Yes, It was Robert Eisler who drew attention to this , and the Mundus & Paulina episode in the early 1930s (in
, 1933, the abbreviated single volume E.T., by Alexander Krappe, to his German Language
, 2 vols. 1929-30), as a bit odd considering these two sets of events occurred somewhere around 19 CE (offhand I do not have the exact dates).
vii AUTHOR' S PREFACE
THE present work is fundamentally different in method, scope, and outlook from any 'Life of Christ' or any other book dealing with Christian origins, or any 'History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus,' that I know of. For it claims to show: -
First. That there once existed a rich fund of historical tradition about the Messiah Jesus both among the Jews and the non-Christian Greeks and Romans.
Second. That this precious material was deliberately destroyed, or falsified, by a system of rigid censorship officially authorized ever since the time of Constantine I. and reinstituted in the reigns of Theodosius II. and Valentinian III. (477 A.D.) .
Third. That, in spite of the tireless efforts of ecclesiastical revisers, enough has been preserved in certain out-of-the-way corners of the world, among Jews and heretics as well as in quotations occurring in Christian polemic and apologetic literature, to allow us to reconstruct with sufficient clarity and plausibility, and even with a certain amount of picturesque detail, the fundamental features of Jesus' personality and his mission, particularly as they appeared to his enemies.
Fourth. That through a careful comparison of this mercilessly cold, detached, and unsympathetic pen-portrait of the man Jesus with the naïvely idealizing presentation of the Kyrios Christos by the writers of the early and later Christian Church, it is possible to come quite close to the historical truth about the Naṣōraean prophet-king and about his elder relative, the schismatic high priest of the Jews, Joḫanan 'the Hidden One,' better known as the Baptist.
It is thus my claim that a history of Christian origins-more exactly, of the Naṣōraean Messianist movement-can be written which will chronologically coincide with the history of the Jews and the Romans from 4 B.C. to A.D. 135-that is, from the first appearance of Joḫanan to the downfall of Bar-Kokheba.
[viii] In face of the prevalent historical scepticism 1 and the Neo-Marcionite subjectivism of certain critics, who claim for themselves the right to disregard any evidence in the Gospels which conflicts with their own preconceived picture of Jesus,2 the present work represents a radical departure. For I claim no such right. I refuse to reject from among the documentary materials this or that statement as 'unworthy' of Jesus' personality and his mission. On the contrary, I humbly and honestly accept whatever I find in the sources, duly weighing the evidence when there is conflict or contradiction, unless indeed the trustworthiness of a given source is disproved by facts quite independent of any judgment of values.
1 The best example is the Jesus of Prof. Rudolf Bultmann, published in Berlin in 1925.
2 Few modern authors will admit this as frankly as honest Max Müller in his time, who said (Chips from a German Workshop: On the Proper Use of Holy Scriptures), after praising as a blessing the fact that Jesus left no written record of his teaching: 'Because, whenever the spirit of truth within us protests against certain statements in the Gospels as unworthy of the high character of the founders of this religion, we can claim the same liberty which even the ancients claimed with regard to the fables told of their gods, namely, that nothing could be true that was unworthy of the gods.'
'As it is now,' said Max Muller, 'it is always open to us to say, whenever we read of anything that is incredible or unworthy of Christ, as we conceive him,3 that it came from his disciples, who confessedly had often failed to understand him, or that it was added by those who handed down the tradition before it was written down.4 ... The true interests of the Christian religion are better served by showing how much time and how many opportunities there were for human misunderstandings to creep into the Gospel story.'
3 Italics mine.
4 This is-avant la lettre-the whole of the new 'formgeschichtliche Methode' !
It seems to me that it is not the business of the historian, quite unconcerned as he is with questions of apologetics, to discredit, on what after all are apologetic grounds, sources fully as good or fully as bad as any ordinary source bearing on profane history. Everywhere tendencies can be detected to a certain extent and therefore must be discounted in a certain measure. The nature of the material being the same, the methods of utilizing it should logically be the same.
If one were timidly to disregard all sources which show a certain tendency one way or other, it would mean a negation of all history-writing; and if the maxim be adopted that the scientific accuracy [ix] of a historian's work is in direct proportion to the depth of his scepticism, we should inevitably end with the neo-Pyrrhonist doctrine that we cannot know anything at all about the past of humanity.
I am fully aware of the fact that every single bit of evidence presented in the following pages can be frittered away and made to crumble into dust by the simple application of certain widely practised methods of criticism and exegesis. Let me say that I am not at all ignorant of these methods. Alas! I have tried again and again these two-edged, over-sharpened tools, only to find them ineffective in the end. Any student who, through sheer inability to synthetize the mass of his evidence, prefers to carry analysis to the length of hair-splitting, and who will go on for ever weighing undecidedly all the possibilities that might come under consideration, will be thoroughly antagonized by the present book, without presumably deriving much profit from it. That I cannot help. I have been working and writing for those who are as convinced as I am myself that no explanation of a single fact is satisfactory which cannot be made to fit into some plausible consecutive scheme enabling us to account for the totality of facts and phenomena- for those who feel that we cannot go on for ever with our traditional histories of New Testament times, into which a life of Jesus cannot be made to fit, and with lives and characteristics of Jesus which cannot be made to fit into the contemporary history of Jews and Romans. To those readers I hope that the new sources, analysed and utilized in this volume, will come as a relief and a genuine intellectual satisfaction.
I sincerely believe that nothing in this book can possibly give offence to a true Christian-that is, a true believer in the deeply rooted messianic hopes of humanity. Yet it may cause somewhat of a startling shock to those whom Bernard Shaw has pertinently called Christian idolaters, defenders of an idolatrous or iconolatrous worship of the Christ-to people, that is, who are only concerned with the traditional pictures and statues of Jesus and the pretty stories attached to him.1
1 Preface to Androcles and the Lion.
'If you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person or even as a still active God, such worshippers are more horrified than Don Juan was when the statue stepped from its pedestal and came to supper with him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus, you may doubt [x] whether he ever existed, you may reject Christianity for Judaism, Mohametism, Shintoism , or Fire Worship, and the iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen. But if you venture to wonder how Christ ... looked or what size he stood 1 in his shoes ... or even if you tell any part of his story in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences that may flow from this terrifying miracle. It is at such moments that you realize that the iconolaters have never for a moment conceived Jesus as a real person, who meant what he said, as a fact, as a force like electricity, only needing the invention of suitable political machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with revolutionary effect. Thus it is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society ; it is belief. The moment it strikes you (as it may any day) that Jesus is not the lifeless, harmless image he has hitherto been to you, but a rallying centre for revolutionary influence, which all established States and Churches fight, you must look to yourselves, for you have brought the image to life, and the mob may not be able to stand that horror.'
1 Italics mine. See below, p. 427n20
As to 'colloquial slang,' the reader will, I hope, find nothing of the sort either in the German original or in the English translation. Yet I have not refrained from applying, wherever it seemed required, the terminology of modern political ideology and sociology, in order to make it quite clear to the reader that the social and political problems of those times are fundamentally identical with those of the present epoch, notwithstanding the differences which; after all, separate that period and civilization from our own. It is this which, I fear, will shock more profoundly than the unveiling of the quaint contemporary pen-portrait of the Naṣōraean Messiah all those who want to convert, and have in part succeeded in converting, churches and chapels into a world-wide organization for the effective repression of the very tendencies for which the Jewish prophet-king suffered and died.
It has been suggested, and will doubtless be suggested again, that this work is itself inspired by a revolutionary Messianist tendency. To this accusation I can only say that I wish it were true. I wish I could honestly plead guilty to being moved in the depths of my conscience by the most powerful religious impulses of my race. Yet for the sake of plain truth I must own that in the unravelling of the mysterious history of this movement I was actuated almost exclusively by a boundless curiosity and a [xi] passionate desire to get at the real truth of this maze of documents, authentic and spurious, falsified in part or altogether forged.
The main difficulty of the presentation lay in the fact that a discussion of the events cannot be separated from a discussion of the sources. A large and expensive volume dealing exclusively with the literary and philological problems raised by the discovery of the Slavonic, the Rumanian, and the less expurgated Hebrew versions of Josephus, could not be published in this poverty-stricken after-war period, because nobody but half a dozen specialists would read it. Still less thinkable was a simple, straightforward history of the messianic uprising and the origins of the Christian Church on the basis of the new sources, but without a thoroughgoing critical analysis of the documents. Such a volume would inevitably be mistaken for one of those biographies romancées which are turned out in our days by the dozen.
An even greater difficulty was presented by the natural desire of both author and publisher to reach both the scholar and the so-called general reader. To justify my theses as far as possible before the forum of the learned critics, I had to include much documentary material which may possibly not interest any one but specialists. Still, to ensure that this book should not attain the unwieldy proportions of the German original, I had to omit practically all of the critical discussion devoted to the previous literature on the subject.1 The logical argument, it is hoped, has not suffered thereby. Yet if any objections should present themselves to the learned reader, he is requested to look into the German original before starting an argument which has possibly already been definitely disposed of there.
1 I regret even more the forced omission of a systematic exposition of the Oriental origins and the Jewish development of political Messianism, a subject I hope to deal with in the form of a separate volume some time in the future.
To the general reader, who would probably prefer a less cumbersome book, I venture to offer a few suggestions which may perhaps be resented as superfluous by expert skippers, but may be of some value to those who still follow the time-honoured and certainly praiseworthy custom of beginning a book at the beginning. Such readers might not unprofitably begin by looking at Pl. VI. and Pl. VII. They will see there without any difficulty the demonstratio ad oculos of my general thesis regarding the ruthless censorship applied to all sources discussing Christianity and its [xii] founder from a non-Christian point of view. If they will then tum to p. 594, App. IV., they will find the proof that all anti-Christian literature was hunted down systematically from the fourth century on. Having thus caught a glimpse of this process of deletion of words, phrases, and whole sections, and duly noted on Pl. VIII. and Pl. XI. that our chief authority, Flavius Josephus, did not fare any better under the hands of the ecclesiastical censors, the reader may be prepared to admit that the standard texts of the Jewish War and the Antiquities may after all not contain everything that Josephus meant to convey to his Jewish and Gentile readers. Having got thus far, he may now be ready for a look at the newly reconstructed texts on pp. 62 and 466ff., and for an unprejudiced reading of the striking statements printed in these chapters.
As likely as not, he will then ask on whose authority he is expected to accept as sound historical facts such surprising and, for many readers, shocking statements. The answer to that question is given in the chapters about Flavius Josephus, his life and work.1 Very probably, after reading the man's edifying biography, the reader will not care to trust him 2 without further checks and verifications. Yet by turning to the Introduction (pp. 9 ff.) he will find that the general view which he takes of Jesus Christ is shared by all ancient non-Christian authors of whose writings we still have a few fragments. He will see, moreover, on pp. 201 ff. that Flavius Josephus-unworthy indeed of any trust whenever his own interests come into play-throughout his work used first-hand evidence, that is, contemporary official documents. Having been so often told that there never were any legal documents about the trial of Jesus, the reader may be surprised to learn (on pp. 13 ff.) that detailed records of this famous case must have existed, and in fact did subsist down to A.D. 311, when they were broadcast in hundreds of copies by the imperial chancery of Rome. By what silly-clever forgeries these genuine Acts of Pilate have been discredited after A.D. 312 for more than 1500 years, I have endeavoured to show on pp. 17 ff. If by this time the reader has become [xiii] more interested in all the forgeries, simple and complicated, resorted to by apologetic ingenuity in order to convert the writings of the unbelieving Jew Josephus into a huge edifying Testimonium Flavianum for the essential truth of the Athanasian creed, let him now turn to pp. 425 ff., where he will find in parallel columns the genuine pen-portrait derived from the official 'hue-and-cry' of the Messiah Jesus, and the idealizing corrections applied to this startling text by the Christian revisers. If he still doubts the authenticity of the description printed on the left side of p. 427, let him turn to p. 416 f. and satisfy himself how exactly this signalement tallies with certain hitherto enigmatic passages in the Gospels and with a number of patristic witnesses on the shortness and uncomeliness of Jesus' 'servile body,' spoken of by Paul. Thus introduced, though as in a mirror darkly, yet almost face to face, to this great prophet and king of the Jews, the reader will now be eager to turn to the history of the world-shattering movement in which he was destined to play such a dominant part.
1 Below, pp. 22-35·
2 These words were already in type when Dr. Burton Scott Easton wrote at the end of a fair and courteous review of the German edition of this book in the Anglican Theological Review of 1930: 'Dr. Eisler's estimate of Josephus' truthfulness and objectivity is as low as is conceivably possible . ... What conceivable right has Dr. Eisler, then, to use his anti-Christian evidence ... as ... infallible?' My answer to this legitimate question has been given by anticipation in the lines which follow.
No doubt he had best begin, as do Josephus and the Gospels, with the 'Forerunner.'1 Yet any reader shunning as yet the more arduous task of reading the consecutive historical narrative is invited to read the concluding chapter on pp. 562ff., where I have tried to present, as concisely as possible, the main outlines of this most startling history. If eager for the details, the reader may now turn to the story of Joḫanan the Hidden One or the Baptist, the revolutionary and schismatic high priest 2 of the year 4 B.C., who outlived Jesus by fourteen years; he may read on to the story of the three messiah kings, Judas, Simon, and Athronga, who answered his call; and finally he may follow the career of the Baptist's erstwhile disciple, the Naṣōraean Jesus,3 who died on the cross for the liberation of his people from the Roman yoke, the rulers of this world, in the night from the 15th to the 16th of April of the year A.D. 21.
1 Below, pp. 223 ff.
2 Below, pp. 259 ff.
3 Below, pp. 312 ff.
I am aware that a good many of my readers, accustomed to the traditional accounts, will consider the thesis here proposed as a gigantic paradox. This cannot very well be helped. I am simply and honestly concerned with what appears to me to be the essential truth for which we have been searching ever since the beginnings of Unitarianism in the sixteenth century and rationalistic Deism in the eighteenth. The 'thoroughgoing eschatological' exegesis [xiv] of the Gospels has led us up to the threshold of the gate which was finally thrown open to Western scholarship by Alexander Berendts of Dorpat as early as 1906. For twenty years no one has cared to walk into this hitherto unexplored field, where a good deal still remains to be done.
I should like to conclude with a word of sincere gratitude to all those who have so generously given me their material and scholarly help, without which I could not have undertaken and after many years of hard work carried through such an arduous task. First and foremost my unstinted thanks are due to Mrs. Alice Chalmers and Dr. James Loeb, who defrayed the huge cost of several thousand photostats of the various MSS.; to the former President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sergius von Oldenbourg, for procuring the necessary permits from his Government; to Prof. Benesevic for superintending the photographer's work and for much useful information; to Prof. Vasilij N. Istrin of the Russian Academy for various apographa from Slavonic Josephus MSS.; to Prof. Andre Mazon and his pupils MM. Antoine Martel and Boris Unbegaun of the Paris Institut des Etudes Slaves; to Prof£. Nikolas van Wyck and Berndt von Arnim of Leyden, and Prof. N . Bubnov of Kiev, now of Ljubiana, for their kind help in editing and analysing the Old Russian texts; to the Most Rev. Ḫakham Dr. Moses Gaster for the kind communication of transcripts and for a translation of the inedited Rumanian Josephus fragments, discovered by him, in his MS. 89; to the Right Rev. Grand Rabbin de France, Israel Levy, who directed my attention to the Paris Josippon MSS., and specially obliged me by copying for me a number of pages from the codex Edmond de Rothschild No. 24; to Messeigneurs Giovanni Mercati, Eugene Tisserant, and Giovanni Galbiati of the Vatican Library and of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana for kind information and for permission to reproduce various MSS.; to Prof. Charles Boreux of the Louvre and Prof. E. Rostagno of the Laurentiana in Florence for two important illustrations; to His Excellency Baron von Oppenheim for the photograph of the Ṣlebi types; to the late Dr. H. St. John Thackeray, who in the most painstaking and conscientious manner translated about 900 printed pages of the German original; to Dr. A. Haggerty Krappe, who completed, revised, and to a large extent completely rewrote this first draft, condensing it into its present shape. It is needless to add that [xv] neither is to be held responsible in any way for any of my theories, hypotheses, or valuations. To my great pleasure, Dr. Thackeray was able to accept certain essential results of my analysis, as the reader will see for himself by studying his admirable new book, Josephus, the Man and the Historian, New York, 1929. Dr. Krappe should not be held altogether responsible for the final literary form of the work. His already difficult task has been rendered even more arduous by my repeated additions to the text. Mr. Theodor Gaster has much obliged me by his kind help in reading the proofs and adding the last polish to the style of the translation.
And now, "καὶ ἡμεῖς [...] τρέχωμεν τὸν προκείμενον ἡμῖν ἀγῶνα" (Heb. xii. 1), which means, I believe, if translated from the stately and altogether admirable language of King James's Bible into a plain and more prosaic modern English, something like -
Let us run the gauntlet and be flogged along the line.
Robert Eisler
Paris, 1930
then anything in the rest of Josephus' works that describes/dates events related to how Christians wanted their origins to be perceived, is open for question.