Author Archives: Bob

About Bob

He is Emeritus Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and Islamic Law and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach and Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford. He holds a B.A. from Cornell University in Philosophy and Engineering Physics (1958), an M.A. from New York University in Near Eastern Studies (1966), and a Ph.D from Columbia University in Middle East Languages and Cultures and Islamic Law (1971). He was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and an American Endowment for the Humanities Fellow-in-Residence at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were first examined.

Interview for the JesusMysteries forum

Interview for the Jesus Mysteries forum, with Dennis Walker, May 15, 2012.

Dennis Walker: Your Ph.D. studies were in Islamic Law at Columbia. How did Christian origins and the Dead Sea Scrolls become your specialty?

Robert Eisenman: My general area of studies was in Middle East History and Religions. As such, I concentrated on Judaism and Islam.

My M. A. was in Hebrew and Near Eastern Studies at N.Y.U. At Columbia, I found working with the most famous Islamic scholar in the world, Joseph Schacht was inspiring.

He wrote: The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, Oxford. and was the Editor of The Encyclopedia of Islam for EJ Brill in Leiden. I found the methods he used revolutionary.

When I came to Cal State Long Beach, I encountered almost all Fundamentalist Christian Students. They were almost to a person interested in Jesus and the New Testament.

I found I could apply Schacht’s methods of Hadith/Tradition criticism which he applied to the Sunna of Islam to the traditions of early Christianity. This helped me immensely.

Then I found everyone was interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of my Master’s subjects. So when I put them altogether. This was what I got.

 

DW: In your first book, Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran, an E.J. Brill monograph published in 1983, you challenged the dominant paradigm of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, seeing the anti-Establishment themes in the DSS as aiming at the Herodian rather than the Hasmonaean rulers. What convinced you to go against the field?

RE: Well, it was clear from my own studies and the numerous lectures that I had been giving at that point for some 10 years that when you read the Dead Sea Scrolls over and over again, the ethos and approach of these documents were generally completely in line with the Maccabeans not opposed to them. In other words, the Dead Sea Scrolls could not be considered anti-Maccabean. Rather they had to be considered pro-Maccabean.

This, in effect, was the thrust of Cecil Roth’s ‘Zealot hypothesis’. He, anyhow, had come to grips with the uncompromising, aggressive and so-called ‘Zealot’ or non-Essene character or ethos of the writings. The only problem was dating. Establishment scholars had decided to place the larger part of the sectarian documents in a pre-‘Christian’ period and had done this on the basis of parameters that they considered totally convincing, that is, external parameters such as archaeology but, in particular, handwriting style or paleography – hardly a secure or well-established discipline.

But what there was in these documents was a reigning establishment that could best be referred to as ‘Wicked Priests’. Who could these be? They either had to be the compromising previous establishment before the coming of the Maccabees or the one who came after the Maccabeans. Why, because the ethos of the documents that were then known (the unpublished documents at that time didn’t change this to any extent – on the contrary, just reinforced it) made it clear that what we had before us were a species of uncompromising, aggressive, and certainly unaccommodating mindset. But ‘the internal evidence’ of the materials – that is, what the documents themselves said, which I always considered superior to the ‘external evidence’ such as it was bearing on these materials – had to be the determinant. This clearly pointed to the same compromising and pro-Roman establishment one encounters in the New Testament period.

For example, there were things like the emphasis on Habakkuk 2:4, ‘the Righteous shall live by his faith,’ the foundation piece of Christian theology such as it became, the brutality of the foreign armies invading the country who ‘adored their standards and worshipped their weapons of war’ (certainly the practice of Imperial Rome), the farming out of taxes by this overseas super power, the condemnation of niece marriage and polygamy, and the emphasis on ‘the Star Prophecy’ which we knew from Josephus played a part in the whole First Century and the run-up to the War against Rome – these were the kinds of internal things pointing towards the Roman/Herodian Period.

It was data of this kind that convinced me that the present ruling consensus among Qumran scholars was, not only completely unsophisticated and woefully out-of-touch, but basically totally wrong. Moreover, to add to this, was something I reiterated in the Introduction to my first book on the subject which you refer to, Maccabees. Zadokites Christians, and Qumran: A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins (E. J. Brill, 1983), which was basically an expansion of an article I was then writing. This was the clear anti-Maccabean bias inherent both in the mindset and, even if unconsciously, the writings of the scholars who were approaching this subject at the time – and unfortunately those still approaching the subject – who were basically either of a Jewish or Christian theological view.

Where so-called ‘Christian’ ones were concerned, one might have expected an anti-Maccabean mindset. This would not have been abnormal, but the casual observer might ask how could Jews have an anti-Maccabean mindset? As difficult as this might be to comprehend, that’s pretty obvious. Rabbinic Judaism or, for that matter, Jews in general have never had a high opinion of the Maccabees until recently. In fact, Rabbinate literature on the whole – if not overtly, then certainly covertly – does not have a positive view of the Maccabeans. In fact, one can hardly find a mention of them in the whole corpus and if and when one does, it is usually unflattering.

Of course, there is the non-inclusion of the Maccabee books in the Canon which was determined by Rabbinic Authorities after the fall of the Temple; but this mindset – which certainly cannot be described as positive or sympathetic – actually seems to go so far as to blame movements like the Maccabean one as the cause of the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the homeland. Therefore scholars emanating from religious backgrounds of this kind found it perfectly normal to view the Maccabean Establishment as a ‘Wicked’ one. Some of us new, more Zionistic authors (believe it or not, I am still persecuted by Israeli scholars and societal institutions) did not.

 

DW: Your follow-up to MZCQ, another Brill monograph, was a line-by-line reading of the Habakkuk Pesher. One thing that stands out is the close attention you pay to the vocabulary, the language of the texts. Did your background in both literature and Islam equip you for this?

RE: This comes from a line by line and word for word repeated reading of the text to classes over a 25-year Period. But as you correctly imply, my background in literature, which was one of my majors during my undergraduate years at college, also played a part. I had learned in such classes and those of my 2nd major Philosophy that instructors conducted such classes, not by following notes or pre-arranged lecture outlines, but by reading the texts themselves – commenting on, analyzing, and illuminating them.

This I found to be the most effective way, not only of teaching classes in atmospheres such as this, but of keeping student interest. Students weren’t interested in ‘canned lectures’ which, as it were, just put them to sleep. They wanted something fresh and exciting and, since our classes at a great public university like California State University Long Beach with 35,000 students had to be interesting in order to survive and not be cut; this, I found this to be the best way of presenting material as it was both a fortuitous conjunction of professional and intellectual development and survival because in this way every lecture was fresh and original and the texts could speak for themselves.

You have to look at the ‘internal data,’ as I said – given the less-than-secure nature of what could be considered ‘external data’ in a subject like the Dead Sea Scrolls. ‘External data’ where these were concerned included archaeology, the results of paleography such as they were, and even the carbon dating. Unfortunately, in a moment of inadvertence, I myself had called for this last-mentioned procedure in the midst of the debate over the release of the Scrolls but not to achieve ‘absolute’ dates – which were for the most part impossible given the margins of error in question – but ‘relative’ dating of the different manuscripts just to test the accuracy of the so-called paleographic sequences then considered both operative and sacrosanct as determinants.

This last turned out to be the most damaging effort I initiated because the public were 1) just not aware of its limitations and 2) did not understand how ‘relative dating’ as a procedure might differ from ‘absolute dating.’ Consensus scholars, who had never called for these tests or felt the need for them in the first place, were quick to capitalize on this ignorance – being for the most part ignorant of such fine-points themselves.

But here’s where Islam comes in and plays a part. The studies in Islam – specifically Islamic Law – I had undertaken at the end of my graduate Ph. D. career gave me the basis for understanding ‘tradition’ research, as I explained above, and how various ‘traditions’ or ‘hadith’ (news) could represent the positions of various schools both early and late. This gave me the understanding of how to determine historical fact from retrospective tradition imposition or more literary mythological representations transposed backwards in time.

My teacher, Professor Joseph Schacht, was the Editor of The Encyclopaedia of Islam and the foremost expert on Hadith criticism in the world – and you could consider what we call ‘the New Testament’ just another form of what the Muslims call ‘Hadiths’, that is, ‘News’, or ‘Good News’. This basically was my fundamental training and it helped me beyond anything I could imagine connect what were being called the Dead Sea Scrolls with what was later being retrospectively represented in the Gospels and later literature.

One caveat here, the Pauline Corpus, where demonstrably authentic, provided an entirely opposite picture and harmonized well, not only with events, but also the vocabulary in the Dead Sea Scrolls; so, once again, here too a line-by-line and even a meticulous word-by-word familiarity with the vocabulary and emphasis of the Scrolls themselves was absolutely necessary and, not only did my repeated classes in these subjects year after year, term after term, help me to achieve this; but this is what I have tried to achieve in my work. Some may regard this as tedious, but nothing less will suffice.

 

DW: Those books were produced well before all the Scrolls were publicly available. Did you feel at the time that ‘consensus’ scholars generally wanted to keep these texts not only hidden from view in many cases, but also wanted the public to see them as only distantly related to the New Testament texts?

RE: Well, not exactly. As you correctly surmise, it was these ideas and these books that led me to campaign for the release of all the Scrolls – and this in unexpurgated editions without the usual commentary. Why? Because the public then came to see such commentaries, being ‘officially sanctioned’ or so it thought, as the last word.

The idea that such ‘consensus scholars’ or members of the ‘International Team’, as it came to be called, purposefully wanted to keep such documents hidden – and I think I originally coined the term ‘consensus scholars’ – was not really mine but more people like Baigent and Leigh in their Dead Sea Scrolls Deception. Of course, psychologically or, shall we say, spiritually these ‘consensus scholars’ were intent on distancing these documents as far as possible from ‘Christian’ origins in Palestine but I’m not even sure this was as purposeful as you imply.

For my part, I did not really think they themselves understood that there actually was a relationship to ‘New Testament texts,’ as you put it, or ‘Christianity’ as it were – whatever this was in Palestine/Judea in this period. I never gave them this credit. So convinced were they of the correctness of their view of ‘the external data’ – particularly a pseudo-science such as paleography with quite large error parameters as I explained – they just never really saw any close connection with things like the New Testament so how could they be frightened?

Moreover, if you took the New Testament to mean solely what we now call the Gospels, their attitude was quite understandable and, for the most part, largely correct as there was very little relationship. This was like comparing fiction to reality or, if one prefers, apples to oranges. Few people bothered looking closely at the vocabulary of the Pauline corpus because they didn’t really consider it had a relationship to any extent to the Scrolls – that is, before we started pointing it out and focusing on it.

People like Frank Moore Cross, the doyen of Dead Sea Scrolls Studies in America, really had no speciality in this area anyhow. His speciality was perhaps some ten centuries earlier – Canaanite literature, if you want to call it that – so how could he and International Team scholars like him and those people following them (more or less like lemmings) correctly perceive the relationship to materials like the Letter of James in the New Testament or the authenticated letters of Paul such as Galatians 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians, Philippians, and such like? They could not.

Therefore, I never really blamed anyone for suppressing the Dead Sea Scrolls for ideological reasons and not just plain empire-building or turf wars – except perhaps someone like Father Milik. Where he was concerned, the perception and insight might have been a little bit deeper. Milik even suggested in the Introduction to the work he finally published, Ten Years of Discovery in the Judean Wilderness, that the group in question – which of course he was referring to as ‘Essenes’ – would be like early Christians (as he conceived of them) except they did not have a really developed notion of the Gospel or Pauline concept of ‘Jesus’ or ‘the Supernatural Christ’!

How surprising! But, of course, this would be true because there was no developed conception of ‘Jesus’ or ‘the Supernatural Christ’ at this time in Palestine or even much later, as the concept was Greek as Paul and others announced it, in any case, in their travels in the Dispersion or overseas in and from the mid-50s onwards. So in Palestine there was something else, ‘the Messianic Movement’ as I liked to call it because the Scrolls were, if nothing else, certainly ‘Messianic’ – and this was, for lack of a better term, the original ‘Messianic Movement’ if one preferred to call it this.

So, I never accused anyone of purposely suppressing the Dead Sea Scrolls for ideological reasons – still don’t (as I said, this was more Baigent and Leigh’s and their imitators’ approach and they got good mileage, financially speaking, out of it). For me, the situation was more subtle. What was clear from what they were doing is that they were empire-building and building academic and scholarly monopolies that not only controlled all publication and reviews of publications, but gave them full control interpretation-wise of the materials and even, moreover who got hired and where; so what developed was a kind of academic curia.

It followed, therefore, that In order to be admitted to this curia you had to adhere to certain views. But this is to a certain extent almost always true in graduate studies. You have to have the same or similar ideas of your ‘Dr. Vater’ as they call him in German – the person who directed your research. Otherwise you really could not be expected to advance and, if you didn’t, you might as well quit. This was not only a problem in Qumran studies but elsewhere too then, but in Qumran Studies it became very serious. As I put it in my Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, ‘control of the manuscripts meant control of the field’ and this problem extended for some 30 years from the early 50s when the Scrolls were first discovered (though the Israelis did at first allow everything they had bought to be published) to the mid-80’s; and this is what I and then others who came to grips with this problem started to agitate against.

I really didn’t expect to find any new or significant materials in the unpublished data. I just wanted to get away from Establishment’s Editio Princeps official interpretations, as it were, which gave the public the artificial idea that such ‘official’ or ‘semi-official’ interpretations were, so-to-speak, frozen in stone. This was the kind of interpretation that we were trying both to undermine and open up by ‘letting a thousand voices sing’ as I put it in my Introduction to James Robinson’s and my Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is what happened when the Scrolls became in their unedited, unreconstructed, and un-interpreted form free for everyone to look at and free for everyone to interpret for themselves.

 

DW: The picture of first century CE Judaea is that it was a pretty bleak time for most of the population. Is the gospel picture strike you as accurate?

RE: This is a pretty good question. Of course, in order to properly study the Dead Sea Scrolls, you must read both the Maccabee Books and Josephus very closely. Of course it is a very bleak, as you put it, though, obviously, there was a lot of interest and enthusiasm in the burgeoning ‘Messianic Movements’ as I have explained and which were emerging in opposition to and hopefully ultimately replace both the Herodian and Roman regimes.

This is also the picture somewhat in the New Testament or the Gospels, but for the opposite reasons because the Gospels – if you can refer to such a multitude of them like this – have been, unfortunately, completely pacified and Hellenized and the real historical picture only occasionally peeks through. Again, unfortunately, this is the general public perception of the period as well – and one means by this, not just the religious public, but also even the secular one because both have grown up on and are familiar with Gospel stories – and are completely unaware of the rather distorted nature of their lens because for almost two millennia so many before them have credited this picture as an historical one or that of true history.

Even today, one sees how impossible it is for either the unschooled or unlettered – nay even the lettered – to distinguish literature from true history. This is a skill only a very small number of highly-sensitized and critically-minded aficionados are able to embrace, since to run against an entrenched spiritual and conceptual axis that has been operating for some sixteen-seventeen centuries now is very difficult for anyone with just a finite, comparatively minuscule time of existence on this earth. How are such persons to stand against almost all of history, yet this is what a proper understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls allow, nay, demand one to do.

So yes, one must expect the reading public to start with a reading knowledge of these early sources but one cannot expect this to be very prevalent in a large segment of the population. This would also include Islamic populations, Hindu populations, Buddhist populations, or almost any other world cultural elites who, because of the insistent way these materials from the Western world have circulated and penetrated their cultures (who in the world, for instance, has not heard of ‘Jesus’?), have come to accept them as authentic stories or authentic history as well. Therefore, the barriers against developing this kind of insight into any of these materials in any widespread way are almost insurmountable.

To start with, as just signaled, one must have an almost meticulous understanding of the works of someone like Josephus, but even his lens must be corrected, as we suggested, for the pro-establishment, anti-agitator/’Messianic’/’Zealot’ (he even seems to have first coined the designation) enthusiast whom he so despises because he blames them and their agitation for the deaths of number of his friends and his own discomfiture. So, like a space telescope whose lens has been distorted, even the images of an historian like Josephus (to say nothing of the Gospels) must be corrected; and this is a skill which is almost impossible to expect in the general population. Even for persons, such as those in your discussion milieu, this task can be Herculean.

But having said this – yes, the Gospel picture, too, is completely ahistorical or, if one prefers, absolutely distorted and has, as I have said, nothing to do with ‘true history’ but rather period literature and its lens must be corrected by using the Dead Sea Scrolls as well even as early Church testimony about people like and the person of James, including how James emerges by refraction in and through the lens of the Pauline corpus, to say nothing of the Book of Acts.

Though I have been criticized for the length or what some have called ‘the density’ of my books, without length of this type or density and the complete presentation of sources for the general reader as remarked above, this task is virtually impossible for the general reader to undertake in any serious and/or convincing manner. Just as in the social sciences or reading a work by, say, Karl Marx, I hope lengthy and heavy-duty works of this kind can help give the reader the tools, he or she will need to penetrate this literary and historical labyrinth and move forward.

For a start, one must also correct the inaccurate picture of the First Century which, while bleak, was essentially one of utter turmoil ending with the destruction of the Temple and independent Jewish life in what the Romans started calling – using a term in Greek based on the Biblical term for ‘Philistines’ – the Province of ‘Palestine’.

Once one has developed the insight and the tools to start to correct the retrospective historical presentations of outside and overseas documents, like a giant snowball rolling down a hill, feeding upon themselves as more and more people unfamiliar with the true situation in Palestine and hostile to Jewish revolutionary and ‘Messianic’ ideals motivating it, took over the production and course of this literature; then one can begin to come to real grips with questions like the true meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the real Historical James, and finally what most people, of course, are most interested in and want to know, who was the Historical Jesus.

 

DW: There are two things in particular that stand out for me in your more recent books that we don’t see elsewhere: the Helen and Izates conversions and certain Scroll texts like the Damascus Document as providing a surprising amount of material for the NT texts. If that’s accurate, did you always know you were headed in that direction or did this insight come gradually?

RE: Again a good question. No, these were things that developed out of my research and lengthy exposition of these matters. Perhaps the key moment of insight came at the climax of my James the Brother of Jesus when I discovered the similarity of the conversion in Acts of the Treasurer of the Ethiopian Queen returning from Jerusalem on his way to Gaza (the gateway to Egypt) with the conversion of the two sons of Queen Helen in Josephus and also as reflected in Talmudic literature (which knows the actual passage from the Bible as opposed to what Ananias and his unnamed companion – Paul? – are teaching, that the ‘Zealot’ teacher from Galilee is using to convert them and convince them to circumcise themselves, Genesis 17:27), set in the Kingdom of Adiabene in today’s Kurdistan and Northern Iraq and Syria; and saw the similarity between the two Queens, Acts’ ‘eunuch’ allusion (the Roman view of circumcision), and Helen’s and Paul’s ‘Antioch Community”s famine-relief operations.

Not only did this give me a good insight into the working method of Acts’ authors, but it is why my attention began to shift to Queen Helen whom I came to see as very important in the support of many of these movements – not the least of which being, as just noted, her famine-relief efforts, celebrated in both Josephus and the Talmud, when she sent her Treasury agents down to Egypt to buy grain paralleling this story about ‘the Ethiopian eunuch’ in Acts (there is so much more buried here, it is difficult to describe but your readers no doubt know the most of it); but also her rich gifts to the Temple, again described both in Josephus and Talmudic literature (here the golden candelabra given by her and her son to the Temple is still pictured as the central item in the booty displayed on Titus’ Victory Arch in Rome), not to mention her son, whose construction of her burial monument in Jerusalem rivals that of any other burial monuments we know from this period.

Nor is this to mention, either, the role of her descendants, who triggered the final Uprising against Rome and martyred themselves on the Road to Beit Horon, nor her seeming involvement with a Simon Magus-type character at some point in her career, nor her relation, for instance, to Nazirite oath procedures so important to Qumran as well. All these matters helped focus my attention on her, her sons, and their conversion to a different form of Judaism than Paul and Ananias were preaching.

Moreover, all the time I had spent meticulously analyzing almost every line of the Damascus Document called my attention too to certain passages seeming to relate to a cadre of Gentile adherents and God-Fearers as supporters of the positions and the Community at Qumran. For instance the use of the term ‘Nilvim‘ or ‘Joiners’ in the interpretation of Ezekiel 44:15 in the 3rd and 4th columns was particularly illustrative of this (this is what I have meant by a meticulous reading of the texts themselves, not people speaking about the texts!). In addition, as one moved through the Document, one could see that there were expressions like ‘raising the fallen Tent of David in a Land north of Damascus’ that also began to point towards an area such as that of Edessa and the Edessenes (Helen’s supposed husband and Izates’ father’s homeland), but also Adiabene.

Finally one could see in the closing Columns that one was addressing this same cadre of Gentile ‘God-Fearers’, ‘for whom a Book of Remembrance would be written out’ (cf. Jesus’ words at the Last Supper) as well as Jews. These were the things that began to focus my attention on Northern Syria and the matters that were transpiring there. Moreover, all these were set in a 1st century CE provenance and that is why a good deal of the attention of a book like my New Testament Code turned its attention to these areas and these issues.

Of course, when one did focus on these issues, one began to realize that even the term ‘Damascus’ or ‘Land of Damascus’ itself was a kind of code, that is, ‘the New Covenant in the land of Damascus’ was another version of what Paul was calling ‘the cup of the New Covenant in his (Christ’s) blood’ of Christ – in Hebrew ‘Dam‘ and ‘Chos‘ even though they rendered in the Greek formulation, were the words for ‘cup’ and ‘blood’. There was very little chance that this could be simply accidental. So the two ‘New Covenant’s had to be related both in kind and orthographical similarity.

There was clearly a play on words going on somewhere either in the Pauline/Gospel formulations that were to my mind later variations, or in the original Qumran allusion which was, in fact, the direct opposite of what one finds in the Pauline and New Testament configuration, that is, instead of basically the Book of Acts version of these things, we were now talking about a rededication to the Covenant of Moses or, as the Damascus Document puts it so eloquently, ‘to raise the Holy Things up according to their precise specifications.’ Of course, in Acts and in the Pauline corpus generally and the retrospective Gospel portrait of Jesus – and I use the term ‘portrait’ advisedly – Paul and others are learning not to call any man or thing impure or profane. In other words, we are not to raise the Holy Thing up according to their precise specifications as in the Damascus Document, but the opposite and that is the importance of Peter’s tablecloth vision on the rooftop in Jaffa in Acts.

This is the Gospels’ new ‘Jesus’ and this of course is the very opposite of what was going on in Palestine in the First Century and in particular, the Dead Sea Scrolls. So yes, these are the things that grew out of what some may call my ‘over-dense’ writing and my need to express these things meticulously and in their totality as well as in my lectures, almost all of which are now free on youtube – but more my writings. It was necessary to set these things forth in detail so the private enthusiast would have everything at his or her fingertips.

So, again, yes – my attention became more and more focused on these aspects of the Damascus Document and its parallels or, shall we say their non-parallels or reversals, and the connecting these things to the Jamesian Community particularly in Northern Syria – as well as the later retrospective New Testament portraiture of these matters or their outright Pauline reversal. I think your audience has perhaps realized these things but your question helps to further focus attention on them.

 

DW: Do you see the Pauline redeemer myth as something arising in gentile environs? Could this idea of the Messiah dying be thought of as a ‘Jewish’ idea?

RE: Well clearly, the idea of a living and dying God who is going to be resurrected in the here and now is a non-Judaic idea. Moreover, the idea of an almost God-like Messiah again has no connection with Palestine at all, nor an actual immediate ‘resurrection’ and not at the End of Time (and this for all ‘the Righteous’ not just ‘the Messiah’!), which is nowhere envisioned. All these are non-Jewish and Hellenistic if one prefers or even Egyptian.

Of course, you can hark back, as documents like the Gospels try to do, to Daniel’s apocalyptic presentation of ‘one like a son of man coming on the clouds’; but this is meant to evoke the coming of the Heavenly Host in apocalyptic vengeance and Glory as the War Scroll from Qumran, much as the Letter of James, in key passages definitively evokes and describes.

Still, the general Gospel or New Testament presentation and Christianity’s to follow is based on an improper and even probably a reversal of the meaning originally in Daniel. Daniel avers in straight-forward Aramaic that he ‘saw one like a son of man riding on the clouds’ – an obvious impossibility even for him since ‘men’ don’t ride on the clouds; but the point was that whoever or whatever was ‘riding on the clouds’ was ‘like a son of man,’ i. e., had the appearance of ‘a son of man’ even though he wasn’t, meaning that, in our English, he looked like a man. There was no such thing like ‘the Son of Man’, this being an obvious figment of the New Testament artificers imaginations.

‘Son of man’ in Hebrew even to this day is the way one expresses ‘being a man’ and this is particularly the case in the Israel of today, where people often say ‘be a Ben-Adam‘ – meaning ‘be a son of Adam,’ ‘Adam’ and ‘Man’ being the same word, that is, ‘be a man.’ So, again, even here the fact is that there is no such thing as an expression or persona like ‘the Son of Man’. This in itself is a complete misnomer, a misunderstanding of the original Hebrew or Aramaic and probably a purposeful obfuscation of the original. At the very least, it was written by people in a more Hellenistic or non-Judaic environment who had no idea what they were talking about.

But in the Bible also, Prophets use the term to refer to themselves, the most notable of whom being Ezekiel who is constantly using the phrase ‘son of man’ to refer to himself – probably to distinguish himself from an Angel, e.g., ‘son of man prophesy against the nations,’ ‘prophesy against the peoples’. Here, he is undoubtedly addressing himself. So the whole idea of ‘the Son of Man’ wherever it occurs is a complete misnomer and would show the reader that we are in a total non-Jewish alien environment.

To go back, however you want to look at this, the idea of a living and dying or to be more precise, in this case a dying and living Messiah, is completely at odds with any conceptuality that would have been understood or known in Palestine at this time. But of course, as you correctly imply it has everything to do with how these sorts of god-like figures were seen elsewhere in the Mediterranean World outside of Palestine.

One can see views of the same conceptuality in the tomb paintings of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and how to enter the environment of the gods in ancient Egyptian mythology and folklore. It runs through the whole Book of the Dead, a good ten or fifteen centuries earlier – instructions for how to become a living and dying God or a dying and living God.

The same is true in the Hellenistic Roman world where figures like Alexander – probably influenced by this kind of earlier Egyptian practice and ideology – start to claim that they are descendants, not of their own fathers, but of much more important supernatural deities. This, then, becomes transferred to the Roman Emperors in succession to him, who seem to feel they have to make the same kinds of claims – particularly someone like Augustus, with whom it seems to really have begun, has to start to claim that he is the son of a Jupiter or whomever, since he wasn’t really the son of Julius Caesar or anyone like that; and then this idea of being the son of God starts to permeate the whole Julio-Claudian line and Emperors up to the time of the fall of the temple and the fall of that line.

Each member, in turn, had to declare himself the son of God or some such phenomena so obviously, if you were going to compete in the Greco-Roman world with these kind of conceptualities, the Messiah-type person you are trying to disseminate had to incorporate many of these kinds of qualities. This kind of material had already been circulating in the Horus/Isis/Osiris theology, also from Egypt, and it was widespread in Mithra and other Greek Mystery Religion materials that someone like Paul, familiar with the part of the world now called Asia Minor (but then just ‘Asia’), would have known.

The claims put forth on his behalf have him coming from Tarsus in Southern Asia Minor or Northern Syria, however you want to put it; but in my work, as you may know, I identify him clearly as an Herodian – which family had, in any event, already spread their influence into these areas under Roman sponsorship too.

Paul’s ‘Herodian’ roots are very apparent, not only in his ideology and Acts picturing his connections to the highest circles of Jerusalem, but also at the end of his greetings in Romans – if you want to credit these – when he speaks of his ‘kinsmen’, in particular, referring to one he sends greetings to whom he refers to as ‘my kinsman Herodion’, meaning ‘the littlest’ or ‘youngest Herod’ – not a very common name.

In the same passage, he sends his greetings to ‘those in the household of Aristobulus’, probably Herodias’ nephew by that name and ultimately the infamous Salome’s second husband, both of whom had been exiled to Rome – and probably, too, Paul’s own first cousin and the father of this telltale ‘youngest’ or ‘littlest Herod’ referred to in 16:11.

I give the genealogies in my James the Brother of Jesus and New Testament Code books as your participants probably know but, once again, I think I was probably one of, if not the, first to identify Paul as an Herodian. Of course, both the sociology and theology of his approach could also have led us to the same conclusion – not least, the claim to be of the ‘Tribe of Benjamin’, an extremely archaizing one saved for groups like the Herodians and in his case, of course as he says, implying being a ‘Hebrew’, but not really a ‘Jew’ – a claim he never really makes for himself in any explicit way anyhow. This is also the way Edomite/Idumaean genealogies as set forth – also in terms of Benjamin – both biblically and in Josephus.

So, yes, living and dying Redeemer myths of this kind are not found at Qumran but rather, starting with the Pauline corpus, where authentic, and down through the rest of the New Testament which has to be seen as being, for the most part, written or compiled after the fall of the Temple. After this, they turn into the ‘Christianity’ we are all so familiar with. As for Palestine proper, as the Scrolls anyhow like some gigantesque time capsule make clear – whether considered Maccabean or later Herodian, still neither edited or redacted – these kinds of Hellenistic/Roman conceptualities just were not present in a native Palestinian milieu.

 

DW: Your reconstruction of the person of James seems to undercut the possibility that the Jesus of the gospels existed as such. You’ve also said we really have no independent information for Jesus as we do for James. James emerges as the revered Zaddik and preeminent leader. Some believed the destruction of Jerusalem was tied to James’ demise. Is there anything to suggest that Jesus even existed as a real figure in first century Judea?

RE: This is a very difficult question to answer. I do not say there was no ‘Jesus’ in Palestine or Judea of the First century. Even the idea of James the brother of Jesus or that he had a brother named ‘James’ or that James was the brother of someone or something important and it was not just a honorific title of some sort, points to the fact of an actual ‘Jesus’ character of some sort in Palestine previously. That’s why I say in my James book and elsewhere that perhaps the best proof that there ever was a ‘Jesus’ was the fact of his brother James (in this sense, that Paul only calls James ‘the brother of the Lord’ – never of ‘Jesus’ – is a little disconcerting).

Of course the partisans and artisans of the so-called ‘James ossuary’ have understood this and that is why they are so intent on proving the authenticity both of the ossuary and the content of its inscription because, clearly, if someone is going to be called ‘the brother of’ of someone, that person must have been very important indeed.

But, of course once again, the recent James ossuary trial is misunderstood by those trying to draw some final conclusions from it. They’re quick to jump on the fact that the forgery charges against those being charged with this were dismissed or, at least, declared ‘unproven’. For them, this proves something when, of course, it proves nothing at all – only that there was insufficient proof against them – which was obviously going to be the outcome of the process from the start, not only because it took so long, but because to get sufficient proof of a such matters is next to impossible.

At the same time, however, they conveniently ignore the fact that certain lesser charges were, in fact, confirmed – a not insignificant happenstance. Still nothing about these proceedings, positive or negative, says anything about the authenticity of the inscription itself and, in particular the second part, seemingly in a different hand, though some deny this and that is the problem. Rather it just throws the whole matter back in the realm of uncertainty.

That is why I have said these kinds of matters have to be determined by the internal evidence, such as it is, not the external because internal evidence – though dependent on insight and a proper historiography – is more accurate. Evidence of this kind, of course, was just not considered because Courts prefer the external which in this instance was just not sufficient enough to say anything of certainty. Like scholarship in general, for the most part, they just do not consider it.

But to go back to the struggle over the ‘Jesus’ issue again. Again, another good witness to the fact that there was an Historical Jesus of some sort is Paul’s information, though it is clear Paul was not an eye-witness to anything. Nevertheless, he does insist in some places that someone was crucified at some point – in fact, the fact that there was a crucifixion of some kind seems to be the only secure information he has about this person whom he ends up by denoting ‘Christ Jesus’ – whatever he meant by that.

So, one is not particularly arguing with the fact of whether an individual who was a brother of another individual we call ‘James’ or ‘Jacob’ and came to an unhappy end, crucifixion – an end that was usually reserved for people who had committed some heinous crime or other, ‘heinous’ according to the Roman definition which usually meant seditious, subversive, or insurrectionary activity of some kind because, from the time of Spartacus Uprising (also documented by Josephus, as well as other early Roman historians), crucifixion was an exemplary punishment telling the population, ‘you see, this horrific fate is what is going to happen to you if you step out of line in some fashion or other’. But, as everyone knows, crucifixion is a punishment forbidden by Jewish law and this is true even in the Dead Sea Scrolls which give pretty clear indication of an outright disapproval of this kind.

No, what I am saying and have been saying is that the picture we have of this ‘Jesus’ in the Scripture, which we are so enamored of and honor to such an extent, is unreliable, inaccurate, retrospective, and mostly fictitious as well. In fact, I have been insisting that this picture is really the reversal of what had to have happened in the Palestine of this period.

Otherwise, there could be no real reason for such a demise other than those I have outlined above (the Romans did not normally make mistakes!) – except perhaps if the Jews were lying to or fooling them in some way. This, of course, is the implication of the picture that has come down to us and everyone knows this; and this is the problem that has haunted the Jews over some twenty centuries of their history – playing a role too in the horrific Holocaust in our own century that even Pope John XXIII, much to his credit, has acknowledged.

So this is how fearful and terrifying such misrepresentations, mythologizing, and fictionalizing can be. So no, all I’ve tried to do is to rescue the Historical Jesus from this kind of obfuscation and I think, to some extent, I have succeeded though it is hard for people to realize that the picture they so cherish and love is a literary and not a completely historical one, largely in line with Pauline theology and dialectic and that of other teachers like him which later turned into the ‘Christianity’ we know.

So, to repeat, we are not denying the existence of the Historical Jesus. On the contrary, we are saying that who and whatever he was had to be a reflection or replica of and not dissimilar to his closest living relatives, associates, and successors, i.e., individuals such as James if we entertain the ‘brother’ relationship.

As for the fall of Jerusalem, it is clear from Josephus and the other early Church Fathers who saw the still-extant version of a different and seemingly original and earlier Josephus in the libraries of the Middle East, particularly Caesarea – people like Hegesippus, Origin, Clement, and others – who averred that in the copy they saw, the Jews considered the fall of Jerusalem to be connected to the removal of James theZaddik. In fact, later theologians like Constantine’s Eusebius and Jerome and Epiphanius in the next century rail against them for having admitted this.

Other documents, such as Wisdom and its derivative literature, including at Qumran, make it clear that the world depended upon or was sustained by the existence of the Righteous – in Kabbalistic tradition, ten of them. The Righteous Teacher at Qumran or in the Dead Sea Scrolls was clearly just such a Zaddik or Righteous One. This is what it means to be a Righteous Teacher or Teacher of Righteousness. In fact at Qumran, every passage where ‘the Righteous Teacher’ is mentioned, the underlying biblical text being analyzed is a ‘Zaddik‘ one. This is rather startling if one inspects them.

Furthermore, it makes sense that the Jews who were sympathetic to an individual like James would have reckoned the fall of Jerusalem to be in some way connected to his removal because the two events occurred in such close proximity or succession to one another. As I have argued in almost all my work, the idea of ascribing the fall of Jerusalem to an event that happened perhaps forty years before that fall is only convincing to unschooled and generally somewhat naive audiences who knew nothing about the history of Palestine – such as the kind that existed outside its borders and still is in wide existence today, but now all over the world.

This is another example of how events from the lives of others – in this case Jesus’ seemingly closest relative, follower, and even successor – are retrospectively absorbed in the portrait of the life and death of that person the Gospels designate as their ‘Jesus’. This does not mean that there was no such person as Jesus per se as you asked. It only means that, according to the documents we have, which are so overwritten, retrospective, and highly mythologized or, if one prefers, Hellenized; there is almost no way of getting through to the really core factual information concerning him.

 

DW: What kind of feedback have you got from younger scholars? Are people more open to your ideas in recent years?

RE: I get quite a lot of feedback and appreciation from younger scholars, but there are also very many who are afraid to identify themselves too closely with the works of someone like myself. The reason for this should be clear. There is no mileage in it, only trouble. They have seen how I have been treated by a good many members of the establishment, so they correctly conclude that what awaits them is not un-similar treatment or worse. Notwithstanding, because of those that have demonstrated their appreciation, I have had the good fortune to get my ideas out in quite a few books – not to mention, even a number of rip-offs – which have had pretty good circulation.

I have found a lot of admirers and a lot of imitators in fact too. As they say, ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ though one would appreciate a few footnotes now and then even from them. There are even imitators who don’t admit that they’re imitators. Actually – and I think I can take some of the credit for this – James has become a central focus of modern theological debate and consciousness. One caveat to this – people don’t like associating any of this with the Dead Sea Scrolls. They prefer to keep it only within the context of early Christianity.

One example of this is someone like Bart Ehrman. Though commencing his writing perhaps a decade or so after me and, if not borrowing at least utilizing many of the very same ideas I utilized; in his most recent Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (2012 – he devotes a whole book to this subject which I thought we covered somewhat above), he speaks about the ‘widely discredited views of Robert Eisenmann in his book James, the Brother of Jesus‘ and calls them ‘wildly speculative’ (I wonder if they are so ‘discredited,’ why does he use so many of them across the spectrum of his work – of course, as usual, without accreditation?).

Not only is he unable to spell my name correctly, but he even reproduces the title of my James book inaccurately: it’s James the Brother of Jesus not James, the Brother of Jesus (was this the work of his research assistant?). Never mind that by making such a gratuitous remark – even if only casually and in passing and delivered in a footnote (p. 355) – he is really only ‘discrediting’ himself and not me. I wonder where have my views been so ‘widely discredited’ (if one chooses to use such language) and in what way and how are they ‘wildly speculative’?

Of course, like so many others, he is really only talking about my views relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls, so he might better have referred toThe Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians (1996), The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (1992), etc., if he has read any of them. Still, by making such a gratuitous and insulting comment, even if only in a passing, he demonstrates the problem in this field and how little of my work he is actually familiar with and not refracted or reflected second or third-hand through others.

Even more to the point, he obviously has not taken the time to read them through and digest them with any diligence and understanding, so his ideas on the subject are themselves hardly to be ‘credited’ (again, if one chooses to use such language). Of course, it is painfully obvious that he knows next to nothing about the Dead Sea Scrolls, nor has even read through them with anything like the thoroughness many of your participants have.

The sources he (or his research assistant) does recommend in the same footnote (the only one in the whole book as far as I can see) are the usual suspects (if one can speak this way): Fitzmyer, Vermes, Vanderkam, etc., all, of course, being basically part of the same ‘Establishment consensus’ and having the same rather routine and somewhat run-of-the-mill points-of-view – none except Fitzmyer very original (especially Vermes).

Still, since people involved in the kind of subject matter Ehrman’s book from the title onwards proposes to deal with are mainly theological writers approaching the subject as secular academic scholars (Jew or Christian, it matters not) – many trying either to make the Historical Jesus more palatable to their constituencies or rescue him as far as possible from those trying to gainsay his existence, while still trying to appear to absorb at least the trappings of some of their ‘doubting Thomas’ approaches (not to mention, make a little money in today’s tough publishing market where the ‘airport book’ is the one that usually flourishes); most like him know next to nothing about the Dead Sea Scrolls, have never made a serious study of them, and – as just indicated – are therefore dependent upon the same rank-and-file of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that we have been dealing with since they were discovered in the late 1940s and throughout the 50s and 60s.

Not having made a serious study of the Scrolls themselves, they rely on the hearsay or word-of-mouth evidence or comments of people whom they consider have: and this is the problem in Dead Sea Scrolls studies today – not only the Scrolls, but other fields as well. Nevertheless, unfortunately however, ‘consensus’ or ‘Establishment’ thinking on the Dead Sea Scrolls has since re-formed as if the struggle over their release and interpretation of the last few decades never occurred; and, once again, we have people who are marginalized if they do not adhere to the establishment or ‘consensus’ line which is the gist of Ehrman’s comment if only in a footnote (nay, even in a footnote).

This is what frightens young scholars away just as it did their forebears, peers, and predecessors. Since they are in fear of their sponsors and dissertation directors, they hesitate to take any really controversial positions. I have even heard over the years of someone being told by their Harvard-trained and, therefore, ‘consensus’-minded and ‘Establishment’ thesis advisors to change his or her dissertation to reflect this. If such persons wanted to continue in the field, they were obliged to do this and, therefore, over time, not a few singularly qualified people have left it.

So the support has really come from the private aficionado, the turned-on non-professional, the person who makes it a personal exercise to follow all these matters and gain these critical expertises even if not in or outside the university; and, with the influence and effectiveness of the Internet, they have been very successful and become very widespread.

Therefore, as I have said, I have found a lot of my ideas, at worst parroted but at best reflected there and absorbed by large numbers of such internet-savvy and self-publishing savants in their attempts to rewrite this historical situation regarding Christian origins and the nature and authenticity of the story of ‘Jesus’ – people, again for instance, like those who take part in and participate in your forum. I am very honored by this and very pleased and most gratified by it.

It’s hard to expect any greater success than that and I don’t – particularly when one who is said to have written such ponderous book as some insist I have done. I am the first to acknowledge that they are both dense and not for the light-of-heart (though it might have been useful for persons characterizing my works in such manner to have actually read them). Still, without treatments of this kind, the ideas they incorporate regarding both the Scrolls and Early Christianity in Palestine could not have stood up to either scholarly or lay criticism as well as they have – and they have, as your participants well know even if some others do not.

It was necessary to argue the case fully and in detail, meticulously if you prefer and beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt (though now we are coming out with some compressed versions of my work; cf.: James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I and II); so the scholarly community could hardly – except for superficial asides of someone like Ehrman – ‘lay a glove’ on them, as it were.

As for the lay community, they had to have all the sources at their disposal, so they could argue with the credentialed ‘scholars’ so-to-speak, who so often tried to either ‘pull rank on them’ or ‘pooh-pooh’ them. This I have attempted to do in my work and, in this, I think I have been not a little successful in accomplishing; so I am quite glad to have found even the kind of relative openness to my ideas that I have found widespread across the internet and among dedicated aficionados like the ones you involve, if not the greater university community itself whom, as I said, rarely if ever read my works either in part or in their entirety.

Thank you for the opportunity of contributing to and participating in your web discussions. Keep up the good work, as they say, and don’t allow yourselves to be defeated or discouraged by any hostile ‘academicians’ or so-called ‘scholars’. These, in the end, will always be the hardest either to influence or bring over to the kind of thinking you represent since they have the most to lose by either acknowledging or entertaining it, largely because they would be seen as somewhat ridiculous by their peers if they were to deny the whole thrust of their previous academic work and training.

We must leave them like this, but should not expect any different from them or be discouraged in any way by them. You and your participants are the final judge of these things and you have sufficient information and data at your fingertips to make your own final, intelligent, and incisive judgments yourselves which will hopefully be full of insight.

The James Ossuary: Is It Authentic? (An Update)

Huffington Post, October 11, 2011.

The only trial in the world which seems to have taken longer than the Amanda Knox one in Italy is the extended “trial” over the so-called “James Ossuary” in Jerusalem. Like the former, which still gives promise of carrying on into several stages of appeal anyhow, the latter is largely concluded, though, unlike it, the only thing waiting to be announced is “the verdict.”

This, in the writer’s mind (as well as in that of the “defendant” and his well-known, rather “over-the-top” supporter, the Editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks), is a foregone conclusion. The latter two are probably correct in this evaluation as no consideration of “data” could possibly take this long (seven years and running) without a “finding” or “verdict” of “forgery unproven” (as actually in the Knox Trial) basically being the conclusion.

It is time, therefore, to take stock of where one stands with regard to this “Bone Box” — as it is sometimes called (as we have done before, but with somewhat less information) — so a verdict of “forgery unproven” will not come as too much of a shock to those who either know little or nothing about the situation or are sure some kind of unpleasantness was connected with it and its sudden, almost miraculous appearance (i.e., almost willy-nilly “surfacing,” as it were), just seemingly when one would have expected it to. Those who have this uncomfortable feeling should be comforted because there is something certainly worrisome and probably even unpleasant connected with it.

I have always insisted the appearance of this “Ossuary,” supposedly appertaining to “Jesus”‘ brother James, just when it did in 2002, was intimately connected with the publication of my (may I be so bold?) ground-breaking, 1,000-page “James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls” (Penguin/Faber & Faber/Watkins, 1997-98). That book put “Jesus”‘ brother “James” on the map so-to-speak.
I say “supposedly” and usually put “Jesus”‘ name in quotation marks because, first of all, one must be convinced there ever was a person resembling the Jesus we are all so confident we know so much about from the “picture” in the Gospels (I also use the word “picture” advisedly) before we can even start speaking about his putative successor and closest living relative, his brother James. In any case, as I have often expressed it, I find the latter more convincing, not so retrospectively enhanced (i.e., cf. below: It is not whether Jesus had a brother; it is whether the brother had a Jesus).

Before the publication of my James the Brother of Jesus (which was reviewed almost ecstatically on Apirl 24, 1997 in The Jerusalem Post), few had even heard of a “James” (“Jacob” of course being his Hebrew or Greek name) or, at least, spoken much about him — as the “defendant” in this Jerusalem “trial” (the focus of which being on the “forging” or “enhancing” of biblical-era artifacts, including this so-called “James Ossuary”) freely admits — meaning the fact of his existence and his importance to the question of “the Historical Jesus” (cf. the last sentence of my James the Brother of Jesus: “Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus,” or, put in another way: “Once we have found the Historical James we have found the Historical Jesus”).

Of course, this “defendant” hadn’t, but there were people who were also in the business of “antiquities collecting” (as it is sometimes euphemistically referred to) who had, namely the unnamed eminence grise behind Michael Baigent’s most recent and rather untypically somewhat lightweight, “The Jesus Papers” (Harper Collins, 2006). This person too is/was an “antiquities collector” — again, if that is the appropriate term for it — one of the most successful and possibly richest, who for many years kept a “display store” in the lobby of one of London’s poshest hotels in the Marble Arch area to “deal” with some of its most well-healed customers.
Yes, this “Jesus Papers”‘ entrepreneur knew all about “James the Brother of Jesus,” including such things as his Leadership of the “Early Church in Palestine” (“the Bishop of Bishops,” as he is referred to in Early Church texts, or, in the language widespread in the Dead Sea Scrolls, “the Mebakker,” “Inspector,” or “Overseer,” and the real “Leader” of “Christianity” everywhere — not just in Palestine and not “Peter”); because Michael Baigent, who had heard about him through me and had read all my books and heard many of my lectures, had and told him all about him as early as the mid-late ’80s when the two first began their relationship and/or became intimate.

It was at this time, too, that the latter purportedly showed Baigent (and, collaterally, told me about) “the Jesus Papers,” meaning a real “letter” supposedly written — get that, if you will — by “Jesus” to the Sanhedrin, that survived all the rain and inclement weather of Jerusalem and which this “antiquities collector” claimed to have found underneath the floor of a house he (just by chance) happened to buy in the Old Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Yes, believe that one and “I’ll sell you another Bridge in Arizonab” as the popular song would put it.

Yes, this second individual knew all about James, as well as how important finding an ossuary in Jerusalem, with the name “Jacob the son of Joseph” on it, would or could be (real ossuaries of this kind are plentiful enough in Jerusalem and one can see stacks of them in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s storerooms), even though “Joseph” probably wasn’t even this “James'” actual father; he wasn’t, in effect, even “Jesus'”, whatever one might make of the latter’s parentage.

In fact, add a few words like “brother of Jesus” to an extant inscription such as “James the son of Joseph” (that is, if the words had not already been added by some pious pilgrim from the third to fourth centuries C.E. onwards — one possible explanation of the “Ossuary” upon which Santiago de Compostela in Spain derives its fame — the two hands being clearly different (one, formal; the other, cursive) and said “Ossuary” goes up in value from $200 to perhaps $2 million (in this regard, its head cheerleader, Shanks, whom, when I first met him in the mid-’80s, too, seemed to me also to have hardly heard of James, having already opined, both on film and in his magazine, that this would be the only extant, really clear “physical proof” of “the Historical Jesus” (see “The Stone Box and Jesus’ Brother’s Bones“).

Plus, the one Israeli “antiquities collector” probably “knew” or had “dealings” of one kind or another at some point with the other (everyone in Israel more or less “knowing each other” but it is my impression that in some context the former has already admitted this). The second “collector” the Israeli Court was investigating and the Antiquities Authority were accusing of having added this pivotal “brother of Jesus” to the original inscription (rare enough in its time and place on any ossuary). This, along with creating a number of other questionable “artifacts.” This just goes to the point of the defendant’s claim of never having even heard of “James” before (I believe him) or knowing “Jesus” ever had “a brother” (I believe this, too). But, as we can see, others did!

In the “60 Minutes” segment from 2008, mentioned above, this “defendant” actually admits to interviewer Bob Simon to being in the business of “collecting” for some 30 years or so. Moreover, he even adds to this admission, mentioning how he sometimes even “repaired” or upgraded such “artifacts,” always “authentic,” of course (again see “The Stone Box And Jesus’ Brother’s Bones“).

It is not my place to comment on suspicious “artifacts” of this kind, nor the activities of these sometimes often nefarious and rather “underground” figures in the world of “antiquities collecting” or “dealing.” The Court will do that and the Court’s verdict, as much else in Israel, will probably come out, as I already said and as in most such things, to be “inconclusive” or “unproven” — that being the safest decision or position to adopt.

I speak from experience, having already had my own encounters with the Courts in Israel. At the highest level, these “found” that I and a colleague were “the Editors” of “The Publisher’s Forward” in the Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (B.A.S., Washington D. C., 1992), when I had never even seen its appendix or displays until after the book was published (the “Forward” was written and the displays compiled also by Mr. Shanks). Apparently, my colleague had, but they were never sent to me — I wonder why? — but he didn’t understand Hebrew that well, nor their significance, so he never forwarded these displays or appendices to me).

Despite the fact that I very carefully only characterized myself and this colleague (not wishing to claim too much credit) as “Arranged with an Introduction by.” But in Hebrew, the difference between “arranged by” as applied to organizing and choosing photographs, as opposed to “edited by,” as applied to something like a “Publisher’s Forward,” doesn’t exist, it being a rather poverty-stricken language. We were “found” by the Court to be “the Editors” of the book and responsible, therefore, for this same “Publisher’s Forward” — the final proofs for which, as I say, I never even saw.

When I did see them (the appendices, not the actual “Forward,” which I had protested against — that is, which included private letters that, as its Adviser, the Huntington Library had shared with me, to say nothing even of final proofs for the Forward itself), I inveighed against them most vociferously, as even The New York Times correspondent and others at the New York Press Conference, called to dramatize its publication in 1992, could testify to (my actual words being: “Shanks has urinated in our book, like a dog marking a fire hydrant”).

In any event, from the very first moment I heard about it, I never ceased protesting about the presence of this “Forward,” amounting to some 30 some pages, when my colleague and I had purposefully limited ourselves to writing an “Introduction” of some two to three pages. But I did not have control of that publication; nor did we need a polish copy of MMT, which was the ostensible reason for the 1992 suit against us, as we already had all the relevant photographs anyhow. In the end, “the Publisher’s Forward” was finally removed (or, shall we say, reduced in size), though after the fact, at my and the Court’s insistence.

But to go back to “the Ossuary”: If the two “antiquities collectors” worked together or simply just “knew each other” (it’s pretty clear they did know each other, nor did they ever deny it), then all the former had to do was tell the latter to be on the look-out for an authentic ossuary with the inscription “James the son of Joseph” (i.e., “Ya’cov bar Yosef’) and the rest would be history. Still, let’s be categorical about it: This might not have been the way it happened; this might only be one of the ways it could have happened.

In any event, everyone knows that people like the ever-critical Joe Zias (whom Shanks criticized, along with others, in a piece entitled “Lying Scholars,” B.A.R., May-June 3/30, 2004, pp. 48-62) claimed to have seen “the Ossuary” in an East Jerusalem antiquities store (this store, too, appears in Bob Simon’s “60 Minutes” program), years after “the defendant” claims he or his family “bought” it there. Zias gave just such testimony to the Court when called as “a witness.” But, according to the defendant’s “take” on the story (which also appears in Bob Simon’s “Report on the Mystery Surrounding the James Ossuary”), “the Ossuary” in question just sat unrecognized in a corner of his family apartment for years before a French epigrapher visited him and recognized the importance of the inscription.

Moreover, in the same program, in the presence of an investigator from the Israel Antiquities Authority, “the Ossuary” was shown to be kept in a lavatory somewhere above the defendant’s apartment “on the toilet” (this, too, Zias proudly and derisively has on display on his website). To add to this, in the presence of said investigator, “the defendant” is shown in another part of the apartment complex (or “laboratory”) to have various kinds of dental-type cutting or incising equipment and materials for doing just the kind enhancing, cleaning or upgrading activity he admits (with a straight face) to having occasionally done above to the interviewer.

But the most important part of the CBS program was the interview in Cairo, Bob Simon did following this, with an Egyptian craftsman/engraver/artificer, or what have you, named Marko Sammech. He not only admits to Simon that he has known and worked for said “defendant” (and, it would seem, other Israeli “antiquities collectors” as well) for 15 years and to having “inscribed several stone slabs just like” the Ossuary – -and also, by implication, perhaps “hundreds” of clay seals (for him or others?), Simon then shows him a picture of — then complaining, he hadn’t been paid very well. When told the value of these things, he is rather incredulous saying, “but these are just pieces of clay,” querying why anyone “would pay that kind of money” for them, and concluding, rather triumphantly, “Tell them to call me. I’ll make hundreds for them.”

In response, again the Editor of The Biblical Archaeology Review — to add to his 2004 article “Lying Scholars” — during a trip to Cairo coinciding with “the Arab Spring” tointerview Zahi Hawass (at the time a Government Minister), of course, took advantage of the occasion to go to “the suk” to interview this craftsman/artificer in his shop. The latter, by the looks of the interview, wasn’t talking very much, never having either been allowed, called or wishing to go to Jerusalem to testify; and, by the looks of the encounter too, was for all intents and purposes brow-beaten into an unenthusiastic recantation (B.A.R., May/June, 20ll). Who wouldn’t recant when faced with this redoubtable Editor on the warpath? I probably would, too. There, so far, is the “plot.” It’s up to the reader what to make of it.

For my part, in my work, I have always insisted on the importance of “internal data” — if it can be interpreted correctly — over “external data.” By this, I have always meant (as at “Qumran” — the name scholars give to the subject of “the Dead Sea Scrolls” to avoid repeating this tedious phraseology — it being the location of the River Wadi emptying into the Dead Sea where the Scrolls were found) what the documents themselves say and not the more imprecise conclusions of paleography, archaeology or even AMS carbon dating, such as these may be. In the case of “Qumran,” they are often at odds with the conclusions of what the texts themselves might say rendering the latter, in the end, impossible to interpret and mute; and this is still the case today.

Given the rather questionable nature of the precision of these “external dating tools” — often with a margin of error of + or – 100-200 years, even more — it is my view that they cannot stand in the face of “internal data.” To the contrary (see my sections on this subject in Chapter 2 of my follow-up, 1,000-page study, “The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ,” Watkins/Sterling/Barnes & Noble, 2006, pp. 40-64).

One can also apply this approach to “the James Ossuary” — and I did this on the very first day it appeared in an AP article, feeling that it was not accidental that it appeared so short a time after my work introducing the world to the subject, not to mention, as noted above too, its having been glowingly reviewed in The Jerusalem Post Literary Supplement by A. Auswaks (cf. “James vs. Paul: Robert Eisenman’s James the Brother of Jesus“). So the issue had to have been already well-known to aficionados in Israel.

Where “the internal data” is concerned, this would mean evaluating it by what the inscription on “the Ossuary” actually said and not simply on the basis of such “scientific” or “pseudo-scientific” tools as patina analysis (a “science” still completely in its infancy and, according to some, easily faked by would-be enhancers), paleography (anyone who was going to forge an inscription or add something to an existing inscription would be sure to get the hand-writing right! It’s just surprising the person, whoever he was, did this in a second, more cursive hand-writing style. He probably couldn’t or just didn’t dare to try to imitate the first) and, finally, archaeology. As already conceded, the ossuary is doubtlessly authentic, meaning from this period and, as already signaled as well, these are legion. That is not the question.

The question is what the inscription itself says and how likely it is (I don’t think AMS Carbon Dating has any application here though, as already noted as well, the “addition,” if authentic, may have been added by a third or fourth century C.E. pilgrim or thereafter; that’s how a similar ossuary might have gotten to Santiago de Compostela in Spain).

I summarized these points in a Oct. 29, 2002, op-ed I was invited to do for The Los Angeles Times about two weeks after “the James Ossuary” suddenly appeared (“A Discovery That’s Just Too Perfect: Claims that Stone Box Held Remains of Jesus’ Brother may be Suspect“). This article was completely done on the basis of “the internal evidence,” i.e., what the inscription itself said, as there was really no “external evidence” available at the time, except for paleography (the second part of which was obviously by a different hand or a different handwriting style, as noted above, or fraudulent. But let’s leave this aside for the moment). This “internal evidence” is just the area of analysis or expertise the Court in Israel did not consider at all; for, had it done so, the verdict would have been open-and-shut from the beginning.

Therefore, now that we are on the verge of just such a “verdict” in this matter, it is worth reproducing the arguments and analyses of this op-ed in their totality — almost nothing having changed in the interim and almost every word of which still rings true almost a decade later. So here it is:

“James, the brother of Jesus, was so well known and important as a Jerusalem religious Leader, according to First Century sources, that taking this ‘brother’ relationship seriously (as I have said in my published work) is perhaps the best confirmation that there ever was an ‘Historical Jesus.’Put another way, it was not whether Jesus had a brother, but rather whether the brother had a ‘Jesus.’ Now we are suddenly presented with this very ‘proof’: the discovery, allegedly near Jerusalem, of an ossuary inscribed in the Aramaic language used at that time, with ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’

An ‘ossuary’ is a stone box in which bones previously laid out in rock-cut tombs, such as those in the Gospels, were placed after they were retrieved by relatives or followers. Why do I find this discovery suspicious? Aside from its sudden miraculous appearance, no confirmed provenance — that is, where it was found and where it has been all these years (from the photographic evidence it seems in remarkably good condition) — and no authenticated chain of custody or transmission; there is the nature of the inscription itself.

There is no problem getting hold of ossuaries from this period. They are plentiful in the Jerusalem area, most not even inscribed and some never used. So confirmation of the Jerusalem origin of the stone avails nothing, nor particularly does the paleography. The Sorbonne paleographer, Andre Lemaire, authenticated the Aramaic inscription as from the year 63 CE. What precision — but why 63? Because he knew from the First Century Jewish historian Josephus that James died in 62 CE. How brilliant!

The only really strong point the arguers for its authenticity have is the so-called ‘patina analysis,’ which was measured at an Israeli laboratory and appears homogeneous. As this is a new science, it is hard for me to gauge its value. Still, the letters do seem unusually clear and incised and do not, at least in the photographs, show a significant amount of damage caused by the vicissitudes of time.

My main objection to the ossuary, however, is the nature of the inscription itself. I say this as someone who would like this artifact to be true, someone willing to be convinced. I would like the burial place of James to be found. Afterall, being the author of a book on the ‘James,’ I stand more to gain by its authenticity than most. But this box is just too pat, too perfect. In issues of antiquities verification, this is always a warning sign.

This inscription appears pointed not at an ancient audience — who would have known who ‘James’ (or ‘Jacob’/’Ya’kov,’ his Hebrew/Aramaic name) was — but at a modern one. If this box had simply said ‘Jacob the son of Joseph,’ I might have been willing to acknowledge it and it might pass muster. But ancient sources are not clear on who this ‘Jacob’s father really was. If the inscription had said ‘James the son of Cleophas,’ ‘Clopas’ or even ‘Alphaeus’ (as in the Gospels), all three probably being interchangeable, I would have jumped perhaps for joy. But ‘son of Joseph’? This is what a modern audience, schooled in the Gospels, would expect, not an ancient one.

Then there is ‘the brother of Jesus’ — almost no ancient source calls James this. This is what we moderns call him. Even Paul, our primary New Testament witness, calls him ‘James the brother of the Lord.’ If the ossuary said something like ‘James the Zaddik’ or ‘Just One,’ which is how many referred to him — including Hegesippus from the Second Century CE and Eusebius from the Fourth — then I would have more willingly credited it. But to call him, not only by his paternal, but also his fraternal name; this I am unfamiliar with on any ossuary and, again, it appears to me to be directly pointed at us.

This is what I mean by the formulation being ‘too Perfect.’ It just doesn’t ring true. To the modern ear, particularly the believer, perhaps. But to the ancient? Perhaps a later pilgrim from the Fourth or Fifth Century CE might have described James in this manner, but not during his lifetime. Nor is this what our paleographers are saying.

Finally, the numerous contemporary sources, I have already referred to, know the location of James’ burial site. Hegesippus, a Palestinian native who lived perhaps 50 years after the events in question, tells us that James was buried where he was stoned beneath “the Pinnacle of the Temple” in Jerusalem. Eusebius in the Fourth Century CE and Jerome in the Fifth say the burial site with its marker was still extant in their times and they seem actually to have seen it.

No source, however, mentions his bones being dug up and put in an ossuary. Our creative artificers presumably never read any of these sources — nor beyond the first few chapters of my book, James the Brother of Jesus, Penguin, 1998 — or they would have known better.”

 

This is what the “internal evidence” would say and it does not appear as if this evidence was ever much heard by the Court, since I, for one, can attest that I was never called to give evidence and I am supposed to be an “expert” on the subject. This evidence is still valid today, as nothing has changed in the interim, no matter what the final “verdict” of the Court turns out to be.

A “Court” cannot either measure or determine these things. A “Court” generally measures whether “the external evidence” is sufficient enough and, in this case, it more than likely will not be. But “internal evidence” is measured by one’s insight and intelligence, and one hopes and expects, these are still intact.

Israeli Geniuses: A Lesson in Strategic Imbecility

Jerusalem Post, September 17, 2011.

This article is actually part of a series, I have been doing, which should probably be called, “Downhill from Sinai.”

As an example, let us follow one particular string of decisions – or, better perhaps, “lunacies” – made by ostensibly intelligent people, long on tactical and political, short-range vision but short on strategic, long-range vision. These concern the question of “Palestine” and its origins – of course, now and always ‘in the news’ – since the Israelis themselves ‘created it’ in the aftermath of the 1967 War and, more particularly, the 1973 one. Prior to 1967, there was no “Palestine” as such – “Jordan” having already ‘gobbled it up’ – shall we say between 1948-50? But ‘officially’ in 1949.

Still, ‘the downhill slide’ I am speaking of really accelerated in the wake of the Disengagement Agreements, promoted by Kissinger, et. al., in January, 1974-75 and finalized by Carter and his Polish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1978-79 as the after-effects of the Six-Day War began to ultimately unravel. But before this, more particularly vis-a-vis “Palestine” itself, in the “refugee camps” of “Jordan” – a situation which has, once more, come into play in the now celebrated “Arab Spring” (wait till “Winter”) and in the protest demonstrations going on, even as we speak, in “Jordan,” some of which as in Cairo centering around the Israeli Embassy.

Nevertheless, before 1968-69 the so-called “PLO” – which had really only just begun to function under the more docile Ahmad Shukeiri as something of a political action committee in “Jordan” in 1964 – was not as militant as it became after Arafat’s take-over with his “Fatah Organization” after the Six-Day War. The “PLO” itself was not officially recognized as the representative body of “the Palestinian People” by the Arab League meeting in Morocco until 1974, but by that time, it was really all over but the shouting.

The ‘key’ moment really came in September, 1970 and “Black September” – ending in 1971 with the PLO being ‘expelled’ to Lebanon. This set up a new configuration of circumstances, whose after-effects are still being felt there today and everywhere. At the time, it was clear to the writer that the Israeli Government should have intervened on the side of “the Palestinians” – if one can call them this. One might call this hindsight, but it was not. The writer really thought, advocated this, and wished he could have shouted it in the ears of the Israeli Government at the time.

Instead, what did they do – perhaps at the behest of the U.S. Government, who knows? – but certainly their own. They warned the Syrians not to intervene and, for all intents and purposes, prevented them from entering Jordan to turn the tide in what was basically a Civil War, thereby saving the present-day Kingdom of Jordan. Of course to the Israeli Government at the time, this seemed perfectly rational as certainly the Jordanian Government of the day was far less militant and extreme than a Yasser Arafat-headed PLO.

But that didn’t matter. It was not rational. It was short-sighted. This is not to say, they should have allowed the Syrians to intervene, though this would have been better than what eventually occurred and what they eventually did. No, they should have intervened on the side of the Palestinians themselves, as Israel did not need a peaceful State in Jordan. It didn’t get one until much later anyhow. What the Israelis needed was a “Palestinian” one as the Mandate had originally called for in 1921 before the whole portion East of the Jordan River became “Transjordan” and two-thirds of “the Palestine Mandate” was cut away by misguided British leaders (i.e., Lawrence and Churchill) “to reward” the family of the Sherif of Mecca for some dubious support, powered by monetary rewards, in the First World War.

This unilateral ‘re-arrangement’ of the Mandate, of course – as many writers have since come to understand – forced the whole of the Palestinian-Jewish/Palestinian-Israel problem on to “the West Bank” and eventually “the Gaza Strip.” Setting up a Palestinian State in Jordan in 1970-71 would have had immeasurably positive effects instead of setting up the militant “Black September” Terrorist Organization in Lebanon, which then focused its ire – for peculiar reasons of its own – not on Jordan but on Israel. One knows the horrific effects of this, which have continued with ever-increasing efficacy and bloodthirstiness up to this day.

It can be objected, how would the Israelis have managed with a militant State in Jordan? They would have managed – as they always have managed; but then, at least, this militancy would have had an address and not become an ever-transmogrifying, footloose, and endless succession of terrorist outrages. Eventually a “Peace” would have been established, but the so-called “Palestinians” would have had their “State” and the area in between would and could have eventually ‘been negotiated.’

But what happened instead? After the “Disengagement Accords” of 1974-75 and the Carter–Brzezinski “Peace Agreements” or “Sinai Accords” of 1978-79, “Palestine” as such was left on the table and, in addition – of all the possible imbecilities – the Israelis allowed themselves to be saddled with “Gaza” even in the face of the statusquo ante of 1967, i.e., they became responsible for all of the future “Palestine.” I have already been through the folly and self-destructive imprudence of giving up the whole of the virtually uninhabited Sinai, including all its airbases, early-warning-time potential, and recreational paradises, while retaining Gaza and, moreover, allowing the question of “Palestine” to remain on the table, in an article I posted previously, “The Stupidity of Sinai.”

So let us travel through the step-by-step “imbecilities” that ensued. First there was the bulldozing of Yamit, the first bulldozing of a “settlement,” and all the other installations the Israelis had built in Sinai and the handing over of the ‘recreational paradises’ of Ophira, Nueiba, and the whole unspoiled and incredible Sinai Red Sea Coast – one of the best skin-diving locales in the world – to say nothing of the fabulous Mt. Sinai itself, to the Egyptians for basically ‘a kiss on the cheek’ and ‘a handshake’ from the seemingly well-intentioned but also extremely clever Anwar Sadat – who was before too long himself then assassinated by this same, now-famous Muslim Brotherhood (1981 – one of the members of which, Amin al-Zawahiri, the co-founder or al-Qaeda), ultimately to morph into Hamas and any number of incipient offshoots up to the present – the “Palestinian issue” and, more particularly, “Gaza” remaining on the table.

But one thing the Egyptians were well clear of (which they had not been in the 1967status quo ante as indicated) was the ruinous, insoluble problem of “Gaza,” which was left completely ‘on the Israeli plate,’ as it were.

Imbecility nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5? – you name them. We all know what is happening today, how Egypt can act as if it has no part in Gaza commerce, security, or supply matters – to say nothing of smuggling through so-called “tunnels” – while Israel is forced into the Public Relations nightmare (among other nightmares emanating from “Gaza,” also newly-emerged as a vast missile operations and storage center) and now being exploited by Israel’s former partner in the region, Turkey, to regain the former ascendency it enjoyed in Ottoman Days over the whole of the Middle East. If Egypt had been left in control of Gaza, as she had been previously, instead of just Sinai; how many of these things would or could have emerged as issues and been exploited in the way they have been for the last 20 odd years?

But we get ahead of ourselves – besides leaving all the oil and gas supplies in Sinai completely in the hands of the Egyptians (in the wake of “the Arab Spring,” now accompanied by the well-known outcries against such “commerce,” “generosity” and, in any event, presently interrupted), what did our “geniuses” come up with next? Why just a few years later, of course, the 1982 Campaign, chasing the PLO into Lebanon in an attempt to root them out there – to some degree to make up, seemingly, for the perceived weakness of the humiliatingly total withdrawal from Sinai.

And why was this? What did this do? Well, first of all, it got a lot of Israelis killed (nor is this to forget, where Ariel Sharon personally was concerned – not to speak ill of the semi-departed – the above-mentioned bulldozing of Yamit accompanied by its concomitant, the first instance of “settler” resistance and/or wrath). Second of all, instead of dealing with the PLO in “the Palestinian State” of Jordan and doing any occupying, that might have had to be done, there; it dealt with them in the formerly, at least superficially, previously “peaceful” State of Lebanon, to where the Jordanian Government had so cannily “exiled” them after “Black September.”

What did this create? Well, aside from the impression of being a bully and world-wide outrage coupled with international condemnation so that even the Reagan Administration had to call a halt to it (but which has continued and grown ever since); it destroyed the status quo there and the Christian/Druse quasi-hegemony in Lebanon – not to mention “Sabra and Shatilla,” the assassination of Bashir Gemayal, and the first actual Syrian intervention in Lebanon and not the earlier one threatened in Jordan.

But most of all, it awoke the previously quiescent “sleeping giant” of Southern Lebanese, martyr-loving Shi’ism and we all know what became of that – a new and potentially more lethal terrorist organization than the PLO, followed by a Government,Hezbullah, and the PLO, still not destroyed, but rather rescued now (again by the Reagan Administration) and relocated to Tunisia.

So two lethal opponents had now been created and developed, with a third and fourth, ‘Hamas’ and ‘al-Qaeda,’ on the way – all taking inspiration from and imitating the original 1970-71 “Black September” – while, all the time, Jordan sat undisturbed, ostensibly at peace, and the West Bank and Gaza beginning to seethe. All this – including the international outcries which, in the aftermath of this invasion, have grown stronger and stronger and never ceased – and all these things connected to and outgrowths of the PLO and the original “Palestine” Problem from 1969-74.

So then what? We can skip the humiliations of the First Iraq War from 1991-92, when Israel under the George Bush Sr./James Baker Administration was not even allowed to defend itself and the Oslo “Peace Process” really got underway; and hurry along now into the 2000’s, as the rest grows clearer. So you say, you really want “Peace”? Ok, we will give you “Peace” and unilaterally withdraw from South Lebanon (May, 2000). But this did not bring “Peace” but, rather, basically a Hezbullah/Syrian-controlled State in Lebanon, in which the former power-brokers – the Druse and the Christians – were almost completely eclipsed. Forget the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005, still unsolved and unresolved.

The result of this state of affairs and unilateral withdrawal with no quid pro quo brought in 2006, the Second Lebanon War as prosecuted by Ehud Olmert, where Israel was, once again, perceived as an even bigger bully and involved in the complete lunacy of bombing civilian population centers in Beirut – all a total nightmare for Public Relations and a Godsend to the Shi’ite control of Lebanon, now with the addition of militant Iran backing it and Lebanon become yet another and even greater armed missile repository.

Ok, this didn’t work; so what do we try next – again relating to the fact of the “Palestinian-Gaza” problem being still left on the table? Why Sharon’s further unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the protective ring of settlements, he personally had helped establish there – another defeat, humiliation, and trauma almost as great as Yamit. Then “Ha-Shamen” was felled by a stroke (p.b.u.h.). But how did this work out? Well, everyone knows. Gaza has become an international cause célèbre. Plus, the range and potential of its missile storehouse has increased exponentially – yet still Israel remains responsible by both its own lights and in the eyes of the world, now through a sea blockade.

So, enter Turkey into the fray and her Gaza flotillas, not to mention its copycat exploitation of the issue to dominate the whole Arab Middle East and a potential clash at sea with a real military power (empowered and supplied by NATO), not a cardboard one. All this and Israel still being blamed for its attempt to exercise a modicum of control over Gaza, which should have been “returned” to Egypt to deal with in the Sinai Accords way back in 1979.

Oh just great and all brought about, almost always, by one’s ‘shooting oneself in the foot’ (to coin an Americanism) by our “geniuses” – and I haven’t even mentioned helping the Turks capture PKK Leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999 and arming the Turks with Israeli-made drones to hunt down Kurdish Revolutionaries when, all the time she should have been clandestinely arming the Kurds on either side of the border and pouring in arms to the protestors in both today’s Iran and Syria.

So what would backing the 1969-71 Palestinian Revolt in Jordan have achieved? In the writer’s view, almost all of this and none of it – even the 1973 Yom Kippur War might have been avoided by the surprise and audacity of such an unexpected gesture but, as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty. Still, it was all so obvious then. Instead, what has Israel achieved – why the abandonment of almost all its early “Zionist” dreams, including even the Temple and the Temple Mount, while gradually reducing itself in land mass and extent to present-day atom bomb target numero uno.

Would all of these things have been avoided by a few intelligent decisions? The writer, whom many might designate as “simplistic,” thinks so because then, at least, Israel would have had an address to which to direct its concerns and complaints, instead of flailing out mindlessly in all directions. Moreover, the original intent of “the Mandate” would have been fulfilled. Nor is this to mention the “breathing space” a less-constricted and restricted “Israel” would have been able to enjoy – always important for a healthy citizenry.

Still, if “the Arab Spring” should now come to Jordan, as it presently shows signs of doing, the Israelis should take lessons from all of the above – but, honestly-speaking, it may already be ‘too late.’ The situation is that dire.

Did the British kill Orde Wingate? (Part II)

Jerusalem Post, July 7, 2011.

Wavell was now Commander-in-Chief in India and on the Governor’s Council and the Japanese were pouring through the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, and Burma. Again, he realized he needed Wingate seconded to him in Rangoon as soon as possible. The latter, who was still fighting for his command of a Jewish Army which would strike Rommel “on the left flank” and dreaming of commanding Jews in action (for him, as he put it “the best Army in the World”), was still begging Weizmann to act. Having no desire to go to Burma and India, he held out until the last moment.

Burma: The First Chindit Campaign 1942-1943

Finally when everything was lost, in despair, he set out on February 27th, 1942 for Burma, Assam, and India. Rangoon fell on March 8th. Wingate moved a unit of Gurkhas and Burmese riflemen, called “The Bush Warfare School” (founded by a Colonel Michael Calvert,  also an alumnus of Woolwich, who now became his trusted second-in-command and a legend second in irregular warfare only to David Sterling. To these, later, was added a third Woolwich comrade, Derek Tulloch, Wingate’s bosom companion ever since fox-hunting days), to Sagar near Bangalore in Central India. To these were added an assortment of Scottish, Welsh, and English volunteers; and, by early 1943, he had his ”First Chindit Campaign” – a name conjured up by Wingate based on a Burmese Temple Guardian-mythological winged creature (and now generally know as “Wingate’s Raiders”) – ready to go.

As in Ethiopia, thus ensued the first major victories of the British over the Japanese in the East, blowing up rail lines, disrupting communications, fighting pitched battles, and then dispersing; and the creation of a new style of warfare behind enemy lines that became known as “Long Range Penetration” – groups working through the land but supplied by parachute drops from the air (later usually American). Though costly, the Japanese were befuddled and Wingate came to the notice of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, the US Air Commander Henry “Hap” Arnold, and even Philip “Flip” Cochran (the model for the famous World War II comic strip – Terry and the Pirates).

A Chindit column crossing a river in Burma, 1943

Then came the Second Chindit Campaign and this on a major scale. By May, Wingate and the remnants of his forces had re-crossed the Irrawaddy and were back in India. By June, his name was famous throughout the land and Churchill was already dictating a memo calling him “a man of genius” and stating he “should command the Army against the Japanese in Burma.” Promoted to Major General – the youngest Major General in the British Army – by July, he had been personally sent back to England at Churchill’s request because he wanted him to accompany him aboard the Queen Mary to meet Roosevelt and the American Chiefs-of-Staff at the Quebec Conference in Canada the next month.

But now Earl Mountbatten had become Chief of Combined Operations in India and he was invited to the meeting too, Wavell having been reduced to the role of civilian Governor General only. William Slim – an inveterate Wingate critic from Ethiopian days – had for his part now also risen to the rank of Lieutenant General in the Indian Army based at Imphal and Cohima in Assam on the Southern Burma/Indian border commanding that part of the Army fighting the Japanese there and, needless to say, suffering the usual reverses.

A special train was sent for Lorna to take her up to Northern Scotland and the Queen Mary as a special courtesy to Wingate for the Atlantic crossing. At that time, their first and only child, Orde Jonathan, was conceived – a child who, as it turned out, never saw his father. Needless to say, as well, Wingate was one of the ‘big hits’ of the conference and a huge amount of American supplies, equipment, and forces were allotted directly to him, including gliders, runway-building equipment for use after having established  “strongholds,” transport aircraft, and even Mustangs.

Basically, so impressed was everyone that he was given ‘carte-blanche’ and a direct line to Churchill in case of obstruction – which as per his habit he never hesitates to use which infuriates people at GHQ, including Mountbatten and Slim. The final War Reports written after the War (not without interest, by a General on Mountbatten’s staff whom, in an inadvertent moment Wingate had recommended “should be sacked for iniquitous and unpatriotic behaviour” because of his obsructionism) confirm all this.

The Second Chindit Campaign

Finally on March 5th, 1944, well before D-Day, “the Second Chindit Campaign” is on, approximately a year after the First, but this time it is a huge fly-in. Though there are many difficulties and much confusion, on the whole it is very successful, all objectives having been met. Wingate is kept terribly busy flying around in an American B-25 with an American crew from old airbase to new airbase, old runway to new runway. As noted, he has the complete support of the entire American Air Force in the East. They are dropping all his supplies, they are taking in his gliders, just as later at D-Day and at Arnhem, though here more successfully. Churchill even sends his personal congratulations.

But meanwhile in the South, Slim is having his usual difficulties, as the Japanese have stepped up their efforts to advance in Assam on Imphal and Cohima – partially as a response to Wingate. But in the midst of these grand airborne successes, Slim quietly convinces Mountbatten to hold back two of Wingate’s Reserve Chindit Brigades, the 14th and the 23rd. He also wants the use of Wingate’s American Air force Dakotas (C-47’s) and fighter aircraft (in this case, Mustangs) to help him in his own situation, rather than allow Wingate to use them to proceed with what is about to become a crushing blow to the Japanese all over Northern Burma.

That this is true is confirmed by the testimony of the Japanese Commander at the time, Lt. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi who, in a tribute to Wingate after the War, called him “a man in whom I had found my match.” Nevertheless, argument develops over the allotment of these two Brigades – the men at Headquarters seeming to be in something of a panic. For his part, hearing of these things, Wingate avails himself of his right to communicate directly with Churchill, wiring him to the effect that “situation most promising if exploited” – a cable which may have played a part in his ultimate fate.

Friction at GHQ also exacerbates over press coverage which omits any mention of Wingate’s successes, including even the British Army Magazine, which further angers Wingate, who refuses to allow it to be flown into his men and, according to reports, is on the verge of resigning. The ‘tipping point’ comes when the RAF bring in six Spitfires into an airstrip named “Broadway,” just built by the Americans behind Japanese lines. Now Cochran is infuriated and goes in to protest to Wingate that even the Americans themselves have not yet had the opportunity to introduce their own Mustangs into the first airstrip to be opened behind Japanese lines in Burma! Within hearing of RAF officers on the ground, he (Cochran) heaps scorn on their appetite for publicity and literally demands they be “bounced.”

Philip Cochran

Wingate himself, clearly favoring the Americans and dependent on them for his future activities, takes Cochran’s side. For his part, Slim now definitively refuses to release Wingate’s 14th and 23rd Brigades – HQ scuttlebutt centering on Wingate’s “megalomania” and how he is “jeopardizing” the War effort. Again, Wingate protests to Churchill about the “distorted” accounts of his operation, demanding that “the truth” be told. He also asks for four more squadrons of American Dakotas to support the gains he has already made – this, in the face of the reversals Slim is currently encountering in the south at Imphal. As Wingate sees it, he can swing around right behind the Japanese into the Malay Penninsula, which is what in the end Slim eventually does without him. Churchill, as usual, backs Wingate, just as he had Lawrence in earlier days; and the order for the planes is made – though, after Wingate’s death, the Chindits never actually receive them.

Wingate’s B-25 Plane Crash Anomalies

On the morning of March 24th, 1944, after a flying inspection of “the first Scottish Airport in Burma” – the “Stronghold” at “Aberdeen” – he flies back to Imphal in his American B-25 with his American crew to discuss with either British Air Marshall Baldwin or Air Commodore Vincent (reports vary here) Cochran’s complaints about the British Spitfires being sent into “Broadway“ even before their American counterparts and another insult, just tendered Wingate by either Baldwin or Vincent, insisting in the future that he route any communications – this is typical – through RAF Wing Commanders on the ground – meaning those at “Broadway”! For its part, his American crew leave the Mitchell unattended to go out of the sun inside the tower for soft drinks. It should be remembered that this is the home base of almost all of Wingate’s detractors; and, though the meeting with Baldwin or Vincent was said to have ended amicably, no agreement seems to have been reached.

It is a beautiful afternoon, blue sky and white puffy clouds and at 5 PM, anyhow, there was not a plane in sight. Some say that Wingate’s plane did not take off till 8 PM. Once again, there is some difference of opinion here but it is of little import. Two journalists, Stuart Emery of The News Chronicle and Stanley Wills of The Daily Herald, ask if they can come along on the plane and Wingate graciously agrees. Baldwin (according to the Baldwin testifiers) suggests Wingate go first as Wingate’s plane is the faster. Wingate climbs into the co-pilot’s seat as per his wont and his B-25 takes off, but allegedly never makes it over the first chain of hills. Nor was there any sign of enemy activity in the sky that day at all. Some argue that the American pilot had been concerned about some issues in the right engine earlier, but had declined to mention it to Wingate. Still, a Mitchell has two engines and should be able to stay aloft on one, even if a little less effectively.

When the wreckage was located, however, it was not on a mountain at all. Rather, it turned out that it had made it over the first ridge of around 8000 feet and had only crashed a mile or so outside one of the simple villages about 3000 feet up, called Thilon, that dot the areas along the ridges. Moreover, the crash was seen to have been so violent as to dig a pit eighteen feet into the ground. No identifications are possible and only the remains of Wingate’s telltale sun helmet are found, which is why the whole crew with Wingate are buried in a mass grave at Arlington National Cemetery in the USA today.

It is hard to imagine that this could be the result of the poor performance or failure of one engine. It was quite a bit more violent than that; nor was there any evidence of enemy fire on the plane, either aerial or ground. If the plane had experienced trouble climbing over the first ridge, the pilot would have jettisoned either some supplies or equipment, but there was no evidence of that either. Nor were there any extant radio messages indicating any trouble.

There were many suspicious deaths during and after WWII, principal among which are the Katyn Forest massacres in Byelorussia at the beginning of the War, not to mention those of the Polish Delegation that came to honor them last year, the troublesome Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski who had signed a pact with Stalin in 1941 and who died in a plane crash in 1943 much like Wingate’s, but this time in an American B-24 Liberator after taking off from the British Base in Gibraltar the year before, George Patton at the end of the War, and even the British movie actor and star of Gone with the Wind, Leslie Howard, on his way back to England after leaving Portugal on a propaganda Mission there.

“A Man of Genius” whose “Spirit Lives on”

Even, aside from anti-Semitism, Wingate’s eccentricity and religiosity, and his support of the Jewish enterprise of settlement in Palestine; it should be appreciated that the feeling against him at this time at GHQ ran so high that the nurse Matron MacGeary, who had nursed him back to health after a bout of typhoid fever from drinking contaminated water from a flower bowl (again at Shepheards Hotel as he passed through Cairo on his final return to India), was sacked after his death as “a dangerous person” even though she had just been awarded an MBE on the King’s Honor List.

Why does this matter? For the present writer, it matters absolutely. For modern Evangelicals and Fundamentalist Christians (including Plymouth Brethren), Wingate and his love for Jewish causes and the Jewish return and up building of Palestine, has assumed almost the proportions of a “Saint.” After his death, “the Chindits” who had and were succeeding so marvelously, building and completing many airstrips behind enemy lines and flying in tens of thousands of soldiers, were with very little fanfare ‘wound down’ and disbanded; and all their assets transferred to Slim. Not only were all their gains abandoned, but many persons suffered grievously for their association with him – not the least of whom, eventually guerrilla-fighter Michael Calvert himself.

Slim who was at some of these meetings and after the War wrote a blistering attack on Wingate, accusing him of incompetence and even indecisiveness (sic), went on to bigger and better things, using all the American aircraft that had been earmarked for Wingate and many of his methods – including the two disputed Reserve Chindit Battalions, to say nothing of all the rest – became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, Viscount Slim of Burma, Field Marshall and Chief of the Imperial Staff (under the succeeding Attlee Labour Government), a Knight Commander of the Order of the Garter, a Knight of the Order of St. John, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, a U.S. Chief Commander of the Order of Merit, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, etc., etc.

Curiously enough, during the recently-exposed scandal over the export of small children from England to Australia, partially during the time of Slim’s tenure as Governor-General there from 1953-1960; he was latterly accused (2007-2009) by three of those who had been sent to one of the ‘Child Migration Homes’ called “Fairbridge Farms” (of which Slim was an official “patron”) of sexually assaulting them during his visits there – accusations vehemently denied by his son, the Second Viscount Slim while at the same time being aired on the ABC Television Special, “The Long Journey Home” (11/17/09).

But one last little point of information – it was pointed out by Dennis Hawley or one of his ‘friends,’ both in a telephone call to the author (after I had placed an ad in The London Times in 1986-87, asking for information on the death of Wingate) or in his book The Death of Wingate (Merlin Books, 1994) that, as a young  radio officer in the British Army on the then Indian Burmese frontier in Assam in 1947; one of the first things Earl Mountbatten did – upon being appointed by this same Labour Government to replace General Wavell as Governor General of India and prior to the process of the disastrous partitions there which so trouble the world even till today – which seemed curiously suspicious to him at the time and thereafter, was to immediately send a team up to the site of Wingate’s American B-25 crash, which had already been thoroughly inspected and scoured for bodies three years before and, for some reason, take away all the still extant wreckage there to some undisclosed disposal locale. This was how he or one of his colleagues described it to me in a phone call – accompanied by a warning.

Why does it interest me? Because, as trivial as these events may seem to the rest of the world, for me, had Wingate survived and lived, not only would he have also been the recipient of many of these honors and the father of many sons or daughters; but he would have gone on to successfully command and lead the very Jewish Army he had always dreamed of commanding and leading; and, under such a Commander – who had never lost a battle in his whole career – the entire history of the modern Middle East would have probably been a good deal different. The 1948 War between the Arabs and the Jews would have been a short one indeed, nor would it have ended upon the so-called “1948 Cease-Fire Lines” now so much in the news and probably there would have been no Palestinian “Problem” – at least as many have come to understand it and think of it today.

With Wingate in command, I believe, Jerusalem would have been taken. It could have been no other way and, with it, the Temple Mount and probably “Palestine” up to the Jordan River and the border with the then “Transjordan” – called this by the British, because it had been unilaterally “cut away,” namely by Churchill and Lawrence themselves, in 1925 from the original Palestine Mandate and given to the “Hashemite” family of the Sherif of Mecca for services rendered in the First World War. And who knows what would have happened after that?

It is difficult to talk about the “what ifs” or tragedies of history, but I believe Christians, that is, Evangelical (a representative of whom was even one of Theodore Herzl’s principal intimates) /Noahic/ Fundamentalist – even Plymouth Brethren – would know, as just suggested, better probably even than Jews. For them, there would have been no Palestinian “Problem” as such and probably a “Third Temple” would already be in the process of construction and well on its way to completion.

Perhaps Churchill in the tribute he gave Wingate in Parliament following the announcement of his death put it best: “We placed our hopes at Quebec in the new Supreme Commander, Admiral Mountbatten and in his brilliant lieutenant Major-General Wingate who, alas, has paid a soldier’s debt. There was a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny. He has gone, but his spirit lives on…”

One thing is sure, given the hatred, intolerance, jealousy, and animosity that surrounded Orde Wingate throughout his entire professional life, the present writer does not credit the ‘official’ story of his death for a moment. It’s just too convenient.

Did the British Kill Orde Wingate? (Part I)

Jerusalem Post, July 3, 2011.

Orde Wingate is perhaps so famous that there is no need to summarize his life. There are a plethora of good biographies, pro and con, about him for these purposes; but just for the argument, let us summarize a few points here. His father was first cousin to Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor of the Sudan before, during, and after the First World War and one of the key sponsors of T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”)’s military activities in the Hejaz, Jordan, and Syria (Sir Reginald was mainly the supplier of the gold sovereigns Lawrence use so promiscuously to buy his beduin confreres, without which they would hardly ‘lift a finger’ as it were).

Throughout his life, Wingate referred to him as “Cousin Rex” (it was through him too that he was later to find out that he was a distant cousin to Lawrence on his mother’s side) and at key junctures in his career was able to turn to him for a helping hand ‘up the greasy Pole’ as Disraeli was wont to call it.

From early youth Wingate, who was at first home-schooled because his parents wished to keep him away from pernicious influences before going as ‘a day boy’ to the famous British Public School of Charterhouse and from there to the British Military Academy at Woolwich, always felt himself “a man of destiny” – a phrase echoed in Churchill’s famous encomium to him at the end of this article – and he was, despite his ill-timed and unhappy death.

Born in India where George, his father, was a colonel and part of ‘the British Raj’; he was brought up with his numerous brothers and sisters in the extreme Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian sect known as “the Plymouth Brethren” and, not surprisingly, always felt a kinship with Oliver Cromwell as a man destined to do great things related to the Bible, from which he always quoted liberally to his troops before going into battle – but this from the Old Testament, never the New, which he felt was unrealistic and unsuited to the choice of profession he had made. The Old Testament suited him perfectly.

Encouraged by “Cousin Rex” to perfect his Arabic at London University’s prestigious School of Oriental Studies and, under his ‘tutelage’, likewise, posted to the Sudan in the late twenties/early thirties; he learned the ways of tracking and treating his body and his spirit hard in hunting both ivory poachers from Ethiopia and slavers from Somalia.

He had previously, as a bored young officer in England after Military Academy graduation, participated in fox hunting and ultimately, steeple-chasing where he won not a few competitions and cups – developing a demeanor and attitude that was seen to be ‘utterly fearless.’ It was under these circumstances that he developed his ideas of guerrilla warfare, almost always fighting at night, knowing how to track in difficult terrain, driving both man and beast to their limits.

At the end of his service in the Sudan, he made the famous “Trek to Zerzura,” which was actually written up by him for the Royal Geographic Society, made famous by the recent English Patient movie and Count Almasy, with whom “Cousin Rex” encouraged him to cooperate; but in his usual manner, he made the trek alone in 1933. On the voyage home, following this show of exploration bravura and totally exhausted, he met his future wife, the lovely and charming 16-year old Lorna, whom he was to marry two years later just as he was being posted to Palestine as an intelligence officer.

It was during “the Arab Revolt” in 1936 and, thereafter, that he encountered his true “calling” as it were, which he always knew he had – to lead a Jewish Army into battle; and, while there, many consider that he laid the foundations for the Israeli Army to come – if not totally ‘the Army,’ certainly many of its future officers like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon and its fighting methods. He even said as much at one of the “Training Sessions” he organized in 1938 (with future Field Marshall Archibald Wavell’s blessing), i.e., “we have come here to lay the foundations for the Jewish Army.” Of course, for most run-of-the-mill English officers, who were largely pro-Arab anyhow and against more Jewish immigration to Palestine at this crucial time, such language was blasphemous bordering even on “treason” and just increased the number of enemies he always seemed to accumulate at GHQ’s.

 

Not for Wingate. He taught Jewish settlers and Haganah enlistees to go out from their previous closed-in and defensive-like stockade enclosures, fearlessly at night like their enemies, to often blindly track the land with nothing but a compass, a flashlight, and a topographical map, to hunt and ambush marauders and terrorists. He felt that Jewish soldiers could be as good or better than any of their British counterparts; and, reporting the same to “Cousin Rex,” he founded the combined units known as “Special Night Squads” (SNS) composed of mixed Jewish and British personnel.

Always hated a GHQ, too, for his sloppy dress, his lack of respect for authority, his eccentricity (often he would sit in his tent naked with nothing but a pith helmet or stand in front of his recruits reading passages from the Bible – usually about his favorite character Gideon, who only wanted to fight with ‘picked men’ and, in whose environs, Daburiyyah, he did much of his fighting – and actually called his force in Ethiopia, when he arrived there “Gideon Force”), and seemed to revel in either shocking or affronting his superiors; he was so successful in protecting the pipelines and stopping cross-border raids that he was finally expelled from Palestine at the instigation of the Mufti and his confreres and most of the other anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish-settlement Headquarters rank and file officers in 1939, just at the time it was most needed – with the proviso, never to return to Palestine.

He never did, but before he left, he even urged his Jewish friends and associates, by whom he was called “the Yedid” – “the Friend” (he was very close to Chaim Weizmann) – to start the Uprising against the British right then and there by themselves raiding the oil refinery at Haifa – again virtual “treason”; but in the face of Hitler’s pronouncements and depredations, he felt this was the only way they would be able to “save” their European Jewish brethren. In this, he turned out to be, sadly, almost completely correct – even prophetic. He even volunteered to lead them – he felt that strongly about the situation.

Who knows, perhaps if he had known or made contact with the Jabotinsky Revisionist faction at the time, he might have been more successful. Even the later Altalena tragedy or fiasco between Labor and Revisionist Zionists might have been avoided – again, who knows? But he did not. He left the country in disgrace, never to return (except on one airplane-refueling stop on his way to India and Burma later); but he never gave up the idea of returning to found a Jewish Army, which he thought would be the best in the world since he considered the Jewish fighting man, when properly trained, to be the best; and perhaps under his leadership it would have. Wingate never lost a battle in his life.

This was in May, 1939 just at the time Hitler’s armies were advancing across Europe. In London, Wingate continued working feverishly through everyone he knew, including Weizmann and Ben Gurion (who were much more phlegmatic and less impetuous and incautious than he), to get a Jewish Army into action.

His next action was to be Ethiopia. It was to be the first British victory in the Second World War and he did it all with irregulars, including kibbutz volunteers, he had trained in Palestine and had specially brought down at his request; and it was done, once again, through his old protector Archibald Wavell, whom at this point had become a full General and Commander-in-Chief of all British Forces in the Middle East. Apparently Wingate had already predicted to one of his sisters that one day he would restoreHaile Selassie to his throne in Ethiopia. He also apparently told the same thing during their courtship to his future wife Lorna – whom he married in 1936, the same year he was posted to Palestine.

The Italian invasion there (in collusion with the French) had begun in 1934, just after Wingate had left the Sudan and finished his Zerzura Expedition. By 1936, despite League of Nations condemnation and native resistance, Mussolini had succeeded in expelling the Emperor. Wingate was sent in by Wavell, who remembered his earlier effectiveness with irregular forces in Palestine, in November, 1940. By May 5th, 1941 after a series of engagements fought by mixed British, Palestinian, and native forces in Northern Ethiopia, Wingate mounted on a white charger was escorting Haile Selessie who, frazzled and weary, preferred riding in a Ford convertible into Addis Ababa six years after his discomfiture.

Now the events that led to Wingate’s greatest fame and demise were about to unfold. First of all, it was in Ethiopia that Wingate had his first encounter with then Colonel, later Field Marshall, William Slim who had command of a small mechanized unit, which had suffered many reverses coming up from the South with a mixed group of Kenyans, British, and Indian Army units, which had also been badly mauled. Wingate’s extraordinary success doubtlessly did not sit very well with these groups or these commanders. Once back in Cairo, Wingate’s report of the Ethiopian Campaign (Wavell now having departed) was flatly rejected at GHQ and all those he recommended for DSO’s denied. In turn, Wingate considered that his extraordinary success there entitled him, once more, to return to Palestine and raise an Army of Jewish Volunteers (this did eventually transpire, but much smaller and later than Wingate envisioned – called, as everyone now knows, “the Jewish Brigade”).

Then in despair, all his hopes having been dashed; on July 4th, 1941Wingate did the unthinkable for a British Officer – he tried to commit suicide, plunging a bayonet into his throat in his room at Shepheard’s Hotel and only being saved from cutting both his carotid artery and jugular vein (he had stabbed himself from both sides) by the involuntary tightening of his neck muscles. By September, he was on a Hospital ship on his way back to England – he was later determined to have been suffering from severe cerebral malaria – which docked in his family’s native Northern Scotland in mid-November.

Now in disgrace for the second time, though people like the famous explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who had served under him in Ethiopia, thought he deserved a Knighthood for his achievements there (by a twist of fate, the General Cunningham of the unsuccessful British/Kenyan Southern Forces and Slim’s superior too  – who had Wingate banished from Ethiopia – was ultimately the last British Governor of Palestine when Jewish Independence was declared in 1948); nevertheless Wingate did not have to wait long for the final triumph and tragedy of his life.

(To be continued and concluded in Part II).

Who Killed Orde Wingate? (Part Two)

Huffington Post, June 27, 2011.

Wavell was now Commander-in-Chief of India and on the Governor’s Council and the Japanese were pouring through the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, and Burma. Again, he realized he needed Wingate seconded to him in Rangoon as soon as possible. The latter, who was still fighting for his command of a Jewish Army which would strike Rommel “on the left flank” and dreaming of commanding Jews in action (for him, as he put it “the best Army in the World”), was still begging Weizmann to act. Having no desire to go to Burma and India, he held out until the last moment.

Finally when everything was lost, in despair, he set out on February 27th, 1942 for Burma, Assam, and India. Rangoon fell on March 8th. Wingate moved a unit of Gurkhas and Burmese Riflemen, called “The Bush Warfare School” (founded by a Colonel Michael Calvert, also an alumnus of Woolwich and a legend second in irregular warfare only to David Sterling, who now became his trusted second-in-command. To these, later, was added a third Woolwich comrade, Derek Tulloch, Wingate’s bosom companion ever since fox-hunting days), to Sagar near Bangalore in Central India. To these were added an assortment of Scottish, Welsh, and English volunteers; and, by early 1943, he had his “First Chindit Campaign” — a name conjured up by Wingate based on a Burmese Temple Guardian-mythological winged creature (but world-wide commonly known as “Wingate’s Raiders”) — ready to go.

As in Ethiopia, thus ensued the first major victories of the British over the Japanese in the East, blowing up rail lines, disrupting communications, fighting pitched battles, and then dispersing; and the creation of a new style of warfare behind enemy lines that became known as “Long Range Penetration,” groups working through the land but supplied by parachute drops from the air (usually later American). Though costly, the Japanese were befuddled and Wingate came to the notice of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. Air Commander Hap Arnold, and even “Flip” Cochran (the model for the famous World War II comic strip — Terry and the Pirates).

Then came the Second Chindit Campaign and this on a major scale. By May, Wingate and the remnants of his forces had re-crossed the Irrawaddy and were back in India. By June his name was famous throughout the land and Churchill was already dictating a memo calling him “a man of genius” and stating he “should command the Army against the Japanese in Burma.” Promoted to Major General, the youngest Major General in the British Army, by July he had been personally sent back to England at Churchill’s request because he wanted him to accompany him aboard the Queen Mary to meet Roosevelt and the American Chiefs-of-Staff at the Quebec Conference in Canada the next month.

But now Earl Mountbatten had become Chief of Combined Operations in India and he was invited to the meeting too, Wavell having been reduced to the role of civilian Governor General only. Slim — an inveterate Wingate critic from Ethiopian days — had for his part now also risen to the rank of Lieutenant General in the Indian Army based at Imphal and Cohima in Assam on the Southern Burma/Indian border commanding that part of the Army fighting the Japanese there and, needless to say, suffering the usual reverses.

A special train was sent for Lorna to take her up to Northern Scotland and the Queen Mary as a special courtesy to Wingate for the Atlantic crossing. At that time, their first and only child, Orde Jonathan, was conceived — a child who, as it turned out, never saw his father. Needless to say, as well, Wingate was one of the ‘big hits’ of the Conference and a huge amount of American supplies, equipment, and forces were allotted directly to him, including gliders, runway-building equipment for use after having established “strongholds,” transport aircraft, and even Mustangs. Basically, so impressed was everyone that he was given ‘carte-blanche’ and a direct line to Churchill in case of obstruction – which as per his habit he never hesitates to use which infuriates people at GHQ, including Mountbatten and Slim. The final War Reports written after the War confirm all this.

Finally on March 5th, 1944, well before D-Day, “the Second Chindit Campaign” is on, approximately a year after the First, but this time it is a huge fly-in. Though there are many difficulties and much confusion, on the whole it is very successful, all objectives having been met. Wingate is kept terribly busy flying around in an American B-25 with an American crew from old airbase to new airbase, old runway to new runway. As noted, he has the complete support of the entire American Air Force in the East. They are dropping all his supplies, they are taking in his gliders, just as later at D-Day and at Arnhem, though here more successfully. Churchill even sends his personal congratulations.

But meanwhile in the South, Slim is having his usual difficulties, as the Japanese have stepped up their efforts to advance in Assam on Imphal and Cohima, partially as a response to Wingate. But in the midst of these grand airborne successes, Slim quietly convinces Mountbatten to hold back two of Wingate’s Reserve Chindit Brigades, the Fourteenth and Twenty-Third. He also wants the use of Wingate’s American Air force Dakotas and fighter aircraft to help him in his own situation, rather than allow Wingate to use them to proceed with what is about to become a crushing blow to the Japanese all over Northern Burma. Argument develops over the allotment of these Brigades and the men at Headquarters are thrown into a panic. For his part, hearing of these things, Wingate avails himself of his right to communicate directly with Churchill, wiring him to the effect that “situation most promising if exploited” – a cable which may have played a part in his ultimate fate.

Friction at GHQ also exacerbates over press coverage which omits any mention of Wingate’s successes, including even the British Army Magazine, which further angers Wingate, who refuses to allow it to be flown into his men and is on the verge of resigning. The tipping point comes when the RAF bring in six Spitfires into an airstrip named “Broadway,” just built by the Americans behind Japanese lines. Now Cochran is infuriated as well and goes to protest to Wingate, to the effect that even the Americans themselves have not yet had the opportunity to introduce their own Mustangs into the first airstrip to be opened behind Japanese lines in Burma. Within hearing of RAF officers, he heaps scorn on their appetite for publicity and literally demands they be “bounced”.

Wingate himself, clearly favoring the Americans and dependent on them for his future activities, takes Cochran’s side. For his part, Slim now definitively refuses to release Wingate’s 14th and 23rd Brigades — HQ scuttlebutt centering on Wingate’s “megalomania” and how he is “jeopardizing” the War effort . Again, Wingate protests to Churchill about the “distorted” accounts of his operation and demands that “the truth” be told. He also asks for four more squadrons of American Dakotas to support the gains he has already made — this, in the face of the reversals Slim is currently encountering further South at Imphal. As Wingate sees it, he can swing around right behind the Japanese into the Malay Penninsula, which is what Slim eventually does without him in the end. Churchill, as usual, backs Wingate, just as he had Lawrence in earlier times; and the order for the planes is made – though, after Wingate’s death, the Chindits never actually receive them.

On the morning of March 24th, 1944, after a flying inspecting the “first Scottish Airport in Burma” — the “Stronghold” at “Aberdeen” — he flies back to Imphal in his American B-25 with his American crew to discuss with either British Air Marshall Baldwin or Air Commodore Vincent (reports vary here) Cochran’s complaint about Baldwin or Vincent, or both, sending the British Spitfires into “Broadway “and another insult, just tendered him by either Baldwin or Vincent — but a typical one — insisting in the future that he route any communications through RAF Wing Commanders on the ground at “Broadway.” For its part, his American crew leave the Mitchell unattended to go out of the sun inside the tower for soft drinks. It should be remembered that this is the home base of almost all of Wingate’s detractors; and, though the meeting with Baldwin or Vincent was said to have ended amicably, no agreement seems to have been reached.

It is a beautiful afternoon, blue sky and white puffy clouds and at 5 PM, anyhow, there was not a plane in sight. Some say that Wingate’s plane did not take off till 8 PM. Once again, there is some difference of opinion here but it is of little import. Two journalists, Stuart Emery of The News Chronicle and Stanley Wills of The Daily Herald, ask if they can come along on the plane and Wingate graciously agrees. Baldwin suggests Wingate go first (according to the Baldwin testifiers) as his plane is the faster. Wingate climbs into the co-pilot’s seat as per his habit and his B-25 takes off, but allegedly never makes it over the first chain of hills. Nor was there any sign of enemy activity in the sky. Some argue that the American pilot had been concerned about some issues in the right engine earlier, but had declined to mention it to Wingate. Still, a Mitchell has two engines and should be able to stay aloft on one, even if a little less effectively.

When the wreckage was located, however, it was not on a mountain at all. Rather it turned out that it had made it over the first ridge of around 8000 feet and only crashed a mile or so outside one of the simple villages about 3000 feet up, called Thilon, that dot the area along another ridge. Moreover, the crash was seen to have been so violent as to dig a pit eighteen feet into the ground. No identifications are possible and only the remains of Wingate’s telltale sun helmet are found, which is why the whole crew with Wingate are buried in a mass grave at Arlington National Cemetery in the U.S.A. today.

It is hard to imagine that this could be the result of the poor performance or failure of an engine. It was quite a bit more violent than that; nor was there any evidence of enemy fire on the plane, either aerial or ground. If the plane had experienced trouble climbing over the first ridge, the pilot would have jettisoned some equipment, but there has been no evidence of that either.

There were many suspicious deaths during and after WWII, principal among which are the Katyn Forest massacres in Bielorrusia at the beginning of the War, not to mention those of the Polish Delegation that came to honor them last year, the troublesome Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski who had signed a pact with Stalin in 1941 and who died in a plane crash in 1943 much like Wingate’s, but a year before his and this time in an American B-24 Liberator, after taking off from the British Base in Gibraltar, George Patton at the end of the War, and even the British movie actor and star of Gone with the Wind, Trevor Howard, on his way back to England after leaving Portugal on a propaganda Mission there.

Even, aside from anti-Semitism, Wingate’s eccentricity and religiosity, and his support of the Jewish enterprise of settlement in Palestine; it should be appreciated that the feeling against him at this time at GHQ ran so high that the nurse Matron MacGeary, who had nursed him back to health after a bout of typhoid fever from drinking contaminated water from a flower bowl (again at Shepheards Hotel as he passed through Cairo another time), was sacked after his death as “a dangerous person” even though she had just been awarded an MBE on the King’s Honor List.

Why does this matter? For the present writer, it matters absolutely. For modern Evangelicals and Fundamentalist Christians (including Plymouth Brethren), Wingate and his love for Jewish causes and the Jewish return and upbuilding of Palestine, has assumed almost the proportions of a “Saint”. After his death, “the Chindits” who had and were succeeding so marvelously, building and completing many airstrips behind enemy lines and flying in tens of thousands of soldiers, were with very little fanfare ‘wound down’ and disbanded; and all their assets transferred to Slim; and many persons suffered grievously for their friendship with him, not the least of whom eventually guerrilla-fighter Michael Calvert himself.

Slim who was at some of these meetings and after the War wrote a blistering attack on Wingate, went on to bigger and better things, using all the American aircraft that had been earmarked for Wingate and many of his methods, including the two disputed Chindit Battalions, to say nothing of all the rest, became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, Viscount Slim of Burma, Field Marshall and Chief of the Imperial Staff (under the succeeding Attlee Labour Government), a Knight Commander of the Order of the Garter, a Knight of the Order of St. John, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, a U.S. Chief Commander of the Order of Merit, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, etc., etc.

Curiously enough, during the recently-exposed scandal over the export of small children from England to Australia, partially during the time of Slim’s tenure as Governor-General there from 1953-1960; he was latterly accused (2007-2009) by three of those who had been sent to one of the Child Migration Homes called “Fairbridge Farms” (of which Slim was an official “patron”) of sexually assaulting them during his visits there — accusations vehemently denied by his son, the Second Viscount Slim while at the same time being aired on the ABC Television Special “The Long Journey Home“.

But one last little point of information — it was pointed out by Dennis Hawley or one of his ‘friends’ in both a telephone call to me many years ago and in his book, The Death of Wingate (Merlin Books, 1994), that as a young radio officer in the British Army on the then Indian Burmese frontier in Assam in 1947, one of the first things Earl Mountbatten did, upon being appointed by this same Labour Government to replace General Wavell as Governor General of India and prior to the process of the disastrous partitions there which so trouble the world even till today, which seemed curiously suspicious to him at the time because he witnessed it and troubled him ever after, was for some reason to immediately send a team up to the site of the Wingate American B-25 crash site, which had already been thoroughly inspected and scoured for bodies three years before, and for some reason take away all the still extant wreckage there to some undisclosed disposal locale. This was how he or one of his colleagues described it to me in a phone call accompanied by a warning.

Why does it interest me? Because, as trivial as these events may seem to the rest of the world, for me had Wingate survived and lived, not only would he have also been the recipient of many of these honors and father of many sons or daughters; but he would have gone on to successfully command and lead the very Jewish Army he had always dreamed of commanding and leading; and, under such a Commander who had never lost a battle in his whole career, the entire history of the modern Middle East would have probably been a good deal different. The 1948 War between the Arabs and the Jews would have been a short one indeed, nor would it have ended upon the so-called “1948 Cease-Fire Lines,” and probably there would have been no “Palestinian Problem” — at least as we have come to understand it and think of it today. With Wingate in command, Jerusalem would have been taken. It could have been no other way and, with it, the Temple Mount and probably “Palestine” up to the Jordan River and the border with the then “Transjordan” — called this by the British, because it had been unilaterally “cut away,” namely by Churchill and Lawrence themselves in 1925 from the original Palestine Mandate and given to the “Hashemite” family of the Sherif of Mecca for services rendered in the First World War. And who knows what would have happened after that?

It is difficult tot talk about the “what if”s or tragedies of History, but I believe Christians, that is, Evangelical (a representative of whom was even one of Theodore Herzl’s principal intimates) /Noahic/ Fundamentalist — even Plymouth Brethren — would know better probably even than Jews. For them, there would have been no “Palestinian Problem” as such, as just suggested, and probably a “Third Temple” would already be in the process of construction and well on its way to completion.

Perhaps Churchill in the tribute he gave Wingate in Parliament following the announcement of his death put it best: “We placed our hopes at Quebec in the new Supreme Commander, Admiral Mountbatten and in his brilliant lieutenant Major-General Wingate who, alas, has paid a soldier’s debt. There was a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny. He has gone, but his spirit lives on…”

One thing is sure, given the hatred, intolerance, jealousy, and animosity that surrounded Orde Wingate throughout his entire professional life, the present writer does not credit the ‘official’ story of his death for a moment. It’s just too convenient.

Who Killed Orde Wingate? (Part One)

Huffington Post, June 24, 2011.

Orde Wingate is perhaps so famous that there is no need to summarize his life. There are a plethora of good biographies, pro and con, for these purposes; but just for the argument, let us summarize a few points here. His father was first cousin to Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor of the Sudan before, during, and after the First World War and one of the key sponsors of T. E. Lawrence’s (“Lawrence of Arabia”) military activities in the Hejaz, Jordan, and Syria (Sir Reginald was mainly the supplier of the gold sovereigns Lawrence use to buy his Bedouin confreres, without which they would hardly ‘lift a finger’ as it were).

Throughout his life, Wingate referred to him as “Cousin Rex” (it was through him too that he was later to find out that he was a distant cousin to Lawrence on his mother’s side) and at key junctures in his career was able to turn to him for a helping hand ‘up the greasy Pole’ as Disraeli was wont to call it.

From early youth Wingate, who was at first home-schooled because his parents wished to keep him away from pernicious influences before going as ‘a day boy’ to the famous British Public School of Charterhouse and from there to the British Military Academy at Woolwich, always felt himself “a man of destiny” — a phrase echoed in Churchill’s famous encomium to him at the end of this article — and he was, despite his ill-timed and unhappy death.

Born in India where George, his father, was a colonel and part of ‘the British Raj’; he was brought up with his numerous brothers and sisters in the extreme Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian sect known as “the Plymouth Brethren” and, not surprisingly, always felt a kinship with Oliver Cromwell as a man destined to do great things related to the Bible, from which he always quoted liberally to his troops before going into battle — but this from the Old Testament, never the New which he felt was unrealistic and unsuited to the choice of profession he had made. The Old Testament suited him perfectly.

Encouraged by “Cousin Rex” to perfect his Arabic at London University’s prestigious School of Oriental Studies and, under his ‘tutelage’, likewise, posted to the Sudan in the late Twenties/early Thirties, he learned the ways of tracking and treating his body and his spirit hard in hunting both ivory poachers from Ethiopia and slavers from Somalia. He had previously, as a bored young officer in England after Military Academy graduation, participated in fox hunting and ultimately, steeple-chasing where he won not a few competitions and cups — developing a demeanor and attitude that was seen to be ‘utterly fearless.’ It was under these circumstances that he developed his ideas of guerrilla warfare, almost always fighting at night, knowing how to track in difficult terrain, driving both man and beast to their limits.

At the end of his service in the Sudan, he made the famous “Trek to Zerzura,” which was actually written up by him for the Royal Geographic Society, made famous by the English Patient movie and Count Laszlo Almasy, with whom “Cousin Rex” encouraged him to cooperate; but in his usual manner he made the trek alone in 1933. On the voyage home, following this show of exploration bravura and totally exhausted, he met his future wife, the lovely and charming 16-year-old Lorna, whom he was to marry two years later just as he was being posted to Palestine as an intelligence officer.

It was during “the Arab Revolt” in 1936 and, thereafter, that he encountered his true “calling” as it were, which he always knew he had — to lead a Jewish Army into battle; and, while there, many consider that he laid the foundations for the Israeli Army to come — if not totally ‘the Army,’ certainly many of its future officers like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon and its fighting methods. He even said as much at one of the “Training Sessions” he organized (with future Field Marshall Archibald Wavell’s blessing) in 1938, i.e., “we have come here to lay the foundations for the Jewish Army.” Of course, for most run-of-the-mill English officers, who were largely pro-Arab anyhow and against more Jewish immigration to Palestine at this crucial time, such language was blasphemous bordering on “treason” and just increased the number of enemies he always seemed to accumulate at GHQ’s.

Not for Wingate. He taught Jewish settlers and Haganah enlistees to go out from their previous closed-in and defensive-like stockade enclosures, fearlessly at night like their enemies, to often blindly track the land with nothing but a compass, a flashlight, and a topographical map to hunt and ambush marauders and terrorists. He felt that Jewish soldiers could be as good or better than any British and, reporting the same to “Cousin Rex,” he founded the combined units known as “Special Night Squads” (SNS) composed of mixed Jewish and British personnel.

Always hated at GHQ too for his sloppy dress, his lack of respect for authority, his eccentricity (often he would sit in his tent naked with nothing but a pith helmet or stand in front of his recruits reading passages from the Bible — usually about his favorite character Gideon, who only wanted to fight with ‘picked men’ and in whose environs, Daburiyyah, he did much of his fighting — and actually called his force in Ethiopia, when he arrived there, “Gideon Force”), and seemed to revel in either shocking or affronting his superiors; he was so successful in protecting the pipelines and stopping cross-border raids that he was finally expelled from Palestine at the instigation of the Mufti and his confreres and most of the other anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish-settlement Headquarters rank and file officers in 1939, just at the time it was most needed, with the proviso — never to return to Palestine.

He never did, but before he left, he even urged his Jewish friends and associates, by whom he was called “the Yedid” — “the Friend” (he was very close to Chaim Weizmann) — to start the Uprising against the British right then and there by themselves raiding the oil refinery at Haifa — again virtual “treason”; but in the face of Hitler’s pronouncements and depredations, he felt this was the only way they would be able to “save” their European Jewish brethren. In this, he turned out to be, sadly, almost completely correct — even prophetic. He even volunteered to lead them — he felt that strongly about the situation.

Who knows, perhaps if he had known or made contact with the Jabotinsky Revisionist faction at the time, he might have been more successful. Even the later Altalena tragedy or fiasco between Labor and Revisionist Zionists (recently written about in the Jerusalem Post) might have been avoided — again, who knows? But he did not. He left the country in disgrace, never to return (except on one airplane-refueling stop on his way to India and Burma later); but he never gave up the idea of returning to found a Jewish Army, which he thought would be the best in the world since he considered the Jewish fighting man, when properly trained, to be the best; and perhaps under his leadership it would have. Wingate never lost a battle in his life.

This was in May, 1939 just at the time Hitler’s armies were advancing across Europe. In London, Wingate continued working feverishly through everyone he knew, including Weizmann and Ben Gurion (who were much more phlegmatic and less impetuous and incautious than he), to get a Jewish Army into action.

His next action was to be Ethiopia. It was to be the first British victory in the Second World War and he did it all with irregulars, including kibbutz volunteers he had trained in Palestine and had specially brought down at his request; and it was done, once again, through his old protector Archibald Wavell, whom at this point had become a full General and Commander-in-Chief of all British Forces in the Middle East. Apparently Wingate had already predicted to one of his sisters that one day he would restore Haile Selassie to his Throne in Ethiopia. He also apparently told the same thing during their courtship to his future wife Lorna — whom he married in 1936, the same year he was posted to Palestine.

The Italian invasion there (in collusion with the French) had begun in 1934, just after Wingate had left the Sudan and finished his Zerzura Expedition. By 1936, despite League of Nations condemnation and native resistance, Mussolini had succeeded in expelling the Emperor. Wingate was sent in by Wavell, who remembered his earlier effectiveness with irregular forces in Palestine, in November, 1940. By May 5th, 1941 after a series of engagements fought by mixed British, Palestinian, and native forces in Northern Ethiopia, Wingate mounted on a white charger was escorting Haile Selessie who, frazzled and weary, preferred riding in a Ford convertible into Addis Ababa six years after his discomfiture.

Now the events that led to Wingate’s greatest fame and demise were about to unfold. First of all, it was in Ethiopia that Wingate had his first encounter with then Colonel, later Field Marshall, William Slim who had command of a small mechanized unit, which had suffered many reverses coming up from the South with a mixed group of Kenyans, British, and Indian Army units, which had also been badly mauled. Wingate’s extraordinary success doubtlessly did not sit very well with these groups or these commanders. Once back in Cairo, Wingate’s report of the Ethiopian Campaign (Wavell now having departed) was flatly rejected at GHQ and all those he recommended for DSO’s denied. In turn, Wingate considered that his extraordinary success there entitled him, once more, to return to Palestine and raise an Army of Jewish Volunteers (this did eventually transpire, but much smaller and later than Wingate envisioned — called, as everyone now knows, “the Jewish Brigade”).

Then in despair, all his hopes having been dashed; on July 4th, 1941 Wingate did the unthinkable for a British Officer — he tried to commit suicide, plunging a bayonet into his throat in his room at Shepheard’s Hotel and only being saved from cutting both his carotid artery and jugular vein (he had stabbed himself from both sides — he was later determined to have been suffering from severe cerebral malaria) by the involuntary tightening of his neck muscles. By September, he was on a Hospital ship on his way back to England which docked in his family’s native Northern Scotland in mid-November.

Now in disgrace for the second time, though people like the famous explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who had served under him in Ethiopia, thought he deserved an MBE for his achievements there (by a twist of fate, the General Cunningham of the unsuccessful British/Kenyan Southern Forces and Slim’s superior too, who had Wingate banished from Ethiopia, was ultimately the last British Governor of Palestine when Jewish Independence was declared in 1948); nevertheless Wingate did not have to wait long for the final triumph and tragedy of his life.

‘The James Ossuary’ and Its Authenticity

Huffington Post, January 20, 2011.

Now that the extended ‘trial’ over “the James Ossuary” or “James Bone Box” in Israel is nearing its conclusion and all that remains to be announced is the verdict — which in the present writer’s mind is a foregone conclusion, no evaluation of data having had to take this long without basically a verdict of “unproven” as regards forgery being the outcome — it is time to take stock of where we stand with regard to this “Box”; so that such a ‘verdict’ will not come as too much of a shock to those convinced of some suspiciousness connected with it and its sudden seemingly almost miraculous appearance or willy-nilly ‘surfacing,’ just when one might have expected it to.

I have always insisted that the appearance of this “Box” in 2002 was intimately connected with the publication of my 1,000-page blockbuster, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Viking/Penguin/ Faber & Faber, 1997-98). That book put this “James the Brother of Jesus” ‘on the map,’ so to speak — meaning the fact of his existence and his importance, as his ‘brother’s successor and closest living relative, to the question of “the Historical Jesus” (the last sentence of the Book being: “Who and whatever James was, so was ‘Jesus’); not to mention his leadership of the “Early Church in Palestine” (“the Bishop of Bishops,” as it were or, in the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls, “the Mebakker” or “Overseer”) and the real “Leader” of so-called “Christianity” everywhere not “Peter.”

In my work, I have always insisted on the importance of “internal data,” if it can be interpreted correctly, over “external data.” By this, I have always meant, as at “Qumran” (the name scholars give to the subject of “the Dead Sea Scrolls” — being the location of the River Wadi emptying into the Dead Sea where the Scrolls were found — to avoid having constantly to repeat the latter terminology), what the documents themselves say and not the more imprecise conclusions of paleography, archaeology, and even AMS carbon dating. These, as in the case of “Qumran,” are often at odds with the conclusions of what the texts themselves say rendering them, in the end, mute and impossible to interpret — this, still the issue in Qumran Studies today. Given the questionable nature, precision-wise, of these “external dating tools” such as they are — often with a margin of error of + or – 100-200 years (even more), they cannot stand in the face of “internal data” to the contrary (see my sections on this subject in Chapter 2 of my follow-up, also 1000-page: The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (Watkins/Baird/Sterling/Barnes & Noble, 2006)).

The same can be said for this so-called “James Ossuary” or “Bone Box”; and I did this on the very first day it appeared — knowing that it was not accidental that it ‘surfaced’ just two or three years after my work introducing this subject the world, a work which had been glowingly reviewed in The Jerusalem Post Literary Supplement by Alex Auswaks on 4/24/97 (James vs. Paul: Robert Eisenman’s James the Brother of Jesus); so the issue was already known to aficionados in Israel — on the basis of “the Internal data,” i.e., what the inscription on the “ossuary” itself said and not on the basis of scientific or pseudo-scientific tools, such as patina analysis (a “science” still in its infancy and apparently easily faked), paleography (anyone who was going to “forge” an inscription or add something to an existing one would be sure not to get this wrong and get the hand-writing right), and finally archaeology — the ossuary is doubtlessly “authentic” as artifacts from this period are plentiful; that is not the question. The question is what the inscription itself says and how likely it is.

I summarized these points in an op-ed I was invited to do two weeks after the artifact appeared for the Los Angeles Times on 10/29/02: “Commentary: A Discovery That’s Just Too Perfect: Claims that stone box held remains of Jesus’ brother may be suspect.” This article was obviously almost completely done on the basis of “the Internal evidence,” i.e., what the inscription itself said, as there was little “external evidence” yet available at the time, except for paleography (and here, the second part of the inscription was patently fraudulent as it was obviously different and added by a second hand).

However, it is just this “internal evidence” that the Israeli Court hardly or does not seem to have considered at all; for, had it done so to any extent, the ‘verdict’ would have been a closed and shut case almost from the beginning. Therefore, it is worth reproducing the arguments and analyses of this op-ed piece in total now that we are on the verge of ‘a verdict’ in this case — every word of which is still true some nine years later, almost nothing having changed in the meantime.

So here it is: “James, the brother of Jesus, was so well known and important as a Jerusalem Religious Leader in his day, according to First Century sources, that taking this ‘brother’ relationship seriously (as I have said in all my published work) is perhaps the best confirmation that there ever was an ‘Historical Jesus.’ Put another way, it is not whether ‘Jesus’ had a ‘brother,’ but rather whether ‘the brother’ had a ‘Jesus.’ Now, we are suddenly presented with this very ‘proof’ – the discovery, allegedly near Jerusalem, of an ossuary inscribed with ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,’ in the Aramaic used at that time.

An ‘ossuary’ is a stone box, in which bones previously laid out in rock-cut tombs — such as the one pictured in the Gospels — were placed after they were retrieved by relatives or followers. Why do I find this discovery suspicious? Aside from its sudden miraculous appearance, no confirmed provenance — that is, where it was found and where it has been all these years (from the photographic evidence it seems in remarkably well-preserved condition) — no authenticated chain of custody or transmission, and the suspicious nature of the addition of a second part in a different hand in the inscription; there is the nature of the inscription itself and what it says.

There is no problem getting hold of ossuaries from this period. They are plentiful enough in the Jerusalem area, many not inscribed and some never even used; so confirmation of the Jerusalem origin of the stone avails nothing, nor particularly does its paleography. The Sorbonne paleographer, Andre Lemaire, authenticated the Aramaic inscription as from the year 63 CE. What precision — but why 63? Because he knew from the First Century Jewish historian, Josephus, that James died in 62 CE — how brilliant!

Actually, the only really strong point the arguers for its authenticity have is the so-called ‘patina analysis,’ which was measured at an Israeli laboratory and the appearance of which seems homogeneous. As this is a new science, it is hard for me to gauge its value or its accuracy — still, its letters do seem unusually clear and incised and do not, at least in the photographs, show a significant amount of damage caused by the vicissitudes of time.

My main objection to the ossuary, however as I said, is the nature of the inscription itself. I say this as someone who would be happy if an artifact of this type were true — someone willing to be convinced, as I would like the burial place of James to be found. Afterall, being the author of a book on this ‘James,’ I would stand more to gain by its authenticity than many others. But this “Bone Box” is just too pat — too perfect. In issues of antiquities verification, this is usually a clear warning sign.

This inscription appears too pointed, not at an ancient audience who would have known who ‘James’ (or ‘Jacob’/ ‘Ya’akov’ — his Hebrew/Aramaic name) was, but at a modern one. If this box had simply said ‘Jacob the son of Joseph’ (which it probably said originally anyhow), it might have passed muster. But ancient sources are not clear on who this ‘Jacob”s father really was. If the inscription had said ‘James the son of Cleophas,’ ‘Clopas’ or even ‘Alphaeus’ (as in the Gospels) – all three probably being interchangeable — I would have been really excited. But ‘son of Joseph’? This is what a modern audience, schooled in the Gospels, would have expected to see — not an ancient one.

Then there is ‘the brother of Jesus’ part, which was seemingly added and written in another, different hand. Almost no ancient source calls ‘James’ this. This is what we moderns have come to know him as or call him. Even Paul, our primary New Testament witness and source, refers to him ‘James the brother of the Lord.’ If the ossuary had said something like ‘James the Zaddik’ or ‘James the Just One,’ which is how all ancient sources referred to him — including Hegesippus from the Second Century CE, Eusebius from the Fourth, and Jerome and Epiphanius in the Fifth — then I would have more willingly credited it.

But to call him, not only by his paternal but also his fraternal name — and this in an obvious addition — this, I am unfamiliar with on any ossuary and, again, it appears to me to be directly pointed at us a later audience primarily composed of believers. This is what I mean by the formulation being ‘too Perfect.’ It is too pointed and just doesn’t ring true — to the modern ear, particularly that of the believer’s, perhaps; but to the ancient? Perhaps a later pilgrim from the Fourth or Fifth Century CE might have described ‘James’ in this manner, but probably no one would have done so in his lifetime. Moreover, this is not what our paleographers are saying. As we saw above, they are dating it in 63 CE (sic)!

Finally, the numerous contemporary sources, I have already referred to above, know the location of James’ burial site. Hegesippus, a Palestinian native who lived perhaps 50 or 100 years after the events in question, tells us that James was buried where he was stoned in Jerusalem — beneath ‘the Pinnacle of the Temple.’ Eusebius in the Fourth Century CE and Jerome in the Fifth say the burial site with its marker was still extant in their time and both, having visited Jerusalem, appear to have actually seen it!

No source, however, mentions James’ bones being dug up and put in an ossuary. They say he was buried in the ground. Our creative artificers presumably never read any of these sources — nor beyond the first few Chapters of my book, James the Brother of Jesus (Penguin, 1998) — or they would have known better.”

This is what “the Internal evidence” would say and it does not appear as if evidence of this kind was ever even placed to any extent before the Israeli Court, since I for one was never called as a witness and I am supposed to be an ‘expert’ on the subject, having theoretically ‘written the book on it.’ No matter what the final ‘verdict’ of the Court turns out to be, this kind of evidence is still valid, real, and applicable today as nothing has changed in the interim, because a ‘Court’ cannot and does not measure these things.

A ‘Court’ generally measures “external evidence” and whether it is sufficient enough; and, in this case as we noted at the beginning of this piece, it probably cannot and will not be. But “Internal evidence” is measured by one’s intelligence and one expects and hopes this is still intact, functioning, and applicable.

“Robert Eisenman – Man of New Ideas”

Article by Allan Koay in The Star (Malaysia), Dec. 5, 2010.

Behind the perceived outlandishness and eccentricity of Robert Eisenman is a brilliant scholar and generous teacher.

Prof Dr Robert Eisenman isn’t your run-of-the-mill everyday scholar. The stereotype of the boring academic doesn’t apply to him at all.

The moment he arrived at the venue of his talk last month – at Universiti Malaya’s Centre for Civilisational Dialogue – travel bag in tow, he was instantly at ease, speaking easily with people he had just met.

His whirlwind-like persona swept us all into its path during his talk on the Dead Sea scrolls – Prof Eisenman was one of the people instrumental in getting the scrolls released to the public.

Prof Dr Robert Eisenman at the mouth of Cave Four in Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. – Courtesy of Robert Eisenman

The Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in a desolate, arid place called Qumran on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, between 1946 and 1956. Over 970 documents were found in 11 caves. The scrolls have courted controversy ever since because of their Biblical and extra-Biblical content, and the question of who actually wrote them continues to be disputed till this day.

Because the scrolls were possessively kept secret for a long time, conspiracy theories arose with some claiming that the Vatican was suppressing information found in the scrolls that was damaging to the church, à la Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. In reality, it was greed and a turf war between scholars that kept the scrolls hidden from the public – scholars wanted to be the first to interpret the texts, for obvious reasons. Today, you can view the fragments of the scrolls on the Internet.

“We said (the scrolls) should be open to anybody,” said Prof Eisenman. “It should be free for anyone – religious, non-religious, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, whoever – to look at the scrolls for themselves. And the Israelis didn’t want that. They wanted their scholars to see the documents and write the principal work so that their version would be the official interpretation.”

The surprising prof

You would expect an academic talk to be monotonous, fact-heavy and as arid as the landscape of Qumran. With Prof Eisenman, though, it was far from that. He gesticulated excitedly, sometimes leaning forward on the lectern, other times turning around to write enthusiastically on the whiteboard. And he peppered his talk with humorous anecdotes, some of which cannot be reproduced in this newspaper.

Anyone who does a quick check on the Internet would find that there is more to Prof Eisenman than just scholarly work. Currently a professor at California State University in Long Beach, California, Prof Eisenman is not just an expert in Middle Eastern religions, Islamic law and archaeology, he is also a “road poet”.

Surprisingly, he started out studying engineering physics at Cornell University and the path somehow led him to philosophy and Middle East studies. (Incidentally, his older brother is famous architect Peter Eisenman who designed the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, among other iconic structures.)

“When I started in engineering, people didn’t have computers,” said Prof Eisenman. “They had slide rules on their belts. Everybody in engineering at Cornell was considered a nerd. They weren’t considered cool then, not like now. And I was reading Nietzsche, poetry, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and all these sorts of things.”

In between all that, he spent five years (1958 to 1963) travelling the world. His journals have been published as a book entitledThe New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario (1959-1962). Incidentally, his travels coincided with the rise of the Beat Generation, the Anerican countercultural movement of the era personified by such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Having traversed the American landscape, Eisenman then took the international route across Europe, the Middle East and overland all the way to India.

He worked in Palestine and on a kibbutz (a collective agriculture-based settlement in Israel) and visited Jerusalem.

“I had no money so I worked on the farms,” explained Prof Eisenman. “I got interested in the Middle East. I was supposed to teach in Iran but there were too many CIA agents there.

“At the time (Lyndon B.) Johnson was president, and he thought Americans should know more languages. So he had these National Defence fellowships. I learned Arabic and Hebrew in graduate school on these fellowships and it was all paid for by the government.”

He learned Islamic law in Palestine and Israel. He couldn’t make a living there so when Cal State offered him a job in the religious studies department, he went back home to America.

Asked what inspired his travels, Prof Eisenman jokingly exclaimed: “I was a hippie! A beatnik!”

Provoking thought

In reality, he was very much anti-Beat, even though he had met many of the proponents and exponents of Beat. Prof Eisenman had even stayed at the famous Beat Hotel in Paris from 1959 to 1960, and he still remembers seeing Burroughs there daily, and having encounters with the likes of Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.

Prof Eisenman doesn’t hide his dislike of them, calling them “criminals” and “low, street people”. He feels they ruined the great culture that America had. He considers the notebooks he kept during his travels as an anti-Beat manifesto. He professes a love for the “old America”, the time when George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were presidents, he loves the nobility, honour, generosity and high-mindedness of the old days, and has great admiration for Walt Whitman, Lincoln and Plato.

However, Prof Eisenman’s outspokenness has courted more negative opinions of him than he is comfortable with. He finds the words of his detractors painful and hurtful. And he doesn’t like to be labelled “controversial”.

“I’m not controversial,” he said. “I think I have new ideas, and new ideas are always controversial. The minute you say someone’s controversial, you’ve finished him.”

Apart from challenging widely held views of the Dead Sea scrolls, Prof Eisenman has also written a heavy tome entitledJames the Brother of Jesus that presents a different look at the origins of Christianity. When the 2,000-year-old James ossuary (an ossuary is a limestone box used by Jews for storing bones) was unveiled in 2002, Eisenman was quick to label it a fraud.

All this may be seen as “controversial”, and some of his work has been called outlandish and eccentric, but Prof Eisenman prefers to be perceived as offering food for thought.

“Universities are there to extend people’s knowledge,” he said. “That’s why when I came (to Universiti Malaya), I could have just said stuff that, people have heard a hundred times before and left everyone happy. But I believe we should bring new information and new knowledge and let people think for themselves about these facts.”

The Scrolls, the James Box and the Gospel of Judas

Jerusalem Post, Dec. 3, 2010.

In this Hanukkah Season, three subjects are again in the news — or at least the first two are. The third, “Judas Iscariot and the Hanukkah Season” or “Was there ever a Judas Iscariot or was He Simply the Product of Retrospective Theological Invective” should always be on the front burner, especially in this Hanukkah Season or how else are we to rescue our children from this ever-recurrent deicide charge and save them from its generational and unceasing two millennia of unbearable effects? This was one of the issues I covered to some degree in my comments about Fidel Castro’s recent remarks in “If Begin Wore Swim Trunks” last month.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are always important — and, by the way, the site of their discovery, so precious to the Jewish People, should not be given away in any projected or, for that matter, even ‘WikiLeaks’-inspired ‘Peace Plan’ — but this issue we already fought out from 1989-92 (see myDead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, Penguin, 1992 and Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, 1991 — the co-authors ofHoly Blood, Holy Grail in 1984, co-opted so effectively in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code), going all the way up to the Israel Supreme Court after the publication by Hershel Shanks’ Biblical Archaeology Society of James Robinson’s (of Claremont University – referred to below) and my Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, also in 1991. It’s good to see the Israeli Antiquities Authority has finally brought itself up-to-date and into the Google universe by laying them out online some two decades thereafter.

That is not the only thing they should be congratulated for. Their case against “the James Box,” as it is popularly known as, or “Ossuary” — it too, probably being based on my James the Brother of Jesus, Penguin, 1997-98, almost no one (except aficionados) having previously understood or realized there was such a character – will finally be coming to adjudication after some six years of itself making its way through the sometimes seemingly glacial processes of the Israeli Courts.

I originally dealt with this “discovery” on the very first day it appeared or “surfaced” having, as it were, written the book on it, in an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times (29/10/02), “A Discovery that’s Just Too Perfect” subtitled “Claims the Stone Box Held Remains of Jesus’ Brother May be Suspect.”; but I shall cover this in a follow-up article next week which will include the  original L.A. Times op-ed piece which is still valid nine years later – “the Box”,  no matter what the Court ultimately decides, being obviously outside the realm of reality since before there could be the “bone box” of “the brother of someone”, there had to be a really historical such a “someone” in the first place. But the Antiquities Authority, despite the justice of its cause, will almost certainly lose this case or why should it have taken so long, since no evidence will rise to what would be deemed as “provable” in a Court of Law.

Which brings us to the third matter I wish to address, particularly on this Hanukkah eve, “The Gospel of Judas and his Redemonization” once again.  I originally submitted a version of this piece in Hanukkah, 2007 under the title: “Judas Iscariot and the Hanukkah Season: Was there ever a Judas Iscariot or was he Simply the Product of Retrospective Theological Invective” after the exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Diego, California in November of that year, where there was also a panel on this newly-discovered Gospel run by the American Society of Biblical Literature as well. The piece finally appeared in December of 2008 in The Huffington Post, where I applied it to both a Jewish and a Christian audience under the title “Gospel Truth or Gospel Fiction and the Redemonization of Judas”.Â

One can immediately see why they would print such an article and for this one must be grateful; so what appears below will basically be an updated form of that article, so important do I consider it to be, not only for well-meaning, believing, and Israel-supporting Christians, of whom there are many (note how the Amish Leaders last week broke all their own rules to fly to Israel and express unreservedly their apologies for their silence during the Holocaust and their present unstinting support); but also for Jews who, to their own detriment, generally know so little about a subject, so basic to this or any Hanukkah season of the year.Â

The best example of this “Redemonization of Judas” after his “undemonization” with the publication of a contrary “Gospel” in his name appeared at this time — the Hanukkah/Christmas Season of the year — in the always ‘fair-minded’ (and liberal) New York Times (12/1/07) in a centrally-featured op-ed piece entitled, “Gospel Truth” by A. DeConick, a Professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  In it, while I was flattered to read how she compared the editorial process of “The Gospel of Judas” to the breaking of the monopoly over the Dead Sea Scrolls Prof. Robinson and myself managed to achieve with our Facsimile Edition, referred to above, as well as the difficulty of overturning entrenched translations and interpretations, “even after,” as she put it, “they are proved wrong” –  not to mention her allusion to the Society of Biblical Literature’s 1991 resolution that, even if the condition of  given manuscript required access to be restricted, a facsimile reproduction should be the first order of business.” This Professor James Robinson and I did that same year as just described.

But Ms. DeConick did not stop there. What she wished to do in this op-ed was to check the heroicization of Judas that had ensued following the appearance of the “Gospel” depicting him as a hero and not a treacherous enemy and return to portraying him as the Demon (Daimon) incarnate – “the Thirteenth Apostle” as she put it. This article was preceded the previous month by the Conference of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, California, at which some Israeli academics were also in attendance, in which the main players in the new literature about the recently-surfaced “Gospel of Judas Iscariot” were together on a panel. These included James Robinson above (The Secrets of Judas), Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels), Karen King (Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity), Gerd Ludemann (Das Judas-Evangelium), Marv Meyer (The Gospel of Judas), April DeConick (The Thirteenth Apostle), etc.

The most interesting points that emerged from the necessarily-curtailed discussion were how few “orthodox Gospels” (Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc.) had come to light from that period (the Second Century — the single example cited being one possibly-identifiable fragment from the papyrus trash heaps of Egypt from the Gospel of John) and how many heterodox ones had, on the other hand, appeared. Did this mean that more people at that time were reading “sectarian” Gospels rather than “orthodox” ones (i.e., those declared “orthodox” at Church Conferences in the Fourth Century starting with Constantine and his Bishop Eusebius and onwards)? The answer of the more conservative members of the Panel (Chair Williams of the U. of Washington, DeConick, and even Robinson, et. al.) was, not really, but that, in any case, the newly-discovered “Gospel of Judas” was less historical than the orthodox.

At this point, since there were no other questions, I raised my hand and asked, “What makes you think any of them are historical and not just retrospective and polemical literary endeavors of a kind familiar in the Hellenistic World at that time? Why consider one superior to the other and not simply retrospective theological repartee expressed in a literary style? The Gospel of Judas was clearly a polemical philosophical text, but so too probably were all the others. Why not consider all a kind of quasi-Neoplatonic, Mystery Religion-oriented literature that was still developing in the Second Century and beyond as the Gospel of Judas itself clearly demonstrates?”

A sort of hushed silence fell on the three hundred or so persons present in the audience, but despite Chair Williams’ attempt to intervene, I continued: “Why think any historical or even representative of anything that really happened in Palestine in the First Century? Why not consider all Greco-Hellenistic romantic fiction or novelizing with an ax to grind – in the case of the “orthodox” anyhow (and to some extent the Gospel of Judas), incorporating the Pax Romana of the earlier great Roman Emperor Augustus, as other literature from this period had; and, of course, the Anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish legal attachments which were the outcome of the suppression of the Jewish War from 66-73 CE?”

“The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were masters of such man/God fiction and the creation of such characters as Osiris, Dionysus, Asclepius, Hercules, Orpheus, and the like, as the works of Hesiod, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, Seneca, Apuleius, et. al. also vividly attest. Why not consider all simply part of this man-God/personification literature — in this instance, incorporating the new Jewish concept of “Salvation”/ “Yeshu’a”  in Hebrew – and nothing more?” At this point, Chair Williams finally did succeed in getting in an answer on behalf of what he described as “the whole Panel,” to the effect that “Tradition affirmed they were” which he probably considered sufficient for someone like myself, one of the only non-Christians or persons of Jewish background in the room who might have enough knowledge to say something meaningful or precise enough to matter.

Nevertheless, in this Hanukkah/Christmas season, it seems particularly relevant to raise the issue of this “Judas” once again and, now that we have more tools, incumbent upon us to do so. Regardless of predictable outcries from “the Left” or “the Right” or the impact on anyone’s “Faith” – as if this could matter in the face of all the unfortunate and cruel effects that have come from taking the picture of the “Judas” in Scripture seriously as “History”; and especially in this post-Holocaust Era, one must look at the issue of whether there ever was a “Judas Iscariot” per se, except in the imagination of these Gospel artificers – to say nothing of all the insidious materials circulating under his name.Â

Nor is this to say anything about the historicity of “Jesus” himself (another difficult question, though the “Judas” issue most likely leads the way towards solving the “Jesus” one as well) or another, largely literary or fictional character now – in view of women’s issues – much in vogue, ‘Jesus” alleged consort “Mary Magdalene” and, according to some, the supposed mother of his only child (in the Gypsy Festival in Les Saintes Maries de lat Mer in Southern France, one “Sara” — sic!).

But while this latter kind of storytelling did little specifically-identifiable harm, except to confuse one’s historical sense and sense of truth or confuse Literature with History; the case of “Judas Iscariot” is quite another thing both in kind and effect. It has had a more horrific and, in fact, totally unjustifiable historical effect because his name has become a by-word for treachery and a slur on the whole Jewish People; and, even if it happened the way the Gospels and the Book of Acts describe it – which is doubtful since the one does not agree with the other – effects of this kind were and are wholly unjustified and reprehensible, particularly in this season of our great Hanukkah hero (for us, as great or greater than Augustus), “Judas Maccabee.”

In the first place, there are only a few references to “Judas Iscariot” in orthodox Scripture, all of which demonstrably tendentious. For example, he is made in John 12:5 to complain about “Mary”‘s (another of these ubiquitous “Mary”s – this time “Mary the sister of Lazarus” not “Mary Magdalene” or “Mary the mother of Jesus” or  even, for instance, “Mary the mother of James and John” or “of John Mark”), “anointing Jesus’ feet with precious spikenard ointment,” in terms of why was not this “sold for 300 dinars and given to the Poor” – a variation on the “30 pieces of silver” he supposedly took for “betraying” the Master later in Matthew 27:3-7 (and pars.). In Matthew and Mark it is the other “Disciples” or  some people referred to as “some” (always an allusion in the literature to “the James Party” who were also called “the Poor”) who do the “complaining”, not specifically “Judas Iscariot.”

But anyone even remotely familiar with the vocabulary of this field would immediately recognize the allusion to “the Poor” as but a thinly-veiled attack on “the Ebionites” or that group of the followers of “Jesus” (or his brother “James”) who were probably “the aboriginal Christians” in Palestine, if we can speak of them in this manner, and who, according to Eusebius in the Fourth Century, did not follow the doctrine of “the Supernatural Christ” and saw Jesus simply as a “man”/”a prophet,” engendered by natural generation and exceeding other men in the practice of Righteousness only.

In fact as just alluded to too, the Lukan version of Judas Iscariot’s death in Acts 1:16-19 and Matthew’s version do not agree at all – a normal state of affairs where Gospel reportage is concerned. In Matthew, Judas goes out and “hangs himself” (thus!) after throwing the “thirty pieces of silver” – “the price of blood” as Matthew likes to term it – into the Temple (whatever this means). This is supposed to fulfill a passage from “the Prophet Jeremiah,” when in fact the passage being quoted is a broadly-doctored version of “the Prophet Zechariah” (11:12-13), which does not really have the connotation Matthew is trying to give it at all.

In Acts, Judas rather “falls headlong” into “a Field of Blood” (“the Alkeldama” – reason unexplained, although this is the verb used in an “Ebionite” document called the Pseudoclementine Recognitions to describe the “headlong fall” James takes down the Temple steps when the “Enemy” Paul physically attacks him, leaving him for dead) and “he burst open and his bowels gushed out” (thus)! Most conflate these two accounts and think they are in all four Gospels when they are not; but, as just implied, this is really only a parody of the death of James as reported in early Church literature. So is the stoning of Stephen (a subject beyond the scope of this article, but see my two books James the Brother of Jesus, Penguin, 1998 and The New Testament Code, Barnes and Noble, 2006) and the other two gospels do not mention either his death or how he died at all.

The point, however, is that the entire character of “Judas Iscariot” is generated out of whole cloth and it is meant to be. Moreover it is done in a totally malevolent way. This “The Gospel of Judas” was obviously trying to ameliorate but, after the initial blush of excitement over its discovery, now the pendulum — if we are to take the words of people like Prof. DeConick in The New York Times seriously — has begun to swing back the other way and we are once again in the business of “demonizing” Judas, not “heroicizing” him. Moreover, despite the good it was doing, we should rather downgrade this “Gospel” and consider the “orthodox” Gospels, in some manner, superior to and more historical than it!

The creators of this character and the traditions related to him knew what it was they were seeking to do and in this they have succeeded in a manner far beyond anything they might have imagined and that – to put it cruelly – would have astonished even their hate-besotted brains. Judas Iscariot is meant to be both hateful and hated – a diabolical character despised by all mankind and a byword for treachery and the opposite of all-perfection – the perfect, Gnosticizing Mystery figure embodied in the person of the “Salvation” figure “Jesus” (the name of whom, as we just saw, even translates out as “Saviour”).

But in creating this character, the authors of these traditions and these “Gospels” (often, it is difficult to decide which came first, “the Gospels” themselves or the traditions either inspired by or giving inspiration to them) had a dual purpose in mind and in this their creation has done its job admirably well. His very name “Judas” in that time and place (forget the fact that it is a byword for “Jew” even to this day) was meant both to parody and demonize two favorite characters of the Jews of the Age: “Judas Maccabee,” the hero of Jewish “Hanukkah” Festivities even to this day, and “Judas the Galilean,” the legendary founder (described by the First-Century Jewish historian and turncoat, Josephus) of what one might call either “the Zealot” or “Galilean Movement” – even “the Sicarii” (see below).

In fact, if the truth were out in the mutual back-and-forth polemics of these characterizations, aside from the whole of the Jewish People itself, he might even be either parallel to or indistinguishable form a third character, known to New Testament tradition in the East as “Judas the Zealot,” and very possibly the third “brother” of “Jesus,” referred to variously as “Judas of James”/”Jude the brother of James”/or “Judas Thomas” (“Judas the Twin’). In fact, if he is “Judas of James” (i.e., “the brother of James”), then he is also very probably “Thaddaeus,” indistinguishable too from him in Gospel tradition and also very likely from another Messianic agitator described by Josephus, whom he calls “Theudas,” who leads a reverse Messianic Exodus like his prototype the biblical “Joshua” and who was beheaded in 44 CE – if all these characters can, in fact, be separated.

To go back to the original point – the name “Jew” in all languages, as should be clear by now, actually comes from this biblical name “Judas” or “Judah,” a fact not missed by the people at that time and not too misunderstood even today. So, therefore, the pejorative on “Judas” or “Judah” and the symbolic value of all that it signified in the First Century CE was not missed either by those who created this particular “blood libel” or by all those following them even to this day and, to reiterate, how very successful over the last two thousand years.

There is, however, one last dimension to this particular “blood libel” which has also not failed to leave its mark, historically speaking, on the peoples of the world and that is Judas’ cognomen “Iscariot.” No one has ever found the linguistic prototype or origin of this curious denominative, but it is not unremarkable that in the Gospel of John he is also called “Judas the son” or “brother of Simon Iscariot” and, at one point, even “the Iscariot” (cf. John 6:71, 14:22, etc.).Â

Of course, the closest cognate to any of these rephrasings is the well-known term Josephus uses to designate (also pejoratively) the extreme “Zealots” or Revolutionaries of the time, “the Sicarii” – the “iota” and the “sigma” of the Greek simply having been reversed, a common mistake in the transliteration of Semitic orthography into unrelated languages like English and well-known in Arabic – the “iota” likewise generating out of the “ios” of the singular in Greek, “Sicarios.” There is no other tenable approximation that this term could realistically allude to. Plus the attachment to it of the definite article “the Iscariot,” whether mistakenly or by design, just strengthens the conclusion.

Furthermore, Judas’ association in these episodes with the concept both of “the Poor” (the name of the group led by “Jesus”‘ brother James in First-Century Jerusalem as we saw),  as well as that of a suicide of some kind in Matthew – suicide being one of the tenets of the group Josephus identifies as carrying out just such a mass action at the climax of the famous last stand on Masada (a coincidence of this kind goes far beyond the realm of  possible accident) – to say nothing of the echo of the cognomen of the founder of this Party or Orientation, the equally famous “Judas the Galilean” (also a “Judas the Zealot” as we have been stressing just as “Judas Maccabee” would have been), just strengthens this conclusion.Â

Equally germane is the fact that another “Apostle” of “Jesus” is supposed to have been called – at least according to Luke’s Apostle lists in the Gospel under his name and Acts attributed to him – “Simon the Zealot”/”Simon Zelotes” which, of course, also translates out in the jargon of the Gospel of John as “Simon Iscariot” or “Simon the Iscariot.” Moreover, he was more than likely a “brother” of the curious Disciple in the same lists, mentioned above called “Judas of James” in Luke, that is, “Judas the brother of James” (the way the designation is also framed in the New Testament Letter of Jude/Judas). In a variant manuscript of an early Syriac document, known as The Apostolic Constitutions, alluded to above too; this individual is designated “Judas the Zealot” as well – thereby completing the circle of all these inter-related terminologies which seem to have been coursing through so many of these early documents in this period.

Of course, all these matters are fraught with difficulty, but once they are weighed together; there is hardly any escaping the fact that “Judas Iscariot”/”the Iscariot”/”the brother” or “son of Simon the Iscariot” in the Gospels and the Book of Acts is a polemical pejorative for many of these other characters, meant to defame and polemically demonize a number of individuals seen as opposing the new “Pauline” more Greco-Roman esotericizing doctrine of the “Supernatural Christ.” The presentation of this “Judas,” polemicizing as it was, was probably never meant to take on the historical and theological dimensions it has, coursing through the last two thousand years and leading up to the present; but with a stubborn toughness it has endured and sometimes even thrived.Â

Nevertheless, its success as a demonizing pejorative has been monumental, a whole people having suffered the consequences of, not only of seeing its own beloved heroes (one of the most notable of whom being the Judas Maccabee of our Hanukkah Celebrations today) turned into demoniacs, but of being hunted down mercilessly – to some extent the terrifying results of its efficacy. If anything were a proof of the aphorism “Poetry is truer than history,” then this is; and, to repeat, I believe its original artificers would have been astonished by its incredible success.

Even beyond this, not only is there no historical substance to the presentation or its after-effects; but if “Jesus” were alive today – human or supernatural, literary or historical, real or unreal – he would surely have been shocked at such vindictiveness and diabolical hatred and he, perhaps even more than any others, would have expected his supporters to divest themselves of this historical shibboleth, particularly in view of the harm it has done over the millennia, most especially to his own People.

This is what the initial appearance of the Gospel of Judas gave promise of helping to achieve, but now the rehabilitation of the character known to the world as “Judas” – so greatly in order in the light of the incredible atrocities committed over the last century, some undoubtedly as a consequence of this account – seems to be reversing itself, particularly among more theologically-minded scholars like DeConick in venues as prestigious as The New York Times, the downplaying of its historicity relative to alleged “orthodox Gospels” and the “demonization” of Judas – deserved or undeserved – being evidence of this. It is yet another deleterious case of literature, cartoon, or lampoon being taken as history.

Still, in the light shed on these matters by the almost miraculous discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls too; it is time people really started to come to terms with the almost completely literary and ahistorical character of a large number of figures of the kind of this “Judas” in whatever the “Gospel” and in whatever manner he is portrayed – positive or negative – and, in the process, admit the historical malevolence of the original caricature and move forward on to the higher plain of amelioration and rehabilitation. This is what Christians of good will have always said they were interested in doing and, in this Hanukkah/Christmas season, no healthier, happier, or higher hope could be wished for or expressed.

“Every Plant Which My Heavenly Father Has Not Planted Shall Be Uprooted,”

With Noelle Magana, from Sources of the Jesus Tradition, ed. R. Joseph Hoffman, 2010.

What I would like to do in this essay is to show that the famous aphorism, “Every Plant which My Heavenly Father has not Planted Shall be Uprooted,” attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics, which comes following a long diatribe condemning the Pharisees (to my mind a euphemism for the anti-Pauline “Party of the Circumcision”) and famously referring to them as “Blind Guides,” followed up by the equally famous “And the Blind shall lead the Blind and both shall fall into the Pit,” was written by people who were aware of the Dead Sea Scrolls—in fact, more specifically, the First Column of the Cairo Damascus Document (CD) where the same metaphors or, shall we say, similes or allusions are used, albeit to 180-degree opposite effect.

Of course, everyone knows what the Damascus Document does later with the idea of the Pit. From my perspective, I do not believe all these correspondences are simply accidental and, in fact, right after CD talks about how “He [God] caused a Root of Planting to grow . . . and inherit the good things of this Earth,” it goes on to talk about how “they were as blind men groping for the Way” when “He [God] raised up a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in theWay of His heart.” I do not think I need to say more but there is, of course, more to say as there always is.

As the Synoptics then unfold, the Jesus they are presenting then goes on with his “toilet bowl parable,” which talks about how “a man is known not by what goes into his mouth but by that which goes forth from it” (I have shown in my recent New Testament Code, as might be known, that this is just a variation of what R. Yohanan b. Zacchai says about R. Eliezer b. Hyrcanus after the latter put cow dung in his mouth to give himself bad breath!—a neat little bit of refurbishment but, clearly, to reverse ideological effect. Again the keynote is always reversal. What once was a pro-Torah pronouncement is inverted a la Paulinism into an anti-Torah one).

The final point is that Jesus is then made to conclude (or at least the narrator does) in all these Synoptic Parables that “He said this declaring all foods clean” (something Peter forgot when he had his “Tablecloth” vision in Acts). But never mind, the point is always the same—a neat 180-degree reversal from the position of Qumran. This is what I would like to show—that the authors of these materials not only knew the Qumran documents or at least some of them (most notably, the Damascus Document), but were reversing them in a systematically consistent manner.

The linguistic interdependence of the “Root of Planting” allusion of Matthew 15:1–20 andMark 7:1–23 and much else in the depiction of Jesus’ arguments with the “scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem” should be clear. This is the case in Matthew 15:1. In Mark 7:1, this changes into the even more pregnant “the Pharisees” and the telltale “some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem” (thus—note both the “coming” and the “some”) and a euphemism, it would appear, evocative of Paul’s interlocutors from “James,” “Church,” or “Assembly” in Jerusalem.” In Matthew, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees as Blind Guides—in this instance, in a polemical exchange with his own disciples, following this up with the passage which is the title and subject of this essay:

Every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up. (Mt 15:13)

It should be obvious that these are anti–“Jerusalem Church” aspersions, since they are usually followed by and tied to equally proverbial statements like “the First shall be Last and the Last shall be First” (Mt 19:30, 20:16 and pars.) — “the Last” having, patently, to do with Paul’s new “Gentile Christian” communities and those, like him, making no insistence on seemingly picayune legal requirements for salvation. The inverse parallel to this—which as at Qumran, as we shall show further below, will also involve a “Guide” or “Maschil”1 — will be present in the Damascus Document’s dramatic opening imprecation about how God caused

a Root of Planting to grow [the parallel is here] from Israel and from Aaron to inherit His land and to prosper on the good things of His Earth.2

I say “patently,” because Paul first made the allusion to being “last” in his 1 Corinthians 15:8 Jesus-sighting-order determinations—also, importantly enough, citing James, even albeit if defectively3:

And last of all he appeared, as if to one born out of term [or “to an abortion”], also to me.

But “the First” is an extremely important expression at Qumran— especially meaningful in the Damascus Document—carrying with it the signification of “the Forefathers” or “the Ancestors.” The sense is always “those who observed” or “gave the Torah,” while “the Last”— aside from Paul’s evocation of it regarding his own post-Resurrection appearance experience—usually has to do with “the Last Times” or “the Last Days” denoting the “present” or “Last Generation” as opposed to “the First.”4

On the other hand in the Gospels, once again absolutely turning Qumran ideology on its head, “the Last” are “the simple” or “these little children”—completely representative of Paul’s new “Gentile Christian Community” knowing or required to know little or nothing about such onerous legal requirements, yet still in a state of salvation, or, as it were, “in Jesus.” The simile, symbolism, parable, or allegory—as the case may be—in all these allusions is not hard to figure out despite endless academic attempts at evasion or posturing to the contrary.

Furthermore, and even perhaps more germane, these polemics in Mark 7:1–23 andMatthew 15:1–20 actually evoke the famous Talmudic tractate, Pirke Abbot (The Traditions of the Fathers, which has a variation in the ARN—The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, here in Mark 7:3–5 and Matthew 15:2, “The Traditions of the Elders”). This designation “Elders” or “Presbyteron” is used at various junctures in the Gospels and the Book of Acts and is the actual designation for James’s “Jerusalem Community” in both Acts 21:18 and the Pseudoclementine Homilies.5

In some of the most convoluted reasoning imaginable, these polemics invoke the Mosaic commandment, “Honor your father and your mother” (Mk 7:10/Mt 15:4) and, in doing so, leave no doubt that we are dealing with “the Fathers.” Just as importantly in Mark 7:1–5 (and to some degree paralleled in Matthew 15:1–4 and 12), the Pharisees are invoked as well—three times in five lines. As just suggested above, this is an expression that often acts as a blind for those of the Jamesian persuasion within the early Church—as, for example, in Acts 15:5 at the renowned “Jerusalem Council” and the elusive “some who believed” of “the sect of the Pharisees” who provoked the council by their insistence on circumcision and “keeping the law of Moses” (thus).

The evocation of these same Pharisees is being used to attack those of the James school over the issue of “table fellowship with Gentiles” in these passages about Blind Guides from Mark and Matthew (an issue clearly being raised by Paul in Galatians 2:11–14). Moreover, there is the additional derivative attack, which now seems to us, if not bizarre, at least rather specious, on the Jewish people as a whole—in this case, plainly meant to include the Jerusalem Community of James, and others of similar mindset—that “eating with unwashed hands does not defile the man” (Mt 15:20/Mk 7:2–3). This attack derogates “washing one’s hands before eating” to the level only of what is being called “a Tradition of Men” and “breaking the [obviously higher] Commandment of God.” In the ad hominem logic being displayed in this patently pro-Pauline exposition, the meaning of this last would appear to be the Mosaic commandment and that of humanity generally “to honor your father and your mother” (Mk 7:8–9/Mt 15:3 and 15:19).

The argument appears to turn on the point that, since one’s parents might have “eaten with unwashed hands,” the commandment not to do so—which the Gospel Jesus is pictured as dismissing here merely as “a Tradition of the Elders” (meaning the allusion to “a Tradition of Men” above)—would be contradicting the higher commandment (the one he is terming “a Commandment of God”) not to dishonor them! This is appears to be the gist of an extremely tortured and, indeed, highly polemicized argument but, to judge by the time spent on it inMark as well asMatthew, a clearly pivotal one as well. The writer sees it as a striking example of retrospective pro-Pauline polemics or “Paulinization” and, consequently, feels it to be a service to rescue “the historical Jesus” from this particular bit of tendentious and not very sophisticated, medically speaking, sophistry.

Both Mark 7:6–7 and Matthew 15:7–9 picture Jesus as using this passage to attack the “vanity” of those who “teach as their doctrines the Commandments of Men,” meaning, “the Traditions of the Elders” just mentioned inMark 7:5 andMatthew 15:2 above. Not only is this clearly an attack on what in Rabbinic parlance is called “oral tradition,” but it turns around the parameters of Paul’s debates with those of the Jamesian school or, if one prefers, inverts their arguments turning them back against themselves.6 Again, the meaning both the Gospels of Mark and Matthew are clearly ascribing to their Jesus from the start here is that “hypocrites” of this kind, following “the Tradition of the Elders,” are forcing people to wash their hands before eating, something that most people nowadays would consider as not only normal but hygienic; however, in Paul’s inverted invective, something Paul (to say nothing about his alter ego Jesus) would obviously consider quite reprehensible.

As in all of the previous episodes above, the denouement of this abolishing purity requirements/table fellowship episode in Mark 7 and Matthew 15, which further legitimatizes the Pauline Gentile Mission, once more has Jesus in 7:17 entering a “house” (as he does yet again in Mark 7:24). In Mark 7:17, this is typically “away from the multitude” to rebuke the disciples. InMatthew 15:15 there is no house7 and the rebuke of “being yet without understanding” is as per usual—because of Galatians 2:11–14—only to Peter. Still, “the multitude” from Mark 7:17 (which probably should be read “the many” or “the Rabim”; the term— unlike “the Sons of Zadok”—usually applied to the rank and file at Qumran) are the ones already portrayed earlier in Mark 7:14 and Matthew 15:10 as the ones being addressed by Jesus on the subject of “pure foods,” “unwashed hands,” “Blind Guides,” and “Uprooted Plants.”

In both Gospels, Jesus’ discourse begins with the words, “Hear and understand,” which has direct links to and appears to play off the opening exhortations of the Damascus Document that read—and this very familiarly and, for that matter, not insignificantly—“Hear, all you who know Righteousness, and understand” (i.1) …

and now listen to me all who enter the Covenant [“the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus” demanding both “purity” and “separating the Holy from the profane”] and I will unstop your ears. (ii.2)8

But in Mark 7:16 in the midst of Jesus’ attack on “the Tradition of the Elders” and “purifying all food” preceding this, the same ears metaphor from column 2 of the Damascus Document, just reproduced above, actually appears, to wit, “If anyone has ears, let him hear.”

To go back to Matthew 15:16, there the rebuke about “being yet without understanding” is, as already remarked, directed at Peter alone and not at the disciples. Notwithstanding, prior to this, after “calling the Multitude” or “the Many to him” (15:10, reprised in Mark 7:14), Jesus does actually address the disciples in Matthew 15:12 as well. There the reproof he gives the disciples concerning staying away from the Pharisees and “leaving them alone” (in 16:6–12 later, “the leaven of the Pharisees” repeated multiple times)—which includes the “Blind Guides,” “planting,” and “uprooting” allusions we have just been calling attention to above—comes in the wake of his enunciation of the following famous doctrine:

Not that which enters the mouth defiles the man, but that which proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man. (15:11—in Mark 7:15, this changes into the more prolix and obviously derivative, “There is nothing from without the man that going into him can defile him. Rather the things that proceed out of the man are those that defile him.”)

This allusion to the Pharisees, the evocation of whom initiated the whole series of encounters right from the beginning in Mark 7:1 and Matthew 15:1 above, comes—as Matthew 15:12 now phrases it— because the disciples reported to Jesus that “the Pharisees were offended by what they heard him saying.”9 It must be reiterated that expressions like “the Pharisees,” regardless of their overt meaning in any other context here or historically, have a covert meaning in these contexts as well. As we have been at pains to point out, they—like “the Scribes” (“some of the Scribes who came down from Jerusalem”) coupled with them in Matthew 15:1 and Mark 7:1 above—are, in this context in the Gospels, stand-ins for “the James Community” in Jerusalem that not only insisted upon circumcision but (as it would appear) its legal consequences as well, such as purity regulations that, by implication, would have included measures of bodily hygiene like “washing their hands” that seem, in the picture Mark and Matthew are presenting, to so upset their Jesus here.10

It is also perhaps not without relevance that an expression like “Pharisees”—Perushim in Hebrew—carries with it, as well, the meaning of “splitting away” or “separating themselves from”—the implication being that, in some contexts, it can even be understood as “heretics,” which, in fact, is one of the appositions Acts 15:5 applies to it. Nor should the reader overlook the fact that Matthew’s picture of Jesus at this point, reproving the Pharisees, follows his exhortation to the Many/the Rabim in 15:10 to “hear and understand” (in Mark 7:14, “hear me all of you and understand”)—a phrase, as we just saw, that has to be seen as comparable to CD i.1’s “Now hear, all you who know Righteousness and understand the works of God.”

Matthew 15:14 also pictures Jesus as calling these Pharisees “Blind Guides” (an allusion we shall presently show to be charged with significance) because of their complaints against his teaching that “eating with unclean hands does not defile the man” (15:20), as well as related matters concerning purity and dietary regulations, themselves having a bearing on the key issue in Galatians 2:11–14 above of “table fellowship with Gentiles.”11 It is at this point, inMatthew 15:14 too, that Jesus then cautions his disciples (none of this paralleled now in Mark or, for that matter, any other Gospel) to “leave them alone.” It would be well to point out that even the line in Matthew 15:19, preceding 15:20 on “eating with unclean hands not defiling the man” just cited and echoed in Mark 7:21–23, enumerates “the things that proceed out of the mouth” (thereby, according to the discourse being attributed here to Jesus, “coming forth out of the heart” and, most famously, therefore “defiling the man”) as: “Evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, blasphemies—these are the things that defile the man” (Mark 7:22 adds “greedy desires, wickednesses, deceit, lustful desires, an evil eye, pride, and foolishness”).

But this catalogue of “evil” inclinations almost precisely reprises one of the most famous passages in the Community Rule from Qumran as well, the “Two Ways”: the “Ways of Darkness” and the “Ways of “Light.” In this document, the “Spirit of Evil”/”Ungodliness” or “of Darkness” is depicted even more lengthily as

greediness of soul, stumbling hands in the Service of Righteousness, Wickedness and Lying, pride and proudness of heart, duplicitousness and deceitfulness, cruelty, Evil temper [there is a lot of Paul in this— to say nothing of Mark 7:21–23 above], impatience, foolishness, and zeal for lustfulness [the opposite, of course, of proper zeal—”zeal for the Law” or “zeal for the Judgments of Righteousness,” as it is expressed in the Hymns from Qumran],12 works of Abomination in a spirit of fornication, and ways of uncleanness in the Service of pollution [now we are getting into it—as opposed to the proper “Service of Righteousness” of “true” Apostles above—all issues of “table service,” for instance, aside), a Tongue full of blasphemies [the “Tongue” imagery of the Letter of James],13 blindness of eye and dullness of ear [this, too, momentarily reappearing in the Gospel episode we shall now describe], stiffness of neck and hardness of heart [as will this] in order to walk in all the Ways of Darkness and Evil inclination.14

This is quite a catalogue, but the parallels with Matthew and Mark do not stop here. Even the allusion to “Blind Guides,” to say nothing of “leave them alone,” which Matthew depicts Jesus as advising vis-à-vis the Pharisees, actually seems to parody the pivotal character evoked at Qumran (in particular, in the Community Rule again, but also in the Hymns), the Maschil or Guide. He is defined, just like “the Teacher of Righteousness,” as instructing theMany in the Ways of Righteousness.15

In the Community Rule this Maschil or Guide is pictured, inter alia, as “doing the will of God” (that is, “being a Doer” not “a Breaker” in the manner of the recommendations in James 1:22–25—nor should one forget, in this regard as well, all the “signs” or “miracles,” Jesus is depicted as doing, in John 2:11, 2:23, 6:2, 6:14, etc.) and

studying all the Wisdom that has been discovered from age to age, to separate [the language of “separation” again, just evoked above in the “leave them alone” allusion] and evaluate the Sons of the Righteous One [here, the usage really is “the Sons of the Righteous One” or “the Zaddik,” not the more usual Qumran and New Testament “Sons of Righteousness”—in Hebrew, Zedek, without the definite article] according to their spirit and fortify the Elect of the Age according to His will as He commanded and, thereby, to do His Judgment [once more the Jamesian emphasis on “doing”] on every man according to His spirit.16

This does begin to seem New Testament-like. Not only does it hark back to several New Testament themes, such as the “Two Spirits” and Paul’s “knowing the things of man according to the spirit of man which is in him” of 1 Corinthians 2:11–15, but the Community Rule’s description of the Guide then goes on to actually evoke two allusions, “clean hands” and “not arguing with the Sons of the Pit”—in other words, the “leave them alone” theme just encountered in passages from Matthew 15:14 and to a certain extent in Mark 7:8 above (the latter to be sure not quite in the same context). Perhaps even more strikingly, yet another allusion is evoked—the third, “the Pit,” just remarked as well and an allusion known throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls, which we shall encounter in Jesus, further disparagement of these “Blind Guides” as we proceed:

[The Maschil shall allow] each man to draw near according to the cleanness of his hands [here, yet another allusion to “clean hands,” should one choose to regard it] and his wisdom and, thus, shall be his love together with his hate. Nor should he admonish or argue with the Sons of the Pit [here again, yet another allusion Jesus’ directive to the disciples a propos of the Pharisees in Matthew 15:12–14, just highlighted above, to “leave them alone”].

Moreover, the Guide or Maschil is commanded in this pregnant, concluding exhortation from the Community Rule to rather

conceal the counsel of the Torah [that is, “the Law”] from the Men of Evil [“the Men of the Pit” or “Ungodly” above], confirming the Knowledge of the Truth and Righteous Judgment to the Elect of the Way [“the Elect” is, of course, a very widespread and important terminology at Qumran, as is “the Way”] . . . comforting them with Knowledge, thereby guiding them in the Mysteries of the Marvelous Truth . . . , that is, to walk in Perfection each with his neighbor. [This being, of course, nothing less than James’s “Royal Law according to the Scripture”—“to love each man his neighbor as himself.” It is often found in the Scrolls.]

Of perhaps even more significance, this leads directly into the Community Rule’s second citation of Isaiah 40:3’s “preparing a Straight Way in the wilderness” in as many columns:

For this is the time of the preparation of the Way in the wilderness. Therefore he [the Maschil”—in Matthew above, Jesus’ Blind Guide] should guide them in all that has been revealed that they should do in this Time [n.b., again, the pivotal emphasis on “doing”] to separate [here again too, the Nazirite-like directive to “come out from among them and be separate,” just enunciated by Paul in 2 Corinthians 6:17 as well] from any man who has not turned aside hisWay from all Evil [including, of course, from these “Sons of the Pit,” just alluded to above as well].

To further demonstrate the interconnectedness of these kinds of usages, the denotation “the Sons of the Pit” is immediately reprised in these climactic passages from the Community Rule:

These are the rules of the Way for the Guide in these Times [presumably “the Last Times” of other Qumran documents and the Gospels]: Everlasting hatred for the Sons of the Pit in a spirit of secrecy, to leave them to their Riches [here the language of “the Pit” coupled with express allusions both to “Riches” and “leaving them alone”] and the suffering [>amal] of their hands, like the slave to his Ruler and the Meek before his Lord.

Not only do we have the “master” and “lord” vocabulary here but also, yet again, that of hands—this time in the sense of “that which their own hands have wrought”—the same hands presumably that were to remain unwashed when eating in Jesus’ crucial “toilet bowl” homily in both Matthew and Mark above.17 The conclusion of all this is quite extraordinary:

And he [both the Maschil and the rank and file] shall be as a man zealous for the Law, whose Time will be the Day of Vengeance [meaning, in this context, “the Last Judgment” but, as usual, without a touch of nonviolence], to do all His will in all the work of his hands [hands” again] . . . delighting in all the words of Hismouth [the “mouth” vocabulary of Jesus’ “what comes into the mouth” or “goes forth from the mouth” above] and in all His Kingdom as He commanded.

The reader should pay particular attention to all these usages, but especially: “doing the will of God”; “separating the Sons of the Righteous One” and “not disputing with the Sons of the Pit,” but “leaving them to their Riches” and “the works of their hands”; and “doing all His will in all the work of his (the Maschil’s or the adept’s) hands” and finally “delighting in all the words of His mouth.”

It is now possible to return to Jesus’ allusion to the Pharisees as Blind Guides in Matthew 15:14 with a little more insight. This is where we began and, it will be recalled, that it was in the run-up to this allusion that Jesus was pictured as evoking the “plant” or “planting” vocabulary in which we are so interested in this essay. It should also be observed that Paul uses this vocabulary, too, when he speaks of “God’s plantation” or “growing place” and “God’s building” in 1 Corinthians 3, concluding in 3:6: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused to grow.” It should be clear that this is also playing off a similar vocabulary, i.e., the Messianic “plant” and “planting” imagery that permeates the literature of Qumran in general18—in particular, “the Root of Planting,” with which the Damascus Document follows up its opening imprecation to “hear and understand” and the focus of our excursus here.

This reads, as we have partially seen above, as follows:

And in the Age of Wrath . . .He [God] visited them and caused a Root of Planting to grow [these are some of the same words that Paul used in 1 Corinthians 3:6–8 above] from Israel and Aaron to inherit His Land [Paul’s “field” or “growing place” imagery in 1 Corinthians 3:9] and to prosper on the good things of His Earth.19

In Matthew 15:13–14, the preliminary characterization introducing Jesus’ “Leave them alone, they are Blind Guides” reproof, alluding to the Pharisees, read:

But he answered, saying, “Every plant whichMy Heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted.”

Of course, we are QED here, the “uprooting” or “rooting up” language being exactly the same as “the Root of Planting” just encountered in the opening exhortation of the this First Column of the Cairo Damascus Document—the “uprooting” playing off the “Root of Planting” that God “caused to grow”; and the “Planting,” the “Planting” part of the “Root” imagery. Nor is this to say anything about Paul’s parallel “Apollos planted, I watered, and God caused to grow,” we just highlighted, which not only plays off but is an actual verbatim quotation of the remainder of this all-important preliminary metaphor in the Damascus Document. One cannot get a much closer fit than this and the Damascus Document’s “the Root of Planting” to Matthew’s “every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted.”

Even so, the very next line in Matthew 15:14 continues the borrowing:

They are Blind Guides leading the Blind and, if the Blind lead the Blind, both will fall into the Pit.

First of all, one has in both subject and predicate here the image of the Maschil, just as in several of the passages quoted from the Community Rule above. Combined with this is the language and imagery of the Pit—in particular, “the Sons of the Pit” just underscored as well and used to attack all the enemies of the Community including, presumably, persons of the mindset of Paul.20 One should also note that in Matthew 15:14, it is both “the Blind Guides” and “the Blind” they lead who will, metaphorically, fall into “the Pit”!

This is an extremely telling example of another process detectable in comparing these documents—one reverses the other, that is, someone using the very language of another person and turning it back on that other person to undermine him. Indeed at this point in Matthew, this whole allusion that on the surface seems innocuous enough actually plays off yet another, seemingly unrelated passage concerning regulations governing the Sabbath in the Damascus Document, most of which counterindicated in the Gospels. In the process, Matthew 15:12–14 makes fun of and pictures its Jesus as having contempt for these too, i.e., if a mans “beast falls into a pit on the Sabbath, he shall not lift it out.”21

More importantly, however, the borrowing does not stop even here, and this is nothing in comparison to the importance of the allusion to “being blind,” which will now follow this pivotal passage about “God visiting them” and “causing a Root of Planting to grow” in the Damascus Document and link up directly with the allusion to the Pharisees as Blind Guides in the Gospel of Matthew. This occurs as follows and in the very next lines in this First Column of the Cairo Damascus Document. There, one comes upon, as we have already to some extent seen and parts of which we have already quoted above, the final linchpin of all this borrowing, ending with the very first introduction of the renowned “Righteous Teacher” himself—“the Guide of all Guides” as it were. It reads in its entirety, following right after the allusion to “God having visited them and caused a Root of Planting to grow” and the words “to inherit His Land and to prosper on the good things of His Earth”:

And they were like blind men groping for the Way [“the Way in the wilderness” and the name for early Christianity in Palestine as recorded in Acts on three different occasions] for twenty years [the time elapsed, perhaps, between the death of whomever “the Messiah Jesus” is supposed to represent and the elevation of James].22 And God considered their works, because they sought him with a whole heart [this language of “works” and “heart” that is pivotal throughout the Qumran corpus] and He raised up for them a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in the Way of His heart [the “guiding” language here is a variation of that of “the Way,” again combined with that of the “heart”].23

Of course, nothing could better illustrate the interconnectedness of all these imageries than the appearance of this allusion to “being like blind men” and how they were to be “guided by the Teacher of Righteousness” in “the Way” of God’s “heart,” following directly upon the one to “planting” the all-important Messianic “Root,” which God then “caused to grow” (the “caused to grow” here using the exact same language of theMessianic “Branch of David” in other documents and contexts, one of which I had the privilege of helping to bring to light)24 and preceding the equally pivotal introduction of the proverbial “Teacher of Righteousness.” One could not get a tighter construction of the inter-relatedness of all these documents than this.

One final point that, perhaps, should be made: the reason for all this borrowing, parody, and sometimes even derogation has to have been that so original and impressive were these new ideas and usages, we now know from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so well versed were some of the original creators of some of this material from the Gospels (in this instance, particularly Matthew), to say nothing of the material in Paul, that they were unable to resist continually playing off them and reversing or inverting the actual original sense or meaning.

Notes

1. See below or New Testament Code (London: Watkins, 2006), pp. 289–97 and for example, CDI.10–12, XII.20–1, XIII.22, 1QSIII.13, IX.12, IX. 21, etc.

2. CDI.7–8. This is followed by the note about “being like Blind Men,” “seeking Him with a whole heart,” and God “raising up for them a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in theWay of His heart,” i.e., “the Guide.” There is also the first note here about God “visiting them”—see New Testament Code, pp. 601–29.

3. The defect here, which was first recognized by A. Von Harnack in “Die Verklarungsgeschichte Jesu, der Gericht des Paulus (I. Kor. 15.3ff.) under die Beiden Christusvisionen des Petrus,” Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademia 1922: 62–80, has to do with two versions of the sighting order in 1 Corinthians 15:6–7: “first to the Twelve” ( there were only supposed to be “Eleven” at the time) and “then to James, then all the Apostles” (a redundancy)—the latter obviously being the authentic tradition.

4. For “the First” at Qumran, which usually represents “the Forefathers who received the Torah,” see CDI.16. “the Last” or “Last Generation”/”Last Times” is already making its appearance here in I.11–12, but see also I.4, III.10, IV.6–9, VI.2, VIII.16–17, 1QpHabII.7, VII.2–12, IX.4–5, etc.

5. See, for instance, the Epistle of Peter to James 5.1 introducing the Homilies.

6. Cf. how Paul does this allegorically in Galatians 4:21–31 or in 1 Corinthians 6:12 (also about “food” and “the belly”)—10:29: “All things are for me lawful”; and my conclusion on p. 997 of New Testament Code.

7. It should be appreciated, however, that in Matthew 15:24 the “house” does reappear, but now it becomes “not being sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. “One should also note that in Matthew 15:13–14 the language of falling into a pit” also occurs, as does “uprooting plants,” both of which will also recur, as we shall see, in CDI.7 and XI.13.

8. This is recapitulated in CDII.14–15, but now the exhortation includes “uncovering your eyes that you may see and understand the works of God … in order that you may walk in Perfection in all His ways and not follow after the thoughts of a sinful imagination or fornicating eyes.”

9. The reader should appreciate, it would be easy to read here, “what they heard Paul saying”—as for example, “John Mark” evidently was in Acts 13:13 and 15:38 when he “withdrew from them in Pamphylia.” In these allusions in Acts, it becomes clear that “Mark’s desertion” of the team (as Paul would have it) to report what as transpiring back to Jerusalem was not an amicable one; but clearly involved a good deal of ill will—and this in the usually more accurate “We document.” Here, since Mark 7:1 had already used the verb “come” to describe the usual “coming down from Jerusalem, while Matthew 15:1 had rather expressed this as: “then come to Jesus from Jerusalem Pharisees and Scribes” (forgetting both the “some” and the “down”); to avoid redundancy Mark must now use the basically meaningless phraseology “there gathered unto him the Pharisees and some of the scribes”—n.b., how Mark has added here the usual “some” to complete the implication of the “some from James coming” down from Jerusalem of Paul in Galatians 2:12 and elsewhere in the Gospels as earlier in Mark 14:4 or Luke 19:39 or John 9:40.

10. Even the allusion in Mark 7:21–23 (in this instance, the most prolix Gospel) to the heart’s “evil thoughts, murder, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, railings” as “defiling the man” recalls the Community Rule’s depiction of “the Spirit of Unrighteousness” or “of Evil” as: “greediness of soul, stumbling hands in the service of Righteousness (cf. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:15), Wickedness and Lying, pride and proudness of heart, duplicitousness and deceitfulness, cruelty, ill-temper, impatience, much folly, and zeal for lustfulness, works of abomination in a spirit of fornication, and Ways of Uncleanness in the service of pollution, a Tongue full of blasphemies, blindness of eye and dullness of ear, stiffness of neck and hardness of heart in order to walk in all the Ways of Darkness and Evil inclination” in 1QSIV.9–11; cf. Matthew 15:19 and below.

11. That the issue is “table fellowship with Gentiles” is just strengthened by all these allusions to “blindness” (as in John 9:13–41 above), “Blind Guides,” and “hypocrites”/“hypocrisy.” At Qumran, as reiterated variously in the Damascus Document, the position is “doing according to the precise letter of the Torah” and “setting up the Holy Things according to their precise specifications” (IV.8, VI.20, XX.6, etc.),whereas in Paul and the New Testament following him, it is “not to separate Holy from profane” (Acts 10:14–5) and “all things are for me lawful . . . eat everything sold in the butcher shop, in no way inquiring because of conscience” (Paul’s favorite euphemism for “the Law”— 1 Corinthians 10:23–25).

12. The reference is to 1QSIV.4 on “the Two Spirits.” The parallel kind of expressions in Hymns are to be found in II.15, V.24, IX.3 and 23, XIV.13–14, etc.

13. See James 3:4–8.

14. This is the second part of “the Two Spirits” in the Community Rule – “the Spirit of Righteousness” or “Cleanliness”—1QSIV.9–11.

15. Cf. CDI.11–12, XII.20–21, XIII.22–3, 1QHIII.13, IX.12–26, 1QHXII.11, etc.

16. 1QSIX.12–14.

17. Furthermore, the implication of the whole simile embodied in this passage, would appear to involve “the Judgment Day,” since the Hebrew camal —as in the all-important Isaiah 53:11 proof-text and the Qumran Habakkuk Pesher, seemingly like the Gospels dependent upon it—is eschatological and also part of the vocabulary here. One can see this camal in 1QpHab VIII.2–3’s interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4: “the Righteous shall live by his Faith.”

18. In the incredible hymn at the end of the Community Rule in 1QSX–XI, the Council is even pictured as “joined to the Sons of Heaven” and described as “an Eternal Planting” or “Plantation” (XI.8–9, but also see VIII.4–9: “With the existence of these in Israel, the Council of the Community will be established upon Truth like an Eternal Plantation, a House of Holiness for Israel . . . a Tested Rampart, a Precious Cornerstone, the foundation of which will not shake or sway in their place . . . a House of Perfection and Truth in Israel”). This is not to mention the “God causing a Root of Planting to grow” itself of the Damascus Document, which will also be directly parodied not only in Paul, but here in the Synoptics as well.

19. CDI.5–8.

20. This “Pit” language is very important and, as we shall see, is duplicated inMatthew 15:14, however tendentiously. Probably the best example of it is to be found in CDVI. 12–14, including the “Nazirite” language of “keeping away from” and “separation,” as well as Acts 21:30’s “barring the door,” introducing the definition of “the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus” in VI.16–18; but also see XIII.14 and XIV.2 and 1QSIX.16–21 above.

21. CDXI.13–14.

22. There is some evidence that “Jesus” (whoever he may have been) came in 19–21 CE. This comes in Eusebius’s citation from what he considers to be the fraudulent Acti Pilati, which places the crucifixion in that year (E.H. 1.9.3–4); but Tacitus, too (Annals. 2.85), places the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under Tiberius in most peculiar and suspicious circumstances in this period as well, not later as in Josephus’s version of similar events—see James the Brother of Jesus, pp. 66 and 863–64. In this manner, the mysterious “twenty years” in CDI.10 evaporates. Furthermore, this would explain why Paul, who is supposed to be functioning ca. 37 CE onwards, knows so little about the “Christ Jesus” (the eyewitness testimony of whom is almost nil) he is talking about. If there is an “Historical Jesus”—aside from the Samaritan one—this is probably the best way of understanding him.

23. CDII.9–11.

24. See, for instance, the document Prof. Wise and myself discovered (4Q285—we called it “The Messianic Leader”), which identifies “the Root of Jesse” with “the Branch of David” and, in turn, “the Nasi ha-cEdah”/”the Leader of the Assembly” or “Church.” This Messianic Leader, of course, then reappears in documents like 4QFlorI.11–13 and CDVII.16–20, above, not to mention the interpretation of “the Shiloh Prophecy” of Genesis 49:10 in 4Q252 or so-called “Genesis Pesher”—see Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise, Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 24–29 and 77–89, and New Testament Code, pp. 349–55, 638–56, and 674–75.

The Greatest Heritage Site of All: A Proposal for an International Architectural Competition to Provide Solutions to the Issue of the Temple Mount

The Huffington Post, August 2, 2010.

The awarding of the Wolf Prize for Architecture to my brother Peter Eisenman for his splendid Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is a well-deserved and noble gesture for extraordinary and brilliant efforts in memorialization. Having said this, let me observe that, while we Jews – ‘we’ in Israel and ‘we’ abroad – are expert at giving awards or commemorating our tragically obliterated and long-departed dead, now most notably on the very boulevards in Berlin where these monstrous exterminations were planned and executed; we totally lack or are deficient in creating memorials – to say nothing of holding competitions or giving awards for them – for the living in the “Altneuland” of Jerusalem.

This process hasn’t even begun yet nor, seemingly, for the most part have they felt the need for it. I speak now of the Temple and Temple Mount (note my previous two articles on this subject last year and two years before that in The Jerusalem Post: “Remember the Temple was Built by Herod” – 10/27/09 and “Digging on the Temple Mount” – 9/16/07). In his Auto-Emancipation, a half-century before the Holocaust, Leo Pinsker, a physician by training and having witnessed the pogroms in 1870’s Odessa, identified the lack of need or the desire for Emancipation or Nationhood as something akin to a disease. At least this was how he claimed it was perceived by people around, i. e., a phobia on their part, he designated in medical terms as “Judeophobia.” He even spoke of how Jews appeared to those surrounding them as an apparition – in modern terms, perhaps, “the walking dead” (Toynbee might have put it, as “fossils”) and therefore, for him, Antisemitism, based on this “Judeophobia,” was merely a species of “fear of ghosts”- people being afraid of ghosts.

Whether he was wrong or right in this analysis (which now might seem a little quaint, the Jewish People having been overtaken by a tsunami of hatred, the likes of which even Pinsker could never have imagined) is impossible to say. But, unfortunately, it is possible to observe the same lack of feeling or need now infecting the Jewish People where the Temple or Temple Mount is concerned, whether in Israel or abroad (the one he characterized, by implication, as a species of “dead men walking”). They cannot put a finger on what the yearning is. They go in all sincerity and kiss stones, representing in the end brutality and national humiliation, set down by the arch-enemy of the Jewish People, Herod.

One cannot blame them for this. They are trying to express something, however bizarre it might appear to the observer standing without the “Cave” of History. I speak here, again, about the lack of feeling for or need of a Temple. Of course, this is what this yearning at the Western or so- called “Wailing Wall” really represents – everyone knows it, but no one is really prepared to speak of it in polite society. Of course, any “normal People” that had been through the horrors, the Jewish People have been through, to say nothing of the redemption of returning thereafter, would have been at work to ameliorate this situation years ago, but we or, shall we say, the Jews are not “a normal People.”

So here we/they are worshiping at – again in all inner rectitude – stones set down by one of their cruelest arch-nemeses for his own self-glorification and vanity and also as a sop (which many since have swallowed) to keep the people otherwise occupied, rather than in revolt. In the aftermath and in wake of its destruction, this was then allowed them by their conquerors for the next some two thousand years to make manifest their humiliation in no less a way than the images on the Arch of Titus in Rome or the Judea Capta coins, issued by the same predators to commemorate these same events (nor is this to say anything of the Roman Colosseum itself – in which so many died so horribly – built with the moneys taken as booty from the Temple Treasury, just as depicted on the Arch of Titus).

And yet they have returned. They have – to put it honestly – been triumphant in the face of such odds, in the face of the sacrifice of some six million; yet one would hardly know it. There is so little awe or joy. The return and its aftermath have not been commemorated. Oh yes, the country itself may be commemoration enough, but as “the Wall” so unfortunately and graphically illustrates, people need something more – something they can feel and touch and see.

The six million dead have now, thankfully, been commemorated and this in the heart of those who brought about their brutal and heartless annihilation. Whether for political reasons – to celebrate the new United Germany and move its capital to Berlin – or otherwise; this commemoration is now done but, except for the name of the architect, by the hands of others. Still the Jews – perhaps because they have been so preoccupied by political matters – have not commemorated their return. They have not given it a living a symbol and, as the Wolf Prize so graphically recognizes, this is what architecture – especially when combined with sculpture – does so consummately both then and now.

This is what a Temple, even if only a monumental one (because we as Jews would never be able agree on anything – in particular, what such a building or monument could or would be or do), would mean. Oh yes, one knows the arguments for and against, the “dos” and “don’ts”, the difficulties, talking points, religious injunctions, commandments, absurdities – the whole subject being fraught with nuance pro and con. These I would not even attempt to sort out as they are far beyond my abilities – probably, in fact, all of our abilities (though I am sure similar issues were explained to Alexander at Gordion on his way to conquer the whole of the Middle East, including Jerusalem. I doubt also if Herod would have taken much notice of them).

But twenty-five years ago, when a colleague was Minister of Science, I was invited to participate in assistantship capacity. As a Professor at a California University, the logistics prevented me from doing so in any formal way; but I gave an answer, when asked for new ideas which could be promoted by such a Ministry, with a proposal for an International Architectural Competition (much like the one ultimately held in Berlin and later in New York to commemorate and replace the destroyed World Trade Center) fifteen years before the Millennium. This would be called: “Temple Mount Two Thousand: Holy to Three Faiths,” announcing a utopian architectural competition and outlining a call to all the great architects of the world to participate (which would, of course, have included my brother, the present Wolf Prize recipient – a little nepotism here for which I am not either embarrassed or apologetic. But he had no hand in the suggestion, which was purely my own, or even any knowledge that I was making it, either then or now).

This is the way these things are traditionally worked out. This was the way it was done in Berlin (in fact, it was done twice before final designs were decided upon); this is the way it still should be done today. The best minds of architects, city planners, sculptors, memorialists, artists – even archaeologists – should be invited to participate and contribute models, suggestions, and designs for how to deal with the situation on the Temple Mount in its totality (which has not changed very much since then, except for the emotions and political agitation surrounding it) from any perspective they wished – what to construct anew, what to add, what to bridge, what to reconstruct – building, monument, or sculpture. Again, I emphasize the word “utopian” or even “academic.”

This would not be beyond them to envision in one way or another and, from my perspective, this was the way to move forward. The proposals, of course, would be completely theoretical or utopian and no promise of any actual building, engineering activity, or sculpture was or would be attached – just innovative ideas for arranging the enormous space involved. Still I knew people would participate both then and now. People would not be able to resist the call to help solve the burning issues inherent in a reconstruction of or on the Temple Mount incorporating in its locale a monument, Temple, or field of sculpture that would express the ideas a new Judaism or Post- Holocaust 1948 Jewish People would need for commemoration, not of the dead but to inspire the living.

Nothing would be deemed out of bounds, not even contemporary solutions using modern sculptural or engineering techniques such as those of a Frank Gehry in Los Angeles or Bilbao or I. M. Pei in Paris. It was my feeling then that these persons of soaring imaginative design would come up with something that could help solve many of these much-vexed and pressing inherent problems, not only physical (its kind, design, placement, the place of other monuments and shrines on the same location) but spiritual, far superior than any nationalist, anti-nationalist, classicist, traditionalist, or even post-modernist or pilpulist could do. I still think this. They could suggest means of how to commemorate the return of the Jewish People to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount and this did not necessarily mean a rebuilding of either the Herodian or Solomonic Temples (even the Talmud makes it clear that Herod totally deconstructed the Ezra/Nehemiah/Maccabean Temple previously down to its foundations – whatever it had been. Nor were its remains necessarily still extant, so there could be no reasonable hope of reconstructing that), though it could include something like the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple of the Last Days (Chapters 40-48), should anyone be moved to do so.

What I was proposing was a competition of the greatest minds and artists of our time to present their ideas on how all these matters should be arranged – even including, since the competition was only to be “utopian,” sacrifice cult or commemorative architectural structure. Nor for such a Memorial or Center of the People’s need for homage, religious urges, and commemoration did it have to be built exactly on the site of previous endeavors, nor the previous “Rock” as it were, if anyone could really claim to identify it without the aid of meticulous archaeological investigation which in the present circumstances was impossible. While nothing needed to be rearranged or moved, unfortunately it had to be on the Temple Mount. Just as for the Muslims and as they see it now and saw it then, nothing less would do. As I said in one of my articles previously, “there is plenty of room there for everyone.”

What was needed was a memorial for the future much as in Berlin. It is a shame that Berlin’s Monument for the dead had to show the Jewish People the way forward for a monument for the living, to celebrate the in gathering of the People and the fulfillment of the Centuries-old dream so old that it is repeated almost every day in prayer and certainly during Festivals like Passover. But the first step should have been and could still be something like this competition proposal I suggested to those at the Ministry of Science in Israel some twenty-five years ago. No one could really condemn a call for new, innovative, theoretical, and artistic engineering designs worthy of the 21 st Century. Then, of course, nothing was done. Now perhaps something could be.

Whether they are aware of it or not, the People’s sensibilities and emotions require it – and they are not the only ones. Other people’s religious sensibilities also call for it – some Christians for instance. There has been enough crying over Roman reverses or stones set down by Herod. For those who wish to continue this tradition and expressing themselves in this manner, let them do so. For the rest, let them now move forward in a sensitive, intelligent, historical, and spiritually- insightful manner to create a Monument or Memorial such as this.

For a start, let this utopian architectural competition be called for and held and let the most thoughtful, serious, innovative and elegant, insightful, and advanced ideas of how to move forward be entertained. Then let Israel proceed to do and perhaps even build something on the Temple Mount where it should be (without affecting anyone else’s rights there) – who knows yet what? In the words of Conservative or Traditional Judaism’s “Historical School” of Leopold Zunz and Nahman Krochmal, “the Zeit-Geist” or “Spirit of the Age” could and would determine this. Bilu – “Bo’ Israel, lech u-va’ “/”Come Israel, it is time to proceed.”

Why We Must Become a Territorial People Again

The Jerusalem Post, July 6, 2010.

Not since the Second Temple Period, have we, the Jews, really been a “Territorial People.” Ok – then, you can say, we really dropped the ball; but this would not be completely fair. One has to appreciate one was up against the most powerful and greatest Empire the World had ever known up to that time – and probably still has ever known; so one could say, apart from being obsequious and flattering – as persons like Josephus, Paul, and even R. Yohanan b. Zacchai most certainly were – there was no other realistic way of survival at the time. Hardly another independent nation achieved it.

But on the positive side of the balance sheet, there were certain things, customs, and aspects of Greco-Roman life and Civilization that the Jews in Judea were not willing to tolerate – nor were they willing to dissimulate with regard to these as some of their more obsequious survivors were willing to do – and so they were willing to go to their deaths, in fact one can argue, the really first so-called “martyrs” lending “a noble example,” as the Maccabean Books put it, for all subsequent generations and their imitators.

This was nothing to be ashamed of and, for really committed persons, such as those at Qumran or Masada – Josephus’ “Essenes,” for instance, to say nothing of his “Zealots” or “Sicarii,” there was really no other way – either this or get as far away as possible, which many “Jews” obviously actually did, either to Babylonia, Persia, Southern Arabia – even “Arabia Deserta” just out of the way of Roman Rule, – India, and further afield. To be perfectly honest, this is what I probably would have done given the choice. I probably would not have had the courage to stick around as it would have either been this or perish. Still if one had a family, just as the Jews in Europe during the War, even this may not have been an option.

But what does that say about today? Mainly this: we must become a “Territorial People” once again and we must have an ideology and a religious inspiration to sustain it. Nor is this to unfairly accuse Rabbinic Judaism. One must be in awe of the staying power and dedication of this metamorphosis of Judaism even including today. But it cannot give the answers to the present existential situation of the Jewish People – and it is possible to argue it could not, though it tried nobly, do so during the Holocaust years – nothing really could, in fact, except “Kiddush ha-Shem” which many nobly undertook. The Rabbinic expression of Judaism really developed and was perfect to sustain a Diaspora People or a Diaspora existence.

But today we need an ideology that will suit and befit a Territorial People. It is this one lacks for the last forty or more years. I do not count the period 1948-67 as in that situation one was clearly still in a defensive or even in a “survival” mode. I am speaking basically since the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars. No one has known what to do – left or right – and, because of this, we have basically been floundering, flopping about from position to position, Government to Government. There has been nothing there, modern enough and sufficiently amenable to the contemporary world, to answer the “Big Questions”; and I mean by these “the Territories,’ the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, the Constitution of a Modern State, Foreign Policy, How to Say “No,” etc., etc. I could go on.

But let me give a few examples: why for instance do some extreme Orthodox still wear black? Haven’t we had enough of this? Ok, this was the tradition of Central and/or Eastern Europe, but do they not realize this is the color of mourning and its origin goes all the way back to “the Mourners for Zion” or “Mourners over the Destruction of the Temple” in the First and Second Centuries? Why, for instance, do they not wear “white”? Would this not be a more celebratory color and a cheerful encouragement to our youth, which certainly does, God knows, need sustenance and cheering up. What, for instance, are we ‘mourning’ now or for that matter since 1948?

Oh yes, in today’s news we hear that the Palestinians are willing to accord us our “Jewish Holy Sites,” meaning primarily “the Wailing Wall” – “the Western Wall” in modern parlance, the pre-1948 “Jewish Quarter”, etc. I have already treated to some extent in previous articles the problem of treating a “Wall” built by Herod, who was not even a Jewish King but an Idumaean/Nabataean Roman lackey as “Holy” or kissing stones set down by him as a sop. And should we have a Temple or what should we do with the Temple Mount and do we really want a sacrifice cult or should we turn it into something more ceremonial as the British, for instance, their “House of Lords,” which is constantly metamorphosing? This problem has bedeviled us since1967. It bedeviled Moshe Dayan who solved it in his inimitably egocentric manner, bequeathing us the situation we have today.

And how do we say “No” in an elegant and dignified manner without humiliating ourselves? How do we say “No” to Barack Obama or his representatives? How do we say “No” to the UN or its “Human Rights Commission”? When is it both permissible and/or obligatory to engage or embark in a “first strike” or “pre-emptive war” and when shall or do we use nuclear weapons? How do we say “No” to Turkey or Ahmadinejad or Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood or Bin Laden and how to do so with so much Honour and Nobility that the whole World, and not just Christian Evangelicals – though, at least, their support is welcome, respects us? Was it permissible, for instance, to evacuate all of Sinai in 1976, while being forced to keep Gaza? How do we tell bereaved parents that the price of freedom of their son, captured on military duty, cannot be bargained for at the expense of or threat to the People?

All these things and more, a “Newly Territorialized People” or “Territorial People” must answer and we have no handy answer or elegant guidebook for them in our previous 2000-2500 year history – maybe before that in biblical times, before being overrun by outsiders but not now. Nor will, clearly, 3000-year old answers do for our time. These are the questions – and more – we must begin to put together a modern ideological, philosophical, or religious approach to and we can start now by telling the Turks and their so-called “Humanitarian Organizations” and Gaza Relief flotillas, as well as their worldwide supporters, Persian facilitators, fellow-travelers, and anti-Semitic provocateur-exploiters, without remorse, where to get off.

Enough Crying Over Herod’s Stones: We Know how to Commemorate the Dead but Do We Know How to Commemorate the Living?

The Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2010.

I would like to propose an international architectural competition called: ‘Temple Mount 2000: Holy to Three Faiths.’

Awarding the Wolf Prize for architecture to my brother Peter Eisenman for his splendid Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was a noble gesture. Having said this, let me observe that while we Jews – in Israel and abroad – excel at commemorating our tragically obliterated dead even on the very boulevards in Berlin where these exterminations were planned, we lack memorials for the living in our Altneuland of Jerusalem. I speak now of the Temple and Temple Mount. I wrote about this issue last year in this publication (“Remember the Temple was built by Herod” and “Digging on the Temple Mount”).

In his Auto-Emancipation, a half-century before the Holocaust, physician Leo Pinsker, having witnessed the pogroms in 1870s Odessa, identified the lack of desire for nationhood as something akin to a disease. At least this was how he claimed it was perceived by outsiders, as what he designated “Judeophobia.” He even spoke of how Jews appeared to those surrounding them as apparitions. For him, therefore, anti-Semitism was merely “a fear of ghosts.”

His analysis might now seem a little quaint, the Jewish people having been overtaken by a tsunami of hatred the likes of which even Pinsker could not imagine. But, unfortunately, it is possible to observe the same lack of feeling now infecting the Jewish people, whether here or abroad. They go in all sincerity and kiss stones set down by the archenemy of the Jewish people, Herod.

One cannot blame them for this. They are trying to express something – however bizarre it might appear. I speak about the lack of feeling for or need of a Temple. Of course, this is what the yearning at the Western Wall really represents. Everyone knows it, though no one is prepared to speak of it in polite society. Of course, any “normal people” that had been through the horrors the Jewish people has been through, to say nothing of the redemption of returning thereafter, would have been at work to ameliorate this situation years ago.

SO HERE we are, worshiping at stones set down by one of our cruelest nemeses for his self-glorification and to keep the people occupied rather than revolting. In the wake of the Temple’s destruction, our humiliation was made manifest in the images on the Arch of Titus in Rome and the Judea Capta coins issued by these predators to commemorate the events. Nor is this to say anything of the Roman Colosseum, in which so many died horribly, built with booty from the Temple treasury, just as depicted on the Arch of Titus.

And yet we have returned. We have triumphed in the face of such odds, in the face of the sacrifice of six million. But one would hardly know it. There is so little awe, joy or pride. The return and its aftermath have not been commemorated. Oh yes, the country itself may be a commemoration, but as “the Wall” so unfortunately and graphically illustrates, people need something more – something they can feel and touch and see.

This is what a temple would mean. One knows the arguments for and against, the “dos” and “don’ts,” the difficulties, talking points, religious injunctions, commandments – the whole subject is fraught with nuance pro and con. These I would not even attempt to sort out, as they are far beyond my abilities – probably, in fact, beyond all our abilities (though I am sure similar issues were explained to Alexander on his way to conquer the Orient, including Jerusalem. I also doubt if Herod would have taken much notice of them).

BUT 25 years ago, when Yuval Ne’eman was minister of science, I was invited to participate in an assistantship capacity. As a professor at a California university, the logistics prevented me from doing so in any formal way. But when asked for new ideas his ministry could promote, I proposed an international architectural competition called: “Temple Mount 2000: Holy to Three Faiths,” with a call to all the great architects of the world to participate.

The best architects, city planners, sculptors, memorialists, artists – even archeologists – would be invited to contribute models, designs and suggestions for how to deal with the situation on the Temple Mount in its totality – what to construct anew, what to add, what to bridge. The proposals, of course, would be completely theoretical – just innovative ideas for the enormous space involved.

No one could really object to a competition to suggest modern reflections of ancient issues, but people would be unable to resist the call to help solve the burning issues inherent in a reconstruction of the Temple Mount that incorporated a monument, temple or field of sculpture not for commemoration of the dead but to inspire the living.

What was needed was a memorial for the future, to celebrate the Ingathering and the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. Such a structure need not be exactly on the site of previous endeavors, nor on the previous “rock,” as even the Talmud agrees that Herod totally deconstructed the Ezra/Nehemiah/Maccabean structure. But it had to be on the Temple Mount; nothing less would do.

Of course, nothing was done. Now perhaps something could be. The people’s sensibilities and emotions require it. Enough crying over Roman reverses or Herod’s stones! For those who wish to continue this tradition, let them do so. For the rest, let us move forward in a sensitive, historically informed and spiritually insightful manner to create this monument for the living.

To start, let us hold this architectural competition and consider the most serious and insightful ideas. Nothing would have to be rearranged or moved. Then let us proceed to do and perhaps even build something on the Temple Mount where it should be – who knows yet what? In the words of “the historical school” of Leopold Zunz and Nahman Krochmal, “the spirit of the age” could and would determine this.

Let us begin.

Remember, the Temple was Built by Herod

The Jerusalem Post, October 27, 2009.

Remember, the Temple was Built by Herod

The Temple, over which we now see such weekly struggles, was built by Herod who, for all intents and purposes, was not Jewish. He had not an ounce of Jewish blood in him – if one can speak in such “racial” terms in this period – his mother, according to Josephus, being an “Arab” from Petra, probably related to the royal family there; his grandfather, a Greco-Arab priest of Apollo from the Gaza/Ashkelon “Philistine”/Palestine Coast.

On occasion, he might have simulated Jewish ways in line with his appointment as king of the Jews (which did not necessarily require being Jewish – it was a Roman title and a tax-farming fiefdom). His father Antipater was the first Roman procurator of Judea (c. 60 BCE), who parlayed a Roman governorship into a family dynasty, in the process eliminating the Maccabees and garnering a Roman citizenship for himself and his family after him.

Herod might have had a few Jewish wives among the 10 or so he allowed himself, including two high priests’ daughters – one the proverbial Maccabean princess Mariamme/Miriam, whom he actually had executed, as he did his children by her, due to his jealousy of their Maccabean blood and therefore their popularity among the masses. Almost all of his other wives were Greek or Arab.

He also built a host of Greek temples – in Sebaste (Samaria) in honor of the Emperor Augustus, at Caesarea and across the Mediterranean, as well as the Antonia fortress in the Temple in honor of Mark Anthony and Phasael (Feisal) after his brother was executed by one of his Maccabean wife’s uncles.

Herod used his building projects to magnify his own image and keep a disaffected population busy. The Temple itself, which he began early in his reign in the 20s BCE, was not finished until shortly before its fall in 70 CE. Herod in fact was a typical Arab potentate, combining the worst qualities of a latter-day Saddam Hussein and the harem aspects of the House of Saud.

As Josephus tell us, Herod had spies everywhere, executed all the members of the previous Maccabean or nationalistic Sanhedrin except the two Pharisees “Pollio and Sameas” – probably Hillel and Shammai – and even went on the streets in disguise to search out malcontents. These he had taken to the fortresses Hyrcania and Machaerus (as John the Baptist was, by one of his Greco-Arab sons) to be tortured and ultimately put to death. He was hated by the Jewish people and, as noted, responsible for the extirpation of the whole Maccabean family root and stalk, including his own several grafts upon them; and there followed 110 years of struggle (37 BCE-73 CE) to be rid of him, his heirs and the Romans who imposed them on the Jews and supported them.

Nor is the celebrated Western Wall anything but a part of this extravaganza he built to mollify Jews and busy unemployed priests. It was consecrated by their Roman overlords, after they destroyed the Temple, as a place Jews could go once a year (on the Ninth of Av) in humiliation to bewail their former glories – therefore its traditional name, the Wailing Wall.

SO THE Jews go today to worship at the remains of a stone edifice built by their arch-enemy, responsible more than anyone else for their destruction, who was himself certainly not native born and hardly Jewish at all except where convenient. (This is much like Paul, in 1 Corinthians 9:19-27. To paraphrase: “I am a Jew to the Jews, a Greek to the Greeks, a law-keeper to the law-keepers, a law-breaker to the law-breakers. I believe in winning. I will do whatever I have to do to win. That’s how I fight, not beating the air.” And Herod did “win,” as did Paul, his probable descendant).

But here’s the rub. The Pharisees and the Herodian Sadducees whom they dominated were the only party willing to live with Herod and the Romans. In fact, Pollio and Sameas in 37 BCE recommended opening Jerusalem’s gates to Herod and the Roman army given him by Mark Anthony. This behavior was repeated over and over, including 130 years earlier, at the time of Judah Maccabee, when they were willing to support Alcimus, a high priest appointed by a foreign power (the Greek Seleucids in Syria) – probably “the birth moment” of the Pharisee party. It happened again when Pompey stormed the Temple 100 years after that. According to Josephus, the Pharisees cooperated with the Romans in slaughtering the Temple’s pro-Maccabean defenders.

Notwithstanding, over and over again the people rejected the counsel of the Pharisees, including at the time of the uprising against Rome in 66 CE, when they cooperated in inviting the Roman army into the city. The Pharisees were not the popular party they are assumed to be, despite the pretensions of historians probably based on Gospel portraiture.

Predictably the nationalists were the popular party (as they usually are even today).

Pollio and Sameas became the heads of Herod’s Sanhedrin after he had executed all its Maccabean and pro-nationalist members when he took undisputed control. Earlier, in the mid-50s BCE, they alone opposed bringing him to Sanhedrin trial when he was governor of Galilee (under his father) and had executed guerrilla leaders there.

BUT THE Pharisees cum Rabbinic Judaism were, as noted, the only party Rome was willing to live with after the uprisings of 66-70 and 132-6 CE. Their patriarchs became the de facto Roman tax collectors in Palestine, as the Herodians had been earlier.

We all respect our rabbis, their durability, learning, and great venerability. We acknowledge their leadership in surviving 2,000 years of the Diaspora, that is, up to the Holocaust – but they were not up to the Holocaust. They could not provide real leadership then. Only the pro-Zionist parties left or right and the worker’s movements did.

In the same manner, the rabbis, experts at non-territorial leadership, cannot provide – almost by definition – leadership in a territorial situation. Now, in the face of the seemingly miraculous Jewish regaining of the Temple Mount in 1967, their bans for or against walking on the Temple Mount smack of quaintness and out-of-touch or even self-serving unreality. One is not walking upon anything there except perhaps Herod’s Temple (recently Herod’s tomb seems to have been found under his pile of dirt Herodion, not surprisingly apparently smashed to bits by revolutionaries).

Perhaps there is an authentic First or early Second Temple Holy of Holies hidden somewhere beneath the ruins, but it would take an archeological investigation to determine this. The Western Wall with all its familiar comfort is nothing but stones set down by the destroyer of the Jewish people and its royal family and a probable abomination, i.e. kissing stones set down by Herod.

The problem is we must start from scratch based on being a territorial people once again.

We need a new approach to religion if, for instance, we are to combat the J Streets, Goldstones or George Soroses of this world, not to mention appealing to the imagination of questioning disaffected youth; and the first step should have been to start rebuilding the Temple.

This does not mean one should revive the priesthood or the sacrificial cult. You need living symbols to move the people. If nothing else, Herod showed us this and the durability of the wall he built is its final proof.

Unfortunately, Rabbinic Judaism can no longer provide us these. Two millennia, yes, and up to the Holocaust. But no further. It cannot provide us with the blueprint for becoming territorial once again. Moshe Dayan was wrong in ordering the Israeli flag taken down, in effect, surrendering sovereignty and giving the Muslim Wakf control over the Temple Mount. No self-respecting people after two victorious wars would have behaved in this way. But he had no guideposts to rely upon, only egocentrism and his own pragmatism – plus he loved the grande geste.

But now, almost three generations after the Holocaust and with its memory beginning to fade, we have nothing positive to appeal to our young generations in Israel and abroad. It is poetry and the spirit that provide this. They are the positives, not humiliating renunciations. The reconstruction of a Temple – any Temple – should have begun 40 years ago and we would be well on our way toward achieving these things. This does not mean we should emulate the old design. Its content, shape and operation should be open to investigation, even architectural competitions, and creativity; but the symbol would be there.

It took the Herodian Temple almost 90 years to be completed. Ours and even its early stage – archeological investigation – hasn’t even begun. People need a positive historical Judaism to go forward and this does not mean a Roman/Herodian-sponsored Phariseeism. People need positive symbols to rally around. The time is late. There is plenty of room on the Mount for everyone.

In no other manner can we gain the respect of the world and regain our own self-respect, and the world come to understand us – and we come to understand ourselves.

The writer is the author of James the Brother of Jesus and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians and co-editor of The Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls and The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered. He is Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach.

Redemonizing Judas: Gospel Fiction or Gospel Truth?

The Huffington Post, September 13, 2009.

“Judas Reconsidered — Betrayal: Should We Hate Judas Iscariot”? These are the shout lines given the most recent article in the New Yorkermagazine (8/3/09) on the Gospel of Judas by Joan Acocella (credentials unknown, though her specialty has mostly been dance), which burst upon the scene in 2006 via a National Geographic TV special and companion book. It had apparently been gathering dust since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in the late 40’s (alongside the spectacular Dead Sea Scrolls), but that it existed had been known since Irenaeus of Lyons pronounced a ban upon it in the late 2nd c. CE — the probable reason for its disappearance thereafter only to re-emerge in our own time in the sands of the Upper Egypt where, presumably, it had been cached to save it from the effects of just such an interdiction.

While Ms. Acocella’s New Yorker piece is tolerable as a quick summary of the twists and turns of the debate for the non-specialist and the books that ensued, it is basically one of the more temporizing, least edifying, and most equivocal of any preceding it, ultimately drifting off into a discussion of Caravaggio (1603), Ludovico Carraci (1590), and Giotto (1305) — as if these could matter — and ending with a critical discussion of a recent book by one Susan Gubar (Judas: A Biography, 2009), perhaps the reason for the whole exercise.

Ms. Acocella displays no sense of history or any critical acumen — and this from a magazine as prestigious as the New Yorker — being so simplistic as to make even the amateur blush. So naturally she can come to no conclusion about a “Gospel” which early on gave every promise of being interpreted as removing some of the stigma adhering to a character taken as representing the Jewish people. Rather she backtracks to the position, best epitomized a year and a half earlier in a New York Times feature article by Prof. April DeConick of Rice University. For her part, Acocella ends by concluding: “The answer is not to fix the Bible (i. e., don’t try to get at the true history concerned, however pernicious its effect), but to fix ourselves.”

To come to grips with her ahistorical approach, take the very first sentence: “At the Last Supper, Jesus knew that it would be the last, and that he would be dead by the next day.” (She sounds as if she were actually there.) She continues in this vein in the next paragraph: “This is the beginning of Jesus’ end, and of Judas’s. Jesus is arrested within hours. Judas, stricken with remorse, returns to the priests and tries to give them back their money” (she had already pictured him in the previous paragraph “perhaps before the Last Supper — “Last Supper,” no quotes, no “purported,” just absolute truth — meeting with the priests of the Temple to make arrangements for the arrest and collect his reward, the famous thirty pieces of silver”).

This is a perfect example of the dictum I have tried to illumine in all my books, “Poetry is truer than History;” that is, it doesn’t matter what really happened only what people think or the literary works upon which they depend say happened. No wonder Plato, who lived closer to these times than many, wanted to bar the poets (whom he felt created the “myths” by which people lived and which he considered to be a world of almost total darkness) from his “Republic.”

She goes on without the slightest hesitation as if there were not an iota of doubt about any of these things: “They haughtily refuse it. Judas throws the coins on the floor (hardly, this is a misstated quotation from Zechariah we shall also elucidate further below). He then goes out and hangs himself. He dies before Jesus does.” What immediacy — she states these things as “facts,” yet doesn’t even seem to know that Luke in Acts has a very different picture of Judas’ end, that he “fell headlong into the Akeldama” or “Field of Blood,” “his guts bursting open,” though for what reason it is impossible to say. This is literature, after all. Nor does she wonder whether there ever was a “Judas Iscariot” or imagine that he might be the literary representation of some retrospective theological invective which, finding a Gospel of completely opposite literary orientation, might suggest.

One should perhaps be grateful, however, to Ms. Acocella because, even in such an exalted forum as the New Yorker, she demonstrates the lack of sophistication and general cloud of unknowing about these things even among those who should know better – scholars, writers, artists, film-makers, Jew or Gentile (in fact, Jews being less knowing, are often more inclined to accept these pretenses than some Gentiles even though they affect them more — sometimes even mortally). For her part, in the end, giving credit to this Gospel scenario of Judas as the Devil incarnate and ignoring the real significance of a contrary Gospel in his name, Acocella returns to the picture of Judas being the harbinger of both classical and modern anti-Semitism.

That being said, the real climax in this interpretative revision and turn-around was first expressed publicly in print on December 1st, 2007, the beginning of Hanukkah season that year and, of course, a prelude to the Christmas, when the New York Times, obviously purposefully, featured a centrally-positioned article on its editorial page, entitled — perhaps facetiously, perhaps not — “Gospel Truth” (my counter to this, “Gospel Truth or Gospel Fiction,” ignored by the Times, was published in The Huffington Post about three weeks later — 12/18/07).

In it, Prof. DeConick alluded (quite flatteringly, one might say) to the monopoly I and some colleagues broke concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls and compared the situation regarding the editing of “The Gospel of Judas” to it. Directly referring to the difficulty of “overturning” entrenched translations and “interpretations…even after they are proved wrong,” she also went on to cite the Society of Biblical Literature’s “1991 resolution holding that, if the condition of the written manuscript requires that access be restricted, a facsimile reproduction should be the first order of business.” This, persons familiar with the sequence of events relating to the freeing of the Scrolls will know, Prof. James Robinson (a party to the present debate over the Gospel of Judas) and myself did in the same year (A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, B.A.S., Washington D. C.,1991).

The problem was that Prof. DeConick did not stop there. What she did (abetted by the appearance of this piece, so prominently positioned at such a time and in such a venue) was was to check the heroicization of Judas that had ensued after the National Geographic Society TV program featuring it, seemingly exonerating him, and return to portraying him in the traditional way as the Demon (Daimon) incarnate (in Gnostic terms, “the Thirteenth Apostle”).

My own encounter with this situation actually occurred two weeks earlier in San Diego, California at a National Meeting of The Society of Biblical Literature (the premier organization in this field). My visit coincided with the exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls during the same period there, when Ms. DeConick appeared on a panel on the Gospel with some eight other scholars, including James Robinson above (The Secrets of Judas), Elaine Pagels of Princeton (The Gnostic Gospels), Karen King of Harvard (Reading Judas and the Shaping of Christianity), and Marv Meyer of Chapman University (who was allowed a very short response to Prof. DeConick in New York Times Letters a week later, 12/8/07, but nothing of any real substance regarding the points at issue here).

And here is the key point for everyone: the upshot of this necessarily-brief discussion was how few “orthodox Gospels” (meaning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc.) had come to light from the Second Century (the single example cited being a possible fragment of the Gospel of John from papyrus trash heaps in Egypt) but, on the other hand, how many heterodox. Did this mean that more people were reading “sectarian Gospels” at that time, not “orthodox” ones? The answer of the more conservative scholars on the Panel (Chair Michael Williams of the University of Washington, DeConick, Robinson, et. al) was, “Not really but that, in any case, the Gospel of Judas was less historical than they” — a conclusion echoed by Ms. Acocella above.

At that point, as there seemed to be no further questions, I gathered my courage, stood up, and asked, “What makes you think any are historical and not just retrospective and polemical literary endeavors of a kind familiar to the Hellenistic/Greco-Roman world at that time? Why consider one gospel superior to the another and not simply expressions of retrospective theological repartee of the Platonic kind expressed in a literary manner as in Greek tragedy? The Gospel of Judas was clearly a polemical, philosophical text but, probably, so too were most of these others. Why not consider all of them a kind of quasi-Neoplatonic, Mystery Religion-oriented literature that was still developing in the Second Century and beyond, as the Gospel of Judas clearly demonstrates?”

A sort of hushed silence fell on the three hundred or so persons present in the audience, because there was a lot of interest in this Gospel at that time, as I continued: “Why think any of them historical or even representative of anything that really happened in Palestine in the First Century? Why not consider all Greco-Hellenistic romantic fiction or novelizing with an ax-to-grind, incorporating the Pax Romana of the earlier Great Roman Emperor Augustus, as other literature from this period had and, of course, the anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish legal attachments which were the outcome of the suppression of the Jewish War from 66-73 CE?”

“The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were masters of such man/god fiction and the creation of such characters as Osiris, Dionysus, Asclepius, Hercules, Orpheus, and the like as the works of Hesiod, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, Seneca, Apuleius, et. al. demonstrate. Why not consider all of this literature simply part of this man-God/ personification literature, in this instance incorporating the new Jewish concept of “Salvation” — “Yeshu’a”?”

At this point Chair Williams finally cut in, gave an answer on behalf of what he claimed to be (and I believe him) “the whole panel” — that, “Tradition affirmed they were.” This he seems to have considered sufficient for me — one of the few non-Christians in the room who might have enough knowledge to say something meaningful or precise enough to matter.

But the reason I write about these things now is that Jews, in particular, must not just leave them to well-meaning Christians to sort out. In view of the suffering of the last century — in fact, the last nineteen centuries — they too should take an interest in and become knowledgeable about these issues. Especially now, in view of the informational turn-around and retreat in the New Yorker, a magazine traditionally aimed at people of sophistication and urbane intellectuality; it is all the more relevant to raise the issue of this “Judas” and not allow it to go by the boards again and, now that we have more tools, incumbent upon one to do so.

Regardless of predictable outcries from “the left” or “the right” or the impact on anyone’s “Faith” — as if this could matter in the face of all the unfortunate and cruel effects that have come from taking the picture of the “Judas” in Scripture seriously as “history” — especially in the post-Holocaust Era, one must go beyond the inanities and superficialities to the core issue raised by the Gospel and not allow it to be just blandly dismissed — that is, all are works of literature. None are really historical works in the true sense of the word, which the appearance of Gospels such as this and an earlier one, the Gospel of Thomas, drive home with a vengeance.

Having grasped this, one must move beyond all this artfulness (“the poetry” as it were) and confront the issue of whether there ever was a “Judas Iscariot” per se (to say nothing of all the insidious materials circulating under his name), except in the imagination of these Gospel artificers. Nor is this to say anything about the historicity of “Jesus” himself (another difficult question, though the “Judas” puzzle likely points the way towards a solution to this one as well) or another, largely literary or fictional character, very much — in view of women’s issues — in vogue these days, “Jesus”‘s alleged consort and the supposed mother of his only child, “Mary Magdalene,” in whom Ms. Acocella along with Mss. Pagels and King above are very much interested.

But while this latter kind of storytelling did little specifically-identifiable harm, except to confuse literature with history or call into question one’s truth sense; the case of “Judas Iscariot” is quite another thing both in kind and effect. It has had a more horrific and, in fact, totally unjustifiable historical effect and, even if it happened the way the Gospels and the Book of Acts describe it, which is doubtful, effects of this kind were and are wholly unjustified and reprehensible.

In fact, there are only a few references to “Judas Iscariot” in orthodox Scripture — all of which probably tendentious. In John 12:5, he is made to complain about Mary’s “anointing Jesus’ feet with precious spikenard ointment” (another of these ubiquitous “Mary”s in the Gospels — this time “Mary the sister of Lazarus” and not “Mary Magdalene” or “Mary the mother of Jesus” or even “Mary the mother of James and John” or “of John Mark”) in terms of why was not this “sold for 300 dinars and given to the poor” — a variation on the “30 pieces of silver” he supposedly took for “betraying” Jesus later in Matthew 27:3-7, and which Ms. Acocella makes so much of.

For their part, Matthew and Mark have the other “Disciples” or “some” do the “complaining,” not specifically “Judas Iscariot” (the episode is ignored in Luke in favor of other mythologizations — see my New Testament Code); but I say “made” because this is certainly not an historical episode, but rather one which one would encounter in the annals of Greek tragedy with various “gods” demanding the obeisance due them.

Moreover, anyone remotely familiar with the vocabulary of this field would immediately recognize the allusion to “the Poor” as but a thinly-veiled attack on “the Ebionites” — that group of the followers of “Jesus” or his brother “James,” according to Eusebius in the Fourth Century, who were probably the aboriginal “Christians” in Palestine who did not follow the doctrine of “the Supernatural Christ,” considering “Jesus” as simply a “man”/”a prophet,” engendered by natural generation and exceeding other men in the practice of righteousness only.

In fact, Luke’s version of Judas Iscariot’s death in Acts 1:16-19, as noted, and Matthew’s version do not agree at all — a normal state of affairs where Gospel reportage is concerned. In Matthew, Judas goes out and “hangs himself” (thus) after throwing the “30 pieces of silver” — “the price of blood” as Matthew terms it — into the Temple (whatever this means — more imaginatively, Ms. Acocella has him “throwing the coins on the floor” before the “haughty” priests!) This is supposed to fulfill a passage from “the Prophet Jeremiah” but, in fact, the passage being quoted is a broadly-doctored version of “the Prophet Zechariah” (11:12-13) which does not really have the connotation Matthew is trying to give it anyhow.

To continue — in Acts, Judas “falls headlong” into “a Field of Blood” (“Akeldama”), reason unexplained. This is the description used in an “Ebionite” document called the Pseudoclementine Recognitions to picture the “headlong fall” James takes down the Temple steps when the “enemy” Paul physically attacks him leaving him for dead; and, as also noted, “he burst open and his bowels gushed out” (thus). Most conflate these two accounts but, as just suggested, they are really only a parody of the death of James as reported in early Church literature (so is the stoning of Stephen in Acts) and the other three Gospels do not mention how “Judas” died at all.

The point, however, is that the entire character of “Judas Iscariot” is generated out of whole cloth and it is meant to be. Moreover, it is done in a totally malevolent way. This, the Gospel of Judas was obviously trying to ameliorate; but now, if we are to take the words of Prof. DeConick in the New York Times‘ “Gospel Truth” column seriously, and Ms. Acocolla in the New Yorker, about “not fixing history but fixing ourselves” — after the first blush of excitement over its discovery, the scholarly pendulum has swung back the other way and we are, once again, in the business of “demonizing” Judas, not “heroicizing” him. Moreover, according to both, we should in effect downgrade the Gospel and consider the “orthodox” Gospels, in some manner, superior to it and more historical.

The creators of this character and the traditions related to him knew what it was they were seeking to do and in this they have succeeded in a manner far beyond anything they might have imagined and that would have astonished even their hate-besotted brains. Contrary to what Ms. Acocella imagines, Judas Iscariot was meant to be both hateful and hated — a diabolical character despised by all mankind and a byword for treachery (“Betrayal” according to the New Yorker) and the opposite of the all-perfection of the perfect Gnosticizing Mystery conceptuality embodied in the person of the “Salvation” figure “Jesus” (“Yeshu’a,” of course, meaning “Salvation”).

But in creating this character, the authors of these traditions and these Gospels (often, it is difficult to decide which came first, “the Gospels” themselves or the traditions either inspired by or giving inspiration to them) had a dual purpose in mind and, in this, their creation has done its job admirably well. His very name “Judas” in that time and place (forget the fact that it is a byword for “Jew” even to this day) was meant both to parody and heap abuse on two favorite characters of the Jews of the age: “Judas Maccabee,” the hero of “Hanukkah” festivities even today, and “Judas the Galilean,” the founder (described by the First Century Jewish historian and turncoat, Josephus — someone who really was a “Traitor”) of what one might call either “the Zealot” or “the Galilean Movement” even “the Sicarii.”

Moreover, the name “Jew” in all languages actually comes from this Biblical name “Judas” or “Judah” (“Yehudah”), a fact not missed by the people at that time and not misunderstood even today. So, therefore, the pejorative on “Judas” and the symbolic value of all that it signified in the First Century, not only as a by-word for “treachery,” but a slur on the whole Jewish people, was not missed either by those who created this particular ‘blood libel’ or by all other future peoples even down to the present — and how very successful over the last two thousand years.

But there is another dimension to this particular ‘blood libel’ which has also not failed to leave its mark, historically speaking, on the peoples of the world. This is “Judas”‘ cognomen “Iscariot.” No one has ever found the linguistic prototype or origin of this curious denominative, but it is not unremarkable that in the Gospel of John he is also called “Judas the son” or “brother of Simon Iscariot” and, at one point, even “the Iscariot” (cf. John 6:71, 14:22, etc.).

Of course, the closest cognate to any of these rephrasings is the well-known term Josephus uses to designate (also pejoratively) the extreme “Zealots” or Revolutionaries of the time, “the Sicarii” — the ‘iota’ and the ‘sigma’ of the Greek having simply been reversed, a common mistake in the transliteration of Semitic orthography into unrelated languages like English and well-known in Arabic — the ‘iota’ likewise too generating out of the ‘ios’ of the singular in Greek,”Sicarios.” There is no other tenable approximation that this term could realistically allude to. Plus the attachment to it of the definite article “the,” whether mistakenly or by design, just strengthens that conclusion.

Furthermore, Judas’ association in these episodes with the concept both of “the poor” as well as that of a suicide of some kind in Matthew — suicide being one of the tenets of the group Josephus identifies as carrying out just such a mass procedure at the climax of the famous last stand on Masada — to say nothing of the echo of the cognomen of the founder of this party, the equally famous “Judas the Galilean” (also a “Judas the Zealot” as “Judas Maccabee” certainly would have been), just strengthens this conclusion.

Equally germane is the fact that another “Apostle” of “Jesus” is supposed to have been called — at least according to Luke’s Apostle lists — “Simon Zelotes”/”Simon the Zealot” which, of course, also translates out in the jargon of the Gospel of John as “Simon Iscariot” or “Simon the Iscariot.” Moreover, he was more than likely a ‘brother’ of the curious Disciple in the same lists called “Judas of James,” that is, “Judas the brother of James” (the way the designation is alluded to in the New Testament Letter of Jude/Judas). In a variant manuscript of an early Syriac document known as The Apostolic Constitutions, this individual is also designated “Judas the Zealot” — thereby completing the circle of all these inter-related terminologies which seem to have been coursing through so many of the early documents in this period.

Of course, all these matters are as difficult for the non-specialist as they have been for the specialist, but once they are weighed together, there is hardly any escaping the fact that “Judas Iscariot “/”the Iscariot”/”the brother” or “son of Simon the Iscariot” in the Gospels and the Book of Acts is a pejorative for many of these other characters, meant to defame and polemically demonize a number of individuals seen as opposing not only the Imperium Romanum but also the new ‘Pauline’ or more Greco-Roman esotericizing and pacifist doctrine of the “Supernatural Christ.” The presentation of this “Judas,” polemicizing as it was, was probably never meant to take on the historical and theological dimensions it has, traveling through the last two thousand years and leading up to the present, but with a stubborn toughness it has endured.

Nevertheless, its success as a demonizing pejorative has been monumental, a whole people having suffered the consequences of, not only of seeing its own beloved heroes turned into demonaics, but of being hunted down mercilessly – to some extent the frightening result of its efficacy. If anything were a proof of the aphorism “Poetry is truer than history” with which we started, then this is. It is worth repeating that I believe its original artificers would have been astonished by its incredible success.

Even beyond this, not only is there no historical substance to the presentation or its after-effects, but if “Jesus” were alive today — whoever he was, human or supernatural, historical or literary, real or unreal — he would be shocked at such vindictiveness and diabolically-inspired hatred and he, perhaps more even than all others, would have expected his partisans to divest themselves of this historical shibboleth, particularly in view of the harm it has done over the millennia, especially to his own people.

This is what the initial appearance of the Gospel of Judas gave promise of achieving, but now the rehabilitation of the character known to the world as “Judas” — so greatly in order in the light of the incredible atrocities committed over the last century, some as a consequence of this particular libel — seems to be reversing itself, particularly among theologically-minded persons, as scholars like DeConick and journalists like Acocella rethink and represent these things; and the process engendered by this historical polemic and its reversal now seems to be ending, the downplaying of its historicity relative to alleged “orthodox Gospels” and the “demonization” of Judas (deserved or undeserved) being evidence of this. It is yet another deleterious case of literature, cartoon, or lampoon being taken as history.

Still, it is time people really started to come to terms with the almost completely literary and ahistorical character of a large number of figures of the kind of this “Judas” in whatever the “Gospel” and in whatever manner he is portrayed — positively or negatively — and, in the process, admit the historical malevolence of the original caricature and move forward onto the higher plain of the amelioration of rehabilitation. This is what Christians of good will have always said they were interested in doing and this is what Jews must learn to do for themselves, if they are ever to escape from its pernicious effects and the re-emergence of the traditional picture.

No one else is going to do it for them and ignorance is no excuse. They must first of all stop repeating the platitudes that these things reflect historical truth. One allows this to continue at one’s own peril and this the Gospel of Judas illumines with a vengeance, which is why the rush to reinterpret and discredit it. It is ignorance that allows this and Jews must be the first to take off the blinders regarding this particular embodiment of it. As the coming of yet another High Holy Day atonement period approaches, no healthier, happier, or higher hope could be wished for or expressed.

Robert Eisenman is a professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology at California State University Long Beach. He is the author ofJames the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code.

Gospel Fiction and the Redemonization of Judas

The Huffington Post, December 19, 2007.

The New York Times is at work again and the “demonization” of Judas Iscariot is once more in play. The best example of this is the appearance at the beginning of the month of an op-ed piece, “Gospel Truth” by Prof. April DeConick of Rice University (The New York Times, 12/1/07). In it, it was flattering to read of DeConick’s comparison of the situation regarding the editing of “The Gospel of Judas” to the monopoly we broke regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls and the difficulty of “overturning” entrenched translations and “interpretations,” “even after they are proved wrong” – not to mention her alluding to the Society of Biblical Literature’s “1991 resolution holding that, if the condition of the written manuscript requires that access be restricted, a facsimile reproduction should be the first order of business.” This Professor James Robinson, also a party to the present debate, and I did in the same year in A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, B.A.S., Washington D. C.,1991.

But Ms. DeConick doesn’t stop there. She wishes to check the heroicization of Judas that ensued and return to portraying him as the Demon (Daimon) incarnate – in Gnostic terms, as she puts it, “the Thirteenth Apostle.” In this regard, I was at the Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature last month in San Diego, California, in which Prof. DeConick appeared on a panel with some eight other published scholars on “The Gospel of Judas” including Robinson (The Secrets of Judas), Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels), Karen King (Reading Judas and the Shaping of Christianity), Marv Meyer (who responded to Prof. DeConick in Letters, 12/8/07), etc.

The upshot of this necessarily-brief discussion was how few “orthodox Gospels” (meaning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc.) had come to light from the Second Century (the single example cited being a possible fragment of the Gospel of John from papyrus trash heaps in Egypt), but how many heterodox ones. Did this mean that more people at that time were reading “sectarian Gospels” rather than “orthodox” ones? The answer of the more conservative scholars on the Panel (Chair Michael Williams of the University of Washington, DeConick, Robinson, et. al) was, not really but, in any case, “The Gospel of Judas” was less historical than they.

At this point, as there were no other questions, I felt constrained to ask: “What makes you think any of them are historical and not just retrospective and polemical literary endeavors of a kind familiar in the Hellenistic World at that time? Why not consider all part of a Mystery Religion-oriented, quasi-Neoplatonic literature that was still developing in the Second Century and beyond, as the Gospel of Judas itself shows?”

A sort of hushed silence fell on the three hundred or so persons present in the audience, but despite Prof. Williams’ attempt to intervene, I continued: “The Gospel of Judas was clearly a polemical philosophical text, but so too probably were all these others. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were masters of such man/god fiction and the creation of such characters as Osiris, Dionysus, Asclepius, Hercules, Orpheus, and the like as the works of Hesiod, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, Seneca, Apuleius, et. al. attest. Why consider any superior to the other and not simply retrospective theological repartee expressed in a literary style?”

“Why think any historical or representative of anything that really happened in Palestine in the First Century? Why not consider all Greco-Hellenistic romantic fiction or novelizing with an ax to grind incorporating the Pax Romana of the earlier Great Roman Emperor Augustus, and, of course, the Anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish legal attachments which were the outcome of the suppression of the First and Second Jewish Revolts in 66-73 and 132-36 CE? Why not consider all simply part of this man-God/personification literature – in this instance, incorporating the new Jewish concept of “Salvation”/ “Yeshu’a” – and nothing more?” At this point Chair Williams finally did succeed in getting an answer in on behalf of what he termed “the whole Panel” – that “Tradition affirmed they were.” This he seems to have considered sufficient for me, one of the only non-Christian persons in the room, who might have enough knowledge to say something meaningful or precise enough to matter.

Nevertheless, in this Hanukkah/Christmas season, it seems particularly relevant to raise the issue of this “Judas” once again and, now that we have more tools, incumbent upon us to do so. Regardless of predictable outcries from “the left” or “the right” or the impact on anyone’s “Faith” – as if this could matter in the face of all the unfortunate and cruel effects that have come from taking the picture of the “Judas” in Scripture seriously as ‘history’ – especially in the post-Holocaust Era, one must look at the issue of whether there ever was a “Judas Iscariot” per se (to say nothing of all the insidious materials circulating under his name) except in the imagination of these Gospel artificers. Nor is this to say anything about the historicity of “Jesus” himself (another difficult question, though the “Judas” puzzle most likely points the way towards solving this one as well) or another, largely literary or fictional character very much now – in view of women’s issues – in vogue, “Jesus”‘ alleged consort and the supposed mother of his only child, “Mary Magdalene.”

But while the latter kind of storytelling did little specifically-identifiable harm, except to confuse literature with history or call into question one’s truth sense; the case of “Judas Iscariot” is quite another thing, both in kind and effect. It has had a more horrific and, in fact, totally unjustifiable historical effect and, even if it happened the way the Gospels and the Book of Acts describe it – which is doubtful – effects of this kind were and are wholly unjustified and reprehensible.

In the first place, there are only a few references to “Judas Iscariot” in orthodox Scripture, all of which probably tendentious. For example, he is made in John 12:5 to complain about “Mary”‘s (another of these ubiquitous “Mary”s – this time “Mary the sister of Lazarus” not “Mary Magdalene” or “Mary the mother of Jesus” or “of James and John” or “of John Mark”) “anointing Jesus’ feet with precious spikenard ointment” in terms of why was not this “sold for 300 dinars and given to the Poor” – a variation on the “30 pieces of silver” he supposedly took for “betraying” the Master later in Matthew 27:3-7 (and pars. – Matthew and Mark have the other “Disciples” or ‘some” do the “complaining” and not specifially “Judas Iscariot”).

But anyone even remotely familiar with the vocabulary of this field would immediately recognize the allusion to “the Poor” as but a thinly-veiled attack on “the Ebionites” or that group of the followers of “Jesus” or his brother “James,” according to Eusebius in the Fourth Century, who were probably the aboriginal “Christians” in Palstine and did not follow the doctrine of “the Supernatural Christ,” considering “Jesus” as simply a “man”/”a prophet,” engendered by natural generation and exceeding other men in the practice of Righteousness only.

In fact, the Lukan version of Judas Iscariot’s death in Acts 1:16-19 and Matthew’s version do not agree at all – a normal state of affairs where Gospel reportage is concerned. In Matthew, Judas goes out and “hangs himself” (thus), after throwing the “30 pieces of silver” – “the price of blood” as Matthew likes to term it – into the Temple (whatever this means). This is supposed to fulfill a passage from “the Prophet Jeremiah,” when in fact the passage being quoted is a broadly-doctored version of “the Prophet Zechariah” (11:12-13), which does not really have the connotation Matthew is trying to give it anyhow.

To continue – In Acts he “falls headlong” into “a Field of Blood” (“the Alkeldama” – reason unexplained, although this is the verb used in an “Ebionite” document called the Pseudoclementine Recognitions to describe the “headlong fall” James takes down the Temple steps when the “Enemy” Paul physically attacks him, leaving him for dead) and “he burst open and his bowels gushed out” (thus)! Most conflate these two accounts but, as just signaled, they are really only a parody of the death of James as reported in early Church literature (so is the stoning of Stephen in Acts); and the other three Gospels do not mention how he died at all. (See my James the Brother of Jesus, Penguin, 1998 and in its sequel: The New Testament Code, Barnes and Noble, December, 2006).

The point, however, is that the entire character of “Judas Iscariot” is generated out of whole cloth and it is meant to be. Moreover it is done in a totally malevolent way. This, the recently-discovered “Gospel of Judas” was obviously trying to ameliorate; but now, if we are to take the words of Prof. DeConick in The New York Times editorial seriously, after the first blush of excitement over its discovery, the scholarly pendulum is beginning to swing back the other way and we are once again in the business of “demonizing” Judas, not “heroicizing” him. Moreover, according to her and other’s view, we should rather downgrade the Gospel and consider the “orthodox” Gospels, in some manner, superior to it and more historical.

The creators of this character and the traditions related to him knew what it was they were seeking to do and in this they have succeeded in a manner far beyond anything they might have imagined and that would have astonished even their hate-besotted brains. Judas Iscariot is meant to be both hateful and hated – a diabolical character despised by all mankind and a byword for treachery and the opposite of all-perfection – the perfect, Gnosticizing Mystery figure embodied in the person of the “Salvation” figure “Jesus.”

But in creating this character, the authors of these traditions and these “Gospels” (often, it is difficult to decide which came first, “the Gospels” themselves or the traditions either inspired by or giving inspiration to them) had a dual purpose in mind and in this their creation has done its job admirably well. His very name “Judas” in that time and place (forget the fact that it is a byword for “Jew” even to this day) was meant both to parody and heap abuse on two favorite characters of the Jews of the age: “Judas Maccabee,” the hero of Jewish “Hanukkah” Festivities even today, and “Judas the Galilean,” the founder (described by the First-Century Jewish historian and turncoat, Josephus) of what one might call either “the Zealot” or “the Galilean Movement” – even “the Sicarii” (see below).

Moreover, the name “Jew” in all languages, as just signaled, actually comes from this Biblical name “Judas” or “Judah” (“Yehudah”), a fact not missed by the people at that time and not misunderstood even today. So, therefore, the pejorative on “Judas” or “Judah” and the symbolic value of all that it signified in the First Century CE, not only as a by-word for treachery, but a slur on the whole Jewish people, was not missed either by those who created this particular ‘blood libel’ or by all other future peoples even down to the present and, as just signaled, how very successful over the last two thousand years.

But there is another dimension to this particular ‘blood libel’ which has also not failed to leave its mark, historically speaking, on the peoples of the world and that is “Judas”‘ cognomen “Iscariot.” No one has ever found the linguistic prototype or origin of this curious denominative, but it is not unremarkable that in the Gospel of John he is also called “Judas the son” or “brother of Simon Iscariot” and, at one point, even “the Iscariot” (cf. John 6:71, 14:22, etc.).

Of course, the closest cognate to any of these rephrasings is the well-known term Josephus uses to designate (also pejoratively) the extreme “Zealots” or Revolutionaries of the time, “the Sicarii” – the ‘iota’ and the ‘sigma’ of the Greek simply having been reversed, a common mistake in the transliteration of Semitic orthography into unrelated languages like English and well-known in Arabic – the ‘iota’ likewise too generating out of the ‘ios’ of the singular in Greek,”Sicarios.” There is no other tenable approximation that this term could realistically allude to. Plus the attachment to it of the definite article “the,” whether mistakenly or by design, just strengthens the conclusion.

Furthermore, Judas’ association in these episodes with the concept both of “the Poor” as well as that of a suicide of some kind in Matthew – suicide being one of the tenets of the group Josephus identifies as carrying out just such a mass procedure at the climax of the famous last stand on Masada – to say nothing of the echo of the cognomen of the founder of this Party, the equally famous “Judas the Galilean” (also a “Judas the Zealot” as “Judas Maccabee” would have been), just strengthens this conclusion.

Equally germane is the fact that another “Apostle” of “Jesus” is supposed to have been called – at least according to Lukan Apostle lists – “Simon the Zealot”/”Simon Zelotes” which, of course, also translates out in the jargon of the Gospel of John as “Simon Iscariot” or “Simon the Iscariot.” Moreover, he was more than likely a ‘brother’ of the curious Disciple in the same lists, already mentioned above and called “Judas of James,” that is, “Judas the brother of James” (the way the designation is alluded to in the New Testament Letter of Jude/Judas). In a variant manuscript of an early Syriac document, known as The Apostolic Constitutions, alluded to above too, this individual is also designated “Judas the Zealot” – thereby completing the circle of all these inter-related terminologies which seem to have been coursing through so many of these early documents in this period.

Of course, all these matters are fraught with difficulty, but once they are weighed together, there is hardly any escaping the fact that “Judas Iscariot “/”the Iscariot”/”the brother” or “son of Simon the Iscariot” in the Gospels and the Book of Acts is a polemical pejorative for many of these other characters, meant to defame and polemically demonize a number of individuals seen as opposing the new ‘Pauline’ or more Greco-Roman esotericizing doctrine of the “Supernatural Christ.” The presentation of this “Judas,” polemicizing as it was, was probably never meant to take on the historical and theological dimensions it has, coursing through the last two thousand years and leading up to the present; but with a stubborn toughness it has endured.

Nevertheless, its success as a demonizing pejorative has been monumental, a whole people having suffered the consequences of, not only of seeing its own beloved heroes (including Judas Maccabee of just-concluded Hanukkah festivities) turned into demonaics, but of being hunted down mercilessly – to some extent the frightening result of its efficacy. If anything were a proof of the aphorism “Poetry is truer than history,” then this is. To repeat, I believe its original artificers would have been astonished by its incredible success.

Even beyond this, not only is there no historical substance to the presentation or its after-effects, but if “Jesus” were alive today—whoever he was, human or supernatural, literary or historical, real or unreal—he would be shocked at such vindictiveness and diabolically-inspired hatred and he, perhaps even more than all others, would have expected his partisans to divest themselves of this historical shibboleth, particularly in view of the harm it has done over the millennia especially to his own people.

This is what the initial appearance of the Gospel of Judas and the National Geographic Society Program promoting it gave promise of helping to achieve, but now the rehabilitation of the character known to the world as “Judas” – so greatly in order in the light of the incredible atrocities committed over the last century, some as a consequence of this particular libel – predictably seems to be reversing itself, particularly among theologically-minded persons as scholars like April DeConick start to rethink these things and publicize their view in The New York Times; and the process engendered by this historical polemic and reversal now seems to be receding, the downplaying of its historicity relative to alleged “orthodox Gospels” and the “demonization” of Judas (deserved or undeserved) being evidence of this. It is yet another deleterious case of literature, cartoon, or lampoon being taken as history.

Still, it is time people really started to come to terms with the almost completely literary and ahistorical character of a large number of figures of the kind of this “Judas” in whatever the “Gospel” and in whatever manner he is portrayed – positive or negative – and, in the process, admit the historical malevolence of the original caricature and move forward onto the higher plain of the amelioration of rehabilitation. This is what Christians of good will have always said they were interested in doing. In this Hanukkah/Christmas season, no healthier, happier, or higher hope could be wished for or expressed.

Digging on the Temple Mount: A Modest Proposal

The Jerusalem Post, September 16, 2007.

There is an old proverb known to most everyone: “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.” Unfortunately the Israelis “sowed the wind” in 1967, but not in the way most people think. Now they are, indeed, “reaping the whirlwind” but, once again, not in the way the screaming or agenda-driven newspaper men or women might believe or lead the world to think. In fact, perhaps even, just the opposite.

When, certainly unexpectedly, on the Fourth Day of the War in June, 1967, the Israeli soldiers suddenly – and this joyfully – found themselves in possession of what, in most people’s jargon, is called “the Temple Mount” – despite what some journalists prompted by Arabo-Islamic propagandists now might call, attempting to be ‘even-handed,’ “the Haram as-Sharif” (they usually don’t even know what such a locution actually means) – they (the Israelis or, for that matter, the soldiers) obviously had not prepared themselves ideologically to deal with such a sudden bounty or, as some might call or consider it as being, “a gift from God” to them.

It was at that point that the always audacious (though perhaps not always thoughtful) Moshe Dayan – in his like-minded attempt to be ‘even-handed’ – stepped in and ordered the Israeli flag to be taken down from the Mosque of Omar, where the Israeli soldiers in a moment of jubilant joy had placed it (who could blame them?). How noble – Dayan and many of his other military compatriots were always good at the ‘beau geste”/the grand gesture or romantic flourish/the fateful choice and often this was done, as just remarked, without the slightest bit of forethought but, rather, just a momentary show of picturesque swagger (don’t tell us – as Rabbi Goren desperately tried to do – we know better).

Oh yes, of after-thought there has been much, but eons turned on that fateful decision (afterall we were dealing here with the morale of the whole Jewish People just a decade or two after the Holocaust), and for some, still do; yet this decision has become encased in stone as it were (excuse the pun), moved forward as if having its own momentum until the present day. Nothing has changed in the forty years since – it is as if a moment were caught in freeze-frame. Worse, there has not even been any discussion of it. It has become another one of those taboo subjects which, just the mention of (at least in most “liberal” or “left-wing” circles) makes people throw up their hands in disgust or automatically labels one a reactionary of some sort, a fanatic, or, even worse, insane.

Yes, eons turned on that momentary bit of beduin-tent theatrics, but was it any good? Had it been carefully weighed and thought out? Was it the right course to follow (was Bush’s course in Iraq the right course to follow?) – especially where the morale, creativity, or self-image of the Jewish People as a whole was concerned – a course now frozen in time as if nothing could change it for the next forty or, for that matter, even perhaps four hundred years? The writer suspects the negative, while at the same time being ready to consider any corrective time, history, or argument might be able offer. But the message that was sent then has now been sent – certainly to the whole of the Muslim World and probably the whole of the Judeo-Christian one as well (we will leave aside for the moment what might be called “the Third World” again) – and it is one of hesitation, uncertainty, tentativeness, ideologically-speaking, ‘treading water,’ and finally even weakness. Look, they made no claim to it (the Temple Mount), leaving it in Palestinian hands – they must have no right to it. Perhaps they have no right to anything?

It is not a question of whether the decision was right or good or noble. Maybe it was. It can be right or good or noble to the end of time, yet still engender deleterious effects. The writer considers the latter unfortunately to have also been the case and, not only to have taken place, but to be increasing day-by-day – year-by-year. You can ‘tread water’ for one, two, or five years, but after forty years it begins to look like weakness – delegitimacy.

In the first place, now we have these nefarious and certainly destructive, unauthorized Temple Mount digs or “repairs” if one prefers. One has only to view pictures of the extent of these and their mindless and absolutely unscientific destructiveness to throw up one’s hands at their senselessness. Secondly, the Mosque of Omar has over time now (confirming another old axiom: ‘nature abhors a vacuum”) become a symbol of all Islamic resistance groups, Middle Eastern television-station logos, and flags and placards everywhere pro-Palestinian sentiments are being expressed (at least some people would seem to know what to do with the symbol of the Temple Mount even if the Jews don’t).

Third and perhaps most importantly, it shows a People (the Jewish) unsure of its cultural and religious heritage, its national identity, and perhaps just as deleterious – even incomprehensibility. We, the Jewish people, in the eyes of the world have always been and still are, an oddity. Arnold Toynbee in the last Century called us a “fossil” and questioned our right to continue to exist at all. For Leo Pinsker in the Nineteenth Century, with his medical background, we were as “the walking dead” which, rightly or wrongly, engendered a kind of “Judeophobia.” But, when we do things that other peoples would not even imagine doing or would never do, then even though we may think we are doing “right’ or “being good,” other people may and often do look upon us bizarre – something frightening.

What people in its right mind, after twenty-five hundred years since the destruction of its most Holy First Temple and nineteen hundred years after the destruction of the Second, would just turn over the keys of its most Holy Place to persons regarded either as outsiders, newcomers, or occupiers – whatever the ideology which led them to build there in the first place or whatever their rights may have been or the justice possibly of their cause? No one – and this is what becomes frightening. This is what makes us sometimes seem so frightening. There must be an ulterior motive – there must be a “plot” of some kind. In some way, we must be sending a signal of some kind, as just suggested above: we have no right to even be there – we have no right even to be in Middle East at all. This is part of the subtle message being sent out, intentionally or not. No one would ever do it.

Is it imaginable that the Muslims, after endless sufferings and wanderings – were the Jews or some other people in control of Mecca which they (the Arabs or Muslims) had just re-conquered – then just give control of their most Holy Shrine the Ka’abah back to the Jews or that other people whatever the ideological reason? Would they even protect what had been built by others in the meantime for whatever the reason on their cultural legacy and not raze it, whatever the consequences? Of course they would not, because they are what is considered “a normal people.” I am not speaking here of right or wrong. Be right or wrong according to one’s own lights – I am not judging that – I am only saying that to behave as we have done or are doing is what almost every people in the world would view as “abnormal.”

Would the Catholics leave the Vatican in some one else’s hands had it been lost and re-conquered, whatever had been built there in the interim? And in Spain, did the Christians leave the Mosque of Cordoba or the one at Sevilla, a Mosque? And what of all the Aztec Holy sites in Mexico or the Inca ones in Peru? Did the Muslims in Istanbul, leave Santa Sophia a Church? I could go on and on. No it is never done, whatever the cause, whatever the reason, whatever the right or wrong. Ok, so we want to be “special” – a “special people” as it were – but this is not what either T. Herzl or N. Bialik wished to be. They simply wished to be completely “normal.”

Would the Hindus leave a Muslim shrine over a sacred Hindu Temple or religious site, if they had some other choice? Of course not and they did not. One has only to witness what they did to one such mosque (the Babur Mosque in Ayodha, India for instance in 1992) when the extreme Nationalists took control of it. They raised it with pick and ax – almost to the last stone. The same thing was done to Joseph’s Tomb outside of Nablus even by the Palestinians themselves and in the full glare of publicity just a little more than five years ago. Did anyone think this was peculiar? Did anyone object? No, not at all. This was the way “a normal people” behaves – even the Palestinians, who make no bones about ceaselessly voicing their demands for special treatment and about the outrages that have been inflicted upon them to anyone who will listen even though “Joseph” was supposed to be one of their own Patriarchs too!

And the Taliban in Afghanistan, with no right or threat whatsoever, just maliciousness, actually even blew up the figure of Buddha in the Mountain known as “the Bahmia Buddha.” Of course, one need not emulate such peoples or acts, but one is simply speaking about what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” – sometimes even, what is dignified and what is humiliating.

The present situation on the Temple Mount is simply humiliating. The “Jews,” as it were, are not even allowed to consider what they might wish to do on the vast expanse of space represented by “the Temple Mount” (should they indeed wish to do anything), while the Muslims are allowed to do whatever they want, including destroying religious and cultural artifacts which even the UN would consider an inappropriate activity. Be this as it may, no abstract political or religious thought – even debate – has really been applied to it in the last forty years. It has just been allowed to drift a la Moshe Dayan. It is as simple as that.

One need not raze anything or even take a building over or change it from a mosque into a temple, though the Dome of the Rock was never, strictly speaking, “a Mosque” and by contrast to al-Aksa, never actually functioned in this way – it is only a pavilion of sorts built over what was perceived to be a Judeo-Islamic Holy Place. One should appreciate that it (“the Dome of the Rock” or “the Mosque of Omar” as it is sometimes also called) was built back in the early 700s by the Umayyad Caliphs (then based in Damascus), at around the same time as Hisham’s Palace outside of Jericho, as an alternative to the Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Ka’abah because of the internecine religious strife and extremism of the time (including Shi’ite) which made travel to Mecca and the Pilgrimage impossible from Syria. Therefore, a site was chosen and consecrated closer to home – in other words, “the Dome” and its “Mosque” simply began as a more expedient, alternative Pilgrimage Site in some manner, copying just what the Jews had always done there whatever the ostensible theological reason invented to justify it. It bears repeating, it was never a functioning “Mosque” anymore than ‘the Ka’abah” at Mecca, the pilgrimage to which it replaced.

But one not need raze anything in order to take control of something and express one’s legitimate cultural heritage. At the moment we are leaving the Jews of the world in a state of a kind of rootless or spiritual demoralization. They cannot always be moved by the ongoing and endless issue of Israel’s security. But the Jews of the world find nothing to be particularly moved about. Being moved is a spiritual/poetic thing. It is a matter of the soul. Does one think that taking a given act or following a given policy does not have consequences – especially unintended ones? It has enormous consequences and the present situation is not only culturally intolerable (we shall leave out the word “morally”); it is psychologically and spiritually so as well – in fact, as just implied, it is spiritually demoralizing.

Do those in control of the Israeli Government think that their actions do not have consequences for the Jews in the world at large – particularly young people? Israelis will ask, why focus on us? We do not say that Israelis should live for the Jews at large, but they should in some manner aspire to inspire. Historically-speaking, like it or not, things either are perceived as being ‘on the rise’ or they decline. The Jews of the world cannot wait any longer for a spiritual center (and “the Western” or “Wailing Wall” is not this). It is not always a matter of international relations. Ok from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, it was the power and strength of the Israeli Army, its bravery, that fortified Jews in the world, gave them pride, made them think God’s hand was somehow showing itself in History (whether it was or not was besides the point – this is a psychological point, a spiritual point).

Now what is it? There is nothing. How can one hold the Jewish People together and give them the encouragement, the pride, and staying-power it needs to continue – aside from demanding of its youth the same old tired and shop-worn norms? It will not hold. They are once again fading away. One sees it here in America – one sees it in the Israeli emigration figures. One need not go into these ramifications here.

So you say, what then is possible? First the necessary archaeological spade work must be done, regardless of outcries, regardless of objections – period. Here we are standing and witnessing a situation where it is possible that archaeological remains either from the First or Second Temples or their appendaged buildings are simply being damaged, destroyed, or insensitively cut through with earth-moving or bulldozing equipment and what is done about it? Nothing. We just stand by and watch this wanton destruction and do nothing. Most imagine this is because of fear of international public opinion, but it cannot be. This must stop. Is this not demoralizing? As just suggested, not even the United Nations could legitimately support the destruction of cultural artifacts in this manner. This is a sine qua non of any United Nations resolution in the cultural area, whatever one’s point-of-view on the Arab-Israel dispute might be.

From a secular point-of-view anyhow (which is all that matters where legally-sanctioned bona fide acts are concerned), surely there can be no harm in scientifically-sound archaeological activity of a thoroughgoing manner whatever Muslim or, for that matter, Jewish Religious Authorities might think of this – and one might hear squeals of objection from either of these two sides. But in theory the Israeli Government is supposed to be a secular affair – a secular Democracy as it were, as for instance is the Indian or Pakistani or Turk (shall we listen to the guffaws here?). I doubt if there would be any objection from the “Christians” except in so far as some kind of ‘political’ advantage were being sought or some sort of pandering at work.

But the present situation and what is happening now is intolerable. In fact, if the Israeli Government had regulated the situation on the Temple Mount from the beginning instead of just giving it back to the Muslim Waqf Authorities to do with as they saw and today still even see fit, a lot could have been illumined. Instead, by not regulating it, as already signaled above, not only have we weakened ourselves as a people; the issue has been utilized almost everywhere to ‘shoehorn in’ a wide assortment of rabble-rousing, anti-Israel and usually anti-Semitic agenda. Those exploiting it have cleverly tapped into the language of “pc” groups to undermine Israel’s position around the world – nay, even the legitimacy of her very existence. This is what forty years of dilatoriness has partially wrought.

By the same token, it is also used as a hammer to actually exclude all other groups from the Temple Mount. Look, so the rational goes, why did they not exercise a claim? This must mean they have no claim at all to anything. They must be in the wrong since otherwise they would not have hesitated so long and the downward slide, as already suggested, begins from there. By not regulating it, they have in effect admitted they have no right to be there at all – this being the mindset of two-thirds of the world.

This is admittedly extreme, but this is what one hears in large areas of the Western World where every liberal or left-leaning group automatically assumes this to be the case; whereas, on the contrary, if analyzed rationally, no one can provide a reason why the site should be exclusively Muslim or, for that matter, exclusively anyone’s, and why other groups should not be allowed to freely participate there should they wish. One has only to look at a bird’s-eye view of the site to appreciate there is plenty of room on the grand platform represented by “the Temple Mount” to accommodate most anyone who wants to be there. Furthermore, instead of being the divisive issue, all such groups try to make of it, it could become a unifying one. Nor is there any excuse why different groups should not be allowed to participate there and in this day and age there should be no exclusivity there (on anyone’s part). In fact, if the situation had been regulated properly from the beginning in a responsible, humane way, instead of the chaos we presently are generally obliged to witness, we most likely would have been well on our way towards a better world for everyone.

So what then should be done where Jews are concerned? There are numerous solutions to the problem of a Jewish Religious Shrine or Holy Site on the Temple Mount once the actual parameters of the situation have been precisely measured and discovered through archaeology. This need not be an actual functioning “Third Temple” in the sense of bringing back or performing animal sacrifice and the like. Very few people probably wish to look back in time in that way. These are not things the writer can determine. They would have to be determined as the process went forward by the “zeitgeist” or “the spirit of the times” as the Nineteenth Century Scientific Judaism or the Historical Schools of Leopold Zunz, Nahman Krochmal, and Zachariah Frankel might have put it. Is not this how things are usually determined – including the original Muslim Pavilion known as “the Dome” itself and even the present-day Holocaust Memorial in Berlin?

But that is not the question at the moment. Something must be built by the Jews on the Temple Mount in spite of what all the world would or might say, just because people’s souls require it. As already signaled, people need poetic things – symbols to sustain their souls and this is what such a monument or functioning building would represent. What are poetic things? They are the inexplicable necessities that move and sustain the soul. Being moved is a spiritual/poetic thing. There is not necessarily any explanation for them, but to lack them is to feel somehow deprived and downcast. Why a Temple? What purpose might it serve? When viewed on the superficial level, perhaps nothing; but when viewed on the symbolical, they are the things that uplift a People’s soul (just like it does, for instance, the Muslims with even less cause). They are of and for the ages.

Such a shrine could be built as a Religious Monument to commemorate the wandering over two thousand years and the return (just as the present Dome of the Rock, for instance, is not a mosque but rather more in the nature of a Religious Monument); or it could be built as an act of Thanksgiving as someone like Abraham Lincoln might have put it in the Gettysburg Address. Why already the Germans, as remarked above, have allowed, sponsored, and built a Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin just a few steps from the Brandenburg Gate and the Old Reichstag Building and yet the Jews are unable – in fact, not unable, unwilling or just unimaginative enough – to build a Memorial Shrine or some sort of spiritual Monument on the Temple Mount?

What could be more pathetic than this? At the moment people are standing in front of and kissing the stones of an old wall built by Herod, the inveterate enemy of the Jewish People and the man responsible, more perhaps than any other, for its destruction 1900-2000 years ago. Most probably don’t even know this and that Herod built it as an ego trip and a sop to the people to keep the disaffected busy for years. Nor do they know that he was not even “Jewish” at all (he certainly was not born “a Jew”) but – if the truth were out – what would today be called “an Arab” (irony of ironies – a Hellenized Idumaean or a kind of early-day Saddam Hussein). Even the Arabs don’t know this. He certainly destroyed the pious and saintly Maccabees and their family – the heroes of our Hanukkah Festivities – root and stalk; and yet one goes on kissing the stones he set in place blithely unaware of these things as if this were sufficient. This is how important such symbols are and how deep the need for them.

The Muslims have already proved that history is not static and is fluid and in flux. They built what they built when they wished to build it. Forget that it might have been Holy to some other people before them. They have always built their shrines upon other peoples’ shrines – the Ka’abah for example on an old pagan religious shrine.There is ample room on the Temple Mount Platform for a shrine or shrines that can be Holy to three Faiths. For the sake of the spirits of our own children and all those departed over twenty centuries we must do something because otherwise we simply face further demoralization and more deterioration – and one is speaking spiritually here, not necessarily politically. It should be obvious that Evangelical Christians and even Mormons would offer nothing but encouragement to such a project even more than many Jews.

It may be that such a “Temple” or “Shrine” would disturb nothing in the present archaeological scheme of things. This has yet to be determined or discovered, but first the necessary archaeological field work must be done. It may be that a given monument would have to be slightly moved just like the Temple of Rameses III at Abu Simbel was moved when the Aswan Dam was built – and this even under United Nations auspices!

Certainly the Mosque of Omar is, architecturally-speaking, a beautiful building that has stood some 1200 years but it was only a monumental pavilion to commemorate a Holy Site – Jewish or Muslim who knows which? Modern ingenuity would easily be able to find a solution to all such problems. It may be that an architectural pavilion could be built over the whole site as a gigantesque Memorial or a Monument of Thanksgiving or, quite simply, a restorative Monument for the Jewish soul as already indicated too above.

Back in the 1980s when I was invited to contribute original ideas to new Governments then being formed, I suggested that, to commemorate the coming Millennium, an Architectural Competition could be held under Government auspices to come up with ideas on what to do with the architectural space of the Temple Mount to make it both accessible and Holy to Three Faiths or, for that matter, as many Faiths as might have wanted to participate. I thought to call it: “Competition Temple Mount 2000: Problems and Solutions – Ground Holy to Three Faiths,” and even envisioned Christians being invited to participate and contribute some memorial or monumental structure of their own should they have wished.

This needn’t have been an actual building or buildings or even a ‘buildable’ project – it might even have been a simply “Utopian Proposal”; but wonderful ideas emerge out of competitions of this kind when the best architectural minds in the world are invited to participate and put their heads together and come up with new ideas to solve old problems; and one could be assured that no one would have wanted to miss this one.

This is what was done in New York City just a few years ago when it became necessary to wrestle with the remains of and solve the problem of what should be done to commemorate the destruction of the World Trade Center. Many wonderful ideas were contributed and, in the end, what emerged was only an architectural imprint of the former buildings. Nothing was actually built in their actual place, because the ground they stood on had become hallowed by the deaths of over 3000 some persons, but rather an architectural footprint was left. So the same could be done on the Temple Mount. One never knows what ideas come forward when one holds things open to architectural minds in competition. This could have been an intellectually sound first step. Look at the Mall in Washington D. C. – there is no end to the memorial monuments (good or bad – wise or unwise) that continue to be built along it. History doesn’t stop. It is in movement.

Well 2000 has come and gone and what is clear is that the present ongoing stalemate and status quo should or cannot be allowed to continue. If one believes the archaeologist, artifacts on the Temple Mount have been destroyed in and ongoing manner in a never-ending succession. This is a direct result of the unwillingness of the Israeli Authorities to exercise sovereignty over their most Holy and Sacred Space. Ok, nothing needs to be destroyed, but this is not to say nothing can be built. As already emphasized, the Muslims themselves have proven that we are not frozen in time. There are creative solutions to be found. We have imaginations. We have talented people who know how to come up with solutions, most could not even have imagined. We have the building techniques to do so.

Here is what must absolutely be done for a start: First, all construction activity not sanctioned or in cooperation with archaeologists must cease forthwith, no matter who complains or what voices of objection are raised. No one could have a legitimate objection to this. Second serious and wide-ranging, complete archaeological work must be done on the whole of the Temple Mount. Creative solutions could easily be found by modern minds where it came to bypassing or tunneling under sacred structures. Nothing would have to be altered or changed but legitimate scientific work should be carried out in a comprehensive and an ongoing manner, no matter who objects and this, without embarrassment, with an eye towards solving the issue of the Temple Mount and making it Holy to Three Faiths.

One need not be embarrassed about any of this. One need only put one’s goals on the table and make them clear. The rest would move forward as if in a divinely-inspired manner. The Jewish People have need of such a Spiritual Center. One has only to begin: Bilu (Bo Israel, lech uva) – Come, Israel, Let us go (forward).

Christiane Amanpur’s God’s Warriors, “the Jews”, and the “Occupied Territories” – Is This For Real?

The Jerusalem Post, August 27, 2007.

Christiane Amanpour in her “God’s Warriors: The Jews” broadcast on CNN this weekend—aside from giving voice to as many anti-Israel and anti-“settlement” critics as one might imagine and almost no “Jewish” (really?) God’s Warriors, except to portray them in the most trivialized manner – must have used the term “Occupied Territories” an endless number of times at every juncture in her narrative from start to finish, so much so that one could be left in no doubt that this was a critique of Israel’s or “the Jews”‘ presence in them (whatever one might mean by “them”) and not about supposedly “Jewish” “Warriors for God” at all.

But it was an altogether too-easy victory. If you start by assuming what in the end you wish to prove, then you have really only indulged in an endless propaganda exercise ostensibly dealing with concepts you haven’t really seriously investigated at all. A case in point – the highpoint of her investigation was clearly a revelation of a supposedly secret Israeli legal memorandum written by someone identified as a “legal adviser” alerting the then 1967 Government to the “illegality” of settlements and their potential violation of the Geneva Conventions and an actual interview (on the streets of London) with the now evidently-retired lawyerly Jewish author some forty years later (had he retired to London?) verifying, though a little more hesitatingly, that he still held the same view today.

That was all Amanpour needed. She then proceeded to run on with a series of cut-ins from a Jimmy Carter interview – as if he with his callow sophistries about Israeli “Apartheid” were some sort of expert too – interspersed with some “B-roll” of shots of James Baker and his Carlyle Group partner George Bush Sr., even the long-vanished Chuck Percy of Illinois! But where was the counter-indicative position stated in any depth to what was after all just another “legal opinion” (though in the sensationalist manner in which she was presenting it to a presumably legally-unsophisticated and unsuspecting public it was being given the appearance of the force of “a finding” or “a legal fact”)? There was none.

Nor was there any serious background to how one came to the Six-Day War as if that was the be-all and end-all of the political situation. History began in 1967 – period. Or, for instance, of the Ottoman Empire previously or the British Mandate, or even the results of the Jordanian Annexation of the West Bank in the early 1950’s, transforming what was once the British-named “Transjordan” (with obvious implications) into “The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” i.e., “Jordan” on both sides of the River. No nothing – just bald statements nurturing present propagandistic fantasies.

“The Occupied Territories” — let us start with that. When was the legal status of the territory in between the present territory of Jordan (now back on the other side of the River where it began) ever resolved? This is a good term for popular journalism or congenial conversation. Afterall, people must communicate, but it has no real presence in legal fact. That is what we meant by saying Ms. Amanpour achieved an all-too-easy victory on this point – from the beginning assuming what she had set out to prove, but the language you use from the beginning and throughout cannot contain the seeds of what you are going to conclude. You must give all sides to an argument or legal discussion a hearing.

In the first place, in Ottoman times, this whole area was part of the “Wilayet” or “Province of Damascus.” There was never a “Province” called “Palestine,” a name which like “Iraq” (i.e., the newly-discovered archaeological “Uruk”) came from the British love of classics – in this instance, their love of classical literature which their professional bureaucrats learned at elite “Public Schools” and which was the legally-designated Roman term for the area after the Jewish presence had been largely eradicated following two Uprisings in 66-70 and 136 CE (interestingly enough, this was based on the Biblical term “Philistia” – the “Mycenaean” or “Greek” area of the Coast occupied by “the Philistines” which even modern Arabic has picked up for the name for its present-day extension – “the Philistinin”/”the Palestinians”, the implications of which should be clear even though these aren’t “Philistines,” or are they?).

Jerusalem only became a separate quasi-administrative entity within this ‘Wilayet” as Western Christian tourism and pilgrimage picked up during the Nineteenth Century and the Ottomans had to deal with Western Consulates that had started to grow up in it. There was never a “Palestine” per se except in late Roman times and there was never one again until the British came in 1917-18.

So it is best to start here with the First World War and its aftermath. The “Mandate” for Palestine and other “Mandates” were awarded to Britain and France by the League of Nations (basically as spoils of war) from the decomposing Ottoman Empire and German colonial possessions in Africa after the Conference of San Remo in 1920 and the Peace Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. This has to be considered the first “legal” building block if one wants to start with anything – whether colonial-minded or non-colonially-minded depending on the observer is besides the point.

Palestine was a “Class B” Mandate meaning, unlike some others (“Iraq” and “Syria” for Instance), its eventual independence was considered to be a ways off in the future. Whether one likes it or not, the fabled “Balfour Declaration” was appended to the Mandate for Palestine as a preamble. It is too bad it was never really observed, not even in spirit, because if it had been, history’s first recorded “Holocaust” (or perhaps its second if one considers the Armenians and Turks) in which some six million were systematically annihilated might never have occurred. But, never mind, this is merely ‘water over the dam’ as it were.

It was at this point that all these results or positions were incorporated into the Palestine-Order-in-Council of 1922, which set forth the legal structure of the new “Mandate” absorbing all previous law including the League of Nations’ Mandate and its controversial rider, “The Balfour Declaration.” I needn’t go into the terms of these. They are pretty obvious. By contrast “Transjordan” (as it was called) received an “Organic Law” after the British unilaterally cut away about two-thirds of the Mandate which originally applied to both sides of the river and gave it, presumably for ‘services rendered,’ to the Hashemite family of Mecca which coincidentally or otherwise was itself being thrown out of the Arabian Peninsula by “the House of Saud” – a dislodgement which had to do with “Arabian” legal affairs and nothing to do with “Palestinian” at all.

Moreover, it is hard to say if this was ever legally recognized by anyone but it didn’t matter, as legal Mandatee, Britain presumably had the right to do this. In any event this threw the whole “Jewish-Palestinian” problem onto the Western Side of the Jordan River while at the same time making the eventual emergence of “Three States” (now possibly “Four”) from the old Mandated Territory inevitable. Be this as it may, events eventually overtook this as well, though the establishment of “The Kingdom of Jordan” out of the old Palestine Mandate became more-or-less an unquestioned legal “fact” over the next 80 years.

Responding to various “Arab” uprisings in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties (to some extent themselves responding to the rise of Nazism on continental Europe and elsewhere – the Baath Party in Syria, for instance, and further East), the British Administration in Palestine (“the man on the spot” as it was often called) became more and more anti-Jewish immigration – in contradistinction to the terms of the Balfour Declaration which in the end became more or less a dead letter – and came up with various “Partition” plans and finally “The White Paper” of 1939 which cut off Jewish immigration in Palestine (of course, just when it was most needed!).

In any event, after the Second World War and all the horrific events everyone is familiar with in connection with that, the legal question of “Palestine” ( though not of “Jordan” which had become an established “fact” as already explained) was once again ‘on the table’ of the heir of this League of Nations – the illustrious, still-functioning “United Nations.” A version of one of these “Partition” plans was eventually adopted in 1947 but was immediately rejected by all of the surrounding “Arab States” by then themselves (several formerly “Class A Mandates”) all independent: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, etc. – only Lebanon does not seem to have been legally clearly regulated, nor does it seem to be today (let’s leave present-day “Iraq” aside) – who immediately invaded looking forward to an easy victory.

What followed was the so-called Israeli “War of Independence,” whose “Cease-Fire Lines” became the eventually demarcations of the 20-year “Truce” that then descended – the official name of which dropped into popular parlance as “the Old Green Lines.” But where was the legal or “official” regulation here? There was none. What followed too was the eventual annexation of “the West Bank” (Jordanian parlance meaning the west bank of their Jordan River) in 1951 by the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan making it “Jordan” on both sides of the River. But where was the legal outcry here? There was none. But equally, where was the legal recognition or basis in international jurispru-dence? There was none – no more than the annexation by Israel of the City of Jerusalem and its surroundings after the Six-Day War in 1967 fifteen years later.

In other words, the status of the area in between Israel and Jordan, which had been part of the original Mandate for Palestine which had been legally recognized, was in a kind of legal limbo and was still to be regulated. This has to be done by Treaty and negotiations. Two such negotiations have occurred for better or for worse between Israel and Egypt and Jordan in the 1970’s and 1990’s. Ok, those situations are more or less legally defined and regulated whether rightly or wrongly.

But what of “the Occupied Territories”? These have not been defined in any legal sense and not even the famous Resolution 242 after the Six Day War in 1967 which called upon the Israelis to “withdraw from territories” in exchange for Peace drew back from doing this and did not – and this apparently purposefully – define which “territories” were to be so regarded and to what extent. This again was to be resolved by negotiations, but these “negotiations” are what are supposedly taking or not taking place; and, in any event have been marred by violence (from whatever the direction or from whosever’s point-of-view) on a continuing basis.

Nevertheless, the term “Occupied Territories” itself would appear to be a misnomer, however it is used in fact, since it is difficult to “occupy” a “territory” which has no legal status to begin with – except that conferred on it perhaps by the illegal annexation by Jordan – and, therefore, it is difficult to see how the Geneva Conventions should apply to it anymore than they earlier did to Jordan (are all Jordanian-constructed buildings, et. al., therefore, “illegal”?). This is especially true in the light of a finding that “settlement” activity on the part “Jews” (if not “Israelis”) in such areas was permissible – in fact, “looked upon with favor” according to the first officially-recognized legal entity, the Balfour Declaration.

However these things may be, the terms of all such legally-binding resolutions or enactments have been systematically violated by all either responsible for or a legal party to them from the beginning up to the present day. The British violated the terms of the Balfour Declaration which had been appended to their “Mandate for Palestine” from the beginning, in effect, doing away with it from two-thirds of the territory appertaining to it in a unilateral manner as early as 1920-21 or thereabouts (no protests here) and abolishing it altogether in 1939. The Jordanians also violated the terms of this Declaration, prima facie (and, as a result therefore, the Mandate for Palestine) allowing no “Jewish Settlement” – which they would have seen as a contradiction in terms – on the territory allotted to them from the beginning on up to the present day. As a footnote to this, it should be observed that even “Palestinian” groups like “Black September” opposed the kind of sovereignty these Authorities were exercising on whatever side of the Jordan.

The British also violated the terms of the Mandate for Palestine by the various unilateral actions they took already enumerated above. All so-called “Arab States,” such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan (many – the last three the beneficiaries of “Class A Mandates” – whose independence had already been consolidated as already explained), absolutely rejected the internationally-adopted “Partition of Palestine,” making this crystal clear by their immediate invasion. And even those who did not invade like Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, etc. supported this rejection and invasion in no uncertain terms. Even the so-called “Palestinians” themselves rejected this, rendering it too a dead letter – many making this clear by their flight whether by choice or involuntary (however one views this and whatever the claims involved) and even more so by their “National Charter” which unequivocally rejects it even to the present day.

So what is, therefore, the legal status of the so-called “Occupied Territories” and what is their extent? There is none. They are in a kind of legal limbo, that is, they are, strictly speaking, legally unrecognized and who knows their extent? This has yet to be determined by negotiation and, like most of the arguments one usually hears (including those on Amanpour’s program), superficial. So how can the Geneva Conventions supposedly be applied to an area whose legal status was never legally or rightfully determined in any meaningful way in the first place, except for the Mandate for Palestine in 1920-23 by the League of Nations and manhandled ever since by all legal parties concerned but still rightfully recognizing a Jewish right of settlement all the way up to the Jordan River and, if the truth were told, beyond? This is one legal nicety which has never been gainsaid, whether one likes it or does not like it.

In any event, “Settlement” has to do with ‘Lands” – “Dead Lands” as they were called in the Ottoman Empire previously, “Mewat.” As in the American West and something in the manner of “Homesteading,” these were and are (Ottoman Land Law having been absorbed into both Israel and Jordan Law) lands outside of cities and public spaces connected to cities whose title according to the Ottoman Land Law of 1856 (and, in fact, strict Islamic legal theory and customary practice upon which it was based) had never either been determined or registered by anyone, but which carried with it a right of “Vivification,” that is, if you fenced off an uninhabited area of this kind with no registered legal title and cultivated it for three years continuously, you had the right to register it as “mulk” – freehold property. Anyhow, these are legal complexities for which the reader might wish to look at my book: Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel: A History of the Survival of Tanzimat and Shari’a in the British Mandate and the Jewish State, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1978.

Another point, which perhaps should be emphasized for the unsuspecting reader – to call these “towns” or ‘bedroom suburbs,” which have been founded or mainly grown up on such lands (“Palestine,” “the Wilayet of Damascus,” “Transjordan,” or whatever you want to call it being comprised of large swaths of such lands), “Settlements” at this point is also a misnomer – as any clear-eyed observer who has seen them might be able to understand – of immense and tendentious proportions whose basic purpose is to delegitimatize them (as clearly Christiane Amanpour was intent upon doing whether intentionally or otherwise) before their legal status even comes under consideration or is negotiated. She like many of her colleagues and confreres just seem to facilely assume these things are obvious without any in-depth examination – forgetting the ancient proverb that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

The Jesus Tomb: Primeval Stupidity

The Huffington Post, March 8, 2007.

The latest ‘discovery’ of the so-called ‘Jesus Tomb’ or ‘Jesus Cave’ is so preposterous that it has to be laughed out of court.

For starters one must say that one must be glad that ossuaries of this kind in Israel are finally getting the publicity they deserve and that sites in which they occur will, as a result, finally be open to and become visited by the public.

They are so rich and beautiful that they demonstrate what a richly beautiful life was being led in Eretz-Israel or ‘The Holy Land’ at the time before – as D.H. Lawrence might have put it as he did the Etruscans – the Romans crushed the breath or spark of life out of it
First of all, all these names — which are mostly ‘Maccabean,’ primarily demonstrating the popularity of the Maccabean family in Israel at the time and not what our intrepid ‘archaeologists’ seem to think they demonstrate — found in the ‘Jesus Burial Cave’ on the outskirts of Jerusalem (as many have now already said) were so widespread at the time that finding a family tomb with ossuaries inscribed with them proves nothing at all.

But even more to the point:

1) To think that an inscription seemingly bearing the name of one ‘Mariamne’ has anything whatever to do with some character we think was called ‘Mary Magdalene’ (only mentioned about three times in the Gospels and this cursorily or in passing) is a stretch of immense proportions. All ‘Mary’s in Josephus are called ‘Mariamne’ in Greek. First disinformation. And what of this ‘Mary’s other descendant all Gnostic Gospel enthusiasts and those wishing for the eternal feminine (to say nothing of ‘the bloodline of the Holy Grail’ ) fantasize over, ‘Sarah’?

2) Then, of course, ‘Jesus’ father (if he existed or there was one) probably wasn’t even called ‘Joseph’ ( really the patronymical tribal name of the Samaritan Messiah). Most contemporary texts give Jesus’ father or Mary’s husband as ‘Clopas’ or ‘Cleophas’. Even the Gospel of John does this, unless this was her second husband or there were two ‘Mary’s or three!

3) And what was ‘Matthew’ (diminutive or otherwise) doing in this tomb – a ‘statistical’ outlier, no? And ‘Mary’s DNA didn’t match ‘Jesus’, so they were married, right?

4) And ‘Jose’ was Jesus’ brother, right? Why not father – meaning, the one mentioned on the alleged ‘Jesus ossuary’? And what is Jose’s DNA, since we seem to have ‘Jesus’ and ‘Mary’s, or weren’t we able to get a sample?

5) And who is this mysterious ‘Judas’? Of course, ‘Mary’s child’ by ‘Jesus’ – why didn’t I think of that? Again, another ‘statistical outlier’. And what were the results of his DNA if they were taken? Did we get a fix on this? Who was his mother?

6) Oh yes, and I forgot, ‘the James ossuary’ was pilfered from here. Why of course. How sensible. And therefore, it wasn’t forged (or was it from the Antiquities Authority’s storeroom) – again, why didn’t I think of that?

‘Though I am no statistician’ (sic – as they say), I would say that the statistical probability of this kind of primeval stupidity is about 666,000 to one.

Still, let’s not take one’s eye off the ball – the fact of a cave with such beautiful ossuaries is interesting in itself and should be examined for and by itself and not just sealed or stored somewhere out of sight. Hoorah, that it will now become part of the tourist itinerary. One plus from this sorry charade and display of historical ignorance anyhow! How beautiful and comely was thy daughter, O Children of Zion.