The populations of the Roman provinces were permitted to worship in any way they wished, with one exception; they had to allow Caesar to be worshipped in their temples.This was incompatible with monotheistic Judaism.At the end of the 66-73 C.E. war, Flavius Josephus recorded that no matter how Titus tortured the Sicarii they refused to call him Lord.To circumvent the Jews religious stubbornness, the Flavians therefore created a religion that worshipped Caesar without its followers knowing it.
To achieve this, they used the same typological method they had used to link Jesus to Moses, creating parallel concepts, sequences, and locations.They created Jesus entire ministry as a type of the military campaign of Titus.In other words, events from Jesus ministry are symbolic representations of events from Titus campaign.To prove that these typological scenes were not accidental, the authors placed them in the same sequence and in the same locations in the Gospels as they had occurred in Titus campaign.
The parallel scenes were designed to create another story line than the one that appears on the surface.This typological story line reveals that the Jesus who interacted with the disciples following the crucifixion, the actual Jesus that Christians have unwittingly worshipped for 2,000 years, was Titus Flavius. (pages 18-19)
In Wars of the Jews, Josephus describes a sea battle where the Romans caught Jews like fish.The battle occurred at Gennesareth, where Titus attacked a band of Jewish rebels led by a leader named Jesus.39
[A]ny patricians who knew the details of the sea battle at Gennesareth would have seen the irony in a Messiah who was named Savior inventing the phrase fishers of men while standing on the beach where the Jews were caught like fish.The grim comedy is self-evident.
Only such individuals could have seen the prophetic irony in Jesus using the expression while standing on the very beach where the Jews would later be caught like fish.
If the authors of the Gospels were referring to the Jewish rebels as fish, they were using a metaphor common in the first century.40
The structure of the black comedy is important.Jesus speaks of catching men in a seemingly symbolic sense.Josephus then records that Jesus was indeed a true prophet.His vision of catching men at Gennesareth did come to pass, the cruel joke being that it came to pass literally, and not in the symbolic manner that Jesus seemed to have meant with the phrase.This is the most common structure of the dark humor created by reading the New Testament in conjunction with Wars of the Jews. (pages 48-49)
So, while at the Sea of Galilee, Jesus predicted woe for the Chorazain, and said that henceforth his disciples would follow him and become fishers for men.Titus experience was strangely parallel to Jesus prophecies in that he literally brought woe for the Chorazainians and his soldiers literally followed him and became fishers of men.That is, they fished for the inhabitants of the village named for the Coracin fish.[41]If the irony of juxtaposing the onset of Jesus ministry and Titus campaign was created deliberately, it apparently stemmed from the fact that Titus saw the sardonic humor in his fishing for the Chorazainians who have the same name as a fish as they attempt to swim to safety.[sardonic- scornfully mocking](page 50)
To summarize, though there were thousands of other possible locations, both Jesus and Titus can be said to have had the onset of their narratives at Gennesareth, and in a manner that involved fishing for men parallels that are unusual enough to at least permit questioning whether they were the product of coincidence.Further, the parallels are of the same nature as the typological relationship shown above between Jesus and Moses.The connections between Jesus and Titus are made up of parallel concepts, locations, and sequences.
Moreover, these parallels must be viewed in conjunction with the historical parallels between Jesus and Titus.Jesus predicted that a Son of Man would come to Judea before the generation that would crucify him had passed away, encircle Jerusalem with a wall, and then destroy the temple, not leaving one stone atop another.Titus was the only individual in history that could be said to have fulfilled Jesus prophecies concerning the Son of Man.He came to Jerusalem before the generation that crucified Christ had passed away, encircled Jerusalem with a wall, and had the temple demolished.
The overlap between Jesus prophecies and Titus accomplishments make the fishers of men parallel more difficult to accept as random.And this is just the beginning of the uncanny parallels between the two men, who called themselves the son of God and whose ministries began in Galilee and end in Jerusalem. (page 53)
. . . the parallels between the son of Mary described in it [Wars of the Jews] and the son of Mary in the Gospels were too precise to have been the product of circumstance.
While readers can judge this claim for themselves, it should be noted that Josephus wrote during an age in which allegory was regarded as a science. (page 55)
Scholars have not noticed the parallel between the two Marys because it is more conceptual than linguistic. (page 59)
The puzzle begins with a passage from the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus gives advice to Martha when she is troubled that her sister Mary is not helping her to serve the food.If Jesus words are interpreted symbolically, he appears to be saying that listening to his teaching is more important than serving or eating food. Though seemingly innocuous, the following passage is the most important in the entire New Testament.[innocuous- harmless]
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