Free Intervention by Robin Cook Page B

the Temple in Jerusalem had been defiled. Although there were Essene cells in most Palestinian cities, their strictest leaders and brethren moved out into the desert along the shores of the Dead Sea at Qumran. They were the transcribers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the people who hid them to keep them out of the hands of the Romans.
    “The Zealots were more politically defined. Their primary goal was to rid Jewish lands of Roman oppressors, and the most fanatical members were called the Sicarii. To understand what was going on in the first century, you have to remember that most everyone wanted the Romans out of Palestine, except, of course, the Romans, and to a large degree that was what a lot of the contemporary messianic prophecy was all about.
    The Jews expected a messiah to get rid of the Romans, which was one reason why a lot of Jews weren’t satisfied with Jesus being the Messiah. Not only did he not get rid of the Romans, he got himself crucified in the bargain.”
    “Okay,” Sana said. “But why would the Zealots and the Essenes plot to steal the body of the Virgin Mary? That doesn’t make sense to me.”
    “Saturninus doesn’t say specifically, but here’s what I think he is implying. When the Virgin Mary died in AD 62 as he says and was entombed in a cave on the Mount of Olives, perhaps even where her tomb is supposed to be today, some Zealots, probably the Sicarii, saw an opportunity to fan the fires of hatred of the Romans toward the Jews.
    What they were trying to do was start a revolt, and they didn’t care which side was the instigator. Prior to that, the Sicarii had mostly concentrated on intensifying the hatred of the Jews toward the Romans, which is why they spent most of their time and energy assassinating those Jews who they thought were collaborating with or even just soft on the Romans. The rationale was to get the Jews to start the fight.
    “Then the death of Mary offered something else. It offered an opportunity to put Roman frustration with the problem of religious strife over the top. You see, at that time in the mid-first century, Jews who had become followers of Jesus of Nazareth were considered Jews and not yet a new religion. Yet they didn’t get along with traditional Jews. In fact, they were constantly at each others’ throats over what the Romans considered ridiculously petty issues. On top of that, there was infighting among the Jewish Christians. It was pure religious anarchy, and the Romans were fit to be tied.”
    “I still cannot understand the Virgin Mary’s role in all this.”
    “Think of the Romans’ frustration. Saturninus mentions that the Romans thought they had taken care of the Jesus of Nazareth problem by crucifying Jesus. But they were wrong, because Jesus didn’t stay dead like all the other crucified supposed messiahs of the time, of which there were a number. Jesus came back in three days, which ended up, in retrospect, magnifying the problem rather than ending it. Saturninus implies that the Zealots counted on Mary’s disappearance in three days after her death to suggest that she too had defied death and had joined her son, reconfirming Jesus’ mission. The Zealots and the Sicarii stole the body of the Virgin, specifically on the third day, in the hope of terrifying the Romans into believing that there was possibly going to be another serious flare-up of religious fervor as followed Jesus’ resurrection, forcing them to crack down to prevent it. The idea was that a crackdown in such a tense environment would cause a cycle of violence, which would cause a harsher crackdown, and so on. As Saturninus mentions, he didn’t know if it was the disappearance of Mary’s body that did the trick, but soon after its theft, a cycle of violence did occur that grew progressively month by month. Within just a few years the tinderbox that was Palestine exploded into the climactic Great Revolt, with all the Jews uniting together to seize both Jerusalem and