The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History. Michael Baigent

of King David would arrive found expression in the books of the prophets in the Old Testament. Thus, the Christian use of the term christos, or “Christ,” a Greek translation of the Aramaic meshiha, along with the transliteration into Greek Messias—now “messiah”—came from a Jewish context and usage that was already well understood by Jesus’s day.⁴

      The most radical logistical challenge is answering a charge that has regularly been made, particularly over the last 150 years: that Jesus didn’t exist at all and the stories about him are simply tales of various messianic leaders that were later gathered together in order to justify, first a Pauline position, and later, a Roman-centered tradition wherein the Jewish messiah was turned into a deified imperial figure, a kind of royal angel. William Horbury, reader in Jewish and Early Christian Studies at Cambridge University, recently noted, “A cult of angels…accompanied the development of the cult of Christ.”⁵

      Can we really be sure that Jesus existed? Is there any proof of his reality beyond the New Testament? If not, if the New Testament was put together long after his time, how do we know that the whole concept of Jesus Christ is not just an ancient myth given a new spin? Perhaps it was some rewriting of the Adonis myth or the Osiris myth or the Mithras myth: all three were born of a virgin and raised from the dead—a familiar story to Christians.

      There is considerable reason, according to Horbury, for seeing, within early Christianity, “a cult of Christ, comparable with the cults of Graeco-Roman heroes, sovereigns and divinities.”⁶ And as mentioned earlier, this cult was accompanied by a cult of angels. Horbury explains that it appears likely that the title given to Jesus, “Son of man,” linked him with “an angel-like messiah.”⁷ In fact, “Christ, precisely in his capacity as messiah, could be considered an angelic spirit…It seems likely that messianism formed the principal medium through which angelology impinged on nascent Christology, and that Christ, precisely as messiah, was envisaged as an angel-like spiritual being.”⁸ So are we dealing solely with an ancient myth revisited for the purposes of Christianity?

      We have seen that the word “Jesus” derives simply from the Aramaic Yeshua, which can mean Joshua but also can mean “the deliverer,” the “savior.” Therefore, it could just be a title. We’ve also noted that “Christ” comes from christos, the Greek translation of the Aramaic meshiha, meaning “the anointed one.” So we are dealing with a double title: “The deliverer (or savior), the anointed one.” In that case, what was his name? We really don’t know—someone “ben David” we would assume, but that is all we can glean.

      We cannot appeal to the New Testament for evidence because we have no idea how much history and how much fantasy is incorporated into the texts. And in any case, the earliest fragments we have are from the second century A.D.—around A.D. 125 for some pieces of John’s Gospel. But what about the letters of Paul? After all, they were written before the first war against the Romans. The earliest—Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians—was written while he was resident in Corinth from the winter of A.D. 50 to the summer of 52.⁹ The rest of his letters were written between A.D. 56 and 60, perhaps even later when he was in Rome and supposedly executed around A.D. 65—although no one knows the truth about this since the Book of Acts, our only source for details of Paul’s travels, breaks off with him under house arrest in Rome.

      Unfortunately, we cannot be sure about the authenticity of all Paul’s letters within the New Testament either, since the earliest copies we have date from the early third century.¹⁰ In the letters written in A.D. 115 by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, on his way to Rome, he quotes from various letters of Paul, so we know that some were in existence by this time, but we do not know whether they might have been edited, before or after. In any case, Paul did not know Jesus, and unlike the Gospels, he did not show any great concern about what Jesus may have said or done. We get no information about Jesus from Paul, whose letters proclaim the gospel of, well, Paul: that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus marked the beginning of a new age in the history of the world, the most immediate practical effect being the end of the Jewish law—quite a different stance to that taken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17).

      No records from Pilate have survived either; there are also no records from Herod, and no records from the Roman military or other administrative bodies. But this is not surprising, as the records office of the Herodian kings in Jerusalem was burned during the war. The official Roman records would have been in their administrative capital, Caesarea, and it too was caught up in the fighting. Copies and reports would have gone back to Rome, but even if they survived the various destructions by later emperors like Domitian, they would have been lost in the sack of Rome by the Goths in A.D. 405, when so many official archives were destroyed—those that had not been taken to Constantinople. Of course, by that time Rome was Christian, and so we can be certain that any documents that compromised the developing story of Christ would have already been extracted and destroyed. And there is good reason to think that Pilate’s reports would have been among such documents.

      But all is not lost: Josephus certainly had access to Roman records, and if Jesus had been mentioned, he would have been able to read of him. In fact, Josephus does mention Jesus, but in such a manner as to lead everyone who has looked at the text to consider it a later Christian insertion, although there is probably a kernel of truth in his discussion somewhere. But Josephus cannot help us entirely, for he has proven to be an unreliable witness and chronicler. Our other Jewish chronicler and philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, who died around A.D. 50, does not even mention Jesus. This is a curiosity for which there is no good explanation beyond taking it as evidence either for the lack of Jesus’s reality or for his irrelevance to the lives of educated Jewish Alexandrians.