The Nature and Origin of the New Testament

from R.E.Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament

B) How the Books Were Written, Preserved, and Collected

Although the term "New Testament" evokes for us a body of Christian literature, that understanding is the product of a long development.

A) The Nature of the New "Testament"

Before the term "testament" was applied to a set of writings, it referred to God's special dealing with human beings. In the story of the Hebrews and of Israel we hear of a "covenant" (agreement or pact01) by which God made a commitment to Noah, to Abraham, and to David, promising special help or blessings. In the tradition, however, the most notable covenant was that which God made with Moses and Israel (Ex 19:5; Ex 34:10,27), whereby Israel became God's special people.

Almost 600 years before Jesus' birth, at a moment when the monarchy in Judah and Jerusalem was collapsing before foreign armies, Jeremiah reported an oracle of the Lord: "The days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors the day when I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt.... I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts. I will be their God and they shall be my people" (Jr 31:31-33).02 "New" here has a connotation of "renewed" even though the renewal is "not like the covenant made with their ancestors"; and it may have had that force when first used by believers in Jesus, as they echoed the language and ideals of Jeremiah (2 Co 3:6; Ga 4:24-26). All the accounts of the eucharistic words at the supper on the night before Jesus died03 have him relate the term "(new) covenant/testament" to his own blood. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, therefore, Christians believed {4} that God had renewed the covenant with a fresh dimension; and they came to understand that this time the covenant reached beyond Israel to include the Gentiles in God's people. Eventually Christian theological reflection and hostile relations between Christians and some Jews who did not accept Jesus led to the thesis that the new testament (in the sense of covenant) had taken the place of the old, Mosaic covenant which had become "obsolete" (Heb 8:6; Heb 9:15; Heb 12:24).04 Of course, even then the Scriptures of Israel remained the Scriptures for Christians.

Only in the 2d century do we have evidence of Christians using the term "New Testament" for a body of their own writings, ultimately leading to the use of the designation "Old Testament" for the Scriptures of Israel. It would still be several centuries more before Christians in the Latin and Greek churches came to wide agreement05 about the twenty-seven works to be included in a normative or canonical collection. The next subsection below will treat in general the history of when a NT book was acknowledged as canonical.

The instinct that prospective readers of the NT books need background appeared early. Details about NT books (author, circumstances of composition) were supplied by "Prologues" attached to the Gospels and some of the Epistles (in the late 2d century if not earlier) and by an ancient fragment that bears the name "Muratorian" (which may date from the same period).06 The first known introductory work to be entitled as such is the short Introduction to the Divine Scriptures of Hadrian or Adrian - a treatise on hermeneutics, or the ways of interpreting the Bible.07 In the next thousand years various works that could be considered introductions gathered and repeated information from past traditions about biblical books. The honor, however, of being the first scientific NT introduction belongs to a series of writings in 1689-95 by the French priest Richard Simon, who studied how the NT books were written and preserved in various texts and versions. His conclusions were regarded as scandalous by more traditional Protestants and Catholics alike. {5}

By the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th "Introductions" became the vehicle for conflicting speculations about the history of early Christianity, as scholars attributed various NT books to different schools of 1st- and 2d-century thought. To some extent this tendency has been continued on the contemporary American scene by the NT Introductions of Norman Perrin (1st ed.) and Helmut Koester. Yet as the Bibliography at the end of this Chapter indicates, today there is a wide variety of NT Introductions, many of them with the simpler goal of reporting information on the books rather than of constructing overall theories of early Christian history.

B) How the First Christian Books Were Written, Preserved, and Collected

Many people assume that Christians always had Bibles even as we have today, or that Christian writings existed from the beginning. Rather, the formation of the NT, which involved the coming into being and preservation of books composed by followers of Jesus, was a complicated affair.

The Coming Into Being of Books Written by Christians

The introductory section above, "Useful Information about the Bible," reported that by the time of Jesus Jews had become very conscious of sacred writings: the Law, the Prophets, and the other books; and that is what early Christians meant when they spoke of Scripture. Why were the first Christians somewhat slow in writing their own books? A major retarding factor was that, unlike Moses who by tradition authored the Pentateuch, Jesus did not produce a writing that contained his revelation. He is never recorded as setting down even a word in his lifetime or telling any of his disciples to write. Accordingly the proclamation of the kingdom of God made present in Jesus did not depend on writing. Moreover, the first Christian generations were strongly eschatological: For them the "last times" were at hand, and undoubtedly Jesus would return soon - "Maranatha" (= Marana tha; 1 Co 16:22); "Come Lord Jesus" (Rv 22:20). Such anticipation of the end of the world did not encourage Christians to write for future generations (who would not be around to read books).

Letters. It is no accident, then, that letters were the first Christian literature of which we know: Since they can be designed to answer immediate, pressing problems, they were consistent with an urgent eschatology. That these letters were written by Paul clarifies another factor in the appearance of Christian literature. Paul was a traveling apostle who proclaimed Jesus in one town and then moved on to another. Letters became his means of {6} communication with converts who lived at a distance from him.08 Thus in the 50s of the 1st century Paul produced the earliest surviving Christian documents: 1 Thess, Gal, Phil, Phlm, 1 and 2 Cor, and Romans There is a somewhat different tone and emphasis to each, corresponding to what Paul perceived as the needs of the respective community at a particular time. This fact should make us cautious about generalizations in reference to Pauline theology. Paul was not a systematic theologian but an evangelizing preacher, giving strong emphasis at a certain moment to one aspect of faith in Jesus, at another moment to another aspect - indeed to a degree that may seem to us inconsistent. On the grounds that Paul does not mention an idea or practice, very adventurous assumptions are sometimes made about his views. For example, the eucharist is mentioned in only one Pauline writing and there largely because of abuses at the eucharistic meal at Corinth. Except for that situation scholars might be misled to assume that there was no eucharist in the Pauline churches, reasoning that Paul could scarcely have written so much without mentioning such an important aspect of Christian life.

By the mid-60s death had come to the most famous of the earlier generation (i.e., those who had known Jesus or who had seen the risen Jesus: see 1 Co 15:3-8), e.g., Peter, Paul, and James, "the brother of the Lord." The passing of the first generation of Christians contributed to the production of works of a more permanent nature. Letters/epistles remained an important means of Christian communication even if they were written now not by Paul himself but in his name to preserve his spirit and authority.

Many scholars assign 2 Thess, Col, Ep, and the Pastoral Letters (1 and 2Tm and Titus) to this category of "deutero Pauline" writings, composed in the period 70-100 (or even later), after Paul's death. A plausible explanation is that disciples or admirers of Paul were dealing with the problems of the post-70 era by giving advice they thought faithful to Paul's mind. While still dealing with immediate problems such as false teachers or counterfeit letters, the deutero Pauline letters often have a tone that is more universal or permanent. For instance, the idea of the second coming of Jesus was not lost but had become less emphatic, and so 2 Thess warns against those who overemphasize its immediacy. Col and Ep theologize about "the church" rather than about local churches as in earlier Pauline writings. The structure advocated {7} by the Pastorals, consisting of presbyter/bishops and deacons, is meant to help the church survive for future generations.

In the view of many scholars, to this post-70 period also belong the epistles attributed by name to Peter, James, and Jude, i.e., letters in the name of the great apostles or members of Jesus' family addressing the problems of later Christian generations. Once again these letters often have a universal or permanent tone. Indeed (along with I, II, III John) they eventually became known as "Catholic" (or "General") Epistles, a term that in Eastern Christianity was seen as appropriate to works addressed to the church universal.

Gospels. Literary genres other than letters also appeared of which "Gospel" is the most noteworthy. (In this volume the term "evangelists" will be confined to the writers/authors of the canonical Gospels: "evangelizers" covers the wider category of those who preached about Jesus.) According to the common scholarly view, somewhere in the 60s or just after 70 the Gospel According to Mark was written, offering an account of Jesus' deeds and words remarkably absent from the letters discussed above. Experiences stemming from the decades that separated Jesus from the evangelist colored this presentation. Relevance to Christian problems determined the selection of what was preserved from the Jesus tradition. For instance, the Marcan Jesus' emphasis on the necessity of suffering and the cross may reflect persecution undergone by Christians addressed by Mark. Expansion or explication of the Jesus tradition was demanded because the hearers and readers were no longer the Palestinian Jews of Jesus' lifetime but Gentiles to whom Jewish customs and ideas were strange (see Mk 7:3-4).

The Gospels According to Matthew and to Luke, probably written ten to twenty years after Mark, offer much more of the Jesus tradition, especially by way of sayings (thought to be drawn from a lost collection of sayings known as Q). This wider tradition betrays experiences different from Mark's church background. Still another form of the Jesus tradition found expression in the Fourth Gospel (John), written around 90-100, a form so different that scholars have labored extensively to reconstruct the peculiar community history behind this composition. Despite the local colorings of all four canonical Gospels, their overall import was to preserve for late-1st century readers (and indeed, for those of all time) a memory of Jesus that did not perish when the eyewitnesses died.

None of the Gospels mentions an author's name, and it is quite possible that none was actually written by the one whose name was attached to it at the end of the 2d century (John Mark, companion of Paul and then of Peter; Matthew, one of the Twelve; Luke, companion of Paul; John, one of the {8} Twelve).09 Nevertheless, those names constitute a claim that Jesus was being interpreted in a way faithful to the first and second generation of apostolic witnesses and preachers.

Acts; Revelation; Other Literary Genres. Another form of early Christian literature of a more permanent nature than letters is exemplified in the Acts of the Apostles. Intended by the author to constitute the second part of a work that commenced with the Gospel According to Luke (which began and ended in Jerusalem), this book moved the story of Christianity beyond Jerusalem and Judea to Samaria and even to the ends of the earth. The atmosphere in which the work was written is suggested by Ac 1:6-11. Knowledge of the time of the second coming has not been given to the disciples of Jesus, and the spread of Christianity is more important than looking to heaven in expectation of that coming. Acts signals this spread by beginning in Jerusalem with the Twelve and ending in Rome with Paul, whose last words proclaim that the future of Christianity lies with the Gentile world (Ac 28:25-28). Such a work envisions an enduring Christianity that needs to know of its continuity with Jesus, Peter, and Paul, and to be certain that its development has not been haphazard but guided by the Spirit received from Jesus.

The Book of Revelation (also called the Apocalypse) represents still another genre in the Christian writing of the post-70 period. With roots in Ezekiel and Zechariah, this book is an example of "apocalyptic" literature, a designation derived from a Greek noun meaning "disclosure" or "revelation." Such apocalyptic literature was well known in Judaism, as exemplified by Daniel and by two books written after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in ad 70, namely, IV Ezra and IIBaruch. (The latter two would have been roughly contemporary with Rev.) Persecution of God's people by the great world empires challenged the extent to which history is under God's control. Apocalyptic literature responds to this by visions that encompass what is happening in heaven and on earth at the same time - visions that can be expressed only in luxuriant symbols. The parallelism of heaven and earth gives assurance that what happens below is under the control of God above, and that earthly persecution reflects straggles between God and the major evil spirits. A special aspect of Rev is that the apocalyptic message has been attached to letters to specific churches, so that by expressing the attributes of God in a symbolism that goes beyond rational description, the author is reminding those Christians of the late 1st century that the kingdom of God {9} is larger than the history they were experiencing. It gives them hope, nay assurance, that despite (or even because of) the setbacks they have suffered, God would make them victorious. Unfortunately, many modern readers have forgotten the lst-century addressees; and not knowing this type of literature and the plasticity of its images and time symbols (so prevalent in the Jewish apocalypses cited above), they think of Rev as an exact prediction of the future revealing arcane secrets to them. Rather, the grandeur of "the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last" (Rv 22:13) lies beyond chronology and human calculation.

Still other forms of early Christian literature existed, concealed under the designation "letter" or "epistle." Precisely because letters were the dominant literary production of the first Christians, later works that were not letters in the ordinary sense were classified as such. 1 Peter and Jas are borderline cases: They have elements of a letter format, but the content is closer to a homily (1 Peter) or a type of oratorical debate known as a diatribe (Jas). The "Epistle" to the Hebrews has the conclusion of a letter but no epistolary address, so that the destination "to the Hebrews" prefixed to the work by an early scholar derives from an analysis of its contents. The polished style is that of Hellenistic or Alexandrian oratory. Although the work envisions a particular problem (seemingly backsliding from aspects of Christian adherence because of the attractions of Judaism), it elaborates a profound christology of God's Son, who is like us in everything except sin - one who is superior to the angels (who gave the Law) and to Moses, and who replaced by his death the Israelite cult and priesthood. The distance in style and development between this "epistle" and the early Pauline letters is striking. I John, which has no letter format and never mentions John, is extremely difficult to classify. It may be seen as the application of Fourth Gospel themes to a situation in which the Johannine community is no longer racked by expulsion from the synagogue but by internal disagreement and schism.

Thus in various literary genres, Christians after 70 continued to wrestle with problems and threats, but the phrasing of their answers created works that could easily speak to Christian situations of other times and places - to the point that often it is no longer possible to analyze the particular problem or situation the author had in mind. Accordingly, while the earlier Christian literature (the "proto Pauline" letters written during Paul's lifetime) can be dated with reasonable accuracy, allowing a variance of only a few years or even a few months, one almost always has to allow a margin of several decades for the suggested dating of the post Pauline works. Indeed, in the instance of a few NT writings (Mark, Acts, 2 Pet) the different dates suggested by well-informed scholars vary by fifty to one hundred years.

{10}

The Preservation and Acceptance of Books Written by Christians

The Christian compositions we have been discussing, most likely written between the years 50 and 150, were not only preserved but eventually deemed uniquely sacred and authoritative. They were placed on the same level as the Jewish Scriptures (the Law, Prophets, and other Writings) and evaluated as a NT alongside them (so that the Jewish Scriptures became the OT). How did this development come about? Again here I shall consider the issue only in general, leaving details to the discussion of individual books. Indeed we do not know fully the process of preservation;10 but several factors played a role.

First, apostolic origin, real or putative. I mentioned above how letters not physically written by Paul, Peter, and James could become very important because they were written in the name, spirit, and authority of the apostles. The Gospels were eventually attributed either to apostles (Matthew, John) or to "apostolic men" (Mark, a companion of Peter; Luke, a companion of Paul). The Book of Revelation, containing the visions of a prophet named John (Rv 1:1-2; Rv 22:8), won acceptance in the West partly because he was assumed to be John the apostle. When Dionysius of Alexandria perceptively argued around 250 that Rev could not have been written by the author of the Fourth Gospel and of the Johannine Epistles (who was also assumed to have been John the Apostle), the acceptance of the book waned in the East (EH 7:25.6-27). Heb had the opposite fate. Although cited at Rome by late-lst century and early-2d century Christians, Heb was not accepted in the first Western lists of sacred writings. Christians in the East, however, from the end of the 2d century thought that it was written by Paul (EH 6:14.4), an attribution which the Western churches long denied but which played a role in the inclusion of Heb in the canon. Finally in the 4th and 5th centuries the Latin church also came to regard Heb as Pauline and canonical.

Nevertheless, apostolic origin was not an absolute criterion for either preservation or acceptance. Letters written by Paul or in his name to the Corinthians (2 Co 2:4) and to Laodicea (Col 4:16) have not survived. Moreover, some letters purporting to be by Paul were to be discounted according to 2 Th 2:2, even if scholars today have no idea how such letters were distinct from the deutero Pauline letters. In the late 2d century the Gospel of Peter was rejected by a bishop because of its content, without any debate as to whether or not it came from Peter. Many apocryphal works rejected by later {11} church authorities as spurious or false bore the names of apostles. One must look, then, for other criteria of preservation and acceptance.

Second, importance of the addressed Christian communities. Those for whom the writings were intended had a role in preserving and winning acceptance for them. Apparently no work addressed to the Jerusalem or Palestinian communities has survived, although some of the sources of the Gospels and Acts may have been Palestinian. The disruption of that area by the Jewish Revolt against Rome in 66-70 probably contributed to such a hiatus. Plausibly Antioch in Syria received Matthew,11 a Gospel that became extremely influential. Seemingly the churches of Asia Minor (e.g., Ephesus) and Greece preserved the largest part of the NT, namely, the Pauline and Johan-nine writings, and perhaps Luke-Acts as well. The church of Rome is thought to have preserved Rm and perhaps Heb and Mark; it is another candidate for the locus of Luke-Acts. When ca. 170 Irenaeus rejected the gnostics' claims to apostolic origin for their writings (AH 3:3), the traceable connections of apostles to major churches in Asia Minor, Greece, and, above all, Rome were important arguments for the inclusion of works he considered part of the canonical NT. This factor of the receiving church (catalyzed at times by the influence of some personality mentioned in a NT book who later was prominent in the particular church) may account for the preservation of works like Philemon and Jude, which are not lengthy or significant enough easily to be explained otherwise.

Third, conformity with the rule of faith. The term "canon" or norm may have first referred to the standard beliefs of the Christian communities before it referred to the collection of writings that became standard. The importance of conformity with belief may be illustrated by a story told by Eusebius (EH 6:12.2-6) of Serapion, the bishop of Antioch (ca. 190), who found the congregation in nearby Rhossus reading from the Gospel of Peter, a work with which he was unfamiliar. At first hearing, he found the work a bit strange but was inclined to tolerate it. When he later learned that this gospel was being used to support docetic teaching (that Jesus was not truly human12), Serapion forbade further church use of the work. Some gnostic writings reflected the thesis that Jesus did not truly die on the cross, a view that consequently led to disparagement of Christian martyrdom. By comparison, the four Gospels and the letters of Paul, which highlighted the centrality of the cross and the death of Jesus, along with the Acts of the Apostles with its description of the death of Stephen, would have been preferred by Christian communities in which the blood of the martyrs had proved to be the seed of {12} the church. The reason for the uneasiness of Dionysius of Alexandria about Rev and what caused him to examine carefully the authorship of the book was that it described Christ reigning on earth for 1,000 years (Rv 20:4-5): a millenarian or chiliastic doctrine that he denied.

Although contributing to the preservation and importance of certain writings, these three factors scarcely do full justice to what also seems to have involved a church intuition as to what was Spirit-guided.

The Collecting of Early Christian Writings

The various literary genres just discussed had different histories of preliminary collection, and these histories throw light on the attitudes that shaped the final NT compilation.

Paul's Letters. Paul's name appears on thirteen NT letters addressed to separate communities or individuals and written over a period of some fifty years - or even longer if the Pastorals were written after 100. If one posits that Paul himself13 and the four or five writers of the deutero Pauline letters kept copies, we still do not know how these copies would have been gathered. If copies were not kept by the senders, recipient communities not too distant from each other may have exchanged letters (Col 4:16), thus gradually amassing collections. Some letters, however, seem to have been edited after being sent, and such a literary process would require more than a community interchange. A plausible suggestion is that, after Acts was written and the career of Paul more widely known, his letters were collected systematically. Scholars have attributed such a collection to Onesimus (Phlm 10), to Timothy, or to a Pauline school of writers (perhaps some of the authors of the deutero Pauline letters); but the attempt would have had to continue after the first post Pauline generation. While writers ca. 100-120 (such as Ignatius of Antioch and the authors of 1 Clement and 2 Pet) betray knowledge of several Pauline letters, the first clear evidence of a large collection comes several decades later, with Polycarp and Marcion. The latter's acceptance of ten letters did not include the Pastorals.14 By the end of the 2d century, thirteen were increasingly accepted in the West, with a fourteenth (Heb) soon being added in the East; only by the 4th century was this last book generally acknowledged in the West.

The Gospels. The church eventually accepted four Gospels composed in {13} the period ca. 65-100. Why four? Although Paul is not referring to a written account, his warning in Ga 1:8-9 against a "gospel contrary to what we have preached to you" suggests that the idea of only one gospel may have been axiomatic (see 1 Co 15:11). The Gospel According to Mark, which most scholars judge to have been written earliest, calls itself majestically "the gospel (good news) of Jesus Christ (the Son of God)," without suggesting that there was another version of the proclamation. When the author of Mt wrote several decades after Mark, he incorporated other material, especially from the collection of sayings that scholars call Q, into a reshaped Mark, seemingly supposing that now there would be no need for readers to consult either of those two earlier sources. Although the author of Luke (1:1-4) knows of "many" previous narratives, he has set out to produce his "orderly account" with the idea that Theophilus (and other readers) should know the truth more effectively. The fact that there is never a citation from Mark, Matthew, or Luke in the Johannine Epistles, even where the Synoptic themes could have served the author well, suggests that for the Johannine community "the message we have heard" (1 Jn 1:5; cf.1 Jn 3:11) was the Fourth Gospel alone. Bishop Papias (ca. 125) knew of several Gospels, but before 150 there is no clear example of more than one Gospel being read as publicly authoritative in a given church.

Indeed the practice of using one Gospel at times had a disturbing exclusivity. Some Jewish Christians used a gospel of their own composition, but many preferred Mt because of the Jewishness of that Gospel and its insistence on every jot and tittle of the Law (Mt 5:18). They did this, presumably, as a polemic against Gentile Christians, who used other writings to support nonobservance of the Law. Gnostic commentaries on John appeared early, for that Gospel could undergird a gnostic rejection of the world.15 Thus, concentration on one Gospel could sometimes be used to support a theology rejected by the larger number of Christians. By reaction to such exclusivity, the acceptance of more than one Gospel became the practice in "the Great Church."16 Four Gospels received ever-widening acceptance after 150. Tatian attempted a compromise between the one and the four by composing a single harmonized account out of the four (the Diatessaron) - a compromise that was accepted as authoritative for several centuries by the Syriac-speaking churches in the East but not by the Greek- and Latin- {14} speaking churches. Irenaeus in the West and Origen in the East were influential in establishing the view that God wanted four separate Gospels for the church.

Marcion (ca. 100-160)17 played a peculiar role in catalyzing the formation of the NT canon. Reared a Christian (perhaps even the son of a bishop) and a brilliant theologian, he came from the East to Rome ca. 140 proclaiming that the creator attested in the OT was only a demiurge ("the god of this world":2 Co 4:4) who insisted on strict justice. That creator was not the all-high, loving God (a God "alien" and "foreign" to this world) responsible for sending Jesus in human form.18 Given the increasing separation of Christians from the Law, the cult, and the synagogue as attested in Paul, Heb, and John, the total rejection of the Jewish heritage by Marcion was not surprising. Yet it was decried as heresy by the presbyters of the church of Rome ca. 144, causing him to set up a church with its own structures which endured for some three centuries.

Marcion found particular justification for his view in the writings of Paul whom he interpreted as altogether rejecting the Law (and the OT). He selected a canon of Christian writings that could be interpreted as favorable to his thesis, namely, one Gospel (Luke without chaps. 1-2: the euaggelion) and ten Pauline letters (without the Pastoral Epistles, the apostolikon).19 Reaction to Marcion's rejection of the OT influenced the larger church's determination to maintain the OT as God's word for the Christian people. So also opposition to Marcion's truncated canon was a factor20 that pushed the churches toward a larger euaggelion (four Gospels rather than Luke alone) and a larger apostolikon (at least thirteen Pauline letters rather than ten). An expansion of the latter may also be seen in the inclusion of the Acts of the Apostles, the second half of the Lucan work. With its narrative about the work of Peter, the chief of the Twelve companions of Jesus, prefaced to its account of the work of Paul, Acts could logically stand between the as- {15} sembled four Gospels dealing with Jesus and the assembled letters of Paul. The same instinct for favoring the Twelve probably explains the inclusion of 1 Pet and I John. However that may be, in the decades just before and after ad 200, church writers in Greek and in Latin widely accepted a collection of twenty works21 as a NT alongside the Jewish OT.

Completing the Collection. The remaining seven works (Heb, Rev, Jas, 2 and III John, Jude, 2 Pet) were cited from the 2d to the 4th centuries and accepted as Scripture in some churches but not in all. Finally, however, by the late 4th century in the Greek East and the Latin West there was a wide (but not absolute) accord on a canon of twenty-seven works.22 This standardization involved churches accepting from other churches books about which they had some doubts, and such "ecumenism" reflected an increasing contact and communion between the East and the West. Origen went to Rome and learned the biblical views of the church where Peter and Paul had been martyred and which had straggled against Marcion. On the other hand, later Western thinkers like Ambrose and Augustine became familiar with the works of Origen and through him with the biblical views of the highly literate Alexandrian Christianity. The most learned Latin church father, Jerome, spent much of his life in Palestine and Syria. Thus, in a sense, the larger canon in the 4th century, like the shorter collection in the late 2d century, testified to the experience of what Ignatius had earlier called "the catholic church" (Smyrnaeans 8:2).

We shall never know all the details of how the twenty-seven books were written, preserved, selected, and collected; but one fact is indisputable. Joined as the NT, they have been the single most important instrument in bringing untold millions of people from different times and places into contact with Jesus of Nazareth and the first believers who proclaimed him.

{pp. 15-19}

(C) Bibliography

For the topics and books of the NT one may profitably begin with the pertinent articles in the following six works. With that understanding, articles from these works will be cited only by exception in the individual Bibliographies that conclude the Chapters in this book:

The Anchor Bible Dictionary (6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992). Abbreviated ABD.

The Books of the Bible, ed. B. W. Anderson (2 vols.; New York: Scribner's, 1989). Vol. 2 has articles on each book of the NT. Abbreviated TBOB.

Harper's Bible Commentary, eds. J. L. Mays et al. (San Francisco: Harper and Row,1988). Abbreviated HBC.

The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (4 vols. 1962; supplementary vol. 1976; Nashville: Abingdon). Abbreviated IDB and IDBS.

New Jerome Biblical Commentary, eds. R. E. Brown et al. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990). Abbreviated NJBC. Refs. to articles and sections, not pages.

The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters, eds. E. J. Epp and G. W. Mac Rae (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989). Reports of the state of research on all aspects of the NT. Abbreviated NTIMI.

General Bibliographies on the NT

NTA (a periodical begun in 1956, giving brief abstracts in English of all articles and most books on the NT, is the most useful resource).

Elenchus bibliographicus biblicus (an annual, formerly part of the magazine Biblica, is the most complete index to all writing on the whole Bible).

Fitzmyer, J. A., An Introductory Bibliography for the Study of Scripture (3d ed.; Rome: PBI, 1990). Offers helpful, balanced evaluations.

France, R. 7., A Bibliographic Guide to New Testament Research (3d ed.; Sheffield: JSOT, 1983).

Harrington, D. J., The New Testament: A Bibliography (Wilmington: Glazier, 1985).

Hort, E., The Bible Book: Resources for Reading the New Testament (New York: Crossroad, 1983).

Hurd, J. C, A Bibliography of New Testament Bibliographies (New York: Seabury, 1966- includes bibliographies of NT scholars).

Krentz, E., "New Testament Library. A Recommended List for Pastors and Teachers," CurTM 20 1993), 49-53.

Langevin, P.-E., Bibliographia biblique. Biblical Bibliography... 1930-1983 (3d ed.; Quebec: Laval Univ., 1985- covers the whole Bible).

Metzger, B. M., Index to Periodical Literature on Christ and the Gospels (Leiden: Brill, 1966). Covers up to 1961 and so is useful for the period before NTA.

Martin, R. P., New Testament Books for Pastor and Teacher (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).

Porter, S. E., and L. M. Mc Donald, New Testament Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995). Annotated bibliography (to be updated every five years).

Introductions to the New Testament

(Some of the most recent and/or the most important, representing various approaches):

Beker, J. C, The New Testament. A Thematic Introduction (Minneapolis: A/F, 1994).

Brown, S., The Origins of Christianity: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; New York: Oxford, 1993).

Childs, B. S., The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).

Collins, R. R, Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1983).

Conzelmann, H., and A. Lindemann, Interpreting the New Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988, from the 8th German ed.).

Davies, W. D., Invitation to the New Testament (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993 reprint).

Freed, E. D., The New Testament: A Critical Introduction (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986).

Fuller, R. H., A Critical Introduction to the New Testament (London: Duckworth, 1974).

Guthrie, D., New Testament Introduction (4th ed.; Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity, 1990). An important, very conservative contribution.

Johnson, L. T., The Writings of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986).

Kee, H. C, Understanding the New Testament (5th ed.; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993).

Koester, H., Introduction to the New Testament (2 vols.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982; 2d ed. vol. 1; New York: de Gruyter, 1995).

Kümmel, W. G., Introduction to the New Testament (rev. enlarged ed.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1986). A classic.

Mack, B. L., Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco: Harper, 1995).

Martin, R. P., New Testament Foundations: A Guide for Christian Students (rev. ed.; 2 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986).

Marxsen, W., Introduction to the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968).

Metzger, B. M., The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content (2d ed.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1983).

Moffatt, J., An Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament (3d ed.; Edinburgh: Clark, 1918). A scholarly classic.

Moule, C.F.D., The Birth of the New Testament (3d ed.; London: Black, 1981).

Patzia, A. G., The Making of the New Testament (Downers Grove, EL: Inter Varsity, 1995).

Perkins, P., Reading the New Testament (2d ed.; New York: Paulist, 1988).

Perrin, N., and D. C. Duling, The New Testament, an Introduction (3d ed.; Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1994). Major changes from Perrin's 1st ed. 1974).

Price, J. L., Interpreting the New Testament (2d ed.; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

Puskas, C. B., An Introduction to the New Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1989).

Schweizer, E., A Theological Introduction to the New Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991).

Spivey, R. A., and D. M. Smith, Anatomy of the New Testament (5th ed.; Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1995).

Stott, J.R.W., Men with a Message: An Introduction to the New Testament (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

Wikenhauser, A., New Testament Introduction (New York: Herder and Herder, 1960). A translation of a Roman Catholic classic of which the most recent German ed. by J. Schmid is the 6th 1973).

Wright, N. T, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: A/F, 1992).

Theologies of the New Testament (some of which are virtually Introductions):

Balz, H., and G. Schneider, eds., Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (3 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990-93). Very useful; supplies transliterations for those who cannot read the Greek alphabet.

Bultmann, R., Theology of the New Testament (2 vols.; London: SCM, 1952, 1955). A classic.

Caird, G. B., New Testament Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

Conzelmann, H., An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

Cullmann, O., Salvation in History (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

Goppelt, L., Theology of the New Testament (2 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981-82).

Kittel, G., and G. Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964-76). German orig. 1932-79. A classic, abbreviated TDNT. Also a one-volume abridgment by G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985) with transliterations.

Kümmel, W. G., The Theology of the New Testament According to Its Major Witnesses: Jesus - Paul - John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1973).

Ladd, G. E., A Theology of the New Testament, rev. by D. A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).

Leon-Dufour, X., Dictionary of the New Testament (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).

Marxsen, W. New Testament Foundations for Christian Ethics (Minneapolis: A/F, 1993).

Matera, F. J., New Testament Ethics (Louisville: W/K, 1996).

Richard, E., Jesus: One and Many. The Christological Concept of New Testament Authors (Wilmington: Glazier, 1988).

Richardson, A., An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament (New York: Harper and Bros., 1959).

________, A Theological Word Book of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1950).

Schelkle, K.-H., Theology of the New Testament (4 vols.; Collegeville: Liturgical, 1971-78).

Spicq, C, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (3 vols.; Peabody, MA: Hen-drickson, 1994). French orig. 1978.

Stauffer, E., New Testament Theology (London: SCM, 1955).

Canon of the New Testament:

Farmer, W. R., and D. M. Farkasfalvy, The Formation of the New Testament Canon (New York: Paulist, 1983). Gamble, H. Y, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985). Hahneman, G. M., The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). Lienhard, J. T, The Bible, the Church, and Authority (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1995).

Mc Donald, L. M., The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995).

Metzger, B. M., The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). Souter, A., The Text and Canon of the New Testament (2d ed.; London: Duckworth, 1954). Westcott, B. R, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (4th ed.; London: Macmillan, 1875). A classic that reprints the basic ancient texts pertinent to canon.

Surveys of New Testament Research:

Baird, W., History of New Testament Research (several vols.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992-). Vol. 1 treats 1700-1870.

Bruce, F. E, "The History of New Testament Study," in Marshall, New 1977), 21-59.

Fuller, R. H., The New Testament in Current Study (New York: Scribner's, 1962).

Hall, D. R., The Seven Pillories of Wisdom (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1990). An elegant, conservative critique of the reasoning encountered in NT research.

Harrisville, R. A., and W. Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture... from Spinoza to Kdsemann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

Hunter, A. M., Interpreting the New Testament 1900-1950 (London: SCM, 1951).

Kümmel, W. G., The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972).

Morgan, R., "New Testament Theology," in Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives, eds. S. J. Kraftchick et al. (J. C. Beker Festschrift; Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 104-30.

Raisanen, H., Beyond New Testament Theology (Philadelphia: Trinity, 1990).

Riches, L., A Century of New Testament Study (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity, 1993).

Chapter 2. The Roman World

Judas had heard of the reputation of the Romans. They were valiant fighters and acted amiably to all who took their side... He was also told of their battles and the brave deeds that they had performed against the Gauls, conquering them and forcing them to pay tribute ... Philip and Perseus, king of the Macedonians... had been overwhelmed and subjugated ... Antiochus, the Great king of Asia ... had been defeated by them. They had taken him alive and obliged him and the kings who succeeded him to pay a heavy tribute... When the men of Greece had planned to come and destroy them, the Romans discovered it and sent against the Greeks a single general who made war on them. Many were wounded and fell, and the Romans took their wives, and children captive ... Yet with all this none of them put on a crown or wore purple as a display of grandeur. They had made for themselves a senate house, and every day three hundred and twenty men took counsel, deliberating on all that concerned the people and their wellbeing. So Judas chose Eupolemus ... and Jason ...and sent them to Rome to establish an alliance of friendship with them (1 Macc 8:1-17).

In those days Caesar Augustus published decree that the whole world should be enrolled; This first census took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria (Lk 2:1).

{46} In the fifteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, Philip his brother, tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God was spoken to John son of Zechariah in the desert (Lk 3:1-2).

Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's (Mk 12:17).

If we let him go on like this, the whole world will believe in him. Then the Romans will come in and sweep away our sanctuary and our nation (Jn 11:48).

If you free this man you are no "friend of Caesar." Anyone who makes himself a king becomes Caesar's rival (Jn 19:12).

I (Paul) stand before the imperial bench. That is where 1 must be tried ... Therefore Festus conferred with his council and finally declared: "You have appealed to the Emperor. To the Emperor you shall go" (Ac 25:10-12).

I am under obligation to Greeks and non-Greeks, to learned and unintelligent alike. That is why 1 am eager to preach the gospel to you Romans as well (Rm 1:14f).

Now I have no more work to do in these regions, and I continue to cherish the desire to visit you which I have had for many years. As soon as I can set out for Spain I hope to see you in passing (Rm 15:23-24).

On her forehead was written a symbolic name, "Babylon the great, mother of harlots and all the world's abominations". I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of God's holy ones and the blood of those martyred for their faith in Jesus (Rev (17:5-6). {47} IN THE PREVIOUS chapter we have noted more than once that the Greek heritage - cultural, legal and religious -was encountered by the early Christians in and through the institutions of the Roman Empire. This is not to suggest that the Romans were merely borrowers in these and other fields of human endeavour; it does mean that for the first Christians the most immediate and concrete reality of life was Roman government and administration. In other words, the outward form of early Christianity's world was undeniably Roman, even if the heart and soul was Greek, or alternatively Jewish, as we shall see in the next chapter. It is on this external world of Emperors and Governors, legal prosecutions and personal and community rights that we wish to focus in this chapter, since it is within these structures that early Christianity emerged and developed. The chain of citations which we have given at the outset (including the First Book of Maccabees) suggests that the relationship could vary considerably. From being the ally and friend of the weak in the first citation Rome becomes the whore of Babylon, the murderer of the faithful, in the final one. We shall examine the various phases of the relationship by considering the way in which Rome came to control the Mediterranean (I), the manner in which its imperial designs were likely to run counter to Jewish national aspirations in Palestine (II) and the legal status of Jews (and Christians) in the Diaspora (III).

I. The Roman Political Scene During the First Century of the Common Era.

In striking contrast to the startling rapidity of Alexander's campaigns by which in the space of ten short years he conquered the Middle East from the Mediterranean to the Indus, the advance of Rome was slow, piecemeal and sometimes even fortuitous. So impressed was the Greek historian Polybius with the gradual but inevitable process of the {48} development, already in the second century B.C.E., that he declared that Fate had determined that Rome should rule the world. The steady expansion of the Roman imperium or rule over two centuries was ultimately to stand the test of time better than Alexander's striking successes. Certainly, by the first century their achievement must have appeared both inevitable and eternal for the Romans themselves. One of their great poets, Horace, speaking of his own works, writes: "I have raised up a monument more lasting than bronze. As long as high priest with silent step ascends the Capitol my songs will be sung." Even second century Christian apologists saw the peace that came to the world with the rise of Augustus, the pax Augusta as it was called, as providentially arranged by God in preparation for Christianity. Earlier, another Roman poet, Virgil, in his famous fourth Eclogue had spoken of the times in language and imagery strangely similar to Jewish messianic hopes, especially the famous Emmanuel prophecy of Isaiah that had been appropriated by the Christians for their own leader, Jesus:

Under thy guidance whatever tracks remain of our old wickedness, once done away, shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear. He shall receive the life of gods, and see heroes with gods commingling, and himself be seen of them, and with his father's worth reign o"er a world at peace.

While the reign of Augustus was not entirely free of wars, especially on the northern frontiers where the Germanic tribes were a constant threat, it certainly came nearest to the realisation of these dreams. Towards the end of his career Augustus was able to boast that three times during his reign the senate had decreed that the temple of Janus, the god of the door, be shut. This symbolic action had only been performed twice before in Roman history - after the first Punic War and after the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E. {49} Rome is the only example in history of a single city-state growing to a world empire. This extraordinary feat can be attributed to a combination of military skill and courage, a pragmatic philosophy that was prepared to extend its citizenship indefinitely as a reward for loyalty and service, and by a political shrewdness that was able to improvise executive and administrative arrangements to meet the particular needs of any situation. The first stages of her advancement within the Italian peninsula were slow and hazardous, beginning with a defense of her own territories and then adopting the role of aggressor as she pushed southwards in the peninsula, but already the pattern for future success was established by the way in which the cities and territories that had been conquered were incorporated into the expanding net - now by treaty of alliance, now by colonisation and again by the grant of citizenship. It was in this push to the south that Rome came into contact with Carthage, a naval outpost of the Phoenicians in North Africa, just across from Sicily, and the two rival commercial and military powers became embroiled in a lengthy confrontation, known as the two Punic Wars (264-241 B.C.E. and 218-202 B.C.E.) that ended with the defeat of the famous general Hannibal, the destruction of Carthage and the establishment of Rome as the dominant force in the western Mediterranean.

The Punic wars were an important milestone in Roman military history. New techniques and weapons of war were developed and above all a competent naval force that was fit and eager to take on the best that the Hellenistic monarchies of the east had to offer. Perhaps the most important effect of all for the future was the emergence of the provincial system whereby conquered territory was organised under Roman rule. At the end of the first Punic War, Sicily was so constituted with its own governor sent annually by Rome. The excerpt from the first book of Maccabees, cited at the beginning of this chapter, is really a catalogue of her successes throughout the second century B.C.E. as Rome {50} extended her influence eastward. Macedonia, Asia (part of modern Turkey), North Africa were all conquered and organised as provinces by the year 133 B.C.E. It was only in the next century that Syria (in 63) and Egypt (in 31) were finally added to the list of Roman provinces in the East, making the Euphrates river the eastern boundary of the Empire. Consequently the Roman conquest never went as far as that of Alexander. This had repercussions for Palestine, since it was to be one of several important buffer states along the borders with Rome's great rival in the East, the Parthians, and Rome had to ensure that at all times this small but strategically important land was firmly in its control.

Naturally, the character of Roman life had changed considerably in the two centuries of conquest and expansion. Unlike the east, where the tradition of monarchy had a long and noble history, Rome had already abolished the kingship in 510 B.C.E., opting instead for an aristocratic republic. Even when eventually in the first century B.C.E. the Emperor became absolute monarch in all but name, he was technically known as "princeps," that is first among equals, and in theory at least he held his position at the behest of the Roman senate. Originally the senate, consisting of members of the patrician or aristocratic families, selected two officers annually, the consuls, to run the affairs of state; but at a relatively early date, the plebeians or second order, had obtained some measure of involvement, even to the point of being eligible for the office of consul. We have already met the equestrian order of knights in the previous chapter, who technically were plebeians rather than patricians, but who through the new wealth and the gradual demise of the old aristocracy due to civil strife and various purges, became very influential in the later Republican and Imperial times. There was however great social unrest in Roman society among the lower classes, especially slaves, freedmen and provincials. Various attempts at reform had been ineffectual, or were blocked, notably that {51} of the Gracchi which sought a fairer distribution of the public land and the stabilisation of prices in Rome. Another reform achieved only after a bitter war was the granting of full citizenship to all the Italians. By the first century a full-scale civil war situation prevailed between the old aristocracy and the rising middle class. The power now gradually shifted to the military men who were warding off the enemies of Rome at the frontiers and at the same time vying for power and influence at the centre. The armies were now no longer recruited from the peasant farming stock but instead soldiering had become a professional art, and the foreign wars - in the east against Mithridates and in the west in Spain and Gaul - gave the species of legitimacy to the several armed forces that were maintained. The final years of the Republic were marked by this bitter in-fighting - the period of the Triumvirates - which inevitably ended in a struggle for power between two of the three who had entered into an alliance. First it was the struggle between Pompey (the conqueror of Palestine, as we shall see) and Caesar, with the latter emerging as sole dictator after the battle of Pharsalus in 48 B.C.E. However his murder in 44 B-C.E. by Brutus and Cassius, who were the remnants of the old aristocratic class that had been swept aside in the struggle for power, gave rise to the second triumvirate and the inevitable struggle between Mark Antony (Cleopatra's lover) and Octavian (Caesar's adopted son, the future Augustus). The matter was finally resolved in 31 B.C.E. with Octavian successful at the battle of Actium, a victory that marked the end of the Roman Republic and the formal beginning of the Principate, as it was originally called.

However, Octavian, or Augustus, as he came to be known when a decree of the Roman government conferred this name with its honorific overtones on him in 27 B.C.E., moved cautiously, realising the fate of his foster father, Julius Caesar. The Senate also conferred on him control of certain provinces - Spain, Gaul, Syria and Egypt - those where the largest portion of the army was located, and this ensured {52} his power base. It was further formally decreed that he could declare war, conclude treaties and do "whatever he may deem to serve the interest of the Republic." He was named "Pontifex Maximus" "High Priest," in 12 B.C.E. and "Pater Patriae," "father of the fatherland" in 2 B.C.E. However, not all the subsequent Emperors (the title Imperator was originally a military one: "head of the armed forces") treated the senate with the same respect. Tiberius, Augustus' successor, withdrew to the island of Capri and conducted the affairs of state from that retreat, surrounded by his own favourites and advisers, and the senate had either lost the will or the interest to complain about such derogation of its powers. This was particularly true of the Emperors Gaius (Caligula) (37-41) and Nero (51-64), both of whose careers were to be of special interest to Jews and Christians, as we shall see.

In controlling this vast territory that comprised the Empire we catch a glimpse of Roman administrative skills. The provincial system had been developed already under the Republic, but now a distinction was made between Senatorial and Imperial provinces as new territories were organised: Egypt (30 B.C.E.); Galatia (25 B.C.E.); Raetia and Noricum (15 B.C.E.); Judea (6 C.E.); Cappadocia (17 C.E.); Britain (43 C.E.); Arabia (107 C.E.). The former, like Sicily and Africa, were under the direct control of the senate, who appointed the governors, whereas the latter, for example Syria, were the places where the military legions were deployed for security or other reasons and under the direct control of the Emperor. Depending on the status of the province the governor came from senatorial or equestrian rank - this latter being the case in Judea. Apparently the governors of senatorial rank had some rights of supervision over those of equestrian background, since there are several instances of the governor of Syria directly intervening in Palestinian affairs, and this is reflected in the New Testament also where the census of Quirinius, governor of Syria is mentioned and Pontius {53} Pilate is called Procurator of Judea, a title that indicates a rank lower than governor.

In theory at least the provincial system was intended to allow for local customs and culture to have their say, and this was part of the Roman genius. However, in reality very often there was too much opportunity for corruption and venality. The term of office was too short and the temptation to capitalise on the provincials was very great for somebody intending to return to the capital shortly. In effect he was an autocrat, and his decisions, even in matters of capital punishment, were final except in extraordinary circumstances, a fact that has particular relevance for understanding the trials of Jesus and Paul in the New Testament. Judea certainly had its share of such procurators, drawn, as we have mentioned, from the middle class equestrians. Indeed the mismanagement of Judean affairs by the procurators especially after 44 C.E. was one of the chief contributory factors to the first Jewish revolt of 66-70.

In all, three of these equestrian procurators of Judea are mentioned in the New Testament - Pontius Pilate (gospels), Porcius Festus and Felix (Acts of the Apostles) - and as we shall see, all three fit well the profile one could anticipate from their background. One of them, Felix, was the brother of Pallas, a close associate and advisor of the Emperor Claudius, so one can imagine the sense of freedom with which he approached the task of governing "the unruly" Jews. Apart from Quirinius, the governor of Syria of senatorial rank mentioned in connection with the census, we also meet two governors of senatorial provinces in Acts: Sergius Paulus in Cyprus and Annius Gallio at Corinth. An inscription found at Delphi bearing the name of this latter makes it possible to date his office with a high degree of probability to the year 51 C.E., and so this gives us some important external confirmation for dating Paul's career.

Apart from the provincial system another facet of Roman administration that is important for New Testament times is {54} the system of "client kings." As already mentioned, kingship had a long tradition in the East, and it is altogether in keeping with Roman policies to allow these to continue -provided they did not interfere with her own dynastic intentions. An excellent example of the way in which this system worked is the family of the Herods in Judea. The family originally came to prominence under Caesar when Antipater, a half-Jew from Idumaea (southern Palestine), was entrusted with the control of the financial affairs in the recently carved-up territory of the Jews. However, it was his younger son Herod who received the title "king, friend and ally of the Roman people," by a decree of the senate in 40 B.C.E. as reward for his support of Mark Antony in the civil war after Caesar's death. An additional incentive from the Roman point of view was the fact that their great rivals in the East, the Parthians, had invaded Palestine and supported one of the deposed Hasmonaean, Antigonus, as king.

Herod eventually conquered his recently acquired kingdom and was in complete control of the internal affairs of Judea until his death in 4 B.C.E., paying an annual tribute to the Roman coffers for the honour of kingship. On Herod's death, and despite his last will, his territory was carved up among three surviving sons, Archelaus, Antipas and Philip, but none of them ever received the title king, despite the fact that Mark calls Antipas "king" on the occasion of the birthday celebration when John the Baptist was beheaded (Mk 6:14). Both Matthew and Luke are familiar with his official title, "tetrarch," literally "ruler of a quarter" (Mt 14:1; Lk 9:7), however, Herod's grandson, Herod Agrippa I, who had been brought up in Imperial court circles and was a close friend of the Emperor Gaius (Caligula) received the title king and ruled over part of Palestine from 37 C.E., and the whole from 41 C.E. until his death in 44 C.E., when the territory reverted to the provincial status once more.

While Agrippa was beloved by the Jews as a devout and good king, mediating with the Romans on a number of important issues, he {55} treated Palestinian Christians badly, having James the apostle put to death. His own sudden death is seen by the author of Acts (12:1-20) as a just punishment by God. Subsequently, his son Agrippa II, though never enjoying the same territorial control as his father, was also recognised as king, and like his father, attempted to play the intermediary between Rome and the Jews at the time of the first revolt (cf. Ac 25:13-26:32). The Herods were not the only client kings whom Rome supported in the East since we hear of a similar arrangement in Armenia, Cappadocia and Comagene. However they were quick to recognise any signs of insubordination and return to the provincial system by which the Emperor bestowed the right to rule directly on a Roman, who then enjoyed full power to direct the affairs of the province as he wished, always subject to the superior authority of the Emperor, of course.

This raises the question already mentioned in connection with the trials of Jesus and Paul, namely, the rights of Roman citizens as distinct from those of peregrini, as the provincials were called. In terms of the New Testament, how was it that Paul was able to have his case transferred from the provincial tribunal of Festus to Rome whereas no such option was apparently open to Jesus? In invoking what is technically called provocatio which should not be confused with an appeal from a lower to higher court, Paul clearly relies on his Roman citizenship (Ac 16:37; 25:10-12). This gave him special privileges in regard ito criminal processes, at least at an earlier period, before citizenship was extended on a fairly large scale to the provincials and the wholesale transfer of cases to the capital was no longer feasible. At Philippi, for example, a Roman colony, Paul having been accused of subverting the Roman citizens of the town, was thrown into prison after having been flogged. Paul was indignant at this treatment of Roman citizens and the magistrates were quite upset on finding out his status (Ac 16:19-40). Again, Claudius Lysias, the commander who was cross-examining Paul after his arrest in Jerusalem {56} was surprised to find out that he was a Roman citizen, and his whole approach to Paul changed considerably once he recognised that they were both on equal footing. Paul had been born with citizen's rights, whereas Claudius had had to purchase his, probably through bribery of some Roman bureaucrats (Ac 22:22-29). Subsequently the governor Festus, and Agrippa II, whom the governor consulted on the matter, upheld Paul's claims and treated him with great caution, even respect (Ac 25:12-25; 26:32). When one contrasts this treatment with that of Jesus by Pontius Pilate, being a Roman citizen was clearly a distinct advantage in the first century C.E., at least in cases where no clearcut crime had been committed in terms of the Roman ordo.

Citizenship was not automatically conferred on the subjects of conquered territories. The inhabitants of the Italian peninsula only received it after a bitter struggle. Various conquering generals were given the right to confer citizenship on those whom they considered fit, and of course the Emperor could also do the same. Usually, the new citizen took the name of his patron - the Claudius Lysias of Acts, for example, had obviously received his from the Emperor Claudius. Paul on the other hand says that he was born a Roman citizen - which means that his father, or some earlier generation still had received it, but we have no indication of the circumstances or from whom it was received, and the name Paul does not give us any clue, since it is a rare name among Roman patrician families.

Apparently, citizenship in the eastern provinces was not granted as readily as in the West, where it was an extension of the rights granted to the Italians at a relatively early date. Consequently, Roman citizens formed a small but important enclave in the East in Paul's day, especially outside the few colonies that Rome had directly founded: Corinth, Philippi, Troas in Greece and Antioch in Pisidia and Lystra in Asia, all on important trade routes, and so visited by Paul on his journeys. One gets the impression that the Roman {57} magistrates are rather surprised to find out Paul's citizenship, since in their experience such a man might be expected to be a ranking officer in the Roman army or magistrate in his native city, especially Tarsus, which had quite a reputation as an intellectual centre.

In sketching this outline of the Roman political and r administrative scene in the first century C.E. we have concentrated on those aspects that directly affected both Jews and Christians. For the Romans there was scarcely any distinction, at least in the earlier period, when early Christianity1 was likely to have been dealt with within the structures created by Rome to deal with Jewish faith and practice. Consequently, we must now examine in greater detail Rome's dealings with Jews, first in Palestine and then in the wider Diaspora, if we are to understand the full impact Rome had in shaping the world of the early Christians.

II. Rome and the Jews in Palestine

The passage from 1 Macc quoted at the beginning of this chapter shows how the Jews first envisaged Rome's presence in the East. She was their ally, supporting Jewish efforts to cast off the yoke of the Hellenistic monarchies - at that time the Seleucids of Syria, who had attempted to wipe out the Jewish religion altogether by the infamous decree of 167 B.C.E., to be examined in our next chapter. Through a combination of daring military exploits and internal troubles of the Seleucid house, the Jews, under the Maccabaean brothers and their successors were able to establish an independent state, the Hasmonaean state as it is called, that included within its boundaries all of Palestine west of the Jordan with the exception of the Phoenician coastal cities, as well as a good deal of Transjordan, both north and south. The fact that the Seleucids were forced to pay a large war indemnity annually to the Romans ever since the {58} battle of Magnesium in 190 B.C.E. was one contributory factor to the weakness of the Seleucids, though it also explains their continued attempts to squeeze the last shekel from the Jewish territory, even at one point violating the sanctuary in Jerusalem in order to rob it of its sacred vessels. Rome was not averse to a strong Jewish state, since it could act as a check on either Seleucid or Ptolemaic ambitions, never totally abandoned, to restore the Empire of Alexander. Thus it was that for the last time until our own century the Jews were able to establish their own state for a period of approximately 70 years, from 142 B.C.E., when final tax concessions were won from the Seleucids, to 63 B.C.E. when the Romans intervened directly in Palestinian affairs.

In 63 B.C.E. Pompey, who was just then engaged in settling the affairs of the East and clearing the Mediterranean of pirates, acceded to the request of a Jewish delegation who wanted him to resolve a dispute between two Hasmonaean brothers as to which of them should be king. It was quite a natural request given the longstanding friendship between the two peoples. However, Pompey availed of the opportunity to carve up the Hasmonaean kingdom, restoring their freedom to a number of Hellenistic cities and leaving three separated territories - Judea (around Jerusalem), Galilee (in the north) and Peraea (across the Jordan) in the hands of the Jews, ruled over by the high priest Hyrcanus II (one of the rival claimants) an ethnarch, not king, and with Antipater as his financial controller.

Pompey actually invaded the temple in Jerusalem and entered the Holy of Holies, to the great horror of pious Jews, but unlike the Seleucid King, Antiochus IV, who also violated the sanctuary almost a hundred years earlier, he did not rob the temple of its precious objects. Yet his action suggested that a new era in Jewish-Roman relations had begun in which Jewish hopes and aspirations would have to take second place to the designs of Roman imperialism. This was confirmed a few years later by {59} Gabinius, the governor of Syria, who pressed ahead with an even more thorough division of the country. Caesar improved the situation somewhat by granting the Jews some tax concessions in deference to their religious obligations of the sabbatical year, and he restored Hyrcanus as head of all the Jewish territory and declared him entitled to receive the tithes. Yet his settlement, confifnied by Mark Antony after his death, made the Jews the unequal partner. Rome was from now on to remain directly in charge of Jewish fortunes, and her authority would always be supreme.

We have already mentioned the rise of Herod, Antipater's son, who succeeded in playing his political cards cleverly throughout the difficult years of the triumvirates and was rewarded by Rome with the kingship of Judea. This was a bitter pill for the Jews to swallow - an Idumaean, half-Jew in complete control of their affairs, both secular and religious. Once established, Herod was not slow to assert himself: the older priestly aristocracy was purged, the high priest, Hyrcanus II, was deposed and replaced by candidates of Herod's own choosing, and the Sanhedrin was denuded of all its powers as the supreme governing body of the nation.

Herod was no mindless monster however, despite his avowed Hellenistic policies abroad. As part of his building projects, the temple in Jerusalem was to be rebuilt, something that came quickly to the mind of Jesus' audience a generation later when it appeared as though he were threatening the temple (Jn 2:18-22). Not only was it the central symbol of their belief, it was also the source of economic stability for many Jerusalemites and Herod's reconstruction policy served the dual purpose of placating his Jewish subjects' religious loyalties and generating extra jobs within his realm. People were less antagonised by the heavy burden of taxes and the spending abroad when there were some visible signs of how their contributions were being used, and besides the large work-force gainfully employed was likely to be more submissive. Despite his {60} shrewdness however, we read in Josephus how the last years of Herod's reign were marked by a growing paranoia about his successor, and even his own family was not spared the threat of execution as plots, real or imagined, were "discovered," and those suspected eliminated. Though there is no evidence in our other sources about the slaughter of the Innocents reported by Matthew (2:16-18), and historians have questioned its likelihood, at least on the scale reported, there is no doubt but that the Evangelist shows Herod's character correctly. He may have wished to ironically suggest to his readers, and no doubt the point was not lost on those who were Jews, that Jesus posed a far greater threat to Herod's kingship than any of those who sought his crown.

So oppressive was Herod's rule that on his death fifty leading men of the Jews appeared before Augustus and asked to have the Herodian dynasty set aside and Judea incorporated into the province of Syria. While they and the surviving claimants were debating their case in Rome, serious trouble had broken out in Palestine - the first in a series of violent episodes that were to dominate Palestinian life for the next century. Apparently, during the long reign of Herod resistance had been driven underground rather than eradicated, and now at the first opportunity these elements erupted in a spontaneous display of independence at the feasts of Passover and Pentecost. National loyalties were fanned by the flames of religious fervour, and first Archelaus (before his departure for Rome), and subsequently the Roman legate of Syria, Varus, put down the revolt with great brutality, underlining what Matthew tells us about Archelaus being as brutal as his father Herod (Mt 2:22). As already touched on, Herod's kingdom was now divided between Archelaus (Judea), Antipas (Galilee and Peraea) and Philip (Trachonitis and Batanaea), the first step in the provincialisation of Palestine by the Romans (cf. Lk 3:1). Ten years later (4 B.C.E. - 6 C.E.) Archelaus, because of continued unrest in his territory, was deposed and Judea made into an imperial province of equestrian {61} rank, with the procurator living at Caesarea on the coast - a city founded by Herod and thoroughly Greco-Roman in its style and atmosphere (cf. Ac 24:1; 25:1.13), something that recent archaeology of the site has confirmed.

Except for the short period of Herod Agrippa I's reign (37-44 C.E.), Judea was to remain a Roman province (enlarged by the addition of Galilee in 44 C.E.). Thus direct Roman rule and the animosity it generated among thg Jews was experienced in the south to a greater extent than in Galilee, a fact that explains the frequency of the Zealots' presence in the former province during the next half century or more. This consideration is important as it is frequently asserted that Galilee was the hot-bed of Jewish nationalism in the first century, even to the point of making Jesus and his followers into an armed band of revolutionaries.

The fact that Judas the Galilean, mentioned in Ac 5:37 as having unsuccessfully attempted a revolution against Rome in 6 C.E., is presumed to have come from the province, lends a specious legitimacy to these assumptions. In fact it was in Jerusalem that Judas launched his call to freedom and the refusal to pay tribute to any human master as the Romans initiated a census of the newly formed province for direct taxation purposes. It remains unproven that his revolutionary ideas were originally fostered in his homeland, where there was no similar disturbance when it was incorporated into the Roman provincial system in 44 C.E.

In fact Herod Antipas, the Herod of John's beheading (Mk 6:15-30) and Jesus' trial (Lk 23:7-12), appears to have given some degree of stability to Galilean life. Though Jesus seems to have avoided Herod's cities of residence, Sepphoris, four miles north-east of Nazareth, and Tiberias, which he founded on the lake front, the reason may not have been just fear of arrest (Lk 13:31). It was not without cause that Antipas had earned the name "fox" (Lk 13:32), probably referring to his astuteness in obtaining the position of ruler without meriting it, in contrast to the lion who was really the king of the animals. Antipas was not likely to {62} engage in any activity that would disturb the peace and draw down the wrath of the Romans after their treatment of Archelaus, and Jesus was undoubtedly popular with the Galilean crowds, at least initially. According to Josephus the beheading of John the Baptist, a Judean not a Galilean figure in the gospels, took place because John was a political threat, and was not just the result of a drunken whim, as the gospels suggest. Furthermore, the episode is located by Josephus in Machaerus (AJ 18:116,) a fortress in Peraea, and not in Galilee, where the population was probably more mixed and resistance less likely from a largely rural and peasant people.

The New Testament mentions three of the Roman procurators of Judea in the period between 6 and 66 C.E., Pilate from 26-36 C.E., Felix 52-60 C.E. and Festus 60-62 C.E. The normal period of office appears to have been two years, but obviously there was considerable flexibility depending on various circumstances, such as the policy of the Emperor, influential friends at Rome and one's performance in the province. It was important for a procurator to establish good relations with some at least of the more influential elements in his province and it is not surprising to find Herod Agrippa II and his wife Berenice paying an official visit to the newly arrived Festus, and the latter defers suitably by having Agrippa also hear Paul's case (Ac 25:13-26:32). Felix had actually married Drusilla, the daughter of Agrippa I, a Jewess (Ac 24:24) who had abandoned her previous husband for him.

The procurators of Judea were in charge of the military personnel in the province. In the case of Judea, there were no Roman legions stationed there, though they were ready at hand for any disturbances and were often called upon. After the great revolt had been put down in 70 C.E. one legion, the Decima X Fretensis, was stationed in the great plain at the ancient strategic site of Megiddo. Whereas the legions were made up entirely of Roman citizens, this was not necessarily true of the auxiliaries that were permanently stationed in Palestine. These were apparently often recruited from the non-Jewish population of Palestine and {63} Syria, and as can be expected, were for the most part resented, and they in turn showed their contempt for things Jewish, to the point where a Roman soldier actually profaned the Temple during a festival with an indecent act. The treatment of Jesus by the soldiers during the trial is perfectly true to life, even when the Evangelists see it as fulfilment of Old Testament Scriptures dealing with the suffering of the just man (e.g. Mt 27:30.35.43; Jn 19:24. 36). However, we do meet some exceptions. Cornelius, the centurion who eventually became a Christian, was a "sympathiser," and so apparently were other soldiers of his unit (Ac 10:7). This means that they had probably some association (possibly as "God-fearers," as such gentiles were called) with the Jewish synagogue. It may be no coincidence that he was from the Italian cohort (Ac 10:1), that is that he was not a native Palestinian, and so not heir to the prejudices and mutual recriminations that had been building up for a century or more in that region.

One general question about the procurators that has been much discussed is their role in judicial matters. We have already confirmed that Paul was perfectly within his rights as a Roman citizen in asking to have his case transferred to Rome, but this does not mean that the procurators did not have the right to impose capital punishment within their province without any right of appeal. This is clear from the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, crucifixion being the Roman form of inflicting the death penalty, which shows that they took full legal responsibility for it in his case. There are plenty of other instances from this period where offenders who could be regarded as "political" were executed within the province also: Theudas, a Jewish rebel who is put on a par with Judas the Galilean (Ac 5:37) and was put to death by Cuspius Fadus the procurator from 44-46 C.E., while his successor Tiberius Alexander, himself an Egyptian Jew in the Imperial service, executed the two sons of Judas the Galilean, presumably for espousing their father's philosophy of rejecting Roman rule. Apparently the procurator could also waive his right to try a particular {64} case and send it to Rome, and there are examples of this procedure also, but from the cases in question there does not appear to have been a definite policy on the matter. A complicating factor in the case of Judea is the competency of the Jewish Sanhedrin to pass the death sentence. Unfortunately, this very intriguing question of ancient legal history has become embroiled in later polemics, in which the Jews have been accused by Christians of killing their Messiah, and Jewish scholarship has, understandably, reacted by denying that the Jewish people had any such authority at that time - something the Gospel of John seems to put beyond doubt by the answer of the Jewish leaders to Pilate: "We may not put anyone to death" (Jn 18:31).

The tractate Sanhedrin in the Mishnah, the Jewish law code, does recognise that it has the power of life and death, but, it is claimed, this reflects a much later idealised view of the Sanhedrin and does not reflect the first century situation. As against this statement in John it has been pointed out that the Sanhedrin passed sentence of death on Stephen (Ac 6:15), and Josephus tells us that during the interregnum between the procuratorships of Festus and Albinus, that is in 62 C.E., James, the brother of the Lord and head of the Jerusalem Christian Church, together with some others, was condemned to death by stoning by the Sanhedrin. However, it should be noted that Stephen's death has more the appearance of mob lynching than a formal execution (Ac 7:54-60), and the high priest who had James put to death was reported to the incoming procurator by moderate Jews and subsequently deposed for his action. On the other hand several inscriptions found in the temple area of Jerusalem threaten death to any gentile who passed beyond a certain point and it should be noted that Stephen was accused of "speaking against the holy place" (Ac 6:13). Paul, also, was on trial for his life when the Romans intervened, and one of the charges was that the Jews suspected him of bringing a gentile, Trophimus of {65} Ephesus, into the temple precincts (Ac 21:29). In fact Festus wanted him to be tried by the Sanhedrin but Paul refused and at that point decided to make his appeal to Rome (Ac 25:9-12). It seems reasonable to suppose therefore that the Sanhedrin did have certain well-circumscribed rights to impose the capital sentence when the temple was expressly under attack, and different Roman procurators may have exercised varying degrees of vigilance over the way in which this right was exercised.

This brings us back to the legalities of the trial of Jesus. The gospel portrait of Pilate has sometimes been regarded as suspect, mainly because Josephus, our only other major source, presents him as a greedy and ruthless individual with little regard for the Jewish religion or practice. He is reported as having introduced images of Caesar into Jerusalem, always a sensitive issue with the Jews, because of the fear of idolatry and the second commandment prohibiting images of any kind. Besides, he appropriated money from the temple treasury to build an aqueduct into Jerusalem. On another occasion he broke up a religious gathering of the Samaritans with wholesale slaughter. Could this be the Pilate of the gospels, it is argued, who is presented as weak, even ineffectual perhaps, but not abrasive and arrogant? Those who think that it could not, believe that the gospels' portrait has been deliberately softened by early Christian tradition, anxious to curry favour with Rome by exonerating her from all blame for Jesus' death, whereas it is maintained, the crucifixion shows that it was Rome, not the Jews who were really responsible. However, to this it can be countered that in passing final judgement, Pilate would naturally impose the Roman form of sentence - crucifixion. Death by stoning would have been inconceivable in a Roman court, yet Pilate's involvement, and decision was inevitable once the charge was made one of subversion of Roman law and order, something that Luke in particular underlines (Lk 23:2). In this instance Pilate was able to placate certain elements of the Jewish aristocracy, and {66} according to Luke, also ingratiate himself with Antipas, by having the latter try Jesus as well (Lk 23:7-12), without compromising his own position in any way. Yet, it should be noted that Luke is aware of Pilate's true nature by referring in passing to an incident, otherwise unknown, concerning the slaughter of Galileans in Jerusalem (Lk 13:2). Given the differing purposes of their writings then, there is no real contradiction between Josephus' portrait of Pilate and the gospel accounts, nor any improbability about the main lines of the latter's version of the charge against Jesus. The Jews referred the case to Pilate, even though it was within their general competence insofar as the charge allegedly involved an attack on the temple, because they were conscious of Pilate's likely reactions had they proceeded independently. At the same time they had to put the case in political, not religious terms, because of his indifference, even hostility to their religious feelings.

The other procurators mentioned in the New Testament, Felix and Festus, get off rather lightly in Acts of the Apostles, considering their records. At the end of Felix's term of office Judea was in anarchy, as the Jewish resistance movement that had been partly underground for sometime now emerged in full light of day. The Judean countryside seems to have been their base, though Jerusalem and the temple was their goal. In fact their name sicarii, is probably derived from their tactic of using the small Roman sica or dagger disguised under their cloaks, as they engaged in what can be described as urban guerilla warfare. Not merely were they determined to overthrow the Romans for religious reasons, first stated emphatically by Judas the Galilean, but they also directed their wrath against the wealthy Jewish aristocracy who were seen as collaborationists with Rome. Felix did nothing to control the situation, and may even have used the sicarii to murder a former high priest Jonathan, whose influence he feared. Consequently there would appear to have been a wholesale breakdown of law and order, and the Jewish population of the Hellenistic towns {67} came under increasing pressure from their gentile neighbours. Felix was replaced by Festus in 60 C.E., but without any improvement in the overall situation, with the more radical elements of the Jewish religion coming more and more to the forefront, and the high priestly aristocracy, who wanted to remain loyal to Rome for their own advantage, were pushed unwillingly to the brink of revolt. It only took a few more short years of weak procuratorial misrule to fan the fire of open revolt that had been smouldering for some time. The procuratorship of Florus (64-66) was the climax. His insolence went beyond the bounds of his predecessors, confiscating temple money and engaging in open confrontation with the people of Jerusalem. Despite the best efforts of Agrippa II to defuse the situation, the Zealots, a party made up of Jewish priests of lesser rank and country peasants, threw down the gauntlet to Rome by taking control of the temple and refusing to allow daily sacrifices on behalf of the Emperor. This was tantamount to an open declaration of war since the daily sacrifice to their God was the Jewish equivalent to worship of the Emperor, which was expected of every loyal inhabitant of the empire as an act of civic duty.

There is no need here to detail the events of the ensuing revolt. It is sufficient to know that after four years of bloodshed and siege the Jerusalem temple was burned to the ground by storming Roman troops, and a chapter of Jewish history that had begun with the rebuilding of the temple by the Babylonian exiles in 515 B.C.E. - the second temple period, as Jewish historians call it - had come to an end. The Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum still stands today as a reminder of the historic event that was to have far-reaching effects for Jews and Christians. The Jews fought with courage, but, like all radical revolutionary movements were bedeviled by internal party struggles and dissensions. Josephus enumerates as many as six different groupings in the revolutionary party, all deadly enemies of each other, and to outline their differing ideologies here would be as {68} confusing as to attempt to explain the internal differences within the Irish revolutionary movement to an American who thinks of the long-standing unrest in Northern Ireland as a religious war. The Roman general, Vespasian, who took control of the campaign (and after him his son Titus when the former had been declared Emperor in 69 C.E.), had only to play a wait-and-see game once the resistance in the countryside was broken. A few desperate revolutionaries held out at Masada, a desert fortress near the Dead Sea, until 73 C.E. before writing a glorious if macabre penultimate page to the Jewish resistance movement, by committing suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. Their heroism had little effect on the final settlement however. The land of Palestine was appropriated and given to loyal supporters of Rome, the whole province was now given Imperial rank, the tenth legion was stationed there and all Jews were forced to pay the half-shekel offering, formerly their annual contribution to the daily sacrifices, to the Capitoline Jupiter.

The suicides of Masada were a penultimate page because a final note had yet to be added. In 132 C.E. as the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, decided to build a temple to the Roman god Jupiter on the temple mount in Jerusalem, Jewish resistance broke out once more under a leader known to us only as Simeon Bar-Kochba, "the Son of the Star." The name presumably has messianic overtones based on the blessing of Balaam in the book of Numbers which speaks of the future redeemer as "a star that shall advance from Jacob" (Nm 24:16). Unfortunately, the second Jewish revolt did not have an historian comparable to Josephus whose seven books of the Jewish War is such a valuable chronicle of the first revolt. Our information on the extent of this revolt and its course is limited to a few general comments of later writers, and some recent archaeological finds in the Judean desert. Apparently it was a bloody affair, confined mainly to the country, and the Jews were successful for a time before eventually their leaders were rounded up and {69} executed, including Rabbi Aqiba, a leading teacher who had apparently given his blessing to the revolt and had acknowledged Bar-Kochba, as a messianic figure. The proposed temple was never built however, but the Judaism that survived this second purge was more than ever committed to "another way," which made no claims to be political in any ordinary sense of the word. This development within Judaism between the two revolts and its impact for emerging Christianity will be discussed in the next two chapters.

III. Rome and the Jews of the Diaspora

According to Strabo, a Hellenistic geographer (+25 C.E. approx.) it was "not easy to find a place in the inhabited world which this tribe (Jews) has not penetrated and which has not been occupied by it." Certainly archaeological evidence of synagogues, cemeteries and other identifiably Jewish buildings are strewn across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, and even beyond. While it is impossible to give any accurate estimate it seems certain that throughout our period the total Jewish population outside Palestine was far in excess of that in the homeland. Undoubtedly the social and economic opportunities that Hellenism afforded were largely responsible for this movement of Jews away from Palestine even though two centuries previously many souls in exile in Babylon had been pining to return there. Jews had left the homeland prior to Alexander's conquests, and many did not return from the Babylonian exile when the Persian Cyrus presented them with the opportunity to do so. Nevertheless it is in Hellenistic times that the greatest movement took place, and the legal arrangements that the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and later, the Roman administration arrived at in safeguarding their distinctive way of life was to have vital consequences for the first Christians also. One has only to consider Paul"s {70} missionary strategy as described in Acts of the Apostles - using Jewish synagogues as his first base of operation - to recognise how vital it was for the new movement to have certain structures established throughout the Roman world. To catalogue, not to speak of describing in any detail the history of the Jews at the various centres in the Greco-Roman world, would take us far beyond the confines of this survey. We shall instead restrict ourselves to a number of more important questions with special relevance for our topic.

The fact that at the time of the first Jewish revolt against Rome we do not hear of any mass uprising throughout the empire, suggests that many Jews had a vested interest in not identifying with the revolutionaries in the fatherland. This is all the more significant in view of the fact that strong religious ties were maintained by means of the annual pilgrimages to the temple, the paying of the half-shekel offering for the daily sacrifices and the acceptance of various regulations on liturgical matters (e.g. dealing with the calendar) from the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. The only explanation must be that many Jews of the Diaspora had achieved a tolerable modus vivendi with the Roman authorities and were reluctant to disrupt such arrangements. Of course, this did not mean that these Jews did not suffer then and later, as popular feeling was aroused against them, especially in the cities of the eastern provinces adjacent to Palestine itself.

We are best informed about the status of Jews in Egypt and we may take it that the general outline was similar elsewhere, subject of course to local circumstances and at different periods. In Egypt we find Jews not merely playing a vital role in the life of the new city Alexandria, but also scattered in pockets throughout the countryside. The fact that a Jewish temple, set up by the expatriate Jewish high priest Onias IV (c. 170 B.C.E.), remained in existence until 73 C.E. is ample evidence of the extent to which differing Ptolemaic and later Roman authorities were prepared to {71} go in granting both religious and legal status to Jews. Many of the Jews of the countryside were settlers to whom plots of land had been granted in reward for military services rendered, and which in time became hereditary. This was a common enough way of settling a particular area and ensuring its proper supervision under the Hellenistic monarchies: The Jews had a reputation for military prowess, and it is no surprise to hear that the Seleucids also availed of their services. Thus we hear of Antiochus III (c. 210 B.C.E.) giving orders for 2,000 Jewish families from Mesopotamia to be resettled in the regions of Phrygia and Lydia (in Asia Minor) and promising them not just religious freedom, but various tax incentives also in return for their taking care of Seleucid interests in a troubled area.

Not all Jewish emigrants were so fortunate, however, and the majority are to be found in the various cities of the empire. This explains why the question of citizenship looms so large in all the surviving documents often giving rise to bitter recriminations between Jews and Gentiles. On this issue depended the rights and privileges of individuals and groups in regard to taxation, military service, trading and commerce, as well as other advantages in private and public life. However, citizenship of a particular city should not be confused with Roman citizenship as discussed earlier. The former was generally a necessary prerequisite for the latter, but even when this status was not achieved, it was still highly significant to have citizen's rights of Alexandria, Antioch or some other city, since the charters of the various cities were all ratified by the Emperor.

Some Jews undoubtedly acquired citizen's rights of various cities, but evidence from Alexandria, Antioch, Asia Minor and other places suggests that attempts were made to achieve this status for all Jews. It would appear, however, that such attempts were unsuccessful, despite Josephus' suggestions to the contrary as part of his apologetic for his Roman readers. A letter from the emperor Claudius to the citizens of Alexandria in the wake of civil disturbances {72} there about the year 41 C.E. makes it clear that Rome was not prepared to authorise an upgrading of the Jewish legal status, and the same conclusion can be gleaned from documents relating to other cities also. Claudius writes:

Wherefore, once again I conjure you that on the one hand the Alexandrians show themselves forbearing and kindly towards the Jews who for many years have dwelt in the same city, and dishonour none of the rites observed by them in the worship of their god, but allow them to observe their customs as in the time of the divine Augustus, which customs I also, after hearing both sides, have sanctioned; and on the other hand I explicitly order the Jews not to agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed, and ... not to force their way into gymnasiarchic or cosmetic games, while enjoying their own privileges and sharing a great abundance of advantages in a city not their own, and not to bring in or admit Jews who come down the river from Syria or Egypt, a proceeding that will compel me to conceive serious suspicions.

Claudius was clearly cognisant of the aspirations of the Alexandrian Jews but he was not prepared to allow any innovations, beyond the traditional freedom of religion and private association, and furthermore, he insisted that such rights could not be extended to other Jews from outside the city. How then are we to define the rights of the Jews in the various cities? In attempting to answer that question it is important to be aware that the charters of the various cities tolerated associations of people for different purposes: work, social purposes, religious, commercial and the like. Such toleration was all the more necessary in the Hellenistic cities, over against those of classical Greece, because of the many different backgrounds and interests represented by the inhabitants of the cities in Hellenistic times. Such associations were legally recognised even when their {73} members did not possess full rights of citizenship. As an example of these diverse elements Strabo writes of the city of Cyrene (in North Africa): "There were four classes in the city: citizens, farmers, resident aliens and Jews." In all probability then, the legal status of Jewish communities within the cities was that of a free association for religious purposes, and this would also have included administration of the group's own internal affairs. This explains why we find fully organised quasi-autonomous Jewish communities with their own synagogues, officials and judicial system within the Greek cities, and also in Rome (cf. Ac 28:17). Inscriptions from various synagogues suggest a wide range of officials, both religious and secular, with different functions in regard to the life of the association. It would appear that at least in some instances there was a supervisory group of elders, headed by a leader, who formed the administrative body for several different synagogues within a particular city. In recognising early Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism one could easily overlook the community structures, legally recognised by the various city charters, that were ready to hand as models for Christian groups to organise themselves along similar lines.

Local circumstances determined to a large degree the toleration that such Jewish associations received at any particular time. Unlike the Hellenistic monarchies that preceded them, the Romans appear to have attempted a universal policy towards the Jews in the various cities of the Empire. In all probability this policy had its origins in the treaty of friendship between the emerging Korean power in the East and Judas Maccabaeus (see opening citation of the chapter). Subsequently, Caesar, Mark Antony, Augustus and Claudius all made general appeals that the rights of the Jews "to live according to their ancestral laws" be recognised. Yet at the same time, the treatment of the Jews in the city of Rome itself was a clear indication that toleration could not be presumed. As early as the year 139 B.C.E. that is within thirty years {74} of Judas' alliance of friendship and only a few years after its renewal by his brother Simon, (1 Macc 14:24), we hear that the praetor or official policeman in charge of foreigners, expelled the Jews from Rome. In the extant account of the incident astrologers are also mentioned as having been banished. This is the first of many attempts that continued on into imperial times to exclude foreign cults from Rome, presumably because they were thought to be a threat to the civic religion of the state, and in all probability it may indicate that even at that early stage the Jews were attracting many proselytes and others to their religion. By the middle of the following century one may infer from Cicero's remarks that the Roman Jewish community was large and affluent in view of the gifts they had been able to send to the Jerusalem temple. While Augustus made serious attempts to curtail foreign cults in his efforts to restore the old religion, it was under his successor, Tiberius, that we hear of the next positive measures against Jews, but once again Egyptian priests of the goddess Isis are included in the expulsion orders. It is doubtful if all Jews actually left, since in Caligula's reign twenty years later we hear of many Jews in Rome at the time when the Emperor was pressing to have his statue erected in the Jerusalem temple. While Claudius apparently intended to reverse the harsh anti-Jewish measures of his predecessor, his hand was forced by rioting in which Jews were involved and so once again we hear of an edict of expulsion, a fact recorded in Acts of the Apostles also. It was this edict that brought Aquila and Priscilla to Corinth, where they were to establish a partnership with their fellow tent-maker, Paul, recently arrived in the city (Ac 18:1-4).

Suetonius, a Roman writer of the second century, describes this particular expulsion as follows: "Since the Jews constantly make disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome." Many commentators see this as a reference to Christ, and interpret Suetonius' remarks to suggest that some Christian missionaries had {75} already appeared in the Jewish community in Rome preaching their version of the "new religion," and that it was this that gave rise to the civil strife between them and more "orthodox" Jews. This interpretation would find further confirmation if we could assume that Aquila and Priscilla were Christians before joining Paul at Corinth, something that the account in Acts at least suggests. Such a conclusion indicates that as far as Roman authorities were concerned Jews and Christians were still essentially one and the same movement coming out of Judea. We do not know when exactly a visibly separate Christian church emerged in Rome, but certainly the Epistle to the Romans written about the year 56 C.E. seems to presuppose one that is no longer predominantly Jewish, and Paul's arrival in the city in the early sixties can only have accentuated the break. Certainly by the year 64 C.E. Roman Christians are a clearly recognisable group distinct from the Jews, though presumably sharing in the unpopularity of the latter with the Roman aristocracy, since Nero made them the scapegoats for the great fire, which had aroused the suspicion of the Roman populace against himself.

As we shall see in the final chapter, the Christians increasingly were to draw the special attenttion of the Roman authorities, presumably because of their growing numerical strength throughout the Empire. Archaeological evidence in the city of Rome itself suggests that a very considerable Jewish population continued there, and this wasn"t at all confined to any one quarter. At the same time aristocratic and influential Roman writers of the later first century C.E., like Seneca the philosopher, Martial the writer of epigrams, Juvenal the satirist, Quintilian the Rhetorician and above all Tacitus the historian, betrayed blatant anti-Jewish bias in their writing. Part of this can be attributed to their general contempt for things eastern and provincial. Tacitus disdainfully comments that all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular in Rome, and Juvenal, somewhat {76} more colourfully but no less bitterly concurs: "long ago the Syrian Orontes has poured its refuse into the Roman Tiber." Yet while the Jews (and Christians) came in for their share of this general invective there must have been special aspects of Judaism that classified it in Roman eyes as a "superstition" - a derogatory term that contrasts with other respectable "philosophies." When their invective is examined it becomes clear that very often it consists of stock phrases, largely unexamined it would appear. The Jews are accused of shameful deeds, their origins were shameful and degenerate, they are given to idleness (the Sabbath), and perhaps most important of all they pervert Roman religion and teach their converts contempt for family and fatherland. One might have expected that ideas like monotheism might have been of special interest to a philosopher/writer like Cicero who wrote a lengthy work on The Nature of the Gods, or that Jewish ethical ideas would have been attractive to a moral philosopher like Seneca. Yet there are no traces of any such interest on the part of the pagan writers.

It is difficult to assess the impact of such literature on popular as distinct from aristocratic attitudes towards Jews and Judaism. Some Jews certainly attained positions of honour in Roman circles, both administrative (Tiberius Alexander, the governor of Alexandria) and social (Herod Agrippa I in the Imperial court). But these appear to be the exceptions. Everywhere there is a synagogue we meet proselytes and God-fearers, that is those who had converted to Judaism or those who were attracted to certain aspects of the faith, but without undergoing circumcision as the formal rite of initiation for males. These must have been due, in part at least, to the active missionary activity of zealous Jews (cf. Mt 23:15), but also because of the search for a personal religion in the Hellenistic and Roman world. It is equally difficult to estimate the value of such Jewish apologists as Josephus or Philo in explaining the meaning of Judaism and its history for interested outsiders. In all {77} probability it was the daily living of the Jewish life that attracted most attention and comment, often no doubt favourable, from those who had no axe to grind. The fact is that Judaism - with its stress on external practices of prayer, ritual purity, Sabbath, circumcision, synagogue meetings for study of the sacred writings - had a high visibility by comparison with the occasional nature of the civic religions and the secret aspects of the Mysteries. Added to this were the very live contacts that were maintained between the Diaspora and the homeland in religious matters. The fact that the Jewish right to collect and send offerings with the pilgrims to the Jerusalem temple was maintained by imperial decree was not particularly popular with local magistrates, and there are cases of opposition and even of confiscation of the money. Nevertheless this aspect of the Jewish religion must have given it a very distinctive quality, even in the ancient world. Many from the Diaspora transferred to Jerusalem, a fact that is attested both by the presence of Greek-speaking synagogues and the presence of the so-called "Hellenists" in the early Christian community there.

It might be expected that the Jewish religion would have been formally banned after the Palestinian Jews had dared to challenge the might of Rome in the two revolts. Yet the measures the Romans adopted, even in Palestine, were not that drastic. Within a relatively short space of time some official status was achieved by the schools of the rabbis, and eventually in the second century a single ruling head, officially styled the Patriarch, was recognised in law and had far-reaching administrative and judicial powers over Jews both at home and in the Diaspora. Clearly, the affronts that Rome had suffered, and the decisive, even ruthless suppression of the revolts did not impede the Roman imperial authorities from distinguishing between Jewish political aspirations which had to be suppressed in the name of Roman authority, and the religious aspirations which could be tolerated. Nor did the question of Emperor worship, which was as unacceptable to Jewish monotheism {78} as it was to Christian beliefs about Jesus, change this official Roman policy. The loyal sacrifices offered on behalf of the Emperor to the Jewish God, and subsequently the half-shekel contribution, now devoted by Roman decree to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, must in time have eased the suspicions that Jews were anti-Roman and lacking in their civic duty. Besides, even when the Palestinian Jews had to bear the brunt of Roman wrath, a clear distinction was made in regard to Diaspora Jews. As he returned home in triumph after the destruction of the temple (70 C.E.), Titus refused the demand to dissolve the rights of the Jewish association in Antioch, thereby clearly indicating that the legal rights of the Diaspora Jews were on a different footing to those in Palestine. No doubt such official decisions did not increase the popularity of Jews within local communities, but it does illustrate how it was possible for Judaism to survive within the Empire, even when its political ambitions were thwarted. What Roman law guaranteed to the Jews of the Diaspora was the right of free association, and given the nature of the Jewish religion this was adequate protection for it to survive.

This discussion of the status and social role of Jewish communities in the Diaspora is important not only in its own right, but also because of the light it sheds on early Christian life and activity within the Roman Empire of the first century. The journeys of Paul and other Christian missionaries throughout the Roman world, his collections for the "poor in Jerusalem" (Ac 11:29-30; Rm 15:25-26; 2 Cor 9), the legal status of local Christian groups in Roman law and city charters, the organisation and internal structures of such groups - all of this becomes intelligible against the background of the Jewish Diaspora we have been discussing. Later we shall emphasise early Christianity's intellectual debt to this tradition. Here we wish to record its dependence on the visible and social role that Jews had been achieving for themselves within the Greco-Roman world long before Christianity's arrival on the scene.

{81}

Chapter 3. The Jewish Religion

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion (Ps 137:1).

Thus says Cyrus, King of Persia, "The Lord, the God of Heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up." (2 Chron 36:23).

In those days lawless men came forth from Israel and misled many, saying: "Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us, for since we separated ourselves from them many evils have come upon us" (1 Macc 1:11).

Then many who were seeking righteousness, and justice went down to the wilderness to dwell there, they, their sons, their wives and their cattle, because evils pressed heavily upon them (1 Macc 2:29).

Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, and you say Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship (Jn 4:20). {82}

For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the market place they do not eat unless they purify themselves; and there are many other traditions they observe, the washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze (Mk 7:3).

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout looking for the consolation of Israel (Lk 2:25).

And he came to Nazareth where he was brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the Sabbath day (Lk 4:16).

The Scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you (Mt 23:2).

The Sadducees who say there is no resurrection came to him and they asked him a question (Mt 22:23).

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force (Mt 11:12).

They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. God who is over all be blessed forever. Amen (Rm 9:4-5).

THIS LAST quotation from St. Paul painfully highlights a fact that most Christians either do not know or do not care to acknowledge. I say "painfully," because had Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism been recognised, centuries of slander and persecution climaxing in the atrocities of our times could have been avoided. It must frankly be admitted {83} that many of the New Testament writings betray a sharp, polemical attitude towards Jews and Judaism and unfortunately, once these texts are prised free of the historical context in which they were written they all too easily suggest that Judaism as a religion is outmoded, even degenerate. It is the aim of this chapter and the succeeding one to begin to set the record straight by attempting to capture something of the variety and complexity of Judaism in the first century of the Common Era, and at the same time to locate early Christianity, as a religious movement, within that spectrum.

We have already outlined the external historical factors that the Jews encountered as part of the larger political worlds of Greece and Rome, and it will be necessary to recall these in this chapter also since the history of the Jewish religion in our period can be seen as a response to those pressures, leading to the ultimate separation between the synagogue and the Christian church. By honestly confronting the facts of history, the polemics of the New Testament can hopefully be better understood, and need not act as a deterrent to Jews and Christians alike recognising their common heritage.

In speaking of Judaism as a religion it is important to distinguish between the Israelite religion as represented in the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures for Jews) and Jewish beliefs and practices at the time of Jesus. While there is clearly a continuity between the two, much had happened in the centuries immediately prior to Christianity that was to be of decisive importance in indicating new directions for Jewish faith and practice. These developments were always grounded on the earlier religion of the Pentateuch and the Prophets, yet went considerably beyond those foundational documents in scope and intention. Central to the religious insights of the earlier period were the beliefs that Yahweh alone was the Lord of history, that he had chosen Israel as his own in a special way, and that he had revealed his will at Sinai in a set of moral imperatives that were absolutely binding if Israel wished to be faithful to {84} her commitment as the chosen people. None of these central insights, and few of the practices and rituals through which they were expressed were ever lost sight of and are presupposed in our treatment, yet the Second Temple Period, as it is called, posed special problems and produced novel answers which will be our special focus in this chapter. The Second Temple Period dates from the re-dedication of the restored Jerusalem temple in the year 515 B.C.E., and remote as it may seem, this is the more correct starting point for a discussion of Judaism than the more usual one of Alexander's conquests, two centuries later. Of course the latter was the beginning of a new and very different epoch in the religious history of the whole Mediterranean world, as outlined in our first chapter, and it is not surprising to find developments within Judaism parallel to those taking place on the larger scene. Nevertheless, the experience of the Babylonian exile two centuries earlier and its immediate aftermath had in a sense prepared Judaism for the crisis that Hellenism was to bring on, and so it is to these earlier developments that we must first turn our attention. Subsequently we shall treat in turn of the Hellenistic reform and its repercussions within Judaism (II); the "Four Philosophies" and their beliefs (III); and the rise of rabbinic Judaism in the Jamnia period (IV).

I. The Exile and the Return

Ps 137 (first citation), aptly described as "the ballad of the exiles" in the Jerusalem Bible, poignantly expressed the trauma to Israel's faith that the exile caused. The belief that Yahweh was the Lord of History, which had been so central to early Israel's religious experience (cf. for example, Dt 26:5-11; Jos 24) had suffered a severe setback in 587 B.C.E. In that year the Babylonians finally destroyed the Jerusalem temple and deported some of the leaders of the Jerusalem religious society, including the king, the officials {85} of the temple, and other members of the: aristocracy, leaving behind "the poorest of the land to be vinedressers and ploughmen" (2 Kgs 25:12). The promise made to David that his son should sit on his throne forever (2 Sm 7) seemed now like an empty wish, and the belief that Yahweh had made his name to dwell in the Jerusalem temple so recently reaffirmed in the Deuteronomic reform (cf Dt 13:41) had suffered a rude shock. The prophet Ezechiel possibly addressing the exilic community, yet reflecting his own sorrow as a temple priest, writes of his vision which saw the glory of Yahweh hovering over the city before departing to the East (Ez 11:22f) - and the same prophet suggests that there were some in Israel who even queried whether or not God was just (Ez 18:25).

Yet disappointment, dismay and disillusionment were not the only reactions of the Jewish community in exile. Clearly some practical arrangements and adaptations had to be made if all was not to be lost, especially as there are hints that the exiled King of Judah, Jehoiachin, was-honourably received at the Babylonian court. In such circumstances total absorption into the local environment would have been very easy, yet clearly, some at least of the more devout exiles were able to see beyond the externals and detect within the tragedy the deeper plan of God. Even prior to the exile, the prophet Jeremiah had prepared for the seeming rejection by warning that Yahweh's ties with Jerusalem were not irrevocable in face of a wicked people. Ezechiel, his younger contemporary and later, the anonymous author of Is 40-55 encouraged the exiles to a new awareness of themselves as the true remnant of Israel whose sufferings could be redemptive for all (Ez 11:15-21; Is 53). Probably the impetus for such a reorganisation came from the priests and Levites, whose social standing in Babylonia would have counted for nothing and who would have considered themselves the guardians of Israel's religious heritage in the absence of the temple. No doubt it was in these same circles that the decree of Cyrus, allowing Jews {86} to return, found its most enthusiastic response, and so those who eventually returned to Jerusalem would be doing so for very definite religious reasons that were to mark them off within the restored community.

First, however, we must briefly consider the experience of the exile itself and attempt to assess its impact on religious views. The first and most important effect of the experience was to create a greater awareness of Israel's past inheritance and traditions, and the puting of these into writing. It is sometimes said that the first two parts of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Law and the Prophets - the Writings are the third division) were more or less finalised in this period. However, that is an oversimplification, given the fact that both sections went through considerable adaptation in the subsequent period as they were interpreted to meet the various crises of the restored community's life. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the exile was an important, indeed decisive moment in the collection of the traditions of the earlier period. This was a very natural reaction to the crisis, since without the temple there was no tangible sign of Israel's special identity. Collecting the traditions of the past was a most natural way of filling that vacuum. Henceforth, all development within Jewish life would be made with reference to this body of traditions, and their study would give rise to a new class of scholars, the scribes, in the succeeding centuries.

Closely related to this development was the emergence of the synagogue as an important institution in Jewish life. Originally, this Greek word and its Jewish equivalent signified a meeting for any purpose, but as early as the exile it apparently had acquired religious overtones, perhaps primarily as an act (rather than a place) of meeting for prayer and the collection and study of the sacred traditions. Already then in this exilic situation, deprived of the temple, one can detect the beginning of alternative institutions that were eventually to replace the temple as the centre of Jewish life and worship. To be sure, as an institution the synagogue in Babylonia was {87} probably highly unstructured and ad hoc, but the important fact remains that Judaism was able to find an alternative way of worshipping its God when deprived of the temple. This discovery was to stand it in good stead in the succeeding centuries.

We have already mentioned the impact that the exile had had on the faith of Israel, even to the point of raising a serious question concerning the nature of God and the divine/human relationship as Israel had experienced it. These questions were to find different expressions in the post-exilic period where differing trends of thought are readily recognisable in the variety of literary productions during this period, as distinct from the relatively homogeneous narrative, legal and prophetic-oracular material of earlier times. In particular Wisdom and Apocalyptic emerge as two new and dominant literary trends. And while they were certainly to blend in the melting-pot of the religious and cultural upheaval of the succeeding centuries they had each originally very different origins and addressed rather different questions. As already mentioned, the loss of king and homeland had given rise to serious problems about the action of God in history, problems that became more intensified for the zealous upholders of Israel's traditions on the return. Besides, the swings in the political pendulum of power - from Babylonian, to Persian, to Greek, to Ptolemaic, to Seleucid, to Roman - all kept alive the questions of the divine purpose on the historical and cosmic planes, and it was to such problems as these that Apocalyptic addressed itself, especially when such shifts affected certain segments of the restored community, as we shall see more clearly in the next section. On the other hand, traditional wisdom, such as that found in The Book of Proverbs, is now pressed into service of the more everyday questions of life and death. While Wisdom's court origins had provoked the criticism of the prophets before the exile as being secular and lacking in proper trust in Yahweh's lordship (Is 29:14), it can be put to use in a more highly {88} individualistic age (cf. for example Ez 17) where now each man's personal lot has to be discovered and lived out, often in face of the dumb opaqueness of life's experiences (cf. for example, Qoheleth and Job). Once again we must move well beyond the immediate exilic experience before problems like these are fully articulated and addressed. Yet there is little difficulty in tracing their origins at least in part to the Babylonian experience.

Our lack of real historical sources makes it difficult to trace the religious history of the restored community in any great detail. However, a number of trends and issues can be detected from the first fifty years or so which are also present when again the sources become adequate almost three centuries later. This suggests that the earlier tensions continued to dominate, with of course the added complicating factor of Hellenism, as we shall see. Basically, the tension was now one of deciding who were the more faithful interpreters of Israel's religious traditions. At least in the first century after the return, two opposing groups emerge, on the one hand the returnees, variously called "the men of the exile," "the holy race," "Israelites," and on the other the natives who had not experienced the exile, usually opprobriously styled "the people of the land" in the sources (The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah as well as the prophets Third Isaiah (56-66), Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi) all of which are definitely written from the perspective of the former group. The issues between these groups (and various subgroups on both sides) were varied: marriage with foreigners, the observance of the purity laws, relations with the Samaritans who had opposed the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple, forms of sacrificial worship. Yet all of these have to do with the question of the self-identity of the community, and clearly the returning exiles were determined that the only way for Judaism to retain its distinctiveness was by a policy of rigid separatism, no doubt based on the experience of what had happened to their more open minded coreligionists in exile. The missions of Ezra, the scribe, and {89} later Nehemiah, are concerned with this question of the separation of the community from outside contacts, especially in the area of mixed marriages (Ezra 10:1-44; Neh 9:2; 10:29-31). The necessity for such reforms suggests that the returnees had not been totally successful in imposing their point of view, and we hear from Josephus that later this issue split the Jerusalem community, causing some dissident priests to join the Samaritans and assist in the building of the rival temple on Mt. Gerizim. Clearly, not even the towering figure of Ezra, a second Moses, was able to eliminate the opposing point of view.

These conflicts, which can only be referred to here in passing, are of great significance for understanding subsequent divisions and struggles within Judaism, something we shall later see in greater detail, in section III. Their importance for our purposes is the fact that they suggest very different, even rival claims to –what is normative Judaism, if we may use that term for this period. Even though the monarchy was divided in earlier times between north and south, there never was a division on the basis of religious beliefs, at least not to the point where one group considered itself to be the sole authentic voice of the communal religious experience. Clearly, the exile has introduced a new and very different element into Judaism, radicalising it into various conflicting factions, and from this perspective the encounter with Hellenism is only another phase of an ongoing problem. Yet, strangely, despite the efforts of the rigorists to separate themselves entirely from outside influences, it would appear that they were less than fully successful. In the very body of literature that is generally considered to emanate from their circles, Apocalyptic, one finds traces of what today) are generally regarded by scholars to be Persian influences: belief in angels and demons, a dualistic understanding of the world, concern with the stars and other heavenly bodies, to be seen in the special interest in calendars. It would appear that no matter how seriously one takes the notion of religious {90} separation and isolation from the larger cultural world, this cannot be effectively realised when other factors, cultural, economic and political are ranged against it. We must now turn to a new phase of Judaism's struggle with this problem in terms of the Hellenistic reform of 167 B.C.E.

II. The Hellenistic Reform and its Repercussions within Judaism

In our opening chapter we discussed some of the cultural and economic results of Hellenism, and we also saw the way in which these developments posed a real challenge to the established religions. Corresponding to the one-culture world of which all were becoming increasingly conscious, we find that the notion of one god (of whom local gods were mere manifestations) was also becoming more acceptable. It causes little surprise then to discover that those Jews who had been affected by the general movement of Hellenism shared some of these assumptions and were ready to identify Yahweh with Zeus, "for since we separated ourselves from them (the gentiles) many evils have come upon us," as the laconic citation from 1 Macc (third quotation above) put it. The evils of separation were undoubtedly social and economic, and so the pattern and tensions we have already seen in the exilic community and that of the immediate return repeat themselves. But who were these "lawless men" and what was the background to their free-thinking attitudes within Judaism?

There is fairly general agreement that throughout the third century B.C.E. - the "hidden century," because of our lack of sources - there had developed within Palestinian Judaism a lay nobility side by side with the priestly aristocracy who, technically at least, were the sole rulers in the temple state. Two families appear in our scattered sources, the Tobiads, as representative of the former, and the Oniads, of the latter. Naturally there was rivalry that came to a head {91} when the Ptolemaic king, as overlord of Palestine, made a Tobiad the chief of the Jews, with the right to collect the taxes. What had effectively taken place was a separation of church and state, to use a modern phrase, and even though the high-priesthood was reaffirmed in its position of primacy on the Seleucid takeover of Palestine, the hellenised aristocracy had discovered that control of the highest religious office meant control of the Jewish state and its policies. Consequently they availed of the first opportunity to seize power, which occurred because of the financial straits of the young Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, (known as Epiphanes because of his desire to be considered a divine being).

First Jason (the brother of the existing high priest) and then Menelaus (who was not even of priestly stock) were installed and it seemed as though the Hellenisers would have their way. Jerusalem was to be turned into a Greek city, thus abrogating its charter as head of a temple state, and an even more damaging innovation was the introduction of a Greek school where young Jewish boys were to learn the Greek way of life and even abandon circumcision, the sign of the Jewish male (2 Macc 4:7-9). Resistance mounted, probably from the hasidim, or pious ones, whose background and views we will presently discuss, but when Antiochus had his military hopes thwarted in Egypt, he invaded the Jerusalem temple carrying off some of its treasures and subsequently sent a general to impose on the Jews also a decree that his whole kingdom should worship the one god This was followed by a wholesale religious persecution that lasted for over three years, until at last a family of country priests, the Maccabees, launched a resistance movement. This eventually led to the repeal of the hated decree and the re-dedication of the Jerusalem temple, giving rise to the feast of Hanukkah, or Dedication feast that we find Jesus observing according to Jn 10:17.

The resistance movement brought together various elements within Jewish society, but once the hour of crisis had passed it soon became apparent that there were serious {92} differences between them as to what constituted the national ideal. The extreme Hellenisers who had been prepared to identify Yahweh with Zeus found that they were a tiny minority, and with the death of Menelaus, their representative in the high-priesthood, there was never any likelihood of their succeeding even with the active support of the Seleucid king. One little episode is perhaps indicative of the temporising with Hellenism that was current. On the occasion of the games in honour of the god Hercules at Tyre, Jason the incumbent high priest had sent an offering on behalf of the god, but the envoys decided that the sacred money should not be spent in this manner and put it to another use (2 Macc 4:18-20). Thus, the extreme Hellenisers could hardly expect to dismantle the Jewish religion entirely - an interesting contrast with the Samaritans at Mount Gerizim where the cult of Zeus was actively fostered (2 Macc 6:2).

Yet this did not mean that all Hellenistic tendencies were purged from the Jerusalem aristocracy. The high priest appointed by the Seleucids after the rededication of the temple, Alcimus, is typical of the modified Hellenisers now emerging. Yet once the temple scribes had ascertained that he was of the priestly line he was accepted, even by the hasidim (1 Macc 7:12f).

The Maccabaean brothers, Judas, Jonathan and Simon, appear to have adopted a middle position between the Hellenisers and the hasidim once the immediate threat of the reform was over. While the authors of the books of Maccabees treat them as national heroes who were ready to sacrifice all for faith and fatherland, the political sequel indicates that their intentions were not just religious. Thus in the year 152 B.C.E. Jonathan accepted the office of high priest from the Seleucid monarch of the day (1 Macc 10:21), even though he was not of the house of Sadok, the high priestly family, and this led to a radical reaction on the part of some Jews, as we shall see. Subsequently Simon, the third brother, also accepted the office, thereby continuing the precedent that the civil ruler in the newly emerging Hasmonaean state should also be the religious leader (1 Macc14:41). {93} Thus we have the anomaly that the family who were celebrated as the saviours of the Jewish faith at the moment of crisis became, themselves, the champions of a thoroughly Hellenistic state retaining control of religious affairs at the same time. It is in reaction to this group that, as we shall see in the next section, the Pharisees emerge for the first time as the party of opposition.

A third grouping mentioned in our sources for the period are the hasidim (literally "the pious ones" whom we have mentioned more than once. We first hear of the one group of hasidim (called literally a "synagogue," suggesting groups or conventicles) who joined forces with the Maccabees in the struggle for the law. They are described as "mighty warriors of Israel" (1 Macc 2:42), and were obviously in the forefront of the resistance movement, not pacifists, as is sometimes supposed on the basis of an earlier passage in the same chapter where we read of a group "who were seeking righteousness and justice," and who had gone to the desert, and left themselves undefended on the Sabbath (1 Macc 2:29-38). As we shall see, there may have been connections between these groups, but at least on the author's presentation they are not identical.

When next we hear of the hasidim they are accompanied by scribes enquiring into the pedigree of the proposed high priest of the restoration, Alcimus, and on being satisfied as to his legitimacy, they were the first to seek peace (l Macc 7:12f). This seems to be the point at which they and the Maccabees parted company: the former were content to give up the struggle for independence once they were assured freedom to practice their religious beliefs, whereas the latter were determined that nothing short of national independence was adequate, even if this meant compromising with the enemy.

On the basis of these scanty references it might appear that little can be said of the hasidim or their distinctive background and point of view. However, it is probable that their role in the resistance was much greater than the author of 1 Macc allows, writing as he was in support of the Maccabees who were under attack because of their {94} conduct of affairs in the Hasmonaean state. It is usual to attribute the book of Daniel to the hasidim for there we can detect attitudes which are more akin to their view of the crisis, than the more nationalistic minded Maccabees, who in fact do not feature very prominently in Dn (cf. the reference to "a little help" at 11:34). The real heroes of this book, clearly written under the stress of the persecution of Antiochus, are "the wise," who understand God's mysterious plan (12:10), have not shirked from giving their lives for their beliefs (11:23-25) and hope for ultimate vindication (12:2-3). They are "the saints of the Most High" who are to inherit the kingdom given to the Son of Man, who, at least in this work, stands as a corporate image for the whole group (7:13.23). Their sanctity finds its model in Daniel, as he is described in chapters 1-6, he is a strict observer of the dietary laws, remains steadfast in his Jewish faith despite threats, is endowed with the spirit of God and can interpret hidden mysteries.

In a word, the hasidim are the group among whom an apocalyptic vision of Israel's destiny has been fostered, and this pre-dates the immediate crisis which produced the book of Daniel. Indeed it could be argued that these are the very groups we have already met in the immediate post-exilic community, imbued with a deep sense of God's purposes in history and among whom the voices of the prophets of the past were brought to life by being constantly reinterpreted to address new crises, real or perceived by the group within the larger community.

As already mentioned, Apocalyptic, both as a mode of structuring reality and as a literary form, is a particular development of this period, with special relevance for early Christianity, as we shall see. There are a number of characteristic features of the apocalyptic mentality that are worth discussing, however briefly. To begin with, apocalyptic is the outgrowth of the belief that Yahweh is Lord of History, but now this belief is transferred to the cosmic plane, and the present time is conceived of as being abandoned to the powers of evil, soon to be superseded by a {95} new age where the just will be rewarded and evil in whatever form destroyed. This doctrine of the two ages, as it is called, finds poetic expression in a first century Apocalypse, the Fourth Book of Ezra: "For the world has lost its youth. The times begin to wax old ... For this cause the Most High has made not one age but two ages." The doctrine finds more concrete expression in other writings also. Thus in the Mishnah (the Jewish law code) we find an enumeration of all those to be excluded from the world to come (Sanhedrin 10:1), and in the gospel of Mark, we read that those who have followed Jesus are to have an hundredfold in this world and in the world to come everlasting life (Mk 10:30). Thus the doctrine of the two ages is the theological underpinning for the belief in the idea of resurrection of the dead - a doctrine that finds its first unequivocal expression in the book of Daniel: "and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament" (Dn 12:2-3). Apocalyptic provided the conceptual and symbolic framework for the first Christians to express their conviction and experience of Jesus' vindication by God. As Paul puts it rather forcefully: "If there is no resurrection from the dead, then Christ has not been raised" (1 Cor 15:13). This latter occurrence is a particular, indeed unique instance of a firmly held belief of wider range and application.

There are other aspects of the apocalyptic view of the world that found a congenial context within early Christianity. Of first importance is the notion of the kingdom of God. This idea, which of course had its origins in the covenant notion in early Israel and found concrete expression in the Davidic monarchy, is transferred to the coming age in the apocalyptic view. It stands over against the kingdoms of this age (in Daniel, the Persians, Alexander, Ptolemies and Seleucids; in later Apocalypses, the Romans), who are seen as the embodiment of the evil forces {96} oppressing the wise or the just, as the addressees are variously called. The establishing of God's rule is not a purely spiritual event however, but encompasses a new world, where God's purposes for history can be truly established. Thus, the dualism (good and evil forces ranged against each other) that is often seen as a distinguishing feature of apocalyptic is not as pessimistic as is sometimes imagined. There is no necessary flight from the world as evil, nor is the physical universe, including the human body, perceived as essentially corrupt, as in gnosticism. Rather the hope of the new world to come is the source of inspiration for the just to live out their radical understanding of God's will in the. present.

Closely associated with the notion of the Kingdom of God is the figure of the Son of Man. Though much has been written about the background and origin of this figure, for our purposes all that is required is to acknowledge that the figure is central to the coming age, either as the representative of the whole community of the just, as in Daniel (7:13.23), or as their judge and vindicator in the Book of Enoch, a collection of apocalyptic material that at least in its older strata pre-dates Christianity. It is worth quoting a few scattered lines from this composite work as an indication not merely of the thematic, but even the verbal links with the gospels:

In that hour the Son of Man was named

In the presence of the Lord of Spirits ...

He shall be a staff to the righteous whereon to stay themselves and not fall.

And he shall be a light of the Gentiles,

And the hope of those who are troubled in heart ...

And there was great joy among them (the blessed)

Because the name of that Son of Man had been revealed to them,

And he sat on the throne of his glory,

And the sum of judgement was given to the Son of Man,

And he caused the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from off the face of the earth. {97} By contrast with the reference in Daniel the figure has clearly become an individual who functions as an end-time saviour for the just in the apocalyptic struggle that is thought of as about to break into the present evil situation. There is no systematic linking of this figure with the more traditional conceptions of the Messiah, as these had been worked out in relation to earlier texts, yet one can detect a general tendency to colour the picture of the one with features from the others. Perhaps the two most significant current images of the Messiah were those of the Davidic ruler (based on 2 Sm 7), and the prophet like Moses (Dt 18:18).

Given the political situation of the Jewish community, it was natural to see the former as a figure of national liberation, the ideal king, who would not only be victorious over Israel's enemies, but would also be a just and righteous king. He would thus be a striking contrast to the Hasmonaean and Herodian kings whose policies and values were so alien to the ideals of the hasidim, as these had been developed and carried forward by the various parties into the first century.

The other image of the Messiah that had wide currency among various groups, including the early Christians, was that of the "prophet like Moses." To this figure was attributed the idea of end-time revealer, or definitive interpreter of the law for the group in question. Here the emphasis is not only on knowledge of when the apocalyptic drama would unfold, but also how the just should conduct themselves in the period of trial and struggle that was to immediately precede the new age.

These two examples of messianic images and their colouring with traits of the Son of Man figure of the apocalyptists should help to illustrate just how fluid a figure the Messiah was in Judaism of the first century. Sometimes the question about Jesus as Messiah is posed by Christians, as though there was one fixed and immutable conception, shared by all elements of the people. The pervasiveness of apocalyptic ideas, even outside the circles of the hasidim, and their wider dissemination through the various groups, ensured that there could be no one Messiah image shared by all. By its very nature apocalyptic deals in symbols and metaphors {98} that are evocative rather than descriptive, and thus capable of multiple applications depending on the point of view of those interpreting them.

This brings us to a final feature of Apocalyptic which has been receiving increased attention in recent studies, namely its social background. What is the social situation of the groups among whom Apocalyptic thrives, and what light would an answer to that question shed on the hasidim, and those who were heirs to their views subsequently, including the early Christians? Earlier studies had suggested that Apocalyptic originated and was most at home among the destitute classes, who substituted another world for the one filled with misery and despair which was their present lot. However, the intellectual sophistication demanded in decoding the highly elaborate symbolism of apocalyptic literature suggests a more intellectual ethos. Anthropological studies would seem to confirm this, in that they suggest the true home of Apocalyptic to be among the relatively, not the absolutely deprived. Relative deprivation focuses not so much on material conditions as on the exclusion from power and prestige within a larger society. The relatively deprived aspire to controlling the institutions of power, but are excluded from doing so, and consequently feel alienated and deprived. By way of compensation they reconstruct another view of reality, another story of how things really are, according to which it is they who control the instruments of power, and their version of life and its meaning becomes the dominant one.

Such an understanding of the social matrix of Apocalyptic would enhance our understanding of early Jewish apocalyptic literature and the circles within which it was produced. For one thing it explains the nature of apocalyptic language, the rigidity of its views and the contempt that it shows, not only for the external enemy, but for those within the larger group who are perceived as showing less than a solid front against the recognised source of evil. It would also explain how the ideals of the hasidim {99} were to be carried forward and fostered by those who felt alienated from the temple and its cult within a theocratic state. As the Maccabees and their successors astutely perceived, in a state whose raison d"etre was religious, it was necessary for those wielding secular power also to control the source of religious power, and that meant the temple, its priesthood and cult. This explains why they and the hasidim, whose devotion to the religious traditions of Israel appeared to give them special authority as its interpreters, were to reach the parting of the ways. The subsequent stages of that parting are best told in terms of the Jewish parties that Josephus describes for us, and of which we know from other sources also, and this is the subject of our next section.

III. The Religious Parties in First Century Judaism

In describing the various groups within first century Judaism, Josephus consciously calls them "philosophies," presumably in the hope of making Judaism appear both reasonable and attractive to outsiders, who were often made to think of it, as well as of other eastern cults as "superstitions" and therefore unworthy of Roman gravitas. He even likens the different Jewish groups to the better known Greco-Roman ones: Pharisees and Stoics; Sadducees and Epicureans; Essenes and Cynics. At first sight this might appear to be a clever ploy by the ex-general turned apologist, yet lacking substance; however, on closer examination, there is more than a little plausibility to the comparison. As we shall see, all the Jewish parties were in a sense the outgrowth of Judaism's response to the extreme threat of Hellenism at the time of the Hellenistic reform, and its subsequent having to come to terms with a more modified, but no less vital form, mediated through the Roman world. In a real sense then all branches of Judaism in this period are a response to the larger ethos {100} we have been examining. In our first chapter we saw that the various trends in Greco-Roman religion and philosophy were equally a response to that larger world and the problems that it posed. Viewed in this light there is nothing improbable in finding developments in Greco-Roman religion paralleled within Judaism in this period also, and the comparisons may prove to be illuminating as we examine each of the parties and their philosophies. We must always keep in mind that despite their differences, they were all thoroughly Jewish, each claiming that it rather than the others was the definitive interpreter of Jewish tradition, and so the authentic voice of God for his people.

(i) THE SADDUCEES

"The Sadducees, the second of the orders, do away with Fate altogether, and remove God beyond, not merely the commission, but the very sight of evil. They maintain that a man has the free choice of good and evil, and that it rests with each man's will whether he follows the one or the other. As for the persistence of the soul after death, penalties in the underworld, and rewards, they will have none of them." (JW 2:163)

This is just one of the descriptions of the Sadducees that Josephus gives us, which, with its mention of Fate and the discussion of free will, is clearly couched in language that would be familiar to the intelligent Roman reader. In fact neither Fate nor free will were ever central questions within Judaism, where the notion of God's election and care for his people, and their free response as the chosen people, made such theoretic questions rather irrelevant. Nevertheless, it is significant that the Sadducees disbelief in the idea of an after-life as mentioned by Josephus corresponds with one of the few other direct pieces of information we have about them, coming from the New Testament where we also hear of their rejection of the idea of resurrection from the dead (Mk 12:18-23; Ac 23:6). This is all the more significant in view of the fact that there are no extant writings of the Sadducees, and we must attempt to briefly {101} reconstruct their history and beliefs on the basis of data that comes from their known critics. There is fairly general agreement that the name Sadducee comes from the priest Sarod, whom Solomon appointed to take charge of the ark of the covenant on his accession to power in Jerusalem (1 Kgs 2:35), and in a later writing, the sons of Sadok are described as being the legitimate line of priests for the restored temple (Ez 40:46; 43:19; 44:15; 48:11). It is noteworthy that if this is the correct derivation of their name, it was also appropriated by some branches of the Essenes, as we learn from one of their documents. Clearly the question of who the legitimate priests were was a very central one in first century Judaism, and this has a very real bearing on our discussion of the sociological basis for these different groupings. -

The Sadducees are mentioned for the first time in our sources by Josephus, during the reign of John Hyrcanus, where it is clear that they and the Pharisees disagree on certain questions of Jewish practice. The Pharisees object to the king's right to be high priest, who thereupon sided with the Sadducees, and from this we may infer that they had no objection to the Hasmonaean take-over of the high-priesthood. With this insight into the Sadducees' position on such a central issue we can fairly assume that as a party they must have organised within the hellenised aristocracy associated with the high-priesthood, in the immediate restoration period. Certainly that was their social position in the New Testament, and it probably had remained constant, especially since Josephus tells us that they were not very popular, and had little success with the people as a whole. Given this background, they were at the opposite extreme to the hasidim at the time of the restoration. Unlike the latter, their political and social interests were greater than their ideological convictions, and so they accepted whoever was the incumbent high: priest, be it Alcimus, Jonathan or John Hyrcanus, probably arrogating for themselves the grandiose title as a way of legitimating their position within the community as a: whole. {102} With this understanding of their social position, it is easy to grasp the theological "conservatism" of the Sadducees. Josephus tells us that they rejected any law that was not based on Scripture, and, as we shall see, this together with their denial of the afterlife really differentiated them from the Pharisees. The law codes of the Pentateuch with their legislation for the temple state and the special role of the priesthood, were clearly a suitable charter for the Sadducees and their position within Jewish society. The formal religion of the cult, which they or their henchmen controlled, was an adequate expression of their piety. It mattered little to them that such a religion did nothing to meet the needs of the large Jewish population living in the Diaspora, far removed from temple and cult and in danger of being submerged by the culture of the Hellenistic cities. Probably some Sadducees were large landowners, living indeed in Jerusalem, but drawing the benefits from a peasantry whose religious beliefs committed them to a tithing of the produce of the land for the upkeep of their clergy. Thus a Sadducean landowner who happened to be a priest stood to profit doubly from his land by receiving both the religious dues (payable in part to the local priest) and the rent for leasing or other rights granted to the peasants.

In such a situation of social and economic superiority one can readily recognise the Sadducees' lack of interest in novelty or change and their resentment of those who might propose it. Here perhaps lies the explanation of the curious fact that though the gospels relate many debates between Jesus and the Pharisees at various stages of the ministry, the Sadducees (in the persons of the chief priests and elders) are the dominant anti-figures of the last trial. The religion of Jesus could be seen as an attack on temple religion as that was controlled by the Sadducees. Understood as a "holy man," a figure of great social as well as religious significance in the ancient world, divine power {103} was accessible in him outside the normal .channels, and that was to challenge the very necessity of the elaborate ritual system of the temple religion. The author of the Fourth Gospel has shrewdly recognised the significance of this threat of Jesus to the Jewish establishment by having the high priest express his anxieties as follows: "What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our (holy) place and our nation" (Jn 11:48). In his eyes destruction of the holy place was tantamount to destruction of the nation, a supposition not shared by the Pharisees. Besides, the Romans had officially tolerated a temple religion in which sacrifices on behalf of the Emperor were offered to the God of the Jews. Were a popular religious movement to be generated around Jesus not only would the position of social supremacy of the Sadducees be challenged, but the wrath of the Romans would be aroused against all Jews. The other point of Sadducean doctrine on which we are well informed is their denial of an after-life. As we have seen it was from the circles of the hasidim that this belief emanated, in response to a faith in God as the vindicator of the just that was challenged by the severe religious persecution of the times. If our assumption that the Sadducees originated within the Hellenistic circles is correct and our assessment of their social situation accurate, the question of an after-life would not have posed itself in such stark terms for them. In accepting some at least of the views of the Hellenistic outlook they would more easily have been able to adapt their faith to the times, thereby avoiding confrontation and persecution. Consequently the question of reward for fidelity in the face of persecution did not arise. Their continued dominance of the economic and social life in the emerging Hasmonaean state meant that the old Israelite belief grounded in the Pentateuch, that the good prosper and the wicked are punished, was quite {104} adequate to justify in religious terms their own present dominance, without any need to pose the question of the future in a serious way.

It is interesting to examine their confrontation with Jesus on this issue against this background (Mk 12:18-23). The passage is a classic example of the differing appeals to the tradition of the law of Moses made by the different religious points of view within Judaism. The Sadducees seek to reduce the notion of resurrection to an absurdity by citing the example of the levirate law, whereby a man is obliged to raise up children to his dead brother on the basis of Deut 25:5, and the case cited would appear to create insurmountable legal problems in the world to come. Jesus' reply claims in effect that the Sadducees are fundamentalists: they do not understand the power of God and so they have an extremely literal understanding and application of the scripture text, but they are in error.

Jesus then cites another text from "Moses," that is from the Exodus tradition about Yahweh's appearance to Moses, and not from Daniel, the only clear literal reference to resurrection, as we have seen. The text cited, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob," scarcely contains the notion on a purely literalist interpretation, yet one can readily recognise how somebody like Jesus or the Pharisees, who have accepted the notion on the other grounds, could read it into such a text as Ex 3:6, or perhaps, better, "draw it out" of the text. The ploy of staying with Moses, not citing from a book (Daniel) whose authority the Sadducees would probably not have accepted, was very much part of the style of argument that was current at the time, and which is so frequently documented in the Talmudic literature. What is noteworthy in this case is that both Jesus and Pharisaic scribes not merely believed in the same doctrine but would have employed very similar exegetical tactics in refuting an opponent.

At the outset we mentioned Josephus' likening of the Sadducees to the Epicureans. Clearly the comparison does {105} not hold up under strict scrutiny. Yet it noteworthy that for both, the idea of an after-life was neither necessary nor acceptable. It is probably unfair to describe the Epicureans as atheists, but they certainly saw the gods as far removed from the sphere of man, living in epicurean bliss. In this regard their doctrine of God and .that of the Sadducees are not dissimilar. By confining the divine presence to the temple and the cult, God was indeed removed beyond "not merely the commission but the sight of evil," to use Josephus' phrase, that is, from the sphere of the everyday. A frozen tradition from the past, rather than a living and self-renewing one, was clearly more in keeping with such a God concept.

(ii) THE ESSENES

At the very opposite end (from the Sadducees) in the spectrum of Jewish parties were the Essenes, who are not mentioned at all in the New Testament. Nevertheless since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 - which are almost universally accepted as the writings of an Essene community living at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea - this party has attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention. This is due in part at least to the very real similarities and parallels with various New Testament writings, but also because the discoveries have given us a whole body of literature from a group within Judaism which documents their beliefs and practices, as well as their self-understanding over against other groups and the way in which they related to the older traditions of Israel. Of course the Essenes cannot be identified simply with the Qumran group, since ancient writers, primarily Josephus and Pliny, had given detailed accounts the movement since it had attracted quite an amount of attention, and not a little admiration, even in the ancient world Their decision to withdraw from society and live apart in small communities of caring and sharing is always an attractive ideal for {106} some people at times of special tension in society, and so Essenism could be seen as another illustration of the signs of the times, represented by the Cynics and the Pythagoreans outside Judaism. But it is their place within Judaism that is our chief concern.

When and under what influences did Essenism emerge within Judaism? It is usual to consider their name as derived from the hasidim, being a graecised version of the Aramaic equivalent, and this connection seems to be confirmed both by what we know from independent sources about the latter and from what the scrolls reveal about the former. During the persecution that went with the implementation of the Hellenistic reform we read that many Jews, "seeking righteousness and justice went down to the desert with their families and their possessions" (fourth citation above), but were followed by the Seleucid officers and as many as one thousand fell by the sword because they refused to fight on the Sabbath. It is probably among such groups as these that we are to see the beginnings of Essenism, since Philo tells us that they fled the cities and lived in villages, considering it impossible to pursue their special life-style otherwise.

The Qumran Essenes were founded by a person whom their writings call "the teacher of righteousness." Before the teacher's arrival they were a wandering and amorphous group in the wilderness, yet not all Essenes followed the teacher's plea to join him, and subsequently his community saw those who refused as the real religious traitors and their leader is styled "the man of lies." Yet another enemy of the teacher is "the wicked priest" who followed him to the desert and persecuted him, possibly even having him put to death, but the community of his followers kept his memory alive, saw in him the definitive interpreter of God's will for the end of days, and possibly even expected his return.

Naturally there has been much discussion concerning the identity of these various characters since no known historical figure is mentioned in the scrolls or by the ancient writers. One plausible hypothesis is that the wicked priest {107} is Jonathan, the Maccabaean, who accepted the high-priesthood from the Seleucids in 152 B.C.E., though he was not of the high priestly lineage. The teacher of righteousness would then be identified with a high standing Jerusalem priest, possibly the one who had acted as replacement since the death of Alcimus in 160 B.C.E., and who refused to serve under an illegitimate high priest. These identifications would help to explain certain features of the Qumran community's life and self-understanding, in particular their views about the temple, that central symbol of Jewish faith.

According to Josephus the Essenes did not offer sacrifices (though there is some doubt about what precisely Josephus did write), and this seems to be borne out by the scrolls which either speak of the community in its present, life as the true temple or alternatively look forward to a temple to come in which the community alone will be able to worship. If then the Qumran community thinks of itself and its own life of prayer, asceticism and study as the true worship of God, this is a clear example of a group appropriating a central symbol of Judaism for themselves alone to the exclusion of all others. Clearly this is both sectarian and highly polemical and the likelihood must be that such attitudes were generated in a situation in which a group and/or an individual were excluded from control of the existing temple. By way of compensation that temple and its priesthood were rejected and an alternative temple-community established, of which those ousted were in total control. This would constitute a good example of the structuring and control of an alternative social world which, we suggested, was typical of an apocalyptically-based community.

The Essenes were certainly highly apocalyptic in their thinking and practice. One of the documents found in the Qumran caves is entitled, "The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness," in which the final struggle between the forces of good, represented by the community and the sons of Belial, or the evil one, is described in great {108} detail. This is a typical motif of all apocalyptic literature, including early Christian (e.g. the final petitions of the "Our Father"), in which the increase of hostility and evil are thought to be the immediate harbingers of the new age that is about to dawn. One has only to read the so-called "eschatological discourse" in the Synoptic gospels (Mk 13; Mt 24-25; Lk 21) to appreciate how fully the early Christians shared such ideas and expressed them in similar, if not actually borrowed, imagery.

Corresponding to this view of the times, the Essenes had developed an extremely rigorous code of ethics and lifestyle as part of the immediate preparation for, if not the ushering in of the messianic age. Again the discovery of the scrolls enables us to document this in great detail especially in the Community Rule, but the broad outlines agree with what the ancient authors (Philo, Josephus and Pliny) had already conveyed. They practiced celibacy (though the possibility of some married Essenes cannot be totally ruled out); they shared their goods in common; they lived in a state of ritual purity - a notion to be discussed in detail when dealing with the Pharisees; novices had to go through various stages of initiation before being allowed to partake of the common meals of the sect; members could be expelled, even for life, for various offences; honesty in speech was a particularly cultivated virtue among them. Clearly the asceticism of the Essenes went far beyond that enjoined by Pentateuchal law, or as we shall see even the Pharisaic teachings, and this can be attributed to the sect's apocalyptic mentality. They, and only they, would share in the great triumph soon to be inaugurated by God.

Much has been written about the relations between the Essenes and early Christianity. John the Baptist, and even Jesus himself, it has been suggested, came under Essene influence. Yet despite the natural excitement that such theories are likely to engender, it must be stated that no such direct contacts can be proved, and in truth are unlikely, given the very different viewpoints of Jesus, in {109} particular, and Essenism. The real value of our newly discovered knowledge of this Jewish sect, contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity, is the light it sheds on the pluralism of first century Judaism; for example the way in which such central theological ideas as covenant, repentance and election were understood and the claims that differing groups were likely to make in the name of their own particular ideology.

In this respect the study of the ancient texts at Qumran is particularly interesting. The archaeology of their site has been able to locate their scriptorium or writing room, and the remains of over 500 volumes have been discovered in the jars, very deliberately hidden in the caves overlooking the settlement shortly before its abandonment, probably in the year 73 C.E. Clearly the sect was devoted to the study and interpretation of the older Jewish writings that were particularly authoritative, even though as yet there does not appear to have been a definitive canon of Scripture, even for this rigid community. Yet side by side with these writings that were the common inheritance of all Judaism, and apparently having equal authority with them, were the sect's own writings, which were also believed to express God's definitive will for the group. Foremost among these is of course the Community Rule, already alluded to. Furthermore, we find some of the prophetic writings being interpreted in relation to events in the community's own life, rather like the way in which several New Testament authors see various Old Testament texts receiving their definitive meaning in the light of Jesus' life and that of the early church (cf. for example Mt 1:23; 2:6; 4:15-17; Lk 4:18-19; Jn 19:36-37; Ac 28:26-27; 2 Cor 3:12-18; Gal 4:21-31).

In the final analysis, the real contribution that the Qumran finds can make to our knowledge of early Christianity is the way they show us how another Jewish sect contemporaneous with the Jesus movement appropriated the traditions of Israel and blended them with their own special traditions as a way of defining themselves over against all other groups. By {110} understanding the dynamics of this activity we are better able to understand the origins and development of early Christian theology as it engaged in a similar activity, though with a rather different vision, as we shall see.

(iii) THE PHARISEES

Of all the groups within Judaism of the first century, the Pharisees were the most influential, and yet their role and achievement have been largely misunderstood. Part of the reason is that the gospels, especially that of Matthew, are less than kind to them for polemical reasons which we shall discuss later, and the later rabbinic sources tend to blur the distinction between the achievements of the rabbis after 70 C.E. and the Pharisees of an earlier period. Even Josephus, who declares himself to have been a Pharisee, has rather different profiles in his two major works, The Jewish War and The Antiquities of the Jews. In the former work written shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. they are not considered to be as significant as the Sadducees, whereas in the latter, written twenty years later, it is the Pharisaic party that is portrayed as the soul of moderation and the real voice of Judaism. Obviously the different objectives of the two works and the change of situation, both for Josephus and Judaism, has affected the picture. We must attempt to reconstruct a more authentic picture of the Pharisees than those which our sources offer and assess their real contribution to Judaism.

Once again it is to the restoration period after the Hellenistic reform period that we must look for Pharisaic origins. Essentially the Pharisaic ideal as it emerges in our various sources was that the special ritual purity which applied to the priests in the temple should be extended beyond the sanctuary to the everyday. This suggests that the movement originated among temple priests - presumably because of their dissatisfaction with the existing situation after the restoration, either during Alcimus' tenure of the high-priestly office or after Jonathan's acceptance of it in 152 {111} B.C.E. Unlike the teacher of righteousness, however, their solution was rather to extend the sacredness of the temple to the everyday, thereby minimising the former's significance within the religious life of Judaism but without denying its centrality. Thus, it is better not to think of the Pharisees as a sect in the strict sense, that is a group who excluded all non-Pharisees from the salvation to which they had acquired the indispensable means. The Pharisees never cut themselves off from the temple, and for a period at least they controlled the regulation of temple ritual, according to Josephus. The Essenes, on the other hand, rejected the existing temple worship altogether, and saw membership of their own group as the only alternative means of approaching God and sharing in his promises.

What prompted this movement within the Judaism of the period? The fact that it began with priests, but soon became a lay movement for the most part, suggests that it was intended to meet and in fact did respond to real religious needs within Judaism. Josephus says that the movement was especially successful among townspeople, that is, presumably among the middle class artisans, traders, officials and other service people, whose emergence was the direct result of the economic and social impact of Hellenism, both within Palestine and among the Diaspora. Clearly the founders of Pharisaism were motivated by a zeal for Judaism that was not content with the laissez-faire attitudes of the Sadducees after the erosions of Hellenism, and they attempted to build a religious system that went far beyond the demands of the temple religion as this was laid down in the Pentateuch. The annual pilgrimages made for the three great feasts may have been quite adequate expressions of their religion for peasants tied to the land and reminded of Yahweh's continued blessings in the various crops that they were supposed to tithe, but for the Jew who had moved to the new urban environment with no crops to tithe, or at best only token ones (cf. Mt 23:23), Pentateuchal religion was not a sufficient antidote to the spirit of the age. We have seen that already in the Persian {112} period those Jews who had returned from the exile had very definite views on the question of separatism, and Ezra's reform had consolidated their position. We have also traced the background of the hasidim to these circles. There was nothing more natural then than for those hasidim who had not adopted the radical views of the Essenes to become enthusiastic supporters of the new movement. The attempted reform had made everybody aware that the threat of Hellenism was much more serious than might have been anticipated, because it was so all-pervasive, reaching every area of life, and challenging the Jew to abandon his tradition in the name of "progress," economic, social or intellectual.

To meet such a challenge Pharisaism developed a detailed programme of life that preserved his distinctiveness for the Jew no matter where he went or what his walk of life. The detailed legislation for the fulfilment of various central regulations of its system - such as Sabbath observance, dietary laws and tithing - went far beyond anything that was found in the Pentateuch. And areas of life not covered at all in the biblical texts were all taken under the umbrella of God's will and legislated for.

In time a whole body of Pharisaic teaching developed that was thought of as being of equal authority with the biblical law. It had many different sources: the extension of the biblical law to subjects only indirectly referred to customs that had developed over a period of time the teaching of the great sages or fathers. Yet all were regarded as equally binding and expressive of God's will, to such an extent that what the New Testament calls the "tradition of the elders" and Josephus "the ancestral laws," were claimed by the later rabbis to be a second, oral law, given together with the written one to Moses on Mount Sinai. Such later statements as these are clearly intended to give full weight and equal authority with the law of Moses to the Pharisaic teachings, but the New Testament is already aware that they were regarded in that light (cf. Mk 7:15; Mt 23:2). {113} By giving their own customs such an authoritative force the Pharisees have often been accused of turning the Jewish religion into a legalistic system where all the emphasis is placed on externals alone, to the neglect of the interior intention and more important ethical issues. No doubt the Pharisees were no less liable than any other group to fall into these perennial pitfalls of devout-minded people, but to characterise them as lacking in genuine religious concern is to confuse New Testament polemics with historical reality. The Pharisaic system was built on law, conceived however, not as a burdensome obligation, but as instruction or a way of life - the root meaning of the Hebrew word for law, Torah. There is a real sense in which their achievement can be compared with the Stoic system which, we saw in our first chapter, perceived the whole world as one large city-state governed by the law of nature which assigned to every man his place in society and gave him a definite programme of action for life. The city charter became the cosmic charter, reassuring man that the world was an ordered whole in which each had a definite meaningful role to play.

Insofar as Pharisaism was a Jewish attempt to meet the challenge of the city and the Hellenistic world-view it can be seen to be giving a similar answer - the Torah was the very basis and foundation of the universe that each faithful Jew had received as a priceless gift to guide and direct his way, no matter where he lived or what his occupation. Where the Pharisees differed from the Stoics was in their belief that this law as the universal guide of the individual was not based on some abstract reasoning process, but on the gift of Yahweh to his chosen ones. Consequently, the Pharisee did not consider himself to be heavily laden; the yoke of the law was for him a sweet and light burden also.

Precisely because the Pharisaic system was built on law, conceived as statute, that is as having a binding force on man, its masters had to insist on the letter of the law. To admit anything else would be to destroy their system completely. However, no body of statutes, no matter how {114} detailed, can possibly meet every situation, and so there was a real need to develop various ways of dealing with instances not specifically legislated for, while attempting at the same time to avoid the more harsh (even unjust) consequences of the letter, strictly adhered to.

As one example of the kind of problem facing the Pharisaic scribe we may instance a prescription of the sabbatical year which insisted that all debts owed to fellow Israelites be cancelled in that year (Dt 15:3). Clearly such an ideal situation would have less serious social consequences in an agricultural society where barter rather than money was the recognised mode of exchange. However, in the Hellenistic age when money was much more frequently employed the Deuteronomic law could have been disastrous. People might use it as a way of avoiding payments of debts, and money would not be so readily available for genuine needs of the poorer people. To deal with this impasse the famous Pharisaic sage Hillel is attributed with having introduced a special legislative measure whereby payment of the debt was guaranteed even after the Sabbath year, by means of a legal fiction. According to this arrangement the creditor transferred his debt to a court in a formal document. Since the biblical text said, "Whatever of yours that is with your brother your hand should release," the debt, now considered as being owed to the court, not to a fellow Israelite, was not covered by the Sabbath year remission, and so the debtor was liable at any time. One has to appreciate the dilemma of the Jew, convinced that the body of laws he had received was indeed a divine blessing and so to be faithfully adhered to in its every jot and tittle (its minutest letter and even part of a letter), and yet faced with real life situations similar to the one just discussed. Without this appreciation the system can be ridiculed as hairsplitting and even ridiculous. Yet looking to its intention and purpose it is seen as a total way of life that ensures the blessings that the whole Torah, (i.e. the five books of the Pentateuch with their story of God's saving election of Israel), and not just its legal enactments, had promised. {115} To live out the Pharisaic ideal was not easy, given the fact that not all Jews, not to speak of the gentile population of Palestine and the Diaspora, were prepared to undertake it. Accordingly, many Pharisees joined together in associations that made it easier for them to live up to their ideal. In the Jewish sources the members of such associations (haverim, as they are called) are contrasted with "the people of the land," a term, that at least in Jesus' day was not a social description but referred to all those who were suspect of being lax in their observance of the purity and tithing laws which the Pharisees regarded as essential, and so to be avoided.

The Pharisaic concern with these laws is attacked in the New Testament (Mk 7:1-20; Mt 23:13-36). Once again, however, before accepting the condemnation at face value it is necessary to understand the meaning of such observances from the Jewish perspective. In the next chapter we shall have occasion to examine some of the reasons for the Christian polemics against them. Both the purity laws (avoiding certain objects that created unclean-ness, for example, leprosy, secretions from the sexual organs, dead bodies, certain types of food) and the tithes (paying a certain portion of what one produces to the priests and Levites) are rooted in the Old Testament legal codes. The latter can be understood readily enough: since the land of Israel is Yahweh's gift, a portion of its produce should be given to those who minister at his sanctuary and have no portion in the land for themselves. Naturally economic and social conditions had changed considerably, even to the extent of many Jerusalem priests having become wealthy landowners. In such circumstances, the leasing tenant farmer could scarcely be expected to be meticulous in tithing, yet the Pharisaic system insisted on the letter of "everything that grows," even to the smallest herb. In this pressing of minutiae we must see a genuine desire to avoid any erosion of the biblical law or its intention. If this led to the undesirable consequences mentioned in Mt 2:23-24 -neglect of the weightier matters - this was clearly a consequence, not an intention of the Pharisaic ideals. Indeed {116} it is noteworthy that in this passage Jesus condemns this consequence, but does not reject the concentration on the lesser matters as unworthy.

The meaning of the purity laws is more difficult to grasp, especially since from an early stage - even in the Bible itself - purity and impurity are also used as metaphors for moral virtue and vice. There is a danger that we might see this as their only significance and so accuse the Pharisee, as many Christian scholars have done, of failing to draw any distinction between the moral law on the one hand and purely ritual (we might say liturgical rubrics) on the other.

The fact that the notions of purity and impurity and rituals for dealing with them are found in many ancient religions and many modern primitive ones, suggests that these concepts do refer to something very real that cannot simply be reduced to a metaphor for something else. This "real" content, at least as far as the Israelites were concerned, seems to be based on the understanding that there is an order and wholeness about the physical universe, man included, which should not be distorted or changed since these reflect the holiness of God, the Creator. Insofar as certain actions (e.g. irregular sexual behaviour) or animals (e.g. the pig) do not fit into this perceived wholeness of things emanating from the Creator, or appear to stand outside their own recognised class, they are thought of as impure, that is polluting or dangerous. Pollution can be brought on either intentionally or inadvertently, and it can concern matters that are strictly speaking ethical or not, as in the examples cited, but its consequences are the same as far as the society is concerned. A destructive power has been set in motion that must be averted by the performance of certain actions that the community has prescribed, depending on the gravity of the violation. This explains why the purity laws are so detailed since every eventuality must be legislated for to protect the order that is believed to be inherent in the whole of the universe. {117} To concentrate on the negative aspect of the purity laws would be a mistake, however, since for their faithful observer, they were a constant reminder that God, the Creator of the universal order could be encountered at every turn of life - at meals, in dealing with the animal kingdom, on the way or in the home. The supreme encounter was of course at worship in the temple, and that is why the purity laws of the books of Leviticus and Numbers are intended for the priests, Levites and others who might enter the sacred precincts. The Pharisees attempted to extend that order to the whole of life, by recognising that the holiness of God was as much part of the everyday as it was of the sacred day, when people approached the temple in a state of ritual purity. As already mentioned, in order to achieve their goal some Pharisees of stricter observance formed associations which had stringent rules of admission, and whose members could be trusted to have observed all the details of the purity laws as the Pharisaic scribes had elaborated them, especially in regard to the dietary laws. This explains why several of Jesus' disputes with the Pharisees occur in the context of meals (Mk 7:1-2; Lk 7:36; 11:37-40), since he, like many other Jews who did not belong to these associations, did not regard meticulous observance of these rules as an essential part of their religious response. Yet it should be noted that Jesus and the Pharisees did agree on some basic ideas like resurrection from the dead, indicating a common background in the apocalyptic world-view, and we do find him on occasion in their homes (Lk 11:37; 14:1).

This is not to minimise the inevitable clash between the Pharisees and any other Jew who was not prepared to accept their view of what the holiness of God demanded. Moreover, this conviction was expressed in their interest in making converts even from the non-Jewish world (Mt 23:15). The Essenes were also concerned with the notion of purity, but unlike the Pharisees, they had solved the problem by living out their beliefs in isolation from the rest {118} of men by considering that in their community alone the ideal of holiness was realised. The Pharisees on the other hand remained very much within society and in fact played a very influential role in Palestinian politics for over a century, even dominating the legislation of the temple ritual according to Josephus, despite the fact that the Sadducees were the party of the priestly aristocracy. As we shall presently see, it was the Pharisaic ideal as elaborated by their scribes that was to become the official one for all Judaism after the temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. It is from this perspective that one can best appreciate their real significance for the Jewish religion. By extending the holiness of the temple outside and beyond the temple even while it still was the centre of Jewish life, they ensured that the holiness of God would remain a vital reality for Judaism, even when the temple, as its visible symbol, was no more.

(iv) THE ZEALOTS

Even though they are scarcely mentioned in the New Testament, in all probability the Zealots played an important part in Palestinian religious and political life of the first century C.E. Yet the virtual silence of all our sources, except Josephus, makes it difficult to fill in the whole picture, since his own career was too closely involved with what they stood for to be totally objective. He gives two rather different accounts of the origins of the Fourth Philosophy, founded by one Judas the Galilean, in the year 6 C.E. and he never calls them Zealots, a name he reserves for the instigators of the revolt against Rome in 67 C.E. In the War account, Judas' party is said to have nothing in common with the other Jewish philosophies, whereas in Antiquities its members are said to resemble the Pharisees in every respect except in their passion for freedom and their refusal to call any man master but God alone. Though Josephus himself never makes the identification, it is generally, and in my view correctly presumed that the {119} Fourth Philosophy of Judas is to be identified with the Zealots of the revolt period, and this would explain the two different characterisations of the group within his writings. In the War account he is particularly concerned to isolate a small group of lawless individuals as having sole responsibility for the confrontation with Rome despite the fact that he himself was a general of the revolutionary government As part of this apologetic for the Jewish nation, the most typical name that Josephus employs for Jewish revolutionaries throughout the period is robber (léstés), thereby suggesting their unprincipled and selfish motives. The likelihood must be that the links with the Pharisees suggested in the Antiquities account are real, and that the Fourth Philosophy (Zealots) does have its roots in the more radical wing of the Pharisaic party. This conclusion will help us to understand their ideology.

When Josephus comes to summing up the situation in Jerusalem during the Roman siege of the years 67-70 C.E. he is able to isolate five different groups, each as bitterly opposed to one another as they were to Rome and the Jewish aristocracy who were seen as collaborationists with Rome. These were: the Zealots, the Sicarii (literally, dagger carriers), the Idumaeans, John of Gischala and Simon Bar Giora.

Because of this fragmentation some scholars have actually doubted the existence of a unified, revolutionary movement throughout the whole first century, dating from the founding of the Fourth Philosophy by Judas. In this view the existence of the Zealots as a distinct party or sect at the time of Jesus would be seriously called into question. However, this seems an unnecessary conclusion, given the well known character of revolutionary movements to splinter around different personalities just when one might expect a united front against the common enemy on whom all are agreed. In the case of the various groups outlined here it is not difficult to recognise differences between them because of tensions emanating from different social backgrounds - city/country, aristocracy/lower classes and {120} lesser clergy/ laity. It is an indication of how deep-seated these tensions were that even though all the groups shared the religious ideology on which the revolutionary party was based, they were still their own worst enemies in the hour of crisis. Josephus paints a sorry picture of the way in which all semblance of religious motivation for the revolt was abandoned, the temple desecrated and the most horrible atrocities committed against fellow revolutionaries or the Jewish aristocracy. Even allowing for a fair amount of exaggeration because of the historian's propagandistic purposes, the whole scenario raises serious questions about the danger of using religion to bolster political or despotic causes.

What was the religious motivation of the Zealots? The passion for liberty and the refusal to accept man as lord except God, attributed by Josephus to the Fourth Philosophy have a certain archaic ring about them, echoing the earlier Israelite religion. Freedom from slavery was the fundamental Israelite experience of the exodus from Egypt and the second command of the decalogue prohibited the acceptance of any other gods except Yahweh, which the Zealots turned into a political programme for rejecting Roman rule. Rabbinic evidence suggests that a series of stringent religious measures, eighteen in all, attributed to the school of Shammai, were passed in Jerusalem in the period shortly before 70 C.E. It is usual to link these with the takeover of the council by the Zealots after they had insisted on abolishing the loyal sacrifices on behalf of the Emperor in the Jerusalem temple in 66 C.E. In general these measures were directed against any kind of association with gentiles and their attitudes-marriage, food, and images for example. The coins struck by the revolutionaries during the revolt corroborate this, since they are aniconic (i.e. without any image) and bear the inscription "for the freedom of Zion." Another element of the Zealot philosophy that was religiously motivated was the use of violent means against the perceived enemies because of the belief that they were {121} engaged in the holy war of the end-time that was to destroy Israel's enemies, an idea expressed in Zachary's hymn on the birth of John the Baptist: "That freed from our enemies we might serve him in holiness and justice before him all our days" (Lk 1:74-75). This violence on behalf of the kingdom links the Zealot movement with that of the Maccabees a century and a half earlier, who treated Phineas' act of violence on behalf of his Israelite faith as the model for religious resistance (Nm 25:6-14; 1 Macc 2:24-26.54). However, the Maccabees and Zealots differed essentially, it would seem, on the kind of Jewish state they sought. Once political power came their way through the weakness of the Seleucids, the former set up a thoroughly hellenised system in which the monarch controlled the religion also, much to the anger of the religious elements in the community. On the other hand the Zealots would appear to have had in mind the re-establishment of the old theocracy with no concessions to modernity, doing away with the sacrifice for the Emperor and electing by lot an unknown country priest as high priest.

If we accept the existence of the Zealot party as dating from the period of Judas the Galilean, the question naturally arises concerning their relation to the Jesus movement during the same period, especially in view of the fact that at least one member of the Twelve, Simon, the Canaanean, was in fact a Zealot, as Luke explicitly says (Lk 6:15). Besides, such actions as the cleansing of the temple by Jesus and his disciples' desire to use the sword in self-defense (Mk 11:15; Lk 22:49) when taken together with the clear political overtones of Jesus' death, have all been construed as pointing to a strong current of Zealot ideology in the attitudes of Jesus and his close followers. This theory is thought to gain further support from the belief that first century Galilee was a hotbed of anti-Roman revolutionaries, as witnessed by the fact that the founder of the Fourth Philosophy was a native of the province. However, we have argued in the previous chapter that this view is not founded on the {122} evidence, and there is far too much that is central to the preaching of Jesus that is utterly opposed to Zealot beliefs. In particular, sayings about turning the other cheek and loving one's enemies as well as the refusal to be drawn on the question of tribute to Caesar, show that Jesus did not wish to be identified in any way with the Zealots or their views about God's kingdom. This holds true even when popular opinion was anxious to cast him in that role and his enemies who wished to have him removed were able to misrepresent him as a political pretender to the Roman authorities. As we shall see, some of his language could have been construed in purely political terms by those who were looking for such a messianic leader, yet in the end the whole trend of his ministry seems to have been concerned with the religious rather than the political aspects of Judaism. Nor is their any evidence that the Jerusalem Christians were prepared to become embroiled in the national struggle, thus obeying the apocalyptic warnings of certain gospel passages. A later Christian historian, Eusebius, says that they fled to Pella shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, and this would seem to confirm the view that neither Jesus nor his followers who stayed closest to the heart of Judaism ever had any fascination with the Zealot ideal.

IV. After 70 C.E.: The Making of Rabbinic Judaism

In the previous chapter we have seen how the Romans reorganised Palestine in the wake of the destruction of 70 C.E. With the temple destroyed, those groups within Judaism who had taken their religious stance in relation to it were now totally deprived of any basis for their faith, and were consequently forced to rethink their position in regard to the temple and its meaning, or to find another way. We do not know how many of the religious leaders survived the catastrophe. Presumably they were not very many, {123} given the civil strife, as well as the Roman siege and its aftermath. Subsequently we do hear of a group called "The holy congregation of Jerusalem," who in all probability attempted to retain their identity as Jerusalemites in exile, presumably hoping for the rebuilding of the temple. There is also some evidence of people returning to the temple mount on pilgrimage even after the destruction. Clearly then, the memory of the temple could not be wiped away so easily, something underlined by the fact that the emperor Hadrian's desire to build a temple in honour of the head of the Roman pantheon, Jupiter, in Jerusalem was a major contributory factor to the second Jewish revolt of 132-135 C.E. Yet despite these scattered pieces of evidence, it is clear that the strand of Judaism that was least dependent on visible or political structures for its survival was likely to have been most successful, and it is in this respect that Pharisaism was best equipped to fill the breach.

Later rabbinic sources have a legend about an influential Jerusalem sage of the Pharisaic party, Johanan ben Zakkai, escaping from Jerusalem during the Roman siege in a rather bizarre fashion: he had his disciples carry him out in a coffin, and thus escaped to Vespasian who then allowed him to open a school at the coastal town of Jamnia. It was there that the beginnings of the reorganisation was to take place as Johanan, first for his own followers, and subsequently for others who joined him was able to gradually place the study of the Torah rather than the pilgrimage to Jerusalem at the real centre of Jewish life and piety. It is not that this was an unimportant facet of Jewish life prior to 70 C.E., indeed for centuries. What was different now was that study became the centre of Jewish life replacing all others of the previous period. The story is told that on one occasion as Rabbi Johanan was leaving Jerusalem one of his students began to lament at the sight of the temple ruins "where the sins of Israel were atoned." But Rabbi Johanan replied, "I will show you another way," and cited a text from scripture, "I will have mercy not sacrifice" (Hos 6:6), to indicate {124} that deeds of loving kindness towards the neighbour were as important in God's eyes as were acts of worship. This episode is a good illustration of the direction of Johanan's and his followers' theological position: the destruction of the temple was God's punishment for failure to live out the demands of God's law, and now the study and application of that had to be intensified and extended to all segments of the people. By seeing the calamity in terms of God's corrective judgement Johanan and his successors were able to achieve the double goal of averting a crisis of faith on the one hand and ensuring greater support for his own particular project on the other.

The synagogue, whose beginnings we suggested may have been as far back as the Babylonian exile and which had served an important function as a religious as well as a social centre, now takes on increasing importance within Jewish life. Indeed some of Johanan's earliest enactments in his role as quasi-official interpreter of Jewish law, were to transfer certain liturgical practices that had been performed only in the temple to the synagogue. Thus the latter increasingly came to have a sacred character as a "house of prayer," and many of the prayers and liturgical practices that now make up the Jewish prayer book (the Siddur) began to take definite form in this period.

One must not give the impression that Johanan and his successors had an easy passage. There are many traditions of tensions and recriminations between the various Jamnia teachers and their disciples. These are in part due to the different personalities in question, their background in the pre-70 situation and the diverging attitudes of the leading Pharisaic schools (especially those of Hillel and Shammai) from that earlier period. It has often been suggested that what has come to be called "the Jamnia period" was one of consolidation of Jewish attitudes over against the early Christians, especially the so-called Jewish Christians who had lived in close relation to Judaism up to that time. While there undoubtedly is some truth to the assertion that as a {125} normative version of Judaism emerged clearer lines of demarcation between the two groups were likely to develop, yet a sense of balance is called for.

It seems unlikely that there ever was a Council of Jamnia, similar in intent and function to later councils of the Church, which finally pronounced the Christians to be heretics. This is the usual explanation of the birkath ha-minim, or blessing (curse) of the heretics which many suggest was introduced into the Amidah prayer (also known as The Eighteen Benedictions) at this time. In fact the curse in question is more general in its intent, and in its earliest version is directed against all who are regarded by the emerging orthodoxy as errant, and this presumably included Christians also.

We know from the rabbinic sources that at this time there was a real effort on the part of the Jamnia rabbis to extend the obligations of their way to Jews who had fled Palestine, especially to Syria, in the wake of the first revolt. In all probability these refugees included many Christians from Palestine, and this would inevitably have given rise to tensions between groups who had previously been content to live in a loosely defined relationship as various parties in the pluralistic religious environment we described in the previous section. Besides, we hear of bitter dispute between later rabbis and "the peoples of the land," a term that now applies to all who did not willingly embrace the rabbinic ideal, irrespective of their social background-disputes that continued into the third century C.E. Thus, while the developments within Judaism which we have been describing played a vital role in helping several early Christian groups define their beliefs and structures more precisely - something we shall discuss more fully in our next chapter - the conflicts and mutual recriminations that one finds echoed in the literature (for example, Mt 23), should not be read as though Christians and Jews were already two mutually opposed world religions engaged in deadly polemics against each other. The fall of the temple was a shock to both Jews and Christians, insofar as it pushed people of all religious persuasions in {126} Palestine (and those in the Diaspora who drew their inspiration from there) to redefine their understanding of their religious convictions, both in terms of the nature and extent of the divine presence and the human response to it. In this regard the fall of the temple was as significant for emerging Christianity as it was for Judaism itself.

Conclusion: Jew and Greek

Our treatment of Judaism of the second temple period has focused almost entirely on Palestine, and our approach has been to show how the historical vicissitudes there shaped the religious response in several different directions. Basically it is an account of Judaism's struggle with the Hellenistic world of which it found itself a part since Alexander's conquests. The problem was how to retain the unique sense of election that the Jews had always experienced when the larger cultural situation was pulling in the opposite direction. As we have seen, there are several possible answers to that question ranging from total assimilation to utter rejection, and we have attempted to outline the more important responses. Inevitably our sketch has not captured every facet and in a survey such as this there is a danger of missing the real heart of the matter.

In emphasising the varieties and complexities one can easily ignore the spiritual power that came from a firm belief in the God who continued to direct the processes of history, even when these seemed to conflict with the best interests of his chosen people. To grasp this aspect of the Jewish experience it is necessary to recognise that today this same belief is a vital force helping a people to transcend the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camp and celebrate the presence of God in this world discovered in and through his creation. This continuity of vision is ensured through the continuity of prayer life which expresses, better than anything, this people's apprehension of the divine/ human encounter. The daily recitation of the Shema ("Hear O Israel, the Lord {127} your God is one Lord") and the Amidah ("Blessed art thou, Lord our God and God of our Fathers...") - are expressions of that faith that span the centuries from the Babylonian captivity and beyond to the present.

It is sometimes difficult for Christians who have learned that Christ is the fulfilment of the Jewish hope, to realise that that hope is still alive in the Jewish faith today and finds an authentic expression still in Jewish religious life and worship. Yet this difficulty of the modern Christian has been compounded by scholars who have been all too ready to see the Judaism of the first century as a dried and desiccated root devoid of all genuine religious expression. Hopefully our sketchy treatment will at least succeed in restoring the balance, as a starting point for twentieth century Christians to learn from and with their Jewish brothers from the great treasury that they hold in common, the Hebrew Scriptures.

Our concentration on Judaism as it developed in Palestine should not obscure the developments in the Diaspora, where, we saw, Judaism's encounter with Hellenism was of a different kind to that of the homeland. Yet it was from these communities that Paul and the other Christian missionaries made their first converts, if Acts of the Apostles is correct. That these communities had learned to adapt to life in the larger world yet retain their Jewishness is evidenced in their production of the Greek translation of the Old Testament as early as the third century B.C.E. Clearly, within a generation or two of Alexander's death, there were many Jews who no longer spoke the Hebrew tongue, yet felt the need to retain their Jewish faith. It was to meet their needs that the first translation of the Hebrew Scriptures was produced. Other books, expressing the essence of the Jewish faith but in concepts and language drawn from Greek philosophy, were written. Alexandria in Egypt, was one centre of which we know, where this activity was highly developed as the Jewish religious philosopher, Philo (c. 20 B.C.E. - 45 C.E.) amply bears witness. Unfortunately, apart from Philo, hardly any of this literature {128} contemporaneous with Christianity has been preserved for us, and it seems to have made little impact on Palestinian Judaism, at least as this is reflected in rabbinic literature. It is not easy to decide whether Philo is representative of this branch of Judaism, or whether he is merely a voice in the wilderness, attempting to reconcile his intellectual curiosity with his religious faith. The fact that the Book of Wisdom, also a product of Alexandria it is thought, shows similar interests, strongly suggests the former. Surprisingly enough, we hear of no great support for either revolt in Palestine from Jews of the Diaspora - though there was a Jewish uprising in Alexandria in 115 C.E. which apparently was Zealot-inspired - and this suggests that at least politically, if not also ideologically, there were real differences between Jews in the homeland and those of the Diaspora.

The conflict between the Hebrews and Hellenists in the early church (Ac 6:1) would also seem to support that view. The likelihood must be that Diaspora Jews for the most part had a different outlook on the way in which their Jewishness could be integrated into a Hellenistic world-view. This would explain Christianity's appeal for many of them, especially as elaborated by Paul, where distinctive religious ideas based on the Hebrew Scriptures could be integrated with a more positive role for the gentiles in the one universal plan of God. But that suggestion takes us to the final chapter of our study.

{131}