Christ also charges his disciples:
Freely you have received; freely give. Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts—no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep. (44)
The “blessing” of poverty is, of course, one of the repeated and central themes of the New Testament, from Jesus advising a “rich young man” to give all that he owns to the poor to the famous adage attributed to St. Paul, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (Although a better translation may be, “all kinds of evils.”) (45) Paul instructs givers to give graciously and without complaint.
As Josephus tells us, the Essenes, too, believed in the virtue of poverty. According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, purist Jewish sectarians of the period actually called themselves “the Poor.” As we have seen, the letter of James in the New Testament also contains a rebel-like threat against “the rich.” (46)
Like the concept of the “messiah” itself, this love of poverty was rooted in the rebel movement, which surely must have appealed most to the poor and those oppressed by the Romans. It is therefore an idea that can only be hypocritically adopted by a wealthy Roman collaborator like Josephus who was working for a Roman emperor—even one who was known for his humble origins, ostentatious modesty and extravagant charity.
There are many other fascinating religious parallels between the Gospels and Josephus. Like Christ, for example, Josephus also gives special veneration to the Jewish prophet Daniel (47), whose messianic prophecy has profound echoes in Jesus Christ’s own prophecy of the Temple’s destruction, the prophecy we have considered in such detail. According to Danieclass="underline"
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. (Emphasis added.) (48)
The term literally rendered as “son of man” in this passage simply means “human being” in Aramaic—but many translations of the Old Testament use the phrase “son of man,” instead, since this is the title given to Jesus in the Gospels.
Jesus echoes Daniel’s prophecy thus: “… you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” (Emphasis added.) (49)
In perfect fulfillment of this prophecy, Tacitus tells us that before Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem:
Prodigies had occurred, which this nation, prone to superstition, but hating all religious rites, did not deem it lawful to expiate by offering and sacrifice. There had been seen hosts joining battle in the skies, the fiery gleam of arms, the Temple illuminated by a sudden radiance from the clouds. (Emphasis added.) (50)
Josephus may be Tacitus’s source for this report since Josephus himself tells us this:
…on the one and twentieth day of the month Artemisius, a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared: I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities. (Emphasis added.) (51)
Christians who still await such a vision to appear above the skies of Jerusalem should be aware that such a vision has already been reported, right down to that very specific detail.
According to standard Christian assumptions, the Second Coming of Christ has not yet happened. If that is true, of course, Jesus Christ made a mistake in the timing of his prophecy. He clearly and unequivocally predicted that the generation hearing him speak would not “pass away” before the events transpired. Jesus is quoted twice in the Gospel of Mark at Mark 9:1 and Mark 13:30 predicting the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Coming of the Son of Man in Power within the current “generation,” and this is repeated in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew at Luke 21:32, and Matthew 24:34.
If this was a mistake, Jesus must be counted as the first of many Christian prophets to come who would incorrectly predict the timing of the Apocalypse. Such an embarrassing error, if it is one, could not be a later Christian interpolation, for obvious reasons. This makes these well-attested passages all the more credibly authentic to the Gospels and fixes the date of their writing even more credibly no later than the 1st Century.
Scholars wrestling with these problems have come to believe that Jesus’s earliest followers were convinced he was returning quite soon. They were so convinced that they confidently put the idea into the mouth of Jesus himself. There can be little doubt that the author of this passage intended his readers to believe the Second Coming was to be a 1st Century event. As a prophecy, that would have been a terribly bold assertion for such followers to make since the prediction also associated the Messiah’s return with the destruction of Jerusalem and the defeat of Jewish hopes.
On the other hand, Jesus may have been right—but only if the thesis we have been exploring is right—i.e. only if Titus’s entry into Jerusalem to level the Temple after spectral armies churned in the clouds was his glorious Second Coming. Again, the Gospels were written after Titus had accomplished these deeds.
If we accept at face value Jesus’s own apocalyptic prophecy, and accept that his plainly stated prediction means precisely what it says, then Jesus himself perfectly justifies Josephus’s own belief in a Flavian messiah. So convenient is this prophecy for Titus’s claim to be the returning messiah that it was quite probably written after the events transpired as prophetic “proof” supporting the Flavians’ messianic propaganda.
Titus Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem by Nicolas Poussin (1638-1639)
Short of Josephus actually attesting his own belief in the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, Josephus’s beliefs already match all of Christianity’s main tenets. However, there may even be evidence that Flavius Josephus himself was aware of—and actually personally endorsed—Jesus Christ himself.
It’s time to look at the most controversial evidence in support of this theory.
Even though Josephus’s own mentions of Christ, if they are credible, would predate by about two full decades the earliest surviving mention of Jesus by anyone outside Christian literature itself (which is widely conceded to be historically unreliable), the existence of such extraordinary evidence linking the Flavians so directly to Christianity probably shouldn’t be as surprising as it is to most scholars, given what we have now seen.
The hypothesis of a Roman pedigree for the New Testament that we have been presenting has already been thoroughly demonstrated by all of the evidence without contradiction by simply taking that evidence at face value. It should be almost predictable, therefore, that the literature of the Flavian dynasty must, somewhere, actually sanction Christianity itself if this theory is correct.
All of the evidence suggests that the Gospels were written during the time of the Flavians as a kind of proof text for their messianic ascension to the throne after their victory over the messianic Jewish rebels. They seem tailored for the imperial cult of the Emperor Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, the son of God (his deified father) who was born on December 30 and who personally fulfilled the prophecies of Jesus at the time predicted to presage his return.