the beginnings of the Jewish-Christian community. The information about John the Baptist and Jesus contained in the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, which sometimes does, and sometimes does not tally with the story contained in the Gospels, is judged authentic by the best scholarly opinion of today.
By the end of this period (41 CE), Augustus and Tiberius were already gone, but the insane Gaius Caligula was still there to make a nuisance of himself in Jewish affairs by insisting that his statue be installed in the Temple of Jerusalem and that he should be venerated as a god. Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate were simultaneously sacked by the Romans and sent to exile in southern France. Caiaphas was also removed from the high priesthood. The leadership of the Christian movement in Judaea was in the hands of Peter and James the brother of the Lord, soon to be dominated outside the Land of Israel by the towering figure of Saul of Tarsus, St Paul. The Jesus movement was still rooted in Palestinian Jewish society, but was almost ready for a unilateral declaration of independence and for devoting itself to the evangelization of the Gentile world in the Roman Empire.
Agrippa I – Roman Procurators – First Rebellion (41–73/4 CE) – The Beginnings of Judaeo-Christianity and Career of St Paul
The period from the Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great who was appointed king of the Jews by Caligula in 41 CE to the fall of Jerusalem and Masada at the end of the first war against the Romans (66–73/4 CE) attests a steadily worsening political situation. The Roman procurators in charge of the Jewish state from the death of Agrippa I in 44 CE until the outbreak of the rebellion in 66 CE were rarely able to exercise full control. Nor was the expert and willing help offered by Agrippa II, the son of Agrippa I, the reformed playboy of Roman high society, to whom the emperor Claudius assigned the kingdom of Gaulanitis, Batanaea and Trachonitis, sufficient to resolve the troubles. The murderous faction of Jewish revolutionaries known as Sicarii (dagger-men) made life impossible. They remained unaffected by the example made of two of the sons of Judas the Galilean whom Tiberius Julius Alexander, Roman governor of Judaea, caught and sentenced to crucifixion. The incompetent and corrupt last procurators further aggravated matters.
Nascent Christianity, too, had its ups and downs during those years. In Judaea two leading figures of the Palestinian church met with violent death. For reasons untold by the author of the Acts, the otherwise notoriously mild Agrippa I is said to have condemned James the son of Zebedee to decapitation, a secular form of death penalty no doubt for a secular crime, and the high priest Ananus, son of Ananus, ordered – unjustly according to Josephus – the execution by stoning of the saintly James, the brother of the Lord for having ‘transgressed the law’. Church tradition places the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul to the final years of Nero, whose reign ended in 68 CE. On the positive side the preaching of the gospel to Palestinian Jews continued, though without spectacular progress, but the decision of the council of the apostles in Jerusalem in 49 CE gave the green light to Paul and Barnabas for their remarkably efficacious mission among the Gentiles of the diaspora once the precondition of the acceptance of Judaism was cancelled and non-Jewish men could be baptized without being obliged first to undergo circumcision. Paul and his helpers were proclaiming the gospel among the inhabitants of Asia Minor and mainland Greece between 49 and 58 CE and the Pauline letters were all written in the fifties and possibly in the early sixties of the first century CE. Events of Paul’s career neatly fit into Roman history. His appearance before the tribunal of Gallio, the brother of the philosopher Seneca, took place in Corinth between 51 and 53 CE, while Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, and Paul was arrested in Jerusalem in the closing years of the procuratorship of Felix (52–60 CE). As he was still a prisoner in Caesarea two years later when Festus replaced Felix in 60 CE, his captivity must have begun in 58 CE. He was transferred to Rome for trial before Nero after surviving a shipwreck close to Malta at the end of 60 CE.
The storm clouds were gathering and despite the initial efforts of the Jewish upper classes the catastrophic war against the Roman Empire became inevitable. We know all the details from Josephus who at the beginning was himself a half-hearted leader of the revolt. Soon the command passed to men of violence, like John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora, and the most stubborn among them the captain of Masada, Eleazar son of Jairus, the grandson of the revolutionary patriarch, Judas the Galilean. But they were no match for the Roman forces of two future emperors, Vespasian and Titus. The fight was bloody. Captured Jews were crucified daily by their hundreds. The city was destroyed and the Temple reduced to ashes. Not even the seemingly impregnable stronghold of Masada could stop the men and the war machines of the Roman governor Silva in 73/4 CE. The discerning defenders preferred self-inflicted death to Roman torture and crucifixion.
According to Jewish tradition Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabban Gamaliel settled, with Vespasian’s permission, in the coastal town of Jamnia or Yavneh and, surrounded by a dedicated group of rabbis, set out to redefine, and thus save, a Jewish religion without Temple, high priest and Sanhedrin.
The state of the Jewish-Christian church is sketched in the eschatological discourse of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Christian theological tradition, recorded centuries later by the historian Eusebius, interpreted the ruin of Jerusalem as divine punishment visited on the Jews ‘for their abominable crimes against Christ and his apostles’. Eusebius further asserts that the members of the Jerusalem church, warned by a prophetic oracle before the outbreak of the war, migrated from the capital and settled in the town of Pella in Transjordan. We lack external support for his statement. Neither are we told about the future fate of those who had migrated to Pella although another Christian legend, referring to the persecution of the church by the leader of the second Jewish rebellion, Simeon bar Kosiba or Bar Kokhba, implies that the refugees of Pella re-crossed the Jordan after the end of the war and settled again in the Land of Israel.
From the Fall of Jerusalem to the End of the Rebellion under Hadrian – The Departure of Christianity from its Jewish Social Setting (70–135 CE)
The aftermath of the first failed rebellion against Rome brought hardship to both Jews and Christians. The victorious emperor Vespasian treated the whole conquered territory as his private property and in addition to the loss of the national and religious institutions, all the Jews in Palestine and the diaspora were subjected to the humiliation of having the annual poll tax, which they willingly paid for the upkeep of the Jerusalem sanctuary, confiscated and converted to a yearly tribute, known as fiscus Iudaicus or Jewish tax, which was to support of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome. It was collected with particular harshness under Domitian (81–96 CE), though apparently the severity was relaxed according to a coin minted by his successor, the emperor Nerva (96–8 CE). Conversion to Judaism, considered as the adoption of atheism, was also strictly prohibited. The rebellion of the Jews in Egypt and Cyrene in 115 CE under Trajan added further fuel to the virulent anti-Judaism of the Romans and the major conflict of the second war (132–5 CE) was already looming on the horizon.
The causes of the Jewish uprising inspired and led by Simeon bar Kosiba or Bar Kokhba during the reign of Hadrian have long been a subject of debate, but the circumstances of the war and the revolutionary administration of the country have become better known now thanks to the archives of legal documents and letters discovered in the caves of Wadi Murabbaat and Wadi Seiyal in the Judaean desert in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Roman governor of Judaea, Tineius Rufus, was unable to stand up to the guerrilla forces of Simeon, the self-proclaimed imperious head of state – he called himself Prince (Nasi) of Israel – and it took three years of strenuous struggle with much blood shed on both sides before Julius Severus, the greatest general of Rome urgently summoned from far-distant Britain, managed to quell the revolt in 135 CE. For years persecution reigned, famous rabbis, among them Akiba, lost their lives and the practice of the Jewish religion was prohibited under the pain of death. Jews in droves were expelled from Judaea and their ancient capital, lavishly rebuilt by the emperor as a pagan city, was even deprived of its name and became Aelia in honour of the triumphant Publius Aelius Hadrianus. But outside Judaea, and especially in Galilee, Jewish life continued and thanks to the zeal and persistence of the rabbinic leaders Jewish religion, re-codified in the Mishnah and the Palestinian or more exactly Galilean Talmud, gained a new lease of life.
