The Second Crucifixion of Jesus

By Rick Massey

This book pulls no punches. We have been lied to about the origins of the New Testament, the Church, and the historical record. But what really happened?

The Second Crucifixion of Jesus peels back layers of historical development to reveal the original message the Romans and the Roman Catholic Church never wanted us to see. Evidence from the Bible, contemporaneous histories, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, is meticulously documented – but presented in a narrative that anyone can follow. 263 pages. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rick Massey
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9780578277523

Rick Massey

Rick Massey has studied Middle Eastern religion and the development of early Christianity for his entire life. He was born into the Pentecostal movement. Always studying and learning, he later became a follower of the modern Messianic Jewish movement. He learned to read the Bible in Hebrew and studied Greek at a Christian college. His path then led him to convert to Judaism and abandon the idea that the messianic prophecies point to Jesus. Today, he no longer practices or believes in any religion. He practices law (part-time) while pursuing his life-long passion of studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and middle eastern archaeology. He still maintains a passion for learning about first century Judea and the history of Jewish and Christian origins.

Book preview

An Unmarked Grave

By 68 C.E. there were two stories about Jesus: one about his life and stated purpose; and one about his afterlife. The story of his life and death was important to those who knew him, and to those who believed his life signaled the end of Roman oppression.

Some twenty years after Jesus was crucified, another story appeared. The new story was not for the Jews in Palestine who knew Jesus. They had already been written off by Roman officials. The new story was intended for the rest of the world outside the region of Roman Judea. That story was based on the character popularized by Paul of Tarsus. He never knew the Jesus of history. Nor did anyone in his reading audience.

Paul’s Jesus was in many ways, the diametric opposite of the historical Jesus. After Paul’s Jesus was resurrected from the dead, he made no effort to restore the Kingdom of Israel as the Messiah was supposed to do. Instead, he went off to heaven leaving the world with a promise that he would come back and do all that Messiah stuff later. For now, his goal was to provide the spiritual salvation the depraved Jewish people (in the eyes of Rome and of Paul) were lacking.

For Paul, the magical, mystical character, Jesus Christ did not intend to restore the Torah as prophesied in Ezekiel 24:23-44 and Zechariah 3:14-16. His mission was to replace it. For readers coming from a Christian background, it should be noted that biblical references to the Law in Christian Bibles do not reflect the original meaning of the word. As we will see below, the meaning was changed by Paul and later writers for theological reasons.

For this Jesus, Rome was not the problem. The problem was that the stubborn messianic Jews were not willing to submit to Rome and to Paul’s faith in what he himself called a different gospel. Nothing could be farther from the life and message of Jesus of Nazareth.

Discovering what Jesus was really like is not as easy as one might think. He is discussed throughout the various writings of the New Testament. But each of these writers had an underlying objective. In some cases, they needed to distance themselves from the Jews in the eyes of the Roman government. In other instances, they wanted to elaborate on what they saw as the deeper, spiritual meaning behind the events they described.

Unfortunately, none of them had the objective of simply documenting an uncensored account of Jesus’ life. Early historians tell us Matthew did. But his account, written in Hebrew, was suppressed and was not included in the collection of books known as the New Testament. The writings we now have were carefully selected in the fourth century, based on a council conducted by Eusebius to convey the message of Jesus that the Roman Emperor Constantine wanted his subjects to believe.

The last thing these compilers of the Christian scriptures were interested in communicating was anything about the actual historical Jesus. Consequently, the New Testament has a lot to say about Paul and his version of the message of Jesus while telling us almost nothing about his life.

Anything that may cast doubt on the approved version of Jesus was banned. As a result, Matthew’s original life story along with other informative accounts and background material have been forever lost.

There were contemporaneous secular accounts of Jesus, his family, and of what happened to him and his first disciples. But as we will see, those records were either dramatically altered or destroyed. The external records of his trial and execution were systematically tracked down and destroyed by edicts beginning in the fourth century.

Not coincidentally, all of this occurred at roughly the same moment in time that the text and composition of the books of the New Testament were being chosen and officially established. Over time, the biography of Jesus was replaced with that of a paper figure having virtually no background or historical context.  

Twenty years after the crucifixion, and thirty years before the earliest New Testament Gospel accounts were written, Christianity’s perceived connection to the Judean messianic movement was already beginning to cause problems for Gentile Christians throughout the Roman Empire. The movement’s central message needed to be changed.

Jesus was a Jew who proclaimed that he was the Messiah (or to use the Greek term, the Christ). He had a group of followers that did in fact consider him to be the Messiah. Before the Gentile Church succeeded in redefining that term (first for the Romans and finally for the rest of us), the only thing this could have meant was what the Hebrew text consistently conveys – the Messiah is to be the final king.

There was no room in the Roman world for a Jewish king who did not recognize the sovereignty of Rome. Within two decades after the crucifixion, the Jewish understanding of Messiah was spiritualized away in the eyes of the Gentile world by Paul and subsequent Church leaders. This cleared the path for a new religion that would be ultimately embraced by the Roman Empire itself.

Such manipulation of the definition of Messiah was not possible in Jerusalem. Those stubborn, pesky relatives of the real Jesus who led the congregation in Jerusalem stood in the way. But they would soon give their lives for their devotion to their understanding of the coming of the messianic age. 

After the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 C.E. and the conquest of Masada in 73 C.E., there was no one left to set the record straight. The only remaining target audiences for the Christian message were Hellenized Jews and their potential converts living outside Judea – in other words, Gentile Christianity.

The Gentiles living overseas had little interest in (and even less knowledge of) the execution of a renegade Jew back in Palestine. Like the Jewish Temple, Jerusalem and its Jewish citizens no longer existed.

But the esoteric theological image of Jesus Christ was still marketable. This was especially true because the image of the Jesus of Gentile Christianity was virtually identical to that of deities the Roman world already knew.

The Romans and in particular, the Greek speaking world of the middle east already believed in gods (many of whom were the product of a virgin birth) who suffered, died, and rose again on the third day.[2]

By 73 C.E., Jerusalem and its last holdouts at Masada had fallen, Jesus’ brother James had been murdered, and no one was left with the will, the knowledge, or the strength to challenge the new branding campaign.

The followers of Jesus had shared a common goal – the elimination of Roman sovereignty. The deity of the Jews was associated with messianic expectations of the end of Gentile (Roman) rule.

The Gentile Church needed a new deity that was not hostile to Roman sovereignty. Jesus had a history that, prior to the Roman devastation of Jerusalem, could be researched and verified. But everyone who knew about that history was gone. The oversees Gentile Christians could now paint on a fresh canvass. The new Greek Jesus could take his place as another one of the many existing Roman-friendly deities.

By defining the resurrected Jesus as a misunderstood spiritual entity; one that had been rejected by the Jews who were at war with Rome, the Gentile Church could now position itself as a supporter of Rome.

There was no longer a reason to understand the motives and emotions of a tragic life story once the man had been replaced with a god. At that point, a new story could be written. The result was a dramatic distortion of the historical record. What has been famously characterized as the greatest story ever told, is quite possibly the biggest story ever told.

In the following chapters, we will examine the origin and intent of the New Testament texts. It is impossible to learn much about the history of Jesus and the early Church without them. But it is likewise impossible to get an accurate picture of what happened by reading the New Testament passages as though they are unbiased, contemporary eyewitness accounts. They are in fact, none of those things.

The earliest fragmentary stories of Jesus’ early years that have survived are recorded in the New Testament books of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels.[3] While these are not the earliest New Testament writings, they are the only ones that describe Jesus in a day to day, almost ordinary context.

But the Synoptic Gospels tell us almost nothing about thirty of Jesus’ thirty-one years on this planet.[4] And they disagree about such important details as Jesus’ family tree,[5] and both the language and content of his last words on the cross. They project mixed messages with many frustrating gaps. In a nutshell, they concentrate on the Christian message rather than the person they describe. Even so, a closer look at what they do say reveals a radically different personality than the one traditionally ascribed to the legendary Jesus.

As we peal back the layers of folklore and legend, we will see that Jesus understood his destiny to be the long anticipated Davidic hero that would restore Israel to the Jewish people. He believed his mission was to fulfill the messianic prophesies. But his brother James would emerge as the driving force that held the Jerusalem congregation together for the first thirty years after his crucifixion.

Those who have not critically studied the texts of the New Testament tend to assume that the writings of Paul were a development of the history and theology of Jesus. But in fact, it was the other way around. The official history and theology of the Gentile Church (like the existing redactions of the Gospels) reflect the beliefs of the followers of Paul.

Because what James believed and taught was contrary to the views of Paul, the views of Jesus (and his brother James) were eventually distorted and almost completely erased from the recorded history of the Church.

Just as Paul never knew Jesus, James never met the Jesus portrayed in the writings of Paul. But as the saying goes, history is written by the winners. And it was the Pauline and Roman versions of history and of Jesus that were to ultimately survive the tumultuous end of the first century.

No one living at the time would have mistaken the legendary Jesus of Nazareth for the new and improved Jesus Christ of the New Testament. Like his brother James, Jesus was (contrary to the image that was imposed upon him posthumously) a strictly observant Jew.

Jesus of Nazareth was not some kind of itinerant preacher. He was a man of action. And like his brother James, Jesus was more impressed by actions than by what people said they believed.

Today we know from the writings of the Qumran community, that it was not unusual for Jewish protagonists in the first century to be highly critical of the hypocrisy of religious leaders and politicians.

But Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees was not an attack on their religion. On the contrary, he blamed them for not faithfully practicing their religion. He never complained about their faith. Their faith and his faith were one and the same. It was their works that he found hypocritical and lacking.

Jesus instructed his disciples to respect the authority of the Scribes as caretakers and interpreters of the scriptures. The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. He said. Therefore, whatsoever they command you to observe, that observe and do. . . But, he said, do not follow their example because they say and do not. Matthew 23:2-3. 

A close examination of Jesus’ words and actions will reveal that it was not traditional Judaism that he disdained. He was disgusted with the Herodian Sadducees and with the Pharisees that hid behind their religion while acting as water boys for their Roman oppressors.

It was these Jewish sellouts and the oppressive Roman domination of Jerusalem that he found intolerable. In the following chapters we will take a closer look at the subsequent dismantling and repackaging of both Jesus and James’s unwavering dedication to Jewish law.

To better understand the world into which Jesus was born, we need to explore the historical landscape of this period. The people and events that made up Jesus’ world had historical roots. It is impossible to visualize what really transpired without some knowledge of the history and politics that created his environment.

These elements will be viewed from the perspectives of Jesus and his family. This is especially important with respect to the Temple, the city of Jerusalem, and the diverse Jewish groups – some of whom benefited from Roman sovereignty, and some of whom fought it to the death.

It is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate how important the Temple and the Torah (Jewish law) were to Jesus’ people. They could not imagine a world in which either of those things was irrelevant. The Torah (which literally means the instruction) was believed to be God’s only user manual for Israel. The Temple rituals form the framework upon which much of it is based.

To the second century Gentiles who became the gatekeepers of this history, neither of those things had any importance at all. For them, the Temple no longer existed and was unnecessary.

Likewise, the Torah was a relic of unenlightened Jewish people who were now seen as the spiritual equivalent of prehistoric cavemen.

The defining moment in which all of this comes together is a three-hundred-year period of time into which Jesus was born. In the following pages, we will refer to that period as the Messianic Age.  

History follows a process similar to that of biological evolution. Every so often, a genetic mutation occurs in the course of events that dramatically changes the subsequent development of the human story.

Sometimes, the event changes everything. In other cases, the important landmark is not so much the event itself. The significance is in the response.

––––––––

Notes from Chapter I

Chapter II

Of course, you realize this will not go unchallenged.

Bugs Bunny

Historical Background

The first Temple of King Solomon was more than the center of religion and government for ancient Israel. It was the heart and soul of Jewish identity. No other symbol of Jewish national pride could be realistically placed in the same category. To insult or do harm to the Temple was quite literally the spiritual and cultural equivalent of attacking someone’s mama.  

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and plundered the Temple in 597 B.C.E. He left the city and the Temple standing but took many of Jerusalem’s youth back to Babylon. Two of Jerusalem’s prophets, Ezekiel (who was taken captive to Babylon), and Jeremiah (who stayed behind in Jerusalem) warned the interim king Zedekiah, to accept the Babylonian conquest as the judgment of God. This reaction to conquest would be a recurring theme as various powers dominated Israel over the years.

Instead of accepting the conquest of Jerusalem as divine judgment, Zedekiah joined with Egypt in revolt against Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonians returned in 587 B.C.E., and this time, in 586 B.C.E., completely destroyed the first Jewish Temple.

Many who lived in Jerusalem fled into Egypt. A large number of them established roots in what would later become known as Alexandria. They were to have a major impact on the development of Jewish and later, Christian history for hundreds of years to come.

Those who remained were either killed or taken captive back to Babylon. However, the Jews who were deported to Babylon were not all held as slaves. They soon began to assimilate and hold prominent positions in Babylonian society. The Jewish community in Babylon would become the most important center for Jewish studies in the ancient world. This would remain true long after the rebuilding of the Temple, the return of some to re-establish the city of Jerusalem, and even beyond the years after the next destruction of Jerusalem and the second Temple in 70 C.E.

Many accepted the destruction of the Temple as a sign from God that it was time to move on. They began to modify the structure of the Jewish religion to accommodate a world with no Jerusalem Temple. Previous Scriptural references to blood sacrifices were redefined as symbolic precursors to prayer and study as the ultimate acts of devotion.

For some, this was a major breakthrough in religious and cultural thought. They still loved Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. But their return to the land and more importantly, the rebuilding of the Temple and the re-establishment of the Temple rituals, were no longer necessary for the survival of the Jewish culture.

As you may imagine, this pragmatic the Babylonians ruined everything for us, let’s build on the ruins here and move on, approach did not appeal to everyone. Many were determined to never abandon their spiritual connection to Israel: their belief that they were chosen by God to live in the land of Israel, and that the Temple was the dwelling place of God on earth. The Temple was the outward manifestation of who they were.

For them, the idea of living as an observant Jew without clean, scripturally observant Temple rituals was unthinkable. They clung to the prophecies that the Kingdom of Israel would be restored, and the Temple would be rebuilt.

For them, the Babylonian captivity was not the end of the Jewish State. It was nothing more than a temporary setback. The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah foresaw a time of future restoration. They predicted a future return to Zion, a rebuilding of Jerusalem and of the Temple, and a righteous king who would lead them to live according to the Torah (the instruction of God as recorded in the Jewish Scriptures).

They were beaten, but not defeated. If the Torah was eternal, the destruction of the Temple must be temporary. The Temple was the very heart of the Torah. Permanently separating the two was impossible and unthinkable. This Messianic dream of the restoration of the Temple, the land, and the Torah, would inspire and fuel every