Of note, while the term Paul uses to describe himself, “Zealot,” on two occasions (Acts 22:3; Galatians 1:14) is usually translated simply as “one who was zealous” for Jewish tradition, that term is actually a noun. It may therefore be an assertion on Paul’s part that he was a member of the rebel group known as the Zealots. Two recent translations (The Jewish New Testament and The Alternate Literal Translation ) translate this simply, “a zealot.” While Jay P. Green’s Modern King James Version makes this out to be “a zealous one,” the passage from Galatians is rendered “being an absolute zealot for the traditions…” in The Unvarnished New Testament (1991). This in itself may suggest that the Jewish Christians and the Zealots were one and the same group, if not close rivals. In either case, we must bear in mind that Paul’s various self-descriptions, as we shall continue to see, are a moving target and far from reliable.

33 Eisenman, Robert, James the Brother of Jesus , 1996, Viking, and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians , 1996, Element.

34 Galatians 5:1-6, emphasis added

35 Ephesians 2:11-20, emphasis added. NOTE: At Matthew 21:41 Jesus even informs the chief priests and the elders of the Jews, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” Jesus’s context, the Parable of the Two Sons, is also noteworthy.

What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, “Son, go and work today in the vineyard.”

“I will not,” he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.

Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, “I will, sir,” but he did not go.

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?”

“The first,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.” (Matthew 21:28-32)

Tax collectors are still mentioned right alongside “sinners” in the Gospels: “When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’” (Mark 2:15; curiously, Matthew, a Gospel directed at a Jewish audience, drops the first “third-person” listing of tax collectors with sinners.) From this should we conclude that all tax-collectors as such are sinners? Tax collectors were already widely regarded as cheats, and while our Gospel references do mention tax collectors in the same breath as “sinners,” the distinction between the two is intriguing, especially since the Gospels depict Jesus as being friendly with tax-collectors. Jesus had “many” followers who were publicans (tax collectors) and even recruited a major disciple who was one. (Mark 2:13-17, Luke 5:27-32 and Matthew 9:9-13) So, just as one might have guessed, tax collectors are likely to have been among the most grateful for Christ’s message. One Zacchaeus, the wealthy “chief tax collector” in Jericho, was so anxious to hear Jesus speak that he climbed a tree to get the best vantage, according to Luke. Favorably impressed, Jesus insisted on dining at the man’s house. (Luke 19:1-10) When the crowd complains that he was dining with “a sinner,” Jesus defends him:

All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:7-10)

By Christ’s reckoning, then, tax collectors can be honest, and he is said to have regarded them as worthy friends and followers.

36 1 Corinthians 9:19-23, emphasis added

37 Galatians 2:2-13, emphasis added. NOTE: Galatians is a first-person narrative, a letter, making it far more credible than Acts’ historical reconstruction of events after-the-fact. In addition, such a heated debate between the Apostles would have been embarrassing to later Christians and for that very reason Galatians is almost certainly authentic, even if it also still contains Paul’s own deceptions. Peter and Titus may well have been granted special exemptions from Mosaic Law. In emergency situations, Jewish tradition sometimes permits avoiding strict Torah observance. King David may have cut corners in a time of need at 1 Samuel 21, for example, which Jesus himself cites to justify the Torah-violating behavior of his own disciples in a non-emergency situation at Mark 2:23-28. Also, during the Hasmonean Revolt, many Jews decided that it was permissible to engage in defensive warfare on the Sabbath rather than be slaughtered (1 Maccabees 2:41).

38 Mark 7:15-16, cf. Matthew 15:10-11

39 Matthew 8:10; Luke 7:1-17 Matthew 8:10; Luke 7:1-17

40 Galatians 1:11-12. NOTE: Even though the Gospels had not yet been written, if any of the material contained in them suggesting that Jesus had argued against the Mosaic Law existed (even in an oral form) at that stage, it surely would have been known both to Paul and the previous “Jewish-Christian” leadership in Jerusalem. We must wonder what, if anything, the Jewish-Christians actually believed about a person named “Jesus.” Given the dramatic liberties taken in the Gospels by inserting teachings into the mouth of Jesus, and creating from whole cloth narrative settings for those teachings, along with their use of Hebrew scriptures as a source of information, rather than recent history, we can be confident that very little, if anything, was known with clarity about a historical Jesus in the late 1 st Century.

41 Galatians 2:11-13

42 Galatians 2:1-5, 11-12 NOTE: If he existed, Jesus is not likely to have been concerned with issues like Kosher diet. His was not the first mission to the Gentiles, as was Paul’s, where such issues would have naturally arisen, and the earliest Christians not only seem to have observed Kosher dietary restrictions, as a group, they fiercely opposed Paul for challenging them.

In order to claim that the Apostles ever agreed with him, Paul suspiciously says that he once “met privately” with them and “presented” to them the Gospel that he preached “among the Gentiles,” according to Galatians, Chapter 2. However, he does not assert that they agreed with him on the subject of circumcision, but only states that Titus, his uncircumcised Gentile associate, “was not forced to be circumcised.” In other words, they may have requested or demanded it, but they simply did not force it to happen. Paul seems to hang his hat entirely on the fact that they did not compel one of his disciples, named “Titus,” to undergo circumcision. Had Paul been able to say that they overtly agreed with him, surely, he would have said so explicitly. Reading Galatians carefully, Paul makes no such claim. Indeed, had the Apostles agreed with him, the later efforts of James to “spy on the freedom” of Paul’s followers, and their continued general opposition to Paul on these matters, would make no sense. Paul instead relies alone upon the fact that his companion “Titus” was allowed to keep his foreskin in order to suggest support for his anti-circumcision message that, in fact, he had supposedly already obtained. Paul also seems to rely on the fact that Peter (he can name no one else) likewise was known to “eat with Gentiles” (a rather vague claim) – that is, at least until men from James showed up. Again, rather than any agreement with Paul’s anti-Torah message, Paul cites examples of their alleged hypocrisy in act. And again, this is something rather dubious, if not laughable, coming from a man who boasted to being and acting like “all things to all men”—precisely in order to win their support.

However, in Acts, Chapter 15, we are told by a third-person narrator that James explicitly agrees with Paul: the Gentiles should be given a pass on the matter of circumcision and the full range of Kosher dietary restrictions. If this is true, then the reason why James would later oppose Paul on these very issues is rendered completely inexplicable.

Galatians reports that the Council of Jerusalem, where Acts says that James had agreed with Paul, why, then, did James later “spy on” the freedom of Paul’s followers? Why did Paul have to oppose them so strongly? Why is Paul still arguing over these issues in his letter to the Galatians?

Stranger still, if James had explicitly endorsed Paul’s anti-Torah message, then why didn’t Paul report James’s agreement in his letter to the Galatians, even though he (reported the hypocritical behavior of Cephas), side with James in the later dispute recorded in Galatians? In turn, why doesn’t Acts report that same hypocritical behavior by Cephas? Indeed, why has Cephas, after his own vision (reported earlier in the Book of Acts), sided with James in the later dispute recorded in Galatians?

In direct contradiction to the green light Acts acclaims that James gave to Paul’s anti-Torah message, we are told that Paul himself still circumcised his own follower Timothy after the Council of Jerusalem “because of the Jews who lived in the area.” (Acts 16:3) Apparently, Paul himself contradicted his own message in his behavior. The man who was “all things to all people” was indeed something of a chameleon.

In any case, Acts dramatically amplified the claims Paul makes in Galatians, and in so doing makes entirely inexplicable any later confrontation over these same issues, a confrontation far more credibly reported in Galatians. This section of Acts seems designed to smooth over this very dispute—and it is pure fiction.

43 Romans 3:27-29

44 Galatians 1:11-24

45 Voskuilen, Thijs, and Sheldon, Rose Mary, Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman Intelligence and the Birth of Christianity (2008, Edgware, Middlesex, UK, and Portland, Oregon, USA: Vallentine Mitchell), and for wider context, see also, Sheldon, Rose Mary, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome (2005, New York: Routledge) and Austin, N.I.E., and Rankov, N.B., Exploratio: Military and Political Intelligence in the Roman World from the Second Punic War to the Battle of Adrianople (1995, New York: Routledge).

46 James 1:17

47 James 1:22

48 James 1:27

49 James 2:10

50 James 2:14-17

51 James 2:19

52 James 4:1

53 James 5:1-5

54 Although its Greek may have been polished by later curators, a persuasive argument that the Letter of James is among the earliest New Testament material and pre-dates the Gospels (along with the authentic letters of Paul), see, Johnson, Luke Timothy, The Real Jesus (1996, HarperOne), p. 121.

55 St. Augustine, Letters 28, 40, 72, 73

56 NOTE: There are certainly differences between the theological perspectives in Paul’s letters and the Gospels—and between the Gospels themselves—but they certainly all share with Paul the same basic position on the Mosaic Law and peace with the Roman government. Moreover, the differences are easily explicable once it is understood that each was writing for a different type of audience. In Matthew, for example, while Jesus’s defense of virtue as part of salvation, e.g., Matthew 25:31-46, is slightly different from the idea of salvation by faith alone found in Paul, both writers agree that Jewish purity laws and Kosher dietary restrictions are no longer necessary and emphasize the virtue of obedience to Roman authorities and paying taxes, instead. It does, however, seem clear that the Gospel writers preserved some of the language of the earlier “Jewish-Christian” movement that flatly contradicts many of the other assertions and actions attributed to Jesus. If the Gospel of Matthew reports that Jesus commanded obedience to the whole of the law at Matthew 5:17-20, it also reports that Jesus attacked Kosher dietary laws at Matthew 15:1-20, and that Jesus made the Pharisees angry with his liberal views on the Sabbath at Matthew 12:1-8. The Gospels may have been written by different authors, as some have surmised, or, possibly, by one author customizing his narratives for different audiences from a learned position of authority. In either case, there is little doubt that the Gospel of Matthew appears to have been aimed at a Jewish audience familiar with Hebrew scripture while Luke’s account seems to have been written to persuade the more Hellenized or Gentile reader. Compare the slight differences between the justifications given by Jesus for the commandment to “love your enemy” in each of these Gospels:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people , what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:46-48, emphasis added)

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. (Luke 6:32-35, emphasis added)

The Book of Matthew attempts to ground nearly every event about Jesus as a fulfillment of some passage from Hebrew scripture that is seen as prophetic. It draws more direct comparisons between Moses and Christ than the other of the Gospels, and its genealogy descends Jesus from the Patriarch Abraham. Luke's family tree takes Jesus's forebears all the way to the legendary ancestor of all humanity: Adam. Its sequel, the Book of Acts, relates how the message was first taken to the Gentiles by the Apostles, and it is only in Luke that we find the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37). In this parable, Jesus tells how a traveler between Jerusalem and Jericho was robbed, beaten and left half-dead on the side of the road. When a priest happened by, he left the man and passed by. The same thing happened when a Levite (another sacred class among the Jews) came upon the scene. Only a Samaritan—a member of a group who adhered to a closely-related religion but whom contemporary Jews thought of as foreigners —is shown to stop and render help to the man. The greater virtue of relative aliens compared to that of Jewish authority figures is thus once again emphasized in the New Testament.

Once we acknowledge that Matthew was tailored for a more Jewish audience than Luke, which seems to be aimed at Gentiles, Jesus’s claim that a Roman centurion’s faith exceeds that of all contemporary Jews (Matthew 8:5-13) only stresses the underlying imperial purpose of all four of the oldest Gospels. Notice, too, that it is in Matthew that the Jewish crowd assumes collective responsibility for the death of Jesus: “When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘His blood is on us and on our children!’” (Matthew 27:24-25) Anti-Semitic in its impact, this apparent justification for their subsequent collective punishment was originally aimed at Jews themselves.

The differences between the Gospel of John and the three earlier Gospels (known as the “Synoptics” because of their overlap) are also well-established. In John, Jesus waxes abstract and self-conscious about his own divinity in a way not found in the Synoptic Gospels. For example, Jesus calls himself “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” (John 14:6) And for its author Jesus was the pre-existent Logos that was with God and was God and was God at the Creation. This understanding of Christ’s divinity is also exhibited in Paul’s writings, as well: “…yet for us there is but one God the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live .” (1 Corinthians 8:6, emphasis added) The Synoptic Gospels do understand Jesus to be divine, as seems implicit in a number of ways: the virgin birth, his asserted superiority over John the Baptist (a mere prophet), and perhaps most strongly by Jesus’s forgiving of sins.

“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’

“Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, ‘Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:5-7, cf. Luke 7:48-49)

However, Jesus himself is never so expansive or overt on the subject of his own status as he is depicted being in the Gospel of John, suggesting this Gospel to be the latest of the four, reflecting a more fully developed theology.

57 St. Croix, G.E.M., "Why Were The Early Christians Persecuted?," Journal of Historical Studies , November, 1963, pp. 6–38, reprinted in Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, And Orthodoxy , 2006, Oxford University Press.

58 Hebrews 6:19-20, emphasis added

59 “Anchor,” The Catholic Encyclopedia , emphasis added

60 Ibid

61 Ibid

62 Ibid

II. Religion and Propaganda