Chapter 10: Quarrels about Prophets and Apostles: Jochanaan, Theudas/Jude/Thomas, Jacob, Simon-Peter, Barnabas, Saul/Paul

If history hasn’t preserved the least trace of someone named Jesus, on the other hand, his inventors and worshipers — disguised [travestis] in the course of time as brothers, companions, witnesses, disciples or apostles — easily revealed themselves at random to the witnesses of the First Century. So it goes with John the Baptist, Thomas, Jacob the Just, Simon Cephas and Barnabas.

Paradoxically, concerning Paul, the best known, upon whom the biographers spread themselves with the greatest gullibility, there remains nearly nothing that hasn’t been reduced to the authenticity of short notes taken from the letters that sheltered the catch-alls of the Marcionites and anti-Marcionites, before being washed, purged and re-sharpened several times according to the rectified line of the Fourth Century.

Jochanaan, Called John The Baptist

In his Jewish Antiquities, drafted around 95, Flavius Joseph speaks of a preacher named John:

He was a man of fortune who incited the Jews to the practices of virtue, justice for all and piety to God so that they could receive baptism. Actually, God considered baptism to be agreeable if it served not to pardon certain faults, but to purify the body, after the soul was purified by justice. (*) Around John were assembled many people who, having heard of him, had reached the greatest excitation (XVIII, 116–118).

(*) Cf. the Master of Justice, Jacob the Just, Tsadoq, Melchitsedeq.

The Greek version of the War of the Jews (written around 90) doesn’t mention Jochanaan. Two Slavic versions, written much later and unreliable, return to this person. One reads in the first version:

By this time there lived among the Jews a man of strange costume; he applied to his body the hides of animals everywhere he wasn’t covered by his own fur. In his face, he was similar to a savage.

He went to the Jews and summoned them to freedom, saying: ‘God sent me so that I can show you the Road of the Law, by which you can deliver yourselves from many powerful people. And over you will not reign a mortal, but the Very High who sent me.’

And when the people heard, they rejoiced. And he was followed all over Judea, the region in the vicinity of Jerusalem. And he did nothing other than plunge them into the waves of the Jordan and dismissed them by saying to them that they should renounce the[ir] bad works and that he would give them a king who would emancipate them and submit to them all who were not submitted to them but who would not be submitted to anyone.

Some blasphemed, others believed him. And as he had been led before Archelaus and as the doctors of the Law had been assembled, they asked him who he was and where he had just been. He responded to them: ‘I am a man, the Spirit of God has led me and I feed upon reeds, roots and carob.’

They threw themselves upon him to torture him if he did not renounce his words and acts, but he said: ‘It is for you to renounce your abominable works and to become devoted to the Savior of your God.’

And Simon, originally an Essene scribe, arose in anger and said: ‘We read divine books every day. But you, who come from the forest like a beast, you dare to instruct us and seduce the crowd with inflammatory discourse.’ He hurried to torment him physically. But he punished them by saying: ‘I will not reveal to you the mystery that lives in you, since you haven’t wanted it. Through this will come on you an inexpressible unhappiness, and it will be your fault.’

After having spoken thus, he went to the other bank of the Jordan and, [the others] no longer daring to molest him, he continued to act as before.

The second Slavic version has Herod intervening.

Alone, this man whom one has called a savage came before him (Herod) in anger and said to him: ‘Why have you taken the woman of your brother, infamous one? Since your brother is dead due to a pitiless death, you too will be bankrupted by the false spirit [celeste]. The decree of God will not be lifted, but you will perish miserably in a strange country. Because you do not uphold [suscites] the line of your brother but you satisfy your carnal passion, since he already had four children.’

From what Herod heard, he became angry and ordained the beating and hunting of him. But he did not cease accusing Herod everywhere that he found himself, until Herod seized him and ordered him to be slaughtered.

His character was strange and his life wasn’t human. He lived like a spirit without flesh. His lips never knew bread. Even at Easter, he didn’t eat unleavened bread, saying that this was given as a souvenir of God, who delivered his people from servitude, as a consolation because the road was sad. As far as wine and the intoxicating drinks, he didn’t even let them near him. And he had a horror of [eating] any animal. He disapproved of all infractions and for him it was necessary to make usage of carob.

Fanatic of anti-Nature, ascetic moralist, hysterical and religiously extreme imprecator, Jochanaan inscribed himself in a current that hasn’t ceased, up to today, to oppose to the freedom of life a system of corporeal and spiritual occlusion that propagates morbidity and death. Such dispositions accorded, depending on the circumstances, with the resentment of the disinherited, nay, all power subjected to Roman colonization that [in response] erected its God as an intemporal machine of war against the imperialist violence of the West.

According to the Slavic manuscripts, his rage at the people of the Temple did not spare the masters of the country. Presented to Archelaus, ethnarque of Judea, Samaria and Idumea from 4 [B.C.E.] to 5 [C.E.] and subsequently banished, he would succumb much later (according to the version in the evangelical legends) to the blows of Herod Antipas, tetrarque of Galilee from 4 [B.C.E.] to 38 [C.E.].

It [the news] raged along the Jordan that Joshua, a conqueror, a miracle-worker, a maker of miracles (he stopped the sun) and leader of the Jewish people, had crossed, [thereby] surpassing a limit that was inseparably terrestrial and celestial.

As in Essenism, his baptism symbolically liberated the soul from the “stain of the body” and consecrated a penitential choice, the renunciation of the goods of the earth and the mortification of the flesh. The least pleasures horrified this man-saint and he execrated the animals, whose sexual liberty annoyed his aggressive chastity. If he covered himself with animal skins, it was to resemble a certain Esau, of whom Genesis (25, 25–26) speaks.

The hostility of the Sadduceans and Pharisians did not rally to him the adhesion of the Essene factions, because a Man of the Community named Simon (so celebrated that [Flavius] Joseph cites him) violently took him aside, manifesting the animosity that reigned between the saints, or perfect ones, devoted to prayer and study, and the preachers of voluntary poverty, or ebbyonim, the Ebionites. Here it must have been a question of rival currents of Essenism, because Simon would not have seated himself among his worst enemies, that is, the sacerdotal aristocracy of the Temple.

Therefore, the hostility to John the Baptist remained vivid among the Nazarenes-Elchasaites, from whom emanated the Homelies of Peter. For the Elchasaites, John the Baptist incarnated the Messiah’s adversary. A syzygy was situated within the antagonism between the Light Jesus and the Dark Jesus, the Son of Man and the road of salvation, and Jochanaan, the Son of Woman, and the road of evil.

In the encounter of the Essenism of the communities — of which agriculture assured the subsistence through various meats and wine, and allowed the neophytes to marry and satiate themselves in the design of procreation, that is, a sexuality reduced to the coitus of circumstance — the wandering prophets extolled absolute dispossession, and continence without reserve; they stigmatized the “laxity” of their coreligionists.

Mandeism (from manda, “gnosis”), another sect issued from Essenism, held John the Baptist as its founding apostle, and took exception to the false messiah Jesus, professed an equal scorn for the Jews and the sectarians of the impostor “denounced by Anosh” (Henoch).

In the heart of Nazarenism, contradictory midrashim re-traced the complexities of the quarrel of the prophets. The echo of these Hebrew and Aramaic texts (today disappeared) clearly resounds, even in the late canonical Gospels that translated into Greek writings the allegorical and Semitic meanings of which escaped their redactors.

In the Gospel attributed to Luke, John the Baptist is not the simple precursor of Jesus, but the announcer of the end of time and the imminent kingdom of God. The works placed under the names of Mark and Matthew present John the Baptist as equal in importance to Jesus, whom he baptized. He recruited his partisans from among the Jochanaanites and only acceded to the first rank of the mythological scene once his master was decapitated. Herod, moreover, saw in Jesus the reincarnation of John the Baptist.

On the other hand, the Gospel attributed to John reduced his role to a congruous share. He is neither prophet nor Elie, but only “the voice that cries out in the desert”; not the Light, but a witness to the Light.

From whence comes the question: did not the John proposed as the author of a Gospel that, at the beginning, was Gnostic (Naassene or Sethian) — did not he procede from John the Essene whom Flavius Joseph mentions? As far as the Revelations, which was a Jewish text transcribed into Greek and also attributed to a certain John: it cites neither Jesus nor Jochanaan, but evokes two “witnesses of God” in struggle against the Beast, that is to say, Rome. Put to death, they remained three days without burial, then resuscitated and rose to the heavens. Therefore, there existed, according to Joseph, two Jewish and anti-Judean chiefs who were victims of the Roman occupation: Jacob and Simon, sons of Juda of Gamala, mythical witnesses of the Angel-Messiah summoned to lead the Just to final victory, despite the terrestrial failure of 70, and to conquer the world in the name of a God more powerful than the bloody and boastful God YHWH.

Theudas/Jude/Thomas

In 45, in his Jewish Antiquities (XX, 97–98) Flavius Joseph cited the tumult incited by the “magician” Thomas, a qualifier frequently synonymous with “Egyptian” due to the great vogue for Hermeticism in Upper Egypt. (*)

Fadus being governor of Judea, a magician by the name of Thuedas persuaded a great crowd to take their riches with them and follow him to the Jordan. He said that he was a prophet and that, after he had divided it by command, the river would permit them to pass easily. By speaking thus he deceived much of the world. But Fadus didn’t let him enjoy this folly. He sent against him a troop of cavalry, which attacked them spontaneously and killed a great many, and took many of the survivors and captured Theudas himself and, after decapitating him, sent the head to Jerusalem.

(*) On the other hand, there is no trace — other than a composite novel entitled Acts of the Apostles — of an agitator by the name of Etienne, who speculated on the Torah, invented midrashim, rose up against the people of the Temple, and claimed to be a Just man, cruelly persecuted, who would return to the earth [after death]. This “imaginary Etienne”[171] fits a portrait that could have included the majority of the Essene preachers, all of whom modeled themselves on the Master of Justice in the midst of a “messianic agitation (that) soon began and didn’t end until Bar Kochba.”[172]

The Talmud identifies the Theudas mentioned by Joseph with Ben Stada, who promised his partisans he’d destroy the walls of Jerusalem as Joshua had destroyed those of Jericho.[173]

Theudas also enjoyed the posthumous privilege of having furnished at least two recruits to the evangelical legends of the apostles. Because Theudas or Thaddeus corresponds to Juda or Judas, who is none other than Thomas. There’s no Mystery as to why the acts and gospels call him the “twin bother of Jesus,” since Thaddeus, Jude and Thomas [all] mean “twin,” from which comes the double of the Greek translators, who were unaware of the original meaning of the name and surnamed Thomas “didyme” (didumos, “twin”).

While the Nazarene disciples of Jacob and Simon-Peter implanted themselves in Antioch, those loyal to Theudas/Thomas propagated themselves in Edessa, where their communities founded a specific [kind of] Christianity before entering the syncretic wave of the years 90–100. At the beginning, each sect expressed the truth of its quest for a unique messiah by putting themselves under the patronage of an elder, a witness or a “brother” of the Savior. The unification of the Judeo-Christian current would engender the legend of the apostles initially united around the Savior, Adonai, descended to the earth (later there would be divergences, doubts and betrayals).

By guaranteeing the separation of the waters of the River Jordan to the crowd of his partisans, Theudas/Jude/Thomas identified himself with Joshua. His crossing transmuted the waters of death into the waters of life. Whatever they had been at the time, in the mythic and messianic spirit of the epoch, Joshua and Thomas are mentioned in the Acts of Thomas (the manuscript dates from the Sixth Century and no doubt transcribes a much older text): “Jesus then appeared under the form of Thomas and sat on the bed.”

Thomas/Thuedas probably had something to do with the Gospel of the Egyptians, in which the will to asceticism common to all of Esseno-Baptism expressed itself violently: “Jesus came to abolish the works of women, generation, and by this [he came to] abolish the death that carries away all placed in the world.” (Beyond the Christian milieu, the idea also existed in several Hermetic groups of Alexandria. According to the Poimandres, 18, love is the cause of death. Asclepius supported the contrary thesis.)

The same spirit was encountered in a text discovered at Nah-Hammadi and popularized under the arbitrary name Gospel according to Thomas.[174]

This work has points in common with the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Philippe, the canonical gospels, Naassene, Sethian and Henochian doctrines (logion 11), Essenism (monachos does not mean monk but the “perfect man,” as in the texts from Qumran), Marcion (logion 32), Theodotus and Heracleon (logion 144), and the Recognitiones, a Latin and later version of the Homelies of Peter, I, 84 (logion 39).[175]

The text includes 118 logia, or remarks attributed to Joshua/Jesus, put onstage in the form of brief dialogues between Jacob, Thomas and Simon-Peter. Imprinted by a number of Semitisms, the text seems to be a collection of rewritten, translated and arranged midrashim. It manifestly inspired the authors of the canonical gospels, who purged it of doctrinal archaisms and strengthened its ascetic rigor.

In a reversal of the real that is the very inhuman essence of religion, the condemnation of desire and pleasure ended in the identification of the Holy Spirit with a mother who gives life, whereas women bring into the world children who engender death. (This is the sense, that is to say, the meaning of the mistake by which Jesus is called “the Living” in the work attributed to Thomas.) The Adamism of a return to Paradise implies a total de-fleshing [decharnement] of sexuality. In Paradise, man is neither male nor female, but identical to the putatively asexual child. Scarcely can it eat of the forbidden fruit of voluptuousness, and so its primitive unity disappears, producing a man who is different from the woman. Only a spiritual androgyny — as pure spirit of a body without desire or impulses — will render to it the disincarnated unicity from which it procedes. The same speculation is illustrated in the Gospel of the Egyptians. Catholicism would condemn as heretical the frenzied asceticism devoted to Jude/Thomas as late as the Third Century (this is perhaps the reason that the evangelical novels recognized by the Church execrated the double of the Good Thomas: the informer Judas).[176]

Jacob

In his Ecclesiastical History (II, I, 3–4), Eusebius of Cesarea cites an extract from the Hypotyposes of Titus Flavius Clemens, known as Clement of Alexandria, who was born around 150 and died around 210. Clement was a Christian philosopher classified among the orthodox by the Catholics, but whom the patriarch and theologian Photios (820–855) judged to be impious and heretical in many of his opinions.

A commentator on biblical texts, Clement belonged to anti-Marcionite Christian Gnosticism, like the Christians of the New Prochecy and its disciple, Origen. He drew his referneces from the Epistle of Jude, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Apocalypse of Peter, which much later were condemned as apocryphal, because Clement didn’t know the canons that still didn’t exist when he was alive; of course, his future copyists were careful to mitigate his legitimate misrecognitions by adding antedated citations.

For him, gnosis allowed one to discover the typography of the celestial dwellings, inhabited by the cohorts of hierarchically arranged angels. It revealed to him the superimposed or successive worlds through which the soul elevates itself so as to attain the supreme repose. And Joshua/Jesus was none other than an informed guide [guide averti] in a spiritual adventure.

According to the extract produced by Eusebius, Clement declares: “The Savior, after his resurrection, brings gnosis to Jacob the Just, to John and to Peter; they will [then] give it to the 70, of whom Barnabas was one.” (This suffices for Eusebius to consecrate Jacob the “bishop of the Church of Jerusalem.”)

In another work, the Stromates, in which he attempts to reconcile Greek philosophy and Jewish prophetism, he called the true gnosis Christian, in a move different from that of Irenaeus who, vituperating the Christian Gnostics Marcion and Valentin, judged gnosis and the teachings of Jesus to be irreconciliable. Clement refers to the “true tradition rightfully issued from the apostle-saints Peter, Jacob, John and Paul, transmitted from father to son,” composing a list of ancient masters in which were unified, under the cover of a will to unity, two antagonistic currents: that of Saul/Paul and that of Jacob and Peter.

Jacob, in whom the Master of Justice was [re]incarnated, played a role of the highest rank in the works at Nag-Hammadi: Here are the hidden words that Jesus the Living said and were transmitted by Didyme Jude Thomas: “The disciples said to Jesus: ‘We know that you will leave us; who above us will (then) be the (most) grand?’ Jesus said to them: ‘There where you will be, render yourselves to Jacob the Just, because of whom the heavens and the earth were produced’” (logion 13).[177]

[The phrase] “because of whom the heavens and earth were produced” designates Jacob as nothing less than the co-creator of the universe, at the same level as Adam and Jesus, who is furthermore his “brother.” This remark, borrowed from a midrash that claimed the authority of Jacob, illustrates quite well how the acts of legitimation of the Church — which, depending on the circumstances, erected the master as the auxilliary or right arm of God — were collected, collated, and harmonized to the extent that the (initially disunited) Nazarene Churches federated and formed accords among themselves. Thus, there would appear — engendered by a community inspired by a Levy/Matthew — a work entitled The Secret Words (*) that the Savior said to Judas Thomas and that I, Matthew, wrote down while I heard them speak, one to another, sometimes called Gospel according to Matthew.[178] The pious lies by virtue of which the local churches invented witnesses or brothers of the Messiah (**) would pass for an inadmissable naivete in the eyes of the redactors of the New Testament, who would take the precaution of borrowing the falsification or, more exactly, the myth of the colors of historical probability, effacing the original documents, which were assessed with [possessing] vulgar aberrations.

(*) Saul/Paul also speaks of a vision in the course of which he heard “the ineffable words that no one is permitted to repeat.”

(**) The abbeys of the Middle Ages didn’t proceed in any other fashion when they invented a patron saint and exhibited relics so as to attract the faithful, crowds and alms.

All things considered, the figure of Jacob didn’t connect exclusively to Judeo-Christianity, since the Naassenes — according to the Elenchos (V, 7) — kept in their teachings “the principle points of the doctrine that Jacob, brother of the Savior, transmitted to Mariamne.” Here the Savior was NHS, the Redeemer Serpent, and Mariamne corresponds to Myriam/Mary. It is also under the name Jacob that, after the Second Century, the Proto-Gospel of Jacob, a recitation of the childhood of the Christ Jesus and the story of Mary and Joseph (the carpenter) would be propagated.

The original specificity of the Christianity and Church of Jacob was perpetuated in Nestorianism, which was condemned as a heresy and [yet] exists to this day in the Jacobite Churches.

Jacob, prophet and Messiah, would assume the roles of witness, brother, and apostle of Joshua/Jesus to the extent that the diverse currents of Esseno-Christianity, nay, Sethian, Naassene and Barvelite messianisms, little by little resembled and regrouped their patrons or founders within the apostolic cohort of the Savior.

A fragment from the Judeo-Christian Hegesippe (end of the Second Century), transcribed by Eusebius of Cesarea, describes Jacob the Just as an ascetic “sanctified in the womb of his mother,” a trait applied to Jesus and that accounts for the mythical slide of Jacob (the Messiah of an Essene community) into Jesus (the syncretic Messiah of the first Churches, perhaps federated by Elchasai).

Like Dunstan, Jochanaan, the Servant celebrated by Esaie and other spawn of the Master of Justice, Jacob did not eat meat, and never shaved, did his hair, nor washed. He dedicated all of his time to prayer. Hegesippe called him “rampart of the people,” because “those who have faith resemble Jacob.”

Among the Elchasaites, Jacob passed for the true founder of their community. The primitive text of the Homelies of Peter presents itself as a letter from Clement, alias Zachea, to Jacob.

History has preserved traces of [various] Jacobs tied to Messianic agitation and whom the ahistorical spirit of the midrashim easily united in an identification rendered plausible by the common fronts of Zealotism and Essenism. According to Flavius Joseph (Judaic Antiquities XX, V, 2), Jacob of Gamala, son of Juda and brother of Simon, was crucified around 45, under Alexandrer-Tiberias, who succeded Caspius Fadus (responsible for the execution several months earlier of Theudas/Thomas) as procurator of Judea.

The first Jacob, a Zealot, was doubled by another, either Nazarene or Ebionite. The Talmud and a midrash set themselves against a Christian Jew named Jacob of Kepher Schanya (or Maia Simai), who was accused of contesting the orthodox rituals prescribed by Deuteronomy. Interrogating Rabbi Eliezer on a point of doctrine, he was invited to answer and advance an interpretation drawn from Micah (2, 7), which emphasized the solicitude of God in the interests of men. Eliezer rallied to Jacob’s explication and thus drew upon himself the reproach of complacency with respect to Nazarenism.

Simon-Peter

Named governor of Bythinia in 111, Pliny the Younger solicited directives from Emperor Trajan on the conduct to adopt with respect to the chrestianoi, whose behaviors had aroused unfavorable reactions among the inhabitants (Letters X, 96–97). Oscar Cullmann has shown that the incriminated Christian sect was that of the Elchasaites, whose doctrine synthesized the teachings of Nazarenism and Ebionism, if not other Messianistic sects.[179] Their ideas were expressed in an ensemble of texts that were revised many times and for a long time were held as orthodox by virtue of Clement’s name, under whom they had been organized. Indeed, Clement (the “Soft”) — a translation of Zachea from the Bible — passed as the third Pope of Rome in the official histories of Catholicism. Rejected much later by the Church, these writings would be re-baptized Pseudo-Clementines by the historians who were, all things considered, not eager to deny the aberrant conjecture concerning the epoch in which this Roman pontificate lived.

Under the name of Clement, a fictive person invented by Ireneaus and consecrated by Eusebius,[180] the Pope of Rome and successor to Peter, a text that distinguished three states was thus propagated. The Homelies [of Peter] or the Epistle of Clement to Jacob proposed the Greek revision of an old midrash placed under the name of Zachea. A Greek development, called the Anagnossos, was translated and revised under the title Recognitiones (“Recognitions”) by Rufin, a notorious forger and censor of the works of Origen. Finally, the Epithome represents the Catholic version (amputated from the text of the Homelies), which would reappear much later under the title Summary of the Predictions of Peter by Clement.

The Hebraic source has disappeared, but the primitive kernel, extracted by Cullmann, explicitly reveals the central theme of the speculations advanced by the author: “From the true prophet and the intelligence of the law according to the teachings of the Mosaic tradition.” Cullmann summarizes it thus:

The world with its sins and errors is compared to a house that is filled with smoke. The men who find themselves inside search in vain for the truth, which doesn’t know how to enter. Only the true prophet, by opening the door, can give it to them. The prophet is the Christ, entered for the first time into the world in the person of Adam, anointed by the sap of the tree of life. For all beings God made a prototype: for the angels, an angel; for the spirits a spirit; for men a man who is Adam-Jesus. Adam is without sin, despite certain mendacious passages in the Scriptures. Adam, the true prophet, announced the world to come. By contrast, Eve, who was inferior to him as the moon is inferior to the sun, was custodian of the present world as the prototype of the prophets born from women, whereas Adam was the ‘Son of Man.’ The feminine principle leads the men of the first generation astray from the road of truth. Their depravity manifests itself especially in the practice of sacrifices. But since the beginning of the world, the true prophet hasn’t ceased to travel through the centuries, changing name and form. He was incarnated in Henoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. Moses renewed the eternal law that Adam had already promulgated, but, at the same time, by authorizing sacrifices, Moses made — to the hardening of the Jews — a concession that placed a curb on the most serious excesses: sacrifices must be offered to God only, and in a unique place. But this permission was only provisional. The true prophet finally reaches his apparent repose in the Christ. He puts an end to sacrifices and replaces them with baptism. Also, during the Jewish War, only the baptists were saved. Before dying, the true prophet chose twelve apostles, and, in the manner of Moses, charged 72 doctors of the law with transmitting the truth. By abolishing sacrifices, the Christ doesn’t abolish the law, but that which was not part of the primitive law. He announces that, until the heavens and the earth have passed, not an iota or a trait of the Law will fall.[181]

The author (or authors) of the Homelies inscribed themselves in the reformist current that was more or less critical of the biblical texts and Mosaic law. They not only eliminated the prophets who represented feminine principles, but also certain important parts of the Pentateuch. Of course, the Elchasaites, in conformity with the Essenian matrix, rejected the sacrifices of the Temple. “When the Law was put in writing, it was subjected to a certain number of additions that contained errors against the unique God” (Homelies, II, 38). This agrument recalls those of the Dunstanites or Dositheans. Jacob, their prophet, mytically presided with the authority of a church to which Peter himself was obliged to render an account.

As far as the defense of the unique God, it inscribed itself in the polemic of the two Gods and their respective natures. Was it necessary in 140, in the manner of Marcion, and perhaps in that of Saul, enemy of the Elchasaites, to postulate the existence of a Good and Christian God radically different from YHWH, the creator-god of a bad world, a bloody God who betrayed his people, a Demiurge who was master of a deplorable universe? Or rallying to the Elchasaite thesis, from which would in fact be born the God of Ireneaus, Tertullien and then the Catholics and the Protestants: “God kills with his left hand, that is to say, through the ministry of the Bad that, by temperment, takes pleasure in tormenting the impious. But he saves and makes good with his right hand, that is to say, through the ministry of the Good, which was created for rejoicing in the heaping up of good works by the just and saving them” (Homelies, XX, 3)?

Finally, the Elchasaites, having entered into the general quarrel about the “true messiah,” were perhaps the first to produce — with Saul/Paul and Satornil — the ecumenical name Joshua/Jesus.

In the manner of the various Christianities of the first two centuries, the Elchasaites’ conception of the Messiah was that of the angelos-christos. He had been created like one of the archangels — in the same way that Michael is also Melchitsedeq. “To all beings, God gave a prototype: to angels an angel, to the spirits a spirit, to men a man who was Adam-Jesus. Adam was without sin, despite certain mendacious passages in the Scriptures.”[182]

Elchasaite Christianity believed in the successive reincarnations of the Messiah, who had “since the origin of the world changed his form and name, and thus reappears ceaselessly and ceaselessly in the world” (Homelies, III, 10).

No doubt he is manifested by the voice of Elchasai as he prophesized a half-century later through the mouth of Montanus in the popular Christianity of the New Prophecy, born in Phyrgia, in the immediate neighborhood of the Bythinia of Pliny and the Elchasaites.

But the means of preventing other enlightened ones from obeying the revelation of the Messiah? The two great enemies of Elchasaitism — much like those of Montanism and Tertullien — also [with]held the message of the Christ.

Cullmann did not detect in the primitive text of the Homleies a charge made against Marcion, which was refuted instead by a subsequent copyist who revised the text. On the other hand, as Baur has demonstrated, the hostility manifested with respect to Simon the “Magician” in fact aimed at Saul/Paul, held to be a false prophet.

Nevertheless, the authors of the Homelies did not know any of the letters by Paul, nor the text of the New Testament invested by Marcion. They simply preached the good news, a gospel, taking exception to that of Saul, the founder of competing churches.

According to the Homelies (II, 17), “[first there is] the gospel of the lie, preached by the seducer, then comes the gospel of truth, after the destruction of the holy place.”

Which holy place? Jerusalem and the Temple? But Essenism never ceased demanding the annihilation of the city consecrated to the “impious priest.” Isn’t it rather a matter of Qumran, or Damascus, that is to say, DMS, the sanctuary, towards which Paul traveled, according to this legend, when he had [received] the revelation of the Messiah? (Unless the allusion is to after 135.)

If Saul/Paul is treated as a false witness to the Savior, his notes stigmatize his adversaries as “false brothers.” Between the different communities invested with the divine message, harmony decidedly did not reign.

Towards the end of the Second Century and more surely in the Fourth Century, the monarchal churches — aiming to reconcile themselves with the good graces of imperial power — would efface from their histories the divergences between the partisans of Jacob and Peter and the disciples of Saul/Paul. Simon-Peter and Paul, finally reconciled, would sit as patron-saints of Rome, in which they had never set their feet.

Nevertheless, the hatred for the “impostor” would never completely disappear from the disparagement of the Christian edifice by Catholicism. A manuscript discovered by Schlomo Pines, which illustrates the opinions of a Jewish community from Syria in the Fifth Century, accuses Paul of Tarse with having falsified the teachings of the Messiah. The false prophet rejected the Torah with the intent of attracting to himself the favors of Rome, and of acquiring power and influence, all for his own profit. Flattering the anti-Semitism of the Romans, he would be the true one responsible for the destruction of the Temple in 70. And the text, caught up in the polemical whirlpool of the Fifth Century — an epoch in which the Church invented the legend of “Paul, apostle to the gentiles,” winning over the Empire to Christian convictions — rebels against the idea: “His Christianity is only pure Romanism; rather than converting the Romans into Christians, he converted the Christians into Romans.”[183]

Elsewhere the manuscript denounces the impostures and contradictions of the canonical gospels and only accords credit to the original Gospel, drafted in Hebrew. The community, claiming the authority of Jacob and Peter for itself exclusively, would be maintained up until the Twentieth Century, according to the Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon.

Perhaps it was from the same milieu that came a kind of “novel about Paul” that thrashed the official novel of the Acts of the Apostles. Epiphany of Salamine (438–496) echoed it in his Panarion (30, 16, 6–9):

They affirmed that he was Greek. According to them, he went to Jerusalem and, after having lived there a certain amount of time, he gave in to an inextinguishable passion for the daughter of the priest. It was for this reason that he was proselytized and circumcised. But when he was shown out by the young woman, he was so enraged that he committed libels against circumcision, the Sabbath and the Law.