King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (27 page)

Archelaus, instead of either ignoring the protests of the people or reminding them of the duty that they owed to their foreign guests, sent his Celts to break up the meeting, and in the ensuing disturbances some three thousand people were slaughtered or trampled to death in a stampede. When, therefore, he sailed to Rome a few days later, accompanied by a large suite, to persuade the Emperor to approve the division of the kingdom into tetrarchies, an embassy of fifty members of the High Court sailed in another ship to plead for its conversion, instead, into a single Imperial province. They undertook that if such a province were administered by a High Priest of their own choice, supported by the High Court and the Great Sanhedrin and a council of delegates from the Greek cities, the “Jewish problem”, as Augustus had designated it in a recent speech to the Senate, would cease to exist. The embassy reached Rome on the same day as the Herodians, and on the following morning when both parties went to the Palace to pay their respects to the Emperor, three or four thousand Jewish merchants and clerks, their wives and children too, turned out to greet the ambassadors with shouts of encouragement and at the same time to revile and hiss Archelaus.

Prince Philip had remained at Jerusalem as temporary administrator of the kingdom, under the energetic protection of Varus the Governor-General of Syria ; but both Antipas and Salome had accompanied Archelaus to Rome, and, when they saw what an unfriendly reception he was given by the Jews, began to regret their agreement with him. Naturally, almost any political compromise was preferable to the plan put forward by the ambassadors of the High Court, but they were vexed that Archelaus had made matters so difficult for them all. Antipas managed to secure a private audience with the Emperor before the hour appointed for the public audience and at once went behind his brothers’ backs in a plea for the ratification of the latest Will that Herod had signed, the one drawn at the time that Archelaus and Philip were under his displeasure. He showed Augustus a certified copy and pretended that he had been ignorant of the existence of this Will, in which he had been
nominated sole heir to the kingdom ; he would never otherwise have assented to the partition of a patrimony which was rightfully his.

Livia was present, and on her advice Augustus reminded Antipas of the impropriety of repudiating a sworn agreement however ignorantly entered upon ; and declared firmly that the only Will which had any legal validity was the original one deposited with the Vestals. Indeed, it was on the strength of this Will, Augustus said, that he proposed to approve the supplementary bequests made to the Lady Livia, himself and other members of his family in the latest, unsigned Will which had just been placed upon his table ; for the Will that Antipas now produced had been so hurriedly drawn that certain of these bequests had been omitted, and he could not venture to pronounce valid in law an instrument which suggested that the testator was not in perfect command of his faculties at the time of signature. However, since the principal beneficiaries under the terms of the original Will, namely, the late King Antipater, Prince Herod Philip and their heirs, either were now dead or had resigned their claims to the estate, and since no provisions were to be found in the Will for the disposal of the estate in such a complex of events, the draft Will must perforce be taken as a good and sufficient indication of Herod’s intentions at the time of his death.

He added : “In only one matter will I meet you. In default of any heir to Antipater—and by the by I heartily deplore the mysterious assassination of Antipater the Younger—the Crown may rest in abeyance : that is to say, I shall spare you any feeling of resentment by not bestowing on your brother Archelaus the title of King. He must content himself with that of Ethnarch.” Ethnarch was a title of little honour ; the commoner who presided over Jewish affairs in Alexandria was also called the Ethnarch.

It is said that Livia’s main reason for pressing this settlement on Augustus was that Salome had urged her to do so. Only in the draft Will was Salome awarded her little Philistine queendom, or toparchy, which she now promised to bequeath to Livia in her Will if she might be allowed to enjoy its usufruct for the year or two of life that remained to her ; she was in failing health.

Augustus next admitted Archelaus and Antipas to the public audience, at which he repeated his decisions, but thought it only just to tell Archelaus afterwards in private : “I will give you the title of King in ten years’ time if you have earned it by then.”

He called for the envoys of the High Court, who were loud in their complaints against Archelaus, and their arguments for the provincializing of Herod’s kingdom and its administration by a representative assembly were so cogent that they nearly persuaded him to go back on his engagement to Archelaus and Antipas. He readily admitted that Archelaus’s action in Passover week had been precipitate and regrettable, but said in conclusion : “Learned Jews, I cannot grant your plea. Frankly, my chief reason is the many thousands of your co-religionists now thronging the approaches to my palace who have intervened in a matter which
does not in the least concern them. You plead that I should demand from the Senate the political autonomy of Palestine—”

“Within the Empire, Caesar !” interposed the leading ambassador.

“Yes, that goes without saying. But these demonstrators are not natives of Palestine, or very few of them, and their appearance in the streets to-day serves as a warning to me against strengthening the power of your High Priest by extending his temporal, and therefore his religious, power. How do I know that if I granted your plea Jerusalem would not become the focus of a world-conspiracy by the Jews against our Roman hegemony? There are Jews everywhere, all prosperous men and as thick as thieves in their business dealings.”

“Alas, Caesar, it is a great mistake to generalize about either the prosperity or the unanimity of the Jews from your experience of the Jewish merchant colonies in Italy, Asia Minor and Egypt. There are hundreds of thousands of very poor Jews in the world, and in Palestine at least our religion is torn by numerous schisms. As for a world-wide conspiracy, rest assured that we of Jerusalem are peaceable people and have no desire whatsoever to extend the bounds of our religious influence. Already we regret the forcible conversion of the Edomites to Judaism by the Maccabee kings and the more recent voluntary conversion of great numbers of Greeks who have come over to us for reasons of trade rather than from religious conviction. The Jews of the Dispersal are, in general, as peaceable as ourselves and none follows the profession of arms.”

“Nicolaus of Damascus tells a different story. He informs me that you have a Conquering Messiah promised you by your sacred poets and daily expected, whose destiny it is to overthrow us. I admit that the Jews of this city are for the most part merchants or accountants, not soldiers, but what of that? Rich men do not need to go into battle themselves nowadays when they can hire mercenary troops.”

“You have been frank, Caesar, and we will be frank in return. There are indeed prophecies current among us of a king who is destined to free us from foreign oppression, as a certain King David delivered our ancestors from the Philistines some three hundred years before Rome was founded ; but they do not refer to any particular date and some theologians even believe them to have been fulfilled fifty years before the foundation of the Roman Republic in the person of King Cyrus the Persian who delivered us from the oppression of King Darius the Mede. If you grant our present plea, the coming of this hypothetic king will no longer be looked for, if only because there will be no foreign oppression from which to expect deliverance. It is perfectly consonant with our national honour to remain a client nation of Rome—just as we were clients in ancient times of Assyria, Persia and Egypt—so long as you Romans permit us to live in peace and retain our ancestral institutions ; if you grant our plea we will richly recompense you for the military and naval protection that you afford us.”

But Augustus feared to offend Livia by listening to the ambassadors
any longer and therefore dismissed them, saying politely : “Learned men, I hope one day to find time to study your sacred literature, though I am told that it cannot be readily mastered.”

Joachim, the father of Mary, who was one of the leading ambassadors, answered : “I have been studying the Scriptures for sixty-five years, Caesar, but many religious questions of the utmost importance still cheat my understanding.”

Joachim might have instanced the questions concerned with the Messiah’s eventual appearance ; and unless the term “Messiah” is carefully defined here, the story of Jesus’s life will lose something of its clear beauty.

The word Messiah signifies “the Christ” or “the Anointed One”, and is therefore applicable only to an anointed king, not to a commoner however greatly distinguished by spiritual gifts or military achievements. The studious Zacharias, Joachim’s brother-in-law, in his unfinished concordance of Messianic prophecy had distinguished five distinct Messiahs, namely, the Son of David, the Son of Joseph, the Son of Man, the Great Priest and the Suffering Servant. His concern, like that of most intelligent theologians of his day, was to discover whether all these distinctions were true ones : whether there were perhaps only four Messiahs, or three, or two, or even perhaps only one to whom all the titles and attributes of the other four could be reasonably attributed.

The Son of David was the most popular concept of the five. This Messiah was to be a monarch in the ordinary temporal sense, ruling the same territory over which David had once ruled. He was the pastoral king foretold by the prophet Ezekiel, by the author of the seventeenth and eighteenth Psalms, by the prophets Zechariah and Malachi, by the author of the second part of the Book of Isaiah, by the Sibyl of the
Oracles
, by the author of the
Psalter of Solomon
, by Esdras and by many others. He was to be born of a virgin mother in Judaean Bethlehem— Bethlehem of Ephrath—after a period crowded with wars, famines and natural calamities, the so-called Pangs of the Messiah, when the Jews were floundering in a slough of misery. He was to be called from an obscure home and anointed King by the ever-young prophet Elijah, of whom Ben-Sira the Preacher had written : “You who are ready for the Time, as it is prophesied, to still men’s anger before the fierce anger of the Lord, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and to restore the tribes of Israel.” Elijah was to prepare the way for the Messiah, who would thereupon enter Jerusalem riding in triumph on a young ass. This would be the signal for a bloody war against Jerusalem by the oppressors of Israel, in the course of which the City would be taken and two-thirds of the inhabitants be massacred. The Messiah, however, encouraged by divine portents, would rally the faithful survivors on the Mount of Olives and lead them to final victory. He would then reunite the scattered tribes and reign peacefully for four hundred or, some said, a thousand years, with the rulers of Egypt and Assyria and all the rest of
the world doing homage to his throne in the newly sanctified City of Jerusalem. This Kingdom of Heaven would be an era of unexampled prosperity, a new Golden Age.

The Son of Joseph, or the Son of Ephraim, was another warlike Messiah, whose reign was similarly to be crowned with universal peace. His birthplace, too, was to be Judaean Bethlehem, the seat of his ancestress Rachel, but he was to reign principally over the ten tribes of the North which had seceded from Rehoboam, the last King of all Israel. Since Shechem had been defiled by the Samaritans, it was expected by some that he would reveal himself on Mount Tabor, the holy mountain of Galilee, but others expected that he would return to Shechem and cleanse it for his own uses. The Son of Joseph was, in fact, a rival concept to the Son of David whose cult was centralized at Jerusalem : for the Northerners considered that the blessing conferred by Jacob on his sons, according to the Book of Genesis, did not justify Judah, after whom the Jews are called, in claiming the perpetual leadership of Israel. The prophecy ran, somewhat ambiguously, as follows :

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the commander’s baton from between his feet, until he approaches the man to whom they belong—him for whom the people wait.

When this happened, the Northerners held, the royal sceptre and the commander’s baton would be made over by Judah to the Messiah—who must necessarily be a Josephite, for the patriarch Jacob had prophesied that from Joseph would proceed the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel, and that blessings were in store for him “to the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills”. With this warrior Son of Joseph was associated a preacher of penitence, who might be Elijah.

But what did “Joseph” signify? Did it not perhaps signify the whole holy nation of Israel which had been led out of Egypt by Moses, rather than the two tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh with whom the name later became identified, and all but the poor remnants of whom had been carried away into Assyrian captivity seven hundred years previously, never to return? In that case, the Son of David might also be the Son of Joseph, and the meaning of the blessing of Judah might be that Judah should keep his tribal sovereignty until the time came to extend it to all Israel.

A puzzling particular about the warrior Messiah—whether the Son of David or the Son of Joseph was intended could not be agreed—was that according to Isaiah he would come marching out of Edom, which in Isaiah’s day lay outside Jewish territory, in dyed garments from Bozrah. If Bozrah was given its obvious connotation, namely the Edomite capital city, this made him an Edomite prince. But perhaps, critics suggested, the other Bozrah on the Persian Gulf was intended, where a purple-dying industry had been established for centuries.

The third Messiah was the Son of Man, but this Messiahship was a doubtful tradition deduced from the seventh chapter of the apocalyptic
Book of Daniel, where Daniel sees a certain Son of Man being given everlasting dominion by the white-headed Ancient of Days over all peoples, nations and languages. The Son of Man was not a human king, and would enter Jerusalem, so Daniel said, riding not on an ass but on a storm-cloud. He might, however, be regarded as the spirit or emanation of either of the first two Messiahs, performing in the Heavens what was simultaneously being performed on earth.