[Chapter Eleven: Noah and Menes―The Ark at Thebes]

Chapter Twelve: 208 BC―The Mystery of Mithras

All these geographical, chronological, political, and philological perplexities,
are such as never could have crossed the path of straight-forward narrative;
but are such exactly as would occur to Eclectic plagiaries,
engaged in the business of setting forth in order a tale of the then olden time;
fitting new names and new scenery to the characters
and catastrophes of an antiquated plot;
and endeavoring to put an appearance of history and reality
upon the creations of fictions and romance.
―Rev. Robert Taylor, The Diegesis

208 BC―Mithras

As I began to realize that the global events recorded in the rings of trees could be used to calibrate the ancient avatar cycle of which I had become aware in my investigation of the alignment of Hebrew and Egyptian chronologies, it occurred to me that the events of 208 BC should be fairly easy to recover and to examine in an attempt to understand just precisely what had been happening over a period of at least 4000 years. At a time after the rise and then fragmentation of the empire of Alexander, that, according to some historians, marked the boundary between the ancient and modern worlds, I was fairly certain that there would be more than enough data to finally catch a glimpse of the historical, geophysical, and cosmological foundations of this most recent of long-term human experiences on this planet. What I hadn't counted on was the active attempt to eradicate all memory of the religion that grew out of the events surrounding the year 208 BC, now so clearly recorded by the new science of dendrochronology, by the adherents of a couple of later dispensations.

My first instinct was to run the date 208 BC through a popular search engine. What I discovered among the multiple citations of the dendrochronological evidence was an obscure reference to someone named Mithras who, it was claimed by a scholar named M. (Mahmad) Moghdam at a conference in Tehran in 1975, was the real person behind what has been thought of until recently as simply a Western adaptation of a Mithraically oriented version of the religion of the Persian Zoroaster that spread across the Roman Empire before being absorbed into Christianity at the time of Constantine. The Mithra or Mitra of this earlier religion was simply the Persian sun-god, or so it was generally supposed.

According to Professor Moghdam, the new Mithras was born during the evening of December 24 or the early morning of December 25, 272 BC, near Lake Hamin. Moghdam points out various references in the works of Islamic historians that appear to distinguish between a "Lord Messiah" and "Jesus of Nazareth." Moghdam's sources are fragmentary, and to some extent vary one from another, but it is possible to extract a fairly coherent picture from the various elements available.

Apparently sometime around 323 BC, in what is now northeastern Iran, a son of one Ashkan (or a descendant of his, or a member of a tribe that drew their name from such an eponymous ancestor) named Ashk (or Afghur Shah) became "king" of what would later become the Parthian Federation. Ashk died about 313 and was replaced by Shabur Shah (or Sabur Shah). Shabur's rule overlapped that of Antiochus I Soter of the Seleucid Empire, the political heirs of Alexander of Macedon in that area, that ruled to the west of the Parthians. During the reign of these two gentlemen a son was born, supposedly miraculously and to a virgin in the region of Sistan. The mother's name was Mary. Her father was Amran, hearking back to Miriam and her father Amram, suggesting that Joshua, whose father was Nun, was the son of Miriam, the sister of Moses. According to Ahmed Osman, in Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs, the Koran specifically identifies Mary, the mother of Jesus, with Miriam the sister of Aaron:

"Oh sister of Aaron! Thy father was not a man of evil, nor thy mother a woman unchaste!"

In this case the Koran identifies Mary, the mother of Jesus, as being the same person as Mary, the sister of Aaron and Moses.

Faced with this seemingly complete contradiction of the Gospel account, Muslim scholars have tried to find a logical explanation. Some have said that the real meaning of this passage is that it is as if Mary were a sister of Aaron, while others have attempted to relate the mother of Jesus to the tribe of Aaron. Neither of these approaches is convincing, however, since the Koran itself confirms the brother-sister relationship between Mary and Aaron by saying that they had the same father, Imram (Sura 3:35).

Much of the vast trove of material presented by Godfrey Higgins in his Anacalypsis relates to the origins of Christianity in the religion of Zoroaster and the confusion of the elements of the two systems. In this regard, he describes the prophesy of the birth of a "sacred personage":

The reader will recollect what was said before by the well-known oriental Christian, Abulfaragius or Bar Hebræus, that there was a prophesy in the oracles of Zoroaster, "That a sacred personage should issue from the womb of an immaculate Virgin, and that his coming would be preceded by a brilliant star, whose light would guide them to the place of his nativity." It is pretty clear that this is a copy from the Gospel histories, or that the Gospel histories are copies from it, or both from a common mythos. And it must be observed here that the story of the Magi is contained in a part of the Gospel history which the Nazareens, Ebionites, Marcionites, Socinians, and most of the modern Unitarians, maintain to be spurious. If one be a copy from the other, which is copied must be left to the reader. After all that he has seen he will probably find little difficulty. This prophecy is evidently alluded to in the Gospel of the Infancy, which says, speaking of the Magi guided by a star, Quemadmodum prædixerat Zorodustht―as Zoroaster had predicted. This Gospel was received by the Nestorians, of whom Buchanan says, there are now about 50,000 in Malabar. It is a striking circumstance that the gifts brought by the Magi, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, were what were always offered by the Arabian Magi to the sun.

In fact, as G. A. Wells says in Who Was Jesus?, "The emperor Constantine the Great 'pursued the deliberate policy of uniting the worship of the sun with that of Christ', for he favoured Christianity because 'its organization made it best able to unite the Empire' [O. Cullman]."

As Moghdam says,

Keeping in mind the fate of the religion of Mithra in the West and its utter absorption in Christianity, and the similar fate it had, even more severely, under the Sasanian neo-Zoroastrianism and later under Islam, we would naturally expect in Moslem historians a total identification of Mithra with Jesus, the only Messiah allowed in orthodox Islam.

The confusion may extend to a statement found in the History of Prophets and Kings, by Hazma, that "Shabur fought Rum," by which is apparently meant Rome, so that Hazma may have confused Antiochus I with the Roman Emperor at the time of Jesus of Nazareth, referred to by the Arab historians as "Ishu Nasiri." Mithras was "al-Sayyid al-Masih." However, Rum was also an early Arabic name for Byzantium, a city founded by the Greeks as Byzantion as early as the 7th Century BC, so that there is a possibility that the entire encounter with Roman power in the New Testament simply mirrors an earlier encounter with Byzantion during the early years of Mithras. The city fell under the control of Lysimachus in 302 BC, as did the entire southern coast of the Black Sea.

In the case of Jesus of Bethlehem (as distinguished from Jesus of "Nazareth"), the place of his birth is instructive. As Godfrey Higgins wrote,

It is impossible to move a step in the examination of the rites and ceremonies of this religion without meeting with circumstances of greater or less importance connected in some way or other with the religion of Mithra or the Sun. Ænon, where John baptized, was sacred to the sun, and had a temple dedicated to it. Again, when Christ was born, he was sought for and worshiped by the Magi, who had seen his star in the East. Here is an evident allusion to astrology, properly so called, as distinguished from astronomy―the calculation of nativities by the stars, which in all ages has been closely connected with magic and necromancy. The magi having arrived at Bethlehem, directed not by A star but by HIS star, made their offerings, and celebrated with pious orgies, along with the angels that appeared at the same time, the nativity of the God, the Saviour, in the stable where he was born: but the stable was a cave, and it is still more remarkable, though it has never been pointed out by priests to their gaping congregations, that at THAT very time, the 24th of December, at midnight, throughout all the Mithraic caves of Persia, and in the temples throughout all the world, the same orgies were really in the act of being celebrated to the honour of the God Ιαω―the Saviour....

... Clarke tells us that the Christian ceremonies in the church of the nativity at Bethlehem are celebrated to this day in a CAVE, and are undoubtedly nearly the same as they were celebrated in honour of Adonis in the time of Tertullian and Jerom; and as they are yet celebrated at Rome every Christmas-day very early in the morning.

In regard to Moghdam's assumption that there is little left of the religion of Mithras, it would not lie beyond the realm of possibility to suggest that this gaping void in the history of theology under the Roman Republic and later Empire may be little more than a result of the above-mentioned total absorption of this wildly popular religion into Christianity at the time of its official recognition during the reign of Constantine, for if we identify the most primitive level of the latter religion with the belief system of the Gnostics, then what remains when we subtract that earlier Gnostic doctrine from the later system of the Christians must be those elements that were adopted wholesale from the followers of Mithras, especially considering that those who held the position of Father in the Mithraic hierarchy were known to have held some of the higher administrative positions of other religions, so that we are forced to consider the possibility that the Christianity of the emperors and their legions was little more than Mithraism renamed and repackaged, with the events of the life of Mithras brought up to date so that Antiochus I became Augustus of Rome, and the background of the tale became Roman dominated Judaea rather than Seleucid occupied Persia, which is not to say that there wasn't a later, Nazarite affiliated avatar by the name of Jesus.

There was, in fact, a gentleman named Yeshu (Jeshu), sometimes called "the Nazir" (ha Notzri) ben Pandera (the son, or grandson, of Pandera [or Pantera or Panther]―though other interpretations have been suggested, including a corruption of the Greek parthenos), who was stoned to death and then hung from a tree in 70 BC for various "crimes" including sorcery, by which was apparently meant the practice of an unsanctioned form of the healing arts, learned probably at Alexandria. We will return to this Yeshu shortly.

Timeline of Events Related to Mithras,
Yeshu the Nazir, and Apollonius of Tyana

102 BC―Yeshu the Nazir

Had Reuchlin stood absolutely alone
he would have been overwhelmed by the first onrush of his countless foes;
but to their lasting credit there rallied to his banner a chosen band of enlightened and courageous friends,
the Humanists, who, though they were dubbed "Talmutphili,"
declared themselves to be "Knights of the Holy Ghost," and the "Hosts of Pallas Athene,"
fighting for the credit of Christianity and not for the Talmud as Talmud.
―G. R. S. Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?

Keeping in mind that my primary interest in this subject is chronological, the question of the historical validity of the early history of Christianity is important enough to our investigation and our satisfactory elucidation of the data to warrant a sidewards glance and even a quick examination of the essential character and origins of the Christian religion that Godfrey Higgins so insistently derived from his hypothetical global, primordial secret doctrine that he believed found but one of its many manifestations in the story of the god, or demigod, or prophet, or simply traveling practitioner of the Egyptian healing arts from Bethlehem. However, the most important proponent in the early years of the 19th Century of the notion that Christianity was ultimately derived from earlier religious systems and that its God was but an echo of earlier deities was not Godfrey Higgins but the Reverend Robert Taylor. Taylor's ideas were so negatively received by the Irish authorities that his master work, the Diegesis, was written in jail. Whereas Higgins at least makes a show of his ultimate belief in the validity of the Christian doctrine, Taylor is clearly not to be placed in the position of pretending to take any of his earlier beliefs at all seriously and he spares no one in his torpedoing of the biblical storyline.

Taylor presents a vast array of evidence of the similarities and identities between earlier incarnations of the godhead and the central figure of Christianity. His intent is to show that Christianity cannot be valid because its doctrines preceded it by hundreds and thousands of years. What Taylor misses, as does Higgins and even many modern commentators, is that the underlying belief system that ultimately led to the founding of Christianity had less to do with the random and disingenuous borrowing of the aspects of earlier religions than with the consistent and quite systematic recognition of the continuing re-incarnation of a single unitary godhead. Thus, the similarity between the name Christna and the position or role of Christ; that between the name Joshua and that of Jesus and those of their mothers Miriam and Mary; the obvious similarities among Iacchus and Bacchus and Yahweh; in fact, the whole series of analogies and identities that pervade the lives of the various avatars enumerated in Chapter Eight are not due exclusively to borrowing but also result from recognition, within the confines of the various aspects of this belief system, of the traits of the earlier members of this most exclusive of clubs in the actions and abilities and defining characteristics of the later ones. It is in this light that we must examine the elements that make up the religion of the earliest Christians, a light that shines most brightly from the persons and personalities of the last two pre-Christian members of the series.

As further evidence of the connection between the protagonist of Christianity and earlier avatars, let us take a look at the genealogy of Jesus preserved in the first chapters of Matthew. From David until Jehoiakim were 17 generations and an average generation during this period was just slightly less than 20 years, taken from death to death, for that is the most complete scale available to us. We know that Jeconias lived into the reign of Evil-merodach (Amel-Marduk) at Babylon, which lasted only two years, so we can say that he lived until at least somewhere around the year 560 BC. Zorobabel served as either governor or king of Judah, that kingship may have been messianic, and we know that he was executed near 510 BC. After this we have little idea how long the purported ancestors of Jesus lived. For the 20 generations from the death of David in 946 until the death of Zorobabel at 510, we have a total period of 436 years or an average of 21.8 years. There is an interesting similarity between the names Zorobbabel and Zoroaster, the latter having been born around 588 BC. It is clear that applying this average to the later members of this tree does not bring us anywhere near the 1st Century AD. It does bring us to 216, close to the death of Mithras at 208 BC, so the implication here is that the Arab historians were not simply confusing Jesus with Mithras. It appears that they were transmitting valid information when they called Mithras, born at Sisten in 272 BC, "al-Sayyid al-Masih," the Lord Messiah. In his genealogy of Jesus, the author of Matthew appears to have somehow managed to insinuate into the very first book of the Christian canon a hidden indication of this identification. This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that there is a second genealogy, in Luke, that baldly contradicts the one in Matthew, that longer one, presumably, meant to be that of Jesus the Nazir, or Ishu Nasiri. In fact, if we assume Nathan died sometime around the time that Solomon did in 926 BC, the 39 generations from Nathan to Yeshu ben Pandira, who died near 70 BC, give us an average generation, death to death, of 21.9 years―not a bad fit.

Ancestors of Jesus According to Matthew and Luke

As Wells points out, "Luke selects Nathan from among the sons of David, and so traces Jesus' descent through a line not royal. He nevertheless rejoins the royal line after the fall of the monarchy by listing Shealtiel and Zerubbabel; and against 1 Chronicles 3:17, he makes Shealtiel the son of an otherwise unknown Neri, instead of the son of the last king, Jechoniah.... Now even a Catholic scholar admits that ... 'most commentators realize today that we have in [the two genealogies] neither official public records nor treasured family lists.' " Or, conversely, we are looking here at the ancestries of two quite different and distinct individuals, and only the appearance in the list of Luke of Shealtiel and Zorobabel is the result of interpolation and Neri should actually be listed as the father of Rhesa. We then would have two completely separate trees intersecting only at King David in the 10th Century BC. The reader should keep in mind that the interpolation of Shealtiel and Zorobabel between Neri and Rhesa does not necessarily mean that the latter two are from the same generation as the former two.

There is other evidence that points to these earlier versions of the protagonist of the New Testament. According to Wells, "those of the canonical epistles which the majority of scholars date earlier than the gospels do not corroborate the gospels' portrait of Jesus. These epistles know him only as a supernatural personage who adopted human flesh to come to earth in unspecified circumstances at an unspecified time in the past, who was crucified there in obscure circumstances and then was raised from the dead and returned to heaven.... Paul elsewhere refers to Jesus as 'the image of the invisible God ....' Such a description does not suggest a familiar or recent historical personage." Later, Wells writes that, "the earliest Christian documents ... say nothing of any item in his biography except his crucifixion and resurrection (both in unspecified circumstances)." Further, "the earliest Christians will simply have asserted that Christ died and was raised, and will have embodied these convictions in the kind of preaching formula that Paul ... quotes." Wells argues "elsewhere that the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as a supernatural personage who had come down to Earth in a human form long (one or two centuries) ago, had lived quite obscurely, been crucified in circumstances about which nothing was any longer known, and had risen from the dead."

The implication of all of this is that the genealogy (or, more accurately, the family history) found in Matthew is that of Mithras, as I have already suggested, and that the one found in Luke is that of Yeshu (Jeshu) ben Pandera who was, as far as we can make this statement about anyone, the "true" Jesus, or, at the very least, the one from whose life story the most important theological parts of the biblical account were taken. The interesting thing about this interpretation of the evidence is that it makes Jesus, or Yeshu, the descendent of an otherwise wholly unknown royal line, and not even a royal line at all if we recognize that Nathan was not the true heir of David, that position having been held by Solomon. Essentially, what we have here is the covert assertion that the murder and mayhem that bedeviled the throne of David had so perverted and diluted the legitimate succession that only a descendant of David's other son Nathan could rightfully claim the kingship of Judah. Nowhere is this spelled out, but it hangs over the entire tale like a cloud just barely perceived and normally confused with the fog created by the scholarly assertion that the entire story is fictitious. In fact, the very existence of this interlinear and unnoticed subplot is that the story must be essentially true, at least as far as it relates to the claim, apparently made by this Yeshu himself, that he was the legitimate king of Israel, a claim that would have thrown the members of the Sanhedrin into a fit of rage. Here, finally, we can just make out the faintest outlines of the true reason for the execution of Yeshu. It was not for claiming to be the messiah, though the chronological evidence could certainly be used to identify him with the cometary avatar of 102 BC, but for claiming to be the perfectly mundane king of Judah.

According to The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, "The references to Yannai [Jannaeus], Salome [Helena] Alexandra, and Joshua b. Peraḥyah indicate that according to the Jewish legends the advent of Jesus took place just one century before the actual historical date; and some medieval apologists for Judaism, as Naḥmanides and Salman Ẓebi, based on this fact their assertion that the "Yeshu'" mentioned in the Talmud was not identical with Jesus; this, however, is merely a subterfuge." This contention is supported by Gerald Massey in the chapter "Typology of Equinoctial Christolatry" in The Natural Genesis, where he also notes that the Toledoth Jehoshua has him as a relative of Alexandra.

Godfrey Higgins took note of this Yeshu ben Panther, though there is no indication of his awareness of the appearance that Yeshu was hanged in 70 BC. Higgins was more interested in identifying Jesus with Bacchus:

The name of Jesus also was Jesus ben Panther. Jesus was a very common name with the Jews. Stukeley observes that the patronymic of Jesus Christ was Panther; and that Panthers were the nurses and bringers up of Bacchus; and adds, " ’Tis remarkable that Panther was the sirname [sic] of Joseph's family, our Lord's foster-father. Thus the Midrashkoheleth, or gloss upon Ecclesiastes: 'It happened that a serpent bit R. Eleasar ben Damah, and James, a man of the village Secania, came to heal him in the name of Jesus ben Panther.' This is likewise in the book called Abodazara, where the comment upon it says, This James was a disciple of Jesus the Nazarene."

Here, in this accidental notice of Jesus, by these two Jewish works, is a direct and unexceptionable proof of his existence; it is unexceptionable because, if it be not evidence of unwilling witnesses, it is the evidence of disinterested ones.... And as the persons who brought up Jesus were called panthers, the name of an animal, so Bacchus was brought up by the same kind of animal, a panther.... The circumstance of Joseph's family name being supposed to be panther is remarkably confirmed by Epiphanius, who says that Joseph was the brother of Cleophas, the son of James, sirnamed Panther. Thus we have the fact both from Jewish and Christian authorities. [Commas before restrictive clauses, here and elsewhere, have been removed to improve readability.]

None of this means that the list of ancestors found in Luke is legitimate, though we have already noted the claim of Josephus that the genealogies of the Levites were kept at Jerusalem. There is no reason to assume outright that a perfectly legitimate non-Levitical family tree could not have survived that went back to the time of Solomon and Nathan. What is clear is that many of the characters found in the New Testament appear among those persons that lived at the time of Yeshu. In essence, what seems to have happened is that the entire 30-year period from about 100 BC until 70 BC was shifted forward in time in that work by about 100 years so that 100 BC became the first year of the Common Era and the earlier characters were replaced by those that lived in the later period; hence the obvious discrepancies in the historical logic and verisimilitude of the official story (or stories) of the life of Jesus.

The identification of Yeshu as a healer is by no means inconsequential. The Reverend Taylor describes at great length the relationship between the earlier Essenes or Therapeutæ and the early Christians:

Eusebius has fully shown that the monastic life was derived from the Essenes; and, because many Christians adopted the manners of the Essenes, Epiphanius took the Essenes in general for Christians, and confounded them with the Nazarenes ....

"It was in Egypt," says the great ecclesiastical historian, Mosheim, "that the morose discipline of Asceticism (i.e. the Essenian or Therapeutan discipline) took its rise; and it is observable, that that country has in all times, as it were by an immutable law or disposition of nature, abounded with persons of a melancholy complexion, and produced, in proportion to its extent, more gloomy spirits than any other parts of the world. It was here that the Essenes dwelt principally, long before the coming of Christ.

This admission of the great ecclesiastical historian ... will serve as the Pythagorean theorem ... ever to be borne in mind, always to be brought in proof .... "Bind it about thy neck, write it upon the tablet of thy heart"―EVERY THING OF CHRISTIANITY IS OF EGYPTIAN ORIGIN....

All the most valued manuscripts of the Christian scriptures are Codices Alexandrini. The very first bishops of whom we have any account, were bishops of Alexandria. Scarcely one of the more eminent fathers of the Christian church is there, who had not been educated and trained in the arts of priestly fraud, in the University of Alexandria....

In those early times, the professions of Medicine and Divinity were inseparable. We read of the divinity students studying medicine in the School, or University of Alexandria, to which all persons resorted, who were afterwards to practice in either way, on the weak in body or the weak in mind, among their fellow creatures. The Therapeuts, or Essenes, as their name signifies, were expressly professors of the art of healing―an art in those days necessarily conferring the most mystical sanctity of character on all who were endued with it, and the most convenient of all others for the purposes of imposture and wonderment....

"These sages were of opinion that true philosophy, the greatest and most salutary gift of God to mortals, was scattered, in various portions, through all the different sects; and that it was, consequently, the duty of every wise man to gather it from the several corners where it lay dispersed, and to employ it, thus re-united, in destroying the dominion of impiety and vice." The principle seat of this philosophy was at Alexandria; and "it manifestly appears," says Mosheim, "from the testimony of Philo the Jew, who was himself one of this sect, that this (Eclectic) philosophy (of this Essenian or Therapeutan sect) was in a flourishing state at Alexandria when our Saviour was upon earth."

Massey elaborates on the relationship of Yeshu ben Pandira (as he spells it) to the biblical Jesus:

There being but one history acknowledged or known, it follows that the Jesus of the gospels (plus the mythical Iesu) is the Jehoshua of the Talmud. This shifts the historic basis altogether; it antedates the human history by more than a century, and destroys the historic character of the gospels, together with that of another Jesus. In short, the Jewish history of the matter corroborates the mythical; and both combine to show that the Jesus of the gospels is the mythical Iesu=Jesus. Jehoshua ben Pandira was a mage and an adept in the mysteries, a mental Thaumaturge, and what in our day would have been termed a spiritualistic medium. His death was in strict accordance with the Jewish laws and customs. He was first stoned and then hung on a tree to become accursed, which is in agreement with the description that occurs twice over in the "Acts," of him who was slain and hung from a tree, and consequently not crucified after the Roman fashion....

This reading will account for the total absence of contemporary testimony or recognition, and explain how it is that no voice breaks the blank silence outside the gospel narrative, save one or two forgeries that may be laughed into oblivion.... It becomes possible even for Paul to have made his second journey to Jerusalem ... to carry the offerings of the faithful to those who had suffered from the great famine in the year 44 A.D.; and for his conversion to have occurred either in the year 30, or 27, as the two different statements imply; because it did not depend upon the death of an historical Jesus.

This view alone enables us to understand the position of Paul, or comprehend the mystery of his gospel, which was opposed to that of the Christ made flesh, the "other Jesus" of the gospel preached by the Sarkolatræ, who were his deadly enemies. A difference the most radical divided Paul and the historical James, John, and Cephas. They had nothing in common with him from the first, and never forgave him to the last. They did not preach the same gospel, nor set forth the same Christ.

The most detailed scholarly attempt to understand the documents and implications of the Talmud Yeshu stories was G. R. S. Mead's Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?, published in 1903 by the Theosophical Publishing Society of London and Benares. It is in the sources of this publication that we will find further chronological evidence for an early 1st Century BC element of the biblical account of the life of Jesus.

The most significant parts of the Yeshu stories, from our chronological point of view, are those in which they generally place the major events of Yeshu's life during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus a century before the time of the biblical account. This is rather peculiar in that the early Church fathers, as well as later Church authorities throughout the Middle Ages, saw these accounts as feeble attempts by the Jewish religious authorities to demean their belief in an incarnated saviour. Why, then, place this refutation at the wrong time in the history of Judea and Galilee? But then, as Mead points out, Celsus, who wrote The True Word, a criticism of Christian "history" written in the 2nd Century and destroyed by the Church but reproduced in part by Origen in Contra Celsum,

categorically accuses the Christians (ii. 27) of changing their gospel story in many ways in order the better to answer the objections of their opponents; his accusation is that some of them, "as it were in a drunken state producing self-induced visions, remodel their gospel from its first written form in a threefold, fourfold and manifold fashion, and reform it so that they may be able to refute the objections brought against it."

This may be taken to mean either that the Christians were engaged in doing so in Celsus's day, or that such redacting was habitual.... It is ... more simple to regard the statement as meaning that the external gospel story had been continuously altered and reformulated to meet objections―in brief, that the latest forms of it were the product of a literary evolution in which mystic experiences played a prominent part.

Hence, it would not be difficult to believe that these redactions had been going on so long that they had managed to change the entire environment of the stories from that of the time of Jannaeus to that of Pontius Pilate, and it might even be argued that the Talmud Yeshu stories were closer to the original truth than the later, modified, biblical account, a position in line with that of Massey above. We might even posit an original account from which both the Talmud story and the biblical one arose, one adding a negative spin to the matter at hand and the other, the so-called Q document, a positive one. In fact Mead points out that the introduction of Yehoshua ben Perachya as the teacher of Yeshu is an anachronism, and "how on earth an apparently so ludicrous anachronism could have held its own for so many centuries is a psychological puzzle of the greatest interest ...." so that the birth of Yeshu near 120 BC may be replaced by something on the order of the 102 BC date mentioned by Massey:

The personal existence of Jesus as Jehoshua Ben-Pandira can be established beyond a doubt. One account affirms that, according to a genuine Jewish tradition “that man (who is not to be named) was a disciple of Jehoshua Ben-Perachia.” It also says, “He was born in the fourth year of the reign of the Jewish King Alexander Jannæus, notwithstanding the assertions of his followers that he was born in the reign of Herod.” That would be more than a century earlier than the date of birth assigned to the Jesus of the Gospels! But it can be further shown that Jehoshua Ben-Pandira may have been born considerably earlier even than the year 102 B.C., although the point is not of much consequence here.

The birth of Yeshu in the "fourth year of ... Jannaeus" goes a long way toward explaining the origin of the 30-year-old executed Jesus of the New Testament, his birth in the year AD 1 of the Christian Era, and his death in the 17th year of Tiberius. Interestingly enough, 102 BC was another one of those years when Typhon was close to the earth, that "star in the east" having foretold the birth of Julius Caesar somewhere near 100 BC as well as that of Yeshu. Gathering together these clues, and knowing that Jannaeus actually began his rule in 103 BC, we can now offer the hypothesis that Yeshu ha-Notzri lived from 100 BC until 70 BC, so that the transposition to AD 1 amounted to a shift of exactly 100 years.

This is about all that we can extract at this point from the story of Yeshu as found in the Talmud and related documents. It is not that we are in need of an avatar at 102 BC, for Julius Caesar was born about this time and his birth was marked by the appearance of a star, apparently the same "star" that punctuated the lives of all of the avatars that we have identified in Chapter Eight. What we have been trying to determine here is whether the line of Jewish kings that makes up a significant portion of that sequence survived into the 2nd Century BC or whether it had already died out and been replaced by analogous series at Rome and in Parthia, in which case the stories of a Jewish messiah at this late date were simply a fictional attempt to extend that Judean-based line beyond its actual lifespan. This supposition is supported by the fact that as Mead successively peels back the layers of the onion that is the story of Yeshu, he does not seem to get any closer to the core of the question of just who exactly this person really was and why exactly it was so important that he had supposedly been hanged for his importation of the Alexandrian magical arts into Judea. For example, Mead relates an incident involving Joshua ben Perachia that takes place in an inn. I will not go into the details of the story but I will note that he manages to find an earlier version of the story that involves Jehuda ben Tabbai, one of the third pair of what Mead calls the "Guruparampara chain ... of Talmudic tradition," the Eshcalath, or president and vice-president, of the Sanhedrin, and not ben Perachia who belonged to the second pair. Yeshu is not mentioned by name. The story only refers to an unnamed student of Tabbai.

It is my subjective impression that what we are looking at here is indeed a failed attempt of the Alexandrian school of Judaism to maintain an unbroken line of Jewish incarnations of the sun, no matter how vehemently the orthodox priesthood railed against just such a concept from their perch at Jerusalem. And whether or not there actually was an incarnate Yeshu ha Notzri is fairly immaterial, since his attempted elevation to the position of earthly representative of the sun was a failure. Even as the story was dragged kicking and screaming forward another celestial cycle to the beginning of the Common Era, it remains a recollection, a backward glance, at an event that was supposed to have installed a new all conquering Jewish king at Jerusalem―just as his namesake Joshua conquered the lands of the Canaanites a millennium earlier―but didn't. This is the fundamental problem at the root of Christianity, for it worships a purported son of God who behaves, not like such an exalted and victorious personage should have and previously did, but like some kind of peculiar self-destructive pacifist like Akhnaton, even as his followers seem to revel in the blood and gore of his destruction as if it somehow proved his superiority, all the while using that self-destruction as an excuse to persecute the very descendants of his original co-religionists over many hundreds of years. Even his Roman equivalent at this point in time, the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, managed, according to one of his biographers, to overthrow the dictatorial regime of Nero and aided in the installation of Vespasian as emperor of Rome while maintaining his stance as a philosopher in the mold of Pythagoras. Meanwhile elsewhere in the Roman Empire the not-yet-Christians were already looking forward to a future time when their unsuccessful savior would return again, this time managing to accomplish what he had failed to do in the first place.

Yet Epiphanius, that well-known heresiologist of the 4th Century, through the medium again of G. R. S. Mead, sheds further light on the notion that Yeshu was a descendant of the Jewish royal line with a legitimate claim to the throne, not during the reign of Pontius Pilate, but at the close of the kingship of Jannaeus:

"Now the throne and kingly seat of David is the priestly office in Holy Church; for the Lord combined the kingly and high-priestly dignities into one and the same office, and bestowed them upon His Holy Church, transferring to her the throne of David, which ceases not as long as the world endues. The throne of David continued by succession up to that time―namely till Christ Himself―without any failure from the princes of Judah, until it came unto Him for whom were 'the things that are stored up,' who is Himself 'the expectation of the nations.' For with the advent of the Christ, the succession of the princes of Judah, who reigned until the Christ himself, ceased. The order [of succession] failed and stopped at the time when He was born in Bethlehem of Judæa, in the days of Alexander, who was of high-priestly and royal race; and after this Alexander this lot failed, from the times of himself and Salina, who is also called Alexandra, for the times of Herod the King and Augustus Emperor of the Romans; and this Alexander, one of the anointed (or Christs) and ruling princes placed the crown on his own head.... After this a foreign king, Herod, and those who were no longer of the family of David, assumed the crown." [brackets in original]

... Here we have the Bishop of Salamis categorically asserting, with detailed reiteration, so that there is no possibility of escape, that Jesus was born in the days of Alexander and Salina, that is of Jannai and Salome; not only so, but he would have it that it needs must have been so, in order that prophecy, and prophecy of the most solemn nature, should be fulfilled that there should be no break in the succession of princes from the tribe of Judah, as it had been written. There is no possible way of extricating ourselves from the crushing weight of the incongruity of this statement of Epiphanius by trying to emend the reading of the text; for not only does the whole subject of his argument demand such a statement, but he supports it by a number of subsidiary assertions....

When, moreover, Epiphanius says that Alexander placed the crown on his own head, we are at a loss to understand him; some MSS., however, read "his" simply and not "his own" head, and this would mean, presumably, that Alexander placed the crown on the head of Jesus; that is to say, at his death the succession passed to Jesus. [my emphasis]

"... Judea was made subject and became tributary to [the Romans], its rulers having ceased from Judah, and Herod being appointed [as ruler] from the Gentiles, being a proselyte, however, and Christ being born in Bethlehem of Judea, and coming for the preaching [of the Gospel], the anointed rulers from Judah and Aaron having ceased, after continuing until the anointed ruler Alexander and Salina who was also Alexandra; in which days the prophecy of Jacob was fulfilled: 'A ruler shall not cease from Judah and a leader from his thighs, until he come for whom it is laid up, and he is the expectation of the nations' " ... The point that interests us is that Epiphanius repeats categorically his puzzling statement about Jannaeus and Salome and the date of Jesus, and again brings this into the closest relation with what he regards as a most solemn prophecy and promise in "Genesis." There is no possible escape from the conclusion that Epiphanius is arguing most deliberately that the kingly and high-priestly offices were transferred immediately from Jannai to Jesus, so that there should be no break in the succession....

... We have seen that in the Jewish legends, based on earlier tradition, Miriam the mother is said to have been related to Helene (Salome), and we know that Simeon (ben Shetach) [vice-president of the Sanhedrin under Tabbai]