prophecy “A star shall come forth out of Jacob.”15 For more than two years, Bar Kokhba, centered in Jerusalem, led a powerful resistance to Rome’s armies, presiding over a reclaimed, if not restored, nation. Coins were struck bearing the inscription “Freedom of Israel.”16 The revolt spread to Jewish communities under Roman control in Arabia and Syria. Those in the Mediterranean diaspora who had been subdued and enslaved during the Kitos War saw another chance. Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, writes that “Jews everywhere . . . were gathering together and giving evidence of great hostility to the Romans.”
Hadrian was having trouble with vassal peoples all across the empire, from Britain to Dalmatia to the Danube, and word of the revolt in Judea spread. “The whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.”17 Hadrian’s hatred of Jews was one thing, but now Roman imperial hegemony itself was at stake. He ordered an unprecedented mobilization, including the emergency conscription of males throughout Italy. From as far away as Britain he summoned “his best generals,” Cassius Dio reports, and dispatched them to Judea, together with six full legions and sizable parts of six others—tens of thousands of crack soldiers. They arrived with ferocious determination and set about the plowing under of towns and villages, the razing of cities. Jewish resistance matched the Roman ferocity, and the fighting went on for more than two years. The Talmud says that the Romans “went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils.”18
By the time the Romans managed to suppress the revolt in the summer of 135, according to Cassius Dio, nearly 600,000 Jews were dead and nearly a thousand towns, villages, and cities had been razed—most especially including, again, Jerusalem. Not just the Temple Mount but the entire urban area was laid to waste. Still, Hadrian was not finished. He ordered the execution of all Jewish scholars. He outlawed Torah, halachic practice, the Jewish calendar. He ordered the torching of Torah scrolls on the site of the former Holy of Holies, and, in addition to a statue of Jupiter, he ordered one of himself erected on the Temple Mount. In an unprecedented act, Hadrian commanded that the province of Judea be renamed, now to be known as Syria Palaestina. Jews were henceforth banished from its capital, Aelia Capitolina—except one day a year, when they would be permitted entrance for the sole purpose of expressing their grief over the loss of Zion. Cassius Dio concludes, “Nearly the whole of Judea was made desolate.”19
As noted, the mortality figures supplied by ancient historians are to be taken more as broad indicators than precise counts, but even so, the picture that emerges of the cost of this Roman war is clear and historically reliable. However much the motives of the Caesars differed from those of the Führer two millennia later, the consequences of their assaults against the Jewish people are comparable. Hitler killed one in three of all living Jews, a ratio the Caesars may well have matched.20 My purpose here is not to compare war statistics, but to emphasize the extreme human suffering—the evil—that formed the context within which both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism came into being. To read, as all Christians do, the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ without reference to the Roman War that raged exactly as those portraits were being composed, and first revered as Scripture, is like reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison without reference to events unfolding outside his cell as he wrote.
Return to the savage destruction of the Temple in 70—the event that began the slow-motion genocide we have tracked. Nothing defines the chasm separating Jewish and Christian perspectives more sharply than the difference between Jewish and Christian responses to what befell the Temple. For Jews, its destruction stands as the defining emblem of all Jewish suffering. The white woolen prayer shawl worn by Jewish men—a tallit—is marked with black stripes said to be a sign of mourning for the Temple’s destruction. The Jewish liturgical year is anchored, as noted, by the annual grief ritual Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av—the date on the Hebrew calendar on which the Romans set fire to the Temple. In the Christian memory, that event, if it registers at all, is celebrated as a proof of Christian claims made for Jesus. That the Temple was destroyed means that Jesus was right in his claim to superiority over Jewish authorities, and Jews were wrong to reject him. The Church Triumphant rose from the ashes on the Temple Mount.
To accept the destruction of the Temple as proof of Christian claims, one has to accept a particular view of Jesus as a future-foreseeing “prophet.” He is remembered in the Gospel of Matthew, for example, as having pointed to the buildings of the Temple compound and declaring, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.”21 Thus, words taken to have been uttered in the year 30 or so, about an event that occurred forty years later, are registered both as proof of Jesus’ power to foretell the future and as an indictment of those who “kill the prophets and stone those” who are sent from God.22 Despite his being shown weeping at what he foresees—“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—Jesus allegedly approves the destruction. Indeed, in the Gospel of John, he taunts his antagonists by saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” That claim is promptly explained by the Gospel writer: “But he spoke of the temple of his body.”23 Jesus was himself the replacement of the Temple—precisely in the way that the Church would replace the Synagogue. On Good Friday, at the very moment of Jesus’ death, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are alike in reporting that, in Matthew’s language, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom”—a symbolic destruction of the Temple.24 Jesus’ death means that the day of the Temple is over. An occasion not of mourning, but of celebration.
We saw earlier that meanings change when, instead of looking at Auschwitz through the lens of the cross, the cross is beheld through the lens of Auschwitz. A similar shift occurs when, instead of looking at the tribulations of Jerusalem in 70 from the vantage of “prophecies” offered by Jesus in 30, we look at the texts about Jesus from the vantage of the later context during which the texts were composed. Quite simply, when Jesus is remembered as describing in harrowing detail the events that will accompany the destruction of the Temple—“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another”25—he is not foretelling an apocalyptic end of the world. Rather, almost as an eyewitness, he is offering a journalistic description of precisely what happens when the Romans smash down on the Jews and when Jews themselves turn against one another. And “eyewitness” is to the point, of course, because, though Jesus did not see such things, the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and the people to whom he was writing, surely did.
It is possible, although far from certain, that in 30 or so, Jesus did use an imagined destruction of the Temple as a metaphor, but he was not “predicting.” This is a small but urgent point; the fully human Jesus could not and did not foresee the future. As an apocalyptic prophet, drawing on the deep legacy of Israel’s past, which had been defined by the Temple destruction at the hands of the Babylonians in 588 B.C.E., such an image could have occurred to him. Jeremiah’s lamentation for that destruction of the Temple might have come readily to his lips. But if Jesus invoked such a nightmare scene, the past was his point of reference, not the future—Nebuchadnezzar, not Caesar. Like all Jews, he would have found the literal destruction of the Temple a second time unthinkable, much as Americans, even remembering, say, the apocalyptic carnage of the Civil War, would have found unthinkable the events of September 11, 2001—until they happened, in all their horror.
Whether Jesus had in fact discussed the Temple destruction was less the point for the Gospel writers and readers than the harsh fact that, in their time, the Temple had been destroyed. We will take up the chronology of Gospel composition below; it’s enough here to note that all four of the Gospels were written during or after the destruction in 70. The writers
