The Triumph of Christianity (6 page)

It was this combination of a rich, relatively worldly priesthood controlling a subsidized state Temple, on the one hand, and “outsider” political rulers reluctant to coerce religious conformity, on the other, that gave rise to the full range of Jewish religious groups (the Talmud notes twenty-four sects).
¹⁹
Unfortunately, all we know about most of the sects is their name, and often not that. And because so few of the many disputatious Jewish groups left much of anything in writing, most of what is known about the rest was composed by outsiders, many of them quite unfriendly.
²⁰

The most important source is the first-century Jewish adventurer-historian Josephus (ca. 37–100), who at least claimed to have spent time as a member of each of three leading Jewish groups: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes.
²¹
Members of each of these three groups kept themselves apart from other Jews and probably numbered no more than twenty thousand members altogether out of a population of perhaps one million.
²²
But they played the determining influence on religious life, as the three spanned the spectrum of religious tastes from very low to very high intensity. All three were recruited primarily from among the wealthy and privileged.
²³

The
Sadducees
represented the “official” Temple Judaism and drew their support mainly from the aristocracy—primarily the hereditary priestly families.
²⁴
Despite their conflicts with the more powerful Pharisees, the Sadducees were able to maintain their monopoly on the right to serve as priests in the Temple (it was a Sadducee high priest who judged Jesus).
²⁵
And, typical of all such temple priesthoods, their theology was quite worldly. For example, they denied both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body and taught that God’s rewards are gained only in this life. Perhaps their most controversial position was to assert that “only those laws written in the Pentateuch were to be regarded as binding, while those that were not written down [those that were only “oral” traditions] were not to be observed.”
²⁶

The
Pharisees
believed in an immortal soul, in the resurrection of the good, and in the condemnation of the wicked to “eternal torment.”
²⁷
In their view the “good” were those who obeyed the Law, both written and oral. The Pharisees probably originated as a sect movement, generated by the increasing worldliness and accommodation of the restored Temple religion. If so, they too soon became a relatively lower-tension movement, the equivalent of a “mainstream” denomination, representing the large, moderate portion of the Jewish religious spectrum—having “the multitude on their side,” according to Josephus.
²⁸
In keeping with their moderate stance, the Pharisees “formulated the doctrine of two realms, secular and divine, with respect to the state.” Consequently, when the first Roman Procurator initiated a census in order to fix the amount of Jewish taxes, “the Pharisees urged the people to cooperate, since the Romans were not interfering in the religious sphere,”
²⁹
thereby anticipating Jesus’s counsel to “render unto Caesar.”

Perhaps the most significant single contribution of the Pharisees was the establishment of synagogues in Israel. The word
synagogue
refers both to a building used for local worship and to the congregation that gathers there to worship. Synagogues had of necessity existed in Babylon, but when they were instituted in Israel they posed a direct challenge to the centralized Temple Judaism. The Pharisees held that synagogues could “be established wherever there were enough men to constitute a
minyan
(quorum),” which was ten.
³⁰
Initially this practice was opposed by the Sadducees, but having the numbers on their side, the Pharisees prevailed, and after the destruction of the Temple once again—this time by the Romans in the year 70—the synagogue became the primary institution of Jewish religious life.

The
Essenes
were typical of the many high-tension, ascetic sect movements that abounded in Israel. Josephus reported that the Essenes condemned “pleasures as evil,” rejected marriage, and embraced abstinence, and that their piety was “very extraordinary.”
³¹
Many authors suggest that the community at Qumran, from whose library the Dead Sea Scrolls probably came, were Essenes.
³²
John the Essene was one of the Jewish generals in the Great Revolt against Rome (66–74), and Josephus indicated that rebellious Essenes were tortured by the Romans. Following the revolt, “the Essenes disappear from the stage of history,”
³³
but there were many other high intensity groups to take their place.
³⁴

For many Jews, nationalism and piety were inseparable. They reasoned that because the Jews are God’s chosen people, they are not subject to “foreign” rule, including Jews crowned as king by outsiders such as the Romans, and a pious Jew will violently resist all such iniquities. Although these sentiments were prominent throughout the history of the ancient Jews, as exemplified by Elijah, they became far more intense and organized in reaction against Herod and boiled over during the interregnum following his death in 4
BCE
. Hence, it was at this time that pious Jewish rebels were called
Zealots
—proponents of the Fourth Philosophy, which held that only God should rule Israel.
³⁵

Perhaps the first of the Zealots was Judas of Galilee. He did not, however, raise his rebellion in Galilee, but in Jerusalem in 6
CE
. The specific focus of the rebellion was a census instituted by the Roman authorities for tax purposes. The Zealots rejected paying any taxes to any ruler on grounds that it violated the First Commandment. In addition, the Roman emperors’ pretentions to divinity aroused angry opposition among most Jews, who held it sacrilege to support such “pretenders.” Judas’s rebellion was brutally suppressed by the Romans; Josephus claimed that the Roman commander had two thousand crucified.
³⁶
Nevertheless, it expressed a spirit and outlook that persisted—Judas’s two sons continued their father’s activities and were executed by the Procurator of Judea in 46
CE
. Of course, the Zealots played the leading role in the Great Revolt of 66–73
CE
—the bloody war with Rome that ended in the complete destruction of Jerusalem.

The most extreme Zealots were known as
Sicarii
because they concealed
sicae,
or small daggers, under their cloaks and used them to kill Jews who were not sufficiently opposed to Roman rule—primarily the Sadducee priestly aristocrats.
³⁷
Josephus reported that the Sicarii “murdered people in broad daylight... mixing with the crowds, especially during the festivals... [they would] stealthily stab their opponents. Then, when the victims fell, the murderers simply melted into the outraged crowd.... [T]he first to have his throat cut was Jonathan the High Priest, after him many were murdered daily.”
³⁸
Remarkably, it is thought that the Sicarii “were probably a group of teachers, in membership as well as leadership.”
³⁹
This is consistent with their populism—when they “entered Jerusalem in 66, they burned the archives containing the records of debt.”
⁴⁰
In any event, this rash of murders helped bring on the Great Revolt, at the end of which about a thousand Sicarii (including wives and children) found martyrdom at Masada in 73.

Josephus also claimed that from age sixteen he had spent three years in the wilderness with a wandering holy man named Bannus (or Banus). Aside from the fact that Bannus lived off shrubs and plants and took frequent cold baths “in order to preserve his chastity,”
⁴¹
nothing more is known about him other than that the wilderness was full of such ascetic Jews. The most famous of them was, of course, John the Baptist—but on Christmas Eve he was still an infant. Some like Bannus were permanent residents of the wilderness, but more often Jews (both men and women) went on a short-term retreat, often for a period of forty days in memory of Moses’s time on Sinai.
⁴²

Yet, amid all this pluralism, a remarkable number of Jews were agreed that the future of Israel was assured by the expected arrival of the Messiah.

Messianism

T
HE WORD
MESSIAH
DERIVES
from the Aramaic word
meshiah
meaning “the Lord’s anointed” (the Greek word is
christos
).
⁴³
A constant theme in ancient Jewish thought through the centuries—especially when beset by powerful enemies—was that God would send a Messiah to reign over an era “of perfect happiness [when] the fulness of Israel’s glory would be restored [and] God’s justice would rule the world.”
⁴⁴
On this everyone agreed. But beyond this, as Jacob Neusner demonstrated, Judaism “presents no well-crafted doctrine of the Messiah.”
⁴⁵
Indeed, the Jews who wrote the scrolls found at Qumran even anticipated two Messiahs, “the Anointed Priest and the Anointed King.”
⁴⁶

Hence, Jewish expectations about the Messiah were “a vast mass of confused, involved and even contradictory notions.”
⁴⁷
Some thought his would be an earthly reign lasting, some said, for sixty years, others said a thousand, still others said it would blend into eternity becoming Paradise. In fact, the coming of the Messiah often was linked to the end of time, to “the resurrection of the righteous dead; and the punishment of the wicked, past and present.”
⁴⁸
Some expected a serene and spiritual Messiah who would accomplish his mission in miraculous fashion. But many more expected a fierce and invincible warrior Messiah who would destroy the pagan nations. The apocryphal
Psalms of Solomon
prays that God will send the Messiah “to purge Jerusalem from gentiles... to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter’s jar... to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth.”
⁴⁹
There are even “far more savage passages in the other apocryphal books: they emphasized the warlike character of the messianic king and dwelt on the destruction of the heathen nations, the crushed heads, the piled-up bodies, the sharp arrows struck into the hearts of enemies... humiliated Israel awaited an avenger, or at all events a liberator who would give the nation back its place in the world.”
⁵⁰

With the rise of the Zealots and their repeated rebellions against Rome, a number of leaders were identified as possible Messiahs—some of them made that claim, others did not. This seems a rather reasonable development given the Jewish determination to drive away the Romans and their inadequate military resources to do so. As Josephus explained, “What more than all else incited them to war was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world.”
⁵¹

Despite the many disagreements concerning the expected Messiah, most Jews seem to have assumed that his would be a worldly kingdom. That the Christ story departed substantially from prophecies of a worldly rule is the sticking point that always has been offered as the reason that the Jews rejected Jesus.
⁵²
Recent studies have revealed that there were in fact Jewish prophecies concerning a suffering rather than a conquering Messiah.
⁵³
There may even have been a prophecy that the Messiah would die and rise again in three days. This resurrection prophecy is based on an interpretation of a newly discovered stone, three feet high and covered with writing in ink, now referred to as “Gabriel’s Revelation.”
⁵⁴
Scholars date it as having been written either in the first century
BCE
or the first century
CE
.
⁵⁵
If the former, then this could be interpreted as a prophecy fulfilled by Jesus. If the latter, it might have been inspired by the Christ story.

Conclusion

T
HIS WAS THE
J
EWISH
world into which Jesus was born and raised, conducted his ministry, and was crucified. It was a society of monotheists dedicated to the importance of holy scripture. In addition to sustaining a remarkable number of scholars and teachers, it was also a world prolific in prophets and terrorists. Hence, this tiny society of Jews at the edge of the empire caused Rome far more trouble than did any other province. It even might be said that in the end, despite having been reduced to rubble by Titus in 70
CE
, Jerusalem conquered Rome.

P
ART II
Christianizing the Empire

Chapter Three
Jesus and the Jesus Movement

T
HE WORLD’S LARGEST RELIGION IS
known as Christianity, not Jehovahism, because the Christ story is central to everything else. Consequently, Christians have always wanted to know as much as possible about the life of Jesus during his time on earth. Hence, it is appropriate to assess what can be known about the human Jesus before turning to the early days of the movement he inspired.

Jesus

U
NFORTUNATELY, SECULAR HISTORIANS OF
the time barely noticed Jesus. Writing in about the year 92, Josephus mentioned Jesus only once, or possibly twice. The first mention tells how High Priest Ananus had James, “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ,” stoned to death.
¹
The second passage, which might well have been inserted by a later copyist, summarizes the Christ-story in five sentences, including the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
²
Even if we accept both mentions as authentic, there is no evidence that Josephus had sources independent of Christian teachings, such as Roman records or recollections. The same is true for Tacitus’s report (probably written in 117) that “Christus... had suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.”
³
Other mentions by classical authors were written significantly later and also offer no evidence of reporting an independent historical tradition.
⁴

Consequently, most of those who have sought the historic Jesus have turned to inference—to assuming what Jesus
must have been
like, given the time and place in which he grew up and pursued his ministry. Keep in mind that “must have been” is one of the most suspect phrases in the scholarly vocabulary; usually it should be translated as “we don’t really know, but perhaps.”

In the case of Jesus, what mostly has gone on is to formulate generalizations about life in Galilee and then to apply them to Jesus: for example, most people in Galilee were illiterate so Jesus “must have been” illiterate too.
⁵
This approach ignores the obvious, that what might be true of most people does not tell us anything firm about any specific individual. Some people in Galilee could read. Was Jesus one of them? To assume he was not goes against extensive evidence in the Gospels that Jesus often read.
⁶
Similar problems arise when scholars infer what Jesus “must have been” like from the fact that he was a Jew. The results differ immensely depending on
what kind
of Jew the author assumes Jesus to have been,
⁷
and it remains quite possible that he was like none of them!

In the end, our knowledge of Jesus comes down to the Gospels; there isn’t really anything else to go on. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written in the form followed by Greco-Roman biographies.
⁸
Unlike modern biographies, this genre often focused on a major aspect of a life and could virtually ignore other biographical matters. This is certainly true of the Gospels. They barely mention Jesus’s life before his baptism by John, and nearly all of the text of each Gospel is devoted to his ministry. Indeed, half or more of each Gospel is devoted to the last week of his life.
⁹
In any event, we know nothing of his appearance and little more about his personal style, although he clearly had no respect for the prevailing social distinctions, being quite willing to associate with stigmatized outsiders such as Samaritans, publicans, “fallen” women, beggars, and various other outcasts. We also know that he was not the meek, mild pacifist so popular with some modern writers, who place all their stress on Jesus’s admonition to “turn the other cheek.” They never mention, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34). And all sayings aside, the image of meekness is entirely incompatible with the Jesus who is reported to have “looked around at them with anger” (Mark 3:5), who often verbally skewered Pharisees, and who drove money-changers out of the Temple.

So, what do we really know about the human Jesus? First of all, his family knew him as Joshua—Jesus being the Greek form of that name. He probably was born in 6
BCE
(and no later than 4
BCE
), at the very end of the reign of Herod the Great. He grew up in the village of Nazareth. He was the son of a woman named Mary whose husband Joseph probably was a carpenter, although he might have been what today would be called a contractor.
¹⁰

Was Jesus a carpenter too? That generally is assumed because in Mark 6:2–3, when Jesus began to teach in the synagogue, “many who heard him were astonished, saying, ‘Where did this man get all this?... Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary... ?’ ” However, the version in Matthew 13:55 does not call Jesus a carpenter. There, the people ask instead, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” Thus, the idea that Jesus was a carpenter is based only on one assertion in Mark that may not be consistent with the sentence in Matthew. Nothing else is said anywhere in the Gospels about Jesus being a carpenter nor is anything ever said about his education. However, throughout the Gospels, Jesus is addressed as rabbi or teacher—the two terms being synonymous and referring to one trained in the Law. It is worth noting the widespread Jewish practice that “a student of the Law always had a trade by which he could live.”
¹¹
It is very inviting to suppose that Rabbi Jesus was a carpenter only in that sense. Alternatively, Geza Vermes claimed that in “Talmudic sayings the Aramaic noun denoting carpenter or craftsman (
naggar
) stands for ‘scholar’ or ‘learned man.’ ”
¹²
Both possibilities seem far more consistent with Jesus’s knowledge of the Law than is the idea he spent his formative years sawing wood. So, with whom did Rabbi Jesus study? Where
did
he get all this? It is inappropriate to suggest that, being the son of God, he need not have studied. The human Jesus required educating.

Some have argued that he was a student of John the Baptist
¹³
; in fact they may have been cousins (Luke 1 and 2). But it is not clear that John was qualified for the role of rabbinical teacher. It seems more likely that Jesus studied with a local rabbi who was unknown outside of Galilee and, therefore, unlike the famous Gamaliel who taught Paul, no memory of him survived to inform the Gospel writers. But how could a carpenter’s son become a rabbinical student? It appears that his family was sufficiently affluent to have supported him. For example, they could afford to go to Jerusalem every year for Passover (Luke 2:41), something most families could not do. Indeed, it is not unlikely that Jesus’s brother James, who subsequently became head of the church, also was trained as a rabbi—given James’s high standing with many Pharisees in Jerusalem who raised a tumult of protest at his execution.
¹⁴
But even if we suppose that Jesus’s family could not or did not support him while he studied to be a rabbi, it was a central part of Jewish culture that young men of outstanding intellect were recruited as rabbinical students regardless of their background—after all, the famous Rabbi Akiva (ca. 50–135
CE
) began as a shepherd. Perhaps the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus amazing the elders in the temple (Luke 2:42–51) was meant to convey how his talents were recognized and rewarded.

Of course, all this is conjecture. What we know for sure is that Jesus’s followers and many others called him rabbi
¹⁵
and that in a “Jewish setting, an illiterate rabbi who surrounds himself with disciples, debating Scripture and halakhah with other rabbis and scribes, is hardly credible.”
¹⁶
That we know nothing more of Jesus’s education is unfortunate.

Jesus had brothers and sisters, but did not marry. At about age thirty he was baptized by John the Baptist and had a vision. It is entirely consistent with the doctrines concerning the human Jesus that this may have been when he first learned of his divine identity and his mission. According to the Gospels, Jesus then went into the wilderness and after forty days returned to Galilee and began his ministry, which lasted only for about a year according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, while John extends it to at least two years, and possibly three. He usually preached in Aramaic, but in Hebrew to more sophisticated audiences.
¹⁷
Some scholars believe that he also spoke Greek,
¹⁸
since Nazareth is only about five miles from Sepphoris, then the capital of Galilee and a Greek-speaking city.
¹⁹
However, there is no hint in the Gospels that Jesus ever visited Sepphoris, or Tiberias, the other Greek city in Galilee, during his ministry;
²⁰
seemingly he preferred the villages and countryside.

Even so, the emphasis on the homeless itinerancy of Jesus and his disciples
²¹
seems geographically naive. Although the Gospel of John has Jesus spending a substantial amount of time in Judea and Jerusalem, even John agrees he spent most of his time in Galilee, and the other three Gospels suggest that is where he spent nearly all his time, often preaching along the Sea of Galilee.
²²
Although Galilee was “the richest, most populous... part of Palestine,”
²³
it is so tiny that it is an easy two-day walk from north to south and only a day’s walk from east to west at the widest point. Specifically, it is less than twenty-five miles from Nazareth to Capernaum, where most of Jesus’s ministry took place (it was “his own city” according to Matt. 9:1), and only about two miles north from Capernaum to Chorazin, and less than five miles from Capernaum along the shore of the Sea of Galilee to Bethsaida, home of Simon, Peter, and Andrew. The “Sea” is, of course, a lake fed by the Jordan River and is only “about thirteen miles long and eight miles wide at its broadest point.”
²⁴
Shifting south, it is only about seven miles from Nazareth to Cana, and Nain is even closer. The only “long” trips reported in the Gospels were a journey from Capernaum to the Tyre area (about thirty miles) and one or several to Jerusalem, about seventy miles from Nazareth. Thus, almost nowhere Jesus is reported to have visited is even “a full day’s journey away from either Nazareth or Capernaum and... it would have been quite feasible to regularly return to a home base in either town.”
²⁵
In fact, Peter had a house in Capernaum,
²⁶
and perhaps Jesus did too (Mark 2:1–2). In any event, as E. P. Sanders noted, “After preaching elsewhere, Jesus would return [to Capernaum].”
²⁷

To sum up: according to the four Gospels, Jesus was a young teacher and miracle worker who spent most of his brief ministry in Galilee. We know nothing of his appearance and very little about his life before he was baptized by John. It seems unlikely that he was really a carpenter, and we probably can assume that he was trained as a rabbi, but we know nothing about who taught him, where, or when. We know that he aroused bitter opposition and was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate. We know that his disciples testified that he rose from the dead. We don’t know much of anything else except, of course, that his teachings and his example changed the world.

But Can the Gospels Be Trusted?

F
OR SEVERAL CENTURIES THERE
has been a long and aggressive campaign to discredit as much of the “historical” content of the Gospels as possible. Some scholars dismiss the Gospels as “little more than a latter-day Christian fantasy that can tell us nothing reliable.”
²⁸
A leader in these efforts was Hans Conzelmann (1915–1989), who claimed, for example, that from beginning to end, Acts is fiction.
²⁹
Paul’s missionary voyages never happened! Paul’s shipwreck is pure fantasy!
³⁰
In dismissing the Acts account of Paul’s voyages and shipwreck, Conzelmann and others “proved” that the story must be a fantasy by demonstrating that it has the boat following “implausible” routes and otherwise goes against common sense. Knowledgeable as they might have been about many esoteric subjects, these historians knew nothing about sailing. To them the Mediterranean was like an indoor swimming pool, and one would, naturally, head directly to one’s destination, giving no heed to currents or to the fact that it is impossible to sail directly into the wind. When it subsequently was shown that the Acts account is fully in accord with meteorological and nautical conditions and principles,
³¹
the response was to grudgingly accept the account in Acts as accurate, but to claim that it didn’t happen to Paul; rather, since it was nautically correct, the account in Acts “must have been” lifted from another unknown, but unbiblical source!
³²

As in the case above, the major result of the many unrelenting scholarly attacks on the historical reliability of the New Testament has been to frustrate the attackers because again and again scripture has stood up to their challenges. For one thing, the New Testament provides a very accurate geography, not only of Israel,
³³
but of the Roman Empire. Places are where they are supposed to be. Reported travel times are consistent with the distances involved. The topography is accurately described and extends to tiny details such as the location of wells, streams, springs, gorges, cliffs, city gates, and the like.
³⁴