The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist: According to Flavius Josephus' recently rediscovered 'Capture of Jerusalem' and the other Jewish and Christian sources

Abstract

Until the recent work of Robert Eisenman this classic by Robert Eisler was the only book really to take a fresh look at the legends of Christianity and the real facts.

Eisler asks a unique question: what if the paucity of non-biblical information about Jesus of Nazareth is not the result of his obscurity but the result of Christian bookburning and censorship? Taking the classic of Josephus, The Jewish War, and discussing its many versions, including the Slavonic version, Eisler shows how the comments of Josephus have been edited, revised, destroyed, and reinterpreted by Christians to make Jesus out to be what he was not and John the Baptist to be what he was not. Both were heavily involved in rebellious movements against Roman rule and Jewish priestly collaboration. The Christian Church after 70AD and particularly after Constantine could not allow this to be known; they worked instead to make Jesus a non-political god rather than a real Jewish apocalyptic and Zealot.

Here for the first time we have an anti-Christian history, recovered from the censorship of the Christians. We come to see how the real Jesus has been concealed from us. Only Robert Eisenman today has taken up this theme in his works on James of Jerusalem, sharing with Eisler not the particular view of Josephus so much as the conviction that the real Jesus had nothing to do with Paul of Tarsus' imaginary Jesus.

In all fairness I should also mention S.G.F. Brandon's Jesus and the Zealots as a work in this general school of trying to get behind the romance and distortion of the Gospels and the Book of Acts.