BASED ON THE Christian gospels, later readers might be puzzled by the seemingly excessive reaction of both Jewish and Roman authorities to Jesus’s activities as preacher and healer as well as their failure to comprehend his purely religious intentions. At the time, in an age when revolutionary ideas had gained such a following, the boundaries between religious and political activism were close to invisible. Modern historians are cautious about using words like “nationalism” in an ancient context, because it often means back-projecting post-Enlightenment ideas into a world that lacked most of the trappings of that ideology. Yet the very strong linkage between religious and ethnic identity in the Jewish case makes the language difficult to avoid.

By the end of the Crucible years, revolutionary activism was increasingly deployed in religious language, and it took scriptural forms. Those new texts included the psalms credited to the ancient king Solomon that were actually written in the 50s BCE, in the latter days of the Hasmoneans. “Solomon” laments the dreadful things that will befall his people when the rightful Davidic line is displaced by evil usurpers who are the Hasmoneans themselves: “Thou, O Lord, didst choose David (to be) king over Israel, and swore to him touching his seed that never should his kingdom fail before Thee. But, for our sins, sinners rose up against us; they assailed us and thrust us out; What Thou hadst not promised to them, they took away [from us] with violence.… They set a [worldly] monarchy in place of [that which was] their excellency; they laid waste the throne of David in tumultuous arrogance” (17). A more recent translation of the last verse proclaims that “With pomp they set up a monarchy because of their arrogance; they despoiled the throne of David with arrogant shouting.” No better are the pagan Romans, who had so brutally conquered and sacked Jerusalem.14

Beyond merely condemning and complaining, such texts move swiftly and inevitably to the language of messianism and apocalyptic, offering readers a glimpse of a better future when their current oppressors would be punished and the righteous would be rewarded. In the same psalm (17), Solomon offers an extended hymn to a coming king, a son of David, who would “shatter unrighteous rulers, and… purge Jerusalem from nations that trample (her) down to destruction”:

He shall destroy the godless nations with the word of his mouth;

At his rebuke nations shall flee before him,

And he shall reprove sinners for the thoughts of their heart.

And he shall gather together a holy people, whom he shall lead in righteousness,

And he shall judge the tribes of the people that has been sanctified by the Lord his God.

Aliens and sojourners would no longer be tolerated in the land. The king would rule from a purged and purified Jerusalem, and he would be a mighty judge and conqueror.

THE SUBSTANCE OF politics was changing, and the scale of that change was already evident by the latter stages of Herod’s own rule. The extent of disaffection in 4 BCE, the upsurge of military messianism, shows just how widespread discontent had been beneath the seemingly tranquil surface of Herod’s rule. Among other elements, the new openness to martyrdom reduced the likelihood that formidable Roman resources would be enough to hold radicals in check. Josephus specifically tells us that Judas and Mattathias, the two firebrands of 4 BCE, had taught their doctrines to audiences of eager young men. At some point in the first century CE, a collection of Lives of the Prophets offered multiple examples of noble martyrdom, adding to the popular literature on heroic death in God’s service. Reputedly, six of the historic prophets suffered that fate, and the accounts of their deaths closely resemble the better-known stories of the early Christian sufferers. The implication is that martyrdom was a natural and glorious consequence of faithfully serving God and his Law.15

Revolutionary ideas had become vernacular and popular, the preserve of mass movements rather than just theorists or elite factions. Crowds and mobs were waiting to be mobilized, and the city of Jerusalem itself perfectly symbolizes the real and potential chaos of these years. The crisis of the Varus War showed the extreme difficulty of controlling the city in the face of armed and dedicated militants. This was hard even for the very well-equipped and well-trained Romans, and their garrison came close to destruction. In Jerusalem above all, Demos—the People—had arrived on the political scene.

The Romans and the high priestly elites were right, then, to be worried about the turbulence of Jerusalem. Just in the first century BCE, acts of extreme violence included the massacres of rivals by king Jannaeus, the conquest of the city in 63 and 37 BCE, and the multiple acts of bloodshed in the year 4 BCE. Each of these instances reputedly claimed multiple thousands of lives. Extrapolating from that history, Jerusalem in Jesus’s time was a generation overdue for an explosion, a fact known all too well by the Temple establishment. The pilgrim feasts were times of special concern. At such times, the city filled with tens of thousands of outside visitors, many filled with religious zeal and easily open to revolutionary manipulation. Making Jerusalem even more sensitive politically was its central role in so many prophecies and apocalypses, canonical or otherwise. The End Times were destined to begin within the city’s walls.

Urban dissidents also knew they could draw on support from the wider territory. The decisive lurch to outright revolt at Pentecost in 4 BCE was sparked by the influx from the small towns and villages of Galilee, Idumea, and Perea. There were worrying parallels to the Maccabean revolt, when country dwellers rose against the Hellenizing slant of the urban elite. In these later years, one additional factor making these areas even more turbulent was the constant frictions with neighboring Gentile areas.16

Local militant and anti-Roman movements also demonstrated deep continuities. In the 40s BCE, Herod captured and killed a Galilean bandit named Hezekiah, who had been raiding into Syria. Or, at least, Hezekiah is remembered as a simple bandit: perhaps he saw himself as a patriotic revolutionary or holy warrior, even a new Phinehas like the Maccabees before him. Hezekiah’s son Judas was one of the popular revolutionary kings of 4 BCE, who mounted an insurrection in Galilee, operating within a few miles of Nazareth. Presumably, his origins were not far away from that center. He was later credited as the founder of what would become the insurrectionary Zealot movement, in which his family were unofficial royalty. Two of his sons were crucified in the 40s; another relative—a grandson?—led the terrorist Sicarii movement of the 50s and 60s. This demonstrates the deeply rooted nature of local opposition cultures and of religious-based extremism. In the 60s, as in Varus’s time, Galilee and Idumea were notorious bastions of sedition.¹⁷

Besides the overtly political groups, religious disaffection was growing apace. Between the 30s and the 50s CE, several self-proclaimed prophets alarmed the established authorities by attracting a devoted following, and also for their messianic pretensions. Quite apart from his notorious actions against Jesus, Pontius Pilate had to send military forces against the hordes following a Samaritan prophet. In the 40s, one Theudas was executed after promising to divide the waters of the Jordan for his faithful followers; some years afterward, an Egyptian prophet persuaded some thousands to join him at the Mount of Olives, in preparation for his miraculous conquest of Jerusalem. As Josephus complains, such false prophets were even more wicked than the Sicarii. They “deceived and deluded the people under pretense of divine inspiration, but were for procuring innovations and changes of the government; and these prevailed with the multitude to act like madmen, and went before them into the wilderness, as pretending that God would there show them the signals of liberty.” A less damning translation of the phrase here given as “act like madmen” would be that they would “abandon themselves to divine powers.”18

Even without the revolutionary prophets, there were still abundant reasons to fear discontent. By no means all Jewish militants in this era were explicitly apocalyptic or otherworldly in their motivation. As the Maccabees had shown in their day, there were plenty of thoroughly secular ways of asserting nationhood without expecting divine intervention. The Seleucid experience had shown that even empires that on the face of things appeared all-powerful might collapse more or less overnight. For all their rhetoric about divine intentions, religious-motivated revolutionaries were not necessarily dreamy fantasists aiming for pie in the sky. The movements they stirred could be thoroughly practical and surprisingly effective.¹⁹

SO STRONG, IN fact, is the evidence for political conflict and revolutionary activism that it is difficult to recall how much was taking place in the Herodian years that had little or nothing to do with what can sometimes seem like the main narrative, the high road to open revolution. Yet these other developments mattered enormously in showing the absorption of the ideas and beliefs from the Crucible years and, critically, how these would allow Judaism to survive overwhelming catastrophe.

Much as many loathed Herod, his reign also marked a fundamental restructuring of Judaism and the creation of many critically important institutions. The greatest new symbol of the material world of Judaism was Herod’s rebuilding of the Second Temple, which began in 20 BCE and was substantially completed by the mid-20s CE, so that the edifice that filled Jesus’s disciples with such awe was a very new (and indeed ongoing) project.

But at humbler levels too, we now for the first time see the emergence of local prayer houses, synagogues. The New Testament makes these institutions sound like such familiar parts of the landscape that it is easy to forget just how new these places were, and how they revolutionized piety and practice at the level of local communities. Appropriately, given the cultural interactions of the time, “synagogue” is a Greek word for a thoroughly Jewish institution, which were also known by the term proseuche, house of prayer.20

The centrality of prayer to religious life was in itself quite revolutionary. In biblical times, prayer was something that was used as needed, but in the Crucible years Jews developed a regimen of daily prayers. The first evidence of such practice comes from Qumran, with the collection known as the Words of the Luminaries. This does not mean that Qumran itself invented the daily prayer institution; rather, the practice was known at or before the sect’s foundation. Together with reading from sacred scriptures, such prayers represented the core practice of the synagogues, and this marked Judaism out as utterly different from most of the religions that Romans and Greeks encountered. How, wondered pagans, could a place of worship not involve sacrifice? Still more surprising, texts written while the Temple was still standing were already proclaiming that sacrifice was not necessarily greater than other religious duties that could be fulfilled in the synagogue or in private life—duties such as daily prayer, giving charity, and generally fulfilling the commandments.21

In this way, synagogues marked the culmination of the shift toward the textualization of religion, toward faith being something communicated through reading and writing. These prayer houses also demanded training in reading, through schools. The structure of prayers, worship, and structured services that evolved in early synagogues lies at the root of all later Christian liturgy, including the Mass and Eucharistic rites. Synagogues permitted the faith to continue even after the cessation of the sacrificial system that had for so long been its bedrock. When the Temple fell, the text endured.²²

This was also a truly distinguished age for scholars and jurists, and we are much better informed about these illustrious figures than the earlier generations around whom so many legends have accumulated. The sages who composed the Mishnah and Talmud looked especially to such leaders of this time as Hillel the Elder, who lived at the start of the Common Era. Alongside such spiritual celebrities, there now appeared local spiritual leaders, the teachers or rabbis, and the ordinary scribes who were so central to the production and consumption of written materials during the ages of Jesus and Hillel. A strong and diverse institutional framework now supported the outpouring of written materials of all kinds during the first century CE, of which the Christian gospels, epistles, and revelations are only the best-known peak of a substantial iceberg. Such works show how thoroughly the worldview of the Crucible years had established itself in popular thought and culture. They also point to the existence of a substantial reading public with an appetite for Jewish-related themes, virtually always in Greek.²³

Some of these texts were apocalyptic in tone, and such writings gained a heartrending quality during the Jewish War itself. Besides serious texts, other works were designed to be read for pleasure and for amusement, and it is presumably for that reason that they are not better known. One example is the Testament of Abraham, which is an apocryphal expansion on the life of a biblical patriarch, with major interventions by the archangel Michael. What we do not expect is just how funny it is. Michael is deputed to tell Abraham of his approaching death, but each time he is about to pass on the message, he is overcome by Abraham’s wonderful hospitality and reneges on his mission. In order to communicate with God without Abraham realizing his identity, Michael has to pretend to need to leave the tent in order to urinate.24

Also from this era is the romantic novella Joseph and Aseneth, about the affair between the patriarch Joseph and the daughter of an Egyptian high priest. Naturally enough, given its date, an archangel is the critical intermediary between the two parties. He introduces himself as “commander of the Lord’s house, and chief captain of all the host of the Most High,” so presumably Michael was making another of his many literary appearances.²⁵

Geographically, these works were produced in any number of centers, from Babylon to Alexandria to Rome, and they circulated easily throughout a Jewish world that stretched farther than ever before. Diaspora communities were stronger and more widespread, largely owing to the growth of Roman power, but many communities also existed east of the Roman frontier, in Babylonia and beyond. Jewish influence was particularly strong in the border states and petty kingdoms separating Parthia and Rome, in lands such as Osrhoene (Edessa) and Adiabene (Arbela), in what are today eastern Syria and northern Iraq. In the first century CE, the king of Adiabene even converted to Judaism.

That incident also points to another force for change in these years. As Jews assimilated into the wider culture, a significant number of outsiders were drawn to Judaism, either as full converts or as fellow travelers, including the “God-fearers” who feature in the book of Acts. Although Jews did not undertake widespread proselytization, many communities welcomed these seekers and inquirers, who brought with them their distinctive concerns and interests. Such Judaizers spread Jewish themes and attitudes in the larger culture.26

Those diverse communities served as an open door to ever-new waves of influence and ideas, which spread throughout the larger world of Judaism. Apart from travel related to trade or commerce, attendance at the great Jerusalem feasts ensured that Jews from various parts of the Diaspora maintained these cultural contacts. By the first century CE, major synagogues flourished in Syrian Antioch, in Egyptian Alexandria, and in Italy (Rome and Ostia), quite apart from the many lesser prayer houses recorded in the New Testament. However strong the political pressures building in Jerusalem, Judaism seemed ever more closely integrated into the wider Mediterranean society.²⁷

FEW HISTORICAL SOURCES allow us to reconstruct the ideas of ordinary nonelite Jews at this time, but there is one obvious exception: the New Testament. At many points in the present book, any modern reader is likely to think of the life and times of Jesus and the origins of early Christianity and to relate every point in mainstream history to those very well-known events. That approach runs the risk of giving that Christian story far more significance than it would have actually had at the time. Even so, the New Testament offers a detailed and wide-ranging source for understanding the Jewish world at this time.²⁸

What we know about Jesus was written and recorded by his followers who may well have adjusted those stories to fit the needs of their own times. Fortunately, that fact poses no great problems for our present purposes. Regardless of whether Jesus himself did not say or think such things—if, say, he did not actually preach particular parables—then those ideas were certainly present in the minds of his Jewish followers a decade or two afterward. And those writers presented their material in terms that they assumed would speak to the needs and interests of their mainly Jewish audience.

The first members of the Jesus movement were in every sense heirs to the revolutionary developments of the previous two centuries, as was Jesus himself. Such a cultural genealogy is anything but a new insight. Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, writers had linked both John the Baptist and Jesus to the Essene sect as described by Josephus. Ernest Renan, author of the pioneering nineteenth-century Life of Jesus, proclaimed that Christianity was simply a version of Essenism that happened to have survived. As early as 1875, long before the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical critic J. B. Lightfoot complained, “It has become a common practice with a certain class of writers to call Essenism to their aid in accounting for any distinctive features of Christianity, which they are unable to explain in any other way.” (Essenes served a similar explanatory role for other movements besides Christianity, including Gnosticism.) The Qumran finds of the 1940s created new interest in that connection and encouraged many overambitious theories about “Jesus the Essene.” Setting aside such far-reaching claims, the Qumran materials often do help us understand Jesus’s world, and especially the precursor movement led by John the Baptist. If they do not link Jesus to the sect itself, they show how strongly his ideas resonated with the spiritual insights of the two centuries before his time and its scriptural understandings.29

Echoes of the Crucible years appear on every page of the canonical gospels. Jesus was above all a prophet of Judgment and apocalypse. On the coming Day of Judgment, he said, the world’s people “will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” (Mark 13:26–27). Jesus’s world was dominated by a belief in the afterlife and Resurrection, in future rewards and punishments. He warned of an Enochian Hell, “where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). However often the gospels disparage the Pharisees, Jesus was closely aligned with their way of thinking. On occasion, his ideas met opposition, chiefly from Sadducees, but usually he was speaking the commonplaces of the time.30

Jesus confronted Satan and he battled demons. In a famous passage, Satan encounters Jesus in the Wilderness and presents him with several temptations (Luke 4). That includes granting Jesus all the authority and splendor of the kingdoms of the world, which the Devil could hardly do unless they were already in his own claws. On several occasions, Jesus identified the prince or ruler (archon) of this world as his enemy, who would be judged or overthrown as a consequence of his mission (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11). Jesus reportedly knew the story of Satan’s expulsion from the heavenly court, as recounted in the Adam literature: at least, he declared that “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). Jesus also attributed some or all disease and human misfortune to demonic activities. He once healed a Jewish woman who had long been severely crippled—or, as he reportedly described her, “a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years” (Luke 13:16).³¹

In his role as prophet too, Jesus was no less a product of the spiritual revolution of the Crucible years. Unlike the ancient prophets, who chiefly proclaimed the word of God and called for repentance, the newer emphasis was on charismatic figures who earned their reputation as wonder workers and healers. Many people suspected or feared that John the Baptist and Jesus himself were prophets, on the basis of the healings and wonders for which they have become famous.³²

For his followers, Jesus was the Messiah, Christ, a term that had been comprehensively redefined in the previous two centuries. So thoroughly did that concept describe his role that in his writings, Paul virtually never speaks of “Jesus” alone but always “Christ” or “Christ Jesus.” But what exactly did the word mean? Generations of Christian sermons have stressed that, in his weakness and apparent worldly failure, Jesus represented a truly odd candidate for messiahship and that in his very rejection of earthly glories, we see his true heavenly character.33 As we have seen from Qumran, the story is more nuanced than this account would suggest, and messianic images were multiform. Whether or not there was any direct influence from Qumran or other sectarian circles, we must be less struck by what initially appear to be the revolutionary novelty of the claims made for Jesus’s messianic role.³⁴

Jesus seemingly stood apart from his contemporaries in his pacifism and rejection of worldly politics, in contrast to insurrectionists like the Egyptian Prophet or even his Zealot near neighbors. Later generations of Christians accept that stance as a fundamental part of Jesus’s mission, although some scholars through the years have doubted whether the written records concerning Jesus can in fact be trusted in this regard. The gospels were written in the aftermath of the Jewish War, when Roman authorities were extremely sensitive about any movement that might be regarded as seditious, leaving early Christians little option but to present their founder in the most pacific and apolitical terms. Just how accurate that picture actually was remains open to discussion. From their point of view at least, the Romans of his time had reasonable grounds to link Jesus with a host of similar figures in these same years.

Even if the Jesus movement was a tiny sect within the larger Jewish world, few of the group’s ideas marked them off significantly from the thought-world of their Jewish contemporaries. In so many of their beliefs, especially about issues of apocalyptic, prophecy, and messianism, Jesus’s first followers were absolutely Jewish men and women of their time.

BY THE 60S, religious nationalist sentiment was growing, to the point of demanding an outright break with Roman authority. Little more was needed to ignite a full-scale revolt. Much like the Maccabean revolt, the Jewish rising that actually did occur in the 60s is usually portrayed in terms of a united patriotic effort of oppressed Jews against a pagan occupier. Like that earlier movement, though, the later rising was also a complex affair, setting different internal factions and ethnic groups against each other.

Interethnic tensions in fact provided the immediate spark for the revolt. Caesarea had long been a microcosm of the region’s divisions. Jews claimed the city as their own, because it had been built by Herod, a Jew. The Gentiles and “Syrians” conceded that fact, but protested that the city was so full of pagan temples and statues that it obviously could not have been intended for Jews. (Reading such exchanges, we realize how far removed we are from any modern sense of peaceful coexistence, still less multiculturalism.) Some Greeks sacrificed doves outside a synagogue, and the offense that that caused was magnified when Roman authorities failed to intervene. Fighting spread until the governor of the Jerusalem Temple took the insurrectionary step of ending the service of sacrifice and prayers for the emperor. Roman troops entered the Temple to seize its wealth, which had the effect of focusing popular unrest on burdensome Roman taxation. This event incited outright revolution, as nationalist forces seized Jerusalem, overrunning the Roman garrisons as they had failed to do in 4 BCE. Roman authorities in Syria sent in a major army—again, closely following the script of Varus’s time—but this force were defeated in one of the worst disasters that insurgents ever inflicted on imperial forces. In response, Rome appointed one of its toughest and most competent generals, Vespasian, to lead the reconquest, beginning in the most radicalized insurgent zone of all, the Galilee.35

In retrospect, we know that the Jewish Revolt was doomed and was bound to destroy the land and its society. Even at the time, a little history should have taught the rebels just how far-fetched their cause really was. Rome might indeed be challenged, but only provided that its empire and army were fatally divided and failing, or if rebels had the support of some mighty external power. For a brief period, internal Roman divisions seemed very promising for the Jewish cause, and Nero’s death in 68 was followed by an intense civil war. The year 69, in fact, is remembered as the Year of Four Emperors, and the chaos naturally slowed the reconquest of Judea. Even so, one of those battling candidates, Vespasian himself, won the imperial crown, and his son Titus led the final assault against the Jewish insurgents. (The former rebel leader Josephus saved his own skin with a well-timed prophecy that Vespasian would be the prophesied world ruler who would come out of Judea—a devious reworking of the then-current Jewish obsession with messianic prophecies.) However disastrous they seemed at the time, then, Roman weaknesses were never grave enough to provide the conditions for a Jewish victory.

The Jews themselves were at least as badly divided. As in any revolution, radicals often found themselves at odds with more moderate groups, but the Jewish case was made much worse by the struggles between old-established sects. In 67 CE, the Roman conquest of Galilee forced thousands of Zealots to flee into Judea, where they confronted the Sadducees who were entrenched in Jerusalem itself. That conflict developed into an outright civil war among the Jews, which persisted into 69. Each side sought to eliminate its rivals by assassination and execution, with the Zealots particularly ruthless against anyone who contemplated surrender to the Romans. Meanwhile, people flocked into the city to aid the rival forces, each under its own warlords. Reliably fervent as ever, Idumeans swelled the Zealot army.

The war reached its climax in 70, when the Romans recaptured and massacred the insurgent city of Jerusalem, in the process destroying the Second Temple. The great Menorah and other sacred vessels were taken to Rome for display during a magnificent Triumph, which is commemorated in a famous and much-reproduced carving on the Roman Arch of Titus, erected around 82. (Another Roman arch erected in Titus’s honor made the extraordinary claim that he was the first ever to have conquered the city, a statement that would have surprised earlier victors like Pompey, among others.) The smashing of God’s House marked the end of the millennium-old sacrificial cult and the devastation of Judean society. The number of dead ran into the hundreds of thousands. Apart from the Temple, the Qumran community itself now came to an end, and the lesser Temple at Leontopolis, in Egypt, fell a few years afterward. A pseudoprophecy in Mark’s gospel has Jesus echoing Daniel in warning about those years, “Those will be days of distress unequaled from the beginning, when God created the world, until now—and never to be equaled again” (13:19).36

THE RESULTING CONFLICT was indeed savage at the local level. Across Palestine and the wider Near East, the revolution was marked by intercommunal massacres and ethnic cleansing, and the redrawing of religious and cultural boundaries. This horrific era fundamentally changed the relationship between Gentile and Jewish communities and consequently altered the nature of Judaism itself. Memories of such atrocities poisoned intercommunal relations for decades.

As so often in such instances, we can rarely tell just who started a cycle of massacres and tit-for-tat revenge. After the radical coup in Jerusalem in 66, the people of Caesarea slaughtered their Jews, reputedly twenty thousand of them. Jews then retaliated against Gentile settlements across the country, devastating the villages and towns of the “Syrians” and burning and massacring across the Decapolis. Gentiles struck back against Jewish communities that they feared might be nurturing potential rebels and genocidaires in their midst. The insanity spilled outside Palestine’s borders. Intercommunal rioting in Alexandria escalated until the Romans sent in regular forces, who massacred the substantial Jewish Quarter. Damascus slaughtered its Jews, allegedly ten thousand in number.37

After striking the Jews, the Gentiles targeted the Judaizers, tous Ioudaizontas, an intriguing word. It might refer to Gentiles sympathetic toward Judaism who had not undergone full conversion, but it might also include Gentiles attracted to the rising Jesus movement, which at the time was viewed as a Jewish sect. This was neither the time nor the place for people who straddled the religious and political boundary and wanted no part in the reciprocal mass murder.³⁸

Obviously, even such disasters did not entirely destroy the Jewish world or its Christian offshoots. Reportedly, the early Christian church of Jerusalem responded to the crisis by relocating across the Jordan, to the Decapolis city of Pella. Other sectarian movements likely followed similar eastward routes, including the Jewish Christian baptismal sects. Nor did the violence actually end Diaspora communities, which in some ways were actually enhanced as they were strengthened by refugees and exiles from Palestine itself. Even so, it is hard to exaggerate the scale of the catastrophe at all levels, cultural, political, and religious. The war transformed the religious world, wrecking many older institutions and movements beyond repair.

Contemporary observers could have been forgiven for seeing the Jewish War as the end of the Jewish people, a cosmic catastrophe even worse than the Babylonian exile six centuries before. In fact, of course, it was no such thing. Judaism itself underwent a fundamental reconstruction, while the associated movements now developed their ideas on a much larger global canvas.