PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF JESUS
Palestine in the first century was a very troubled corner of the globe. For some time the Holy Land had been fraught with dynastic squabbles, internecine strife, and on occasion, full-scale war. During the second century B.C. a more or less unified Judaic kingdom was transiently established—as chronicled by the Old Testament books
14 Palestine at the time of Jesus
of Maccabees. By 63 B.C., however, the land was in upheaval again and ripe for conquest.
More than half a century before Jesus’ birth Palestine fell to the armies of Pompey, and Roman rule was imposed. But Rome at the time was overextended and too preoccupied with her own affairs to install the administrative apparatus necessary for direct rule. She therefore created a line of puppet kings to rule under her aegis. This line was that of the Herodians—who were not Jewish but Arab. The first of the line was Antipater, who assumed the throne of Palestine in 63 B.C. On his death in 37 B.C., he was succeeded by his son, Herod the Great, who ruled until 4 B.C. One must visualize, then, a situation analogous to that of France under the Vichy government between 1940 and 1944. One must visualize a conquered land and a conquered people, ruled by a puppet regime that was kept in power by military force. The people of the country were allowed to retain their own religion and customs. But the final authority was Rome. This authority was implemented according to Roman law and enforced by Roman soldiery—as it was in Britain not long after.
In A.D. 6 the situation became more critical. In this year the country was split administratively into one province and two tetrarchies. Herod Antipas became ruler of one, Galilee. But Judaea—the spiritual and secular capital—was rendered subject to direct Roman rule, administered by a Roman procurator based at Caesarea. The Roman regime was brutal and autocratic. When it assumed direct control of Judaea, more than three thousand rebels were summarily crucified. The temple was plundered and defiled. Heavy taxation was imposed. Torture was frequently employed, and many of the populace committed suicide. This state of affairs was not improved by Pontius Pilate, who presided as procurator of Judaea from A.D. 26 to 36. In contrast to the biblical portraits of him, existing records indicate that Pilate was a cruel and corrupt man who not only perpetuated but intensified the abuses of his predecessor. It is thus all the more surprising—at least on first glance—that there should be no criticism of Rome in the Gospels, no mention even of the burden of the Roman yoke. Indeed, the Gospel accounts suggest that the inhabitants of Judaea were placid and contented with their lot.
In point of fact very few were contented, and many were far from placid. The Jews in the Holy Land at the time could be loosely divided into several sects and subsects. There were, for example, the Sadducees—a small but wealthy land-owning class who, to the anger of their compatriots, collaborated, Quisling-fashion, with the Romans. There were the Pharisees—a progressive group who introduced much reform into Judaism and who, despite the portrait of them in the Gospels, placed themselves in staunch, albeit largely passive, opposition to Rome. There were the Essenes—an austere, mystically oriented sect, whose teachings were much more prevalent and influential than is generally acknowledged or supposed. Among the smaller sects and subsects there were many whose precise character has long been lost to history, and which, therefore, are difficult to define. It is worth citing the Nazorites, however, of whom Samson, centuries before, had been a member and who were still in existence during Jesus’ time. And it is worth citing the Nazoreans or Nazarenes—a term that seems to have been applied to Jesus and his followers. Indeed, the original Greek version of the New Testament refers to Jesus as "Jesus the Nazarene"—which is mistranslated in English as "Jesus of Nazareth." Nazarene, in short, is a specifically sectarian word and has no connection with Nazareth.
There were numerous other groups and sects as well, one of which proved of particular relevance to our inquiry. In A.D. 6, when Rome assumed direct control of Judaea, a Pharisee rabbi known as Judas of Galilee had created a highly militant revolutionary group composed, it would appear, of both Pharisees and Essenes. This following became known as Zealots. The Zealots were not, strictly speaking, a sect; they were a movement whose membership was drawn from a number of sects. By the time of Jesus’ mission the Zealots had assumed an increasingly prominent role in the Holy Land’s affairs. Their activities formed perhaps the most important political backdrop against which Jesus’ drama enacted itself. Long after the Crucifixion Zealot activity continued unabated. By A.D. 44 this activity had so intensified that some sort of armed struggle already seemed inevitable. In A.D. 66 the struggle erupted, the whole of Judaea rising in organized revolt against Rome. It was a desperate, tenacious, but ultimately futile conflict—reminiscent in certain respects of, say, Hungary in 1956. At Caesarea alone 20,000 Jews were massacred by the Romans. Within four years Roman legions had occupied Jerusalem, razed the city, and sacked and plundered the temple. Nevertheless the mountain fortress of Masada held out for yet another three years, commanded by a lineal descendant of Judas of Galilee.
The aftermath of the revolt in Judaea witnessed a massive exodus of Jews from the Holy Land. Nevertheless, enough remained to foment another rebellion some sixty years later in A.D. 132. At last, in 135, the Emperor Hadrian decreed that all Jews be expelled by law from Judaea, and Jerusalem became essentially a Roman city. It was renamed Aelia Capitolina.
Jesus’ lifetime spanned roughly the first 35 years of a turmoil extending over 140 years. The turmoil did not cease with his death, but continued for another century. And it engendered the psychological and cultural adjuncts inevitably attending any such sustained defiance of an oppressor. One of these adjuncts was the hope and longing for a Messiah who would deliver his people from the tyrant’s yoke. It was only by virtue of historical and semantic accident that this term came to be applied specifically and exclusively to Jesus.
For Jesus’ contemporaries no Messiah would ever have been regarded as divine. Indeed, the very idea of a divine Messiah would have been preposterous, if not unthinkable. The Greek word for Messiah is Christ or Christos. The term—whether in Hebrew or Greek—meant simply "the anointed one" and generally referred to a king. Thus, David, when he was anointed king in the Old Testament, became, quite explicitly, a "Messiah" or a "Christ." And every subsequent Jewish king of the house of David was known by the same appellation. Even during the Roman occupation of Judaea, the Roman-appointed high priest was known as the Priest Messiah or Priest Christ. 6
For the Zealots, however, and for other opponents of Rome, this puppet priest was, of necessity, a false Messiah. For them the true Messiah implied something very different—the legitimate roi perdu or "lost king," the unknown descendant of the house of David who would deliver his people from Roman tyranny. During Jesus’ lifetime anticipation of the coming of such a Messiah attained a pitch verging on mass hysteria. And this anticipation continued after Jesus’ death. Indeed, the revolt of A.D. 66 was prompted in large part by Zealot agitation and propaganda on behalf of a Messiah whose advent was said to be imminent.
The term "Messiah," then, implied nothing in any way divine. Strictly defined, it meant nothing more than an anointed king, and in the popular mind it came to mean an anointed king who would also be a liberator. In other words, it was a term with specifically political connotations—something quite different from the later Christian idea of a "Son of God." It was this mundane political term that was applied to Jesus. He was called "Jesus the Messiah" or— translated into Greek—"Jesus the Christ." Only later was this designation contracted to "Jesus Christ" and a purely functional title distorted into a proper name.
THE HISTORY OF THE GOSPELS
The Gospels issued from a recognizable and concrete historical reality. It was a reality of oppression, of civic and social discontent, of political unrest, of incessant persecution and intermittent rebellion. It was also a reality suffused with perpetual and tantalizing promises, hopes, and dreams—that a rightful king would appear, a spiritu
al and secular leader who would deliver his people into freedom. So far as political freedom was concerned, such aspirations were brutally extinguished by the devastating war between A. D. 66 and 74. Transposed into a wholly religious form, however, the aspirations were not only perpetuated by the Gospels, but given a powerful new impetus.
Modern scholars are unanimous in concurring that the Gospels do not date from Jesus’ lifetime. For the most part they date from the period between the two major revolts in Judaea—66 to 74 and 132 to 135—although they are almost certainly based on earlier accounts. These earlier accounts may have included written documents since lost—for there was a wholesale destruction of records in the wake of the first rebellion. But there would certainly have been oral traditions as well. Some of these were undoubtedly grossly exaggerated and/or distorted, received and transmitted at second, third or fourth hand. Others, however, may have derived from individuals who were alive in Jesus’ lifetime and may even have known him personally. A young man at the time of the Crucifixion might well have been alive when the Gospels were composed.
The earliest of the Gospels is generally considered to be Mark’s, composed sometime during the revolt of 66-74 or shortly thereafter— except for its treatment of the Resurrection, which is a later and spurious addition. Although not himself one of Jesus’ original disciples, Mark seems to have come from Jerusalem. He seems to have been a companion of Saint Paul, and his Gospel bears an unmistak- able stamp of Pauline thought. But if Mark was a native of Jerusalem, his Gospel—as Clement of Alexandria states—was composed in Rome and addressed to a Greco-Roman audience. This in itself explains a great deal. At the time that Mark’s Gospel was composed, Judaea was, or had recently been, in open revolt, and thousands of Jews were being crucified for rebellion against the Roman regime. If Mark wished his Gospel to survive and impress itself on a Roman audience, he could not possibly present Jesus as anti-Roman. Indeed, he could not feasibly present Jesus as politically oriented at all. In order to ensure the survival of his message he would have been obliged to exonerate the Romans of all guilt for Jesus’ death— to whitewash the existing and entrenched regime and blame the death of the Messiah on certain Jews. This device was adopted, not only by the authors of the other Gospels, but by the early Christian Church as well. Without such a device neither Gospels nor Church would have survived.
The Gospel of Luke is dated by scholars at around A. D. 80. Luke himself appears to have been a Greek doctor who composed his work for a high-ranking Roman official at Caesarea, the Roman capital of Palestine. For Luke, too, therefore, it would have been necessary to placate and appease the Romans and transfer the blame elsewhere. By the time the Gospel of Matthew was composed— approximately A.D. 85—such a transference seems to have been accepted as an established fact and gone unquestioned. More than half of Matthew’s Gospel, in fact, is derived directly from Mark’s, although it was composed originally in Greek and reflects specifi- cally Greek characteristics. The author seems to have been a Jew, quite possibly a refugee from Palestine. He is not to be confused with the disciple named Matthew, who would have lived much earlier and would probably have known only Aramaic.
The Gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew are known collectively as the Synoptic Gospels, implying that they see "eye to eye" or "with one eye"—which, of course, they do not. Nevertheless, there is enough overlap between them to suggest that they derived from a single common source—either an oral tradition or some other document subsequently lost. This distinguishes them from the Gospel of John, which betrays significantly different origins.
Nothing whatever is known about the author of the Fourth Gospel. Indeed there is no reason to assume his name was John. Except for John the Baptist, the name John is mentioned at no point in the Gospel itself, and its attribution to a man called John is generally accepted as later tradition. The Fouth Gospel is the latest of those in the New Testament—composed around A.D. 100 in the vicinity of the Greek city of Ephesus. It displays a number of quite distinctive features. There is no Nativity scene, for example, no description whatever of Jesus’ birth, and the opening is almost Gnostic in character. The text is of a decidedly more mystical nature than the other Gospels, and the content differs as well. The other Gospels, for instance, concentrate primarily on Jesus’ activities in the northern province of Galilee and reflect what appears to be only a second- or third-hand knowledge of events to the south in Judaea and Jerusalem—including the Crucifixion. The Fourth Gospel, in contrast, says relatively little about Galilee. It dwells exhaustively on the events in Judaea and Jerusalem that concluded Jesus’ career, and its account of the Crucifixion may well rest ultimately on some first-hand eyewitness testimony. It also contains a number of episodes and incidents that do not figure in the other Gospels at all—the wedding at Cana, the roles of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and the raising of Lazarus (although the last of these was once included in Mark’s Gospel). On the basis of such factors modern scholars have suggested that the Gospel of John, despite its late composition, may well be the most reliable and historically accurate of the four. More than the other Gospels it seems to draw upon traditions current among contemporaries of Jesus, as well as other material unavailable to Mark, Luke, and Matthew. One modern researcher points out that it reflects an apparently first-hand topographical knowledge of Jerusalem prior to the revolt of A.D. 66. The same author concludes, "Behind the Fourth Gospel lies an ancient tradition independent of the other Gospels." 7 This is not an isolated opinion. In fact, it is the most prevalent in modern biblical scholarship. According to another writer, "The Gospel of John, though not adhering to the Markian chronological framework and being much later in date, appears to know a tradition concerning Jesus that must be primitive and authentic."8
On the basis of our own research we, too, concluded that the Fourth Gospel was the most reliable of books in the New Testament— even though it, like the others, had been subjected to doctoring, editing, expurgation, and revision. In our inquiry we had occasion to draw upon all four Gospels and much collateral material as well. But it was in the Fourth Gospel that we found the most persuasive evidence for our as yet tentative hypothesis.
THE MARITAL STATUS OF JESUS
It was not our intention to discredit the Gospels. We sought only to sift through them—to locate certain fragments of possible or probable truth and extract them from the matrix of embroidery surrounding them. We were seeking fragments, moreover, of a very precise character—fragments that might attest to a marriage between Jesus and the woman known as the Magdalen. Such attestations, needless to say, would not be explicit. In order to find them, we realized, we would be obliged to read between lines, fill in certain gaps, account for certain caesuras and ellipses. We would have to deal with omissions, with innuendos, with references that were, at best, oblique. And we would not only have to look for evidence of a marriage. We would also have to look for evidence of circumstances that might have been conducive to a marriage. Our inquiry would thus have to encompass a number of distinct but closely related questions. We began with the most obvious of them.
Is there any evidence in the Gospels, direct or indirect, to suggest that Jesus was indeed married?
There is, of course, no explicit statement to the effect that he was. On the other hand, there is no explicit statement to the effect that he was not—and this is both more curious and more significant than it might at first appear. As Dr. Geza Vermes of Oxford University points out, "There is complete silence in the Gospels concerning the marital status of Jesus ... Such a state of affairs is sufficiently unusual in ancient Jewry to prompt further enquiry."9
The Gospels state that many of the disciples—Peter, for example— were married. And at no point does Jesus himself advocate celibacy. On the contrary, in the Gospel of Matthew he declares, "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female... For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh
?" (19:4-5) Such a statement can hardly be reconciled with an injunction to celibacy. And if Jesus did not preach celibacy, there is no reason to suppose that he practiced it. According to Judaic custom at the time it was not only usual, but almost mandatory, that a man be married. Except among certain Essenes in certain communities, celibacy was vigorously condemned. During the late first century one Jewish writer even compared deliberate celibacy with murder, and he does not seem to have been alone in this attitude. And it was as obligatory for a Jewish father to find a wife for his son as it was to ensure that his son be circumcised.
If Jesus was not married, this fact would have been glaringly conspicuous. It would have drawn attention to itself and been used to characterize and identify him. It would have set him apart, in some significant sense, from his contemporaries. If this were the case, surely at least one of the Gospel accounts would make some mention of so marked a deviation from custom? If Jesus were indeed as celibate as later tradition claims, it is extraordinary that there is no reference to any such celibacy. The absence of any such reference strongly suggests that Jesus, as far as the question of celibacy was concerned, conformed to the conventions of his time and culture-suggests, in short, that he was married. This alone would satisfactorily explain the silence of the Gospels on the matter. The argument is summarized by a respected contemporary theological scholar:
Granted the cultural background as witnessed... it is highly improbable that Jesus was not married well before the beginning of his public ministry. If he had insisted upon celibacy, it would have created a stir, a reaction which would have left some trace. So, the lack of mention of Jesus’ marriage in the Gospels is a strong argument not against but for the hypothesis of marriage, because any practice or advocacy of voluntary celibacy would in the Jewish context of the time have been so unusual as to have attracted much attention and comment.10
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