by Tom Bissell
The first, Barabbas, is the criminal whose release the people of Jerusalem demand in Jesus’s stead. Luke vaguely describes Barabbas as a man “put in prison for an insurrection that had taken place in the city, and for murder,” which actually makes him sound more like a “bandit” in the later, more Josephusian sense of the word—an irony Luke might have been consciously playing with. The symbolic convenience of a man whose name means “son of the Father” being freed in place of the Son of the Father has long been a matter of vexation to thoughtful Christians. In the third century, Origen was arguing that it had been added to the gospel by heretics. Origen had a point: Why on earth would the people of Jerusalem select Barabbas over Jesus? The former was a murderer and bandit; the latter was someone whose good works many had seen and who days before entered the city on a wave of adulation. In light of this, it seems obvious that the scene is the gospel writers’ response to later Jewish attitudes about Jesus.
The other two are the men Luke tells us were crucified beside Jesus. One of them berates Jesus from the cross, but his friend rebukes him, saying they were both “condemned justly.” For this admission, Jesus tells the so-called good thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” The New Revised Standard Version refers to these men as “criminals,” but the Greek word Luke uses is more akin to “wrongdoer.” Mark and Matthew both refer to Jesus’s co-crucified as “bandits,” while John, altogether uninterested in these men, refers merely to “two others.” All the evangelists were writing for people in temporal proximity to the Jewish War. Luke was apparently highly conscious of how the various groups of criminals and revolutionaries who brought so much strife on Romans and Jews alike might have blended together in the minds of his audience, much in the way Josephus was guilty of blending these groups together in his account of the Jewish War. Luke seems to have worried about the revolutionary message it would have sent to the Gentile and especially Roman members of his audience if Jesus was depicted as having been crucified between two “bandits.”
One possible explanation for how “Zealot” might have slipped Luke’s notice: Mark’s “Simon the Cananaean” was a garbled attempt to obfuscate the semantic connection between an apostle widely known as “Simon the zealous” and the Zealot party. Matthew understood Mark’s goal and preserved “Simon the Cananaean.” Luke did not understand Mark’s goal and corrected “Simon the Cananaean” to “Simon the zealous.” Perhaps Luke simply failed to regard the term “Zealot” as being as politically incendiary as “bandit,” but Galilee, where Christianity began, was deeply associated with the Zealot party, members of which were sometimes called Galileans. If, however, Luke did slip by referring to Simon as Simon the Zealous, it was a strange and uncharacteristically sloppy slip.
Mark likely purposefully tried to avoid associating Jesus with the Zealots; he was wise to. Among the Zealots’ accomplishments during the half decade in which they were politically active were a handful of victories against Roman troops, the seizure of the Temple Mount, the destruction of the Romans’ department of records, the burning of numerous Herodian temples, the looting of the Temple’s supply of sacred lumber to build siege engines, the massacre of Jerusalem’s priestly class, the setting up of what Josephus described as “sham courts and faked trials,” and the fervent instigation of a religious and class war. Only seven years before the Zealots rose up, the Romans were faced with another violent uprising in a similarly far-flung province: Roman Britain. In this case, the Romans’ chief opponent was Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe. The revolt she led resulted in the deaths of several thousand Roman soldiers and as many as eighty thousand Iceni, including Boudicca, who committed suicide rather than suffer the humiliation of capture.
The savage Roman experience against the Iceni helped determine the harshness with which they responded to the first stirrings of revolt in Palestine, which, of course, only strengthened the hand of the Zealots and extremists. In a strangely poetic coincidence, Simon the Zealot was later imagined by Christian storytellers as having been in Britain—and, in some legends, crucified by the Romans—around the time of the Icenian revolt against Rome. For their part, the Zealots ended the war they helped start by following the path of Boudicca and committing mass suicide at Masada with what remained of the equally radical Sicarii. Anyone who visits that godforsaken place today is unpleasantly reminded that the most fanatical of the Zealots are regarded as heroes by many in modern Israel, despite the Zealots’ disastrous role in helping to bring Palestinian Judaism to its knees.
V.
Simon the Zealot was not a Zealot, and Jude Thaddaeus was not Jude. Then again, Jude might not have been Jude. Other than Thaddaeus, the New Testament contains several potential Judes. One is “Judas of James” from the apostolic lists of Luke and Acts. One is John’s “Judas (not Iscariot).” One is the author of the Letter of Jude. All three might be the same person. They might be two people. They might be three different people. Fitting that Jude Thaddaeus became the patron saint of lost causes: discerning his real identity is as lost as New Testament causes get.
We can be virtually certain of one Jude’s existence, though, and that is Jude the brother of Jesus. The scholar Richard Bauckham has done extensive work on early Christianity’s opaque relationship to the brothers of Jesus. He argues that “brothers of the Lord” was a special title used by Jewish Christians of first- and second-century Palestine to refer to Jesus’s blood brothers. Furthermore, he believes, this title was roughly (and briefly) akin in prominence to “apostle,” even though it likely indicated a different degree of ecclesiastical authority and its use was not nearly as widespread.
According to Bauckham, Jewish Christianity developed other phrasal titles to describe the descendants of Jesus and his brothers, one of which was the curious phrase “humanly speaking” (also translated as “according to the flesh”). Here, for instance, is Eusebius describing the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the resultant flight of its Christian communities: “There is a firm tradition that those of the apostles and disciples of the Lord who were still alive assembled from all parts together with those who, humanly speaking, were kinsmen of the Lord—for most of them were still living.”
The phrase turns up again in a fragment of Hegesippus, which survives thanks to Eusebius’s extensive citation. Here, we learn that “the grandsons” of Jesus’s brother Jude, “who was said to be his brother, humanly speaking,” were “informed against” by mysterious parties and dragged before the emperor Domitian, “who was afraid of the advent of Christ as Herod had been.”
Domitian asked them whether they were descended from David, and they admitted it. Then he asked them what property they owned and what funds they had at their disposal. They replied that they had only 9,000 denari*7 between then, half belonging to each; this, they said, was not available in cash, but was the estimated value of only thirty-three plethra*8 of land, from which they raised the money to pay their taxes and the wherewithal to support themselves by their own toil.
In his subsequent gloss of Hegesippus, Eusebius described how the grandsons of Jude showed Domitian their farmer’s calluses “as proof of their toil.” When Domitian asked them about “Christ and His Kingdom—what it was like, and where and when it would appear,” the grandsons of Jude patiently explained to the emperor that Christ’s kingdom “was not of this world or anywhere on earth but angelic and in heaven.” Domitian, apparently relieved that the ethereal portents of Christianity were nothing to worry about, released Jude’s grandsons and “issued orders terminating the persecution of the Church.” After this, Jude’s grandsons—Jesus’s grandnephews—“became leaders of the churches, both because they had borne testimony and because they were of the Lord’s family.”
Needless to say, this is extremely interesting information. While it is doubtful that the grandsons of Jude ever had a meeting with Domitian—much less that Domitian called off his persecution of Christians due to their testimony—the rough outlines of the story may have a
vague historical basis. The aspects of the story that Bauckham regards as something other than simple hagiography include the fact that Jude’s grandsons were landowning but not particularly wealthy farmers (probably in Galilee),*9 that they fell under Roman suspicion due to their descent from David, and that they were well-known among their fellow Jewish Christians in Palestine.
Eusebius turned again to Hegesippus to describe the fate of Jesus’s other brother, Simon, or Simeon, who following the death of James the brother of Jesus became the second bishop of the Jerusalem church and who was frequently confused with Simon the Zealot in early Christian legend. According to Hegesippus, Simon was charged by “heretical sects” with “being a descendant of David and a Christian” and brought before the Roman authorities. Jude’s grandsons were, of course, said to have been hauled in on a similar charge. In Hegesippus’s account, Atticus, the provincial governor of Judaea, tortured Simon “for days on end” despite Simon’s advanced age of 120. Having miraculously survived this torture, Simon was then crucified.
Despite this story’s obviously fantastical elements, Bauckham believes there may be something to the notion that a rival “heretical” Christian sect betrayed Simon to the Romans. Hegesippus claimed that a Jewish Christian named Thebuthis, angered that he was not ceded leadership of the Jerusalem church after the death of James the brother of Jesus, went on to corrupt the Christianity of Palestine, which had hitherto “not yet been seduced by listening to [the] nonsense” of heretics. Out of Thebuthis’s apostasy, Hegesippus wrote, sprouted “seven sects” in which “every man [introduced] his own opinion in his own particular way. From these came false Christs, false prophets, false apostles, who split the unity of the Church by poisonous suggestions against God and against His Christ.” While this information is too polemical to take seriously as history, it may point to friction within first-century Jewish Christian communities. After all, a fine way to destroy a Jewish Christian community in Palestine would have been to tell the Roman authorities that all who descended from David and Jesus were messianic insurrectionists. An internally divided Jewish Christian church, with one sect eagerly reporting on the other, might also have discouraged a notionally sympathetic Gentile church from extending the hand of fellowship. Add to this the destruction of Jerusalem and the consequent flight of Jewish Christianity’s leaders into exile, and a clear—and tragic—picture emerges: a community ripped apart from within and clobbered by all sides, despite its vaunted connection to Jesus’s own brothers.
Hegesippus’s stories about Jesus’s grandnephews and brother falling into Roman dragnets due to their Davidic descent is further supported by the testimony of a Christian traveler named Julius Africanus, who lived from roughly 160 to 240 and spent time in Palestine. But for a few stray citations in Eusebius, Julius’s writings have disappeared, even though he was well known among his contemporaries and apparently corresponded with Origen.
Julius employed yet another phrase to describe Jesus’s relatives, which appears nowhere else in ancient Christian literature: desposynoi, which is Greek for “those who belong to the master,” in Bauckham’s translation. According to Julius, the desposynoi “took pride in preserving the memory of their aristocratic [i.e., Davidic] origin” to such a degree that a few preserved “private records” documenting their bloodlines. One of the desposynoi’s annoyances concerned the discrepancy between the genealogical lists in Matthew and Luke that detail Jesus’s descent from David. If those who claimed to be Jesus’s relatives made it part of their mission to lobby for their Davidic genealogy, it is easy to see why certain Romans mistook Jesus’s relatives for messianic troublemakers—and why the Gentile church might have gradually sought to distance itself from them. (How exactly Jesus descended from David was of so little concern to the Gentile church that it placidly accepted scripture that contradicted itself on the issue.)
Even so, the church and the synagogue were not easily separated prior to the destruction of Jerusalem, and rancor between Christians and Jews—and between Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians—became increasingly prominent after 70. It affects even Matthew’s gospel, which is otherwise sympathetic to Jews and Jewish Christians. By the time the gospels were written, Jerusalem was in ruins, the nation of Israel had been crushed by Rome, and Jewish diaspora communities were in disarray. Why the Temple had been destroyed, and what that meant for Jews, became a question about who Jesus was and what he promised. For decades after the Jewish War, Jewish scribes adopted a mission to refute the Christian notion that Jews had been judged by God for rejecting Jesus. It was, apparently, an intellectually consuming mission: there are no more proper works of Jewish history, and no proper Jewish historians, until a thousand years later. Little record exists at all of what went on within Judaism for roughly 150 years, so dense was the fog that lowered upon the faith after the razing of the Temple. One mission of Gentile Christianity, meanwhile, became appropriating Jewish scriptural writings to prove that Jews had been judged by God, whether they knew it or not, for rejecting Jesus. This eternal humiliation eventually came to affect the descendants of Jesus and their Jewish Christian communities.
The little evidence that exists suggests that members of Jesus’s family maintained their prominence in the Jewish Christian churches of Palestine, and the (eventually restored) mother church in Jerusalem, until the second century. While the destruction of Jerusalem severely damaged Jewish Christianity, it did not destroy it. What finally destroyed Jewish Christianity was the Second Revolt*10 against Rome in 132, which was led by Simon Bar Kosiba, whom the influential rabbi Akiva had suggested might be the Messiah (after which Simon took the name Bar Kokhba, or “Son of the Star”).
His revolt began as a response to Hadrian’s determination to remake Jerusalem into a great Roman city. In pursuing this goal, Hadrian disregarded several centuries of freely available and highly cautionary historical precedent. Hadrian thought little of Judaism, but almost certainly he did not intend to trigger the Second Revolt. For his part, Bar Kokhba was not merely a nationalist but one of the finest guerrilla fighters of his time. The Second Revolt, unlike the lunatic free-for-all of the First Revolt, was a continuously and horrendously fought four-year-long military campaign. More than half a million Jewish rebels were destroyed, along with almost one thousand Jewish villages, and when it was over, not a single synagogue was left standing.
Tradition maintains that the Jewish Christian church had returned to Jerusalem before the Second Revolt began, and, according to Justin Martyr, those who refused to defy Jesus and accept Simon Bar Kokhba as their messiah were killed. While it would be interesting to learn precisely how many Jewish Christians blasphemed Jesus and fought alongside Simon, it could not have been many: the psychological appeal of Jewish independence was already a fading memory to most Jewish Christians, whatever their precise beliefs. When the Second Revolt was finally put down, Jews and Jewish Christians alike lost access to Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina and dedicated to the three principal gods venerated on the Capitoline Hill in Rome: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Circumcision was forbidden, as was reading the Torah. No one who had been circumcised was allowed to set foot in Jerusalem for fifty years—and then only on a temporary basis. Consequently, the next Christians to step into Jerusalem in the mid-second century were Gentiles, led by a bishop apparently named Mark. After Constantine, Gentile Christians maintained their hold on the world’s most Jewish city for centuries. A newly entrenched and radically cautious rabbinical power structure emerged from the ashes of the Jews’ disastrous revolts against Rome, and one of the things it did was continue the formal exclusion of Jewish Christians from its synagogues.
Aside from a few scattered mentions in the work of the church fathers, Jewish Christianity begins to fade from history after the Second Revolt. When the church fathers do deign to mention Jewish Christians, it is mostly with overt disapproval or (as with Jerome) neutral half interest. The fate of Jesus’s descendants is even sadder for being so unknown.
Richard Bauckham writes, “If we knew more about Christianity in Egypt, Arabia, Phoenicia, east Syria, and Mesopotamia the impression [of Palestine-derived Christianity] might be different.”
Why there is not more information about the influence of the relatives of Jesus has been said by some to be the greatest riddle of early Christianity. Yet Christians failed to preserve and in many cases destroyed the work of countless early Christian writers, including that of Papias, Irenaeus, Origen, and Hegesippus. The likely Gentile Christian response to work that emphasized the enduring influence of Jesus’s family’s descendants is not terribly difficult to imagine. Recognizing Jesus’s family endangered the doctrine of the virgin birth, placed the exceptionality of Jesus himself at risk, and unhappily reminded Gentile Christians that at the beginning there was only Jewish Christianity. The strange thing is that several church fathers spent time in Palestine and could conceivably have sought out the living relatives of Jesus. This includes Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and, especially, Jerome, who lived for many years in Bethlehem. As Bauckham notes, none of them seem to have had “the slightest interest in doing so.” The later family members of Jesus were products of a culture defined by the strength of family ties and members of a church whose leadership structure was apparently determined by bloodline succession. How these men and women were allowed to become historical phantoms would be the greatest riddle of early Christianity were it not so patently obvious why the Gentile church would have wanted them all to vanish without a trace.