by Robert Conner It’s clearly impolitic, to say nothing of impolite and impertinent, to ask if Jesus of Nazareth was as barking mad as, say, Pat Robertson, the Baptist Nosferatu, or Jim Bakker with his End Times food buckets, but before you cast the first stone or speed dial the local office of the Inquisition, just hear me out.

Jesus, which is basically Latin for Joshua, was a popular name in Roman occupied Palestine. As you’ll recall from all those wasted hours in Sunday school, Joshua was the Jewish general who led the conquest of the Promised Land, overseeing the slaughter of all the men, women and children in one Canaanite city after another, so naming children Joshua naturally reminded the Romans that the Jews could kick ass as well as kiss ass.

By 66 CE, the beginning of the First Jewish-Roman War, the situation in the province of Judea had gotten so completely out of hand that the Roman general Vespasian invaded Galilee to restore the Roman order. When it became apparent to some that the Romans were going to eventually roll the rebel forces up like a rug, a Jewish general by the name of Josephus wisely decamped to the Roman side and eventually produced a history, The Wars of the Jews, our primary source of information about events up to and following the life of Jesus. Vespasian became the Roman emperor after the death of Nero and built the Flavian Amphitheatre, aka the Colosseum, the largest such structure ever raised, to commemorate his reign. His son Titus, who continued the war and destroyed Jerusalem in CE 70 before mopping up the last resistance at Masada, became emperor after his father died and to celebrate his victories built the Arch of Titus, an impressive piece of Roman propaganda that portrayed the Roman legions returning in triumph with sacred items from the Jewish Temple.

In Book Six of his Wars of the Jews, Josephus briefly relates the story of a certain Jesus son of Ananias, a rustic from the hinterlands, who began incessantly proclaiming a series of woes upon Jerusalem several years before the Romans attacked. Regarded by the Jewish leaders as demon possessed, this Jesus was hauled before the Roman governor Albinus and flogged to the bone with whips. Albinus eventually pronounced the wretched man insane and released him. During the siege of Jerusalem, while still preaching judgment on the city, a stone from a Roman catapult struck the unlucky Jesus, killing him instantly but confirming his predictions.

Jesus son of Ananias bears a striking similarity to Jesus of Nazareth, another rustic from the hinterlands—“No prophet comes from Galilee!” (John 7:52)—who likewise pronounced a series of woes on Jerusalem: “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” (Mark 13:2) Jesus was considered insane by his family and also regarded by the Jewish leaders as demon-possessed: Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons. (Mark 3:20-22) The religious authorities also handed Jesus of Nazareth over to a Roman governor, Pilate, who had him flogged, but this Jesus was crucified rather than released. The similarities between the two Jesuses is anything but coincidental; Jerusalem “was the eschatological centre of the world, the destination of the homecoming Diaspora and of the pilgrimages of the nations, the place of the coming of the messiah...the place of judgment in Gehinnom and the metropolis of his coming kingdom” and as Martin Hengel noted, Jerusalem was also the focus of “eschatologically motivated attempts at rebellion.” (The Pre-Christian Paul, 55-56) Jerusalem, in short, was a well-established crazy magnet.