Vespasian’s miracles turn out to be: exactly the same healing miracles performed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels.
Jesus is said to have cured a man with a diseased or withered hand. (25) And in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is said to have cured a blind man by spitting into his eyes. Just like Vespasian.
In the Roman historian Suetonius’s account of Vespasian’s healings at Alexandria, Vespasian cures a lame man by touching him with his heel and cures a blind man by spitting into his eyes. (26) In this slightly different account, Vespasian is still shown performing miracles identical to those of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, which were—again—written during the Flavians’ reign.
Ruins of the Serapeum at Alexandria where Vespasian performed his healing miracles
Vespasian biographer Barbara Levick denies that he was a “cynical” manipulator of religion and was, perhaps, just a victim of the flattery of others (27). However, this is obviously contradicted by the facts.
For example, when Vespasian captured the priest and rebel general, Josephus, during the Jewish War we are told that his Jewish captive predicted he would become emperor. Josephus records that he declared this to Vespasian himself while Nero was still alive. As Levick concedes, this isn’t credible. The Roman general would have surely executed the man on the spot for saying such a thing if only to protect himself from being associated with such a dangerous lunatic. (28)
However, if this was a lie concocted later, as it must have been, then Vespasian was a party to that lie. After all, by then Josephus had become, in effect, the Flavians’ own court historian, in which capacity he unblinkingly recorded this tale.
And, of course, Vespasian himself had to have been aware of the true nature of his own “miraculous” healings. He could not have taken the chance of failing at the temple of Serapis. So he must have been pre-assured of success, which required a considerable degree of religious and political cynicism.
According to Mark’s Gospel (29), Jesus cured a blind man by spitting into his eyes and healed a crippled man by laying his hands upon him. In the Gospel of John (30), Jesus cured a blind man by mixing his spittle with some earth and applying it to the blind man’s eyes. Both the saliva of Jesus and the saliva of Vespasian are reported to have cured the blind. Likewise, the touch of both are said to have restored the lame. And both Jesus and Vespasian were regarded as Jewish messiahs by their respective devotees.
According to Flavius Josephus, Vespasian was the Jewish Messiah:
But now, what did the most elevate them [the Jews] in undertaking this war, was an ambiguous oracle that was also found in their sacred writings, how about that time, one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth. The Jews took this prediction to belong to themselves in particular, and many of the wise men were thereby deceived in their determination. Now this oracle certainly denoted the government of Vespasian, who was appointed emperor in Judea. However, it is not possible for men to avoid fate, although they see it beforehand. But these men interpreted some of these signals according to their own pleasure, and some of them they utterly despised, until their madness was demonstrated, both by the taking of their city and their own destruction. (Emphasis added.) (31)
The 2nd Century Roman historian Suetonius agreed completely (32), as does his contemporary, Tacitus, who wrote:
The majority [of the Jews] were convinced that the ancient scriptures of their priests alluded to the present as the very time when the Orient would triumph and from Judaea would go forth men destined to rule the world. This mysterious prophecy really referred to Vespasian and Titus, but the common people, true to the selfish ambitions of mankind, thought that this exalted destiny was reserved for them, and not even their calamities opened their eyes to the truth. (Emphasis added.) (33)
Jewish prophecies of a coming messiah were a fundamental motivation behind the Jewish revolt. And yet, as it turned out, the Emperor Vespasian (along with his son Titus) fulfilled the messianic prophecy of the “Christ” predicted by Hebrew scripture, according to both contemporary Roman and Jewish sources. Even the Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, a father of modern Rabbinic Judaism, declared at the time that Vespasian was the messiah of Hebrew prophecy, according to the Talmud. (34) It is doubtful that the famous rabbi was sincere and this is likely to have been required of him by the Roman state. However, like Jesus, Vespasian could claim both Gentiles and Jews among those who, at least formally, believed he was the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy.
For his part, the Jewish historian Josephus finds the idea of the “Messiah” to be both the cause and the cure of the Jewish revolt. Like Christianity, he, too, converts the politically explosive concept of the Messiah into a pro-Roman one—in his case by simply naming Vespasian himself the Messiah.
Because they were reported by both Tacitus and Suetonius, we know that Vespasian’s healing miracles at Alexandria were a propaganda coup for the Flavian imperial cult. Their coins inform us that both Vespasian and his son Titus celebrated Serapis and associated themselves with that deity. Here is an example with Titus on one side and the bearded god Serapis on the other:
Titus and Serapis
Many students of ancient history have observed the numerous elements of Christianity that are apparently pagan in origin, but the wider questions that this observation implies have largely gone unanswered: why were those elements introduced, at all? And more: how could those pagan elements—especially the idea of worshipping a man-god born of a mortal—be interwoven into a religion born of a fiercely monotheistic faith?
In light of the purity laws Jews then practiced—whether at the Temple or within groups like the Qumran sectarians or the suicidally violent rebels of the 1st and 2nd Centuries—how could a pious sect of Jews so modify their faith as to centrally feature the worship of a man who had walked the earth in the flesh?
Jews were willing to fight the mighty Roman war machine, and to die and be tortured in vast numbers, precisely in order to protect their strictly monotheistic tradition from foreign “pollution” and the blasphemy of emperor worship. At such a time—when so many were willing to commit mass suicide rather than submit to foreign domination—we are hard-pressed to explain how a form of Judaism could actually blend the most objectionable elements of the paganism they were fighting into the very heart of its identity—the worship of a man-god who had suffered, died and was resurrected during his earthly life like a pagan suffering savior god. And add to that the religious use of graven images, forbidden representations of the divine, a form of “idol worship” that even quoted the pagan symbols of a Roman emperor.
While Pauline Christians in the 1st Century rejected Kosher dietary restrictions, circumcision and the like, the most revolutionary aspects of their “Christianity” are the identification of the Messiah with God himself and the use of divine symbols as early as the first decades of the 2nd Century. And the symbols they were using were far more than abstract personifications of divine features like “Wisdom,” something already underway within Jewish thought—this was the worship and depiction of a man as God.