Part 2 of 2
Most felt powerless to deal with the problem in their midst; thus, solutions ranged from random assassinations carried out against apostate Jews, spies, and Jewish civil servants on the Roman payroll ("publicans") to capitulation, in the case of the Herodian party. The apocalyptic preachers such as John tended to see Jewish history as a story of irreversible decline, at the end of which God would come (or send his delegate, the Son of Man) to judge the gentiles and the unrepentant for their sins. John the Baptist belonged to this tradition. Alongside this solution, however, stood the "preferred" belief that God had not deserted his people and did not intend to settle accounts on a supernatural level. Instead, he would send a mashiah, a leader like David, a prophet like Moses -- a kingly deliverer who would redeem the nation from its enemies, restore the kingdom, regather the ancient tribes -- or such remnants as had remained faithful, wherever they might be -- and rule in peace and justice, like Augustus.
Taken literally, the two beliefs seem incompatible: would God save his people by destroying the world, or save the world by delivering his people? But messianic belief and apocalyptic belief were seldom distinctly separated in the popular mind. Many Jews believed in both divine judgment and messianic deliverance, and invented an ingenious literature to bring the two beliefs into conjunction. The remnants of this effort can be seen as early as the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, but include apocryphal sources like First Enoch, 4 Esdras, as well as the canonical Christian gospels, which belong in part to the literary world of apocalyptic thought (cf. Mark 13; Matt. 25.31-46).
JESUSThe pessimism of previous decades concerning what Jesus of Nazareth might have taught has now largely been set aside by developments in our understanding of the social and religious matrix of first-century Palestine. After John clashed with the Herodian party (Matt. 14.1-12), he was imprisoned in the fortress of Machereus by the Dead Sea (Josephus, Antiquities 18.2), and subsequently beheaded. Some of his followers continued to plague the Herodians with their purist interpretations of Judaism (Matt. 9.14) and their insistence on a baptism of "renunciation" or repentance (John 3.22). After his beheading, there was a rumor that John had risen from the dead (Mark 6.16). Some of his followers declared John the messiah and continued to follow a more or less rigorist interpretation of his teaching (Matt. 9.11f.). A slightly more liberal element, though one equally imbued with the spirit of apocalyptic enthusiasm, followed Jesus of Nazareth who declared himself, or was declared (John 1.37), the Baptist's successor. Jesus modified John's ethnocentric message of repentance and judgment (Luke 3.7-9) while building on his radical interpretation of the law (Matt. 5.17-20) and attacks on the Pharisees and (perhaps also) the Herodians (Matt. 22.16; Mark 12.13; 3.6). With the death of Jesus, the cult blended the strands of apocalyptic and messianic thinking to a degree then unparalleled in first-century Judaism. The crucified and defeated messiah would come again as deliverer and judge -- the victorious son of man.
Apparently Jesus declared the Pharisees beyond the scope of salvation for their interpretations of the law (Matt. 5.20), which tended to focus on technical requirements rather than personal conversion. The triumph of rabbinical Judaism after the destruction of the temple and the obliteration of the priesthood in 70 C.E. (which was a triumph for legal interpretation in the pharisaic style) marginalized Jesus' apocalyptic teaching to such an extent that early preachers like Paul had little option but to declare the law "fulfilled" in Jesus, a view then read back into the preaching of Jesus himself (Matt. 5.17-18).
Around the time of John's arrest it would seem that a dispute ensued about the meaning of baptism, John's followers declaring that those who wished to escape divine retribution should be washed as a token of their repentance. Jesus' followers, meanwhile, claimed that the baptism was a "spiritual" preparation for the dawning of God's kingdom -- a spiritual rebirth (John 3.8). Jesus' message of apocalyptic judgment was, at the outset, no different from John's (Mark 1.14). His early followers were disposed to look upon him as being -- in some sense -- the fulfillment of John's gospel of repentance, and only with difficulty were they able to separate his message from that of their original prophet. By the time Jesus removed himself from Galilee, having run afoul of popular feeling there (Mark 6.5), his followers had begun to think of him as a prophet in his own right, associating his rejection and defeat with the unwillingness of Israel to listen to the prophets who had come before (Mark 8.28).
The New Testament tradition also preserves the belief that Jesus was the messiah or christos, i.e., the anointed one of God who would restore the kingdom of Israel and defeat the enemies of God. Jesus' followers evidently included, besides the legendary twelve members of both theological and political camps, those who saw him as the prefigurement of an apocalyptic judge and those who saw him as a political savior. It may have included members of the Zealot party and members of the Sicarii, the assassins, if the names Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot are of historical significance.
The two competing but often indistinguishable traditions -- messianic and apocalyptic -- in popular Judaism merged into a single grand scheme in the gospels. Jesus was viewed as both son of man and messiah, the lord (king) Christ and savior; the son of God and prophet like Moses; the son of David, who would come again in glory to redeem the nation. In the Hellenistic preaching of the gospel, however, these "titles" were quickly decontextualized and subsumed within the widespread belief that Jesus was a savior god on the order of Asklepios and Mithras, despite the efforts of the preachers to keep this belief under control (Phil. 2.5-11).
This speculation took place against the background of rabbinical Judaism and an emasculated priesthood, not to mention a puppet Herodian dynasty that had to bear the insult of having a Roman governor deciding cases which, in better days, would have been decided directly by Jewish authorities.
The tradition that Jesus was betrayed by Jews in his own party and crucified by the Romans as part of a conspiracy is not fashionable. It remains, however, the most plausible explanation of the events leading to his death and is fully supported by the evidence of the gospels and non-Christian sources. According to the gospel tradition (Mark 14.50), not only Judas and Peter but the whole band of disciples deserted Jesus at the time of his arrest. Later attempts to rehabilitate the apostles through a post-resurrection "enlightenment" and the descent of the spirit on the feast of Pentecost bear the traces of second-century legend (d. Acts 2.3): Its function was to ensure that the deserters become official witnesses and teachers of a new messianic faith through the divine charisma, the gift of the "holy spirit."
The facts are probably more mundane. Jesus ran afoul of the Pharisees for his style of legal interpretation; of the Sadducees for his (apparent) contempt for the temple cult and perhaps also because of his origins; and of his own followers, or the bandits and zealots among them, for failing to liberate the Jewish nation from the yoke of foreign domination (cf. Luke 24.21). This is three-pronged Jewish opposition which could be resolved only through assassination or judicial despatch. While scholars clash on this point, the judicial process involved seems to have belonged to the Romans, since a sentence of death was officially requested by the Jewish opponents. By the same token, the mob scenes (d. Matt. 27.24-26) with the "Jews" begging Pilate for crucifixion and Pilate washing his hands of an innocent man's blood "in full view of the people," are self-serving fictions designed, insofar as possible, to remove the burden of guilt from the Roman protectors, upon whose unpredictable good will the Christian missionaries depended for the continuation of their mission. The crucifixion of Jesus from the standpoint of both sides was not an injustice but an agreement to remove a difficult character from public view. There was nothing complicated about such an arrangement.
Whether Jesus preached against the paying of taxes to the Romans or offended the priests with his not-so-veiled threat against the temple cult (Mark 11.17f.) cannot be decided. The actions of Pilate in "handing Jesus over" are in general alignment with the picture of the governor painted by Josephus. Pilate would not have been interested in the "theological" correctness of Jesus' position, but he would have gone out of his way to prevent an uprising instigated by an alliance of Pharisees, Sadducees, and disappointed Zealots.
What seems to have regathered Jesus' followers out of their retreat in Galilee was the "news" of his resurrection, a tale parallel to that originally circulated about John the Baptist. Jewish polemic immediately countered (Matt. 28.14-15) that Jesus' disciples had stolen his body. By this time, however, conflicting tales of Jesus' appearances -- to disciples in Galilee, to pilgrims along the road, to Mary of Magdala outside the tomb, to crowds in and around Jerusalem -- had begun to circulate wildly and continued for years after his death (1 Cor. 15.3-7). Jesus' last "public" appearance prior to his arrest, a Sabbath and possibly a Passover meal with his followers, became saturated with reminiscence and remembered promises: he had said he would die; he had predicted that he would rise; he had told his disciples that he would be away for a little while but had said he would come again. Slowly his life story began to take shape against the promises of apocalyptic fulfillment and the Jewish doctrine of the Son of Man. Past disappointment gave way to the hope of Jesus' quick return, a hope enhanced by a growing conviction that God had raised him from the dead because he was God's own son, the chosen one of Israel (Acts 2.22-36).
The New Testament presents this evidence in the context of a "salvation history" whereby prophecies after the fact are given as foreshadowings of a divine plan (e.g., Ps. 16.8-11). From the standpoint of a social and cultural history of the movement, however, there is little doubt that the attractive thing about Jesus of Nazareth was not his bizarre apocalyptic predictions, which after a while had been softened to the point of melting. It was rather the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead and the good news that the same fate awaited those who believed that he saved them from "sin and death," which had acquired a cause/effect relationship in early Christian preaching (1 Cor. 15.12-19). It was this message, enhanced by the teaching of the Greek salvation cults and augmented increasingly by "sayings" attributed to Jesus and "signs" he had performed as enticements to belief in him, that formed the nucleus of the gospel tradition.
NOTICES AND CRITIQUES OF THE NEW FAITHThe criticism of the resurrection faith was almost immediate, beginning with Jewish accusations that the followers of Jesus had fabricated the story of his resurrection (Matt. 27.15; 1 Cor. 15.14). This accusation passed quickly from rabbinical discussion to gentile ears and pivoted on two contingent pieces of information: first, no one -- not even Jesus' followers -- had witnessed the resurrection. Early on the Christians were hard pressed to deny this fact, and the earliest of the gospel reports, that of Mark, exhausts the primitive tradition by declaring that a group of women, finding empty the place where Jesus' body had been laid, ran away in terror to report the news to his confused (male) disciples in Galilee, where they had fled to avoid arrest.
No effort was made to alter this tradition, apparently, until Jewish speculation concerning the whereabouts of the body made it necessary to offer proof that the body of Jesus had been raised, not stolen and buried privately. The appearance stories grew in number and variety, careless of detail and geographical consistency. Paul knew a tradition current in the 50s and probably before, that Jesus had appeared to Peter (Cephas), the twelve (the number would have to include Judas), five hundred others, followed by James and finally to Paul (1 Cor. 15.4-7). What Paul does with exaggerated numbers Matthew does with literary hyperbole: Guards were posted by the Jews, with Pilate's approval; the tomb was sealed (Matt. 28.66). At daybreak on the Sabbath, however, an earthquake announced the descent of an angel, who broke the seal, opened the tomb, sat on the stone and declared Christ risen to the visitants, while the guards "shook with fear and lay like dead men" (Matt. 28.4).
The Gospel of John adds a male witness at the foot of the cross ("the beloved disciple") and makes this disciple race a disbelieving Peter to the tomb, to find neither Jesus nor an angel (John 20.2-9). The tales of Jesus' appearances following the resurrection -- the most famous of which involves an apostle named Thomas or "the Twin" inserting his fingers into the wounds of the risen Lord -- were similarly devised to "prove" the resurrection to nay-sayers of assorted varieties.
THE MESSIANIC PROBLEMThe second level of criticism of the resurrection faith was more parochial, at least from the standpoint of Roman perceptions of the affair. While gentiles were free to believe or disbelieve the preaching of the resurrection, they were less familiar with the hopes for the messiah and the disputes between Jews and Christians that surrounded it. Put bluntly, Jesus lacked the curriculum vitae of a messiah. He was from a region known as the Galil'ha goyim (i.e., Galilee) whose reputation for religious and ethnic mixing -- apostasy in the minds of some Jerusalemites -- was well established (cf. John 1.46). Jewish tradition and later pagan critics knew Jesus as the son of a woman named Miriam or Miriamne, who had been violated and become pregnant by a Roman soldier whose name often appears as Panthera in talmudic and midrashic sources. The "single parent" tradition, if not the story of Jesus' illegitimacy, is still apparent in Mark, the earliest gospel (Mark 6.3), as is an early attempt to show Jesus' freedom from the blemish of his background (Mark 3.33-4).
Late first- or early second-century tradition, however, took the same aggressive stance against Jewish reports concerning Jesus' birth and lineage as it did against the attacks on the resurrection. Editors of Matthew and Luke contrived genealogies designed to show that Jesus was descended from the requisite messianic stock, a true son of David. According to these improvised traditions, he had been born in Bethlehem -- a place named by the prophets as the provenance of the future king and deliverer (Mic. 5.2). To counter the reports of Jesus' illegitimacy more than to secure his divine stature, his mother was declared the recipient of a singular divine honor: Jesus was the son of Mary -- a virgin -- "through the holy spirit" (Matt. 1.20). As is typical of his writing, Matthew comes closest to revealing the argumentative purpose of his birth story and its links to Jewish polemic against Christian belief in his reference to Joseph's suspicion of Mary's pregnancy (Matt. 1.19). He is also careful in the birth story and elsewhere to provide evidence and proofs from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew bible -- as a running part of his narrative. Almost certainly, the texts Matthew uses, such as Isa. 7.14 ("A virgin [parthenos in Greek, although the original Hebrew means simply "girl"] shall conceive and bear a son ... ") were already favorite talking points in debates between Christian preachers and the rabbis.
Attached to the question of messianic credentials, which loomed large in early Jewish-Christian debate, was the related question of Jesus' fate or, more exactly, the fate of the messiah. One might be able to finesse if not erase a man's origins among the second-class Jews of Galilee; indeed, for some antagonists of the new cult, being from Galilee was slander enough, tantamount to being a bastard ("the son of a carpenter," Mark 6.3). That Jewish polemic is any more "factual" in this respect than Christian attempts to evade the slander is doubtful.
But the crucifixion of Jesus was a public event. That Jesus was executed is agreed upon by Jewish and Christian traditions, and more significantly perhaps by such "outsiders" as Josephus and Tacitus. Traditions preserved in the non-Christian sources differed, however. According to Tacitus, writing around 115 C.E., Jesus was "executed in Tiberius' reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate" (Annals 15.43). But in talmudic literature we find the following: "This they did to Jeshu ben Stada (Jesus] in Lud: two disciples of the wise were chosen for him, and they brought him to the Beth Din [place of judgment] and stoned him" (T.Sanh. X.ll and J. Sanh. 7.16/25c,d). In the Jewish tradition, which, measured against the chronology of the gospels and pagan sources, is full of anachronisms, the charges against Jesus were sorcery, the preaching of heresy, and leading the "whole world astray" (cf. Luke 23.2f.).
The Jewish tradition is driven by the conviction that Jesus had not been the messiah -- a question of little relevance to writers like Tacitus. His judicial killing according to the penalty described for a heretic and magician (b. Sanh. 43a) served as a proof that he had not been God's anointed, the deliverer of his people. A Roman execution would, according to the law, have left the matter undecided; hence, in the Jewish polemical tradition Jesus was stoned and thereby proved to be a false messiah bent on leading his people into the worship of false gods. He is equated elsewhere with Ahab, Jeroboam and Manesseh -- the kings who presided over the apostasy of Israel and Judah.
More difficult to explain, from the Christian side, was the death of their messiah in humiliating circumstances, deserted by his closest followers. There were very few, if any, references to a Christ who would fail spectacularly to achieve the this-worldly hopes of the nation. Indeed the term was used specifically to denote kingly heroism, military prowess and success, as its application to the Persian king Cyrus (Isa. 45.1) suggests. The term presupposed not only ancient Davidic lineage (Mic. 5.2-5) but also one who would restore and uphold the kingdom of David forever (Isa. 9.6-7). Jewish polemic was severe on this point: Jesus had failed, as had Theudas, a magician named by Josephus (Antiquities 20.5.1) as having attracted a following (beheaded ca. 44 during the procuratorship of Fadus), and Judas, another Galilean "messiah" mentioned by Josephus (Antiquities 18.1.1; cf. Acts 5.36f.) as having raised an insurrection over the enrollment ca. 4 B.C.E. Between the time of Theudas and the bar Kochba rebellion of 132 C.E. Judaism had grown suspicious of pretenders to the messianic title. Insofar as any claim of the sort was made on Jesus' behalf during his lifetime, the Jews of the city would have been suspicious of the "Galileans" as well (Acts 5.27-40).
FROM THE TEMPLE TO BAR KOCHBAThe messianic movement associated with bar Kochba in the second century, though later in point of origin than Christianity, provides the most edifying parallel to the Christian movement. The Hellenistic cities created by the Herods had become hotbeds of Jewish and Greek tension. Anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out repeatedly in Caesarea and reached such intensity that the Jewish inhabitants of the city were reduced to paying protection money to the Romans. When the Romans failed to respond effectively to put down the riots, scattered resistance to their misrule and partisan support for the Hellenists turned into armed rebellion. In Jerusalem the temple area was seized by the Zealot leader John of Gischala, the rest of Jerusalem by Simon bar Giora. After a series of shows of force, the Romans under Titus broke through the city walls on three sides, set fire to the temple, and managed to wrest from the holy of holies its seven-branched candlestick and the table of the unleavened bread, which were taken as trophies back to Rome along with the rebel leaders. The destruction of the temple meant the end of the Sadducean party. The Pharisees concentrated their energies on the developing synagogue movement, since with the burning of the temple the sacrificial cult had come to an end. The synagogues were under the protection of the civil authorities, and were left alone to develop a new and distinctive style of Judaism so long as they did not become centers for political discussion, and dutifully paid to Rome the tax which previously had been collected from Jews for the maintenance of the temple.
On a routine tour of the eastern province of Palestine in 130, the emperor Hadrian decreed that a temple to the Roman god Jupiter should be built on the site of Herod's ruined temple. In an unrelated edict, Hadrian ordered a stop to the practice of ritual castration, a ban which was understood to include the rite of circumcision. A rebellion against the decrees, led by a certain Simon bar Kochba (or bar Cosiba) succeeded in regaining Judah and Jerusalem. Sacrifices were offered on the temple site and coins were minted as a sign of "independence" from Rome, using the first year of the rebellion as beginning of the new era. Rabbi Akiba, one of the foremost biblical interpreters of the day, declared bar Kochba the promised messiah, the "son of the daystar" spoken of in Num. 24.17. Since the Jewish Christians in Palestine could not accept bar Kochba's messianic claims, they were pursued and bloodily persecuted if they refused to renounce Jesus as the messiah (Justin, Apology 1.31).
The Romans closed in slowly, forced to find the rebels in their hiding places. Bar Kochba entrenched himself in Beth-Ter in Judah, surrounded by his closest followers, but the Romans had little difficulty in breaching his defenses. His slaying by the Romans was seen as a compelling disproof of his messiahship, and rabbinical Judaism seldom referred to him thereafter by name. The rabbis who had sided with bar Kochba were executed; Akiba himself is said to have had his flesh raked with iron combs before being put to death. On the ruins of Jerusalem, Hadrian's "model city," Colonia Aelia Capitolina, was erected. A temple dedicated to Jupiter was constructed, and Jews were forbidden to enter the city.
CHRISTS AND CHRISTIC TITLESThe oblivion that encircled "false" messiahs from Theudas to bar Kochba did not touch Jesus of Nazareth. Three strands of argument and belief were woven together to prevent him from falling into obscurity. These can be summarized as (1) the belief in the resurrection. (2) the Christian use and interpretation of prophecy, and (3) Christological complexity of the movement's understanding of Jesus' person and work. These cannot be dealt with in detail here, but any understanding of the strokes and angles of later criticism of Christian doctrine and practice depends on knowing that from its earliest days, the church was an "apologetic" structure. This means simply that doctrines which are usually thought to be the defining ones of Christianity developed in an environment hostile to Jesus' messianic claims, beginning with the view that he lacked the Davidic credentials to fulfill the role, and ending with the view that his death was -- like bar Kochba's -- sufficient disproof of his followers' preaching. The pagan critics later embraced this fundamentally Jewish view enthusiastically.
The Christian missionary preaching of the mid-to-late first century C.E. was summarized by Paul's assurances that "Jesus, the messiah, is Lord" (Phil. 2.11). The proof of this was his resurrection, the overcoming of death, which, in line with Jewish atonement theology, was also seen as a conquest of sin by the incarnation of innocence or righteousness in the person of Jesus himself. He was the perfectly righteous victim, the spotless lamb of God, who took the sins of the world onto himself. Thus his death was the "climax" of the temple cult (on the verge of collapse when this theology developed). He could be called "high priest" and, with tortured logic, the "sacrificial victim" -- a "spiritual and eternal sacrifice" (Heb. 9.14) whose blood washed away corruption.
The death of Jesus could be frankly acknowledged, therefore, as a "moment" in a process, at the end of which stood the negation of death (1 Cor. 15.20-1). In this way, the historical data -- the failure of the messianic mission in this worldly terms -- were overturned by the belief that only one part of the mission had been fulfilled. The momentous events, beginning with a resurrection known only to his closest followers, was still to come and would be made known to all only in the "last days" (cf. Mark 13. 26-7). By then, however, it would be too late for the enemies of the gospel to repent and to accept Jesus as Lord, a calculation which introduced the element of threat into the call for conversion. Who Jesus had been would be made known unmistakably in the future -- a future calculated by using the standard symbols of Jewish apocalyptic thought. This amalgamation may have been more a confusion of images than a studied blueprint for converting masses to the new faith, but all the religions of the empire, from Judaism to the gnostic schools and mystery cults, were amalgamations of some sort.
In an obvious way, this stratum of messianic "proof" was untestable. No one could say precisely when the effects of the resurrection would be made known unmistakably or when Jesus would be revealed from heaven as the true savior of the nation and the world. Even the gospels and letters of Paul were remarkably indefinite about the timing of these events (cf. Mark 9.1; 13. 31-32; 1 Thess. 5.2f.). The hope of the small community, of course, was that the proof would come "soon" (1 Cor. 16.22), especially as expulsions from the synagogues of the empire exposed clutches of Christians to the discipline of Roman judges and to the contempt of the intellectual classes.
A related and more testable assertion was the claim that the death of the messiah had been prophesied and that, therefore, the death of Jesus conformed to Jewish messianic expectation. The resurrection would have been -- in terms of messianic claims, anyway -- an unnecessary addition to the Christian armory of proofs and cases if the tradition of a dying messiah could be maintained. Attention fell on the book of Isaiah as a storehouse of rabbinical speculation concerning the messiah. Isa. 53 (52.13-53.12), commonly known today as "the fourth servant song," speaks of a nation despised, tormented by its enemies, pierced, chastised, and tortured by God for the unfaithfulness of the people. The nation is Israel, personified as a suffering servant who is buried among the wicked but who will one day be restored (healed) by God and vindicated for having made itself a sacrifice for sin. In Christian interpretation, the story of Israel was dislocated from its historical context and applied to the life history of Jesus. The servant was Jesus not Israel; the restoration referred not to the political welfare of the nation but to the resurrection and reappearance of the Christ. The crucifixion narratives were actually constructed with the text of Isa. 53, Ps. 22, and perhaps the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon 2.10-24 in hand as "proof texts" in support of the claim that the messiah was ordained to die an ugly and seemingly meaningless death -- from which he would be rescued as a sign that he had redeemed others.
These texts would have been compelling had the Jews recognized them as "messianic" and if the idea of a dying and rising messiah had occurred in first-century Judaism. During the reign of Hadrian, it is true, certain rabbis seem to have read Deut. 33.16 (Moses' blessing of Joseph) as having to do with a kind of "proto-messiah" who would die in a victorious encounter with Gog and Magog (the powers of evil) after a glorious career. There was no notion that this figure would suffer, nor that his death would have a redemptive significance. By the same token, Isa. 53 was not taken by the Jews of Jesus' generation to refer to the messiah or to announce his coming. In his "Dialogue with Trypho," written toward the end of the second century, Justin Martyr strives to persuade his Jewish opponent that the death of Christ was foretold in prophecy. Trypho -- Justin's invention and his ideally agreeable opponent -- acknowledges the "truth" of most of what Justin has to say, with one exception: "Whether the messiah should be shamefully crucified, this we are in doubt about; for whoever is crucified is said to be accursed by the law. I am exceedingly incredulous on this point" (Dialogue with Trypho 89). Justin proceeds to put together a tangle of texts, including a reflection on Deut. 33.13-17, which may have influenced rabbinical thinking on the point. But it was only in conversation with Christian teachers that some texts acquired a messianic gloss. At the time the gospels were composed, the death of the messiah caused confusion (Mark 8.32; Matt. 16.22) and could only be substantiated on the testimony of the risen Jesus (Luke 24.46) or attributed to a deliberate design of God (Acts 2.23f; Eph. 3.9-13). An early Christian sermon defended the death of the Christ as the amortization of the devil's lease on the world, the canceling of a debt owed by God to Evil: "[God] has forgiven us of all our sins; he has canceled the bond which pledged us to the terms of the law. It stood against us but he has set it aside, nailing it to the cross. On that cross he discarded the cosmic powers [of wickedness] and authorities like a garment; he made a public spectacle of them and led them as captives in his triumphal procession" (Col. 2.14-15). Thus, from the end of the first century onward, the preaching strategy diverted attention from the visible proofs and signs of messiahship to the "unseen" and hence untestable assertion of what his death accomplished on a cosmic scale. It was Jesus' death, interpreted messianically, rather than his life that saved him from obscurity.
A final stratum of defense, which grew naturally out of the diffuseness of early Christian preaching, was the use of multiple titles to refer to Jesus. While the risen Jesus of Luke 24 can declare with authority that the "Messiah is to suffer death and rise from the dead," the earliest recorded "prophecies" of the death of Jesus prior to the crucifixion referred to the death of the "son of Man" (Mark 8.31; 9.13; 10. 34). Traditionally commentary on these passages has focused on the fact that Jesus speaks on these three occasions not of his own ("I must be betrayed and killed") but of the son of man's betrayal and death. In fact, the use of the apocalyptic title -- "son of man" instead of messiah -- may well have grown out of the need to divert attention from the latter usage.
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The political overtones of the messianic claim were so pronounced and the expectations attached to the feats of the messiah so numerous that the gospel of John, in a famous interrogation scene, actually presents Jesus repudiating messiahship: "My kingship is not of this world. If it were, my followers would be fighting to save me from the Jews .... 'King' is your word, my task is to bear witness to the truth" (John 16-7). Growing originally out of differing political and theological viewpoints, the son of man and the messiah became in Christianity a single figure: that of the risen and exalted Christ "who would come again." Titles such as "son of God" or "a son of God," "Lord," "son of David," "prophet [like Moses]" (Acts 3.22) and "servant of God" (after Isa. 53), despite their technical differences, were brought together instinctively in the preaching of the early missionaries. The titles represented at one level a multiple-choice approach to the divinity of Jesus: Jews and Greeks heard different things when confronted with phrases such as "son of God." But at a strategic level the titles could be used in debate as ways of qualifying what was meant, or what was implied, in the eccentric Christian understanding of who the messiah was, what was expected of him, and how his death should be interpreted. While there was nothing deliberate about the logic of this development, the result might be summarized as follows:
• Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the son of God
• who was also the son of man and thus God's preappointed representative on the day of Judgment;
• who would be revealed in glory on the last day, but whose glory had been hidden during his earthly ministry;
• and who had died in "accordance with scripture" (i.e., prophetic texts) as an atoning sacrifice for the sins -- not only of the Jewish people but of the world;
• and who, as the risen Christ, offered the gift of salvation (from sin) and eternal life (its reward) to everyone who believed in him.
Against the view that Jesus failed to conform to Jewish requirements for a messiah the Christian preachers could offer only vague scriptural retorts. An example survives from the late first or early second century in a speech attributed to Peter, and reportedly given in the Court of the Gentiles (the east colonnade of the temple) to a Jewish audience (Acts 3.17-24):
[Men of Israel] This is how God has fulfilled what he had foretold in the utterances of all the prophets: that his messiah should suffer .... Repent so that your sins may be wiped out. Then God may grant you a time of recovery and send to you the messiah he had already appointed. that is, Jesus. He must be received into heaven until the time of universal restoration comes, of which God spoke by the holy prophets.
The speech is important not because it can be plausibly ascribed to the apostle Peter (it is given a setting more appropriate to a speech delivered by a Greek rhetor on a public festival), but because it may preserve something of the argumentative thrust of actual preaching by early Jewish and Samaritan missionaries.
By the early second century, the churches of Syria and Palestine had grown more confident of their use and interpretation of prophecy. For the second-century Syrian bishop Ignatius, only those prophecies which corroborated Christian doctrine were to be accounted true, since "Jesus Christ is the door through which the prophets enter the church" (Ep. to the Philadelphians 9.1). This inversion made it possible for Christians to appropriate the Old Testament as a preparation for the gospel, though pagan and Jewish observers of the new religion were unsparing in their criticism of applying prophecies, in an exclusive way, to Jesus of Nazareth. Porphyry notes that what is said in Hebrew prophecy could as well apply to a dozen other figures, dead or yet to come, as to Jesus.
JEWS AND CHRISTIANS ADRIFT: FROM NOTICE TO POLEMICBy the year 100 C.E., the religious split between Jews and Christians had been clearly defined, if not always clearly expressed, in every city or in the minds of Roman observers. Judaism was to continue as a licit religion (religio licita), approved if not encouraged by Rome. The problematical temple cult had been destroyed and, with it, the debates over the purity and descent of the priesthood which had plagued ceremonial Judaism since the Captivity. Judaism had lost its center, if not its spirit, but was as much a pilgrim religion in the Roman Empire as the foundling and illegal "congregations" of Christians.
Judaism was not inconsequential to antiquity-conscious Romans. From their standpoint, Jewish civilization, being older than their own, possessed an element of truth: "What is old is true, what is true is old" was a dictum which the Christians struggled to overcome in their efforts to persuade the Romans that their cult was not a discredited sect of Judaism (an opinion urged upon the Romans by Jewish lobbyists in their exclusion of Christian teachers from synagogues, in their ritual curse of the Nazarenes, and in slanderous propaganda such as the ben Panthera tradition). No Christian litterateur of the late first century commanded a Roman audience as extensive or influential as the Jewish historian Josephus. Indeed all the letters surviving from the earliest period of Christian history, from Paul to Clement of Rome (ca. 98), are attempts to bring the cult under control and to define the rudiments of its beliefs. It was not the kind of literature -- or message -- that could have assuaged Roman suspicions that Christianity was, above all, new, unproved, and potentially dangerous.
Josephus had fought against Vespasian toward the beginning of the Jewish war in 68. Suspected by the Jews of being a capitulator, he returned as an observer and court reporter for the final siege in 70 under the Roman commander Titus' protection. After the war, he returned to Rome and was awarded the rights of Roman citizenship for distinguished service as a translator, mediator and chronicler. In his treatise Against Apion, Josephus responds to the increasing anti-Semitism of late first-century Rome, a city that was destined to receive masses of Jewish immigrants dispossessed of their homeland between 70 and 135. Written around 94 C.E., with the Christian community itself beginning to make strides, the treatise performed the task of reminding the Romans (thinly disguised in his lecture as the "Greeks") of the antiquity of his own people. The Jews are more ancient than the Greeks, he observes. Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Babylonians all testify to his nation's history, though Greece is not mentioned and indeed is a relative latecomer in world affairs. Moreover, the laws of Moses and the ethical code of the Jews are far superior to the immoral myths of the Greeks and their inferior conceptions of the gods.
Hardly a defense used by Josephus and hardly a charge leveled against the Jews by Roman anti-Semites fails to resurface in the empire's war against the Christian church and its practices. Even Christian martyrdom, seen early on as the sublimest "proof" of the faith, is anticipated in Josephus' defense of the Law: "We have practical proof of our reverence for our own scriptures. For although long ages have now passed, no one has dared to remove or to alter a syllable: and it is an instinct with every Jew from the day of his birth to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them and, if need be, cheerfully to die for them. Time and again ere now the sight has been witnessed of prisoners enduring tortures and death in every form in the theaters rather than utter a single word against the law and the allied documents" (Contra Apionem 1.42f.). Both Josephus the Jew and Tertullian the Christian (cf. Apology 39. 40) make steadfastness and virtue their "proofs" of authenticity. What confessing Jesus as "lord" was to the Christian martyrs, adherence to Moses and the law was to the Jews.
As rabbinical Judaism and Christianity entered onto the Roman scene in harness, the one claiming legitimacy on the basis of history, the other on the basis of having fulfilled Judaism's historical purpose, there was predictable confusion and disarray of opinion. Writing around 115, Tacitus describes the beliefs and traditions of Judaism in a way that suggests the ineffectiveness of Josephus' defense: "[Jewish] customs owe their strength to their very badness.... They regard the rest of mankind with hatred and as enemies. They sit apart at meals; they sleep apart, and as a nation they are singularly prone to lust -- though they refrain from intercourse with foreign women. Among themselves nothing is unlawful. Circumcision was adopted by them as a mark of their difference from other men" (Hist. 5).
The same writer, commenting on the great fire of Rome (64 C.E.) which Nero attributed to the Christians, paints the following picture: "Nero fabricated scapegoats [for the fire] and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius' reign by the governor of Judah, Pontius Pilate. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judah but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital" (Annals 15.43).
For Tacitus, both Judaism and Christianity were "depraved" and immoderate: the charge of sexual immoderation would soon be transferred wholesale from Judaism to Christianity. Both were "degraded" and un-Roman in their exclusivism, which was tied to no national cult and was, therefore, unpatriotic from the standpoint of late Hellenistic understandings of religion as a set of beliefs that tie (ligare/religare) a nation together. It could be (and was) argued that Judaism had known a time when religion served precisely that function in subservience to the state cults of Rome. But that time had come and gone. Christianity, on the other hand, despite its protestations that it was the evolved form of Judaism, had never known the bond of religion and national identity. From the standpoint of Judaism, Christianity was minuth, apostasy. From the standpoint of Roman intellectuals, it was superstitio, religious enthusiasm, without historical credentials, or atheism because it seemed to worship "a man who has recently appeared" (thus Celsus [Contra Celsum 1.26]) as a god, without any relationship to the God worshiped by the Jews. Or (like Judaism) it was "hatred of mankind" (cf. Tertullian, Apology 37) for its refusal to do as the Romans did in matters religious.
Eventually Christianity found its counterblast in the belief that Christians were a "third race" and that the bond between particular nations and gods had been broken by the Christian doctrine of one God who watches over and deserves the allegiance of all nations (Tertullian, Apology 25). Occasionally, as from the mouths of Latin writers like Tertullian, bravado in the face of persecution could sound seditious and threatening and was regarded as such by conservative intellectuals such as Celsus: "On valid grounds," writes Tertullian, "I might say that Caesar is more ours than yours, for our God has appointed him .... [Yet] let it suffice him to bear the name of emperor. That, too, is a great name of God's giving. To call him a god is to rob him of his title. If he is not a man, emperor he cannot be" (Apology 33).
THE ERA OF ANTI-CHRISTIAN FEELINGIt is difficult to say when Christians were singled out for special opprobrium by the Romans. Anti-Semitism had been centuries in the making and had passed as an inherited set of attitudes to the Romans from the common lore of the Hellenistic world. The Jews were "difficult, stiffnecked, religiously uncompromising." Yet their laws were acknowledged to be old, if eccentric, and their historical scholarship impressive.
On the other hand, Christianity's claim to have "completed" the law, while not an outright rejection of Judaism's claim to antiquity, was at least a rejection of antiquity's ability to serve as a means of testing the truth of a religious system. Furthermore, the apocalyptic vision of history prevented Christians from engaging in serious reflection on their historical situation: they stood "at the end of time" with their eyes turned heavenward for the coming of their savior. Only as this vision waned did they develop a historical "consciousness" of the world and their chronological location within it.
The attack on Christian belief in the resurrection and on the messianic teaching of the Christians, which included their interpretation of prophecy, had originated in the synagogue (cf. 2 Cor. 11.22-25). When Christian hopes for the speedy return of Jesus as the Son of Man did not materialize, a new target of criticism presented itself, one that was utilized first by Jewish opponents to show the incompetence of Christian scriptural interpretation, and then by pagan critics of the new religion. Christian defenses of their belief in the coming of the savior were already circulating in oral form before the fifties of the first century. Paul is aware of a movement in the church in Thessalonike to abandon or radically alter the new faith, apparently at the instigation of Jewish preachers, who come in for some unusually harsh criticism from Paul or his secretary (1 Thess. 2.12-15). In his letter to the Christians at Thessalonike, Paul claims to have been "driven away" by Jewish interlopers who have planted doubts in the mind of the Macedonian Christian churches about the "promise" of Christ's return (1 Thess. 4.15f.). As the mission progressed with its apocalyptic teaching persistently an issue in debates with itinerant Jewish teachers, the churches developed a variety of strategies for dealing with the delay:
• the gentiles would be converted before the last days (Mark 13.10)
• the power of pagan Rome and of the emperor would decline before God's son could be revealed in glory (Rom. 16.20; 2 Thess. 2.2-10)
• Jesus himself had professed ignorance about the time of this coming (Mark 13.32), or had refused to speculate about the signs of the last days (Mark 8.11-12)
• the kingdom of God was already working "secretly" and was being progressively realized through the success of the Christian mission (Luke 12.49-56; 17.22-37; Matt. 38-42).
It is best to regard these rationales as defensive and experimental. Jewish apocalyptic tradition itself had been mystically vague, studiously mysterious with respect both to the "timing" of the apocalyptic events and to the identity of the son of man. Christianity did not so much invent its imprecision as use it to advantage, having mimicked the style of its Jewish prototype (cf. 4 Esdras 5.1-8; Matt. 24.15-31, etc.). The fact that the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. was factored into this imagery at around the time the gospels were being transcribed (cf. Mark 13.14-15; Luke 21.20) suggests that many Christians associated the end of the temple cult with the imminent return of Jesus. A flimsy tradition suggests that the Jerusalem Christians fled from the city before Titus' final assault to await the coming of Jesus in Pella (Khirbet Fahil) in the Decapolis. But a competing tradition (which the Christians currying Roman favor would have wanted to mute) linked the killing of James "the Lord's brother" to the siege on Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple (Josephus, according to Origen, Contra Celsum 1.47 and 2.13; Comm. on Matthew 10.17). If the "Josephus" tradition is accurate, then the Christians withdrew from Jerusalem following the failure of apocalyptic signs to materialize after the burning of the temple.
Their disappointment is registered in a variety of late New Testament writings. A very late first or early second-century text attributed to James sees the beginning of persecution as a test of Christian endurance, but acknowledges that patience is required in the face of overwhelming disappointment and insult to the new faith (James 5.7-11). The attribution of the letter to James, the brother of Jesus and caliph of the Jerusalem church after the crucifixion, makes it difficult to know what direction the abuse was coming from, though the "style" of the letter would make encounters between Christian believers and Jews outside Palestine a likely source for the writer's counsel. At around the same time (ca. 110) a letter attributed to an aged Peter some two generations after his death comments on an increase of "scoffers" -- presumably Jewish and pagan writers who see the delay of the last days and Jesus' return as proof that Christians preached lies and practiced deceit: "We have not followed cunningly devised fables," the writer argues in defense of the churches (2 Peter 1.16), but acknowledges that his arguments are lost on "libertines" who have turned aside from the faith at the urging of skeptics (2.21). What the skeptics taught is made clear: "Where now [they ask] is the promise of [Jesus'] return? Because since the first believers fell asleep everything remains just as it was at the beginning of creation; nothing has changed" (2 Peter 3.4). While "Peter's" advice remained typical of Christian apologetic responses for a century thereafter -- those who have disbelieved have misunderstood the prophecies -- the attack on Christian apocalyptic rhetoric remains a feature of anti-Christian polemic until the fourth century and features prominently in Porphyry's assault.