Actually two riddles need to be considered. Christianity arose first among Jews living in Palestine. Belief in the coming of a savior called a messiah—a god who would look like a man—was an important feature of Judaism at the time of Christ. The earliest followers of Jesus, almost all of whom were Jewish, believed that Jesus was this savior. (“Christ” is derived from krystos, which was the way Jews referred to their hoped-for savior when speaking Greek.) To solve the riddle of the early Christian lifestyle, I shall first have to explain the basis of the Jewish belief in a messiah.
All ancient peoples—not unlike most modern ones—believed that battles could not be won without divine assistance. To win an empire, or merely to survive as an independent state, you needed warriors with whom ancestors, angels, or gods were willing to cooperate.
David, the founder of the first and largest Jewish empire, claimed to be in divine partnership with the Jewish God, Jahweh. The people called David messiah (Hebrew: mashia), a term which they also applied to priests, shields, David’s predecessor Saul, and David’s son Solomon. So messiah probably originally meant any person or thing possessing great holiness and sacred power. David was also called the Anointed One—the one who, by collaboration with Jahweh, was entitled to rule over Jahweh’s earthly domains.
David was born Elhanan ben Jesse. The name David, meaning “great commander,” was given to him to celebrate his victories on the battlefield. His rise to power from humble beginnings provided the basic inspiration—the life plan—for the ideal Jewish military-messianic career. He was born in Bethlehem and spent his youth as a shepherd. Later, he became the outlaw leader of a guerrilla movement in the Judean desert. He located his headquarters in a cave and achieved his victories against seemingly insuperable odds—epitomized in the fight against Goliath.
The Jewish priests insisted down to the time of Jesus that Jahweh had made a covenant with David. Jahweh had promised that David’s dynasty would never end. But David’s empire actually began to crumble shortly after his death. It disappeared temporarily when Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and deported large numbers of Jews to Babylonia. Afterwards the Jewish state resumed a precarious existence as the dependent client of one or another imperial power.
Jahweh told Moses: “Ye shall rule over many nations but they shall not rule over thee.” Yet Jahweh’s promised land was an unlikely spot from which to launch the conquest of the world. For one thing, it was a military thruway—the main corridor along which all the imperial armies of Asia, Africa, and Europe chased each other to and from Egypt. Before any indigenous imperial growth could take root in Palestine, it was stamped out by some million-footed monster of an army passing in one direction or the other. Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans sallied back and forth through the holy land, often burning the same place twice before they yielded to the next in line.
These experiences placed a considerable strain on the credibility of Jahweh’s sacred books and his remnant priesthood. Why had Jahweh permitted so many nations to become great while his chosen people were repeatedly conquered and enslaved? Why hadn’t Jahweh kept his promise to David? This was the great mystery which the Jewish holy men and prophets kept trying to decipher.
Their answer: Jahweh had not kept his promise to David because the Jews had not kept theirs to Jahweh. The people had violated the sacred laws and had practiced impure rites. They had sinned; they were guilty; they had caused their own ruin. But Jahweh was a forgiving God and he would still keep his promise if the Jews, despite their punishment, continued to believe that he was the One True God. By realizing what they had done, by repenting and asking for forgiveness, the people could atone for their sin and Jahweh would reinstitute the contract, save them, redeem them, and make them greater than ever before. Mysteriously, when the atonement was complete—at a moment known only to Jahweh—his people would be avenged. Jahweh would send another military prince like David, messiah, anointed one, to destroy the enemy nations. Great battles would be fought; the whole earth would heave with the clash of armies and the fall of cities. It would be the end of one world and the beginning of another, for Jahweh would not have made the Jews wait and suffer had he not intended to give them a greater reward than any previously known by man. And so the Old Testament teems with the promises of the redemptive prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Zechariah, and others—all urging or sanctioning the adoption of a military-messianic lifestyle.
Isaiah speaks of a “wonderful counselor, mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” who will reign forever on the throne of David. This savior will tread the Assyrian down “like the mire of the streets”; reduce Babylon to a deserted city inhabited by owls, satyrs, and other “doleful creatures”; make the people of Moab “bald and beardless, reduce Damascus to a ruinous heap,” and provoke Egypt into civil war, “everyone against his neighbor, city against city and kingdom against kingdom.”
Jeremiah has Jahweh say: “In those days and in that time, will I cause the Branch of Righteousness to grow up unto David; and he shall execute Judgement and righteousness in the land.” And then “the sword shall devour” the Egyptian “and it shall be satiate and made drunk with their blood.” The Philistines “shall cry and all the inhabitants of the land shall howl.” From Moab “a continual weeping will go up.” Ammon will become “a desolate heap and her daughters shall be burned in fire.” Edom will be a “desolation.” In Damascus “the young men shall fall in her streets.” Hazor will become “a dwelling for dragons.” Elam is to be “consumed by the sword,” and as for Babylon: “Come against her from the utmost border, open her storehouses; cast her up as heaps and destroy her utterly: let nothing of her be left.”
The Book of Daniel—written about 165 B.C., when Palestine was ruled by Syrian Greeks—also speaks of military-messianic redemption by an anointed one, the Prince, leading to a great Jewish empire: “I saw in the night visions, and behold the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven … and there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations and languages shall serve him … an everlasting dominion … [a] kingdom that shall not be destroyed.”
What most people fail to realize about these vengeful prophecies is that they were made in conjunction with actual wars of liberation waged under the leadership of real-life military messiahs. These wars enjoyed popular support because they not only aimed at restoring the independence of the Jewish state, but also promised to eliminate economic and social inequities that foreign rule had exacerbated beyond endurance.
Like cargo, the cult of the vengeful messiah was born and continually re-created out of a struggle to overturn an exploitative system of political and economic colonialism. Only in this case, the natives—the Jews—were militarily more of a match for the conquerors, and they were led by literate soldier-prophets, who remembered a far-off time when the “ancestors” had controlled an empire of their own.
During the period of Roman rule, if any lifestyle can be said to have been preeminent in Palestine, it was that of the vengeful military messiah. Inspired by the model of David’s triumph against Goliath and the promise of Jahweh’s military-messianic redemption, Jewish guerrillas waged a prolonged struggle against the Roman administrators and the Roman army. The cult of the peaceful messiah—the lifestyle of Jesus and his followers—developed in the midst of this guerrilla war and in the very districts of Palestine that were the main centers of insurgent activity, seemingly in total contradiction to the tactics and strategies of the liberation forces.
The Christian gospels fail to expound or even mention Jesus’ relationship to the Jewish liberation struggle. From the gospels alone, you would never know that Jesus spent most of his life in the central theater of one of history’s fiercest guerrilla uprisings. Even less apparent to readers of the gospels is the fact that this struggle continued to escalate long after Jesus was executed. You could never guess that in 68 A.D. the Jews went on to stage a full-scale revolution that
required the attention of six Roman legions under the command of two future Roman emperors before it was brought under control. And least of all would you ever suspect that Jesus himself died a victim of the Roman attempt to destroy the military-messianic consciousness of the Jewish revolutionaries.
As a Roman colony, Palestine exhibited all of the classical political and economic symptoms of colonial misrule. The Jews who occupied high civil or religious positions were puppets or clients. The high priests, wealthy landowners, and merchants lived in Oriental splendor, but the bulk of the population consisted of landless, alienated peasants, poorly paid or unemployed artisans, servants, and slaves. The country groaned under the weight of confiscatory taxes, administrative corruption, arbitrary tribute, labor conscription, and runaway inflation. Absentee landlords lived in pomp in Jerusalem while their tenants absorbed the 25 percent tax which the Romans imposed on agricultural production, on top of a 22 percent tax on the remainder claimed by the temple. The hatred of the Galilean peasants for the Jerusalem aristocrats was especially glaring and openly reciprocated. In the Talmudic commentaries, true Jews are advised not to let their daughters marry the “people of the land,” as the Galilean peasants were called, “because they are unclean animais.” Rabbi Eleazar sarcastically recommended the butchering of these types even on the most holy day of the year, when no animals may be killed; and Rabbi Joahanan said, “One may tear a common person to pieces like a fish,” while Rabbi Eleazar said, “The enmity of a common person toward a scholar is even more intense than that of the heathen toward the Israelites.”
Popular enthusiasm for the military-messianic ideal went beyond a desire to see Jewish nationalists replace foreign puppets. The Galileans wanted to see David’s kingdom restored because the prophets said that the messiah would end economic and social exploitation and punish the wicked priests, landlords, and kings. This theme was announced in the Book of Enoch:
Woe to you, ye rich, for ye have trusted in your riches and from your riches ye shall be torn away.… Woe to you who requite your neighbor with evil, for you will be requited according to your works. Woe to you, ye lying witnesses.… But fear not, ye that suffer, for healing will be your portion.
The dialectic of Jahweh’s kingdom necessarily embraced the totality of human experience. As in the case of cargo, secular and sacred components were indivisible; “this-worldly” and otherworldly themes were inseparable. Politics, religion, and economics were fused; heaven and earth were confounded, nature was married to God. In the new universe, life would be completely different; everything would be turned upside down. The Jews would rule and the Romans serve. The poor would be rich, the wicked would be punished, the sick would be healed, and the dead brought to life.
The Jews began their war against Rome shortly before Herod the Great was confirmed as puppet king by the Roman Senate. At first, guerrillas were identified by the Romans and the Jewish ruling class merely as bandits (Greek: lestai). But these bandits were not so much guilty of thefts as of programs directed against the absentee landlords and the Roman tax collectors. The other term applied to the guerrilla fighters was “zealots”—indicative of their zeal for the Jewish law and the fulfillment of Jahweh’s covenant.
Neither term alone properly conveys the sense of what these activists were doing. It is only as zealot-bandits—guerrillas—that their exploits can be related to the everyday context of their world. The zealot-bandit-guerrillas believed that with the help of a messiah they would eventually be able to topple the Roman Empire. Their faith was not a state of mind; it was a revolutionary praxis involving harassment, provocation, robbery, assassination, terrorism, and acts of bravery ending in death. Some specialized in urban guerrilla tactics and were called “dagger men” (Latin: sicarii); the rest lived in the countryside, in caves and mountain hideouts, depending on the peasants for food and security.
Any description of the political and military events in Palestine during the first century A.D. has to be based largely upon the writings of one of the great historians of the ancient world, Flavius Josephus. Since the matters that I am about to discuss are likely to be unfamiliar, let me say a word about the reliability of this source. Josephus was a contemporary of the authors of the earliest Christian gospels. Two of his books, The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, are recognized by scholars as no less essential to the history of first-century Palestine than the gospels themselves. We have definite knowledge of who Josephus was and of how he came to write his books—knowledge which we do not have about the authors of the gospels. Josephus was born Joseph ben Matthias in 37 A.D., the child of an upper-class Jewish family. In 68 A.D., when he was only thirty-one years old, Josephus became governor of Galilee and a general in the Jewish liberation army in the war against Rome. After his followers were wiped out in the seige of Jotapata, Josephus surrendered and was brought before Vespasian, the Roman general, and Vespasian’s son Titus. Josephus thereupon announced that Vespasian was the messiah the Jews had been awaiting and that both Vespasian and Titus would be future emperors of Rome.
Vespasian did in fact become emperor in 69 A.D., and as a reward for his prophetic words, Josephus was taken to Rome as part of the new emperor’s entourage. He was given Roman citizenship, an apartment in the imperial palace, and a life pension based on income from farms which the Romans had confiscated as spoils of the war in Palestine.
Josephus spent the rest of his life writing books explaining why the Jews had revolted against Rome and why he himself had defected to the Roman side. Writing in Rome for Roman readers—many of whom, including the emperor, were eyewitnesses to the events described—Josephus was unlikely to have fabricated the basic facts of his history. The distortions that have been identified are related in obvious ways to Josephus’ desire not to be labeled a traitor and can easily be discounted without impairing the credibility of the main narrative.
The events recounted by Josephus make it clear that guerrilla activism and the Jewish military-messianic consciousness rose and fell in synergetic waves. The dusty, sun-baked backlands were filled with wandering holy men, strangely dressed oracles who spoke in parables and allegories and made prophecies about the coming battle for world dominion. Successful guerrilla leaders inspired rumors that flourished in the light and shadow of these perennially renewed messianic speculations. A steady stream of charismatic leaders stepped forward into the glare of history to claim messiahship; at least two of them precipitated insurrections that actually shook the foundation of the Roman Empire.
Herod the Great first attracted the attention of his Roman patrons because he waged a vigorous campaign against a bandit chief who controlled an entire district in northern Galilee. According to Josephus, Herod trapped this bandit chief, whose name was Hezekiah, and executed him on the spot. But we know that Hezekiah was a guerrilla leader rather than an ordinary thief because the bandit’s sympathizers in Jerusalem were powerful enough to force Herod to stand trial for murder. A cousin of Julius Caesar intervened, obtained Herod’s release, and gave him the recommendation that soon led to Herod’s appointment as puppet king of the Jews in 39 B.C.
Herod had to fight more bandits in order to consolidate his control over Palestine. Josephus declares that “bandits overran a great part of the country, causing the inhabitants as much misery as a war could have done.” So Herod “took to the field against the bandits in the caves” When trapped inside, the bandits turned out to have their families with them, and they refused to surrender. One old bandit stood at the mouth of an inaccessible cave and in full sight of Herod killed his wife and each of his seven children “and went so far as to sneer at Herod” before leaping to his own death. Thinking himself “master now of caves and cave-dwellers,” Herod left for Samaria. But his departure removed all restraint from the “habitual troublemakers in Galilee,” who promptly killed a Roman general named Ptolemy and “systematically ravaged the country, establishing their lairs in the marshes and other inaccessible places.”
Upon Herod�
�s death in 4 B.C. uprisings took place in all outlying areas. Hezekiah’s son, Judas of Galilee, seized a royal armory. Simultaneously in Peraea across the Jordan, a slave named Simon “burnt the palace at Jericho and many magnificent country residences.” A third rebel, a former shepherd named Athrongaeus, “declared himself king”—which is probably Josephus’ way of saying that he was considered a messiah by his followers. Before the Romans killed Athrongaeus and four of his brothers, one by one, these bandits succeeded in “harassing all Judea with their brigandage.” Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, restored law and order. He captured 2,000 “ringleaders” and had them all crucified. This event occurred in the year that Jesus was born.
Judas of Galilee soon emerged as the leader of the main guerrilla forces. Josephus says he “aspired to royalty,” and at times characterizes him as “a very clever rabbi.” In 6 A.D. the Romans tried to carry out a census. Judas warned his countrymen to resist because the census would lead to “nothing less than complete slavery.” Josephus has him say that “the Jews have no king but Jahweh” Therefore “taxes should not be paid to the Romans” and “Jahweh would surely assist them if they had faith in their cause.” Josephus reports that those prepared to submit to Rome were treated as enemies: Their cattle were rounded up and their dwellings burned.
No information has survived concerning how and when Judas of Galilee met his fate. We know only that his sons continued to fight. Two were crucified, and another claimed messiahship at the beginning of the revolution of 68–73. The final act of resistance in that war, the suicidal defense of the fortress of Masada, was led by still another descendant of Judas of Galilee.
Jesus actively began to preach his messianic doctrines about 28 A.D. At that time a “shooting war” was being fought, not only in Galilee, but in Judea and Jerusalem as well. The Jesus cult was neither the largest nor the most threatening of the rebellious situations with which Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who decreed Jesus’ death, had to contend. For example, Josephus describes the appearance of an angry city mob joined by a huge influx from the country when Pilate transgressed the Jewish taboo on graven images in Jerusalem. Later, Pilate was surrounded by another angry mob protesting the misuse of temple funds for the construction of an aqueduct. From the gospels we know that Jesus himself led an attack on the temple, and that some sort of uprising took place shortly before Jesus’ trial, since the popular bandit leader Barabbas and several of his men were in jail at that point.
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