Gospel, page 103
23. Compare the similar legend in Matthew 14:22–33.
24. The Three Wise Men are found solely in Matthew, its absence is suspicious in Luke, the most detailed of the canonical birth narratives.
25. In the Infancy Gospel (ca. 100s) the Wise Men and the diapers of Christ are again associated (3:1–10). Mary gives them a piece of swaddling cloth, they return to Persia and according to the custom of their country [Zoroastrianism] they made a fire and worshipped it. And casting the swaddling cloth into the fire, the fire took it and kept it. And when the fire was out they took forth the swaddling cloth unsinged, as much as if the fire had not touched it. Then they began to kiss it, and put it upon their heads and eyes saying, This is certainly an undoubted truth. Later, more of this inexhaustible diaper is hanging upon a washing line (4:15–16) when it touches the head of a demonic child, who is relieved as crows and serpents fly out of his mouth. This precious relic found its way to Charlemagne’s court where every seven years the Holy Roman Empire’s mother church, Aix-la-Chapelle, displays the diaper to pilgrims, along with the loincloth from the Crucifixion and Mary’s veil.
26. It is well to remember the bourgeois origins of Christianity. A woodcrafter in forestless Israel, like a fisherman who owned his own boat, would not have been thought of as poor or particularly humble, as it has suited the Church to think.
27. The centurion-prostitute genealogy had a credence of about three centuries, and became a staple of Jewish anti-Christian rhetoric, finding its way into pagan anti-Christian attacks, such as the tract by Celsus the Epicurean (countered by Origen, early 200s), where he identifies the soldier-father, downgraded from a centurion, as the Egyptian Panthera.
The palm tree legend lived on in Arabic Christianity and then into Islam. The lack of adverse comment about Mary’s conceiving before marriage is surreal, given that era, and the Quran’s account has something of isolation and banishment in it: And she conceived him and retired with him to a far-off place. And the throes came upon her by the trunk of a palm. She said, “Oh would that I had died ere this, and been a thing forgotten, forgotten utterly!” (Surah 19:22). Perhaps the true source of this notion is Homer and the description of the virginal Latona, selected to conceive by God/Zeus, and her delivery clutching a tree.
28. Pre-Christian virgin births abound: Nana gave birth to Attis, a virgin to Mithra, the worship of the Egyptian Osiris was associated with virgin birth and an ikon of madonna and child, but no preexisting myth is more similar than the Phoenician Tammuz. Born of a virgin, Tammuz died with a wound in his abdomen, rose from the dead from his rock tomb after three days. His cult had been popular in Jerusalem for some time, apparently:… and behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz. Then [the Lord] said to me, “Have you seen this O Son of Man? You will see still greater abominations than these” (Ezekiel 8:14–15).
29. Ezra, the Chief Scribe, is thought to have single-handedly compiled the Bible’s Old Testament as we know it, in 444 B.C.E.
30. The Pharisees make this claim against Jesus (Matthew 26:61, Mark 14:58), though Jesus isn’t recorded in the Synoptics saying precisely that. John 2:19, written a half-century after the others, reports that Jesus does say it, but “He spoke of the temple of his body.”
31. Nothing is more disheartening to the fundamentalist than the confusing, contradicting, and ultimately unreliable accounts of the Resurrection, in which almost no two assertions are in agreement. One is struck by the strangeness of the disciples’ actions—does no one rush to the authorities with Jesus as proof? Would Peter and Andrew return to fishing, as in John, rather than stay with the Risen Jesus or preach His gospel? The original Mark (without Chapter 16) and “Q,” the lost source of Matthew, do not have resurrection sequences at all.
In the added Deutero-Mark 16, the party that went to the tomb was the Magdalene, Mary-Alphaeus, and Salome; in Matthew, it’s the Magdalene and the “other Mary”; in Luke, it’s the Magdalene, Mary-Alphaeus, and Joanna; in John it’s Mary Magdalene, later accompanied by Peter and John.
Mark and Matthew say there was an angel who spoke to the women; Luke and John say there were two angels; and Matthew has the guards faint in terror, while there are no guards in the other narratives.
Most incredibly, the gospels have no agreement on where Jesus was or what He said after this resurrection, the very centerpiece of the Christian witness. Deutero-Mark and Matthew have Mary instruct the disciples to go to Galilee where Jesus meets them. Luke and John show Jesus never leaving Jerusalem, and Acts has Jesus insist that the disciples stay in the Holy City to await the Pentecost.
Luke has Jesus “part” from them, the others don’t precisely say He ascends to Heaven except for Deutero-Mark.
No one seems to recognize Jesus. Mary Magdalene thinks He’s the gardener (John), Jesus appears “in another form to two others,” (Deutero-Mark 16:12, the vaguest piece of scripture in the New Testament); Simon and Cleopas don’t recognize Him at the dinner at Emmaus, where Jesus then disappears like a ghost (Luke). To counteract this ethereal impression Jesus proves He is bodily resurrected in the episode with a doubting Thomas (John) and when He asks to be fed. After His “parting” in Luke, the Disciples, like good Jews, go to the Temple, home of the Pharisees who allegedly masterminded Jesus’ execution, and give thanks!
To the detractors of Christianity, Celsus, the Gnostics, Jewish rabbis, Julian the Apostate, and others, the testimony of the four gospels has made the task of undermining the Resurrection a simple chore.
Chapter 4
1. The author means Harmodius and Aristogiton, the popular warrior-lovers of 6th-Century B.C.E. Greece.
2. There was no shortage of syncretic sex-and-Christianity cults in the early centuries of the Church, culminating in the Helvidians and Paternians of the 300s, known for their sexual excesses. A Gnostic sect by various names—Cainites, Contrarians, and others—allowed themselves great sexual license, having decided the God of the Old Testament had been defeated by the God of the New, meaning the prohibitions of the Pentateuch were ungodly. Some sects of the 1st–4th Centuries systematically tried to break every known Biblical rule. This author’s reputation as a crusader against sexuality seems to have been all, previously, that survived him; e.g., Clement of Alexandria:
For in obedience to the Savior’s command … [a man has] no wish to serve two masters, pleasure and Lord. It is believed that Matthias also taught this, that we must fight against the flesh and treat it with contempt, never yielding to it for pleasure’s sake, but must nourish the soul through faith and knowledge (Stromateis, Book III. ca. 210 C.E.).
3. Among the most notorious of the Gnostic leaders were Valentinus (who claimed a quite-likely succession from Paul), Cerdo, and Marcus, who, according to Irenaeus (in Heresies Answered, ca. 185), fits out a bridal chamber and celebrates a mystery with invocations on those being initiated, declaring that what they are doing is a spiritual marriage on the patterns of the unions above.
Carpocrates may be referred to by the author here. This disciple of Simon the Magus was working in this period in Sidon (60–85 C.E.), and taught that until all sin had been experienced by the body, the body could not be expected to defeat these demons, hence every wickedness must be practiced. We hear of Carpocrates and his commune of shared women from Irenaeus of Lyons (130–200 C.E.). Polygamy seems to be inextricable from Christian Gnosticism up to more recent times with the American Mormon Church and Joseph Smith (1805–1844).
4. Acts 8:9–24 mentions Simon the Magus and shows Peter contending with him and eventually converting him to Christianity. No later account, strangely, mentions anything like this—Simon remains a fixed enemy for decades in the Early Church and long a figure of fascination, mentioned by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Justin Martyr. In numerous apocryphal Acts and Contendings, Simon pops up to do battle with God, trick against trick, and always loses; in The Passion of Peter and Paul (300s?, attr. Marcellus), there is a contest before Nero in which Simon Magus flies and is brought down and breaks into four pieces. A Coptic version from the 300s of an early epistle warns Cerinthus and Simon … are enemies of Our Lord Jesus Christ, for they do pervert the truth.… Keep yourselves therefore far from them, for death is in them and great pollution and corruption, on whom shall come judgment and the end and everlasting destruction.
5. The Magus apparently spawned a dynasty of gnostic trickery, passing his “church” to Menander (who peddled earthly immortality), before it split into two camps of Saturninus (a mere magician) and Basilides, who wrote some 24 heretical gospels, inventing disciples as it pleased him, and (writes Eusebius) “monstrous fictions to support his impious heresies.” We know of him from Agrippa Castor (90–150 C.E.?), who wrote a specific refutation.
6. Simon’s accomplice Helen is mentioned in Justin Martyr’s Defense of Christianity (ca. 150 C.E.) addressed to Antoninus Caesar. And a woman named Helen who traveled around with [Simon] at the time and had previously lived in a brothel, [the gullible Samaritans] call the first Emanation from him.
The author decries the irony that she should have the same name as Queen Helen, wife of Monobazus, who converted to Judaism and fed Judea during a famine (ca. 48 C.E.), mentioned in Josephus, Antiquities XX.ii.
7. A cave church (now with a Syrian facade from the 700s) still exists north of Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) and has been revered as the site of Peter’s first see from the very earliest times.
8. Peter, traditional chief of the original Twelve, spokesman of the Jerusalem community in Acts. His historicity is obscure but undoubted. Mark is traditionally held to be from his perspective. 1 Peter might well be a dictation of his; 2 Peter is most certainly later than the time of Nero.
Though all Church sources are in agreement that he died in Rome, there is no telling when or how, and there seems never to have been any relics. Tradition holds that Peter was martyred in the Neronian Persecution of 64–68 C.E., but this document implies he is unmartyred as late as 76 C.E. (see 6:23) and much modern scholarship casts doubt upon the severity of Nero’s persecution, instead crediting Domitian in the 90s with the first systematic purge.
9. Acts 11:5–10.
10. Matthias’s election in Acts 1:23–26: And they put forward two … Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias. And they prayed and said, “Lord, who knowest the hearts of all men, show which one of these two Thou hast chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.” And they cast lots for them and the lot fell on Matthias, and he was enrolled with the eleven apostles.
11. Despite the prohibitions on astrology and the black arts throughout Judeo-Christendom, it was popular nonetheless and experienced great tolerance in this period and in the Byzantine world (numerous dome and apse paintings on Mt. Athos show Christ surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac).
12. A note about Judas Iscariot.
Another universal archetype borrowed by Christianity is that of the betrayer, which can be found in the Orient, in Hindu, in Toltec and Mexican, in Native American, and in many Mediterranean heroic tales. The name Judas Iscariot is a corruption of Judah el-Sicarious, or of the party of the Sicarii, the extremist Zealots. With Simon the Zealot and Judas the Sicarii among Jesus’ band, one can see how easy it was for Rome to execute him for political trouble-making.
The New Testament disagrees on what became of Judas: Matthew has him hang himself; Acts has the fanciful story that Judas bought a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out (Acts 1:18); and another codex says he merely swelled up, burst open, etc. Acts elsewhere, and more believably, says Judas turned aside to go to his own place (Acts 1:25), which as a Sicarii he might well have done, having had enough of pacifist Messiahs.
The incentive of the Early Church to perpetuate a Judas-Betrayer story is twofold: 1) It was necessary to get in the pieces of silver prophecy of Jeremiah 32:6–15, and the potter’s field prophecy of Jeremiah 18:2–3—both prophecies a bit forced—and the clearer one in Zechariah 11:12–13.
And 2) as the Church became more Greek, anti-Semitism became more prevalent. Judas, which means “Jew,” became useful symbolically—he is the wicked representation of his people who rejected the Son of God.
This gospel’s author does not mention anything about Judas’s betrayal.
13. Having missed his chance, Barsabbas disappears from Church history. Peter in this gospel says Barsabbas was martyred in Cyprus as was, traditionally, the Apostle Barnabas (one of the 70, companion of Paul, founder of the Antiochene Church). One wonders whether there has been a conflation in later hagiographies.
14. Peter is in fact correct. Psalms 22:18.
15. The reference to Pilate reveals some of the more evangelical tactics of the Early Church.
As Christianity became less a Jewish concern, and more a Greek and Roman possibility, anti-Semitic scriptural elements become more pronounced, and Romans increasingly become heroes and chaste converts. The dialogue of Pilate and Jesus in John (ca. 120 C.E.) is pure anti-Semitic propaganda, attempting to rehabilitate Pilate and the Romans, ending with Pilate insisting on Jesus’ being identified as the King of the Jews on the Cross. Nowhere was Christian pro-Romanism more in evidence than in the litany of trumped-up Roman virgin and soldier martyrs (late 100s–300s C.E.) and the revised history of Pontius Pilate, who begins to appear as a virtual lawyer for Jesus’ defense. Tell me, how can I that am merely a governor examine a King? Pilate pleads in the Acts of Pilate (ca. 300s?); Jesus Christ of whom I recently wrote to you has been executed against my will. So pious and austere a man has never been seen, nor will be again! insists Pilate in the “Epistle of Pilate to Tiberius” (concocted 100s?). The historically unsophisticated Middle Ages and its Crusaders were inspired by the anachronism of Tiberias ordering Vespasian to destroy Jerusalem to “destroy the enemies of Jesus” (the popular The Avenging of the Savior).
Nothing in Josephus suggests Pilate was other than a despised, corrupt, murderous procurator; see Antiquities XVIII.ii and iv.
16. Tradition holds that Rome launched ten Christian persecutions—a suspiciously significant number—until Christianity compromised with the sun-worshiping, relative-slaying Emperor Constantine in 313 C.E. This cultish array of persecutions and martyrologies, as well as the total fiction of the Catacombs (which inconveniently do not bear but a handful of traces of Christianity), are fixtures of Early Church mythology.
A Church endured in Rome and persecution was more exaggerated than actual in the first decades of Christianity. Paul, one may recall, began his mission calmly: “And [Paul] lived [in Rome] two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered (Acts 28:30). Paul sends his love another time, writing All the Saints greet you, especially those of Caesar’s household (Philippians 4:22). And this from Romans 16:23 is extraordinary: “Gaius who is host to me and to the whole church greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus greet you.” If Romans is of the 40s, before Gaius (Caligula) Caesar became insane, might this be a conventional greeting of Caesar? Could someone as high up as Rome’s treasurer have been a convert?
17. This rather weak piece of rhetoric concerns Saul being from Tarsus and its similarity in sound to Tartarus, one of the depths of Hell, where Cerberus sat outside the adamantine gate.
18. Again, could things have been so bad in Rome? We know a Roman Senator Pudens lent his home for the purposes of Christian gatherings, and this titulus has come down to us as the still-standing church of Santa Pudenziana. (From the 300s this church was misnamed, suggesting a female saint—some confusion over the Latin possessive).
19. Indeed, Matthias was virtually “replaced” by Paul throughout Byzantium and the Middle Ages, due to Paul’s greater importance, but also because Matthias’s relics resided in the northermost apostolic shrines, in Trier (Germany), which soon fell to the barbarian world, effectively ending his cult. On Mt. Athos and in most pre-1400 Ascension scenes, one can count only eleven disciples gazing up at Christ; in medieval Pentecosts, one counts eleven disciples and Mary. On the porch tympanum of Malmesbury Abbey (from the 1100s) the Eleven Disciples and Paul ring the doorway, and this configuration is next to universal.
Paul, in the popular mind, became the Twelfth Disciple.
Chapter 5
1. The ancient world thought little of these vulgarities and one finds them commonly in Catullus and other saltier writers. (The proper understanding of Latin and Greek, in this editor’s view, never recovered from the prim bowdlerization of the Victorians.) The πυγιξɛινσν is a place of anal penetration; Cras vives? means “Will you live tomorrow?” and as a popular expression of carpe diem found its way into Martial’s epigrams (Epigrammaton, book V, 58); and Quo Irrumbis? means “Who will put out their penis to be sucked?”
2. John the Baptist (ca. 4 B.C.E.–28 or 29 C.E.) All that we know of John is from the Synoptic accounts: a baptist-prophet figure who harangued Herod Antipas and his brother’s wife Herodias for their adultery, and was beheaded at the request of Salome, who was granted any wish for her lascivious dance at Machaerus. While attempts to make him an Essene are improbable, his being a Nazirene (with long hair, and his father being given divine instruction to protect his son from wine in Luke 1:15) is virtually certain.
3. The Greeks had more specific words for gradations of sin than we use now; there were many kinds of adultery, theft, apostasy, etc., and these crimes figure largely in Paul’s rantings as well. Κατηλɛω is adulteration, as a merchant might water down his product, but could also describe the whoring of oneself in adultery for gain (as opposed to δλος).
