The Quamranites had the order of battle worked out down to the last detail. They were even ready with a song of victory:
Arise, O Valiant One!
Lead away Thy captives, O glorious Man!
Do Thy plundering, O valorous One!
Set Thy hand upon the neck of Thine enemies
And Thy foot upon the heap of the slain!
Strike the nations Thy enemies
And let Thy sword devour guilty flesh!
Fill the land with glory
And Thine inheritance with blessing!
A multitude of cattle in Thy pastures,
Silver and gold and precious stones in thy palaces!
O Zion, rejoice greatly!
Appear amid shouts of joy, O Jerusalem!
Show yourselves, O all you cities of Judah!
Open thy gates forever.
For the riches of the nations to enter in!
And let their kings serve thee
And let all thy oppressors bow down before thee
And let them lick the dust of thy feet!
We know that the Quamranites sent missionaries to act as a vanguard for the Anointed One. Like John the Baptist, these missionaries are said to have eaten locusts and wild honey and dressed in the skins of animals. Like John the Baptist, their task was to make the children of Israel repent. It can’t be proved that they also practiced baptism, but at Quamran itself archaeologists have uncovered extensive ritual bathing facilities. John’s ritual of baptism may very well have been introduced as an abbreviated form of the more extensive ablutions and purificatory rites performed in the commune’s baths and which in one form or another were long a part of Jewish ideas about spiritual cleanliness.
I think a point that needs special emphasis here is that the existence of this literature was not even hinted at in the writings of such people as Josephus or the authors of the Christian gospels. Without the scrolls we would know absolutely nothing about what these militant holy men were up to, because Quamran was destroyed by the Romans in 68 A.D. The communards sealed their sacred library in jars and hid them in nearby caves before the “Sons of Darkness” swooped down and obliterated the commune. Because they could not have been tampered with during the two thousand years their existence was forgotten, the scrolls now constitute one of the great manuscript sources of information about Judaism in the period immediately prior to, during, and shortly after the time of Christ.
The Quamran scrolls make it extremely difficult to separate John the Baptist’s teachings as reported in the gospels from the mainstream of the Jewish military-messianic tradition. In the ambience of the prolonged and bloody guerrilla war with Rome, the B’aptist’s metaphor of “chaff burned in unquenchable fire” cannot reasonably be opposed to what the Quamranites predict about a “blazing torch in a swath of grain.” I don’t propose to say what was in John the Baptist’s mind, but the earthly context in which his behavior should be judged can’t be that of a religion as yet unborn. I can only think of his reported sayings and actions in the context of a dusty, surging ragtag mass of peasants, guerrillas, tax evaders, and thieves, knee-deep in the Jordan, burning with an unquenchable hatred for the Herodian tyrants, puppet priests, arrogant Roman governors, and heathen soldiers who farted in holy places.
Immediately after the Baptist was captured—probably while he was still awaiting trial in Herod Antipas’ prison—Jesus began to preach among precisely the same kind of people and under the same kinds of risky conditions. The resemblance in lifestyle was so great that among Jesus’ first disciples, at least two—the brothers Andrew and Simon Peter (St. Peter)—were former followers of the Baptist Herod Antipas later found so little difference between Jesus and the Baptist that he is said to have remarked, “It is John, whom I beheaded; he is risen from the dead.” At first Jesus did most of his preaching in the back country, performing miracles and attracting large crowds. He was probably always only one jump ahead of the police. Like John the Baptist and the messianic messengers discussed by Josephus, Jesus was launched on a collision course that would end either in his arrest or in a cataclysmic insurrection.
The logic of his growing popularity drew Jesus forward into increasingly dangerous exploits. Before long, he and his disciples set out to missionize Jerusalem, the promised capital of the future Holy Jewish Empire. Deliberately invoking the messianic symbolism of the Book of Zechariah, Jesus rode through the gates mounted on a donkey (or possibly a pony). Sunday School teachers claim that Jesus did this because it signified an intention to “speak peace unto the heathen.” This ignores the overwhelmingly military-messianic significance of everything else in Zechariah. For after Zechariahs messiah appears, lowly and riding on an ass, the sons of Zion “devour and subdue” … and become “mighty men which tread down their enemies in the mire of the streets in battle … because the Lord is with them and the riders on horses shall be confounded.”
The lowly figure on the ass was not a peaceful messiah. It was the messiah of a small nation and its apparently harmless prince of war, a descendant of David, who also rose from apparent weakness to confound and subdue the enemy’s horsemen and charioteers. The heathen were to have peace—but it was to be the peace of the long-awaited Holy Jewish Empire. That at least is how the crowds who lined the way understood what was happening, for as Jesus passed by, they shouted: “Hosanna! Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed be the Kingdom of our Father David that is coming!”
Nor was there anything notably peaceful in what Jesus and his disciples did after they entered the city. By choosing to invade Jerusalem just before the beginning of Passover, they assured themselves the protection of thousands of holiday pilgrims arriving from the countryside and from all over the Mediterranean. Zealot-bandits, peasants, laborers, beggars and other potentially volatile groups were all streaming into the city at the same time. During the day Jesus went nowhere unless surrounded by tumultuous and ecstatic crowds. When it became dark he slipped away to the houses of friends, keeping his whereabouts hidden from all but the inner core of disciples.
Jesus and his disciples did nothing that would have distinguished them from the members of an incipient military-messianic movement. They even provoked at least one violent confrontation. They stormed into the courtyard of the great temple and physically attacked the licensed businessmen who changed currencies so that foreign pilgrims could purchase sacrificial animals. Jesus himself used a whip during this incident.
The gospels recount how Caiaphas, the High Priest, “plotted” to arrest Jesus. Since Caiaphas had witnessed the violent attack against the moneychangers, he could not have entertained any doubts about the legality of putting Jesus in jail. What Caiaphas had to figure out was how to arrest Jesus without provoking all the people who thought he was the messiah. Mobs were extremely dangerous in those days before the invention of shotguns and tear gas, especially if the people believed they had an invincible leader. So Caiaphas instructed the police to take Jesus, but “not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people.”
The crowd surrounding Jesus certainly had not had time to adopt a nonviolent lifestyle. Even his most intimate disciples were clearly not prepared to “turn the other cheek.” At least two of them had sobriquets which suggest that they were linked with militant activists. One was Simon, called “The Zealot,” and the other was Judas, called “Iscariot.” There is an uncanny resemblance between Iscariot and sicarii, the word used by Josephus to identify the knife-wielding, homicidal dagger men. And in certain Old Latin manuscripts Judas is actually called Zelotes.
Two other disciples had warlike nicknames—James and John, the sons of Zebedee. They were called “Boanerges,” which Mark translates from Aramaic as “Sons of Thunder” and which could also mean “the fierce, wrathful ones.” The sons of Zebedee deserved their reputation. At one point in the gospel narrative they want to destroy an entire Samaritan village because the people had not welcomed Jesus.
The gospels also indicate
that some of the disciples carried swords and were prepared to resist arrest. Just before being taken into custody, Jesus said, “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” This prompted the disciples to show him two swords—indicating that at least two of them were not only habitually armed but had kept their swords concealed under their clothes … like dagger men.
All four gospels record the fact that the disciples put up armed resistance at the moment of Jesus’ capture. After the Passover supper, Jesus and his inner circle slipped away to a garden in Gethsemane where they prepared to spend the night. Guided by Judas Iscariot, the High Priest and his men burst in on them as Jesus was praying and the rest were sleeping. The disciples drew their swords and a brief struggle ensued, during which one of the temple policemen lost an ear. As soon as the police grabbed Jesus, the disciples stopped fighting and ran away into the night. According to Matthew, Jesus told one of his disciples to sheath his sword, a command which the disciple obeyed but was obviously unprepared to hear, since he immediately deserted.
In the gospel narrative, the price given to Judas resembles Herodias’ denunciation of John the Baptist. If Judas was in fact Zelotes—a zealot-bandit—he might have betrayed Jesus for any number of tactical or strategic reasons, but never simply for money. (One theory is that Jesus wasn’t being militant enough.) By identifying Judas’ motivation as pure greed, the gospels may simply have repeated the kind of distortion that Josephus and the Romans automatically employed with respect to all zealot-bandits. But zealot-bandits were prepared to kill without getting paid—that at least should be clear from the events described in the previous chapter.
Why did the disciples all run away, and why did Simon Peter deny Jesus three times before the night was over? Because as Jews they shared with Caiaphas the lifestyle consciousness of their ancestors and understood that the messiah was to be an invincible, wonder-working military prince.
All this leads to one conclusion: The lifestyle consciousness shared by Jesus and his inner circle of disciples was not the lifestyle consciousness of a peaceful messiah. Although the gospels clearly intend to deny Jesus the capacity to carry out violent political acts, they preserve what seems to be an undercurrent of contradictory events and sayings which link John the Baptist and Jesus to the military-messianic tradition and implicate them in the guerrilla warfare. The reason for this is that by the time the first gospel was written, nonpeaceful events and sayings which had been attributed to Jesus by eyewitnesses and by unimpeachable apostolic sources were widely known among the faithful. The writers of the gospels shifted the balance of the Jesus cult’s lifestyle consciousness in the direction of a peaceful messiah, but they could not entirely expunge the traces of continuity with the military-messianic tradition. The ambiguity of the gospels in this regard is best demonstrated by arranging some of Jesus’ most peaceful statements in one column and the unexpected negations in another:
Blessed are the peacemakers.
(Matthew 5:9) Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, I come not to send peace but a sword.
(Matthew 10:34)
Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
(Matthew 5:39)
Suppose ye that I come to give peace on earth? I will tell you nay, but rather division.
(Luke 12:51)
All that take the sword shall perish with the sword.
(Matthew 26:52)
He that hath no sword, let him sell his garments and buy one.
(Luke 22:36)
Love thine enemies; do good to them that hate you.
(Luke 6:27) And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them out of the temple … and poured out the changer’s money and overthrew the tables.
(John 2:15)
I should also note at this point the obviously false construction traditionally given to what Jesus said when he was asked if Jews ought to pay taxes to the Romans: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” This could mean only one thing to the Galileans who had participated in Judas of Galilee’s tax revolt—namely, “Don’t pay.” For Judas of Galilee had said that everything in Palestine belonged to God. But the authors of the Gospels and their readers probably knew nothing about Judas of Galilee, so they preserved Jesus’ highly provocative response on the mistaken assumption that it showed a genuinely conciliatory attitude toward the Roman government.
After they had captured him, the Romans and their Jewish clients continued to treat Jesus as if he were the leader of an actual or intended military-messianic uprising. The Jewish high court put him on trial for having made blasphemous and false prophecies. He was quickly found guilty and turned over to Pontius Pilate for a second trial on secular charges. The reason for this seems clear. As I showed in the chapter on cargo, popular messiahs in colonial contexts are always guilty of a politico-religious crime, never merely a religious one. The Romans had no interest in Jesus’ violation of the natives’ religious codes, but they were vitally concerned with his threat to destroy the colonial government.
Caiaphas’ predictions about how the crowd would react once Jesus was shown to be helpless was soon fully vindicated. Pilate publicly exhibited the condemned man and not a voice was lifted in protest. Pilate even went so far as to offer to free Jesus, if the mob wanted him back. The gospels claim that Pilate made this offer because he himself believed that Jesus was innocent. But Pilate, you will recall, was a tricky, heavy-fisted military hard-liner who kept having trouble with the Jerusalem mob. According to Josephus, Pilate once lured several thousand people into the Jerusalem stadium, surrounded them with soldiers, and threatened to cut their heads off. On another occasion his men infiltrated the mob by wearing civilian clothes over their armor and on a given signal clubbed everybody in sight. In presenting Jesus to the rabble that had only yesterday adored and protected him, Pilate was making use of the inexorable logic of the military-messianic tradition to impress the natives with their own stupidity. There stood their supposedly divine liberator, King of the Holy Jewish Empire, utterly helpless against a few Roman soldiers. The crowd may very well have responded by demanding that Jesus be killed as a religious imposter, but Pilate was not interested in crucifying religious charlatans. To the Romans, Jesus was just another subversive who deserved the same fate as all the other rabble-rousing bandits and revolutionaries who kept crawling out of the desert. That was why the title on Jesus’ cross read “King of the Jews.”
S. G. F. Brandon, a former dean of the School of Theology of the University of Manchester, reminds us that Jesus was not crucified alone; the gospels report that his fate was shared by two other convicted criminals. What was the crime for which Jesus’ companions were put to death? In English language versions of the gospels, the two are said to be “thieves.” But the original Greek manuscript term for them was lestai, precisely the same term that Josephus used when he wanted to refer to the zealot-bandits. Brandon believes that we can be even more specific about who these “bandits” actually were. Mark states that at the time of Jesus’ trial, the Jerusalem jail contained a number of prisoners “that had made insurrection.” If Jesus’ companions were drawn from these insurrectionists, the grisly scene at Golgotha obtains a unity otherwise lacking: the supposed messianic King of the Jews at the center, flanked by two zealot-bandits—a scene compatible with everything that we know about the mentality of colonial officers intent on teaching law and order to rebellious natives.
All four gospels converge on the somber spectacle of Jesus suffering on the cross with the disciples nowhere in sight The disciples could not believe that a messiah would permit himself to be crucified. They did not as yet have the slightest inkling that the Jesus cult was to be the cult of a peaceful rather than a vengeful savior. In fact, as Brandon points out, the gospel of Mark gains its dramatic thrust from the failure of the disciples to grasp the reason why their messsiah will not destroy his enemies and will not save himself from being killed.<
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It was only after the disappearance of Jesus’ body from the tomb that his apparent lack of messianic power came to be understood. A number of disciples began to have visions, which made them realize that the usual test of messiahship—victory—did not apply to Jesus. Inspired by their visions, they took the important but not entirely unprecedented step of arguing that Jesus’ death didn’t prove he was another false messiah; rather, it proved that God had provided the Jews with another climactic opportunity to show themselves worthy of the covenant. Jesus would return if people repented for doubting him and asked God’s forgiveness.
There is no reason to suppose that this reinterpretation of the significance of Jesus’ death led at once to a rejection of the military and political import of his messiahship. Much evidence supports the view argued persuasively by Professor Brandon, that most of the Jews who awaited Jesus’ return in the period between his crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem continued to expect a messiah who would overthrow Rome and make Jerusaem the capital of the Holy Jewish Empire. At the outset of the Acts of the Apostles, which is Luke’s account of what happened after Jesus was killed, the political significance of Jesus’ return is uppermost in the minds of the apostles. The first question they put to the risen Jesus is: “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” Another New Testament source, the Book of Revelations, depicts the returning Jesus as a many-crowned rider on a white horse who judges and makes war, who has eyes as “a flame of fire,” wears a garment “dipped in blood,” and rules the nations with “a rod of iron,” and who returns to “tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.”
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