By Peter Longley
I am a writer of historical Fiction, but these days, like so many, I am constantly battling the current debate about this genre. Outside crime and memoir, historical fiction is possibly the most enjoyed form of fiction on the market these days, but nonetheless it faces the scrutiny of the purists. Can you write about real people of historic interest subjectively, or must you only see them through the provenance of their historic record? One of the most successful writers of historical fiction today is Hilary Mantel with her brilliant trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, but is this her Thomas Cromwell or the Thomas Cromwell of history? How much of Thomas Cromwell’s dialogue and thoughts are based on actual written documentation and how much is in the flight of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant imagination and characterisation? Then, there is Netflix’s The Crown that is so effectively acted and produced, but how much can you claim fictional plots and twists if you are writing about well-known people whose lives are established in the public record? Mary Beard, the popular classicist from Cambridge, has certainly put her stamp on new interpretations of life in ancient Greece and Rome. Perhaps this is a little easier as the further back we go in history the less obvious the provenance becomes. Finally, dare I say it, but how about the ‘black’ Ann Boleyn. We all know from the portraiture of her in the Sixteenth Century that Ann Boleyn was racially white, so how can a prominent historical character like her be presented as black? Here we are in the difficult area of the purpose of historical fiction. Are we recording history, or are we presenting a fictional drama around the lives of real people? What is our agenda and purpose in writing? Is it to put some contemporary twist on lives and stories from the past. If so, then a ‘black’ Ann Boleyn can certainly carry a powerful message, but however good the actor might be, we have surely lost a tangible connection with the real historic person.
When it came to writing about the rise of Christianity in the first century AD, I was faced with all the above problems, as I tried to sift through archaeology, a few contemporary documents, past historic interpretations, and the popular expressions of Biblical Epic movie moghuls. I had to strive to unearth a historical Jesus. A man who could inspire the movement that by the end of the First Century and beginning of the Second Century lays out Jesus’ life in the form, that admittedly with numerous contradictions, we find in the canonically accepted gospels of St Mark, St Matthew, St Luke and St John. What actual contemporary evidence is there of Jesus? Sadly, there is not much. Although he was in my opinion probably literate, he left us nothing that he might have written. There are no contemporary records of his life or family. So what provenance of Jesus do we have? Possibly, just two things—Christians say in their creed, Jesus ‘was crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ That is the only concrete fact of his life, for we know with certainty that Pontius Pilatus was the Prefect of Judea from 26 AD to 36 AD. Pilatus leaves no record of Jesus’ crucifixion, but linking Jesus’ death to his prefecture at least gives us a strong sense that the crucifixion was real and took place sometime between 26 AD and 36 AD. The second is even more obscure—a tomb has been found in northern India that has an inscription on it showing the Jewish Aramaic name Yeshua (often anglicised as Joshua). This led to fringe scholars and romantic fictionalists believing, seeing that such a name would not have been common in India, that Jesus might have really died in India. This theory was particularly well researched by the German theologian Holger Kersten in her book Jesus Lived in India. Well, someone of that name certainly did live in India as the tomb has been accurately dated to the First Century. This leads to much speculation that Jesus might have survived the crucifixion. This could explain the empty tomb, or that at some point in the missing years of the Jesus of our canonical gospels, where a gap is found between the age of twelve and the approximate age of 30, Jesus might have ventured to India, and that the crucifixion either never took place, or if Jesus survived it, he returned to India where he might have deemed his life to be safe. Here, we are definitely falling heavily into the realm of pure fiction. I personally, do not subscribe to any such theories and am quite happy to accept that Jesus was crucified and died under Pontius Pilatus. Surely, if Jesus had earlier travelled to India, this would somehow have been noted in the probable oral traditions that eventually lead to the canonical gospels? It would have been an enormous event in his life, and one on which he could have drawn for many stories in his teachings. Yet, we still do have the mystery of that tomb in northern India and I will come back to this later.
We do have plenty of evidence, however, of St Paul and St Luke. They have both left us important contemporary written documentation on both their lives and the early rise of Christianity. Most of the letters of St Paul can be pretty safely attributed to him, and the book of the Acts of the Apostles is almost certainly the earlier work of St Luke, and tells us much about the life of St Paul. We base this on the similarity of the Greek in both the Acts and the Gospel of St Luke and more importantly on the change of tense after St Paul receives his commission to cross from Troas in Asia Minor to spread the new Christian message in Macedonia. If the writer is Lukas, a probable physician from the great medical centre of Pergamon, not far from Troas, it seems that the writer of Acts by using the first person voice, actually travels with Paul into Greece and possibly remains with him as the witness who records the life of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles all the way to Paul’s arrival in Rome. In his letters, Paul frequently refers to his ‘thorn in the flesh’, some life-long medical condition that was not life threatening, but obviously bothered him. I would suggest that Lukas the physician from Pergamum became his travelling physician. Again, if we look at the gospel of St Luke, we find it to be the gospel that most concentrates on the healing abilities of Jesus during his ministry, including some of the almost psychiatric counselling that was prevalent in the great medical centre of Pergamon. Incidentally, Pergamon was also the medical centre where the great Galen trained, the most important medical authority of the Graeco-Roman world.
For me, there is certainly enough circumstantial evidence for the life of Jesus, even if for the most part not from eyewitnesses. The canonical gospels start with St Mark that was written possibly just before and just after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 AD. All but 66 verses are literally repeated in the other three gospels of St Matthew, St Luke and St John making the strong argument that it was the first written record. St Luke probably comes next when after Paul’s disappearance in Rome in approximately 64 AD, Lukas assembles first his record of Paul in the Acts and then, after St Mark’s gospel becomes known, writes his gospel around about 80 AD. St Matthew’s gospel probably appears about 95 AD and the gospel of St John possibly is not completed until as late as 110 or 120 AD. They are certainly written as agendas for various communities of late first-century and early second-century communities of Christians. They were certainly not written by eyewitness apostles. The Gospel of St Mark is the only one that approaches an eyewitness record as it records a unique incident on the night of Jesus’ betrayal. The author describes how a young boy fleeing the Garden of Gethsemane loses his loin cloth, and we presume that this is St Mark himself (St Mark 14:51). In the Flavian Trilogy I do take this license by having this young Marcus as a child of Mary Magdalene, and thus living as a camp follower with the twelve chosen ones. Do not jump to conclusions, however, as I do not fictionalise this Marcus as a child of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Some have, but I will explain my reasons for not doing so later. Even this child would have been a fair age by the time of St Mark’s gospel and his memory of life as a camp child among the disciples of Jesus would be limited to those of a probable pre-adolescent boy. I would suggest, therefore, that if the author of St Mark’s gospel is this child he relies heavily for his information on the plausible oral tradition of someone like St Peter, but oral traditions are subjective and tend to change as they are passed along. They are not the most reliable historical record.
When it comes to oral traditions, legend starts to play a significant part, as legend, although unproven and often fanciful, stems from the old adage that ‘there is no smoke without fire’. Somewhere, deep in legends there is an element of plausible truth. This can become a valuable source for the writer of historical fiction.
Two of my major characters in The Flavian Trilogy are historic characters of legend—Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea. They are possibly based on real people, but we have no direct historical evidence of them. Mary Magdalene occupies but a few verses in the canonical gospels almost entirely related to the fact recorded in all four gospels that she was present at the burial of Jesus and the first to witness his resurrection. Whether she can actually also be attributed to the sinner and presumed prostitute whom Jesus saves from stoning, or as the woman with the alabaster jar of precious ointment who anoints Jesus, is not obvious fact. The name Mary or Maria, was common in the Graeco-Roman world and in the Jewish world as Miriam, and the gospels confuse their stories. It does seem fact based on some strong oral tradition unknown to us, however, that Mary Magdalene was significant among the apostles at the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection. So there must have been some kind of special relationship between them. By the mid-second century, Mary Magdalene has become significantly well known to be ascribed as the source of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene among the Nag Hammadi texts of the infant Coptic Church in Egypt. Among the texts are also found the Gospels of Philip and Thomas, both with interesting insights on the character of Mary Magdalene, including the now famous line in the Gospel of Philip that ‘Jesus often kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth’. In truth, the word mouth is missing in the Greek Coptic text, but it enabled Dan Brown to base his best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, on this spark surrounding a legend that Mary Magdalene had a child by Jesus, whom she brought up in Massilia (Marseilles) in Roman Gaul in the south of France, and that their descendents became the Kings of France. Long before Dan Brown, however, Nikos Kazantzakis, had also alluded to the legend that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children. In his novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, he is less blatent, hiding the legend within a day-dream sequence where Jesus is tempted by the devil to free himself from the cross and marry Mary Magdalene. Kazantzakis in 1955 was, however, excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church. When the book was made into a Martin Scorcese film in 1988, it was also banned by many religious groups. By 2003, Dan Brown, had better luck. The Da Vinci Code was discussed by scholars within the Christianity, and many churches held discussion groups on the role of Mary Magdalene in the life of Jesus. I had myself just published my first novel, Two Thousand Years Later,that is actually an introductory novel to The Flavian Trilogy that I actually first wrote in 1988. I was invited to speak on the panel of scholars at a Christian church on the topic in 2003. Originally published in the USA as The Magdala Trilogy, my trilogy has now been revised as The Flavian Trilogy, principally because Mary Magdalene, although an important character in all three books is not as important as the truly fictitious and protagonist character, Linus Flavian.
The legend of Mary Magdalene is also closely linked to the legends of Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph of Arimathea is a very minor biblical character, who apparently persuaded the Roman and High Priestly authorities to allow the crucified Jesus to be buried in a tomb he had prepared for himself in the Garden of Tombs just outside Jerusalem’s northern gate—the site today of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He must have been influential to have achieved this as the bodies of supposedly crucified criminals were normally just buried in a common pit. We are told no more about him in Scripture, but legends about Joseph of Arimathea abound. We find him associated with Mary Magdalene in Gaul. We find him associated with the Cornish tin trade in Britannia, which becomes the basis of the Glastonbury legends of how the Holy Grail, or Jesus’ cup from the last supper, made its way to England. Another massively popular book The Holy Blood and Holy Grail by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh was published in 1982. The authors put forward a hypothesis that the historical Jesus married Mary Magdalene, had one or more children, and that those children or their descendents emigrated to what is now southern France. Once there, they intermarried with the noble families that would eventually become the Merovingian dynasty, whose special claim to the throne of France is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion. They concluded that the legendary Holy Grail is simultaneously the womb of Mary Magdalene and the sacred royal bloodline. An international bestseller upon its release, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail spurred interest in a number of ideas related to its central thesis. Response from professional historians and scholars from related fields was negative. They argued that the bulk of the claims, ancient mysteries, and conspiracy theories presented are pseudo-historical. Historian Richard Barber called the book “the most notorious of all the Grail pseudo-histories, which proceeds by innuendo, not by refutable scholarly debate.”
In a 1982 review of the book for The Observer, novelist and literary critic Anthony Burgess wrote: “It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel.” Is all this beginning to sound familiar? The theme was indeed later used by Margaret Starbird in her 1993 book The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, and by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code.
In my novels, Joseph of Arimathea’s wealth comes from his vast trading empire. He encounters Jesus when Jesus is healing the sick in Bethany. Coming forward, Joseph seeks healing, and believing himself to be cured he becomes a follower. He has sympathy for Mary Magdalene as he sees her shunned by Judas Iscariot and the inner three apostles, Cephas (Simon Peter), James and John (the fishermen sons of Zebedee). After the crucifixion, when it is found that Mary Magdalene is pregnant and that Jesus is probably the father, the apostles turn on her in fear. Joseph, then takes Mary Magdalene away with her older child, Marcus, and sets her up in Massilia in Gaul where through the House of Arimathea he seeks to expand into the lucrative new tin trade with Britannia. Mary’s child with Jesus is born in Gaul and she names him Ben Joshua after his father, Yeshua or Joshua being the Aramaic for Jesus, and how he would have been known in his lifetime. Joseph of Arimathea never marries Mary Magdalene in my fictitious account, but he financially takes care of her and adopts her two sons and buys them Roman citizenship. Marcus is old enough to venture into the tin trade with Joseph, while Ben Joshua grows up in Massilia. So my story becomes a less far-fetched, and I believe a more plausible version of the same legend. At this point, I will not reveal who was Marcus’ fictitious father as that will come later, along with an explanation of the legend of Yeshua in India based on that tomb in Kashmir.
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Imagine a map of the known world in the First Century as perceived by the Romans. Within a red line boundary is the Roman Empire, including the recently incorporated first-century Britannia. On the extreme right in yellow is China that was then ruled by the Han Dynasty. There was in the First Century AD considerable contact between these two empires, and the exchange between the two was in the area of India, both overland in the Himalayas and by sea on the east coast of India in what is today the Bay of Bengal. The fictitious House of Arimathea that I create in my novels and that becomes the inheritance of Marcus and Ben Joshua straddles this network from Britannia to India.
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I would like to share with you a story about my Hebrew professor when I was an undergraduate reading theology at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, in the early 1960s. He was a famous collector of coins from the ancient world. He would hold one up to us and say something like, “See this…there is one in the Asmolean Museum at Oxford. There is one in the British Museum and I have the third.” He taught us the movement of ancient empires of the Biblical period through his remarkable collection of coins.
Throughout the Middle East from the time of Alexander the Great in 333 BC until the Arab conquests in about 700 AD, Greek coinage was the universal currency of the Middle East, but local currencies and Roman currency also circulated. Goods were often exchanged for other goods as they made their way between the empires of Rome and the Han. Often acting as a guarantee, were gold, frankincense and myrrh, mostly picked up where the incense trees still grow to this day along the fringe of the Arabian desert where it meets the Arabian sea in today’s Oman. They provided value in both directions as highly wanted commodities both in the Graeco-Roman world and on the sub-continent of India and in China beyond. So, I would like to start with the story of the Magi and the importance of Petra in the Nabatean kingdom.
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Camels were of enormous importance in handling this trade of the Middle East in the Graeco-Roman world of the First Century. As much of this terrain is desert, the camel is particularly well suited with its capacity to store water in its hump. It is not surprising, therefore that the useful camel is often called the ship of the desert. They are, however, not a comfortable ride for the novice.
I am a reasonably competent horseman, but I have not mastered the art of comfortably riding a camel. A camel’s saddle, and the design has not changed much since biblical times, has two large wooden pommels in the front and back. The front pommel certainly gives you something to hold onto, but in the see-saw motion of a camel’s gait, unless you are an expert they can become a most uncomfortable ride. You have no stirrups and as the gait swings you back and forth, those wooden pommels have a nasty habit of hitting you in the lower back and stomach. I once took an all-day safari trip out from Aqaba into the Wadi Rum in Jordan with thoughts of Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia yelling “To Aqaba! To Aqaba!” Alas, it was one of the most uncomfortable rides of my life.
The story of the Magi is perhaps the most common depiction on religious Christmas cards. Three kings, wise men, or rich merchants, by legend named Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, are seen riding camels under the stars and being led to the place where Jesus was born. There, they present gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the holy mother and child, that in the Christian tradition is to show the epiphany or realisation that they are in the presence of the Messiah or Prince of Peace. In reality, however, as rich merchants arriving in Bethlehem at the time of a Roman census, they would probably have also found no room at an inn. Like Joseph and Mary they probably settled to spend the night with shepherds in caves in the rugged terrain just outside the city. So why were they travelling this road?
They had almost certainly come from Petra in the Nabatean kingdom to the southeast of Judea across the barren wilderness to the south of the Dead Sea. Petra was the last city on the long trading routes across the Arabian desert from the incense coast of today’s Gulf of Oman or further north above the gulf into the lands of Chaldea and Persia. By legend, the three rich merchants were Chaldean. Petra grew wealthy on tariffs collected on these travelling goods before they entered the Roman Empire and the Nabateans had been accumulating fortunes trading first with Ptolomaic Egypt and after the Roman defeat of Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, with the new Roman Empire. Alexandria was the most prosperous city of the Graeco-Roman World as the means of exporting goods from the Orient to Rome. Herod the Great, the vassal King of Judea, was himself half-Nabatean and sought part of this lucrative trade for himself. He built a magnificent port in difficult terrain on the Judean coast to rival the older ports of Tyre and Sidon in Phoenicia further north. He dedicated his new port to the Emperor Augustine naming it Caesarea Maritima. His real intent, however, was to siphon off some of the Alexandrine trade from Petra for his own benefit. These Chaldean merchants were probably taking advantage of these new possibilities wanting to strike up trading deals with Rome through Herod the Great. On their way from Petra to Judea they would travel what has come to be known as Herod’s ‘Fortress Road’ passing two hill fortifications with Royal palaces at Masada and Herodium passing the boundary from the desert wastes into this revival of the ‘land of milk and honey.’ Bethlehem was on this desert fringe about six miles south of Jerusalem.
Petra from whence they had come, is set in a depression of rose coloured rocks in the Arabian desert where a water source from the north was cleverly channeled from storage dams in the rocky terrain into the heart of the city. To enter the city camel trains had to pass through a narrow siq in the pink rocks to arrive at the Treasury Square where tariffs were collected before they could go on into the busy city markets. An amazing building greets the traveller as he comes out of the siq into the Treasury Square. It is often called the Treasry building, but in reality it is a Nabatean tomb probably of a wealthy trader. It is interesting as it was hollowed out of the rock from about 4 BC until 30 AD the exact time of the probable earthly life of Jesus Christ. The building has became popularly recognised as the central goal of Indiana Jones in the film The Last Crusade.
From Treasury Square into the city you pass many other magnificent rock tombs of wealthy Nabateans and also a first century theatre. All these buildings, like the Treasury Building have been carved out of the solid rock—an enormous undertaking probably almost entirely accomplished through slave labour. I have visited the ruins of Petra many times and I am always amazed at the dedication that went into the construction of these amazing tombs. Petra is of course the Greek for Rock and so much of the city is literally carved out of this rose coloured rock. The importance of the Greek language throughout the Graeco-Roman world is also illustrated in how Simon Peter got his name. Jesus in Aramaic gave his leading apostle the name Cephas which is the Aramaic for rock. He was in part moved to do this as there were two apostles with the name Simon among the twelve, but it was also a sign of his leadership when the author of St Matthew writing in Greek quotes Jesus as saying (Matthew 16:18) “And I tell you that you are ‘Petros’ and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
Impressive gates lead into the actual city of Petra in the central plain of the desert depression and lead into the market street where could be found the numerous traders and the essential camel lots. This was the business centre of Nabatean Petra. Similar cities were found at the last posts before entry into the Roman Empire, most notably Palmyra in Syria and ancient Damascus. They do not have the stunning pink rock of Petra, however, that changes in intensity at different times of the day.
Was there one particularly bright star that could have led the Magi? In the winter of 7 BC Halley’s comet was visible in the Middle East and just might have been the star of wonder if it really is a part of the nativity story. In 5 BC there was an interesting planetary illusion creating an unusually bright star mass where Jupiter and Saturn came into alignment. Such alignment is rare and has only occurred three times since, the last time being in the winter of 2020. Could this have been the Christmas star? If Herod the Great is truly a part of the nativity story, we know the historical date of his death which was in the spring of 4 BC. If the story of the slaughter of the holy innocents in Bethlehem is true, then to align with the star story, the 5 BC date seems the most likely for the birth of Jesus.
Bethlehem today is almost a dormitory town of Jerusalem, but in the first century, it was the place where the desert met the sown. It was a small town, but it had a great history. It had been the birthplace of King David, the iconic hero of Judaism, the shepherd boy who had become the anointed king of the Jews.
For Christians Bethlehem is universally considered to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The very word ‘Christos’ in Greek means ‘the anointed one’. We see the humble birthplace of this Prince of Peace as a stable because there was no room at the inn, but it is far more likely that the birth was in a cave outside the crowded city, where shepherds sheltered their flocks. The shepherds have become an integral part of the nativity story. Such a site was chosen in the fourth century by the Dowager Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. She made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and founded several commemorative churches at plausible biblical sites. Her site just outside the fourth century village is now in the heart of Bethlehem at Manger Square. It is, of course, the Church of the Nativity occupied by several different denominations. In the crypt at the most sacred spot, you can peer down through a silver star and look into an ancient cave. The historicity of this site and the many others founded both by Empress Helena in the Fourth Century and Empress Theodora in the Sixth Century are questionable, based on logic and imagination with possibly foundations of oral tradition, but they are venerated by the entire Christian world giving focus to the gospel stories.
Only St Matthew and St Luke tell the Nativity story centered on Bethlehem. The writers of St Mark and St John leave us with the impression that Jesus was born and brought up in Galilee. So why did the Bethlehem tradition become so important? The answer lies in the legitimacy of that Davidic messiahship. The prophet Isaiah predicts in a message of future hope that, “in that day there shall be a Root of Jesse, who shall stand as a banner to the people; for the Gentiles shall seek him, and his resting place shall be glorious.” (Isaiah 11:10). Jesse was the biblical father of David and the founder of the legitimate line of anointed kingship, redemption and messiahship. Messiah in Hebrew and Aramaic translates as ‘the Anointed one’, which is the same as the Christ in Greek and Latin.
The Herods were the puppet kings legitimised at Rome’s bidding to rule in Judea. They were not of the Davidic bloodline and were considered by Jewish zealots as usurpers in league with the Romans. It is understandable, therefore, that when Herod hears of the birth of this Prince of Peace of the Davidic line from the Magi, he reacts in fear of a zealot threat to the legitimacy of his own rule and that of his heirs.
In terms of Christian origins, Herod the Great is mostly remembered for his slaughter of the innocent babies of Bethlehem on hearing of a plausible threat to his claim on the throne by the birth of a prince of Judah, of Davidic lineage rather than Herod’s rather bogus Nabatean lineage. St Matthew 2:15-18. “And Herod sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem and in all the coasts thereof, from two years of age and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.” It is known that Herod the Great was suffering from severe illness in the last year of his life that led to irrational periods of rage.
A Sunday school teacher once asked her class to draw a picture of their favourite bible story. One boy drew a picture of a sort of a stick man with a beard leading a two dimensional donkey with large pointed ears, and a stick lady seated on the donkey holding in one, six-fingered hand, a suitcase with the initials JC inscribed upon it. In her other arm, she held a small stick child. A long string was attached to the donkey’s tail with a blob at the end. When asked what bible story this depicted, the boy said “This is Joseph, with Mary and the babe pulling along the flea that is the blob at the end of the string.” The teacher looked curious until the boy said confidently, “You know…When the angel said to Joseph, ‘Take Mary and the babe and flea into Egypt.” That is possibly one of the most important verses in the New Testament, and now you will probably always remember it thanks to that boy’s drawing. In Egypt, the holy family probably settled in Alexandria. This is highly significant.
We hear nothing else in the gospels until Jesus is twelve years old and astounds the Temple sages in Jerusalem with his knowledge. There are two things about that story that are interesting in trying to sort the fiction from fact. Jesus appears to have been well educated, probably with competence in three languages—Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. The Jewish scriptures in Jerusalem were written in Hebrew and discussed in Aramaic, but the scriptures in Alexandria were written in Greek and discussed both in Aramaic and Greek. Alexandria was the largest Jewish community in the Graeco-Roman world and mostly Greek speaking. It would have been into this rather learned community into which the child Jesus was thrust. The second interesting thing to note is that at the age of twelve after the family have returned from Egypt, presumably to live in Nazareth of Galilee, Jesus is presented at the Temple. Temple presentation was a sort of rite of passage for adolescent boys of the better families of Jewish society. A Galilean peasant would have been unlikely to have been presented at the Temple.
In the Coptic Nag Hamadi texts of the second century there are two works that flesh out some ideas about Jesus’ background—The Book of Mary and The Infancy Narratives. They were written at least a hundred years after the crucifixion and probably even later, and are unlikely to be very accurate, but they do give us some interesting insights. They tell of the Virgin Mary’s family. We learn she was the daughter of Joachim and Anna. We find that Anna is the sister of Elizabeth, who is married to the High Priest in Jerusalem. There obviously was a strong oral tradition to this effect as it is also echoed in the opening chapter of St Luke’s gospel where Zechariah and Elizabeth are shown to be the parents of Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. The Book of Mary shows us that Mary was brought up as a sort of ward of Zechariah at a House of the Virgins, whose young girls were dedicated to God in their early lives at the house in a private corner of the Temple. The sacrifice of offering his daughter to the House of the Virgins was in appeasement for his having to give up the priesthood he had held at the Temple as he had not been able to raise up sons. Raising sons for the priesthood was an expected requirement in these hereditary priestly families. There is no solid historic evidence for any of this, but it is early legend and spurned these second century documents. It feeds into the realm of historical fiction and gives us that hint that Jesus may have come from an upper-class Jewish background rather than the traditional peasant background. Even in the canonical gospels it does seem that Jesus is able to mingle and communicate with Aramaic and Greek-Speaking persons freely.
I would like to think that the Davidic Joseph, who marries the Virgin Mary, was from a probably impoverished family who had once been prominent, but fallen on hard times. If Joseph had children from a previous marriage as by legend he was considerably older than Mary, it is possible that James, the brother of the Lord, found to be the first real leader of Jewish followers of the risen Lord in Jerusalem according to The Acts of the Apostles, might have also been quite literate and a student of the scriptures. He could have joined his family in Egypt and become Jesus’ mentor during those early years.
There are glimpses of life in Egypt in The Infancy Narratives. I particularly like one story where the young boy Jesus is shown working in a brick-making factory with his father and he slacks off, making mud birds out of the slime of mud and straw, dreaming of becoming a healer of animals. It is logical that as a builder from Bethlehem, Joseph would have worked in an associated trade in Alexandria. His eldest son, James, however, being the literate one, might have worked at the great Jewish Synagogue library, which in the early First Century AD spurned such great Jewish scholars as Philo. Someone had to mentor Jesus if he were to become the youth who could astound the Jerusalem scribes and scholars when he was twelve. I believe that might have been James, his step-brother. In all probability, however, after a decade in Egypt, in order to avoid the chaos in Judea on the deposition of Archelaus, Herod’s son who had reigned from 4 BC to 6 AD as King of Judea, the family moved to the more secure kingdom of Antiphas in Galilee and settled in Nazareth possibly because Jesus’ grandparent s were living there. Joseph would have then been able to set up his own building business again and Jesus probably worked beside him as a carpenter.
Before leaving the Bethlehem story, however, I must allude again to the second-century rebellion of Nasi Simon Bar Kochba. The initial uprising against Roman rule in 132 AD was surprisingly successful. Initially, the Romans were defeated and Simon Bar Kochba became the leader of the Jews. His story is found in Josephus, where he is given the title Nasi Bar Kochba that in Aramaic translates as ‘The Prince of the Star’. The Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva regarded Simon as the Jewish Messiah associating the title ‘Son of the Star’ in Aramaic from the prophecy verse found in Numbers 24:17: “There shall come a star out of Jacob.” As a result, for three brief years Simon Bar Kochba persecuted Judean Christians claiming they had a false messiahship in Jesus and that he was the true messiah. What is interesting is that they both believe in the symbolism of a star. Bar Kochba was finally defeated by the Emperor Hadrian’s legions making his last stand close to Bethlehem at Betar, having been driven out of the fortress of Herodium in 135 AD.
At last, as I promised, we come back to India and that legend connecting Jesus with India. As I earlier stated, I do not believe personally that Jesus was ever in India, but we do have that mysterious piece of historic evidence that someone of the same name, Yeshua or Joshua in Aramaic, was buried in a first-century tomb in northern India.
We must start this investigation with Alexander the Great and his conquest of the entire Middle East in the latter part of the Fourth Century BC. The Macedonian commander brought Greek culture to most of the known world, including beyond the lands of Persia and Chaldea to the great sub-continent of India, where he briefly conquered much of the Punjab.
On the death of Alexander the Great in 321 BC in Susa about which in itself you could write a whole book, Alexander’s empire was divided up between five of his generals—Antipater, Perdiccas, Ptolemy I, Seleucus I, Antigonus I, and Lysimachus. Inevitably, a civil war ensued that eventually carved the empire up into four, with the Seleucid Empire the largest and the Ptolomaic Empire in Egypt probably the most prosperous and significant. Antigonus was the loser, ceding Asia Minor to the Seleucids and the Kingdom of Macedon was increased in Greece.
Although Alexander the Great had advanced quite far into northern India he was personally forced to retreat before he died, so that the Indian sub-continent was not divided up as the spoils of his sudden death in Susa. Through the extensive trade that then followed, however, between the Seleucid Greek or Hellenist empire and India, the Greek language and culture was imported. It is extremely interesting to look at India as it was three hundred years later, where Greek trading posts were found throughout the country.
I remember being very surprised when visiting India for the first time in 1970 to see the famous Greek-key design of parallel right angles as a frieze in the stonework of Hindu temples of the Second Century BC. I did not then realise the enormity of the legacy of Alexander the Great even as far away as India. During the Hellenic period in the Middle East, Greece itself declined, and two great empires rose in the west and east. Rome defeated Carthage in the three Punic Wars pathing her way for the conquest of the Mediterranean Greek-speaking world, culminating in the defeat of Cleopatra, the Ptolomaic Queen of Egypt. This ended the power struggle between Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, both of whom had courted the Egyptian queen. Octavian and Mark Antony were bitter rivals. Gaius Octavius, also known as Octavian, was Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted child. Octavian, Antony, and Marcus Lepidus were part of a triumvirate that ruled Rome after Caesar’s death, but Antony and Octavian each wanted complete control over Rome. Octavian, as the victor of Antium that was actually fought in the Ionian Sea off Greece in 31 AD, not only acquired the Ptolomaic Empire of Cleopatra, but also himself became the victor over the triumvirate and was proclaimed the first emperor of the Romans as Augustus Caesar founding the first-century lineage of the twelve Caesars.
Roman conquest continued in Britannia during the First Century AD, but in the Mediterranean world the century was the ‘Pax Romana’, where apart from the Jewish War of 66-74 AD there was almost continuous peace and trade flourished.
The other great empire of the period lay to the east on the far side of India, the enormously successful and well advanced Han Empire of China. The indirect exchange of goods on land along the Silk Road and sea routes involved Chinese silk, Roman glassware and high-quality cloth. In Chinese records, the Roman Empire came to be known as Daqin or Great Qin. Roman coins minted from the 1st century AD onwards have been found in China, as well as a coin of Maximian, who was Roman emperor from 286 to 305, and earlier medallions from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius in the second century. Chinese records claim that Romans first actually landed in Jiaozhi in present-day Vietnam. Roman glassware and silverware have been discovered at Chinese archaeological sites dated to the Han period that reached its height in the late First Century AD. Roman coins and glass beads have also been found in Japan. India was the pivot of this trade. It built up throughout the First Century AD.
I want to take you to southern India, to Cochin today, but it was Kotiara then, one of many Greek-speaking trading posts of first-century India. It is in the tropical south, steamy and hot. In the previous photograph we see Indian fishermen of today getting their boats ready at Cochin as the sun rises. In front of the sun, we see the jungle foliage in silhouette. I doubt things looked much different 2,100 years ago. Even the design of the boats was probably similar. For the Romans, however, Kotiara was the starting point of an overland route from the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal on India’s east coast. A trail of Roman coins have been found between what is today Cochin and the area that is now Chennai but was formerly known as Madras. Graeco-Roman merchants established themselves in Kotiara in the middle of the First Century and some of them were Jewish. Cochin has the oldest synagogue in India and still has a thriving Jewish community.
On the far end of this trail of Roman coinage found in southern India, in a quiet suburb to the north of Chennai, is a Christian church devoted to Thomas the Apostle, supporting the ancient legend that ‘Doubting’ Thomas also known as Didymous the twin, founded the first community of Judaic Christians in India.
Let us imagine that Thomas who disappears from the New Testament story after the resurrection appearances, finds himself in Egypt where he is rediscovered by Marcus and Joseph of Arimathea opening up exciting new trade routes from Alexandria and Nabatean Petra to India. In the Flavian Trilogy Thomas becomes the House of Arimathea’s man for the task. Eventually, goods start to flow back to the House of Arimathea from India, including the silks and cloths of the Han Empire. Marcus, after he has established his half-brother, Ben Joshua, as his partner, sends Ben Joshua on a quest to link up with Thomas in India. Through the trading posts of the House of Arimathea, they finally do meet up and Thomas takes Ben Joshua with him from Kotiara to Chennai. It has all the atmospheric excitement for the novelist of introducing Ben Joshua, this fictitious but plausible son of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, to the colour and glamour of first-century India. These characters can travel by elephant in an exotic country quite different from the Roman world. At the far coast, Ben Joshua sees ships of the Han Empire twice the size of Roman galleys and people of a different physique, who speak a strange language quite unlike any he has ever heard. And yet it all slots neatly into the legend that Thomas was in India.
There are no written vowels in Aramaic or Hebrew, so Ben Joshua’s name, probably pronounced Yeshua, also would have sounded to Thomas’ Indians like “Yeshiva” or son of the great Hindu god. Inevitably, Thomas would have mixed his interpretations of the message of Jesus with local customs and imagery, just as the Jesuits did in China and Japan centuries later. Ben Joshua could have become fascinated in this world already steeped in Mary Magdalene’s probable interpretation of a Jesus who had preached the divinity of all life, making us all sons of God. Was this the reason she had seen the face of Jesus in the gardener at the tomb of her risen lover? Ben Joshua was not brought up in the strictures of the early Jerusalem church or Temple, but in his mother’s convictions, and he could adapt those in whatever way he chose in India.
Could Thomas have eventually sent Ben Joshua to northern India to seek connections for the House of Arimathea between Rome and the overland Himalayan ‘silk road’ into the Han Empire? Possibly, but few were able to establish this road in the First Century. Fierce Kushan tribesmen controlled the passes and valleys of the extreme north and acted as middle men taking goods both from Rome and China, but not allowing Graeco-Roman or Han traders to actually meet each other. If Ben Joshua was killed by such Kushan tribesmen he would be lost to history, except we find this strange tomb in northern India dedicated to one named Yeshua or Yeshiva. The stuff of legend has now given us a plausible truth. This can be historical fiction. It is pure speculation, but it certainly poses interesting discussion.
Among the Gnostic gospels of the Coptic church of second-century Egypt is the Gospel of Thomas. It is largely based on sayings of Jesus that are unlikely to be accurate, but show the philosophical view of a very different but possibly equally significant missionary of the first century as the great Paulus, from whom grew the Christian church.
By the end of the First Century the building up of trade with the Han Chinese Empire in the Indian Ocean was well established. Roman geographers such as Ptolemy in the second century AD, provided a rough sketch of the eastern Indian Ocean, including the Malay Peninsula, and beyond this the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. Ptolemy’s ‘Cattigara’ was most likely Óc Eo, Vietnam, where Antonine-era Roman items have been found. Ancient Chinese geographers also demonstrated a general knowledge of West Asia and of Rome’s eastern provinces.