The governors sent out from Rome to rule Judea beginning in A.D. 6 were second-rank and often second-rate Roman colonial administrators, sometimes simply incompetent, sometimes corrupt, sometimes deliberately provocative of Jewish loyalties. Pilate, governor from A.D. 26 to 36, was particularly insensitive, and a few years later the insane emperor Caligula sought to have a statue of himself erected in the holy of holies of the Jerusalem temple. Even beyond these specific provocations (and there were many others), the Roman presence brought unintended but inevitable conflict with Jewish law.
UNDER ROME: DOUBLE TAXATION
Roman rule had direct economic consequences with an immense impact on the Jewish social world. It brought a second system of taxation, which was added to the system of “tithes” contained within the Torah. For modern Christians, “tithes” are understood as voluntary contributions to the church. In the Jewish social world, however, the tithes required by the Torah were understood as divine laws and functioned as its tax system. The tithes supported the priests, the temple and temple staff (the Levites), and the poor. Designed for an agricultural society, each tithe was a certain percentage of a farmer’s production. Taken together, the various tithes added up to slightly over 20 percent per year.
To this system of taxation, the Romans added their own. The two with the greatest effect on farmers were the land tax (1 percent of its value) and crop tax (12½ percent of the produce). There were other Roman taxes as well (customs, toll, and tribute): but even without them, the combined total of Jewish and Roman taxes on farmers amounted to about 35 percent.10 This was a crushing amount, and would be even today.11 Moreover, the way in which the Roman taxes were collected exacerbated the problem. Rome sold the privilege of collecting taxes to “tax farmers,” who paid Rome a fixed amount and whose own profit depended on the percentage they added to the taxes.12
The impact upon the Jewish social world was severe. The Jewish people were powerless to affect either system of taxation. One was dictated by Roman policy, over which they had no control; the other was required by divine revelation. But there was a difference between the two systems of taxation. The Roman taxes were enforced by police power, the Jewish taxes were not. One had no choice but to pay the Roman taxes, or lose one’s land. Their collection was enforced by the state.
But there was no legal sanction if the Jewish taxes were not paid; Rome did not enforce their collection, and the Jews had no political power to compel payment. The situation confronted the Jewish population with an economic dilemma which was at the same time a test of religious loyalty. In addition to paying the Roman taxes, could one pay the tithes commanded by the Torah?
Many Jewish farmers could not without risking losing their land. Indeed, some small farmers could not pay even the Roman taxes and thus did lose their land, creating a growing number of landless day laborers, widespread emigration, and a social class of robbers and beggars. Many of the rest could save their land only by not paying the tithes commanded by the Torah. The system of double taxation was generating a large class of “nonobservant” Jews, not because of the attractiveness of Roman and Hellenistic ways, but because of economic pressure.
The situation created a severe crisis for the Jewish social world. Every social world is sustained by the commitment of the group which lives within it; without the group, the social world would not continue, just as the group could not survive without a social world.13 A social world remains intact only so long as people affirm it. But under the pressure of the Roman occupation, one of the central sustaining mechanisms of the Jewish social world, the commitment of its people to the observance of its laws, was being undermined.
The introduction of Roman rule thus brought a crisis into all aspects of Jewish life, religious, political, and social—and, because of the economic impact, into the smallest hamlet of the Palestinian countryside. Moreover, the conflict between the Jewish social world and the Roman presence seemed incapable of resolution. Roman imperial strategy demanded her presence and power in Palestine, both as a buffer against the Parthian empire to the east and to ensure the security of Egypt, the breadbasket of the empire. To many within the Jewish social world, however, the Roman presence itself was the problem.
THE RESPONSE: THE POLITICS OF HOLINESS
In response to the threat produced by Roman occupation, the Jewish social world became dominated by the politics of holiness. Though the word “politics” is used in many different senses, most fundamentally politics concerns the organization of a human community. Polis is the Greek word for “city,” and thus politics is concerned with the “shape” of the city, and, by extension, of any human community. Indeed, it concerns both the shaping and the shape, process as well as result. In this sense of the word, biblical religion is intrinsically political, for it is persistently concerned with the life of a community living in history.
The politics of holiness was a continuation in intensified form of a cultural dynamic that had emerged in Judaism after the exile.14 It was expressed most succinctly in the “holiness code” whose central words affirmed, “You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy.” The cultural dynamic was thus articulated in one of the classic patterns of religious thought, an imitatio dei or “imitation of God.”15 God was holy, and Israel was to be holy. That was to be her ethos, her way of life. Moreover, holiness was understood in a highly specific way, namely as separation. To be holy meant to be separate from everything that would defile holiness.16 The Jewish social world and its conventional wisdom became increasingly structured around the polarities of holiness as separation: clean and unclean, purity and defilement, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, righteous and sinner.
Holiness as the cultural dynamic shaping Israel’s ethos had originated as a survival strategy during the exile and afterward as the Jewish people pondered their recent experience of destruction and suffering. They were determined to be faithful to God in order to avoid another outpouring of the divine judgment. Moreover, as a small social group—a conquered one at that, bereft of kingship and other national institutions—they were profoundly endangered by the possibility of assimilation into the surrounding cultures. Such has been the fate of most small social groups throughout history. The quest for holiness addressed both needs. It was the path of faithfulness and the path of social survival.
“Holiness” became the paradigm by which the Torah was interpreted. The portions of the law which emphasized the separateness of the Jewish people from other peoples, and which stressed separation from everything impure within Israel, became dominant. Holiness became the Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the age,” shaping the development of the Jewish social world in the centuries leading up to the time of Jesus, providing the particular content of the Jewish ethos or way of life. Increasingly, the ethos of holiness became the politics of holiness.
JEWISH RENEWAL MOVEMENTS IN PALESTINE
The politics of holiness was intensified by Jewish renewal movements active in first-century Palestine.17 Writing in the closing decades of the first century A.D., the Jewish historian Josephus spoke of four “philosophies” or sects within Palestinian Judaism. One, the Sadducees, was a conservative and aristocratic group, not a renewal movement. However, the other three—the Essenes, the Pharisees, and what Josephus called “the fourth philosophy” (sometimes incorrectly known as the Zealots)—were renewal movements. Each addressed the crisis facing the Jewish social world by asking the question, “What does it mean, in these circumstances, to be a faithful Jew?” All of them intensified the postexilic cultural dynamic of holiness as separation. But each had its own understanding of what this meant, and each offered its own strategy for coping with the Roman crisis.18
THE ESSENES
Known to us largely through the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea near the middle of this century, the Essenes19 believed that a life of holiness within society as then constituted was impossible. Their response was to withdraw from society to the wilde
rness. They formed their own separate self-sufficient communities in which they lived a highly disciplined monastic style of life, holding all things in common. Calling themselves the “men of holiness” and a “house of holiness,” they understood holiness to require separation from an impure society. Seeing themselves as “children of light,” they viewed the Romans (and most of the Jewish people, for that matter) as “children of darkness,” and looked forward to the day when God would destroy the Romans in a cataclysmic battle. Though an interesting example of Jewish monasticism, their experiment was short-lived. They did not survive the first century, but apparently perished in the war with Rome.
THE PHARISEES
Of the Jewish renewal movements, the Pharisees20 are the best known, simply because they are frequently mentioned by name in the gospels. Because they most often appear as opponents of Jesus, they have become victims of a historically inaccurate stereotype, namely as hypocrites.21 But if “hypocrite” means somebody who is insincere, or who says one thing and then does another, the stereotype is unfair. The Pharisees as a group seem to have been very serious about following the path as they saw it.
Like the Essenes, the Pharisees sought to counteract the threat to the Jewish social world and identity by radicalizing the Torah in the direction of holiness. Unlike the Essenes, however, they sought to accomplish this within society by transforming the Jewish people into a “kingdom of priests.” Becoming a Pharisee meant undertaking that degree of holiness required of priests in the temple.
The laws regarding purity and tithing were the major focus of the Pharisaic intensification of holiness. The Pharisaic program thus addressed the greatest source of nonobservance, that created by the double system of taxation. All tithes were to be paid, and one who would be holy could not eat untithed food. Loyalty to God meant giving to God what was God’s—namely, the tithes commanded by the Torah.
Like the Jewish people in general, the Pharisees had no police power to enforce the payment of the tithes. Their sanctions were of another kind. Though some of them appear to have boycotted the produce of nonobservant Jews, the effect of the boycott could not have been great, for their numbers were small. They had some influence upon the priests, for they would give their tithes only to priests who followed Pharisaic rules of purity. But their major sanction was social and religious ostracism. From the Pharisaic point of view, the most offensive of the nonobservant were said to have lost all civil and religious rights; they were deprived of the right to sit on local councils and lost their place as children of Abraham in the life of the age to come. They became “as Gentiles.” The major vehicle of social and religious ostracism was the refusal of table fellowship. To share a meal with a person was an expression of acceptance; to refuse to share a meal symbolized disapproval and rejection. Accordingly, Pharisees would not share a meal with the nonobservant.
As the only major renewal movement operating publicly within society, the Pharisees were the most visible manifestation of the politics of holiness. They sought to preserve and shape the Jewish social world by intensifying the Torah precisely in the area in which the temptation to nonobservance was the greatest. Their accomplishment was that they provided a way of being faithful to God and the Torah even under foreign rule, without leaving society. With regard to Rome, it appears that most tolerated the payment of the Roman taxes. Those who did not would have been sympathizers with the resistance movement, as some clearly were. But toward Rome most probably adopted an attitude of resigned acceptance, protesting only when Roman practices flagrantly violated the Torah. Remembering that one’s first loyalty was to God permitted other loyalties as well, so long as the Torah was not violated.
Our focus on that which distinguished the Pharisees within first-century Judaism leaves the picture of them incomplete. They also were devoted to all that was common to Judaism: absolute loyalty to God, love of neighbor, the joy of the Sabbath, the richness of the Jewish festivals, and religious disciplines such as prayer and fasting. Pharisaic circles produced some of the noblest saints in Judaism. In the first century, there was the peaceable and lovable Hillel; some years later, Yohanan ben Zakkai wrested from the ruins of the war with Rome the fundamental form of Jewish piety that remains to this day. In the second century A.D., Rabbi Akiba put loyalty to Torah above life, and in his nineties was flayed alive by the Romans. His last words as the flesh was stripped from his bones were, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”22
THE RESISTANCE
The century between the beginning of Herod the Great’s reign in 37 B.C. and the outbreak of the great war of rebellion against Rome in 66 A.D. was marked by frequent incidents of guerilla warfare as well as more massive attempts to overthrow the rule of Rome and her client kings and governors. However, we do not know whether there actually existed a continuing well-defined resistance group, analogous to the Essenes and Pharisees, or whether the episodes of armed resistance were more or less spontaneous outbursts participated in by diverse elements of the population. Josephus speaks of the “fourth philosophy” as if it were a group parallel to the Essenes and Pharisees (though he does not give it a name), but our sources do not provide enough data for us to know. Perhaps we should speak of a current of resistance rather than a movement.23
In any case, the point of view of those who were motivated by religion to take up arms against Rome was clear. Holiness could be achieved only by expelling Rome, the impure and idolatrous Gentile occupier. Implicitly, the resistance fighters radicalized the first commandment: “You shall have no other lords besides God.” Only God is Lord, not Caesar. It was the rallying cry of the founders of the “fourth philosophy” in A.D. 6, and the explicit motivation for the mass suicide of the last resistance fighters at Masada in A.D. 74. Their position on taxation was also clear. One’s only loyalty was to God and the Torah; therefore, one was not to pay taxes to Rome.
Thus, with their different strategies, all of the renewal movements sought to preserve the Jewish social world by shaping it increasingly in accord with the politics of holiness. But the politics of holiness also informed the large number of Jews who were not “members” of any of these groups. The majority continued to practice the form of Judaism passed down by “the elders,” the conventional Torah wisdom which enshrined the ethos of holiness. They would have been aware of the movements, and many of the more devout and earnest among them would have been attracted to one or another. But all of them—the renewal movements as well as the people not identified with any movement—were committed to the politics of holiness, for that was not the monopoly of any particular movement, but the cultural dynamic shaping the society as a whole.
Ironically, the attempt to preserve the Jewish social world through the politics of holiness further fragmented it. The result of the radicalizations of Torah taught by the various renewal groups was greater division. There was competition among the groups themselves, as well as a division between each group and the rest of the population. Each group in a sense generated its opposite; the more intense the demands of holiness became (however defined), the greater the number of people who did not meet them. Thus the intention to produce a sharper division between Jew and Gentile led to greater divisions among the Jewish people themselves.24
“SINNERS” AND “OUTCASTS”
In particular, the emphasis upon the politics of holiness, combined with the economic pressure toward nonobservance, produced a large group of “sinners” and “outcasts.” The term “sinners” referred to an identifiable social group, just as the term “righteous” did: those who did not follow the ways of the fathers as spelled out by the Torah wisdom of the sages. The worst of the nonobservant were the outcasts. We do not know the exact extent of the class, though it included the notoriously “wicked” (murderers, extortioners, prostitutes, and the like), as well as members of certain occupational groups, membership in which made one as a “non-J
ew.”25
The outcasts were virtually untouchables, not very different from the lowest caste of the Hindu system, though the status of outcast was not hereditary in Judaism. Teachers in the Jewish tradition disagreed about whether repentance was even possible for them. Next to them were the impoverished landless, whose economic status put them outside the world of family and property presupposed by conventional wisdom, and thus outside the world of respectability. The distinction between a starkly poor person, living on a mixture of begging and day labor, and an outcast must have been almost imperceptible. The status of a small farmer who did not pay his tithes would have been somewhat better, for he and his family could live more in accord with conventional wisdom, but still they would be among the nonobservant.
THE POLITICS OF HOLINESS AND THE CONFLICT WITH ROME
The politics of holiness also intensified the conflict with Rome. Members of all of the movements, as well as much of the population in general, shared varying degrees of antipathy toward Rome, whose control of the land was primarily responsible for the crisis. The spirit of hostility and resistance to Rome was widespread, as the many episodes of massive nonviolent resistance demonstrate. The memory of the heroic and successful struggle of the Maccabees against a powerful occupying Gentile nation some two centuries earlier was alive not only among the resistance fighters, but in the population as a whole.
The generation in which Jesus lived was heading toward war, not because it was a particularly warlike generation or because it was dominated by “men of violence.” Rather, the most fundamental causes were twofold. There was the perception of real injustice—Roman rule was chronically oppressive and could be brutal. And there was loyalty to a deeply ingrained way of life, namely to the ethos of holiness understood as separation from all that was impure. To a large extent, the politics of holiness, coupled with the insensitivity of Roman imperial power, was responsible for the conflict. Though the politics of holiness was a survival strategy, in fact it was a path of catastrophe, leading to the war of A.D. 66-70 with its enormous suffering and destruction of the temple and Jerusalem.
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