Jesus Died 1,992 Years Ago Today
Almost no one knows the real story about why he was assassinated
~3:00 PM on Friday, April 3, 33AD
A former craftsman from northern Israel named Yehoshua ben Yehoseph, now nailed to a Roman cross outside the walls of Jerusalem, bows his head and breathes his last.
How did he get here?
What chain of events led to his grisly crucifixion?
Who engineered this assassination of an obviously innocent man?
And why?
The truth will shock you.
This story is almost never discussed in establishment Christendom because it’s an uncomfortable economic cautionary tale with shockingly modern implications for all of us today.
There is a chess master behind the scenes, a man of political cunning and unfathomable violence. He is the man who plots Jesus’s murder, yet almost no one has ever heard of him.
As I unpack in my book A God Named Josh, his name is Annas ben Sethi and he is the most powerful Jew in the world.
Annas was born into a wealthy family and in his mid-twenties came to power as high priest in 6 AD, having gotten himself appointed by the Roman governor Publius Sulpicius Quirinius. Such a thing is not possible without vast amounts of capital with which to purchase said post. In 175 BC, a fellow named Jason of the Oniad family outbid his own brother for the Jerusalem high priesthood by promising the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes 440 talents of silver. Weighing in at nearly 33,000 pounds, the high priest seat cost him $13.3 million in today’s dollars. He likely more than recouped his investment in less than three years.
That’s because the high priest gets to collect the nation’s tithes and taxes, set the exchange rates, and mint the money. He controls the temple treasury, essentially acting as the central banker for the Jewish nation.
In the same way that Italian bankers bought themselves the papacy around the Renaissance, the Jewish High Priesthood goes up for sale on an annual basis. Annas uses political machination and industrial-scale bribery to get five of his sons appointed to the lofty position and dominates the high priest seat for six decades.
To say that Annas is the Jewish equivalent of Crassus is not a stretch — he is by far the greediest Jew in first-century Israel. His family’s thirst for money is unquenchable; they even go so far as to collect all the sacrificial blood, dry it out, and sell it to gardeners as fertilizer.
In 1973, the remains of a first-century priestly mansion were discovered in Jerusalem and are thought to belong to Annas. The building’s two-story floor plan boasts over 13,000 square feet of living space, making it the largest private residence ever excavated in the entire nation of Israel.
Annas’s goal is to personally rule an independent Israel, and he will stop at nothing — not theft, not systemic injustice, not corruption, not murder, not the wholesale slaughter of his enemies, and not temporary political alliance with the Romans — to get it.
Monday, March 30, 33 AD
It is morning. Jesus enters Jerusalem and stomps to the temple’s outer court and surveys the scene. The place is packed. The pilgrim-milking market is open. He spots the money-changers and the monopoly market selling overpriced oxen and sheep and pigeons for up to twenty times the normal price. He sees this place for what it has become — a money-making, power-broking, Rome-colluding religionist sham.
Annas forces the nation to pay more tax than they legally owe, his moneychangers charge criminally high exchange rates, plus sky-high commissions. Their monopoly No wonder his family is so wealthy — they have a monopoly on nearly everything in the capital city, including money itself.
This temple con is a colossal money-making machine. Annual revenue estimates range from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s currency — the kind of gangster crime syndicate that finances 13,000-square-foot stone palaces with multiple floors and an inner courtyard.
This is where Jesus makes his stand. He braids a whip out of rushes and drives everyone out of the courtyard, hurls their money everywhere, and flips over their tables.
This is economic sabotage.
Annas and his family hears of the commerce-crushing commotion and rushes to the courtyard. Jesus immediately calls them out. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers”
Annas is simultaneously furious and fearful. This Galilean racketeer has ground his temple thievery to a halt in their busiest week of the year. They need the money to pay off the Romans to stay in charge of the temple money-making machine. What’s more, Jesus has publicly indicted the high priestly family as thieves. It is a personal affront and the final straw. Mark 11:18 says the chief priests immediately begin looking for a way to kill Jesus.
It is dark.
It is quiet.
It is late.
It is the perfect time to arrest a rabbi. And Jesus knows it.
He prays for hours in the Garden of Gethsemane, wracked with emotion.
Judas Iscariot arrives with some of Annas’s men and arrests Jesus.
Peter and John follow their leader at a distance.
They trail the murderous mob in the dark for at least ten minutes, down the hill from the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Brook, up the hill to Jerusalem.
Where are they taking our rabbi?
They head uphill, to the posh part of town.
The soldiers don’t take Jesus to the Roman praetorium.
They don’t take him to the Herodian palace.
They don’t even take him to the Jewish temple.
Instead, they take him to a colossal two-story villa with an inner courtyard.
Jesus is about to meet the political mastermind who quietly engineered this murder plot.
Inside the villa, an aging terrorist in a high priest’s costume emerges from the shadows. It is none other than Israel’s premier power broker, the head of the most powerful crime family in Jerusalem. It is Annas himself.
He is in his mid-fifties, but he is more lethal than ever. Annas has zero reservations about sacrificing the life of one peasant Galilean to save his family’s profitable place atop the echelon.
Annas grills Jesus in hopes of extracting an accusation that will convince the Romans to crucify Christ. It is the first of five corrupt “trials” Jesus will endure this dark night.
At 3:00pm today, I’ll be taking a moment of silence to remember Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of truth and the poor.
After Judas commits suicide, Annas’s family uses his betrayal money to buy a field. They announce they’re going to use it as a burial place for foreigners.
But history tells a different story.
Archaeological work has revealed the cemetery isn’t full of penniless travelers but rather some of the most expensive and luxurious tombs in town. Judas’s tomb hasn’t been found, but Annas’s family tomb has been tentatively identified there, decorated just like the Temple Mount.
The locals nickname the field the “field of blood.”
In real, practical, earthly, political terms, Jesus was murdered because the richest family in the country wanted to silence a critic who temporarily stopped them from exploiting the poor for profit.
The moral of the story?
Never let rich elites control your nation’s currency creation.
Or your tax policy.
Never let creditors charge interest.
Never let land-lorders devour the houses of the poor.
Never let elites gain a monopoly on any industry or trade.
Otherwise, you become ruled by a den of thieves.
They will debase your money.
They will raise your taxes and cut your services.
They will shackle you with debt.
They will raise your rents to the utmost.
They will raise prices to the breaking point.
They will gain so much power that stopping them will be almost impossible.
And they will discredit and kill those who speak out against their corruption and injustice.
Sound familiar?
The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
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