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

Jesus had deliberately chosen his path. And he had been recognized as the king of the Line of David by the crowds of Jerusalem. The die was cast. Or so it seemed.

This deliberate acting out of Old Testament prophecy and its implications were discussed by Hugh Schonfield in his book The Passover Plot , which was first published in 1965; reissued many times since, it sold over six million copies in eighteen languages. 23 It was a best-seller by anybody’s standards, and yet is today almost forgotten. Recent books do not even mention Schonfield’s work.

The matters he raised are certainly controversial but important; the custodians of the orthodox story are constantly trying to keep these alternative ideas out lest they shake the paradigm, lest they cause us to change our attitude toward the Gospels, the figure of Jesus, and the history of the times. Such lessons as Schonfield’s need to be repeated, generation after generation, until eventually they are supported by a weight of data so substantial that the paradigm has no alternative but to flip, causing us to approach our history from a very different perspective.

So many factors in Jesus’s life—the Zealot revolt, his birth to parents who were descendants of the Line of David and the Line of Aaron, respectively, the Zealot members of his immediate entourage, his deliberate entry into Jerusalem as king—should certainly have ensured Jesus’s place in history as the leader of the Jewish nation. But they didn’t. So what went wrong?

Simply put, the Zealot cause failed, utterly and disastrously. It was probably inevitable since, at its heart, it opposed the domination of the Romans, who were the greatest military power the Mediterranean world knew at the time. Although the natural course of the Zealot movement led it to oppose this domination openly and with all the force it could muster, it could never have won. That much was clear to all who looked even a little ahead.

It was evident that there were more Romans than Jews, and Roman power was centered upon an army of disciplined and well-trained professional soldiers who were not averse to feats of creative brutality if the situation demanded it—or if the soldier at hand just happened to feel like it. All this force was backed up by a widespread and formidable command of logistics supported by wellmaintained roads and ships, all of which were integrated into a structure that ensured troops and supplies were delivered in strength and on time.

Since the open emergence of the Zealot opposition in A.D. 6, a series of rulers—Roman governors and Jewish high priests alike—had managed, one way or another, to keep a kind of stability in Judaea.

JUDAEA, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY

THE FIRST CENTURY

Both sides needed peace and the wealth that arose from it—conflict never plants seeds or grows crops, and idle land never produces food or money for the farmers, nor taxes for the rulers—and Rome relied upon Judaea for the forty talents it produced each year for the Roman treasury (the approximate equivalent of 3,750 pounds of silver). 1 Through careful political husbandry, this unstable balance had lasted for half of the century. And then suddenly it all fell to pieces.

A group of anti-Roman priests in the Temple in Jerusalem decided to stop non-Jews from giving offerings. This cessation of the customary daily sacrifices performed for Caesar and for Rome in the Temple was a direct and abrupt challenge to the emperor. There was no turning back. The Zealots and the anti-Roman priests had led their people across the threshold of the doorway to hell. As Josephus reports, war against Rome was inevitable because of this act. The Zealots, in their misplaced ambition, thought that they would recover control of their nation, but so great was their loss that all such hope was to vanish for nearly two thousand years.