But after four years of preaching, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and proclaimed himself the Messiah, the saviour who had been awaited for centuries. This made him suddenly dangerous to the Jewish establishment. Accordingly, he was arrested and taken before the high priest. Caiaphas has come off rather badly in the history books, but he cannot really be blamed for what followed. When asked if he was the Messiah, Jesus replied in the affirmative. Caiaphas was understandably outraged, for it must have seemed obvious to him that nothing was less likely than that this unprepossessing little man with his hump-back and straggly beard could be the man destined to lead the Jews to freedom. He called Jesus a blasphemer – which, technically speaking, he was – and sent him off to Pilate to be judged, confident that the Roman would recognise the danger. But Pilate was a cultured Roman, and when he asked Jesus the same question, Jesus was cautious enough to reply only ‘You have said so.’ Pilate had been a weary spectator of the endless religious squabbles of the Jews for years – he probably thought they were all mad, or at least deluded – and he no doubt resented the attempt of Caiaphas to make him the executioner of this gentle-looking little man. He tried to get Jesus released – mercy was shown to a condemned man every Passover – but the people, who were as clamorous as a Roman mob, said they would prefer another rebel called Barabbas, who at least had tried to kill a Roman guard. Pilate gave way – he had sentenced so many rebels to death that it made little difference; in fact, this Jesus was to be crucified between two of them. And so, like thousands of other victims of Rome, Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross.
And how did he go on to conquer the world? Again, the reasons are complex. The most important is undoubtedly that soon after his death his disciples claimed to have seen him again, and actually touched him. One historian, Hugh Schonfield, argued in The Passover Plot (1966) that Jesus was probably given a drug that made him appear to be dead and that he revived in a perfectly normal way. It is just conceivable. It is just as conceivable that Jesus was not completely dead when taken from the cross – a good bribe to a Roman centurion could work wonders. In another controversial book, published in 1982 (The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh), Henry Lincoln also suggested the drug hypothesis; and he went further to cite a secret Rosicrucian tradition that Jesus was married, and left Judea with Mary Magdalene to live out the remainder of his life in Gaul, where his descendants became the Merovingian kings. (He argues that the discovery of this secret explains the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau and how a poor Catholic priest became rich overnight.) Sceptics may feel that the explanation could be altogether simpler, and that the whole story of the Resurrection was invented by the followers of Jesus. Whatever the explanation, it is certain that stories of Jesus’s miraculous revival after death were circulating soon after the crucifixion.
One thing about Jesus that seems very clear is that he possessed remarkable healing powers. Josephus, as we have seen, describes him as a magician. It makes no difference whether we attribute such powers to suggestion or to some genuine ability to release a healing force; what seems quite clear is that they work, and can be developed. Jesus had developed them to a high degree, and this seems to explain why he was regarded as a magician.
Nothing spreads faster than tales of the marvellous; and this undoubtedly explains why Jesus’s death on the cross only made his name more potent than ever. At this early stage there were two distinct groups of disciples. The Nasoraeans, or Messianists, were the original followers, who believed that Jesus was a political Messiah who would lead the Jews to freedom. He was still alive, and would in due course reappear to fulfil his promises. (King Arthur later inspired identical beliefs in Britain, and many people were still expecting him six centuries after his death.) They most emphatically did not believe that Jesus was a god in any sense of the word – this would have been contrary to all Jewish religious teaching. The other group, who came to be called Christians, were followers of Paul as much as of Jesus. Within a few years of the crucifixion, this Paul, who loathed the Messianists, had undergone a sudden conversion, which suggests that his original hatred of Jesus was based upon some deep fascination that he found unacceptable. Paul created a new version of Messianism that was far more strange and mystical than that of the Nasoraeans. Paul’s Jesus was the son of God, who had been sent to earth to save men from the consequences of Adam’s sin. All men had to do was to believe in Jesus and they were ‘saved’. And when the end of the world occurred – as it was bound to do within the next few years, according to Jesus – these ‘Christians’ would live on an earth transformed into paradise.
The Messianists and the Christians detested one another with the peculiarly virulent loathing that seemed to characterise Jewish religious controversies. Paul’s version won through a historical accident. As we have seen, the Jews broke into open rebellion just before the end of the reign of Nero, and he was forced to send his general Vespasian to try and subdue them. But in the year after Nero’s suicide, Rome had four emperors. The first was Galba, the Spanish governor who had joined Vindex in the rebellion. Within a short time the Praetorian Guard found him too strict and closefisted, and murdered him. They appointed Nero’s friend Otho, from Portugal. Meanwhile, the German troops had proclaimed their general Vitellius emperor, and he marched on Rome and defeated Otho. Otho committed suicide. Then Vespasian, still on the other side of the Mediterranean, was proclaimed emperor by his troops. He seized Egypt and cut off Rome’s grain. When legions from the Danube marched on Rome and killed Vitellius, Vespasian was next in line for the post of emperor, and was appointed by the senate in 70 A.D. He sent his son Titus to subdue the Jewish rebels, and Titus did it with Roman brutality and ruthlessness. After a six-month siege, the temple was burned, the Zealots massacred (more than a million of them), and the treasures of the Temple were carried back to Rome. The Messianists were among those who were slaughtered. So Paul’s Christians (who were scattered all over the place) were the only followers of Jesus left.
Any Messianists who remained must certainly have felt that this Christianity of Paul was a blasphemous travesty of the teachings of their Messiah; and, in a literal sense, they were correct. Whether Jesus was Jewish by nationality or not (and Galilee contained more Arabs than Jews), he was undoubtedly a Jew by religion, and as such would have been horrified at the notion that he was a god. That was the kind of blasphemy that was typical of the Romans – Pontius Pilate had mortally offended the Jews by allowing his legionnaires to march through Jerusalem with a picture of the deified Augustus on their standards. Yet in another sense, Paul’s Christianity was an accurate reflection of the basic spirit of the ideas of Jesus. Bernard Shaw once suggested that Jesus went insane at some later point in his career – when he became convinced he was the Messiah – for Shaw felt that the earlier Jesus regarded himself as an ethical teacher and no more. But there is no evidence that Jesus ever took such a rationalistic view of his mission. His statement that he could forgive sins suggests that he believed he was in some kind of direct communication with God. Christians believe, of course, that this was true; but it seems clear that Jesus also believed that the end of the world was about to occur, and if he believed that this was also a message from God, he was mistaken. By modern standards, Jesus was suffering from delusions.
Paul seems to have been fascinated by the parallel between Jesus and various other Middle Eastern gods who died and were resurrected – Attis and Adonis, the Egyptian Osiris, the Babylonian Tammuz – such stories were common at the time. Paul was also a Jew, and the Jews in the time of Jesus were much preoccupied with the question of how, if God is good, He could have made so much misery and suffering. The answer of the rabbis, of course, was that Adam had sinned, and so been expelled from Eden. Now, in one stroke, Paul had added an amazing new dimension to Judaism: not only a traditional saviour-god, but one who had come to solve that ancient problem of misery and sin. Jesus had vicariously atoned for the sins of mankind; after Armageddon, his followers would live for ever.