In my previous post I mentioned a modern forgery that claimed Jesus never actually died on the cross.  Some of those who read that will probably have immediately thought of a modern scholar who with great sensational flair and vigor argued precisely that: Hugh Schonfield in his once (and in some circles still) popular book The Passover Plot.

I discuss that as well, but only briefly, in my book Forged (HarperOne, 2011).  Here is what I say there – with an opening paragraph that sets it up by mentioning several other accounts with very interesting but completely fabricated claims.

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There are lots of modern apocrypha that try to report on what Jesus and those associated with him really did.  There is, for example, a book called The Confession of Pontius Pilate, which tells the story of Pilate going in exile to Vienna where he feels deep remorse for what he did to Jesus and eventually commits suicide.  Among other things, this account refers to a story in which Mary Magdalene presents the Roman emperor Tiberius with an Easter egg dyed red.[1]  Or there is The Gospel of the Holy Twelve in which Jesus is said to espouse a strictly vegetarian view in opposition to those who kill and eat animals.  In this inventive narrative Jesus is said not to have eaten lamb at the Passover and to have fed the multitudes not with five loaves and two fish but with five melons.[2]

One could argue that hoaxes are created not only by obscure figures trying to sensationalize accounts of Jesus (Jesus studied with the Brahmins!) or to authenticate their particular world views (Jesus was a vegetarian!), but by scholars, who may have had obscure reasons of their own.

One of the wildly popular books about Jesus during the 1960s and 1970s was Hugh Schonfield’s, The Passover Plot: A New Interpretation of the Life and Death of Jesus.[3]    Schonfield was a brilliant and widely acknowledged scholar of ancient Judaism, with a complete set of bona fide credentials.  But his historical reconstruction of what really happened to Jesus reads more like a Hollywood production than serious scholarship.

The short story is that Jesus from an early age “knew” that he was the messiah, and so manipulated events during his public ministry to make it appear that he was fulfilling prophecy.  In particular, he plotted with his disciples to feign his own death for the sins of others.  He arranged to be drugged on the cross (when he was given the gall and vinegar, it was medicinal) so that his vital signs would slow down and he would appear dead.  He would then be revived and appear to have been raised from the dead.

The plot failed, however.  Jesus had not counted on a Roman soldier spearing him in the side on the cross.  He revived only briefly and was removed from the tomb by prior arrangement with co-conspirators (not the disciples).  He died of his wounds soon thereafter and was reburied elsewhere.  The disciples, however, discovered the empty tomb and mistakenly thought they saw Jesus alive afterwards.  They then proclaimed that he had been raised from the dead.  And thus started Christianity.

The Passover Plot is not a forgery, of course — that is, a Gospel allegedly written in the ancient world by an apostle .  The author of the book (Schonfield), who writes in his own name, is a serious historian and lets his readers know it.  And it is not exactly a fabrication, in that he claims that he is basing his account on historical research.  Moreover, he presents it as a historical study.  But as creative as it is, the major premise of the account is completely made up; there is no historical truth to it.

 

[1] Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, pp. 45-49.  This tale is based on old traditions, especially popular in the Byzantine Christianity, about Mary and a red egg, which arguably provide the origin for the custom of coloring Easter eggs.

[2] According to Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus, this account was written by an Anglican clergyman, Gieon Ouseley (1835-1906) who was a committed vegetarian who wrote ten books on vegetarianism and the occult.

[3] New York: Bantam Books, 1965.