James A. Bacon, Jr., is a lifelong journalist — newspapers, magazines, blogging — and an occasional historian. His other historical work, “Maverick Miner,” profiled E. Morgan Massey, one of America’s great coal mining entrepreneurs.
A resident of Richmond, Va., he graduated from the University with a B.A. degree in history, and pursued graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an M.A. in history.
At Hopkins, Bacon wrote his master’s thesis about the interplay between religious beliefs and rebelliousness among the Luba tribe during Belgian rule of the Congo. His research documented how the practice of black magic, spirit possession, anti-witchcraft movements, the introduction of Christianity and the spread of millennial beliefs influenced how the Luba interacted with colonial authorities.
After leaving Hopkins, he happened to pick up a book. “The Jewish War,” by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Over and above the stirring account of one of the great sieges of the ancient world, which led to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, Bacon was struck by the parallels between the 1st-century Jews and the 20th-century Luba. According to Josephus’ account, the Jews also practiced magic, and they also gave rise to a series of charismatic figures prophesying the end of times and the overthrow of foreign rule. Intrigued, Bacon re-read the New Testament, this time as a literary and historical document, and was astonished to find in the Gospel of Mark abundant references to magic and demon possession.
He was hooked. Beginning years of self-study, he read the original sources and delved into the rich historiography of Second Temple Judaism. In the late 1990s, he launched a website, The Jesus Archive, written for serious amateurs interested in the historical Jesus. Over the course of two years or so, he interviewed and profiled prominent scholars and reviewed numerous academic works. Those essays can be reviewed here: profiles and essays.
Career obligations compelled Bacon to abandon the enterprise, but he never lost his passion for Second Temple Judaism, the historical Jesus, and the impassioned scholarly debates they gave rise to.
Writing in 1906, Albert Schweitzer wrote his classic work, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus,” detailing how in the previous century scholars had given rise to new interpretations of Jesus — usually in their own philosophical image. He concluded that Jesus was an apocalyptic visionary who predicted the imminent coming of the kingdom of God.
In the century since, New Testament studies have fallen into the same pattern: scholars reinterpreting Jesus in conformity with their contemporary social and political prejudices. Thus, in recent decades we have seen, just to cite a few examples, Jesus as Buddhist, Jesus as feminist, and Jesus as gay man. Two dominant strains of interpretation have emerged: Jesus as social reformer and Jesus as leader of anti-colonial resistance. All are grievously flawed. Jesus, as Schweitzer correctly understood, was not a man of the 20th (or 21st) century.
Bacon tried writing a non-fiction work laying out his own view of Jesus as a mystic, a practitioner of healing magic, and a prophet of the end times. But he eventually concluded that buttressing his theories would require hundreds of pages of dense argumentation that would render any book inaccessible to the layman. In the end, he chose to incorporate his understanding of Jesus in a novelistic format with light footnotes to indicate where he had rooted material in the historical sources and where he was taking the liberties of a fiction writer.
Readers can get a sense of the academic underpinnings of the novel by referring to the scholar profiles and essays from The Jesus Archive republished on this website.
The protagonist of “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb,” is Nicolaus of Caesarea, a fictional advisor to Pontius Pilate. Upon hearing that Jesus is missing from the burial tomb, Pilate orders him to find who was culpable of stealing the corpse. The novel then becomes a who-done-it as Nicolaus’ quest takes him to all quarters of Judean society.
Ultimately, the answer to what happened to Jesus’ body is unknowable. The historical sources simply do not allow us to answer definitively. But the theory Nicolaus proposes is plausible and consistent with the limited evidence available and, in Bacon’s estimation, comes as close to the truth as we are ever likely to know.