History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The idea of judgment at death and immortality on the basis of merit had been developed in Egypt more than a millennium before. It was not Jewish, because it was not in the Torah, and the Sadducees, who stuck to their texts, seemed to have denied the afterlife completely. But the idea was embryonic in Isaiah, and the Pharisees eagerly seized upon this aspect of apocalypse because it appealed to their strong sense of ethical justice. There might be no earthly answer to the problem of theodicy, as Job had shown; but if there were no justice in this world, there would certainly be justice in the next, when the righteous would be rewarded by the divine judge, and the wicked sentenced. The idea of a final judgment fitted neatly into the whole Judaic concept of the rule of law. It was because they taught this doctrine, together with a rationalistic approach to observing the Law, which made salvation feasible, that the Pharisees attracted such a following, especially among the pious poor, who knew from bitter experience the small likelihood of happiness this side of death.74

  But if the Pharisees drew a distinction (as St Augustine was to do later) between the heavenly kingdom and the earthly one, others took apocalyptic more literally. They believed the kingdom of righteousness was physical, real, imminent and that they were bound to hasten its appearance. The most violent group were referred to by the Roman occupation forces as the Sicarii; they carried hidden daggers and used to assassinate Jewish collaborators, especially in the crowds at festival times. This was merely, however, the ultra-violent terrorist fringe of a movement who called themselves the Zealots. The name comes from the story of Phinehas in the Book of Numbers. He saved Israel from plague by slaying a wicked man and his wife with a javelin and was thus said to have been ‘zealous for his God’.75 According to Josephus, the movement was founded in 6 AD by Judah the Galilean, when he organized an uprising against Roman direct rule and taxation. He seems to have been a kind of early rabbi, and he taught the ancient doctrine that Jewish society was theocracy, acknowledging rule by none but God.

  Josephus distinguishes between the Zealots, who preached and practised violence, and what he terms the other three principal sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, who seemed to have accepted foreign rule in general.76 But the fact that Judah’s deputy, Zadok, was a Pharisee indicates that the lines could not be drawn sharply, and, as the first century AD progressed, more and more pious Jews, such as the Pharisees, seem to have accepted that violence was inevitable in certain circumstances.77 However, this is an obscure area, for Josephus, who is our main authority, was an interested party. He regarded the term Zealot as an honourable title, and he withdrew it when he deemed their activities to be terroristic or anti-social. The legitimacy of terrorism when other forms of protest fail was as hotly debated then as it is today, and the precise part played by Zealots and Sicarii, who were active in every violent uprising of the century, is a subject of scholarly speculation.77

  Even more controversy surrounds the various millenarian sects of the desert fringe, whom Josephus (as well as Philo and Pliny) grouped together as Essenes. There were, in fact, many different categories. The best known are the Qumran monks, because their Dead Sea monastery was excavated by G. L. Harding and Père de Vaux in 1951-6, and their numerous writings are being fully analysed and published. They lived in tents in summer, and in winter holed up in caves. They had elaborate plumbing arrangements in their central buildings for their ritual lustrations, and we have found their kitchen, bakery, dining-room and pottery shop, as well as a meeting room. The sect shows the importance of literature in these extremist groups, for there was an elaborate scriptorium and a large collection of books, put for safety in tall jars concealed in the nearby caves, when the community was menaced by the Romans in the rebellion of 66 AD. But it also illustrates the way in which literature fostered violence, for in addition to canonical texts with apocalyptic implications (such as Isaiah), the monks also produced eschatological writings of their own, of a revolutionary and indeed military kind. Their document, known to us as ‘The War of the Children of Light Against the Children of Darkness’, was not just vaguely apocalyptic but constituted a detailed training guide to a battle they believed imminent. Their camp was defensive in layout and provided with a watchtower, and indeed it seems to have been attacked and destroyed by the Romans when the ‘end of days’ came in 66-70 AD.78

  However, the militant monks of Qumran were only one of many Essene-type communities. All were affected by apocalyptic, but not all were violent and a few were wholly pacific. Some were hermits dwelling in caves, like the Therapeutae, who came from Egypt, where desert communities had existed for at least 2,000 years. The Margherians, in Syria, were also monastic troglodytes. Other cave-monks were the baptist groups living near the Jordan, of which John the Baptist and his followers are the best known.

  John the Baptist lived and worked for the most part in Galilee and the Peraea, territory which was now overwhelmingly Jewish but which had been annexed to Judaea by fire and sword—and often forcible conversion—in Maccabee times. It was an area both of fierce orthodoxy and diverse heterodoxy, and of religious and political ferment. Much of it had been devastated in the risings immediately after Herod’s death and in 6 AD; and the great man’s son, Herod Antipas, whom the Romans made governor, tried to rebuild it by planting new cities on Greek lines. Between 17 and 22 AD he created a new administrative centre at Tiberias on Lake Galilee, and to people it he forced Jews from the surrounding countryside to give up their farms and live there. He drafted in the poor and ex-slaves too. It thus became a curious anomaly: the only Greek city with a majority of Jews. Antipas attracted criticism for other reasons. His Judaism was suspect because he had a Samaritan mother; and he broke Mosaic law by marrying his brother’s wife. It was John the Baptist’s preaching against this sin which led to his imprisonment and execution.79 According to Josephus, Antipas felt that the Baptist’s following was growing so formidable that it was bound to end in revolt.

  The Baptist was a believer in what the Jews called the Messiah. His mission centred on two books—Isaiah and Enoch. He was not a hermit, a separatist or an excluder. On the contrary: he preached to all Jews that the day of reckoning was coming. All must confess their sins, repent and receive baptism by water as a symbol of atonement, and so prepare themselves for the Last Judgment. His task was to respond to the injunction in Isaiah, ‘Clear ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord’,80 and to proclaim the coming of the end of days and the advent of the Messiah, who would be the Son of Man as described by Enoch. According to the New Testament, the Baptist was related to Jesus of Nazareth, baptized him and identified him as the Son of Man; and it was shortly after the Baptist’s execution that Jesus began his own mission. What was this mission, and who did Jesus think he was?

  The Jewish doctrine of the Messiah had its origins in the belief that King David had been anointed by the Lord, so that he and his descendants would reign over Israel to the end of time and would exercise dominion over alien peoples.81 After the fall of the kingdom, this belief had been transformed into a prophetic expectation that the rule of the House of David would be miraculously restored.82 On top of this was grafted the Isaiac description of this future king as the dispenser of justice, and this was perhaps the most important element in the belief because Isaiah seems to have been the most widely read and admired, as it was certainly the most beautifully written, of all the Bible books. During the second and first centuries BC, this justice-dispensing reincarnation of the Davidic ruler fitted neatly into the notions, in the Book of Daniel, the Book of Enoch and other apocalyptic works, of an end of days and the Four Last Things-death, judgment, hell and heaven. It was at this comparatively late stage that the divinely chosen and charismatic figure was first called the Messiah or ‘the anointed [king]’. The word was originally Hebrew, then Aramaic, and simply transliterated into Greek as messias; but the Greek word for ‘the anointed’ is christos, and it is significant that it was the Greek, not the Hebraic, title which was attached to Jesus.

  The
messianic doctrine, being of complex and even contradictory origins, created great confusion in the minds of the Jews. But most of them seem to have assumed that the Messiah would be a political-military leader and that his coming would inaugurate a physical, earthly state. There is an important passage in the Acts of the Apostles describing how Gamaliel the Elder, grandson of Hillel, and at one time president of the Sanhedrin, dissuaded the Jewish authorities from punishing the early Christians, by arguing that the authenticity of their Messiah would be demonstrated by the success of their movement. There had been, he said, the case of Theudas, ‘boasting himself to be somebody’, but he had been killed, ‘and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered and brought to nought’. Then there had been Judas of Galilee, ‘in the days of the taxing’, and ‘he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed’. The Christians, he said, should be left alone because, if their mission lacked divine sanction, ‘it will come to nought’.83

  The other Jewish elders were persuaded by Gamaliel’s argument, for they too thought in terms of an uprising designed to alter the government. When Herod the Great heard that the Messiah or Christ was born, he reacted with violence as if to a threat to his dynasty. Any Jew who listened to a man making messianic claims would take it for granted he had some kind of political and military programme. The Roman government, the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Sadducees and even the Pharisees assumed that a Messiah would make changes in the existing order, of which they were all part. The poor people of Judaea and Galilee would also believe that a Messiah preaching fundamental changes would be talking not, or not only, in spiritual and metaphysical terms, but of the realities of power—government, taxes, justice.

  Now it is obvious from the evidence we have that Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns. He was not a Jewish nationalist. On the contrary, he was a Jewish universalist. Like the Baptist, he was influenced by the teachings of the pacific elements of the Essenes. But like the Baptist he believed that the programme of repentance and rebirth should be carried to the multitude, as was foreseen in Chapter 53 of Isaiah. It was not the job of the teacher of righteousness to hide in the desert or in caves; or to sit in the seats of the mighty either, like the Sanhedrin. It was his mission to preach to all, and in a spirit of humility before God, who might demand the extremities of suffering. The person of whom Isaiah wrote had to be the ‘tender plant’, the ‘despised and rejected of men’, the ‘man of sorrows’, who would be ‘wounded for our iniquities, bruised for our transgression’, ‘oppressed and afflicted and yet he opened not his mouth’. This ‘suffering servant’ of God would be ‘taken from prison and from judgment’, ‘brought as a lamb to the slaughter’, be buried with the wicked and ‘numbered with the transgressors’. This Messiah was not a mob leader or democrat or guerrilla chieftain, let alone a future earthly king and world sovereign. He was, rather, a theologian and sacrificial victim, a teacher by his word and example, and by his life and death.84

  If Jesus was a theologian, what was and whence came his theology? His background was the heterodox Judaism and increasing Hellenization of Galilee. His father, a carpenter, died before Jesus was baptized, in 28/29 AD. In the Greek New Testament Joseph bore a Hebrew name, but Jesus’ mother was called Mary, a Greek form of Miriam. Two of Jesus’ brothers, Judah and Simon, had Hebrew names but two others, James (in Hebrew Jacob) and Joses (in Hebrew Joseph), did not; and Jesus was the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua. The family claimed descent from David, and it may have been predominantly conformist, since the New Testament hints at family tensions created by Jesus’ teaching. After his death, however, the family accepted his mission. His brother James became head of the sect in Jerusalem and, after James’ martyrdom by the Sadducees, Jesus’ cousin Simon succeeded; the grandsons of his brother Judah were leaders of the Galilean Christian community in the reign of Trajan.

  The evidence we possess shows that, though Jesus was influenced by Essene teaching and may have spent some time living with them, and though he was personally connected with the Baptist sect, he was in essentials one of the Hakamim, the pious Jews who moved in the world. He was closer to the Pharisees than to any other group. This statement is liable to be misleading, since Jesus openly criticized the Pharisees, especially for ‘hypocrisy’. But on close examination, Jesus’ condemnation is by no means so severe or so inclusive as the Gospel narrative in which it is enclosed implies; and in essence it is similar to criticisms levelled at the Pharisees by the Essenes, and by the later rabbinical sages, who drew a sharp distinction between the Hakamim, whom they saw as their forerunners, and the ‘false Pharisees’, whom they regarded as enemies of true Judaism.85

  The truth seems to be that Jesus was part of a rapidly developing argument within the pious Jewish community, which included Pharisees of various tendencies. The aim of the Hakamic movement was to promote holiness and make it general. How was this to be done? The argument centred around two issues: the centrality and indispensability of the Temple, and the observance of the Law. On the first point, Jesus clearly sided with those who regarded the Temple as an obstacle to the general spread of holiness, since the concentration on the physical building, with its hierarchies, privileges (mostly hereditary) and wealth, was a form of separation from the people—a wall built against them. Jesus used the Temple as a preaching forum; but so had others who had opposed it, notably Isaiah and Jeremiah. The idea that the Jews could do without the Temple was not new. On the contrary, it was very old, and it could be argued that the true Jewish religion, long before the Temple was built, was universalistic and unlocated. Jesus, like many other pious Jews, saw holiness spreading to the whole people through the elementary schools and synagogues. But he went further than most of them by regarding the Temple as a source of evil and predicting its destruction, and by treating the Temple authorities and the whole central system of Judaic administration and law with silent contempt.86

  On the second issue, the degree to which the Law must be obeyed, the original argument between the Sadducees, who admitted only the written Pentateuch, and the Pharisees, who taught the Oral Law, had by Jesus’ time been supplemented by a further argument among the Hakamim and Pharisees. One school, led by Shammai the Elder (c. 50 BC-c. 30AD), took a rigorist view especially on matters of cleanliness and uncleanliness, an explosive area since it militated strongly against the ability of ordinary, poor people to achieve holiness. The rigorism of the Shammai school, indeed, was eventually to take his descendants and followers out of the rabbinical-Judaic tradition altogether, and they vanished like the Sadducees themselves. On the other hand, there was the school of Hillel the Elder, Shammai’s contemporary. He came from the diaspora and was later referred to as ‘Hillel the Babylonian’.87 He brought with him more humane and universalistic notions of Torah interpretation. To Shammai, the essence of the Torah lay in its detail; unless you got the detail exactly right, the system became meaningless and could not stand. To Hillel, the essence of the Torah was its spirit: if you got the spirit right, the detail could take care of itself. Tradition contrasted Shammai’s anger and pedantry with Hillel’s humility and humanity, but what was remembered best of all was Hillel’s anxiety to make obeying the law possible for all Jews and for converts. To a pagan who said he would become a Jew if he could be taught the Torah while standing on one foot, Hillel is said to have replied, ‘What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbour: this is the entire Torah. All the rest is commentary—go and study it.’88

  Jesus was a member of Hillel’s school, and may have sat under him, for Hillel had many pupils. He repeated this famous saying of Hillel’s and it is possible that he used other dicta, for Hillel was a famous aphorist. But of course, taken literally, Hillel’s saying about the Torah is false. Doing as you would be done by is not the entire Torah. The Torah is only in part an ethical code. It is also, and in its essence, a series of absolutist divine commands which cover a vast variety of activities many of which have no bearing at all on relations be
tween men. It is not true that ‘all the rest is commentary’. If it had been, other peoples, and the Greeks in particular, would have had far less difficulty in accepting it. ‘All the rest’, from circumcision, to diet, to the rules of contact and cleanliness, far from being commentary were injunctions of great antiquity which constituted the great barriers between the pious Jews and the rest of humanity. Therein lay the great obstacle, not merely in universalizing Judaism but even in making its practice possible for all Jews.

  Jesus’ teaching career saw him translate Hillel’s aphorism into a system of moral theology and, in doing so, strip the law of all but its moral and ethical elements. It was not that Jesus was lax. Quite the contrary. In some respects he was stricter than many sages. He would not, for instance, admit divorce, a teaching which was later to become, and still remains today, enormously important. But, just as Jesus would not accept the Temple when it came between God and man’s pursuit of holiness, so he dismissed the Law when it impeded, rather than assisted, the road to God.

  Jesus’ rigorism in taking Hillel’s teaching to its logical conclusion led him to cease to be an orthodox sage in any sense which had meaning and, indeed, cease to be a Jew. He created a religion which was sui generis, and it is accurately called Christianity. He incorporated in his ethical Judaism an impressive composite of the eschatology he found in Isaiah, Daniel and Enoch, as well as what he found useful in the Essenes and the Baptist, so that he was able to present a clear perspective of death, judgment and the afterlife. And he offered this new theology to everyone within reach of his mission: pious Jews, the am ha-arez, the Samaritans, the unclean, the gentiles even. But, like many religious innovators, he had a public doctrine for the masses and a confidential one for his immediate followers. The latter centred on what would happen to him as a person, in life and in death, and therein lay his claim to be the Messiah—not just the Suffering Servant, but someone of far greater significance.