After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (Emphasis added.) (54)
Notice how closely this Old Testament prophecy coincides with the account of Jesus’s life in the Gospels—especially the stories of his trial and execution. So closely, in fact, that most scholars now acknowledge that Isaiah was a primary source for the Gospels’ narrative about Jesus.
There can be no doubt that many contemporary Jews also believed that some form of human sacrifice was also required to achieve the expiation and purification required for the People of Israel to be worthy of the Messianic Advent, and martyred figures such as John the Baptist and James the Just may have been seen by rebellious Jews in just this way.
In order to flesh out the biography of Jesus, therefore, Gospel authors liberally mined ancient Hebrew scripture as a source of material about the life of Jesus rather than simply relating recent history. One might reasonably be entitled to ask why, if Jesus existed, did they feel free to do this?
Even if a historical Jesus really existed, so little was known about him at the end of the 1st Century that the authors of the Gospels have creatively inserted material that was centuries older in order to accomplish their theological purposes and flesh out the biography of Jesus.
How this happened, and exactly who might have employed such tactics to compose the New Testament, will be addressed in Part II.
Isaiah’s prophecy may have shaped the story of Jesus, but there remain important differences between Isaiah’s so-called “Suffering Servant” story and the story of Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus did not “prolong his days” nor did he “see his offspring,” for example, like Isaiah’s martyr. Most importantly, Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” is not a messiah.
Nevertheless, the one whose coming is predicted in Isaiah’s passage would certainly be a convenient reference for writers who wished to use Jewish texts in a propaganda war, especially one whose casus belli was the Jewish religion. Notice how Isaiah is predicting a generation of Jews who have gone astray—and who need redemption. He goes on to mention a messianic precursor who will be rejected by Jews. He will be peaceful, and he will be misunderstood by Jews and even despised by them. He will be martyred, as a result. Never mind that Isaiah does not predict that he will be a healer, his poetry is still an elegant foreshadowing of Jesus that compliments the pagan idea of a healer God: “by his wounds we are healed.” (55)
Again, neither this “Suffering Servant” nor the prophecy of the messiah whose glorious coming and world rule was also predicted by Isaiah suggest the arrival of a pagan man-god, healer god, or mystery cult god. Yet such a prophecy of a sacrificial precursor to the conquering messiah could quite easily be seen as convenient to Roman emperors who had just conquered Judea in a holy war. The Jewish messiah of prophecy is converted by Paul and the Gospel authors into a “suffering” mystery cult savior modeled after healer gods like Aesclepius and Serapis while retaining parts of Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” as a premonition of the Flavians. It is hard to imagine what could have accommodated the Romans more in their conflict with fundamentalist Jews than the kind of cultural syncretism exhibited in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ depicted as a Roman Emperor, c. 500 CE, Ravenna, Italy
The New Testament does not present an anti-Roman message and then give the Roman government a couple of perfunctory nods of appeasement to earn forgiveness in treacherous times. Rather, the central, overriding and consistent theme propounded in the New Testament is one of peace, meekness, submission, obedience, mercy, and getting along with all of the people of the earth—and especially with Roman authority: i.e. it embodies the Romans’ central objectives in regards to rebellious Jews and their wider empire.
In a time of Jewish rebellion, 1st Century Christian literature is commanding its adherents to pay their taxes, honor the emperor and go the extra mile for Romans. It argues that existing governmental authorities are nothing less than the agents of God, appointed by God, and that all virtuous people have nothing to fear from Roman authority. Submission to them is itself a virtue, and the more subservient the submission, the greater that virtue. All this the New Testament instructs us.
Our inherited idea of the earliest Christians being driven underground by hostile Roman authorities because of their incompatible codes of ethics simply isn’t true. Christians were apparently devotees of precisely the same virtues embodied by the Flavians’ imperial cult even as their Gospels were being composed.
Not just Romans, but even Roman centurions are awarded highest praise in the New Testament in the aftermath of the bloody conquest of Judea. The greatest story ever told takes pains to completely exonerate Romans while exclusively blaming Jews for Christ’s death, three times, with a cartoonishly heavy hand. This theme is further confirmed in the betrayal of Judas and the accusations of the Jewish authorities as the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate washes his hands of all blame.
These melodramatic details, hatched by political issues we can now clearly see, are so exaggerated and strange outside their actual context that they continue to fuel anti-Semitism after almost two thousand years.
If, as a thought experiment, one were to imagine what a sophisticated Roman propaganda war aimed at rebellious Jews in the 1st Century during their conflict with Nero and the Flavians might theoretically have looked like, the New Testament would match such a model in every imaginable respect.
The overtly Roman politics, the religious shape of its political propaganda, the commanded servile worship of a Caesar-like man-god in the place of a liberating Jewish Messiah, the sweeping rejection of the Kosher lifestyle and denial of Jewish exceptionalism, all of it leaves nothing off the Roman government’s check-list of 1st Century “corrections” to Jewish religion and culture. Christianity contains all of the revisions to Judaism that the Romans who conquered Judea could have possibly desired.
Where Jewish morality and Roman morality overlap, we can find Jewish doctrines favorably featured in the New Testament, such as Jesus’s adoption of the early rabbis’ Golden Rule. Obviously, the “mortal helping mortal” benevolence of the Flavians praised by the Emperor Titus’s personal friend, Pliny the Elder, parallels the Christian concept of charity. Even more famously, the altruism of Jesus is similarly advocated in the philosophical work of the 1st Century Roman Stoic writer Seneca, who was a tutor and assistant to the Emperor Nero.
Titus was educated along with the Emperor Claudius’s son, Britannicus, in the imperial palace, where Nero, who was only two years Titus’s senior, was being tutored by Seneca. It is therefore certainly possible that Titus himself knew the famous philosopher personally, as his father Vespasian must have known the man Nero later named an imperial advisor. St. Paul lived and wrote at precisely the same time as Seneca. Both were writing in Rome during the same years, and the two may have died at about the same time, as well. Seneca’s enduring influence as a philosopher can be felt even today.
This passage of Seneca is relevant here: