The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The agitator known as Jeshua – or Jesus – of Nazareth was born in about the twentieth year of the reign of Augustus – around 10 B.C. Pompey the Great had placed the Jews under Roman rule in 63 B.C., and the Jews loathed it. Crassus had plundered the temple. Herod the Great, appointed by the Romans to rule Judea, was as violent and murderous as any of the later Roman emperors, and was hated by all the religion factions with the exception of the Hellenised Sadducees. So the expectation of the long-awaited Messiah, a warrior-king who would free the Jews from foreign rule, increased year by year.

The early records of Jesus of Nazareth were so tampered with by later Christians that it is difficult to form a clear picture of his few brief years as a teacher and prophet. Even his physical description was altered; it was reconstructed in the 1920s by the historian Robert Eisler in The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist. Among the documents Eisler used was a ‘wanted notice’ probably signed by Pontius Pilate, and later quoted by the Jewish historian Josephus, whose reconstructed text runs as follows:

At this time, too, there appeared a certain man of magical power, if it is permissible to call him man, whom certain Greeks call a son of God, but his disciples the true prophet, said to raise the dead and heal all diseases.

His nature and form were human; a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high (about five feet), hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose and meeting eyebrows, so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of the head, after the manner of the Nairites, and an undeveloped beard.

This original portrait of Jesus – with a humped back, long nose, half-bald head and scanty beard – was altered by later Christians to read:

ruddy skin, medium stature, six feet high, well grown, with a venerable face, handsome nose, goodly black eyebrows with good eyes so that spectators could love him, with curly hair the colour of unripe hazel nuts, with a smooth and unruffled, unmarked and unwrinkled forehead, a lovely red, blue eyes, beautiful mouth, with a copious beard the same colour as the hair, not long, parted in the middle, arms and hands full of grace…

And so it went on, turning the unprepossessing little man into an early Christian equivalent of a film star. It is easy to see why it is difficult to take most of the Christian texts about Jesus at their face value.

If the Romans had been coarsened by success and victory, it could be said that the Jews had been refined by failure and defeat. At about the time the Mediterranean was undergoing its ordeal by fire at the hands of the ‘sea peoples’, the Hebrews, who lived in the land of Goshen near the Nile delta, had been enslaved by the Egyptians. At about the time of the Trojan War, they were led out of Egypt by Moses and spent hard years wandering in the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula. Hardship deepened their religious sense; they became a people of one God, whose laws were based on religious ideals. (The story of the dance around the golden calf suggests that at an earlier period they were polytheistic, like most Semitic peoples.) Under Joshua, they achieved victories in the land of Canaan and adopted many of the ways of the Canaanites. Then there was a long and desperate struggle against the Philistines, who were finally conquered by King David around 1000 B.C. But after the death of Solomon (about 930 B.C.) there were unsettled times, and two centuries of strife and civil war. In the eighth century B.C., the Israelites came under the brutal Assyrian yoke, and in 705 B.C. the kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. After the destruction of Nineveh (612 B.C.), the Babylonians became the dominant power in the Middle East, and the Jews were again dragged into captivity. They were allowed to return to the ruined city of Jerusalem when Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians (538 B.C.), but remained under Persian rule for two centuries. Under the leadership of the Persian Jew Nehemiah they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and returned to the old religious ways taught by Moses. In 332 B.C. Persian rule was overthrown by Alexander the Great, and for nine years the Jews were his subjects. After his death, they again fell under the rule of Egypt. One of Alexander’s generals, Seleucas, had conquered an empire and founded a dynasty, so from 198 to 168 B.C. the Jews were ruled by the Seleucids. It was the attempt of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV to Hellenise Judea and ban the Jewish religion that led to the revolt of Judas Maccabeus and a brief period of political freedom. But less than a century later, Pompey conquered Jerusalem, and the Jews become Roman vassals.

So, over the course of many centuries, the Jews had become accustomed to war, persecution and a foreign yoke. The Jewish religious impulse was deepened by adversity. Understandably, it laid emphasis on pacifism, on gentleness and mercy, on the blessedness of the meek and humble and the rewards of the next world. Rabbi Akiba said that the essence of the Mosaic message is to love one’s neighbour, while Rabbi Hillel stated that the central message of Judaism is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In the time of Jesus, there were three main religious sects in Judea: the Sadducees, who were conservatives, the Zealots, who were revolutionaries, and the Pharisees, who occupied the middle ground. There was also a powerful group known as the Essenes, who might be called ‘withdrawalists’. Like modern Quakers, they founded their own communities, where they lived pious and abstemious lives. Their teachings had come down to them, they asserted, from a certain Teacher of Righteousness who had been killed by the forces of darkness. In 1947, some of the scriptures of the Essenes came to light in caves on the shores of the Dead Sea – where the Essenes had once lived. These Dead Sea scrolls revealed that the Essenes called themselves the Elect of God, that they initiated new members through baptism, and that they had a protocol for seating that resembles that of the Last Supper described in the New Testament. John the Baptist was almost certainly an Essene. And the Dead Sea scrolls make it clear that Jesus was heavily influenced by them.

So the doctrines we now associate with Jesus were familiar in the Jewish world for centuries before his arrival. Judaism already forbade men to hate their enemies. This carpenter’s son from Nazareth, who began to preach in the twenty-eighth year of his life, went a step further and declared that we should also love our enemies, and that if someone strikes us on one cheek, we should turn the other. In the time of Roman occupation, this must have seemed to most people sheer stupidity – rather as if some English religious teacher had declared in 1939 that there should be no resistance to Hitler. Clearly, this pacifistic doctrine can have had no wide appeal in 20 A.D., the sixth year of the reign of Tiberius, even though Jesus’s personal magnetism seems to have been remarkable. How, then, did he make an appeal to the intensely patriotic Jews of his time? The answer which emerges from contemporary documents is that Jesus taught that some immense, catastrophic change was about to take place: in fact, the end of the world. The kingdom of God was at hand. There would be wars and rumours of wars, famine and earthquakes. The dead would be brought back to life. The sun would be turned into darkness and the moon to blood, and stars would fall from heaven. All this would not be at some vague date in future centuries, but within the lifetime of people then alive. Accordingly, it would be better for the faithful to take no thought for the morrow – God would provide.

The teachings of this apocalyptic preacher offended Pharisees, Sadducees and Zealots alike. The Zealots – who wanted to see Rome destroyed – had no patience with this preaching about ‘kingdom come’. It could only distract attention from the real struggle. The Sadducees were inclined to Hellenism and disbelieved in life after death; for them Jesus was an uncultivated fanatic. The Pharisees were the Temple party and stood for strict observance of every minor religious ritual. Jesus felt about them as Martin Luther was later to feel about the Catholic Church, and he went out of his way to attack them. The result is that Jesus had few real supporters during his lifetime. He was a minor and rather unpopular prophet; if he had lived to be seventy and died in his bed, he would probably now be totally forgotten.