From Barbara Thiering’s “Jesus of the Apocalypse: the Life of Jesus after the Crucifixion” (Bantam Books; Sydney: 1995) pp. ix – xi

***********************

The historical information about Jesus that is set out in this book and in its predecessor Jesus the Man is the result of the application of a newly discovered technique, suggested by the Dead Sea Scrolls, that may be called the pesher technique.

The gospels of the New Testament, and the Book of Revelation, are written in a special language. They make not just an occasional use of symbolism, as most people would concede, but a thoroughgoing, systematic use of sequences of symbols and images, to the extent that a whole new language has been created, and one that needs special information to understand. In that sense, it is a code, although the purpose is not a trivial one.

The purpose was to record a complete and exact history of Jesus and of the events that led to the formation of the Christian Church. But to most of the audience for which it was intended ­both then and now-Christianity, with Jesus as a divine human being, was a revelation from heaven, supported by miracles and supernatural events to prove its truth. What they believed they needed was scripture, not a history book.

To those who had lived through the events, however, there was a dilemma. They knew that belief in revelation and miracles was a product of a less mature kind of faith, the faith of a child. It was a necessary step in faith, but it could not be left as the whole content of religion. There was an urgent need to give a means of growing out of fantasy into an adult religion.

The solution came from a definition of scripture that they had developed when they tried to wrestle with the unbelievable parts of the Old Testamen t. Living at a time of historical crisis for Judaism, they had come to think that their own history was contained within the pages of the Old Testament, but could be seen only because of their special knowledge. When it said, for instance, that ‘the righteous will live by faith’ and ‘the wicked will prosper’, it was not simply making general ethical statements, but was giving facts about the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest or Man of a Lie, their two leaders. Details of what had happened to these two were read into the words of the prophets.

For example, when the prophet Habakkuk wrote:

” traitors, why do you look and stay silent when the wicked one swallows up one who is more righteous than he?” (Hab 1:13),

its meaning to those who knew how to read it was:

‘Its pesher (interpretation) concerns the House of Absalom and the men of its council, who were silent at the chastisement of the Teacher of Righteousness, and they did not help him against the Man of a Lie, who flouted the Law in the midst of their whole congregation.

Scripture, then, in their view, contained hidden historical facts. In the case of the Old Testament, they had read the facts into it; they were not really there. But the definition gave them an ideal way of solving their problems. A new scripture was needed; and, moreover, they needed to record in full detail their history, a history that must, by religious necessity, remain partly secret. This time, the history would be objectively present in their scripture, because they had placed it there.

In the gospels and Acts of the New Testament, they produced a masterpiece. The outline of the real history of Jesus was given on the surface, but dressed in so much apparent miracle that he was presented as the kind of divine human being needed by simple faith. But they set up within it, by symbols, images, double meanings, special meanings, the complete history. It was placed within the stories in a way that was subject to decipherment by those in possession of the special knowl­edge required. Everyone who worked on it with the special knowledge would arrive at the same result. it was like a puzzle with a solution, and there could only be one solution.

One of the methods was to present human beings, religious leaders, in the form of supernatural beings, and real places in the form of heavenly places. Stories such as parables and miracles, apparently dealing with a metaphorical reality or another world, actually record normal human history. These are some examples from the gospels and Acts:

. When Jesus was ‘tempted by Satan’, he was in fact having political discussions with Judas Iscariot, called ‘Satan’ as a leader of political revolutionaries.

. When Jesus ‘ascended into heaven’, he actually went to a monastery, called ‘heaven’ because it was the place where priests and levites, called ‘gods’ and ‘angels’, conducted a perpetual liturgy.

. When ‘a star guided the wise men’ to the birthplace of Jesus, there was no real star. It was Joseph, his father, who was the Star of David, leading the Magians, his political associates, to witness the fact that an heir to his dynasty had been born.

. The ‘raising of Lazarus’ was a lifting of the excommunication of an expelled monk, who had ‘died’, ecause excommunication was treated as a spiritual death.

. The Prodigal Son was a real person who, when he divided his father’s property with the Elder Brother, brought about a schism in the community that was of lasting political significance.

The gospels themselves suggest the method of approach to such stories when Jesus says, in Mark 4: 11, ‘for those outside, everything is in parables’, but says to his inner circle: ‘To you has been given the secret (Greek mysterion) of the Kingdom of God’. Hellenistic literature, especially Jewish Hellenistic literature, has many examples of such a theory of scripture.

Related Reading: