CHAPTER 3

The Son of Mary Who Was a Passover Sacrifice

To understand the parallels between Jesus' ministry and Titus' campaign it was necessary to make a series of discoveries, each new insight providing the capacity to make the next. This process began when I came across the following passage in War of the Jews and concluded that the parallels between the "son of Mary" described in it and the "son of Mary" in the Gospels were too precise to have been the product of circumstance. 

While readers can judge this claim for themselves, it should be noted that Josephus wrote during an age in which allegory was regarded as a science. Educated readers were expected to be able to understand another meaning within religious and historical literature. The Apostle Paul, for example, stated that passages from the Hebrew Scriptures were allegories that looked forward to Christ's birth. I believe that in the following passage Josephus is using allegory to reveal something else about Jesus. 

The passage begins with Josephus speaking in the first person. He describes the difficulty he is having in writing about an exceptionally grisly event caused by the famine that occurred during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. 

But why do I describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates? It is horrible to speak of it, and incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I might not seem to deliver what is so portentous to posterity, but that I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age . . 47 

He then describes the event: 

There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary; her father was Eleazar, of the village Bethezob, which signifies the house of Hyssop. She was eminent for her family and her wealth, and had fled away to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude, and was with them besieged therein at this time. The other effects of this woman had been already seized upon, such I mean as she had brought with her out of Perea, and removed to the city. What she had treasured up besides, as also what food she had contrived to save, had been also carried off by the rapacious guards, who came every day running into her house for that purpose. This put the poor woman into a very great passion, and by the frequent reproaches and imprecations she cast at these rapacious villains, she had provoked them to anger against her; but none of them, either out of the indignation she had raised against herself, or out of commiseration of her case, would take away her life; and if she found any food, she perceived her labors were for others, and not for herself; and it was now become impossible for her any way to find any more food, while the famine pierced through her very bowels and marrow, when also her passion was fired to a degree beyond the famine itself; nor did she consult with any thing but with her passion and the necessity she was in. She then attempted a most unnatural thing; and snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, "O thou miserable infant! for whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and this sedition? As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our lives, we must be slaves. This famine also will destroy us, even before that slavery comes upon us. Yet are these seditious rogues more terrible than both the other. Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets, and a by-word to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews.

As soon as she had said this, she slew her son, and then roasted him, and ate the one half of him, and kept the other half by her concealed. Upon this the seditious came in presently, and smelling the horrid scent of this food, they threatened her that they would cut her throat immediately if she did not show them what food she had gotten ready. She replied that she had saved a very fine portion of it for them, and withal uncovered what was left of her son. Hereupon they were seized with a horror and amazement of mind, and stood astonished at the sight, when she said to them, 

"This is mine own son, and what hath been done was mine own doing! Come, eat of this food; for I have eaten of it myself! Do not you pretend to be either more tender than a woman, or more compassionate than a mother; but if you be so scrupulous, and do abominate this my sacrifice, as I have eaten the one half, let the rest be reserved for me also." 

After which those men went out trembling, being never so much afrighted at any thing as they were at this, and with some difficulty they left the rest of that meat to the mother. 48 

I would first note that while the passage may have been based on an actual event, Josephus seems to have invented the dialogue. There are no witnesses to the speech Mary gives before she kills her son. It is, of course, unlikely that a mother would have slain and eaten her son in the presence of others. Josephus wrote this as a historical account, yet as if he was writing a New Testament passage - as if his account was divinely sanctioned, so much so that he knew the exact words she spoke. He could have just stated the truth - that famine raged in the land, and some Jews resorted to eating their children.

To see the satire that lies within this passage one must first understand the phrase "Bethezob, which signifies the House of Hyssop." 

Beth is the Hebrew word for "house" and Ezob is the Hebrew word for "hyssop," hyssop being the plant that Moses commanded the Israelites to use when marking their houses with the blood of the sacrificed Passover lamb. This mark identified the houses that the Angel of Death would "pass over." 

Then Moses called on the elders of Israel and said to them, Pick out and take lambs for yourselves according to your families, and kill the Passover lamb. And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin . . . 49

The phrase House of Hyssop, therefore, brings to mind the first Passover sacrifice. Another statement in this passage can also be seen as relating to the Passover sacrifice. After slaying her son, the woman roasts the body. In God's instructions to Moses as to how to prepare the Passover sacrifice, God ordered the following: "Do not eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted in fire — its head with its legs and its entrails." 50 

Thus, in the passage from War of the Jews we are analyzing, Mary's son can be seen as a symbolic Passover lamb. This is the same method used by the author of the New Testament, who also denoted the symbolic Passover lamb by combining a reference to hyssop with an instruction to Moses about preparing the Passover lamb — that not one of its bones be broken. 

Now a vessel full of sour wine was sitting there; and they filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on hyssop and put it to his mouth. So when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, "It is finished!" And bowing his head, He gave up his spirit.  Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw him already dead, they did not break His legs.

John 19 

Identifying Jesus with the symbolic Passover lamb at his crucifixion continued a theme begun at the Passover supper where Jesus asked the disciples to eat of his flesh. 

Also during the meal He took a Passover biscuit, blessed it, and broke it. He then gave it to them, saying, Take this, it is my body.

Mark 14:22-27 

There is, then, a parallel between the New Testament's son of Mary who asks that his body be eaten and the son of Mary Josephus described, who actually has his flesh eaten. 

Josephus connects the Mary described in his passage to the Mary in the New Testament with another of the details he records.

He describes the famine — as Winston translates it above — as having "pierced through Mary's very bowels." In the New Testament, being pierced through is predicted for only one person, Jesus' mother Mary: 

Then Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary His mother, Behold this child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which will be spoken against (yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also; that the reasonings in many hearts may be revealed.") 

Luke 2:35 

The fact that the New Testament's Mary and the Mary in War of the Jews both had their heart pierced has, to my knowledge, never been noticed by another scholar. The reason for the oversight is important. Scholars have not noticed the parallel between the two Marys because it is more conceptual than linguistic. In the New Testament the Greek words making up the phase are dierchomai psuche while in War of the Jews they are dia splanchon. Though the words that indicate the piercing through, dia 51 and dierchomai, are linguistically related (the verb dierchomai having the preposition dia as part of its stem), the words used to describe the part of Mary that was to be pierced through — psuche and splanchon — are different. 

Psuche, 53 the word translated in the New Testament above as "soul," can also mean "heart," or "the seat of emotions." Splanchon, the Greek word that Josephus uses to describe the part of Mary that was pierced through, is translated above as "bowels," but is in fact a synonym for psuche, and can mean either "inward parts," especially the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys, or, like psuche, it can mean "the seat of the emotions." Scholars have not seen this conceptual parallel between the two Marys simply because it was created using different words, even though the words mean the same thing. 

In other words, if a prophet predicted that "next week a dog will bite a mailman" and a historian recorded that during that week "a cur sank its teeth into a letter carrier" the prophecy, in fact, came to pass even though the prophet and the historian used different words to describe the event. The concept the prophet predicted was the same as the one the historian recorded.

The "fulfilled prophecy" of the "bitten postman" cannot be seen through an analysis of the individual words that the historian and the prophet used. Likewise, the satirical system that exists between the New Testament and War of the Jews cannot be seen by analyzing their individual words and nuances of grammar. The system is made up of parallel concepts, not parallel words. 

Notice also that the parallel "heart piercings" of the two Marys are prophetically logical. This is to say that the Mary in the New Testament is the one predicted to have her heart "pierced through" in the future and the Mary in War of the Jews, which occurred later, is the one who fulfilled this prophecy. If the New Testament had stated that Mary's heart had been pierced through, then the logic of this prophecy would have been contradicted. And notice also that the statement in the New Testament, though innocuous, is a prophecy. One reason that the comic level of the New Testament has remained unseen is because scholars have failed to recognize the many seemingly innocuous New Testament prophecies that are fulfilled within War of the Jews. 

Josephus has, thus, described a Mary who fulfilled the prophecy made for the Mary in the New Testament, in that she was "pierced through the heart." As this Mary is of the "House of Hyssop" and her son is a "sacrifice" who was "roasted" and his flesh was eaten, he can certainly be likened to a human Passover lamb, like the one established in the New Testament. Josephus' use of the word "splanchon" also builds on this theme — "splanchon" being the Greek word that was used to describe those parts of a sacrificed animal reserved to be eaten by sacrificers at the beginning of their feast. Yet another detail recorded by Josephus also links this passage to the New Testament. Josephus gives the name of Mary's father as Eleazar, which in Greek is Lazarus, the name of the individual whom Jesus raised from the dead.  Lazarus is an aspect of Zechariah.

To summarize, within this short passage Josephus has used a number of concepts and names that are parallel to those associated with the New Testament's symbolic Passover lamb. These are a mother named Mary; the fact that this Mary was pierced through the heart; a son of Mary; hyssop; a son who is a sacrifice; a son whose flesh is eaten; a son who is to become a "byword to the world," one of Moses' instructions regarding the Passover lamb; an individual named Lazarus (Eleazar); and Jerusalem as the location of the incident. It is unlikely that there is another passage in all of literature that contains, by chance, as many as half the number of parallels with a concept as singular as Christianity's Passover lamb. When I first recognized these parallels I felt that the simplest explanation for such an improbable grouping was that it had been deliberately created and that, therefore, the passage was a lampoon of Jesus. Why would Josephus mock the exact faith that he and his adopted family was creating a cult regarding?

To argue against this proposition one must accept this idea that Josephus unknowingly recorded these parallels in such detail within a passage of less than two pages. However, because Josephus wrote War of the Jews while living in the Flavian court, a place where Christianity flourished, and was one of the few historians to have recorded Jesus' existence, he would seem to be among the authors least likely to have recorded a satire of Christ accidentally. 

For example, if the passage in question had occurred within a work by Tolstoy, there would be virtually complete agreement that it was a deliberate satire. And notice that when viewed from such a perspective the passage would certainly be seen as comical, the irony being self-evident of a Messiah who instructs his followers to symbolically "eat of my flesh" actually having his flesh eaten by his mother. 

I shall show in a later chapter that Josephus' passage shares yet another parallel with the life of Jesus, that of "Mary's fine portion that was not taken away from her" — a parallel that when seen in combination with those noted above puts the proposition that Josephus was intentionally satirizing Jesus beyond doubt. 

If Josephus was lampooning Jesus, what was his purpose? An obvious explanation is that he wrote the passage to amuse a group on whom the joke would not be lost: he would have created it to be enjoyed by the Flavians and their inner circle. 

This conclusion is especially plausible in light of the fact that there were individuals within the Flavian court who were aware of Christianity around the time Josephus published War of the Jews. Further, there were four colleges in Rome that were responsible for overseeing the religions within the empire. Because religion was an important tool of the state, these colleges had considerable political power. From Augustus on, the emperor was a member of all four colleges, one of which, the Quindecimviri Sacris Faciundis, was responsible for the regulation of foreign cults in Rome. All the Flavian emperors were members of this college and would have categorized Christianity as a foreign cult during this era. 

Moreover, the most obvious reason to believe that there were Flavians familiar with Christianity is that so much of the New Testament is related to the family. The Flavians brought about the fulfillment of all of Jesus' doomsday prophecies - the destruction of the temple, the encircling of Jerusalem with a wall, the towns of Galilee being brought low, and the destruction of what Jesus describes as the "wicked generation." Titus' mistress, Bernice, and Tiberius Alexander, his chief of staff during the siege of Jerusalem, are actually named within the New Testament. A cult whose canon prophesied the accomplishments of the Flavians, named individuals within its inner circle, and actually had converts within the imperial family would certainly have been scrutinized during an era when the regulation of religion was so important that the emperor himself was involved with it. 

Titus is known to have reviewed War of the Jews. As noted above, Josephus wrote that Titus so wished that "the knowledge of these affairs should be taken from these books alone, that he affixed his own signature to them." Thus, Titus certainly had read the passage describing the Mary who ate her son and, considering the traditions connecting his family to Christianity, could well have understood its ironic parallels with the mother of Jesus. Again, though Jesus seems to be speaking symbolically when he speaks of having his flesh eaten as a Passover sacrifice, in Josephus' history we see a literal interpretation of Jesus' words, which renders them blackly comic. 

If the passage is a satire of Jesus, a number of statements Josephus makes within it can be seen as double entendres. The reader need only read these statements from the perspective that the Flavians had invented Christianity and their satirical meaning will become obvious. Some of these are found in Josephus' narration:

The Son of Mary Who Was a Passover Sacrifice

It is horrible to speak of it, and incredible when heard . . . 

While I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relate . . . 

I might not seem to deliver what is so portentous to posterity . . . 

I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age . . . 

But the most important play on words is found within Mary's address to her "miserable child," wherein she states 

"... be thou a fury to these seditious varlets and a byword to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews." 

As I have suggested, this quote seems to have been invented by Josephus. Not only were there no witnesses to hear them, but they
are, on their face, dubious. Would a mother who has eaten her son really wish him to become a byword to the world? Further, taken literally, Mary's words seem incoherent. Why would her child become a "fury" to the "varlets" - that is, the Jewish rebels against Rome - by being cannibalized? And why would this "complete the calamities of us Jews"? 

Within the context of a lampoon of Jesus the meaning of the phrase becomes clear. The author is not merely ridiculing Christ. He is stating that Jesus will "complete the calamity" of the Jews by becoming a byword to the world and that the spread of Christianity will "complete" the destruction of the Jews. 

This interpretation indicates that Christianity was designed to promote anti-Semitism — a concept that is at least plausible, historically. A cult that produced anti-Semitism would have both helped Rome prevent the messianic Jews from spreading their rebellion and punished them by poisoning their future. 

The New Testament has numerous passages that seem deliberately intended to cause Christians to hate Jews. Though Christian apologists have attempted to explain away such passages, there are clear examples of this technique throughout the New Testament.

The most famous occurs in the Gospel of Matthew, in which Pilate, after having "washed his hands of the blood of this just person" tells
the Jews that they, not the Roman authorities, must be the ones responsible for crucifying Christ. The Jews responded thus: 

... all the people answered and said, "His blood will be on us and on our children."  

Some scholars have speculated that later Christian redactors inserted the anti-Semitism passages into the New Testament out of hatred for the people who had crucified their savior. My interpretation of the passage above suggests the opposite. The New Testament was designed to promote anti-Semitism. 

If Christianity had been created by the Flavians to "complete the calamities" of the Jews, why had the religion's inventors created a Messiah who was a symbolic Passover lamb? The symbolism of John 19 and the passage from Josephus we have been analyzing, which set up the symbolic Passover lambs, both stem from Exodus 12, where God tells Moses and Aaron how to observe the Passover  "throughout their generations": 

This is the ordinance of Passover: no foreigner shall eat it. But every man's servant who is bought for money, and when you have circumcised him, then he may eat it. In one house it shall be eaten; you shall not carry any of the flesh outside the house, nor shall you break one of its bones. All the congregation of Israel shall keep it. 

And when a stranger dwells with you and wants to keep the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised and let him come near and keep it; and he shall be a native of the land. For no uncircumcised person shall eat it. 

The above passage may have provided one of the motives behind the decision to establish a Messiah whose flesh may be eaten by all humanity. God's instruction to Moses regarding how only the circumcised, the Jews, may eat of the Passover lamb is one social marker of the religious separateness of the Jewish people. 

Judaism's requirement of religious separatism was one of the causes of the war with the Romans. By creating a Passover lamb for all mankind, the New Testament was clearly, on one level, ending the religious separatism that made it impossible for Judaism to be  absorbed into the Roman Empire. However, another passage within War of the Jews may reveal a more comic inspiration for  Christianity's human Passover lamb. 

As the number that perished during this whole siege, eleven hundred thousand, the greater part of whom were indeed of the same nation, [with the citizens of Jerusalem], but not belonging to the city itself; for they were come up from all the country for the feast of the unleavened bread. And were on a sudden shut up by an army, which at the very first, occasioned so great a straitness among them that there came a pestilential destruction upon them, and soon afterward such a famine as destroyed them more suddenly.  

Thus, the Romans were aware that they had besieged Jerusalem at a time when Passover celebrants had swollen its population. As  starvation set in, these Passover celebrants, like the Mary described by Josephus, engaged in cannibalism. The Roman historian  Suetonius, writing in the third century, also recorded that there was cannibalism during the siege of Jerusalem. 

The Jews, meanwhile, being closely besieged, as no chance either of peace or surrender was allowed them, were at length perishing from famine, and the streets began everywhere to be filled with dead bodies, for the duty of burying them could no longer be performed. Moreover, they ventured on eating all things of the most abominable nature, and did not even abstain from human bodies, except those which putrefaction had already laid hold of and thus excluded from use as food. 

The cannibalism that occurred during the siege of Jerusalem is, therefore, a candidate as the inspiration behind Christianity's "flesh  eating" innovation. This premise is especially plausible in light of the fact that so much of Jesus' ministry involved prophecy, and these
prophecies all seemed to have come to pass within War of the Jews. In other words, the New Testament's "son of Mary" telling his disciples that they must "eat of my flesh" would simply have been another prophecy Josephus recorded as having come to pass. 

If the Romans did create the New Testament, they invented the darkly comic narrative about a human Passover lamb to satirize the grim "feast" of the starving Passover celebrants who were trapped inside Jerusalem. Josephus' story concerning the "starving Mary" and the sacrament of communion are both reflections of this comic theme. 

Though the strange fact that Jesus' flesh was the basis for the sacrament is not often noted today, this may not have been the case during Christianity's first centuries. Eusebius recorded that early Christians had to defend themselves against charges of infanticide and cannibalism: 

. . . she contradicted the blasphemers. "How," she said, "could those eat children who do not think it lawful to taste the blood even of irrational animals?" And thenceforward she confessed herself a Christian. 56 

Members of the Flavian court could have understood the passage from Josephus as black comedy because such individuals would have seen irony in Jesus telling his followers, particularly at Jerusalem, where Jews resorted to cannibalism, that "the bread that 1 give is my flesh." From the Flavian perspective, the comedy is self-evident. 

The short chapter in War of the Jews that contains the "son of Mary" passage concludes with Titus, having been told the story of the mother who ate her son's flesh, delivering a sermon on the meaning of the sordid affair. 

But for Caesar, he excused himself before God as to this matter, and said that he had proposed peace and liberty to the Jews, as well as an oblivion of all their former insolent practices; but that they, instead of concord, had chosen sedition; instead of peace, war; and before satiety and abundance, a famine. That they had begun with their own hands to burn down that temple which we have preserved hitherto; and that therefore they deserved to eat such food as this was. That, however, this horrid action of eating an own child ought to be covered with the overthrow of their very country itself, and men ought not to leave such a city upon the habitable earth to be seen by the sun, wherein mothers are thus fed, although such food be fitter for the fathers than for the mothers to eat of, since it is they that continue still in a state of war against us, after they have undergone such miseries as these. And at the same time that he said this, he reflected on the desperate condition these men must be in; nor could he expect that such men could be recovered to sobriety of mind, after they had endured those very sufferings, for the avoiding whereof it only was probable they might have repented. 57 

Titus' use of the word "repent" here is interesting. "Repent" is, of course, one of the key words of Jesus' ministry and Caesar's usage of it brings the parallels even tighter. Jesus states repeatedly, "Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand," but exactly what sin does he wish the Jews to repent of? Jesus never gives an answer to this question. However, if my interpretation of the lampoon is correct, the sin of which Jesus wishes the Jews to repent becomes obvious. It is their rebellion against Rome.

• Chapter 4: The Demons of Gadara