Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ history made them necessary—of Rabbinic Judaism and the Jesus movement.

      The conflict with Rome became lethal when the strength of such belief confronted the strength of the empire’s determination to squelch it. An entire people unyielding in resistance could face only elimination. And it nearly came, beginning with the prelude to Rome’s Bellum Judaicum, a century before its actual start. In 65 B.C.E., two generations before the birth of Jesus, the legions, commanded by the Roman general Pompey—Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus—first swept into Palestine from Syria. Pompey, popularly known as “the vulture,” had brought Rome’s fist down on peoples from Hispania to the Caucasus, and now his armies were solidifying the empire’s southeastern frontier. For most of a thousand years, Israelites had been at home in the crossroads region between Syria and Egypt, centered on David’s city, Jerusalem. Though various powers had vanquished them and occupied their territory, they had survived as steady claimants of Palestine through accommodation (to a point), loose alliances, and periodic rebellions. But with Rome solidifying the borders of its sway, Eretz Yisrael’s turn under a new imperial wheel had come—this time with an unprecedented totality. Sixty years before the birth of Jesus, and a century before the official Jewish War, the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem. For three months, the Jews of the holy city held out, but then it was over. “Of the Jews,” writes Josephus about this first contest, “there fell twelve thousand, but of the Romans very few.”⁵ That was the beginning.

      In subsequent decades, sporadic rebellions broke out against local Roman authorities and their client-rulers. For example, around the time of the birth of Jesus, in the power vacuum left by the death of Rome’s puppet king Herod the Great, Jews rose up, first in Galilee, then in Jerusalem. The Romans promptly slammed down, burning towns and villages in the environs of Nazareth, then killing and enslaving many in Jerusalem. Josephus says that in Jerusalem alone on this occasion, two thousand Jews were crucified.⁶ The Jews again submitted, but restlessly. They were waiting for openings, and for God’s deliverance.

      That tension surely shot through the life of Jesus: he almost certainly would have grown up hearing stories of the local Roman rampages in his neighborhood at the time of his birth. Events then would have slid, as he came of age, into the all-defining myth of Roman violence, which showed up eventually in the Gospel story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.⁷ Jesus’ life span was bracketed, that is, by savage Roman violence against unyielding Jewish troublemakers—of whom, finally, he would be only one.

      It was in train with this century-long experience of forced occupation⁸ that the climactic Jewish rebellion—the Great Revolt—came in 66 C.E., more than three decades after the death of Jesus. Such was the heat of smoldering resentment that a local dispute over defilement of a Jewish holy place in Caesarea, a Palestinian seaport city with a sizable population of Greeks and Hellenized Jews, escalated into a Judea-wide rebellion. In Jerusalem, Jews associated with the priestly caste attacked the Roman garrison and took control of the entire inner-city plateau on which the Temple stood. As word spread of this audacious action, Jews from all over Judea and Galilee rushed to Jerusalem to join in its defense, an onslaught sufficient to drive out the puppet ruler Agrippa II. The Roman historian Tacitus puts the number of these Jewish defenders of Jerusalem at 600,000; Josephus posited one million.⁹ The Roman legions regrouped, were reinforced, and were put under the command of Vespasian, conqueror of Britain. He invaded Galilee, systematically dismantled rebel defenses, destroyed towns, burned crops, and set his soldiers loose on women. Gradually, the Romans made their way to Jerusalem.

      The suicide of Nero¹⁰ in 68 sparked a brief civil war in Rome. Vespasian returned from Judea to Italy and joined the succession fight, quickly emerging as the new emperor. His son Titus took over as the head of the legions in Judea. They laid siege to Jerusalem, cutting it off from resupply and reinforcement. In the beleaguered city, the Jewish rebels fell to attacking one another, with so-called Zealots executing any Jew who advocated surrender. One should note here, and later, that the term “zealot” is not just a generic synonym for die-hard enthusiasts. Zealots in first-century Palestine were religiously motivated political partisans (or politically driven religious sectarians) who included, for example, the Sicarii, killer squads whose name meant “knife wielder.” Zealots were like the Taliban, or even perhaps Al Qaeda.¹¹

      While the Romans patiently built ramparts for an eventual assault on the city walls, the Jerusalem defenders ran so low on food that many starved, and others began to flee. Those caught by the Romans were promptly and prominently crucified, so that the Jews could see—and, as the corpses rotted, smell—whom they were dealing with. The siege lasted most of a year, during which something like ten thousand crosses sprouted in a ring around the inner city, each with its stinking cadaver.

      In May of 70, the Romans succeeded in breaching the city wall. The Zealots concentrated their forces in the Temple itself, where they made a last stand, holding out for more than two months. At the end of July, the Romans took the Temple, killed its last defenders, looted its treasury, and set it afire. Those Jews not killed were enslaved. On the Hebrew calendar, it was the ninth day of the month of Av, a date memorialized in a Jewish liturgy of mourning to this day.

      Jewish resistance continued in the hills of Judea and in the Jordan Valley, high above which stood a butte—Masada—which served as the last Jewish stronghold. It took the Romans nearly three years to finish off the die-hard rebels. When the Romans finally stormed Masada, Josephus reports, they found that of the 967 resisters, 960 had killed themselves. In all, the Jewish dead in the Great Revolt numbered, according to Josephus, 1.1 million.¹²

      As the Roman Empire expanded its control to the east across Asia Minor and west along the north coast of Africa, Jewish communities in various cities were loath to surrender their religious and cultural prerogatives. In the Diaspora, too, the integrity of worship of the one God, Yahweh, was at stake. It was inevitable that such smoldering religious steadfastness would become inflamed, and in the year 115, four decades after the Great Revolt, it did. The restiveness of Jews in the coastal city of Cyrene, in present-day Libya, flashed into open rebellion against newly re-established Roman authorities. The uprising was quickly imitated by Jews in various other Mediterranean cities—in Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq. This was expressly Jewish resistance, beyond the far briefer and less potent reactions of other peoples laid low by Roman expansion.

      Soon enough, Jews in Judea joined in the assaults, making this the second large revolt in half a century. Once again, Rome reacted with crushing power. In this conflict, the Roman general Lusius Quietus led the campaigns; one of his deputies was a fierce military leader named Hadrian. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, with Jewish communities in Cyprus and Libya entirely wiped out. The violence finally ended in 117. This Mediterranean-wide sequence of Jewish uprisings is known as the Kitos War, from a corruption of the name of the Roman commander, Quietus. In Hebrew, though, the wars are known as the Rebellion of the Exile.

      For the following decade or so, Jews bided their time, nurturing their faith-supported conviction that a Messiah would yet deliver them from Roman rule—and quietly preparing for the next conflict.¹³ Rome, meanwhile, was beset by perennial intrigues of imperial succession. After the death of the emperor Trajan, Hadrian outmaneuvered Quietus, his former commander, to become emperor. He began a new campaign of solidifying the far-flung boundaries of Roman control. He built, for example, what we call Hadrian’s Wall, which still stands in Britain. His visit to Judea in 130 occasioned his order to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem and restore the city that still bore the scars of the Great Revolt in 70. But he gave Jerusalem a new name, Aelia Capitolina, and declared that the new temple would be dedicated to Jupiter. When Jews protested, Hadrian resolved to eliminate the unyielding people once and for all. He cut to the quick of Jewish identity by outlawing circumcision, making yet another Jewish revolt inevitable.¹⁴

      In 132, it came. A Jewish force led by a Galilean named Simon Bar Kosiba surprised the Roman garrisons in the countryside, and then quickly wrested control of Jerusalem from the unprepared occupiers. Kosiba СКАЧАТЬ