These conscientious objectors to the moral compromises of urban life in a Hellenized world—let’s call them “arch-conservatives”—may have included John the Baptist. But they would have criticized Herod’s Temple in the name of God’s Temple—a point we saw, in brief, before. To resist Herod’s blasphemy, of course, was a mode of resisting the blasphemy of his patron, Rome. But such criticism of the Temple would have been for the Temple’s sake.
Jesus might have associated with the radicals of Qumran. If they included John the Baptist, he surely did. But it seems likely that, from a certain point on, Jesus kept his distance from such purists, including John. As Jesus came into his own, it was as anything but a Zealot. Indeed, the Gospels go out of their way to show him as a man not given to puritanical repudiations. He was not an ascetic, nor did he eschew the bustle of towns and cities. Accommodation marked his style. We will see more of Jesus’ difference from the Zealots below.
If we are, a priori, to take seriously Jesus’ character as a devout Jew, then his devotion to the Temple follows, and we should be very slow to imagine him as repudiating either the Temple itself or the transactions, like money changing, that would have been germane to it.39 There is every reason to believe that Jesus himself, as a devout Jew, was devoted to the Temple, and could not conceivably have repudiated it in total. If, as all four Gospels report, he committed a transgression there, it was more likely as a defense of the Temple than as an attack on it.40 The main evidence for believing that Jesus revered the Temple until the day he died is that his followers then continued to devoutly worship in the Temple as Jews for as long as the holy place survived.
Against the notion that the Gospels began to jell as written accounts of the story of Jesus without reference to the destruction of the Temple and the ongoing Roman War against the Jews that were simultaneous to the writing, I argue that the destruction of the Temple, and the attendant mass violence, were precisely what created the urgent need among the Jesus people for these texts just then. They needed the texts as Jews. That the oral traditions of the story of Jesus, combining memory, myth, interpretation, and literary invention, began to find written form at this moment was no coincidence. It was an answer. And if the Gospels are read in this light—as documents dated to 70 and after, instead of as prophecies dated to 30—they take on meanings that differ decisively from what Christians usually say and are usually told. We are closing in on the actuality of origins.
The most obvious instance of this is well known by now, although its implications have yet to be fully unpacked: the way in which the Gospels are read as setting Jesus not only against the Temple but against his own people. The intra-Jewish antagonism—rabbis versus Jesus’ followers—dating to the last decades of the century hugely influenced how the Gospels, describing events earlier in the century, were composed. The point is that all four canonical Gospels took form after the Roman destruction of the Temple, after the rivalry between surviving groups of Jews began to calcify, in the deadly context of massive war. The war with Rome sparked civil war among Jews, and the Gospels are the literature of that civil war.41 “The Jews” portrayed by evangelists as the mortal enemy of Jesus in about the year 30 were enemies of—if anyone—the followers of Jesus five decades later.
The point for us, though, lies in the way in which the Temple defines the very center of this conflict. Since the Gospels were all written during the catastrophic years in which Jews were traumatized by the loss of the Temple of Jerusalem, it would be odd if that crisis were not reflected in how the story of Jesus was told, since the entire point of composition just then was to put Jesus forward as the solution to the problem of the destroyed Temple. The Jewish experience during the savage violence of what I presume to call the first Holocaust, in other words, could be expected, in the scales of narrative composition, to weigh as much as, if not more than, the remembered actualities of Jesus’ life four decades earlier. The crisis of Temple destruction in 70 was enough for the Jesus people to put the Temple at the center of their explanations of his meaning—and they did. We will see more of this.
Humans are forever on the hunt for meaning, but brute experience can force radical breakthroughs into other orders of existence. The religious wars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, in which tens of millions of Protestants and Catholics slaughtered one another in the name of God, came to the hyper-violent climax of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). That paroxysm of killing, in which something like eight million persons died, led in short order to a new politics—distilled in the idea of the separation of church and state, a pillar of democratic liberalism—while simultaneously advancing a new intellectual culture: the scientific revolution.43 The total-war violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars, in which more than one hundred million died, led in Europe to a Continental repudiation of narrow nationalism and a broad rejection of war as an instrument of political power—the foundational principles of the European Union.
Savage war generates, in reaction, new ideas. This principle undergirds the line of thinking here—that the Roman War against the Jews prompted radical shifts in the religious imagination of Jews. The shifts were taken as revelations from God. But this was the pattern established in the religious DNA of Israel by the Babylonian War, which, as we saw, generated the essential character of Jewish religion in the first place. In the centuries after Babylon, Israel found itself under one heel after another, a succession of oppressors—Persians, Greeks, and Hellenized Egyptians—against whom Jews launched no significant resistance. But then came the Greco-Syrian Seleucids and the next Jewish war, the so-called Maccabean Revolt (167–160 B.C.E.), resulting in the next shift in the religious imagination of Jews.
Again, the war produced wartime literature, indeed a new genre of it—the so-called apocalyptic, epitomized by the book of Daniel.44 The author of that text, an unnamed pious Jew writing in Aramaic, presented a wildly imaginative rendering of otherworldly dreads, hopes, and expectations—redemptive interpretations of his present tribulations. In Daniel, six stories set during the Babylonian Captivity, centuries before the book was written, describe the ways in which Jews faithfully clung to their identity as God’s people during that previous Jewish war. Then, in four ecstatic visions, the coming triumph of the “saints” is promised. Daniel is full of dreamlike fancies and horrors, an almost psychedelic hallucination, with figures flying through the air, men surviving a fiery furnace, the man Daniel surviving lions because “God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths”45—visions so exotic as themselves to require deciphering by angels. The book of Daniel was sparked by an expression of enraged reaction to the Seleucid desecration of, yes, the Temple—“the abomination that makes desolate.”46
But at bottom, the apocalyptic vision was a mode of turning pure destruction into creative transformation. “And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered . . . and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.”47 Bracing and consoling a people who, when violence flared, inevitably found themselves endangered and beleaguered, the apocalyptic vision insisted that transcendent intervention was about to occur, changing a broken and suffering world into a realm of peace and joy, with Israel at its center. “Go your way till the end; and you shall rest, and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.”48 Violence would be redeemed by God’s act, and hopeless military odds would be reversed by God’s direct interruption of history. The vision was both realistic—acknowledging present violence—and hopeful, in that it insisted that the violence would not be vindicated in the end. The book of Daniel, usually dated to about 160 B.C.E., is the classic work of Jewish apocalypticism, searing the imagination of Israel across each of the two centuries before and after Jesus. Josephus, calling the figure Daniel “one of the greatest of the prophets,” said the book was hugely influential among Jews in that era.49 No surprise, therefore, that Jesus’ core meaning was constructed out of materials drawn from this work. We will see more of this.
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