Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (14 page)

"When Jesus was born," the Columbia University scholar Alan Segal writes, "the Jewish religion was beginning a new transformation, the rabbinic movement, which would permit the Jewish people to survive the next two millennia. The complex of historical and social forces that molded rabbinic Judaism also affected the teachings of Jesus, helping to form Christianity into a new and separate religion."
¹⁶
Segal entitled his book
Rebecca's Children,
reflecting a theme already noted, that it is useful to think of the two religions as siblings, which, like Jacob and Esau, struggled against each other even in their mother's womb. The history of the origins of Jewish-Christian conflict suggests that the metaphor of rivalrous fraternity is more than a metaphor; it actually defines the way these two religions came into being. In Jesus' lifetime and shortly after it, Segal writes, "Dislocation, war, and foreign rule forced every variety of Jewish community to rebuild its ancient national culture into something almost unprecedented, a religion of personal and communal piety. Many avenues were available to Jews for achieving this new sense of personal piety, one of which was Jesus' movement."
¹⁷

When a Christian asks Who is a Jew? he risks falling into the trap of a mythic projection of perennial Christian anxiety, defining Jewishness in a way that serves a Christian purpose. Obviously, Judaism defines itself in its own terms. In trying to understand the origins of Jewish-Christian conflict, perhaps it would be more useful to put the question as those first rivals within the broad Jewish community might have, which would be to ask, in effect, Who is the "true Israel"?
¹⁸

Competing answers were offered by the groups characterized in the New Testament. There were the Pharisees, whose movement evolved into rabbinic Judaism, referred to earlier. Some Pharisees were priests, although most were laymen, and their religious impulse, competing with Temple sacrifice, emphasized the study of Torah in their synagogues and the rigorous keeping of the Law. Josephus says that six thousand Jews were Pharisees.
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There were Sadducees, whom we might recognize as aristocrats, and some of them were high priests whose religious focus was the sacrificial cult of the Jerusalem Temple. They were inclined to cooperate with the Roman occupiers.
²⁰
It is not clear how large this party was, but according to the distinguished scholar E. P. Sanders, there were many thousands of priests.
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Josephus argues that the majority of Jews would have inclined toward such cooperation with Rome.
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The Sadducees, in effect, formed a core of the establishment. There were Essenes, famous now for their caves in Qumran,
²³
but in the first century they were a countersect that rejected the corruptions of the cities, and in particular of Herod's Temple, which to them was a Hellenized blasphemy. Herod the Great (c. 73–4
B.C.E.),
the half-Jewish Roman puppet, had ruled as king of Israel, including Judea and Galilee, since 37
B.C.E.
He is remembered by Christians for the story of his slaughter of the innocents at the time of Jesus' birth, but his greatest undertaking was the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem, which for him fulfilled a political purpose as much as a religious one. The Temple was designed to impress his Roman overlords as much as his Jewish subjects. But because of that duality, the Temple was a flashpoint to the Essenes, who wanted to replace the Romans as rulers of Israel with their own leaders. Josephus put their number at more than four thousand.
²⁴

The numbers offered by Josephus, while not to be taken as precise, indicate that relatively few Jews belonged to the identifiable parties. But the broader population would have had clear sympathies one way or another. At one extreme—in our terms, perhaps, the "liberals"—would have been the Hellenizers, those open to the customs of the Gentiles. By and large, these Jews would have been of the Diaspora—Greek speakers, men and women who had learned to live within and take for granted the pagan culture of Greek and Roman cities. Most famous of these would have been Philo of Alexandria (c. 30
B.C.E
-45
C.E.),
who wrote favorably, for example, of the emperor Augustus. But many Palestinian Jews would probably have rejected Hellenization, and that is especially true of the rural people, whose experience of the wider world would have been limited.

At the other extreme from "liberals" would have been "zealots," whether pacifists or violent revolutionaries—pietists or apocalyptic believers who looked for divine intervention as a means of restoring Israel. An example of such a movement, perhaps, would have been that of John the Baptist. He was a radical spiritualist, yet his direct challenge to Herod, for which he was beheaded, demonstrates the impossibility of separating religion from politics in this milieu. In addition to the main parties and the sects, there were powerful regional divisions among those who identified themselves as the "true Israel." Judeans were dominant because the cultic center was in Jerusalem, yet there were Samaritans who, worshiping at their own Mount Gerizim instead of on Mount Zion, were disdained by Judeans.
²⁵
And there were the villagers of Galilee, whom city-dwelling Judeans would have looked down upon as peasants. In turn, Galileans would have regarded the Jewish oligarchs of Jerusalem both as near traitors for accommodating Rome and as idolaters for allowing images of Caesar to be venerated, if only on coins. (Jesus' question about the coin, "Whose likeness and inscription is this?,"
²⁶
is a sly jibe at his challengers' idolatry.)

The true Israel. Centered in the Temple. The Torah. The oneness of God. The idea of election. The covenant. Each of these metaphors had adherents who gave it priority. But it is important to recall the rather obvious fact that such debate, in Fredriksen's phrase, "coexisted with consensus."
²⁷
Indeed, agreement on those elements as essential, however much one or the other was emphasized, would have been the precondition of diversity within the community. Still, it is impossible to detect in the vibrant religious expressions of first-century Palestine an all-encompassing Jewish orthodoxy. The very sectarianism of Israel in the time of Jesus appears to be its defining note. Segal argues that sectarian multiplicity amounted to an efficient channeling of conflict among classes and across ideologies, achieving a remarkable social balance in an era of massive cultural mutation.
²⁸
That is why Jesus was acting exactly like a Jew of his time when, apparently influenced by John the Baptist, he initiated yet another sectarian movement, and like a Jew of his place—Galilee—when he targeted the Herod-compromised Temple in Jerusalem as the site of his defining spiritual-political act.

So the college students who didn't label Jesus as a Jew inadvertently score a point, because Jesus, while taking his membership in the covenant people Israel for granted, would likely have thought of himself not as a Judean (from which our word "Jew" derives, but which to him would have implied geography) but as a Galilean. "The Nazarene" after all. What was it to be a first-century Galilean? In trying to imagine Jesus' experience—and in trying to understand how his became a story told against Judaism instead of within Judaism—there is a key element yet to be considered. It is the most important element, yet it is also one often left aside. To tell the story of Christian origins (or the origins, for that matter, of rabbinic Judaism) without reference to it is equivalent to telling the story of the 1916 Irish Rising without reference to the Great War. And war—war every bit as savage, in relative terms, as World War I—is the missing element.

War was not in any way missing from Palestine when Jesus was born. Nor was war missing from the direct experience of his followers, his followers' children, of their children, and of their great-nephews. The origins of the Jesus movement, and ultimately of Christianity, cannot be understood apart from the century-long Roman war against the Jews, albeit a war punctuated by repeated acts of Jewish rebellion. That is the social and political context that is all too often missing from the memory: Jesus and his movement were born in the shadow of what would stand as the most grievous violence against the Jewish people until Hitler's attempt at a Final Solution.
²⁹
(I would add here that it is equally misguided to consider the late-twentieth-century ferment in Christian theology, symbolized by the Second Vatican Council, apart from the trauma of the Holocaust, including the failure of the Christian churches to resist it.)

Between half a million and a million Jews lived in Palestine at the time of Jesus' birth.
³⁰
Some scholars put the Jewish population there as high as two and a half million, with a few hundred thousand Gentiles. Sanders accepts a figure of "less than a million, possibly only about half that."
³¹
Later we will see that Josephus posits Jewish casualty figures in the war with Rome that Sanders finds too high. Whatever the totals, the ratio of Jewish dead in Palestine at the hands of Rome may well approximate the twentieth-century record of one in three. Already, when Jesus was born, the inhabitants of his region were a defeated, violated people. The brutally effective Roman general Pompey (106–48
B.C.E.),
undertaking a major clampdown on the Asian provinces of the empire, had set his legions loose throughout the area little more than half a century before (63
B.C.E.).
³²
He conquered Jerusalem. Thus began a period of oppressive colonial occupation
³³
that would climax twice: when Roman garrisons leveled Jerusalem in 70
C.E.,
and again—once and for all—in 135
C.E.

Largely because we are heirs to a Roman imperial culture that controlled the writing of history, we are inclined to read Rome's story through rose-colored lenses. We tend to see the march of the Roman Empire as a civilizing work of human progress. Every schoolchild knows that the darkness of barbarianism was penetrated by Julius Caesar, who brought order to its chaos. "All Gaul," we learned, "is divided into three parts." But we never asked who was doing the dividing, or how the dividees felt about it.
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We accepted the idea of a system according to which only citizens had rights, and roles in the story. Saint Paul's story, for example, takes a dramatic turn when, as Acts tells it, he announces his citizenship.
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Only then are the Romans who arrested him bound by what we call due process. In the story of Rome, all others, especially that invisible mass of slaves, are the forever unnamed—and forever unentitled to any semblance of due process. We mark Rome's progression from a republic to a dictatorship, and while we take note of the madness of a Caligula (12–41
C.E.),
who had himself worshiped as a god, or a Nero (37–68
C.E.),
who killed himself saying "What an artist I perish," reports of their brutality serve mainly to emphasize the relative worthiness of most rulers. We are conditioned to think of the decline and fall of Rome sentimentally, as tragedy pure and simple. The gradual dissipation of imperial power, leading to vulnerability before the northern hordes, is the condition only of a new darkness.

But what if Roman imperial power itself, not in decline but at the peak, was the real darkness? A British critic and author of several important works on early Christianity, A. N. Wilson, says that Rome "was the first totalitarian state in history," the first to extend absolute control over the lives of a vast population. When compared to other empires of antiquity, Rome comes off well in some ways. The Greeks under Alexander, for example, imposed their language on those they conquered, while the Romans allowed local languages and cultures to remain intact. That is why Greek was the lingua franca of the Hellenized world. In addition, the breadth of religious diversity in Rome itself shows that the caesars tolerated, and even admitted to the pantheon, local gods. But the Roman war machine, once set running, was ruthless beyond what the world had seen. And though local gods were left alone, Rome was perhaps the first empire to require of its subjects an at least outward show of assent to the proposition that the emperor, too, was God.
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It is the glories of Roman dominance that are emphasized in the cultural memory of Western civilization—those arrow-straight roads, elegant aqueducts, timeless laws, conjugated language—to the exclusion of what the imposition of those glories cost those on whom they were imposed. What if, when we thought of Caesar, we thought less of Cleopatra's lover or Virgil's patron or Marcus Aurelius's delicate conscience than, say, of a Joseph Stalin or a Pol Pot whose program worked? How would history tell the story of the twentieth century if it were the first century of the thousand-year Reich? It all depends on where you stand. It may be anachronistic to judge the policies of a great empire of antiquity by the standards of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, but if being human means anything, it is that a minimal level of decent treatment is required in every culture and era.
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It is clear that from the point of view of those on the bottom of the Roman pyramid—indeed, under it—that such a minimal standard was not met.

To the peasant peoples of the Roman-dominated world, to the millions of slaves and petty laborers (in Rome itself, fully one million of the population of two million were slaves
³⁸
), to the lepers and beggars, to the troublemakers whose lives could be snuffed out with little notice taken, no characterization of Caesar's evil would have been too extreme. We have looked back at Rome from above—from the point of view, that is, of those who benefited from its systems, traveled its roads, beheld its architectural wonders, learned to think in its language—but what of that vast majority who drew no such benefit? There is no understanding either the Jesus movement itself or the foundational memory of its violent conflict with the Jews if we cannot look back from below, from the vantage of those for whom the Roman systems were an endless, ever-present horror. It was to them, above all, that the message of Jesus came to seem addressed.