Murder at Golgotha Read online

  Amidst such genetic uncertainties, can we at least be sure when Jesus was born? No, not exactly. According to the Matthew testimony, he was born during the reign of Herod the Great. But as Herod died in 4 B.C. after reigning well over thirty years, Jesus would have to have been at least four years old at the time that the official Christian calendar has him being born, in the year A.D. 1. The Christian calendar that we use today is in fact based on a number of miscalculations made by a sixth-century monk, Dionysius Exiguus, who took no account of when King Herod reigned. Dionysius fixed the day of Jesus' birth as December 25, a date that had earlier been chosen, not because it had any scriptural authority but because it conveniently coincided with a popular Roman holiday. And he calculated the year as A.D. 1, and not, as often supposed, A.D. 0, sometimes called "the year dot," which has never existed, except in popular imagination.

  Inevitably, such confusions over the year and day when Jesus was born have implications for our trying to work out exactly how old he was when he died. But these simply cannot be helped, and nothing suspicious needs to be inferred from this lack of hard information. In antiquity, if an individual sprang into the limelight late in his life, only then to have that life tragically cut short, the memories of those who knew him concerning when, how, and where he was born could often be very vague. In such circumstances it was not uncommon for biographers to invent sometimes fanciful birth stories, as certainly occurred in the case of Egyptian pharaohs and Middle Eastern emperors.

  And the silence about Jesus' birth in the Mark and John testimonies—both of which would have been written as the accounts of Jesus' life and death for their individual, early Christian communities—may be rather more valuable than the apparent knowledge exhibited in the Matthew and Luke versions. In these latter the birth stories are notably never alluded to again. Additionally noteworthy is that the original Hebrew of the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah's coming carries no expectations that this individual would be born by anything other than normal means. Only when these prophecies were translated into Greek for the benefit of Greek-speaking Jews did the Greek word parthenos come to be used for the young woman who would give birth to the Christ. And as parthenos carries the specific meaning of "virgin," so those communities rightly or wrongly came to expect that the Christ/Messiah could only be from a woman who was a virgin intacta.

  We are on more certain ground concerning Jesus' district of origin. As all testimonies agree, this was Galilee, a Roman province that lay well over a hundred miles north of Jerusalem. In contrast to Jerusalem's surroundings, much of which are desert and semidesert adjoining the lifeless, lethally saline Dead Sea, Galilee was altogether more fertile and agricultural in character. Its "Kinnereth' or Sea of Galilee teemed with fish, providing a good source of income for resourceful fishermen. Its population was comprised of predominantly country folk, farmers, fishermen, and farm laborers. These spoke with a strong Galilean accent, which to the sophisticated, urban Judaeans of Jerusalem made them sound like country bumpkins. Jesus' teachings, with their allusions to the size of a mustard seed, to the watering of donkeys, to the nonfruiting of a fig tree, and to a hen gathering her chicks under her wings (these within just a single chapter), are full of imagery reflecting his upbringing amongst such rustic people. And whereas the Judaean southerners were often inclined to collaborate with their Roman occupiers, recognizing their enjoyment of many commercial benefits from living under Roman rule, Galileans had a reputation for their being tiresome, boorish troublemakers.

  What do we know about Jesus' immediate family members? Of his mother Mary our information is extremely limited. History has no way of determining whether Mary really was a virgin at the time of Jesus' birth, but the Mark witness statement and data from two early church historians, Tertullian and Hegesippus, indicate that she and Joseph subsequently had quite a large family. There seem to have been another four brothers, and at least two sisters. Some people, maintaining that Mary was always a virgin, insist that these people must have been cousins. But the four testimonies make clear enough that these were brothers and sisters in the normally accepted sense. There can also be little doubt that Mary was relatively young when she gave birth to Jesus. This is because the later testimony is firm and consistent that she was still alive at the time of Jesus' death, and actually present to witness this in all its horror. Joseph, on the other hand, is described as having been a widower before his marriage to Mary. And he is never mentioned in any context later than a time when Jesus was a twelve-year-old boy.

  One brother of Jesus, James—known as James the Righteous, to distinguish him from the disciple of the same first name—stands out as an individual of some importance because he is mentioned in sources even outside the testimonies of Jesus' close supporters. Historical writers, such as Hegesippus and later Eusebius, make it clear that James was the first leader of the followers of Jesus who would stay on to promulgate Jesus' message in Jerusalem, as distinct from carrying it elsewhere around the Roman Empire. And the well-respected Jewish historian Josephus, who lived just a generation after Jesus' murder, described how in A.D. 62 a Jerusalem High Priest had James killed with much the same ruthlessness as had been meted out to his brother three decades earlier.

  Curiously, no surviving written testimonies describe what Jesus looked like. As an orthodox Jew he would probably have been bearded, for unlike the Romans, who were punctilious about being clean-shaven, this was not the case with the Jews. Probably his living amongst an agricultural community in which food was plentiful, as in Galilee, would have ensured that he would have been well built. Certainly he seems to have liked his food, because numerous episodes in the testimonies refer to him enjoying sometimes lavish meals accompanied by wine. In Mel Gibson's Passion Jesus was represented as a tall, handsome Caucasian to conform to mystic nun Anne Catherine Emmerich's vision:

  The complexion of our Lord was fair. . . and slightly tinted with red, but his exposure to the weather during the last three years had tanned him considerably. . . . His neck was rather long, with a well-set and finely proportioned head; his forehead large and high; his face oval; his hair, which was far from thick, was of a golden brown color, parted in the middle and falling over his shoulders; his beard was not any great length, but pointed and divided under the chin.

  In actuality, whether Jesus was tall or short, bearded or clean-shaven, nothing in the written records provides us with authoritative information.

  We are little better informed concerning how he dressed. Whereas his contemporary, John the Baptist, raised many an eyebrow by going around dressed only in animal skins, Jesus was certainly not of that mold. He is described as publicly reading from the scriptures and teaching in synagogues and the Jerusalem Temple, settings in which it was characteristic of Jews to take care to be seen wearing their Sabbath best. There was an occasion in which he was forcibly expelled from one of the former, but it was for what he said, not for any breach of the dress code. One of the clearest glimpses that we get of how he dressed would come at the very end of his life, when he was stripped of his garments immediately prior to his crucifixion. Clothes were expensive commodities in the ancient world, and one of the perks of his executioners was for their prisoner's clothing to be shared amongst them. According to the John gospel, Jesus' undergarment "was seamless, woven in one piece from neck to hem."

  Whatever this garment actually looked like, it was sufficiently valuable that we are told his executioners decided to toss for it, rather than just cut it up between them. In his teachings Jesus would urge his listeners not to pay too much attention to how they dressed. However, there is never any suggestion that he was unkempt or slovenly.

  What about clues from his childhood that this was someone who might, as an adult, turn out to be rather unusual? The Luke testimony embodies what may be a vestige of somebody's memory—very likely his mother Mary's—along these lines:

  Every year his parents used to go to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. When he was twel
ve years old they went up for the feast as usual. When the days of the feast were over and they set off home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem without his parents knowing it. They assumed he was somewhere in the party, and it was only after a day's journey that they went to look for him among their relations and acquaintances. When they failed to find him they went back to Jerusalem looking for him everywhere.

  It happened that three days later they found him in the Temple, sitting among the teachers listening to them, and asking them questions. And all those who heard him were astounded at his intelligence and his replies. They (his parents) were overcome when they saw him, and his mother said to him, "My child, why have you done this to us? See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you." He replied, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" But they did not understand what he meant. (Luke 2:41-50)

  This passage has been quoted in full partly because every parent can relate to and sympathize with such an incident occurring with their offspring. The child goes missing while the family is out shopping, or on an outing. Panic sets in. At first there is enormous relief when he is found safe and well. Then follows the reproach: "How could you have done this to us!" Whether Jesus was grounded or was punished afterwards is not recorded, but his reaction was definitely not that normally expected from a twelve-year-old. And hardly surprisingly, his parents had no idea what he meant by it.

  But while this is the first recorded instance of Jesus exhibiting a mind of his own—and clearly a very questioning and unworldly one—it would be very far from his last. And it is surely ironic that it would be in this very same setting—the Jewish Temple—that Jesus would similarly question an authority rather higher than that of his parents, and with tragically fatal consequences.

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  Possible Murder Motives

  AFTER THE INCIDENT of the distraught parents losing then finding their son in the Temple, our four key testimonies have essentially no further details of our victim's life throughout the next two decades. Then, when according to the Luke testimony, the Roman Emperor Tiberius was "in the fifteenth year of his reign . . . Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea . . . and . . . the high priesthood was held by Annas and Caiaphas" (Luke 3:1-2), a certain ill-dressed wild man began declaring the imminent coming of one who would open up the "Kingdom of God" for them. But to prepare themselves they first needed publicly to cleanse themselves of their worldly failings.

  Living rough, and dressed only in animal skins, this "John the Baptist" performed these cleansings on the banks of the river Jordan, which runs southwards from Galilee to trickle into the Dead Sea some twenty miles to Jerusalem's east. And when Jesus—aged "about thirty" according to Luke 3:23—turned up amongst the thousands who heeded John's call, there seems to have been some kind of instant recognition between them, that he, Jesus, had to be the individual whom John had been proclaiming. And it was evident that whatever Jesus had been doing up to that point—presumably, quietly carrying on the late Joseph's carpentry business—he had acquired a very good working knowledge of the Jewish scriptures.

  The journey to our victim's downfall was about to begin, for this little-known carpenter was becoming fired with a very strong sense of personal mission, and he began moving around the countryside talking about this to all who were prepared to listen to him. The group of followers that Jesus would gather around him were indeed a motley bunch in the eyes of the more traditional Jews, most of whom any worthwhile recruitment consultant would unhesitatingly have rejected as thoroughly unsuitable for helping him launch a religion to last for two thousand years and attract two billion adherents. After all, who in his right mind would even attempt to found a religion from a few commercial fishermen, a tax collector (in Jesus' time, notorious for their dishonesty), a couple of Greeks, a couple of ex-terrorists, and an avowed skeptic? And all of them possessing serious character flaws, with not a decent scholar or lawyer among them. When events later began to get tough, it was all too predictable that even this unlikely group's leader, the fisherman Simon, renamed by Jesus as Peter ("the Rock"), would break some solemn promises and repeatedly lie to save his own skin.

  The message that Jesus was beginning to spread was guaranteed to earn him enemies. For, as evident from the four testimonies, while Jesus recognized the traditional Jewish wisdom as set down in the old Hebrew Torah (today the "Old Testament" section of Christian Bibles), he had also acquired some "new," altogether less clear-cut lifestyle values which he said had come to him directly from God. According to him, while there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the Ten Commandments that the prophet Moses had taught, there were circumstances in life in which God looked for responses with a lot more "heart" or love to them. However normal and reasonable we might suppose our quest for the perennial desirables of health, wealth, status, and security, the excessive pursuit of any or all of these could positively block our ever enjoying one day that "Kingdom of God" that John the Baptist had proclaimed. Conversely, if only we could find more love in our hearts for those suffering from serious illnesses, for the poor, for the marginalized, and for those genuinely repentant because of their succumbing to some serious human weakness, then God and his unworldly Kingdom were ever at their closest amongst these. Such thinking seriously grated with the prouder amongst those who listened to this upstart carpenter.

  To help convey his so simple yet so difficult-to-live-by message, Jesus crafted some highly original and memorable parables. Well over thirty of these have been recorded in three of the testimonies (that of John being the exception), and they show no signs of any garbling as from second-hand memories long grown dim. Rather, they have the quality of their having originated from a single, wry, and highly observant mind, and of their having been set down as near direct from that mind's lips as makes little difference.

  Yet however simple Jesus tried to make his message, there were inevitably those who, quite aside from their finding it difficult to follow, seriously misunderstood what he had in mind. Even within Jesus' closest followers several seem to have thought that all his talk of some unworldly "Kingdom of God" was just so much smoke and mirrors. Their fervent hope was that his real mission was to lead them all in something practical: an armed revolt to expel the Romans and return Jewish territories to their true and rightful identity as God's own kingdom. Any reading between the lines of the four accounts of his "Miracle of the Loaves" shows that this was also high in the minds of the five thousand men who insisted on following him when he sought some peace out in the desert. According to the John testimony, after this army-size gathering had been fed:

  Jesus realized they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, [and] fled back to the hills alone. (John 6:15)

  To attract such a following there has to have been something quite magnetic about our victim. It takes someone very special to walk up to a group of commercial fishermen and ask them to follow him, and then have them meekly do so, rather than tell him to take a jump in the lake. Something about him convinced people he could look into their hearts. As the John testimony expressed it, he knew all people. . . . He never needed evidence about anyone. He could tell what someone had within. (John 2: 24-25)

  But Jesus, who had no intentions of becoming any kind of terrorist, would let down such supporters, individuals who would have steeled themselves to follow him in an armed struggle against Rome's fearsome military might. Amongst these followers Jesus' "turn the other cheek" pacifism could only generate ill feeling. Additionally, he was hardly likely to win friends by reaching out to people positively loathed by those same supporters. A case in point was his agreeing to a Roman centurion's request to cure the paralysis afflicting his slave—a healing recorded in the Matthew (8:5-13) and Luke (7:1-10) testimonies. Such helping of a Roman was tantamount to a World War II Frenchman collaborating with one of Hitler's Nazis. And it was made even worse by Jesus warmly commending the centurion for the faith that he had shown.

  Simil
arly ill-suited to winning friends amongst more mainstream Jewish society was Jesus' reported urging his listeners to sell all their goods and give the proceeds to the poor, while himself making no attempt to conceal his enjoyment of some liberal food and wine hospitality from individuals notorious for their loose morals. Though Jesus justified himself by arguing that the "publicans and sinners" providing him with this hospitality were most in need of the message that he brought them, those who were already trying to lead purer, less selfish lives could hardly be expected to view such double standards so kindly.

  As a further point of friction, while upright Jewish society frowned upon any man associating with a woman outside his immediate family, Jesus clearly welcomed and enjoyed female company, and was rashly indiscriminate about strangers of this gender to whom he talked. As but one example, he made a special point of engaging in conversation with a woman who was drawing water from a well. She was a Samaritan, a group hated and despised by Judaeans and Galileans alike. Yet Jesus not only ignored such political considerations, he made such a favorable impression upon the woman, seeming to know many intimate details about her, that she returned to her village to relay what he had taught her with all the enthusiasm of a born-again disciple.