The Roman garrison in Judea was tiny, three cohorts and an ala (cavalry force) that together numbered no more than 3,000 men, which, as Tacitus comments, was altogether inadequate. About a thousand were stationed permanently at Jerusalem in the Antonia Fortress. These soldiers were not legionaries but local auxiliaries or “native troops” (Syrians, Samaritans, Idumeans, or Nubians, but never Jews), although their senior officers were Romans. Often badly equipped and poorly disciplined, always on the lookout for loot, and savage in dealing with the Hebrews whom they regarded as hereditary enemies, they were unreliable—resentful of discipline, bad in a crisis, and prone to panic. They also operated a kind of protection racket. “Don’t ill-treat anybody, don’t denounce anyone falsely,” John the Baptist is recorded as telling troops of this type. “Be content with your pay.”1 Nevertheless, led with a mixture of brutality and bribery, these Judean recruits kept the peace, enforced taxation, and chased the bandits who plagued the countryside.
Undoubtedly, the occupation brought benefits for the Jews, though these were more apparent to society’s richer members. It brought roads that enabled commerce, it brought justice of a sort, however corrupt, and it brought what Pliny proudly called the “immense majesty of Roman peace.” For a long time, brigands and troublemakers, such as the itinerant prophets who stirred up the peasantry, were kept in check, although it was impossible to exterminate them. Merchants could sail across the Mediterranean without too much fear of piracy and travel the roads without too much fear of robbery.
The Roman government had no bureaucracy or district commissioners. Instead it relied on the ruling class to prevent any organized resistance from breaking out and used native officials to collect taxes.2 For a time, the system worked well enough. Jews from the same background as Josephus realized that, for people like them, the advantages of Roman rule outweighed the drawbacks. Rich enough to pay their taxes without discomfort, they welcomed the presence of troops who kept the lower orders in place. They knew there was no alternative; recent history showed that Rome won every war, invariably defeating her opponents.
The procurator realized that his job was to maintain law and order so that the Jews would pay the taxes. It was complicated by every senior Roman official’s determination to screw as much money out of a subject country as possible. “Naturally, governors want to get as much as they can, particularly the ones feeling insecure who expect to stay for only a short time,” writes Josephus, quoting the Emperor Tiberius.3 “Uncertain about when they will lose their post, they work all the harder at fleecing people.” If allowed to stay in office, they eventually became gorged with plunder after extracting such vast amounts and grew less harsh, so that their successor’s rule seemed almost intolerable in contrast.
The one thing that stopped a procurator from bleeding Judea dry was a fear that some Jewish delegation might make a successful complaint about his illegal exactions to the emperor or the legate of Syria. Yet at the same time, he knew that Rome would ignore most maladministration or corruption so long as it did not provoke rebellion. In order to ensure that the natives remained docile, he needed to avoid being caught up in the unending local quarrels (though not all procurators behaved so sensibly). Above all, he must be careful not to upset the Jews’ religious sensibilities.
Many aspects of “Romanitas” did not accord with the faith of Israel, and procurators were aware that they were sitting on the brink of a volcano. A dangerous rebellion might break out at any moment. They remembered how when Herod the Great died in 4 CE, the bandit Judas, son of Hezekiah, had proclaimed himself king, as had the giant slave, Simon, who burned down the royal palace at Jericho. They recalled, too, how in Judea the shepherd Athronges and his brothers had raised an army, which ambushed a Roman century, killing the centurion and forty men before taking to the hills. Varus, legate of Syria, had found it necessary to crucify 2,000 Jews before he was able to restore order.
This explains Pontius Pilate’s suspicion of Jesus of Nazareth. “At this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he did amazing things—a teacher for men who listen joyfully to truth,” says Josephus in a famous passage in his Jewish Antiquities, and one whose authenticity has been hotly debated. “He found many followers among both Jews and Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, after hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, condemned him to be crucified, those who had loved him from the start did not stop doing so. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, God’s prophets having prophesied this as well as other wonderful things about him. Even now, the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not yet disappeared.”4
The references in this passage (known by scholars as the Testimonium Flavianum) to the resurrection and “the tribe of Christians” may be a second-century interpolation by a Christian copyist.5 Otherwise, however, it is accepted as genuine by many authorities, including Geza Vermes. Even if the sentence about Christians was added later, it certainly looks as if Josephus mentioned Jesus, placing him among the wise to prove his point that Pilate was unjust. A Christian writer would never have been content with saying that Jesus was merely a wise man who did amazing things.6
Just before Josephus was born, Pilate caused outrage by bringing into Jerusalem his soldiers’ eagles, the Roman symbol of victory that bears Caesar’s image, although he took them out after a rioting crowd refused to be cowed by his troops’ drawn swords. He also backed down after complaints that golden shields bearing Tiberius’s name, which he had displayed at his residence, the former royal palace, were idolatrous. However, when he robbed the Temple treasury to pay for an aqueduct and the Jews gathered in the amphitheater at Caesarea to yell their disapproval, he let his men loose on them with clubs, and many died in the ensuing stampede. Finally, he went too far, ordering his men to butcher a group of Samaritans who had met on Mount Gerizim to pray. The Samaritans complained to Vitellius, the legate of Syria. Realizing that Pilate had become a liability, Vitellius sent him back to Rome in disgrace to answer their charges, and then he disappears from history.
Some Romans behaved more sensibly. When in 41 Caligula sent Publius Petronius, legate of Syria, to set up an image in the Temple of the deified emperor as a god, with orders to exterminate any protesters and enslave their countrymen, the legate wrote to the emperor, saying that a vast number of Jews had implored him not to do it and that the emperor must cancel his order unless he wanted to lose the country. Luckily, Caligula died before he could carry out his intention. The brief reign of Agrippa I, Herod the Great’s grandson, who became the client king of Judea the same year, was a welcome respite from the procurators.
However, when he died in 44, his son, Agrippa II, was fobbed off with a border kingdom. The procurators returned, and over the next few years Rome usually appointed the wrong man. Over the next twenty years, law and order gradually broke down, as we can see from what Josephus tells us in The Jewish War.7 In 45 CE, for example, a magician called Theudas persuaded a large crowd to follow him to the river Jordan, which he promised to divide with his staff, like Moses, but the new procurator, Cuspius Fadus, sent cavalry to disperse them, and the “prophet” was caught and beheaded—his head being taken back to Jerusalem.8 Josephus also records that shortly afterward James and Simon, who were sons of Judas the Galilean, were arrested and crucified by Tiberius Alexander, Fadus’s successor, presumably for planning some sort of Zealot revolt.
The use of native troops, men recruited from places like Caesarea, who for racial reasons could be relied on to insult and mistreat Jews, was bound to cause trouble. During the Passover of 51 CE, when thousands of pilgrims had come to Jerusalem, a soldier who was on duty at the Portico of Solomon and guarding the outer precincts of the Temple, pulled up his kilt, displayed his bare backside to the worshippers and made a noise “in tune with his posture.”9 A mob of infuriated Jews stoned the troops until the procurator, Ventidius Cumanus, brought in reinforcements and threw them out of the Temple, many being kill
ed. A more serious incident took place during the pursuit of some brigands when a soldier tore a copy of the Torah in pieces and threw it on a fire. The only way Cumanus was able to calm the uproar was to have the man beheaded in front of the Jews.
Meanwhile, a Galilean going up to Jerusalem for the Passover was murdered on his way through Samaria. Led by a bandit called Eleazar, Jews rushed down from the city to avenge him, attacking Samaritan villages and killing the inhabitants. After accepting a bribe from the Samaritans, Cumanus arrived in their country from Caesarea with mounted troops and slaughtered many of Eleazar’s followers, dragging others back in chains to Caesarea. When the Jews appealed to the legate of Syria, Numidius Quadratus, he went to Caesarea and crucified Cumanus’s prisoners, besides beheading a further eighteen who had been involved. He then sent the chief priest, Jonathan, to Rome with other important Jews and the Samaritan leaders to argue their case before the Emperor Claudius. He also ordered Cumanus and his second-in-command, the tribune Celer, to return to Rome and explain themselves. The smooth-tongued King Agrippa was the Jews’ advocate, and Claudius decided in their favor. He had the three Samaritan leaders beheaded, banished Cumanus, and sent Celer back to Jerusalem in chains to be tortured and dragged through the city before being beheaded. Even the emperor realized that the country might easily erupt in revolt.
Antonius Felix, who replaced Cumanus as procurator—and is familiar to readers of the Bible as the man who imprisoned St. Paul10—was a former slave described by Tacitus as “ripe for any sort of villainy.”11 He got the job because his brother was Emperor Claudius’s favorite adviser and because he had married King Agrippa’s beautiful sister. Corrupt and cruel, he was always trying to feather his nest, and so the Jews were constantly complaining to Rome about his criminal activities. However, he managed to give the impression that he was restoring order, at least in the countryside. He captured the veteran bandit Eleazar, along with his whole gang, promised him a pardon, and then sent him in chains to Rome. Besides hunting down brigands and the villagers who sheltered them, he executed any “prophets” he could catch, crucifying large numbers of them.
While the countryside was being pacified—or at least cowed into submission—trouble of another sort was breaking out in Jerusalem. The Zealot knifemen, the sicarii, were growing more active. (Their name came from their knives or small swords, which were curved like Roman sickles, or sicae.) Their first victim was the high priest, Jonathan, who had been grumbling that the procurator was not doing his job properly and threatening to complain to Rome. Felix bribed one of the high priest’s friends to arrange for the sicarii to eliminate him.12 After his murder, there were daily assassinations, and soon all Jerusalem was living in terror—“everybody expected death at any moment, just as men do in wartime.”13 The assassins mingled with the crowds who packed the city’s narrow streets during festivals and then, knives hidden in their clothes, stalked a victim, struck him down, and escaped by pretending to lead the pursuit. They even attacked in the Temple. According to Josephus, they were more than fanatics of the Fourth Philosophy; they were professional hit men who carried out contract killings.14 Among the more obscure folk they tried to knife was an ex-Pharisee called Saul of Tarsus.15
In addition, a group of “magicians” pretended to be divinely inspired and persuaded a crowd to follow them into the desert, promising that once they were in the wilderness, God would show them how to win their liberty. Felix sent a force of infantry and cavalry in pursuit and killed most of them. He dealt in the same way with an Egyptian “prophet” who deluded a mob of 4,000 men—described as “murderers” in the New Testament—into believing that they could take over the city.16 His troops slaughtered a large number of them, although they failed to catch the Egyptian, who fled into the desert. Later, a certain Saul of Tarsus was mistaken for him and arrested by the Roman authorities.
Meanwhile, because their leading men were richer than the Greeks, and because their numbers were swollen by starving peasants, the Jews of Caesarea claimed that the city belonged to them exclusively, on the grounds that it had been built by King Herod, who was a Jew. This was a dangerous thing to do since the majority of the population were Greeks. When stones were thrown, several people were hurt, and some of the garrison joined in on the side of the Greeks. However, the Jews began to get the upper hand despite their inferior numbers, so Felix went into the main square and told them to go home. When they refused, he ordered his soldiers to chase them off the streets. Although his men inflicted severe casualties and looted Jewish houses, the rioting continued. Finally, he sent the leaders of both sides to Rome to argue their case before Nero.
Despite Felix’s reasonable response to the upheaval in Caesarea, on the whole his behavior in Judea was deplorable. Tacitus says that “he liked to pretend he was a king although he had the mind of a slave, and enjoyed indulging a taste for cruelty and vice.”17 Serious trouble was looming by the time Nero recalled him in disgrace in 60 CE. He had relaxed his campaign against the brigands, who combined with the “prophets” in inciting country people to revolt, fight for their freedom, and kill anyone obedient to the government. Their message was so attractive that bands of thugs, welcomed by the peasants, roamed the countryside, plundering the houses of rich men, murdering well-to-do folk, and setting villages on fire—“until all Judea was filled with the consequences of their madness.”18
Josephus implies that the next procurator, Porcius Festus (who sent Paul of Tarsus to Rome), was more capable. He says that Festus made the restoration of law and order in the countryside his priority, capturing most of the bandits who were causing all the trouble and putting many of them to death. He, too, had trouble with a “prophet,” sending soldiers to exterminate the man’s followers when they assembled in the desert. He seems to have been tactful in his dealing with the Jewish ruling class, and there is no record of his upsetting religious sensibilities. Unfortunately, he died after a mere two years in office. Had Festus lived longer, he might have averted the looming tragedy.
Before his replacement reached Judea, the high priest Ananus summoned the Sanhedrin and “brought before them James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ and others, charged with breaking the law, and had these men stoned.”19 Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, but quoting the lost writings of Heggesipus, who wrote in the second, adds that James, Bishop of Jerusalem, was made to climb the topmost pinnacle of the Temple and ordered to abjure Jesus. After refusing, he was hurled down but survived the fall—to be stoned before being finished off with a grindstone. James had led the Judeo-Christians, who kept many Jewish observances, praying at the Temple at the prescribed hours.20 The incident shows the increasing lawlessness of the upper class, since only a procurator had the power to condemn men to death.
This reference to James is generally accepted.21 Josephus refers only twice to Jesus of Nazareth and the Christians in his books. His silence has been interpreted in different ways, the most likely explanation being that as a loyal Jew writing for a pagan readership, he tried to make men of his faith seem as admirable as possible. He probably saw little point in writing about Jesus, who, in his eyes, was no more than an obscure fanatic who had died disgracefully on a cross. (Even so, his eighteenth-century translator, William Whiston, reached the bizarre conclusion that Josephus had secretly been an Ebionite—a Jew partly converted to Christianity.)
In 62 CE, Nero, whose judgment was growing increasingly erratic, appointed Lucceius Albinus to succeed Festus. When the new procurator arrived, he made feeble attempts to hunt down the sicarii, but he proved to be an unmitigated disaster, weak and venal. “He did not do his job as the other [Festus] had done it while there was no species of graft in which he did not have a hand,” says Josephus.22 Besides using his position to rob and plunder everybody, he imposed new taxes that crushed the entire nation and allowed the relatives of anyone who had been imprisoned by the municipal authorities or former procurators to buy their freedom in return for cash. The only people left in
jail were those who could not pay. The criminal element in Jerusalem grew more dangerous all the time. Its leaders bribed Albinus to turn a blind eye to their activities so that their thugs could rob law-abiding citizens with impunity. Nobody dared to complain.
What was peculiarly shocking was the behavior of men at the top of society, such as the former high priest Ananias ben Nedebaeus, who cultivated the friendship of the procurator and the current high priest Yeshua with lavish presents. A notorious “hoarder of money,” he wanted a free hand to do as he liked. He sent his servants, armed with clubs, to the threshing floors, reinforced by professional criminals, to seize tithes from the poorer priests, who were beaten up if they tried to resist. In consequence, some of the older clergy died from starvation during these years of bad harvests—another reason for the breakdown of society.
Ananias “increased in glory every day.” However, he met his match when the sicarii kidnapped his son, Eleazar, the Temple captain, along with his secretary and held them ransom until Ananias released ten sicarii whom he had taken prisoner. After he let them go, the sicarii went on kidnapping his officials whenever he arrested their fellow knifemen.
Other high priests besides Ananias employed armed bands, who fought each other, as well as “plundering the goods of people weaker than themselves.” 23 Just how much magnates of this sort were hated by ordinary folk in Judea is conveyed by the Talmud: “House of Boethus? Woe upon us, watch out for their whip! House of Kanthera? Woe upon us, watch out for their pen! House of Annias? Woe upon us, watch out for their viper’s hiss! House of Ishmael ben Phiabi? Woe upon us, watch out for their blows! They themselves are high priests while their sons are treasurers and so are their fathers-in-law, all great men at the Temple. As for their servants, they are always thrashing us with cudgels.”24
Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea Page 4