Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (15 page)

Most of the subjugated peoples in the Mediterranean world yielded to the Romans in what Romans regarded as essential, and those who refused to do this found themselves required to yield in everything, surrendering whatever was distinctive in their cultural identities to the dominant occupier. That is why we know so little of the Phoenicians, say, or the Nabataeans. The people in Palestine proved to be especially stubborn, clinging doggedly, and despite efforts at coercion and co-optation, to a self-understanding that permanently set them apart. But Jewish resistance arose from something far deeper than some pseudogenetic stiff-necked stubbornness that would one day inspire an antisemitic stereotype. For the Jews of Palestine, the indignity of an emperor-worshiping colonizer's foot on the throat was compounded by the religious convictions that no such emperor was divine and, more pointedly, that their freedom in this now violated land was a gift from the one true God—their God. Despite everything that set them apart, the rivalrous groups of Jews agreed that the land was a sacred symbol of that God's enduring promise. So for Palestinian Jews of all stripes, the Roman occupation as such was a religious affront as well as a political one. Furthermore, and equally across the board, a Jew's belief in the covenant included the belief that, one way or another, sooner or later, God would fulfill the promise again, as God had done repeatedly in history. God would do this once the purpose of this humiliating defeat—some, like John the Baptist, said its purpose was to bring the people to repentance—was fulfilled. God would do it by vanquishing the foreign invader and restoring to Israel its holy freedom. In other words, Jews
as Jews
had a reason to resist Rome, and a reason to believe, despite Rome's overwhelming military superiority, that the resistance would be effective.

What Jews did not have was anything approaching agreement on the form this resistance should take. And it is here that the other, negative meaning of Jewish sectarianism surfaces. Typically, imperial powers depend on the inability of oppressed local populations to muster a unified resistance, and the most successful occupiers are skilled at exploiting the differences among the occupied. Certainly that was the story of the British Empire's success, and its legacy of nurtured local hatreds can be seen wherever the Union Jack flew, from Muslim-Hindu hatred in Pakistan and India, to Catholic-Protestant hatred in Ireland, to, yes, Jew-Arab hatred in modern Israel.
³⁹
Rome was as good at encouraging internecine resentments among the occupied as Britain ever was. At one level, it is a matter only of exploiting the temperamental differences that perennially divide conservatives, moderates, and radicals from one another. E. P. Sanders says that for Jews confronted with "the great empires of the Mediterranean," the various parties had to decide "when to fight, when to yield; when to be content with partial independence, when to seek more. In terms of internal affairs, the primary issue was who would control the national institutions: the temple, the sacrifices, the tithes and other offerings, and the administration of the law."
⁴⁰

Sectarian conflict amounted to more than mere squabbling. There were grave tensions involving the life and death of the nation of Israel, and every aspect of its existence could be disputed because Israel's God had become involved at every level. Today, even believers take for granted the "wall of separation," in Jefferson's phrase, between areas of God's concern and those of government's, but it was not so at the time of Jesus. "There was no simple distinction," Sanders says, "between 'church' and 'state' or 'religion' and 'politics.' God, in the eyes of Jews, cared about all aspects of life; no part of it was outside 'religion.' Thus, in any case in which there was a choice—whether between would-be rulers, competing architectural plans for the temple, or various prohibitions on the sabbath—Jews would attempt to discern and follow
God's
will. Not infrequently they disagreed."
⁴¹
In every case, their disagreement served the purposes of Rome.

To the radical revolutionaries who wanted to mount an immediate, violent assault on the occupier, the impulse of aristocrats to cut the best deal with the enemy looked like collaboration or treason; equally, from inside the Temple precincts, the radicals' fanaticism looked like suicide. So the establishment party of Sadducees, associated with the priestly class, participated from their place at the Temple in the administration of Roman power in Jerusalem; the separatist Zealots, like the monastics at Qumran, pursued a rejectionist path; the Pharisees advocated an adherence to Mosaic law as a way of ushering in God's liberating intervention; and the Sicarii launched knife-wielding terrorist attacks against agents of the occupiers. What the Romans could depend on—a classic exercise of divide-and-keep-conquered—was each group's readiness to identify a competing group as the primary enemy, often leaving Rome above the fray. For our purposes, the point is that even in the way events of this era are remembered, the unleashed sectarian impulse continued to keep the Roman overlords at the margin of the story.

Take two examples, one from the beginning and one from the end of the story of Jesus, as his followers told it to each other and the world. First, in the year 4
B.C.E.,
which also happened to be the year of Jesus' birth,
⁴²
Herod the Great died. His death left a temporary power vacuum, which caused violent outbreaks among forces loyal to various pretenders to succeed Herod as Rome's client king and among the followers of messianic movements who sought to seize an opening against Rome.
⁴³
The Romans smashed every rebellion and, with those legions pouncing from Syria, restored direct imperial rule. As summed up by the scholars Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman: "The Roman armies had swept through many of the towns and villages of the country, raping, killing, and destroying nearly everything in sight. In Galilee, all centers of rebellion were brutally suppressed; the rebel-held town of Sepphoris was burned to the ground, and all its surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery."
⁴⁴
Thousands of Jews were killed. Villages in Galilee were laid waste. In Jerusalem, where rebels had briefly taken charge, the Romans showed the lengths to which they were prepared to go to maintain control by swiftly executing anyone even suspected of collusion in the rebellion—Josephus puts the number at two thousand.
⁴⁵
The Roman means of execution, of course, was crucifixion, and Josephus makes the point that indeed the victims were crucified. This means that just outside the wall of the Jewish capital, crosses were erected—not three lonely crosses on a hill, as in the tidy Christian imagination, but perhaps two thousand in close proximity. On each was hung a Jew, and each Jew was left to die over several days the slow death of suffocation, as muscles gave out so that the victim could no longer hold himself erect enough to catch a breath. And once squeezed free of life, the corpses were left on their crosses to be eaten by buzzards. This grotesquery was its own justification. Its power was magnified because for Jews, coming into contact with a corpse made one ritually impure—a priest, for example, could not bury a parent. Such impurity could even be acquired by "overshadowing" a corpse, or being "overshadowed" by one.
⁴⁶
The shadows of those crucifixes, in other words, were also the point. The Jews who'd been left alive were being reminded whom they were dealing with in Rome, reminded for weeks by the sight and stench of the bodies. The image of those scores of crosses would stamp Jewish consciousness for a generation.
⁴⁷

The opening chapters of the Gospel of Matthew evoke the political and social stresses of the world into which Jesus was born, but doesn't it seem odd that the ruthlessness displayed in Matthew's account of the slaughter of the innocents—the murder of every male child under two in the town of Bethlehem, a very few miles from those crosses—belonged not to the Romans but to the Jewish king Herod? This is not to dismiss that crime, if it occurred, nor to deny Herod's brutality, especially in the madness of his last years, but only to note that in the Christian memory—the Gospel of Matthew, usually dated to the decade of the 80s
C.E.,
was written long after these events took place—the Roman crime is forgotten while the Jewish one is highlighted. Similarly with the Gospel of Luke, which was composed about the same time as Matthew. Luke's nativity-narrative reference to Caesar Augustus (63
B.C.E
-14
C.E.)
as issuing a decree "that all the world should be enrolled,"
⁴⁸
which moved the action of the Mary and Joseph story to Bethlehem in the first place, cries out for elaboration. It was the same Caesar Augustus who declared himself "Savior of the world," making him anathema to Jews. When he came to power with the Senate's authority in 27
B.C.E.,
it was as the head of a republic, but when he died in 14
C.E.,
it was as the emperor of a dictatorship, one tool of which was that world census. The perfect symbol of Caesar's regime was the gibbet on which those who refused to be part of his all-encompassing blasphemy were hung to die.

Now the second example, from the end of Jesus' life. When that Roman gibbet finally enters his story, by an extraordinary set of narrative machinations it is hardly Roman at all. Certainly the Gospel accounts are explicit in describing the Romans as the executioners of Jesus, but if they are coconspirators with the Jewish high priests and leaders of the Jewish ruling body, the Sanhedrin, they are decidedly
unindicted
coconspirators, which in modern law is a distinction between parties to a crime and perpetrators of it. According to the Christian memory, as conjured again by Matthew, the hand of the hand-washing Pilate (whose term as procurator, or appointed governor, in Judea ran from 26 to 36
C.E.)
is forced by the bloodthirstiness of the crowd. "I am innocent of this man's blood," Pilate says.
⁴⁹
This procurator is remembered somewhat differently by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who lived when Pilate did, and wrote sometime around 41
C.E.
that the Roman used "bribes, insults, robberies, outrages, wanton injuries, constantly repeated executions without trial, ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty."
⁵⁰
Crossan, having cited these words, nevertheless asserts that Pilate "was neither a saint nor a monster."
⁵¹
Fredriksen, however, makes the point that Philo, Josephus, and the Roman historian Tacitus all single out Pilate "as one of the worst provocateurs."
⁵²
Even by the standards of brutal Rome, Pilate seems to have been savage. When, six or so years after the death of Jesus, he wantonly slaughtered Samaritans for gathering to venerate Moses on a sacred mountain they associated with him, Pilate was recalled to Rome.
⁵³

Given the ways in which his occupying force routinely maintained control over a restless population, the Roman commander's self-exculpation, as recorded in Matthew, in the matter of one particular crucifixion is the moral equivalent of Adolf Eichmann's standing in his glass booth and declaring himself innocent. "And all the people," Matthew says, "answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'"
⁵⁴
Which, of course, it has been.

This start-to-finish pattern in the Gospels of deflecting blame away from Romans and onto Jews is commonly taken now as evidence of a primordial Christian anti-Judaism, or worse: an anti-Judaism at the service of a craven attempt to placate Roman authorities. But this perception fails to take the "Christian" impulse here as one of people who are in fact Jews. So this anti-Judaism is evidence not of Jew hatred but of the sectarian conflict
among
Jews. Yes, there may have been an element of attempted ingratiation with Romans, but Jewishness was not the point of distinction in that attempt.
⁵⁵
As early as 64
C.E.,
well before the Gospels were composed, the emperor Nero had singled out the Jewish sect that claimed Jesus as its
Christus,
blaming them for the fire that had just then ravaged Rome.
⁵⁶
Tacitus writes of the violence that Nero inflicted on them,
⁵⁷
which is the first recorded mention of the movement. The Christian Jews were labeled as arsonists. They were crucified, burned, and driven out. One of them would flee from Rome to the Aegean island of Patmos to compose the fire-ridden Apocalypse, which labels Rome the beast.
⁵⁸
The Christian Jews were punished not for what they believed or refused to believe, or for any political threat they posed, but because, as a readily identifiable and vulnerable group, consisting in all likelihood mainly of slaves and lower-class workers with whom other Jews seemed not to identify, they were useful to Nero in providing the angry citizens of Rome with another target for their hatred besides him.

A. N. Wilson makes the point that Nero's savage scapegoating of the Christian Jews was for them an organizational boon, giving the until then inconsequential movement a reputation in the empire and numerous martyrs around whom to rally.
⁵⁹
Two of these, apparently, were Peter and Paul. Long-run organizational boon or not, in the short run Nero's persecution traumatized the Christian Jews, who knew they had been falsely punished. They knew themselves not to be the violent threat to Roman order that Nero accused them of being. If the Gospels, just then starting to jell in their final forms, emphasized a relative friendliness to Rome, there was a reason for it. The followers of Jesus had just been slandered, defined not merely as Rome's mortal enemy but as violent insurrectionists. It was not true, and the Gospels were slanted, in effect, to emphasize that followers of Jesus fully intended to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's. Sectarian tensions between Christians and what Wilson calls the "generality" of Jews may have been exacerbated by the narrow scapegoating, but again, those tensions were multilayered, still decidedly intra-Jewish. But soon enough, after the Gospels had jelled, Rome's murderous assault on the Jews of Judea would make Nero's violence seem benign, and explode the boundaries against which Christian-Jewish stresses had begun to press. The trauma of bloodshed on an imperial scale, unprecedented for the Jews, is the necessary context for understanding what was happening in those years among the Jews. Christian anti-Judaism, in others words, is not the first cause here; the Roman war against Judaism is.