Either that or Jesus made a big mistake.
And it increasingly appears that he did not.
Was Jesus’s prediction meant to apply to the current events at the time it was written instead of the current events of our time? Could the bloody campaign of a future Roman emperor have been the fulfillment, and the explanation, of Jesus Christ’s prophecy?
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself is accused of threatening to destroy the Temple:
Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “So! You who are going to destroy the Temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!” (2)
This is yet another reason why references to Vespasian as the messiah of Jewish prophesy—even by Jewish priestly figures such as Josephus and the rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai—are so striking. The Flavian father and his son were “messiahs” who did destroy the Temple in a “glorious” triumph. They did rise in Judea to rule the world exactly when Jesus predicted his return.
Model of the Jerusalem Temple in the 1st Century at the Israel Museum
Allegedly predicted some 40 years before the event, though written down only afterwards, Christ’s prophecy of the Temple’s destruction would certainly be miraculous if true, even though predicting the rebellion, and the Jews’ defeat at the hands of the Roman military machine, might have been possible for a truly foresighted individual in Christ’s time. Even then, events were pointing, at least, in that inevitable direction.
But there is a problem. Jesus describes the war with details so remarkably similar to Flavius Josephus’s contemporaneous historical account—including the appearance of “false messiahs” and a portentous vision of a battle seen in the clouds before the siege—that one must conclude that Jesus’s prophecy was probably composed after the event with the benefit of hindsight, unless Jesus had genuinely divine foresight of this event and his words were simply not written down until 40 years later, by pure coincidence, when Josephus was writing his historical account.
For these obvious reasons, most scholars point to Jesus’s prophecy as the primary evidence (though by no means the only evidence) that the Gospels must have been written after (or perhaps even during) the Jewish War, since the actual events as recorded by historians mirror what Jesus predicted in such precise factual and literary detail.
In either case, through his prophecy Jesus is put on record as warning Jews in the 1st Century against rebelling from Rome. His divine proscription against war is not only consistent with his own teachings concerning peace, obedience to Roman authority, paying taxes, and even his extravagant praise of a Roman centurion, it is also consistent with the teachings of the earliest contributor to the New Testament itself, St. Paul. We have already noted that Christ’s rejection of the Jewish purity laws that alienated the Jewish population from the wider Hellenistic world, along with his rejection of key aspects of the Mosaic Law, are perfectly consistent with Paul’s rejection of the Kosher lifestyle.
Notably, Jesus predicts a total Jewish defeat—one that will entail the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. And yet, paradoxically, he proposes that this military catastrophe will signal the Glorious Second Coming of the Son of Man. Simultaneously, Jesus identifies the leaders of the coming Jewish rebellion as “false messiahs.”
The historian Flavius Josephus’s description of the cultural ferment before the war dovetails with Jesus’s predictions that these “false messiahs” were to blame for leading Jews astray. Josephus’s own writings suggest that these Jewish rebel leaders presented themselves as the prophesied messiah, and he describes how they lead their people to disaster. Knowing they were written concurrently, one must wonder whether Josephus’s history is supporting Jesus’s prophecy or Jesus’s prophecy is supporting Josephus’s history.
Most Jews would naturally see these rebel leaders as far more credible Jewish messiahs than the Jesus of the Gospels. What a Jewish “messiah” meant to Jews at the time was a warrior and a champion, something completely different from the Jesus depicted in the Gospels. Jews anticipated the arrival of a military leader, like Joshua (Yeshu’a, itself meaning “God saves,” rendered via the Greek as “Jesus”). They were awaiting a new King, like David, or a rebel priest, like Judas Maccabeus—in other words, a perfectly human and never a divine political leader who would lead them to military victory and national and cultural independence. This did not preclude divine assistance, but it certainly precluded the messiah himself being divine.
Here is how the Flavians’ court historian, Flavius Josephus, describes one of the “false messiahs” who inspired Jews to rebel against Rome:
It came to pass, while Cuspius Fadus was [Roman] procurator of Judea, that a certain charlatan, whose name was Theudas, persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with them, and follow him to the Jordan River: for he told them he was a prophet, and that he would, by his own command, divide the river, and afford them an easy passage over it. Many were deluded by his words. However, Fadus did not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt, but sent a troop of horsemen out against them. After falling upon them unexpectedly, they slew many of them, and took many of them alive. They also took Theudas alive, cut off his head, and carried it to Jerusalem. (3)
Parting the Jordan River would mirror the miracle performed when the original Joshua/Jesus led the Israelites across that river to the Promised Land. (4)
False though these messiahs Josephus mentions invariably turn out to be, each leading the Jewish people to apocalypse at the hands of the Romans, they at least fulfilled the expectations of monotheistic Jews that are so vividly expressed in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Josephus, the Jewish priest, general and scholar who became the Flavian court historian after he was captured by the Romans, confirms that the main motivations for Jews to revolt against Rome were the same messianic prophecies that led to their ruin. Exactly as Jesus warned.
We will take a much closer look at Flavius Josephus, and at the astonishing cast of characters who link the Flavians to Christianity, in Part II.
There is no reason in Jewish prophecy for the messiah to be a healer god, much less a god, at all.
Quite the reverse: in the first place, messianic Jews were expecting a warrior; in the second, such a man-god is blasphemous to very concept of monotheism.
For some time, Christians also wrestled with the polytheistic implications of Jesus’s divinity. The “solution” they ultimately came up with, the Trinity, is just another paradoxical “mystery” that has been inherited by the faith.
There was no reason for the Jewish people to have expected a divine man, a kind of demigod, in any of their messiahs. It was a pagan idea. They had already experienced a number of messiahs—and they had rigid religious reasons to strenuously deny the very possibility of their divinity. As one might expect, the early Jewish response to Pauline Christianity was to parody the Gospel narratives, especially accounts of Jesus’s virgin birth, healing miracles, and the claims of Jesus’s divinity. (5)
According to the Christian Gospels, the messiah who actually came was a surprise to his contemporary Jews. He was neither a military nor a political leader of any kind, but a humble peace lover and an advocate not of Jewish exceptionalism (almost the entire job description of the messiah up to that point) but a proponent of transnationalism. Indeed, he was a passionate ambassador of the same universal peace desired by the Roman Empire.