It is important to note that most of the protests against imperial rule in Roman Palestine were nonviolent; far from being fanatically driven to suicidal aggression by their faith, as Josephus would later suggest, Jews conducted principled demonstrations that resorted to armed force only under extreme pressure. When angry crowds protested against the cruel death of their beloved teachers, Archelaus, Herod’s eldest son, asked them what he could do for them. The response reveals that their hostility to Rome was not solely inspired by religious intransigence: “Some clamoured for a lightening of direct taxation, some for the abolition of purchase-tax, others for the release of prisoners.”19 Even though Jerusalem still rang with lamentation, there was no violence against the authorities until Archelaus panicked and sent troops into the temple. Even then the crowds merely pelted them with stones before returning to their devotions. The situation could have been contained, had not Archelaus sent in the army, which killed three thousand worshippers.20 Protests then spread to the countryside, where popular leaders, acclaimed as “kings,” waged guerrilla warfare against Roman and Herodian troops. Again, taxation rather than religion was the main issue. Mobs attacked the estates of the nobility and raided local fortresses, storehouses, and Roman baggage trains to “take back the goods that had been seized from the people.”21 It took P. Quintilius Varus, governor of neighboring Syria, three years to restore the Pax Romana, during which he burned the Galilean city of Sepphoris to the ground, sacked the surrounding villages, and crucified two thousand rebels outside Jerusalem.22
Rome now decided that Herod’s realm should be divided among his three sons: Archelaus was given Idumaea, Judea, and Samaria; Antipas Galilee and Peraea; and Philip the Transjordan. But Archelaus’s rule was so cruel that Rome soon deposed him, and for the first time Judea was governed by a Roman prefect, supported by the Jewish priestly aristocracy, from his residence in Caesarea. When Coponius, the first governor, arranged for a census as a prelude to tax assessment, a Galilean named Judas urged the people to resist. His religious commitment was inseparable from his political protest:23 paying Roman taxes, Judas insisted, “amounted to slavery, pure and simple,” because God was “the only leader and master” of the Jewish people. If they remained steadfast in their opposition and did not shrink “from the slaughter that might come upon them,” God would intervene and act on their behalf. 24
Typically peasants did not resort to violence. Their chief weapon was noncooperation: working slowly or even refraining from work altogether, making their point economically and often cannily. Most Roman governors were careful to avoid offending Jewish sensibilities, but in 26 CE Pontius Pilate ordered the troops in the Antonia fortress to raise military standards displaying the emperor’s portrait right next to the temple. At once a mob of peasants and townsfolk marched to Caesarea, and when Pilate refused to remove the standards, they simply lay motionless outside his residence for five days. When Pilate summoned them to the stadium, they found that they were surrounded by soldiers with drawn swords and fell to the ground again, crying that they would rather die than break their laws. They may have relied on divine intervention, but they also knew that Pilate would risk massive reprisals had he slaughtered them all. And they were right: the Roman governor had to admit defeat and take down the standards.25 The chances of such a bloodless outcome were much slimmer when, fourteen years later, Emperor Gaius Caligula would order his statue to be erected in the Jerusalem temple. Once again the peasants took to the road, “as if at a single signal … leaving their houses and villages empty.”26 When the legate Petronius arrived at the port of Ptolemais with the offending statue, he found “tens of thousands of Jews” with their wives and children massed on the plain in front of the city. Again, this was not a violent protest. “On no account would we fight,” they told Petronius, but they were prepared to remain in Ptolemais until after the planting season.27 This was a politically savvy peasants’ strike: Petronius had to explain to the emperor “that since the land was unsown, there would be a harvest of banditry, because the requirements of the tribute would not be met.”28 Caligula was rarely moved by rational considerations, however, and the episode could have ended tragically had he not been assassinated the following year.
These peasant communities may have voiced their opposition to Roman rule in terms of their egalitarian Jewish traditions, but they were neither crazed by their fervor nor violent or suicidal. Later popular movements failed because their leaders were less astute. During the 50s CE a prophet called Theudas would lead four hundred people into the Judean desert in a new exodus, convinced that if the people took the initiative, God would send deliverance.29 Another rebel leader marched a crowd of thirty thousand through the desert to the Mount of Olives, “ready to force an entry into Jerusalem, overwhelm the Roman garrison, and seize supreme power.”30 These movements had no political leverage and were ruthlessly put down. Both these protests were inspired by the apocalyptic and perennial belief that activity on earth could influence events on the cosmic plane. This was the political context of Jesus’s mission in the villages of Galilee.
Jesus was born into a society traumatized by violence. His life was framed by revolts. The uprisings after Herod’s death occurred in the year of his birth, and he was brought up in the hamlet of Nazareth, only a few miles from Sepphoris, which Varus had razed to the ground; the peasants’ strike against Caligula would occur just ten years after his death. During his lifetime, Galilee was governed by Herod Antipas, who financed an expensive building program by imposing heavy taxes on his Galilean subjects. Failure to pay was punished by foreclosure and confiscation of land, and this revenue swelled the huge estates of the Herodian aristocrats.31 When they lost their land, some peasants were forced into banditry, while others—Jesus’s father, the carpenter Joseph, perhaps, among them—turned to menial labor: artisans were often failed peasants.32 The crowds who thronged around Jesus in Galilee were hungry, distressed, and sick. In his parables we see a society split between the very rich and the very poor: people who are desperate for loans; peasants who are heavily indebted; and the dispossessed who have to hire themselves out as day laborers.33
Even though the gospels were written in an urban milieu decades after the events they describe, they still reflect the political aggression and cruelty of Roman Palestine. After Jesus’s birth, King Herod slaughtered all the male infants of Bethlehem, recalling Pharaoh, the archetypal evil imperialist.34 John the Baptist, Jesus’s cousin, was executed by Herod Antipas.35 Jesus predicted that his disciples would be pursued, flogged, and killed by the Jewish authorities,36 and he himself was arrested by the high-priestly aristocracy and tortured and crucified by Pontius Pilate. From the start, the gospels present Jesus as an alternative to the structural violence of imperial rule. Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as “Son of God,” “lord,” and “savior” and announced the “good news” (euaggelia) of his birth. Thus when the angel announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, he proclaimed: “Listen, I bring you euaggelion of great joy! Today a Savior has been born to you.” Yet this “son of God” was born homeless and would soon become a refugee.37
One sign of the acute distress of the population was the large number of people afflicted with neurological and psychological symptoms attributed to demons who came to Jesus for healing. He and his disciples seem to have had the skill to “exorcise” these disorders.38 When they cast out demons, Jesus explained, they were replicating God’s victory over Satan in the cosmic sphere. “I watched Satan fall like lightning from Heaven,” he told his disciples when they returned from a successful healing tour.39 So-called spirit possession seems often linked with economic, sexual, or colonial oppression, when people feel taken over by an alien power they cannot control.40 In one telling incident, when Jesus cast out a host of demons from a possessed man, these satanic forces told him that their name was “legion,” identifying themselves with the Roman troops t
hat were the most blatant symbol of the occupation. Jesus did what many colonized people would like to do: he cast “legion” into a herd of swine, the most polluted of animals, which rushed headlong into the sea.41 The ruling class seems to have regarded Jesus’s exorcisms as politically provocative: they were the reason Antipas decided to take action against him.42
In Jesus’s mission, therefore, politics and religion were inextricable. The event that may have led to his death was his provocative entrance into Jerusalem at Passover, when he was hailed by the crowds as “Son of David” and “king of Israel.”43 He then staged a demonstration in the temple itself, turning over the money changers’ tables and declaring that God’s house was a “den of thieves.”44 This was not, as is sometimes assumed, a plea for a more spiritual style of worship. Judea had been a temple state since the Persian period, so the temple had long been an instrument of imperial control, and the tribute was stored there—although the high priests’ collaboration with Rome had recently brought the institution into such disrepute that peasants were refusing to pay the temple tithes.45 But neither did Jesus’s preoccupation with imperial misrule mean that he was “confusing” religion with politics. As he upturned the tables, he quoted the prophets who had severely castigated those who ignored the plight of the poor but whose religious observance was punctilious. Oppression, injustice, and exploitation had always been religiously charged issues in Israel. The idea that faith should not involve itself in such politics would have been as alien to Jesus as it had been to Confucius.
It is not easy to assess Jesus’s attitude to violence, but there is no evidence that he was planning military insurrection. He forbade his disciples to injure others and to retaliate aggressively.46 He did not resist his arrest and rebuked the disciple who cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant.47 But he could be verbally abusive: he fulminated against the rich;48 cruelly lambasted those “scribes and Pharisees” who served as retainers;49 and called down God’s vengeance on villages that rejected his disciples.50 As we have seen, the Jewish peasants of Palestine had a tradition of nonviolent opposition to imperial rule, and Jesus knew that any confrontation with either the Jewish or the Roman ruling class—he did not distinguish the two—would be dangerous. Any disciple, he warned, must be ready to “take up his cross.”51 It seems that, like Judas of Galilee, Jesus may have relied on God to intervene. While she was pregnant with him, his mother had predicted that God had already begun to create a more just world order:
He has shown the power of his arm
He has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.
The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich sent empty away.
He has come to the help of Israel his servant.52
Like Judas the Galilean, Jesus may have believed that if his disciples did not shrink “from the slaughter that would come upon them” and took the first step, God would overthrow the rich and powerful.
One day the Pharisees and Herodian retainers asked Jesus a trick question: “Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay, yes or no?” Taxation was always an inflammable issue in Roman Palestine, and if Jesus said no, he risked arrest. Pointing to Caesar’s name and image on the denarius, the coin of tribute, Jesus replied: “Give back [apodote] to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”53 In a purely imperial context, Caesar’s claim was legitimate: the Greek verb was used for a rendition made when one recognized a rightful claim.54 But as all Jews knew that God was their king and that everything belonged to him, there was in fact little to “give back” to Caesar. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus followed this incident with a warning to the retainers who helped to implement Roman rule and trampled on the poor and vulnerable: “Beware of the scribes who like to walk about in long robes, to be greeted obsequiously in the market squares, to take the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets; these are the men who swallow the property of widows, while making a show of lengthy prayers.”55 When God finally established his kingdom, their sentence would be severe.
That Kingdom of God was at the heart of Jesus’s teaching.56 Setting up an alternative to the violence and oppression of imperial rule could hasten the moment when God’s power would finally transform the human condition. So his followers must behave as if the kingdom had already arrived.57 Jesus could not drive the Romans from the country, but the “kingdom” he proclaimed, based on justice and equity, was open to everybody—especially those whom the current regime had failed. You should not merely invite your friends and rich neighbors to a festivity, he told his host: “No, when you have a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” Invitations should be issued in “the streets and alleys of the town” and “the open roads and hedgerows.”58 “How happy are you who are destitute [ptochos],” Jesus exclaimed; “yours is the kingdom of God!”59 The poor were the only people who could be “blessed,” because anybody who benefited in any way from the systemic violence of imperial rule was implicated in their plight.60 “Alas for you who are rich, you are having your consolation now,” Jesus continued. “Alas for you who have your fill now; you shall go hungry.”61 In God’s Kingdom, the first would be last and the last first.62 The Lord’s Prayer is for people who were terrified of falling into debt and could hope only for bare subsistence, one day at a time: “Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are in debt to us. And do not put us to the test, but save us from the evil one.”63 Jesus and his closest companions threw in their lot with the most indigent peasants; they lived rough, itinerant lives, had nowhere to lay their heads, and depended on the support of Jesus’s more affluent disciples, such as Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary. 64
Yet the kingdom was not a utopia that would be established at some distant date. At the very beginning of his mission, Jesus had announced: “The time has come and the Kingdom of God has already arrived.”65 The active presence of God was evident in Jesus’s miracles of healing. Everywhere he looked, he saw people pushed to the limit, abused, crushed, and desperate: “He felt sorry for them because they were harassed [eskulmenoi] and dejected [errimmenoi], like a sheep without a shepherd.”66 The Greek verbs have political connotations of being “beaten down” by imperial predation.67 These people would have been suffering from the hard labor, poor sanitation, overcrowding, indebtedness, and anxiety commonly endured by the masses in agrarian society.68 Jesus’s kingdom challenged the cruelty of Roman Judea and Herodian Galilee by approximating more closely to God’s will—“on earth as it is in heaven.”69 Those who feared indebtedness must release others from debts; they had to “love” even their enemies, giving them practical and moral support. Instead of taking violent reprisals, like the Romans, people in God’s kingdom would live according to the Golden Rule: “To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too; to the man who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and do not ask for your property back from the man who robs you. Treat others as you would like them to treat you.”70 Jesus’s followers must live as compassionately as God himself, giving generously to all and refraining from judgment and condemnation.71
After his crucifixion, Jesus’s disciples had visions that convinced them that he had been raised to the right hand of God and would shortly return to inaugurate the kingdom definitively.72 Jesus had worked in rural Roman Palestine and had generally avoided the towns and cities.73 But Paul, a diaspora Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, who had not known Jesus, believed that he had been commissioned by God to bring the “good news” of the gospel to the gentile world, so he preached in the Greco-Roman cities along the major trade routes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Macedonia. This was a very different milieu: Paul’s converts could not beg for their bread but had to work for their living, as he did, and a significant number of his converts may have been men and women of means. Writing in the 50s CE, Paul is the ear
liest extant Christian author, and his teachings influenced the accounts of Jesus’s life in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke (known as the Synoptics), written in the 70s and 80s. And while the Synoptics drew upon the earliest Palestinian traditions about Jesus, they were writing in an urban environment permeated by Greco-Roman religion.
Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had ever separated religion from secular life. They would not have understood our modern understanding of “religion.” They had no authoritative scriptures, no compulsory beliefs, no distinct clergy, and no obligatory ethical rules. There was no ontological gulf separating the gods from men and women; each human being had a numen or genius that was divine, and gods regularly took human form. Gods were part of the citizen body so the Greco-Roman city was essentially a religious community. Each city had its own divine patron, and civic pride, financial interest, and piety were intertwined in a way that would seem strange in our secularized world. Participation in the religious festivals in honor of the city’s gods was essential to city life: there were no public holidays or weekends, so the Lupercalia in Rome and the Panathenaea in Athens were rare opportunities for relaxation and celebration. These rituals defined what it meant to be a Roman or an Athenian, put the city on show, invested civic life with transcendent meaning, presented the community at its best, and gave citizens a sense of belonging to a civic family. Participating in these rituals was just as important as any personal devotion to the gods. To belong to a city, therefore, was to worship its gods—though it was perfectly acceptable to worship other deities too.74
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