Archibald Robertson, The Origins of Christianity, International Publishers, 1954, rev. ed. 1962.

CHAPTER IV

THE JEWS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The Roman Empire was the most successful and lasting of the ancient experiments in imperialism. The Roman ruling class of wealthy nobles, who under the republic all but monopolized office and filled the senate, won their empire not by an attempt (which would have courted speedy catastrophe) to exploit whole countries to enrich a single city, but by linking their own interests (not without friction and struggle, but to a progressively greater and greater extent) with those of the ruling classes elsewhere.

This policy evolved from small beginnings by a snowball process. Rome owed her political rise in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. to her leadership of other Latin cities first against the Etruscan power, then against the hill tribes of central Italy, then against Celtic invaders from the north who threatened to submerge them all. She consolidated her power by granting citizen rights in the Roman state to her Latin allies. Since only the richer Latins could travel to Rome to vote, this involved no danger to the Roman ruling class. Far from swamping them, it reinforced them against the Roman plebs, while Rome in return protected the rich Latins against the masses in their respective cities. In the third century B.C. this strategy was repeated in the south of Italy. The wealthy Greeks of Italy needed an ally against the half-civilized tribes of the interior and against their own masses. Rome granted them her alliance and garrisoned their cities. The masses called in Pyrrhus of Epirus to help them; but Pyrrhus was only a rival empire-builder, and when it came to the point, the Greek democrats were not prepared to fight for the honour of being garrisoned by Epirots rather than Romans. The Greek cities thus became, like the Latins, subject-allies of Rome, but without even the empty compensation of voting rights. Rome became mistress of Italy, able to treat on equal terms with the Greek East and to buy from Egypt supplies of corn which fed her in future wars. By the end of the third century B.C. Rome with her network of subject-allies, bound to her by the common interest of their ruling classes with her own, had proved that she could wear down and defeat Carthage, who relied on mercenary armies and imperial exploitation of the old, crude kind. The Punic Wars left Rome strong enough to hold down Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Cisalpine Gaul and Spain, without any pretence of alliance, as provinces -- sources of loot for her ruling class, tribute for her treasury, corn for her people and profit for her traders, usurers and speculators.

In the second century B.C. the process was repeated in Greece proper. The wealthy classes of the Greek homeland wanted freedom from their Macedonian overlords without the risk of social revolution, against which Macedonian occupation had insured them. Rome intervened as their ally, defeated not only Macedon, but (as we have seen) the Seleucid Empire, and became the paramount power in the Mediterranean. When the Greek democrats got out of hand, Rome sacked Corinth and turned Greece into one more province to be skinned by her proconsuls, tax-farmers and usurers.

As a result of these wars Italy was flooded with slaves, and the Italian peasants who manned the legions were ruined by the competition of big estates farmed by gang-labour. Years of savage class struggles followed between masters and slaves, between wealthy landowners and impoverished peasants, between the Roman ruling class and the Italians who bore the burden of empire-building without sharing proportionately in its proceeds. In 89 B.C. a revolt of the Italians forced the Roman ruling class to extend Roman citizenship to her allies in the peninsula. In 88 Mithridates of Pontus, a king who was not afraid of revolutionary allies, profited by Roman misrule to raise the Greek masses against the exploiters who were sucking them dry. Rome was able to reconquer Greece, but was too distracted by her own civil struggles to lay the menace of Mithridates. For twenty years he defied her, fomenting piracy in the Mediterranean, taking Italian refugees into his service, allying himself with revolutionaries in the West and holding out to the Greeks the hope of liberation from a yoke which had proved far more brutal than that of Macedon.

At last in 66 B.C. Rome was ready for a new push to the East. The Italian allies had been pacified; the democrats had been broken in civil war and cowed by proscription; the slaves who revolted under Spartacus had lined the Appian Way on crosses. It remained to finish with Mithridates. Pompey, who had done the senate good service against the democrats and against the slaves, was given the command in the East and led his legions through Pontus and Armenia to the Caucasus, amassing treasure by the million and slaves by the hundred thousand. In 64 Syria was made a Roman province. The once great house of Seleucus were allowed to reign in Commagene as puppet-kings in the Roman interest. Mithridates fled to the Crimea and ended his own life.1

It was at this moment that the two rival claimants to the high priesthood of Jerusalem, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, appealed to the Romans for aid against each other. The Jewish people sent a delegation to Pompey begging to be spared the rule of either brother. It was a bad time for any small nation to remind Rome of its existence. Pompey followed the time-honoured Roman policy of offering support to the ruling class in return for an admission of suzerainty. As Aristobulus was slow to agree, Pompey in 63 made him prisoner, besieged and took Jerusalem with a slaughter of twelve thousand Jews, and installed Hyrcanus as a puppet of Rome subject to tribute ancl to the supervision of the governor of Syria.

To most Romans the capture of Jerusalem was no more than a small operation taken by Pompey in his stride during his conquest of the East. But to the more informed it had a wider significance. The Jews were not merely a Palestinian people, but a propagandist sect infiltrating into every corner of the Graeco-Roman world. In every great Mediterranean city there were Jews, some of them merchants seeking their fortune, but most of them slaves, freedmen or petty traders, organized in their synagogues and propagating among their neighbours the idea of a juster social order set forth in the law and the prophets.

We have samples of this propaganda in the Sibylline Oracles circulated at various dates in the centuries immediately before and after the Christian era. These writings adapted to Greek conditions the prophetic technique evolved in Palestine centuries before. Since about the sixth century B.C., for reasons no doubt similar to those which evoked prophetic literature in Palestine, there had circulated in Greek cities oracles in hexameter verse under the name of a legendary prophetess Sibylla. No priesthood sponsored them; and the ruling class despised them as irresponsible demagogy.2 The Roman senate took them more seriously. From the time of their first contact with the Greeks they made it their policy to withdraw Sibylline writings from public circulation and to lodge them in safe custody at Rome as part of the paraphernalia of official priestcraft. There they were kept from the people and invoked by the senate to justify any religious innovation which from time to time seemed expedient. But the circulation of unauthorized oracles continued, and from the second century B.C. provided a ready weapon for Jewish propaganda. The first Jewish Sibyllines were written at Alexandria under the Ptolemies. Their doggerel character shows that the writers were men of the people with no more than a nodding acquaintance with classical poetry. After the manner of Jewish apocalyptic they enumerate the empires which have ruled the East down to their own time, denounce the judgment of God on them all and foretell the coming of peace and plenty on earth under a Messianic king. The circulation of Jewish and later of Christian Sibyllines continued as late as the third century A.D.3

The Roman ruling class were aware of Jewish subversive activity. In 58 B.C. Flaccus, ex-governor of the province of Asia, was charged with extortion -- one count being that he had confiscated money subscribed by the Jews of his province towards the upkeep of the temple at Jerusalem. Cicero defended him and justified the confiscation on the ground that Judaism was "a barbarous superstition . . . very much at variance with the splendour of this empire, the dignity of our name and the institutions of our ancestors ".4 But the Jews of Rome were numerous and well organized. Cicero moreover was hated by the people for his championship of the rich and his illegal execution of Catiline's revolutionaries five years before. Though Flaccus was eventually acquitted, the Jews helped to howl his defender down.

Meanwhile Rome ruled Palestine with the collaboration of the high priest Hyrcanus and his right-hand man, Antipater the Idumaean. In 54 Crassus, the millionaire slave-owner and slave-dealer, crusher of the revolt of Spartacus, became governor of Syria and plundered the temple at Jerusalem to finance his war with Parthia. In 53 he and his army were annihilated on the field of Carrhae, leaving Syria open to invasion. For the next two years his officer, Cassius, was busy repelling the Parthians from Syria. Some Jews made Rome's difficulty their opportunity to bid for independence; but the movement was local and easily suppressed. The insurgents were sold as slaves by Cassius to the number of thirty thousand.

In 49 civil war broke out in Italy between Pompey, backed by the senate and ruling class, and Julius Caesar, backed by the peasant-soldiers with whom he had conquered Gaul, and by all who had not a vested interest in the senatorial regime. The senate, no longer masters of the legions, crumpled up. Pompey fled from Italy. His men in the West forced their own officers to surrender. In 48 he was routed at Pharsalus in Greece and murdered as he landed in Egypt. Antipater, who virtually governed Palestine in the Roman interest, quickly came to terms with Caesar and was rewarded with Roman citizenship and the title of procurator of Judaea. Caesar further allowed Jerusalem to be refortified, remitted the tribute imposed by Pompey and guaranteed religious liberty to the Jews throughout the empire.

The Jewish people could not believe that the Roman Empire had come to stay; and in the existing revolutionary crisis their unbelief was not without plausibility. Caesar had avenged them on Pompey, but Caesar to them was only a stop-gap. Their reaction to the civil war is expressed in the Psalms of Solomon, composed about this time for use in the synagogues of Palestine. They dwell on the wickedness of the Hasmonean princes, whose sins brought a conqueror from the ends of the earth to batter down the walls of Jerusalem and carry its sons and daughters captive to the West. That conqueror has now met his deserts on the shores of Egypt. At the appointed time God himself will raise up his anointed, a son of David, to crush unjust rulers, rid Jerusalem of heathen masters and bring the dispersed tribes back to Palestine. Then all nations will be converted to Judaism and go to Jerusalem to see the glory of the Messiah. The psalmists do not seem to contemplate revolutionary action to hasten this consummation; but the omission may be for reasons of prudence.

Even more striking is an Essene document discovered in 1947 in a cave near the Dead Sea. Under the disguise of a commentary on the prophet Habakkuk, the writer describes the tyranny of a high priest who persecuted the Essene sect and tortured and executed its leader, "the master of justice and the elect of God". As a judgment on this crime the high priest was taken prisoner and Jerusalem captured by westerners.5 Another impious high priest now reigns and has rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. But soon the "master of justice" will reappear to judge Israel and all nations, and only those who believe in him will be saved. In this document the conquerors are plainly the Romans, and the two high priests Aristobulus and Hyrcanus. Of the "master of justice " we know no more than may be inferred from this document -- that he was executed by Aristobulus before 63 B.C., and that after 48 B.C. some Essenes still hoped for his triumphant return.6

Thus in Jewish literature of the last century B.C. we find three distinct ideas of the Messiah who was to inaugurate a better world-order. In the book of Enoch he is a "Son of Man " supernaturally predestined to his Messianic role from the beginning of the world. In the Psalms of Solomon he is a descendant of David, a man like other men. In the Essene document he is a particular leader recently put to death, but expected miraculously to reappear. If we take into account the poetical and figurative language usual in prophetic and apocalyptic literature, these ideas are not as incompatible with one another as they seem. In poetic diction any revolutionary leader could be hailed as chosen from the foundation of the world to put down the mighty and avenge the blood of the righteous. Among people steeped in stories of miracle and acquainted with the ancient idea of reincarnation, any revolutionary leader might pass as a dead champion come again. So in the Gospels Jesus passes as John the Baptist, Elijah or one of the prophets.7

The assassination of Caesar in 44 B.C. and the renewal of civil war no doubt fanned the expectations of Jewish patriots that the Roman Empire was about to break up. We learn from Suetonius that the Jews of Rome joined the Roman plebs in mourning Caesar and flocked for successive nights to the scene of his cremation. Naturally so: he was the conqueror of Pompey, and the first Roman statesman of their acquaintance to treat provincials, and in particular Jews, as anything but victims to be squeezed. They soon knew what manner of men were his murderers. Cassius returned to the East to raise money and men for the senatorial cause, levied a heavy tribute on the Jews and sold four cities into slavery in default of payment. In 43 Antipater. who had collaborated with Cassius, was poisoned. His son Herod immediately succeeded him as handy-man to the Roman rulers of the moment. After Cassius and the senatorial regime had met their end in 42 on the field of Philippi, Herod got himself confirmed by Antony for cash down as tetrarch of Judaea. In 40 the Parthians profited by the Roman civil wars to occupy Syria and Palestine, but had nothing better to offer the Jews than the restoration of Antigonus, the brutal son of Aristobulus of evil memory. Herod escaped to Rome and was recognized as king in opposition to Antigonus. In 39, while the Romans attended to Syria, Herod returned to Palestine with Roman troops. By 37 Jerusalem had fallen, Antigonus was beheaded, and Herod reigned as king of Judaea in the Roman interest. As long as the civil wars continued, the Jewish masses (if we may judge from the Sibylline Oracles) cherished hopes of their own liberation. But after Antony's defeat in 31 at Actium by Octavian (the future Augustus) Herod promptly went over to the conqueror and was rewarded by the addition of the rest of Palestine to his kingdom. Palestine was at last firmly held by a client-king of the stabilized Roman Empire.

While the propertied classes hailed Augustus as a bringer of peace and order, to the peoples of the East his government was a more formidable instrument of exploitation by reason of its greater stability. The hopes of patriots who had expected Rome to break up in the civil wars were dashed to the ground.

For most of Herod's reign Palestine remained quiet. Ruffian though he was, he was at first an improvement on the Hasmoneans. He was himself as Hellenized as an Oriental king could be, and showed it by re-endowing the Olympic Games, by benefactions to various Greek cities (including Athens and Sparta), by patronizing Greek artists and authors, by rebuilding Samaria as a Greek city, and by building an amphitheatre at Jericho and another at Jerusalem itself, where quadrennial games were held in honour of Augustus. But he did not force Hellenism on his Jewish subjects, he rebuilt the temple at Jerusalem on a magnificent scale, and he used his influence at Rome to protect the Jews of the "dispersion" from molestation and from military service. The Pharisees, therefore, acquiesced in his Hellenism, accepted his rule as a "judgment" and put the kingdom of God into cold storage. But towards the end of his reign the struggle reopened. To make sure of the Jews, Herod exacted an oath of allegiance to Augustus and himself. Over six thousand Pharisees refused it and were fined. They openly denounced him and his house; and many were put to death. A band of young men hewed down a golden eagle which Herod had put over the gate of the temple. He had them burnt alive. Soon afterwards in 4 B.C. he died.

While Herod's sons were at Rome wrangling over his inheritance, the Jewish people, whom he had taxed to the bone to gratify his Greek tastes, rose in revolt against the whole family and against the Roman occupation. But the risings were sporadic and had no common plan. We read of three separate leaders -- Tudas in Galilee; Simon, a former slave of Herod, in the Jordan valley; Athronges, a shepherd, in the south -- and each of the last two set up as king. The governor of Syria, Varus, put down the revolt, burnt the towns which had harboured the rebel leaders, and crucified two thousand of their followers. Augustus divided Palestine among three sons of Herod, but gave the royal title to none of them. By A.D. 6 Archelaus, the ruler of Judaea and Samaria, had made himself so hated that Jews and Samaritans united to petition for his removal. Augustus then brought Judaea and Samaria under direct rule and imposed imperial taxation.

This led to a new rising under Judas of Galilee and a Pharisee named Sadduk, who proclaimed it unlawful to pay tribute to foreigners or to call any man master. Their rising failed; but their numerous following, under the name of Zealots, kept revolt simmering until the outbreak of the revolutionary war with Rome sixty years later.

The resistance to Rome was throughout a movement of the masses. The priestly nobility of Jerusalem and the richer Jews everywhere had no interest in revolutionary movements and every inducement to collaborate with Rome or Rome's client-rulers against them. Josephus records the contempt of the priestly Sadducees for the masses. "When they mix with their fellow-countrymen", says he, "they are as offhanded as if their fellows were aliens."8 Judaism to them was a temple cult very profitable to themselves, not a way of life destined to transform the world. A contemporary satire on the brutality and corruption of these priestly families found its way into the Talmud centuries later.

" A plague on the house of Boethus!
A plague on their rods!
A plague on the house of Hanan!
A plague on their tricks!
A plague on the house of Cantheras!
A plague on their pens!
A plague on the house of Ishmael ben-Phabi!
A plague on their fists!
These men are high priests, their sons keep the cash,
Their sons-in-law get jobs, and their flunkeys -- can thrash ".9

The popular attitude to Roman rule ranged from the non-cooperation of the Pharisees to the active resistance of the Zealots. But the collaboration between Judas of Galilee and the Pharisee Sadduk suggests that there was no rigid barrier between the two parties. The assiduous prediction of the downfall of a regime leads naturally, if the situation seems favourable, to revolutionary action. To the Roman authorities most Pharisees can have appeared no better than crypto-Zealots. What above all alarmed Roman rulers was the propaganda carried on by Pharisaic Jews outside Palestine. The Jews in Palestine could hardly be called a menace to the empire: their Zealots could be dealt with by the procurator of Judaea or, if necessary, by the governor of Syria. But an empire-wide organization with synagogues in every great Mediterranean city, preaching to the dispossessed classes the nullity of all gods and all cults but one, the abolition of usury, the liberation of runaway slaves, a weekly day of rest for slaves equally with freemen, and the imminence of a day when the kingdoms of the earth should be broken and dominion given to the saints of the Most High -- that was an altogether different thing.

The Roman government was not yet prepared to undertake the suppression of Jewish propaganda throughout the empire; but an attempt was made to banish it from Rome and Italy. In A.D. 19, under the emperor Tiberius, the senate had four thousand freedmen, converts either to Judaism or to Isis-worship, rounded up and sent to Sardinia to fight brigands or die of the unhealthy climate. Other Jews in Italy were to recant or quit the country. The ban proved ineffective; for thirty years later it had to be renewed. During the interval the Jews of Palestine had been goaded to the point of rebellion, first by the severities of Pontius Pilate in Judaea, and then by the mad attempt of the emperor Caligula to have his statue erected in the temple. The result was a rise in revolutionary temperature throughout Mediterranean Jewry, and a second expulsion of the Jews from Rome by the emperor Claudius on the ground, we are told, that they "constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus."10

With this statement the name of Christ first appears in Roman history.


Notes

1 By an accident of history Mithridates is commemorated in the modern Soviet town of Eupatoria -- originally named from his surname Eupator.

2 In the Peace of Aristophanes a repeater of demagogic oracles is derisively told to " eat your Sibylla".

3 The pagan prophetess is actually invoked in the Catholic Dies Irae.

"Day of wrath and doom impending,
David's word with Sibyl's blending!
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!"

4 Cicero, Pro Flacco, 28.

5 Kittim. In Hebrew this denoted originally the city of Citium in Cyprus, then by extension the island of Cyprus, and in late writings (such as this) the West in general.

6 See The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Preliminary Survey, by Professor Andre Dupont-Sommer of the Sorbonne. The date of the Dead Sea scrolls has been disputed. Professor G. R. Driver would put them as late as A.D. 500-600. But most scholars who have examined them date this one (or at least its original) before the Christian era, and the references to Jewish high priests seem incompatible with a late date.

7 Matthew xvi, 13-14; Mark viii, 27-28; Luke ix, 18-19.

8 Jewish War, II, 8, 14.

9 Tosephta and Babylonian Talmud, cited by Renan, Antichrist, chap. III. Tosephta is a compilation ascribed to rabbis of the second century a.d. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the fifth century a.d.

10 Suetonius, Claudius, xxv.