When the Romans finally discovered what was happening beneath their feet, they filled the cisterns with stones, destroying the water source. Then they broke into the tunnel complex and crawled in seeking to destroy the Bar Kochba fighters who had fled down to the deeper levels.
Gichon asked me to follow him as he crawled along ahead of me through the claustrophobic tunnels. We then reached one that turned down into the rocky hillside at a steep angle. It had been sealed up with stone and mortar.
“The Romans sealed this up permanently,” he explained to me. He paused for a moment. “This tunnel has never been opened. All the defenders are still down there.”
It took me a moment to realize the magnitude of what he was saying. And then I was struck by the scene of tragedy and horror that would await the first archaeologist to remove the stonework and crawl down into the tunnel. I have never forgotten that small bricked-up entrance to the refuge that, in a few minutes almost 1,900 years ago, became a sealed tomb for the living.
This, then, was the world within which Jesus, his followers, and at least the first of his later biographers lived. It was also the world out of which Christianity emerged. And it is the connection between these two parts of that world that is so contentious. It was, as we have seen, a time when belief was everything and the wrong belief in the wrong context could bring a sudden death, either from the Romans via crucifixion or from the zealous Sicarii via lethal dagger.
Few of these events have found their way into the Gospels. Instead of history, our New Testament gives us a sanitized, censored, and often inverted view of the times. But even those who brought us the New Testament were unable to entirely cut away the world in which their characters moved. Jesus was born and spent his formative years in the era of the early Zealot movement. When he began his ministry around the age of thirty, some of his closest followers were known to be members of this messianic movement, a movement in which Jesus was born to play an important role. In the New Testament, we can see the arguments against the Romans, and we can pick up a dulled sense of the violence that permeated the era—a sense that sharpens, of course, when we reach the end of the story with the crucifixion of Jesus.
But this crucifixion in their telling has quite deliberately had its political context expunged. This is proof that later censors made a concerted attempt to separate Jesus and his life from the historical times in which he was born, lived, and died—however he eventually met his death. In so doing, these later censors did something far more pernicious: they removed Jesus from his Jewish context. And today a large number of Christians remain completely unaware that Jesus was never a Christian; he was born, and lived, a Jew.
A generation after the crucifixion of Jesus—or, at least, the removal of him from the scene—Jerusalem and the Temple were lost to Judaism. The faith was instead centered upon the rabbinical school at Jabneh. At the same time began the manipulation of Jesus’s story that ultimately created a tradition centered upon Jesus rather than upon God. This was a point upon which many early chroniclers did not agree but one that would eventually take over all alternative explanations. The Jewish origins of Jesus became subsumed within an increasingly influential pagan context introduced by converts to Christianity from among the Greeks and Romans. This pagan influence drew Christianity and its view of Jesus a long way from Judaism in the succeeding centuries.
The audience for the Christian message had clearly changed: it was no longer intended for Jews but rather addressed pagans—believers in gods and goddesses like Mithras, Dionysius, Isis, and Demeter—and as such it needed to be presented in a new package, one laced with an anti-Jewish flavor. The field was ripe for the reinterpretation of history and the beginning of the triumph of the artificial “Jesus of faith” over the true “Jesus of history”—a man who spoke of God, who expressed a divine message, but who did not himself claim to be God.
In what is probably a true miracle, one of the Gospels, while creating a distance between Jesus and his Jewish context, still maintains elements of the Jesus of history and the inclusiveness of his teaching on divinity:
The Jews fetched stones to stone him, so Jesus said to them, “I have done many good works for you to see…for which of these are you stoning me?” The Jews answered him, “We are not stoning you for doing a good work but for blasphemy: you are only a man and you claim to be God.” Jesus answered, “Is it not written in your Law: I said, you are gods? So the Law uses the word gods of those to whom the word of God was addressed.” (John 10:31-35)
Between the time these words were spoken and committed to writing, perhaps near the end of the first century A.D., Jesus had been made a Christian. And to be a Christian meant to follow teachings far removed from those of Judaism. This is clearly evident in a recorded dialogue between the second-century church father Justin Martyr and a Jewish teacher named Trypho. The latter makes the very reasonable point that “those who affirm [Jesus] to have been a man, and to have been anointed by election, and then to have become Christ, appear to me to speak more plausibly.”36 To further his point he poses a challenge to Justin: “Answer me then, first, how you can show that there is another God besides the Maker of all things; and then you will show, [further,] that He submitted to be born of the Virgin.”37
Leaving aside the particulars of the debate and Justin’s responses—ambiguous and weak, according to Trypho—what is clear is that a distance had evolved between the two religions that was now unbridgeable. There was little point of compromise left among those who were marching resolutely into that horizon that would become Christian orthodoxy. For Justin, only belief in Christ mattered, and such belief could bring salvation to anyone, “even although they neither keep the Sabbath, nor are circumcised, nor observe the feasts.”38
As we can see, the Jewish law had been left far behind—along with the true history of Jesus.
JUDAEA, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY
| Before 4 B.C. | Birth of Jesus, according to Matthew’s Gospel (2:1). |
| 4 B.C. | Death of Herod the Great. |
| A.D. 6 | Birth of Jesus, according to Luke’s Gospel (2:1-7). Census of Quirinius, Governor of Syria. |
| A.D. 27-28 | Baptism of Jesus (traditional date) in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius (Luke 3:1-23). |
| A.D. 30 | Crucifixion of Jesus, according to Catholic scholarship. |
| c. A.D. 35 | Following the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias in c. A.D. 34, John the Baptist is executed, following the evidence in Josephus. |
| A.D. 36 | Passover—crucifixion of Jesus, according to Matthew’s timetable. |
| A.D. 36-37 | Conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus. |
| c. A.D. 44 | Execution of James, the brother of Jesus. |
| A.D. 50-52 | Paul in Corinth. Writes his first letter (to the Thessalonians). |
| A.D. 61 | Paul in Rome under house arrest. |
| c. A.D. 65 | Paul supposedly executed. |
| A.D. 66-73 | War in Judaea. The Roman army under Vespasian invades Judaea. |
| c. A.D. 55-120 | Life of Tacitus, Roman historian and senator, who mentions Christ. |