To the Death

TO THE
DEATH

To The Death

THAMES RIVER PRESS
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC)
Another imprint of WPC is Anthem Press (
www.anthempress.com
)
First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by
THAMES RIVER PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road
London SE1 8HA

www.thamesriverpress.com

© Peter R. Hall 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary
and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78308-274-2

This title is also available as an eBook

TO THE
DEATH

The History of
The Jewish Rebellion Against
Rome in the First Century A. D.
and the Murder of Jesus'
Brother, James.

PETER R. HALL

Acknowledgments

M
any
thanks to sisters Katie and Nicola Helps (who really did!) for transcribing the first draft that I had dictated to tape.

Thanks are also due to Laura Stooke of LS Secretarial Ltd who worked on the penultimate draft.

My thanks, too, to my agent Darin Jewell, m.d. of The Inspira Group and my publisher, Mr K Sood, m.d. of Thames River Press.

And last, but not least, to my long-suffering wife, Wendy, who has dealt with endless revisions and produced the final manuscript.

Sources

I
would
like to express my indebtedness to the following, which have been studied for the purpose of this publication:
    
The complete works of Flavius Josephus
; translated by W. Whiston, A.M., Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge University, England; published by Thomas Nelson, London, Edinburgh, New York 1855.

The works of Flavius Josephus
; Whiston's translation revised by The Rev. A. R. Shilleto, MA, Trinity College, Cambridge University, England; published by George Bell & Sons, London 1889.

Historical Note

T
his
novel is about the Jewish rebellion against the Rome of the Emperor Nero and the death of Jesus' brother James in the First Century AD. It is based on fact. The war was documented by a participant, Flavius Josephus, Jewish intellectual, historian and reluctant army general, sent by the Jewish authorities of Jerusalem to raise and train an army and defend Galilee.

The horrors of the Roman siege of Jerusalem, witnessed at first hand by Josephus, broke his heart. They were among the worst suffering inflicted by man on his own kind in any age. In antiquity the only comparable act of barbarism, inflicted by one people on another, occurred in 1300BC when migrant Jews from Egypt invaded Canaan - a.k.a. Judaea, Palestine and Galilee – to murder the entire population. The Jews' authority for this act of ethnic cleansing? They were following orders; allegedly a direct order from their God.

Deuteronomy,
20:16–18
:
“But of the cities of the people which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy them.
The Hittite and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Perrizite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, Just as the Lord your God has commanded you. Lest they teach you to do according to all the abominations which they have done for their gods, and you sin against the Lord your God.”

The view that Jesus had brothers and sisters is vehemently denied by the Catholic Church. This denial has got nothing to do with the facts. The denial is based entirely on canon law created by the Catholic Church in AD325.

The brutal murder of Jesus' brother James is fact, and is well documented.
(See Appendix)

In AD70, Israel lost its war of rebellion against Rome, the occupying military power. The country then became the personal property of the Emperor Vespasian. As a result of this appropriation, no Jew could own land. He could, however, rent it.
The State of Israel ceased to exist.
Ancient Canaan, the spoils of war, had been won and lost by the Jews after a few hundred years of occupation. Jerusalem disappeared off the face of the earth, dismantled by the Romans, stone by stone, down to bedrock.

Josephus' history,
The War of the Jews,
survives to this day. It is a record of one of the bloodiest war in history. The account of the siege of Jerusalem is a harrowing story of unimaginable human suffering, largely inflicted not by the Romans but by
Jew against Jew
.

Finally, a note on Jewish names.
Eleazar and Simon are common names that occur repeatedly in Josephus'
War of the Jews.
To assist the general reader, having used either once, I have identified others by using their family name.

There are a number of Eleazars and Simons in Josephus' history. To assist the general reader I have used the family name to differentiate, e.g.:

Eleazar ben Simon became a leading figure in the rebellion, alongside Simon ben Gioras and John of Gischala. In the final weeks of the siege of Jerusalem, Simon was assassinated by John of Gischala, leaving Gioras and John to fight to the end.

1

T
he
man stood in silhouette on one of the high towers of the Temple. Below him was the Court of the Gentiles, its acres of sweeping terraces packed with crowds of people. The outer courts had been taken over with additional animal pens - sheep and cattle to be slaughtered to celebrate the festival of
Passover
.

Drovers and pilgrims stood ankle deep in dung, bartering over the price of an animal for sacrifice. The poor, who wished to make an offering, pushed their way through the mob to the outskirts of the animal pens. Here, traders with huge wicker cages filled with doves, sold birds for a few pennies. This great mass of animals and people swirled and eddied against the rows of columns that supported long covered arcades where merchants had established shops selling more expensive relics and souvenirs. In the shaded colonnades, money changers had also set up their tables alongside the booths occupied by the merchants.

Every foreign Jew, who had come on pilgrimage to visit at least once in his lifetime the Temple of his God, took the opportunity to pay in person the annual sacred tribute of half a shekel. The tribute was paid by every Jew on earth, whether rich or poor, no matter where he lived. This money was sent to the Temple in Jerusalem as atonement for his sins, to be used to defray the expenses of the rites performed for absolution.

As it was unlawful to make this offering in a foreign currency, pilgrims were obliged to exchange their money for Temple coinage. Not only were they charged five percent for this service, they were invariably cheated with inflated exchange rates. What was a man to do? Having saved and scrimped for years to make an often hazardous journey over many months, sometimes years, to reach the house of God, was he to lose this once in a lifetime chance to make his offering personally to his maker? No, he exchanged his savings for the only currency accepted by the Temple priests - that which they had minted themselves and sold at a profit to the money changers.

This was the entrance court to the Temple of the Most High, which stood witness that this was a house of worship for Jews of all nations. It had been reduced by the priests to a foul and stinking farm yard; an abattoir that fed the great altar with sacrificial blood from sun up to sunset every day; incidentally providing meat for the twenty two thousand priests and functionaries, who served the Temple.

The noise was deafening. In a babble of languages and accents, men cursed and shouted to be heard above the bellowing of cattle and bleating flocks of sheep. In the confusion and uproar, tempers were frequently lost and punches thrown. Fortunately no weapons were allowed either within the Temple courts or outer precincts, the exception being those allowed to the Levites, the Temple police, who were responsible for keeping order. Armed with clubs, they would step in when a fight broke out and end it in summary fashion.

It was a patrolling Temple guard who not only spotted the figure on the tower, but also recognised it as the leader of a Jewish sect that acknowledged the dead man Jesus as the Messiah, God's messenger - a sect that would eventually be known as Christians. He immediately ran to his superior and reported what he had seen.

The bored priest who received this information stopped picking his nose and thought with malicious glee of the furore his news would cause. He also recognised the man on the tower as James, one of the dead Jesus' brothers and knew that the present High Priest of all Israel, Ananus, was the son of Hanan, the father-in-law of Ciaphas, who had had Jesus condemned to death. Humming to himself, he sped away to find Ananus. As he hurried along he speculated as to why James was on the ramparts. A thrill of vicarious excitement swept through him, as with a sudden flash of intuition he realised that James, who had been elected by the Christian Jews as the first bishop of their church, intended to speak to the Jews gathered in the Temple courts.

The High Priest of all Israel, Ananus, was leaving a meeting of senior priests when he received the report of the man on the tower. Muttering his displeasure he hurriedly returned to the meeting.

Knowing the identity of the man on the tower, he knew that a crisis was in the making. Swift, decisive action was needed.

The members of the re-assembled committee discussed the situation. Not knowing why the man was there and what he intended, led to conjecture and confusion. Among them was Eleazar Ben Ananias, Governor of the Temple. This role made him second in command to Ananus. His father, who had served a term as the High Priest of all Israel, was responsible for the Temple's finances and its vast treasury.

Unknown to his fellow priests, Eleazar was a leader in the Zealot party, whose members declared themselves to be Nationalists. Currently they restricted themselves to terrorist attacks on civilians who didn't agree with their political agenda, “Home rule for Israel”. As well as killing civilians, they ambushed Roman patrols when the opportunity presented itself. To anybody who would listen, they declared that the Jews should rebel against Rome. As Commander of the Temple police, who were all Levites, Eleazar was prepared to deal with the situation in whatever way Ananus ordered.

Ananus said nothing but sat, thinking furiously. James the Just, as he was known to his followers, represented a serious threat to orthodox Jewry, for he was the acknowledged leader of a new teaching; a teaching that found expression in Judaic Christianity - Judaism in transformation - a new religion which spoke of one God for all mankind. This new teaching saw Judaism as the foundation of Christianity, and in Christianity the ideal Jew. For James the Just, a devout Jew, the Law meant the rule of life as Jesus had taught it, available to all men, gentiles as well as Jews.