After Jesus was killed, the Romans continued to try to clear the Judean countryside of “bandits.” Josephus reports that another great bandit chief named Tholomaios was captured in 44 A.D. Shortly thereafter, a messianic figure named Theudas appeared in the desert. His followers abandoned their homes and posessions and massed on the banks of the Jordan River. Some say Theudas intended to make the waters part as they had done for Joshua; others that this messiah was going the other way, westward, toward Jerusalem. No matter—the Roman governor Cuspius Fadus sent the cavalry; they beheaded Theudas and slaughtered his followers.
During the feast of Passover in 50 A.D. a Roman soldier pulled up his tunic and farted into a crowd of pilgrims and temple worshipers. “The less restrained of the young men and the naturally tumultuous segments of the people rushed into battle,” writes Josephus. The Roman heavy infantry was called in, creating a gigantic panic in which, according to Josephus, 30,000 people were trampled to death (some say he probably meant 3,000). Jesus’ attack on the temple had coincided with the Passover pilgrimage of 33 A.D. AS we shall see, concern with the reaction of mobs of pilgrims like those who died in the panic of 50 A.D. led the Jewish and Roman authorities to wait until nightfall to take Jesus into custody.
Something close to a general revolt developed in 52 A.D. under the leadership of Eleazar ben Deinaios, a “revolutionary bandit” who had been in the mountains for almost twenty years. The governor, Cumanus, “rounded up Eleazar’s followers, killing still more.” But the disorder spread “and all over the country plundering went on and the bolder spirits rose in revolt.” The Syrian Legate intervened, beheaded eighteen partisans, and crucified all of the prisoners who had been rounded up by Cumanus. The revolt was finally crushed by a new governor, Felix, who captured Eleazar and sent him to Rome—probably to be strangled in public. “The bandits whom he crucified,” says Josephus, “and the local inhabitants in league with them whom he caught and punished were too many to count.”
In Jerusalem, assassinations by dagger men who concealed their weapons inside their garments now had become common. One of their most famous victims was the High Priest Jonathan. In the midst of all this bloodshed, military-messianic contenders appeared again and again. Josephus refers to one set of messianic leaders as
scoundrels in act less criminal but in intention more evil, who did as much damage as the murderers—cheats and deceivers. Claiming inspiration, they schemed to bring about revolutionary changes by inducing the mob to act as if possessed, and by leading them out into the wild country on the pretense that there God would show them signs of approaching freedom.
Felix interpreted this foray as the first stage of a revolt and ordered the Roman cavalry to cut the mob to pieces.
Next came a Jewish Egyptian “false prophet.” He collected several thousand “dupes,” led them into the desert, then turned around and tried to attack Jerusalem—providing confirmation, if the Romans needed it, that all such people were politically dangerous. Josephus gives the following picture of the situation in Palestine about 55 A.D.:
The religious frauds and bandit chiefs joined forces and drove numbers to revolt. Splitting up into groups they ranged over the countryside, plundering the houses of the well-to-do, killing the occupants, and setting fire to the villages, till their raging madness penetrated every corner of Judea. Day by day the fighting blazed more fiercely.
By 66 A.D. the bandits were everywhere; their agents had infiltrated the temple priesthood and forged an alliance with Eleazar, the son of the High Priest Ananias. Eleazar issued a kind of declaration of independence: an order preventing the daily sacrifice of animals dedicated to the health of Nero, the reigning emperor. The pro-Roman and anti-Roman factions began to fight in the streets of Jerusalem: dagger men, freed slaves, and the Jerusalem rabble led by Eleazar on one side; the high priests, the Herodian aristocracy, and the Roman royal guard on the other.
Meanwhile, in the backlands, Manahem, the last surviving son of Judas of Galilee, stormed the fortress of Masada, equipped his bandits with Roman weapons taken from the armory, and marched on Jerusalem. Bursting onto a chaotic scene, Manahem took command of the insurrection—“like a king,” says Josephus. He drove out the Roman troops, gained control of the temple area, and murdered the High Priest Ananias. Manahem then decked himself with kingly robes, and followed by a train of armed bandits, prepared to enter the sanctuary of the temple. But Eleazar, possibly to avenge his father’s death, ambushed the cortege. Manahem fled but was captured and “put to death by prolonged torture.”
The Jews fought on, convinced that the real messiah would yet appear. After the Romans had suffered several reverses, Nero called in his best general, Vespasian, veteran of the campaigns against the Britons. With 65,000 men and the most advanced forms of military engines and siegecraft, the Romans slowly regained control of the smaller cities.
On Nero’s death in 68 A.D. Vespasian emerged as the favored candidate for emperor. Assured of all the men and equipment he might need, Vespasian’s son Titus finished the war. Despite fanatic resistance, Titus broke into Jerusalem in 70 A.D., set fire to the temple, and looted and burned everything in sight.
Reflecting that the siege of Jerusalem had cost the Jews over one million casualties, Josephus bitterly denounced the messianic oracles. There had been terrible portents—bright lights on the altar, a cow that gave birth to a lamb, chariots and regiments in arms speeding through the sky at sunset—but the bandits and their execrable prophets missed these signs of doom. These “cheats and false messengers beguiled the people into believing that supernatural deliverance would yet be theirs.”
Even after the fall of Jerusalem, the bandits still could not believe that Jahweh had deserted them. One more heroic effort—one more blood sacrifice—and Jahweh would at last decide to send the true anointed one. As I mentioned before, the last sacrifice took place at the fortress of Masada in 73 A.D. A bandit named Eleazar, descendant of Hezeldah and of Judas of Galilee, exhorted his remnant force of 960 men, women, and children to kill each other rather than surrender to the Romans.
To sum up: Between 40 B.C. and 73 A.D., Josephus mentions at least five Jewish military messiahs, not including Jesus or John the Baptist. These are Athrongaeus; Theudas; the anonymous “scoundrel” executed by Felix; the Jewish Egyptian “false prophet”; and Manahem. But Josephus repeatedly alludes to other messiahs or prophets of messiahs whom he does not bother to name or describe. In addition, it seems to me very likely that the entire lineage of zealot-bandit-guerrillas that descended from Hezekiah through Judas of Galilee, Manahem, and Eleazar were believed by many of their followers to be messiahs or prophets of messiahs. In other words, at the time of Jesus, there were as many messiahs in Palestine as there are today cargo prophets in the South Seas.
The fall of Masada was scarcely the end of the Jewish military-messianic lifestyle. Continuously re-created by the practical exigencies of colonialism and poverty, the revolutionary impulse burst forth again sixty years after Masada, in an even more spectacular messianic drama. In 132, Bar Kochva—“Son of a Star”—organized a force of 200,000 men and set up an independent Jewish state that endured for three years. Because of Bar Kochva’s miraculous victories, Akiba, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, hailed him as messiah. The people reported seeing Bar Kochva mounted on a lion. Not since Hannibal had the Romans faced a military opponent of such daring; he fought in the front ranks and at the most dangerous points. A whole Roman legion was lost before Bar Kochva was cut down. The Romans leveled 1,000 villages, killed 500,000 people, and shipped thousands more abroad as slaves. Generations of embittered Jewish scholars thereafter spoke ruefully of Bar Kochva as the “son of a lie” who had duped them into losing their homeland.
History shows that the Jewish military-messianic lifestyle was an adaptive failure. It did not succeed in restoring David’s kingdom; rather, it resulted in the complete loss of the territorial integrity of the Jewish state. For the next eighteen hundred years the Jews we
re a subordinate minority no matter where they lived. Does this mean that military messianism was a capricious, impractical, even maniacal lifestyle? Are we to conclude along with Josephus and those who later condemned Bar Kochva that the Jews lost their homeland because they let the messianic will-o’-the-wisp dupe them into attacking the invincible power of Rome? I think not.
The Jewish revolution against Rome was caused by the inequities of Roman colonialism, not by Jewish military messianism. We cannot judge the Romans as more “practical” or “realistic” simply because they were the victors. Both sides went to war for practical and mundane reasons. Suppose George Washington had lost the American Revolutionary War. Would we then want to conclude that the Continental Army was the victim of an irrational lifestyle consciousness dedicated to the will-o’-the-wisp called “freedom”?
In culture, as in nature, systems that are the product of selective forces frequently fail to survive, not because they are defective or irrational, but because they encounter other systems that are better adapted and more powerful. I think I have shown that the cult of the vengeful messiah, like cargo, was adapted to the practical exigencies of a colonial struggle. It was extremely successful as a means of mobilizing mass resistance in the absence of a formal apparatus for raising and training an army. I would not judge the zealot-bandits to have been duped unless it can be shown that the probability of their defeat was so great at the outset that no amount of effort could ever have led to any result other than the one that history now reveals. But there is no way of proving that the zealot-bandits could have predicted that their defeat was inevitable. History reveals with equal finality that Judas of Galilee was right and the Caesars wrong about the alleged invincibility of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was not only eventually destroyed, but the people who destroyed it were colonials like the Jews, and vastly inferior to the Romans in numbers, equipment, and military skills.
Almost by definition, revolution means that an exploited population must take desperate measures against great odds to overthrow its oppressors. Classes, races, and nations usually accept the challenge of such odds not because they are duped by irrational ideologies, but because the alternatives are abhorrent enough to make even great risks worthwhile. That, I believe, is the reason the Jews revolted against Rome. And that is the reason why the Jewish military-messianic consciousness underwent a great expansion at the time of Christ.
To the extent that the cult of the vengeful messiah was rooted in the practical struggle against Roman colonialism, the cult of the peaceful messiah assumes the guise of an apparently inscrutable paradox. The peaceful messiah of Christendom came at a most improbable moment in the 180-year trajectory of the war against Rome. The Jesus cult developed while the military-messianic consciousness was still accelerating, expanding, soaring toward the untarnished ecstacy of Jahweh’s grace. Its timing seems all wrong. In 30 A.D. no major obstacle to the zealot-bandit revolutionary impulse had yet been encountered. The temple was intact and was the scene of great annual pilgrimages. Judas of Galilees sons were alive. The terror of Masada was as yet unimagined. Why should the Jews have yearned for a peaceful messiah so many years before the military-messianic dream had anointed Manahem and Bar Kochva? Why surrender Palestine to the Roman overlords when Roman power had not so much as nicked the edge of Jahweh’s sacred shield? Why a new covenant while the old one was still capable of twice shaking the Roman Empire?
The Secret of
the Prince of Peace
THE DREAMWORK of Western civilization is not fundamentally different from the dreamworks of other peoples. Only a knowledge of practical circumstances is needed to penetrate its mysteries.
In the case before us, there really are very few practical options to choose from. It would be most convenient if the dating of Jesus’s ministry was wrong—if it could be shown that Jesus had not begun to urge his fellow Jews to love the Romans until after the fall of Jerusalem. But an error of forty years in the conventional chronology of events such as Judas of Galilee’s tax revolt or Pontius Pilate’s governorship is inconceivable.
Although we cannot be in error about when Jesus spoke, there are many reasons to suppose that we are in error about what he spoke. A simple practical solution to the questions raised at the close of the previous chapter is that Jesus was not as peaceful as is commonly believed, and that his actual teachings did not represent a fundamental break with the tradition of Jewish military messianism. A strong pro-zealot-bandit and anti-Roman bias probably pervaded his original ministry. The decisive break with the Jewish messianic tradition probably came about only after the fall of Jerusalem, when the original politico-military components in Jesus’ teachings were purged by Jewish Christians living in Rome and other cities of the empire as an adaptive response to the Roman victory. That, at least in brief, is the argument that I shall employ now in order to relate the paradoxes of peaceful messianism to the conduct of practical human affairs.
Continuity between the original teachings of Jesus and the military-messianic tradition is suggested by the close link that existed between Jesus and John the Baptist. Dressed in animal skins and eating nothing but locusts and wild honey, John the Baptist clearly corresponds to that genre of holy men whom Josephus describes as wandering about the badlands of the Jordan Valley, stirring up the peasants and slaves and making trouble for the Romans and their Jewish clients.
All four gospels agree that John the Baptist was the immediate forerunner of Jesus. His mission was to perform the work of Isaiah, to go into the wilderness—the bandit-infested backlands full of caves that echoed with the memories of Jahweh’s covenant—and cry out: “Prepare ye the ways of the Lord; make his paths straight.” (Repent for your sinfulness, recognize your guilt, so that you may at least be rewarded with the promised empire.) John “baptized” Jews who confessed their guilt and were properly penitent, bathing them in a river or spring to symbolically wash away their sins. According to the gospels, Jesus was the Baptist’s most famous penitent. Upon being washed in the Jordan River, Jesus embarked on the climactic phase of his life—the period of active preaching that led to his death on the cross.
John the Baptist’s career replicates the pattern of desert oracles described in the previous chapter. When the crowds around him grew too big, he was taken into custody by the nearest guardian of Roman law and order. This happened to be the puppet king, Herod Antipas, ruler of the part of Palestine east of the Jordan where the Baptist had been most active.
There is no hint in the gospels that John the Baptist might have been arrested because his activities were regarded as a threat to law and order. The entire politico-military dimension is absent. Instead we are told that John the Baptist’s arrest resulted from his criticism of the marriage between Herod and Herodias, the divorced wife of one of Herod’s brothers. The story goes on to attribute John the Baptist’s execution not to any political motive but to Herodias’s desire for revenge. Herodias gets her daughter Salome to dance for King Herod. The king is so pleased with the performance that he promises the dancer anything she wants. Salome announces she wants John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and Herod complies. Herod is said to have been overcome with remorse, just as later on Pontius Pilate is said to have been overcome with remorse at the execution of Jesus. Considering what John the Baptist was telling the crowds in the wilderness before he was arrested, the lack of political references and the remorse attributed to Herod seem most inappropriate. What John preached was a pure military-messianic threat:
One mightier than I cometh—He shall baptize you in spirit and fire: his winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing-floor, and gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire.
Was Herod Antipas blind to the connection between the desert oracles and the zealot-bandits? A king whose reign was to last forty-three years and who was the son of the tyrant bandit-killer Herod the Great could not have been indifferent to the dangers involved in per
mitting people like John the Baptist to attract large crowds in the desert. And how could an oracle whose messiah was not related to the zealot-bandit cause attract such large crowds?
The Baptist’s place in the military-messianic tradition has been clarified as a result of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These documents were found in a cave near the ruins of an ancient pre-Christian community called Quamran, located in the region where John baptized Jesus. Quamran itself was a religious commune dedicated, like John the Baptist, to “clearing the path in the wilderness.” According to the commune’s rich and previously unknown sacred literature, the history of the Jews was leading toward an Armageddon in which the Roman Empire would meet its doom. Rome was to be replaced by a new empire with its capital in Jerusalem, ruled over by a military messiah descended from a branch of the House of David, mightier than any Caesar yet seen on earth. Led by the “anointed one of Israel,” invincible general, commander in chief, the Jewish “Sons of Light” were to go into battle against the Roman “Sons of Darkness.” It would be a war of annihilation. Twenty-eight thousand Jewish warriors and six thousand charioteers were to strike against the Romans. They “will take up the pursuit in order to exterminate the enemy in an eternal annihilation … until he is wiped out.” Victory was guaranteed because “as thou hast declared to us from old; ‘a star shall come forth from Jacob, a sceptre shall rise from Israel’ ” (the prophecy in the Book of Numbers that was later applied to Bar Kochva). Israel was to be victorious “because as in the past, through thine anointed ones thou hast devoured evil like a blazing torch in a swath of grain … for of old thou hast proclaimed that the enemy … shall fall by a sword not of man, and a sword not of man shall devour him.”
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Page 14