2.5 Jewish History - The Romans and the Setting of Jesus

Okay, today: Some quick recap again, more historical events, and then some talk about the groups of people you read about the New Testament but probably have little context for–folks such as the Pharisees and Sadducees and Samaritans. When you read about them, what do you know about them, and how does it shape how you understand what you are reading? 

I keep saying I want this to be a bite-sized podcast with no more than 10-12 minutes per episode, but bear with me through the remaining couple of episodes on Jewish history–its a lot to cover. A bit longer today than I might prefer.

The quick Jewish history so-far recap, then, to start: the Hebrew tribes became Israelite kingdoms, which were destroyed, and we’ve now seen the Jewish people subjugated by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Greeks, in that order, and when we left off last week, one of the Greek Kings, Antiochus IV, in 167 BC had pushed too hard to force the Jews to assimilate and become more Greek, prompting a revolt that led to the establishment of a short-lived Jewish independent state we call the Hasmonean Kingdom that, it turns out, was just the latest in another stage of oppression for the Jewish people in Palestine.

It is difficult to get into some of the Hasomean history without getting into all of it, because it’s super complicated and frankly a total mess. Here I go, anyway, but I will make this brief: The Hasmoean family were constantly infighting and drawing their neighbors into their fights and were fickle and cruel and combined the offices of high priest and king in ways that pious Yahweh-worshippers often found disturbing. And, finally, in 63 BC after a civil war had broken out between two Hasmoean family members vying for the throne of Judah, we reach the stage of history when the great new power of the Mediterranean world, the Romans, enter this story for the first time. Rome will play a critical role from this point, 63 BC, up to the present day in the history of Judeo-Christianity, since Catholicism has now outlasted the Roman Empire by over 1500 years.

In 63, roughly sixty years before Jesus is born, the famous Roman general Pompey stamps out the Hasmonean civil war in Judea, besieging Jerusalem and damaging the temple in the process. Judea is made into a client state of Rome, though it remains quite unstable for the next couple of decades until the year 39 BC when the Romans put a half-Jew of their own choosing on the throne of Judea, whose name is Herod the Great. 

So, for the rest of today and the next episode, we will be talking about the Greco-Roman period of Judea’s history, which is the stage on which the story of Jesus and the birth of Christianity will play out. By the way, we call this period Greco-Roman, because while the Romans were in charge politically speaking, the Greek world continued to dominate culture and thought.

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So, Herod is on the throne of Judea for 35 years, and one of the very noteworthy things he does is completely rebuild the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, which was in a generally sad state. Herod’s temple and the surrounding complex of buildings were very grand, one of the world’s most impressive structures in the world in fact at that time. Herod builds lots of other things, too, including fortresses and palaces for himself. The other noteworthy thing about Herod the Great, at least according to the Gospel of Matthew, is that he was the king when Jesus was born, an event often dated to around the year 5 BC. 

We won’t get into ancient calendar dating and how it has changed in the last two millennia, but suffice it to say for now that Jesus was not born in the year zero or one as we would date backwards from our own day and as you might have been tempted to assume, but his birth was likely a few years before that. Our calendar year does not precisely correspond to the proverbial “year of our Lord”. It’s close, not exact.

Herod dies in 4 BC, and his kingdom is divided up by the Romans into four different parts, governed by four different leaders collectively called the Tetrarchy, “tetra” having to do with the number four. The tetrarchy is a hard-to-follow patchwork of lands ruled by Herod’s children and other Roman-appointed governors.

Confusingly, two of the four Tetrarchs are sons of Herod, also both named Herod. Herod Archileaus is given control of the area of Judea around Jerusalem, but he, like many who inherit great wealth, proves incompetent and is summarily fired. Which is to say, his part of the estate is managed by other governors starting in the year 6 AD. This year is important because it’s when a guy named Quirinius was put in charge of a census of Judea for the purposes of taxation, and this tax made the Jews mad at the Romans. 

You read about this 6 AD census in the birth account of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and while careful listeners may now be wondering how Jesus could have been born in about 5 BC while Herod the Great was the king AND also born in the year 6 AD when the Judeans were being taxed…you have to wait until some future episode of the Bible Unthumped for an explanation. 

So, the other son of Herod named Herod was Herod Antipas, and he was the Tetrarch or ruler of Galilee to the north of Judea. He shows up in the gospels as the guy who executes John the Baptist and, in Luke, plays a role in the trial of Jesus prior to his crucifixion. Also playing a starring role in the crucifixion of Jesus is Pontius Pilate, who from 26-36 AD was one of the other governors within the complicated bureaucratic patchwork of Palestine in that day.

Finally for this history bit, let’s mention that during the life of Jesus, there were two Caesars, or Emperors, of Rome. Caesars were kings of kings, compared to whom someone like King Herod was merely a local peon. Augustus, who was the first Roman emperor, was on the throne when Jesus was born, regardless of whether we are talking about Matthew’s birth story version or Luke’s. Augustus died in 14 AD, which is when his step-son Tiberius became the Roman Emperor, and Tiberius ruled until his own death in the year 37. He was the emperor when Jesus died in around the year 30. 

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Let’s now talk a little about the Bible and religion during this general time period. I hinted in the last episode that ancient Hebrew was, by the Greco-Roman period, a dying language. The everyday language of people living in Palestine became Aramaic, a language picked up back during the Persian period, and the Greek language was commonly used in official capacities and among the educated classes. Outside of Palestine and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Greek was very commonly used. The language of the Romans, Latin, by the way, never really took hold in Palestine or anywhere else in the eastern part of the empire. 

By the time of Jesus, as we’ve noted, Jews were not living only in Palestine. Some were living in Babylon, having been exiled there and finding themselves happy to stay. Many were living in Egypt where the Greek city of Alexandria featured a major concentration of Jews, and Jews were scattered in all of the major cities of the eastern Mediterranean, including in modern day Syria, Turkey, Greece, North Africa, and Italy, and these Jews of the diaspora were not Hebrew speakers. They spoke mostly Greek.

At the request of the Greek king of Egypt around the year 250 BC, the Torah and other Hebrew cultural and religious texts were translated into Greek in the city of Alexandria. The product of this translation was known as the Septuagint, the Greek-language Hebrew texts that included much of what we call the Old Testament. The legend goes that the 70ish Jewish scholars who created the Septuagint–”sept” being related to “7” and the 70 scholars–all independently and miraculously translated the texts identically, but this can’t be true because, as we know from ancient commentators, the Septuagint actually wasn’t such a great translation from the original Hebrew. But, it’s important, because this is the primary version of the (quote) “Old Testament” books that was in use in Judaism at the time of Jesus and that was referenced by the writers of the New Testament later in the first century. In other words, the Greek-language Septaugint was the closest thing the early Christians had to a set of scriptures to refer to. 

Last week we mentioned that Daniel was the last of the Old Testament books to be written–if you are a Protestant, that is. Daniel was completed in the year 165 BC, give or take a year. The first of the New Testament books to be written were the letter to the Galatians and I Thessalonians, both by the apostle Paul written around the year 50, maybe the late 40s. So, between Daniel and the earliest of Paul’s letters, a period of about 215 years has gone by, and we call this the Intertestamental Period, as it is the time between the writing of the Old and New Testaments. Apart from the quick recap at the very beginning, all of the history discussed in this episode so far today, including the life of Jesus, took place in the intertestamental period. 

Between the time when the curtain falls on the Old Testament world and then rises again to reveal the New Testament world, a whole lot has happened. The world is different, and to read the Bible without an awareness of what has changed is, in my opinion, a sad anemic experience. Nothing comes to life without its context. Thus, this podcast.

Anyway, I have to go on to mention here that if you are one of the 1.5 billion Catholic or Orthodox Christians, you have the seven extra books commonly called the apocrypha, which we talked about way back in episode 1.2. These seven books mostly date from the Intertestamental Period or, in a couple of cases, from late in the Greek period–basically from the first and second century BC. But, if you are Protestant, we have no new books for today’s episode. The Old Testament is finished and the New Testament doesn’t exist yet–until we get to the next episode. 

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Now, a few other quick notes about religious life during the Greco-Roman period:

The Romans supplied the political leadership in Palestine, but they didn’t interfere too much in religious matters as long as things were stable. So, a group of important Jewish leaders were responsible in each major Jewish city in Judea for regulating religious life, and these folks were collectively called the Sanhedrin. You read about the Sanhedrin council in the gospels. The word just means ”the council”.

Among the scattered Jewish diaspora, it was generally not easy to travel to Jerusalem to make sacrifices or interact with the priests of Yahweh there. This is true in spite of the Old Testament emphasis on how important it was supposed to be to God to concentrate faithful worship on the Jerusalem temple. But, if you can’t you can’t, so Jewish communities abroad had synagogues, Greek for “meeting houses”, where Jews would meet to pray, and listen, and have social events. If you were Jew living far from Jerusalem, the temple was a place of rare pilgrimage. 

As we mentioned in the last episode, the cosmopolitan, connected world of the Greeks was ushered in by Alexander the Great, and was in some respects reinforced by the general efficiency of the Romans. The trend was away from national gods who demanded bloody sacrifices by priests at temples and more toward universal divinity, something with which humanity could connect spiritually. 

The name of the god Yahweh had more or less disappeared by the time of Jesus, as we also mentioned last week, and this was for two reasons. One, a universal divinity would not credibly carry the name of a national god. It would need to be fully substitutable with other nations’ conceptions of god. So, just saying “god” was better, never mind the name of the god you were referring to. Two, the name Yahweh had long come to be considered too holy to speak by pious Jews, anyway, so they used the word “Lord” to refer to God. Yahweh never shows up in the New Testament and presumably wasn’t spoken by Jesus. The New Testament writers either used Kyrios, Greek for Lord, or Theos, a generic Greek word for god. 

It was not just Yahweh, but the national Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Canaanite gods had also changed in the public mind. They lost their former status, as they became interchangeable–Zeus is the same as Jupiter, and Athena is the same as Minerva is the same as Isis and so forth. The virtues of the gods, not their mythic stories, became the focus of philosophy and the connection of humanity with divinity. 

Paganism at the time of Jesus often was channeled through what are today called by scholars “the mystery religions”. These were sort of secret societies, almost like the Masons or something, where people would gather and reverence the divinity manifest in such figures as Isis, Mithras, Dionysius, Orpheus, or the Great Mother. It was common in the mystery religions to engage in purifying initiation rites, to recite creeds containing secret knowledge, and to find salvation, either from one’s own sin or from the suffering of the world. Salvation was a commonly used word even among pagans and in societal contexts, not just religious ones. 

In one sense mystery religions were exclusive, only for escorted initiates who kept quiet about their secret knowledge and rites, but they were at the same time among the first places where, in cosmopolitan cities, people mingled together regardless of class, race, or nationality. The mystery religions are underappreciated in world history, and they had an appearance in some respects like the communities of the synagogue or, later, early churches with whom they were contemporaries and in some ways competitors.

Like the mysteries, the Jewish synagogue in Jesus’s day had attracted a diverse set of participants including what the New Testament and other contemporary texts called “God fearers”, non-Jews who were attracted to Judaism and participated at its fringes without fully converting. The bottom line is that in the first century AD–in the complex diversity of the Greco-Roman world–Judaism had become a complexity of things, itself, not just one thing, and we will end this episode talking about some of the groups of Jews with whom Jesus mixed and mingled and sometimes tangled.   

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While there were many, perhaps mostly, run-of-the mill Jews in Palestine who didn’t especially identify with any particular sect within Judaism, there are several groups from the first century who deserve some description.

Let’s first talk about the Sadducees, who are mentioned rather frequently in the gospels, though without many details offered about them. The Sadducees may have begun as a political party during the time of the Hasmonean kingdom. By Jesus’s day, they were a generally aristocratic group who were priests or otherwise closely connected to worship at the Jerusalem temple and to the Greco-Roman secular leadership. They did not want to rock the boat, as they had it pretty good. The Sadducees are notable for sticking to the written law of God, which they interpreted rather leniently, and for rejecting any idea of the resurrection of the dead or an afterlife. Agreeing with the Judaism of their ancestors, they thought dead people went to a place called Sheol and that there was no such thing as heaven, hell, or judgment of any sort. People just die. Like earlier Jews, they also did not believe in spirits such as angels or demons. Sadducees were highly influential on the local religious council, the sanhedrin.

The next group to discuss is the Pharisees, who are mentioned constantly in the stories of Jesus as his primary opponents. The Pharisees were also likely descended from a political party from the Hasmonean period. They believed not only in the written law of the Torah, but had all sorts of prescriptions for living they considered the oral law–not written down historically but passed down by word of mouth. More so than the Sadducees, they emphasized that even lay Jews and not just the priests should follow Jewish laws thoroughly. The Pharisees were viewed as very pious, and they did believe in angels and demons and an afterlife and a judgment, concepts that had entered Judaism from Persian and Greek influences in recent centuries. 

The third group are the Zealots, who only get a mention in the Bible in the person of one of the twelve apostles, known as Simon the Zealot. While the Sadducees and Pharisees were generally content to get along with their Roman overlords, the Zealots were fanatics who wanted to stir up the population to fight for Jewish independence from Rome. As we will see next week, the Zealots could be influential and sometimes promoted open insurgency, getting the Jews into catastrophic trouble more than once. Interestingly, the Zealots apparently first organized as a group in opposition to the infamous census and tax mentioned earlier that figure prominently in Luke’s birth narrative of Jesus. We use the word zealot even today in English to talk about someone whose dedication to something verges on crazy.

We next need to mention the Essenes, even though they are not mentioned in the Bible. Much of what we know about the Essenes is because they are the ones who collected the texts that we know as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were accidentally discovered in some caves in the desert in 1946. The Essenes tended to live in communities separated from society, as they wanted to preserve the purity of their own lives and their Jewish faith and to avoid engagement with secular authority. They might be compared to the Amish in some respects. The Essenes practiced a bathing ritual called baptism on a daily basis that signified their purification, and they lived communally or communistically. They led ascetic lives. Interestingly, they were big into the subject of angels. Like many other Jews (not all), they believed in a coming messiah and a judgment for the whole world. It has been speculated based on his austere physical description, his life withdrawn to the wilderness, the prominence of ritual washing and spiritual purity in his ministry, and his pronouncement of a coming messiah that John the Baptist was himself an Essene Jew. 

Finally, let’s mention a group that figures importantly in Jesus’s ministry who had a religion that was semi-Jewish. The Samaritans, the group I referred to in episode 2.3 as “muggles”, believed themselves to be the remnant people of the northern kingdom of Israel who had been left behind around the city of Samaria after their kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians way back in 720 BC. They believed Judaism was simply a corruption of an older religion that was more truly dedicated to Yahweh and that properly worshiped God on a mountain near Samaria. They were not Jews but were related to the Jews and the Jews despised them and viewed them as half-breeds who had intermingled with other peoples and corrupted the faith while the Jews had kept it pure. Judea to the south and Galilee to the north were the two parts of the country where Jews were the predominant population, and the hated Samaritans were sandwiched between them geographically. The Samaritans show up in Jesus’s ministry, especially in the parable you may know about the Good Samaritan (as opposed to the loathsome half-breed Samaritan). 

So those are the important groups of folks you find in the stories about Jesus and we’ll stop here for today. Next time, we will talk about messiahs, a bit about the life of Jesus, the writing of the New Testament, and what happened to the Jews and the Jewish spin-off group known as the Christians during the century or so after Jesus’s crucifixion. And that discussion will end our arc on Jewish history.

We will follow that in a couple of weeks with another of our interview episodes where we do some Q&A, so in the meantime, email your questions about Jewish history. I really love to read and consider what’s on your mind.

Thanks for listening. Less thumping. More understanding. See you next time.