Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (62 page)

I therefore decided to look more closely at the two men central to the Christian myth: St Paul – referred to here as Saulos – and Judas the Galilean, known to later generations by the Greek name Jesus, an adaptation of the name Yeshu or Yeshua (Joshua) which means ‘saviour’ in Hebrew.

I should say that nowhere is there any concrete proof of either man’s existence, never mind their lives and deaths, in the way there is, say, for Nero, whose life – and death – were recorded in a number of different classical sources, some of which were written by men who were alive at the time. We can also still visit the monuments that were built in Nero’s name, complete with the inscriptions. And if we need to know what Nero looked like, we have a series of coins that were struck during his reign showing his progress towards maturity. On a grander scale, we know which legions marched where on his orders, which governments were overthrown as a result, and what politics ebbed and flowed around him.

He was a giant figure, is gigantically recorded, and that’s as good as historical proof ever gets, short of an inscribed tomb with bones that could be DNA-tested. Thus, in so far as we believe anything in history to be an objective fact, we can say that Nero was indeed emperor of Rome. How he ruled is open to interpretation and is the stuff of heated academic argument, but nobody doubts his existence.

We cannot however say the same about Judas/Jesus or any of the men, women and children associated with him – which may be one reason why the arguments as to the truth are a lot more heated and not restricted to the academic field.

Taking Paul first, we have seven authenticated epistles – which is to say those letters that scholars conclude were all written by the same man who may have called himself Saulos/Paul and may have been instrumental in spreading the Christian myth around the eastern Mediterranean.
¹

Few men of the early church are viewed with such varied passions. At one end of the scale, St Paul is the founding father of the Christian church, the ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’ who brought the faith to Rome, at huge personal risk.

At the other end, he’s a delusional ‘seer of visions’ who took upon himself the role of ‘educating’ the Greek-speaking Hebrews of the Mediterranean and in the process demolished all the hope, compassion, equality and mercy that the man we know as Jesus Christ taught, thus setting the tone for future generations of hate, misogyny and homophobia.

There is a third view, developed in more depth by Robert Eisenman and Hyam Maccoby, which seems most plausible to me and is the one I have developed in
The Emperor’s Spy
. It holds, in essence, that Paul/Saulos was a Roman agent tasked with suppressing the growing anti-Roman insurgency fomented by the Sicari rebels of the movement Josephus calls ‘the Fourth Philosophy’.

A failed Pharisee who lacked the necessary grasp of logic to be taken on as a rabbi, the embittered Paul joined what was, in effect, the military police run by the Sadducees under the auspices of the High Priest. In this role, he spent several years pursuing and torturing members of the Fourth Philosophy in an effort to subdue the insurrection. But he failed – they were stronger than anything the Romans could do to them and every man, woman or child tortured only recruited more to their cause.

If he wasn’t a Roman agent to begin with (in my fiction, I have said that he was), then it was around now that he was recruited and given the more complex task of turning the Hebrews’ famed religiosity against them, making it a weapon that would bind them more closely to Rome, removing the necessity for revolt.

To do so, he created a new religion, basing it on the death of the Galilean, a man he had never met; a man whose
followers
he barely met until he was summoned to Jerusalem in the early 60s and asked to explain himself.

Failing, he would certainly have been executed had not a Roman detachment taken him into protective custody and escorted him to safety in Caesarea. He languished in prison for two years and then vanished from history well before the date of the fire.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that of the two groups around at the time of the fire, the one which was fixated on the imminent arrival of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, the one which had most to gain – and least to lose – by burning Rome, was Paul’s.

He had the motive and the means and I don’t think Nero was as mad as everyone says, or at least not in this: if he crucified anyone afterwards, it was because they were intimately involved in the fire. He won’t have known them as Christians because I don’t think they’d begun to take on that name yet, but even if they had, they were Paul’s creation, not related to the real thing.

If you’re interested in more detail, I’d recommend reading Robert Eisenman’s book
James, the Brother of Christ
for a far more intricate look at the enmity between Paul and James, and Hyam Maccoby’s
The Mythmaker
for a more detailed look at Paul the man.

Judas the Galilean is less easy to pin down. The historian Josephus is our only source for him, in the way that the Christian gospels are the only source for Jesus.

Daniel Unterbrink, in his book
Judas the Galilean: the Flesh and Blood Jesus
, argues that Judas was the basis for the Christian story, while I think that the man who led the Sicari zealots in their audacious raid on the armoury at Sepphoris in ad 6 was not the same man who, say, preached the Sermon on the Mount or gave rise to the aphorisms in the gospel of Thomas. That, I believe, was Judas’ pacifist vegetarian brother, the Nazirite James, but I share Unterbrink’s view that Judas was the basis for the part of the story that relates to the crucifixion.

Josephus tells us nothing of Judas’ death but he does tell us that his grandson, Menahem, raided an armoury to arm his men and that he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey proclaiming himself the messiah, from which we might infer that nobody thought there was only one messiah or that he had been and gone – and that he was probably following a family tradition.

For me, the clinching argument that Judas’ death was taken and usurped by men who had never met him is that they twisted his name. He was Judas, leader of the Sicarioi. By stroking a T across the last letter and inverting the first two, we have Judas Iscariot – a surname not known in Hebrew histories to that point. If you wanted to hide the origins of your sect, if you wanted to make it as pro-Roman as you could, while removing all stain of an anti-Roman past, what better way than to hide the name of the man who had founded it, than in the name of his own worst enemy?

I don’t think Paul did this – he was using the moniker ‘Christ Jesus’ which means ‘saviour saviour’ in Greek, and then the Greek version of the Hebrew Yeshua. Another example is ‘Thomas Didymus’, which means ‘twin twin’ in the same two languages – clearly there was a habit at the time of saying the same thing twice. That said, I think that, like ‘Boudica’ which means ‘victory’ and was a name acquired after the fact, this was a name given by Paul to highlight the role of the man whose death he had usurped. It became current only after the fall of Jerusalem and the utter destruction of the Fourth Philosophy.

By then, if we follow Joseph Atwill’s theories in
Caesar’s Messiah
, Paul was gone from the scene, but Titus Vespasian and Josephus together saw the value in continuing what he had begun and it was they who put together the mix of fact and fiction that became the gospels. In creating a religion that could be acceptable under Roman rule, it was in their interests to paint it as pro-Roman and anti-Semitic as they could, while distancing it as far as possible from the insurrection that had been at its heart. They changed a lot of names, but turning the name of the hero Judas of the Sicarioi into a traitor was the greatest act of spin, and the most successful.

Judas had at least three sons and a number of grandsons, the last of whom was crucified at around ninety years of age. His daughters are not recorded, but then Josephus doesn’t ever tell us much about women unless it’s to point out how flaky they were, so I have allowed myself to assume that he had at least one daughter. Hannah was always going to take a central role in my novel – although I didn’t know until I was writing her story which of the possible men in her life would climb the wall into the goose-keeper’s garden and become the father of her child.

Of the other characters taken from history, Shimon is Simon, also known as Simon Peter, Cephas and, latterly, St Peter. It seems to me that, next to Judas the Galilean, Shimon’s memory has been most traduced by those who came after him. In
The Emperor’s Spy
, St Peter is restored to his original character as Shimon the zealot, referred to by Josephus as Sadduc/Zadok, the Galilean’s lieutenant and a senior figure in the Sicari zealots, a man who devoted his life to expelling Rome from his country and restoring a theocracy based on Hebrew texts.

As with all good books, the era has drawn me deeper than I had ever imagined, which means there are at least three more books in plan that will see Pantera, the Leopard, pursue Paul into Jerusalem and out again and then across the empire in his quest for fulfilment and peace.

¹
See ‘Sources’ for a list of the relevant letters.

My sources are too numerous to list individually, but the primary texts are as follows:

•  Tacitus, who provides most of the detail of the fire. In fact, as with the burning of Colchester and London in the Boudican revolt, without his account we would barely know it happened. I have based my timeline of the conflagration itself on his account.

•  The writings of Josephus, both ‘Antiquities’ and ‘War’, particularly those parts of ‘Antiquities’ that deal with the rise of what he terms the ‘Fourth Philosophy’ of Judaism, also known as the ‘Assembly of the Poor’ or ‘the Way’.

•  Acts, particularly the so-called ‘we’ document beginning at Chapter 16 which is narrated in the first person plural and which contains details of St Paul’s actions until the early 60s, concluding with his excommunication from the Assembly headed by James, and his flight from Jerusalem.

•  The epistles of Paul which are generally considered to be authentic, these being: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Romans 15/16. I am assuming that the insertion into 1 Corinthians 14 v 34–36 regarding the role and actions of women is a later addition. Apparently this is absent from the earliest manuscripts of this text, is added as a marginal note later, and is inserted into a number of other places before settling in its current position. The text reads perfectly acceptably without it, in fact, it makes a great deal more sense. It also clears Paul of the charge of misogyny, which otherwise doesn’t stick.

Other early sources have provided insight into the times, particularly Suetonius and Philo.

The works of Joseph Atwill (
Caesar’s Messiah
), Bart D. Ehrman (various, particularly
Lost Christianities
), Robert Eisenman (
James, the Brother of Christ
and
The New Testament Code
), Hyam Maccoby (
The Mythmaker
) and Daniel T. Unterbrink (
Judas the Galilean: the Flesh and Blood Jesus
) were key to my reconstruction of events at the time.

I don’t agree in their entirety with any of them, but an amalgamation of the concepts outlined by Eisenman, Unterbrink and Atwill in particular have enabled me to envisage a time frame and event cycle that makes sense of what is otherwise a historical morass. Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King were also immensely instructive and Paul Cresswell very kindly sent me the chapter concerning St Paul from his then unpublished work
Jesus the Terrorist
(now in press and due for publication in early 2010).

I am persuaded by Bart Ehrman that the earliest existing versions of Luke contain no reference to the Eucharist. (
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/extras/ehrman-pres.html
)

Given that Luke post-dates Paul’s letters, it may be that Paul was not its progenitor and that the instructions on its practice given in 1 Corinthians 17 are a later addition, but Paul still seems to me the most likely progenitor – only a committed anti-Semite would both annihilate the Hebrews’ covenant to their God
and
incorporate into his newly minted religion a rite that, while normal among the Greeks in their worship of Dionysus, was an abomination to the Hebrews.

For the rest, I am indebted to Justin Pollard and Howard Reid for their magnificent text on Alexandria, and particularly for the revelation that the Romans had all the technology to create a hydraulic engine, or even a steam locomotive, but that slave power was cheaper than wood and so they never took it forward.

The Oracle under the Serapeum at Alexandria is a fiction, but it is based on the one recently excavated at Baia near Naples, which replicates almost exactly the details of Virgil’s trip to Hades. The Serapeum itself was a dominant feature of Alexandria, but was destroyed by a Christian bishop some centuries later.

Quadrigas were of course driven four abreast rather than four in-hand, but the latter fitted the story better, so I have re-arranged the driving style.

In the early part of 2010, I was asked to write a short story for a ‘What if …’ compilation: what if various turning points in history had turned the other way. Mine, of course, was ‘What if the Boudica’s armies had won?’ I spend half of my life talking to people at literary festivals or in reading groups about the
Boudica: Dreaming
books, and about Pantera’s ‘Rome’ series, and we often end up discussing how life might have been had the Romans not kept their foothold in Britain, so I jumped at the chance of writing about it.

The short story went on to be published by the BBC
History
Magazine as their first item of fiction, but we include it here as something for those of you who knew Ajax when he was Cunomar, and Valerius when he was Bán, and who watched the Boudica’s daughter, Graine, from her birth, through the trauma of her rape, to her part in the final battle. It is here, too, for those of you who have only known Ajax as he is here, who have come to know only a fraction of Valerius, and Graine barely at all. For you, this is my vision of how Pantera might have been had he remained in Britain, part of a victorious army, and chosen to remain – but as a Briton, not a Roman.