From: heb_roots_chr@mail.geocities.com
Sent: Thursday, November 6, 1997 11:44 PM
To: Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup
Subject: History of the 2nd Temple - Part 7
Reply-to: history@virtual.co.il
From: JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il>
To: Contemporary Jewish History <history@virtual.co.il>
Subject: JUICE History 7
X-To: history@wzo.org.il
==============================================================
World Zionist Organization
Student and Academics Department
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
==============================================================
Course: An Introduction to the History of the Second Temple Period
Lecture: 7/12
Lecturer: Scott Copeland
Jesus the Jew
Life under the Roman occupation in Judaea was increasingly difficult to
bear. Rapacious tax policies impoverished the Jewish working class. The
legions of Rome infested the land like ants drawn to a lump of sugar.
Political dissent was met with torture and execution. As in times past, a
bleak reality nurtured the hope that a savior would rise to liberate the
Jewish people from the yoke of Rome, a messiah who would herald the dawning
of a better tomorrow. The figure, who Christians refer to as Jesus Christ,
was born in Roman occupied Palestine around the turn of the millennium as
Yehoshua, or Yesu, a Jew like many others, who wandered the country
teaching, and inspiring the hope that the freedom of Israel was not far
off.
Historically, we know very little about Jesus. Our main sources are the
three synoptic Gospels - Matthew, Mark, and Luke. As historic documents,
the Gospels, like any religious text, are problematic. Clearly not
eye-witness accounts, the Gospels were written between 75-110 CE. ,some 40
to 75 years after the death of Jesus. However, they do represent a fairly
coherent story about a Jewish teacher, faith healer, and political
dissident who because of his message of compassion, social justice, and
Jewish freedom was crucified by Rome.
Neither Matthew, Mark, Luke, nor John wrote their accounts as historians.
Each of the four wrote in order to proclaim a particular religious
perspective, and to provide a basis for the origins of the developing
Christian faith. Subsequently, it is not surprising that contradictions do
exist between the four accounts of the life of Jesus, and that material
included by one Gospel does not necessarily appear in another. For example,
where was Jesus born? The Gospels provide no straightforward answer to a
seemingly simple question. Matthew and Luke set the site of the birth in
Bethlehem. John and Mark do not name a particular site. The choice of
Bethlehem as the site of the nativity is central to Matthew and Luke in
creating a basis for the claim of Jesus as Messiah within the confines of
Jewish messianic tradition. Within Judaism, the messiah must come from the
House of David. Matthew and Luke constructed a genealogy tracing Jesus'
descent from David, and mark his birth place in Bethlehem, the hometown of
David Ben Yishai. Likewise, the tradition of the virgin birth is only
mentioned by Matthew and Luke. In an additional attempt to tie Jesus to the
messianic teachings of the Hebrew prophets, they misinterpret Isaiah's
word's - "A young woman (Hebrew: Almah) is with child, and she will bear a
son, and she will call him Immanuel." (Is. 7:14) The idea of the virgin
birth is a misreading of the word for young woman, confusing the Hebrew:
Almah with the word for virgin (Hebrew: Betulah.)
In any case, the main area of Jesus' activity before his final pilgrimage
to Jerusalem was the Galilee. He probably was born in the area of Nazareth.
Like the Moses of Jewish tradition, and the Mohammed of Islam, the
childhood and youth of Jesus are shrouded in mystery. However, his baptism
by John (Yohanan) the Baptist was a major formative event. Yohanan was a
wandering preacher, travelling the Galilee, the Jordan River Valley, and
Judaea preparing his disciples for the immanent "kingdom of heaven."
Yohanan's emphasis on ritual purity through bathing and his messianic
expectation were in no way unusual to the Jewish milieu of the Second
Temple period. His asceticism and critique of the Temple establishment hint
at a possible Essene influence. As a travelling holy man, it is entirely
possible that Yohanan encountered, and perhaps lived with Essene
communities in the Judaea wilderness. Qumran, for example, sits perched by
the Northern shore of the Dead Sea, not far from the point where the Jordan
River meets the salt lake. Like his mentor Yohanan, Jesus also built his
message on a devotion to simplicity, and an unswerving dedication that the
salvation of Israel was approaching.
Jesus, like his mentor, circled the Jewish villages of the Galilee as
preacher, storyteller, and faith healer. His audience were the working
class peasantry: farmers, fishermen, netmakers, carpenters, and craftsmen.
In preparation for the coming messianic age, Jesus gathered twelve
students. They were to be his vanguard. In his instructions to the
disciples, he is perfectly clear. First, the message of Jesus is only for
the Jewish people. Secondly, like any revolutionary cadre, no commitment,
not even to family, precedes dedication to the cause.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus does nothing to diverge in any major way from
Jewish teaching. "Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the Torah and
the Prophets; I do not come to abolish, but to complete it." I will tell
you this, so long as heaven and earth endure, not a letter, not a stroke
will disappear from the Torah until all that must happen has happened."
(Matt: 5:17)
His objections to the Temple cult were voiced long before him by Jeremiah
and Isaiah, and were shared in his own day by the Essenes, on one hand, and
by many of the Pharisees, on the other. The emphasis that Jesus placed on
the need for a flexible law, a law in conjunction with social ethics, and
his concern for the common person are in close connection to the teachings
of the great pharisaic sage, Hillel. Not only was Hillel a champion of the
oppressed, and a legal reformer, but in addition a famous story reveals the
teacher's patience for his fellow human beings. The story tells that when
approached by a non-Jew who requested to be taught the entire Torah while
standing on one foot, Hillel, smiled, and answered, "Do not do to another
what is hateful unto you. All the rest is commentary. No go and learn."
Jesus' golden rule is but a reworking of Hillel's adage.
Debate, mutual criticism, and even bitter verbal exchanges were not
uncommon among the pharisaic sages. Nonetheless, the negative portrayal of
the Pharisees in the Gospels as nitpicking legalists and hardhearted
elitists is the attitude of the authors of the Gospels themselves, not
necessarily the attitude of Jesus. When the Gospels were written, after the
fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Christianity was still a small Jewish sect
beginning to break away from it's parent religion. Like the adolescent who
rebels against the parent in order to define their own individuality, much
of the anti-Jewish and anti-Pharisaic flavor of the Gospels reflects early
Christianity's struggle to break away from Judaism, and establish itself in
the Greek speaking, pagan world as a religion separate and unique from
Judaism.
Whereas much of Jesus' attitude towards Torah was akin to the liberal
Hillel, in other ways, he strongly resembled Hillel's rival, the
conservative Shammai. Before meeting Hillel, the same non-Jew asked Shammai
to teach him the Torah with one foot in the air. Shammai drove the non-Jew
off in anger. Similarly, Jesus is approached by a Canaanite woman. she begs
him to heal her daughter. Jesus replies, "I was sent to the lost sheep of
Israel. . . It is not right to take children's bread and throw it to the
dogs." (Matt. 15:23-25) After some persuasion, Jesus regrets his harshness,
and agrees to assist. Essentially, the historic Jesus was a charismatic
teacher who packaged in parable a Jewish message of social justice and a
rising dawn for Israel. His charisma and open disregard for authority could
only have led him into direct conflict with the Roman occupation forces.
Jesus' last journey to Jerusalem was for the Passover, one of the three
pilgrimage festivals when the city would be packed with Jewish worshippers
from around the world. He enters the city on a donkey in order to fulfill
the verse - "Tell the daughter of Zion, Here is your king, who comes to you
in gentleness, riding on an ass . . . (Zechariah 9:9 and quoted in Matthew
21:4-5). Greeted by throngs of his followers at the city gates, Jesus
arrived at Jerusalem, it seems, to announce the approaching messianic age.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as the "Son of Man," a
messianic title found in the Book of Daniel. Whether he saw himself as a
precursor of the Messiah, as John the Baptist did, or as the Messiah
himself is a point of controversy. At the Temple, he deliberately sought to
draw public attention by overturning the tables of the money changers,
publicly castigating the Pharisees and Priesthood, and by 'predicting' the
ultimate destruction of the Temple.
The same evening, like the rest of the Jewish world, he and his students
celebrated the Passover Seder. For the Jews of the Land of Israel under the
Roman occupation, the eternal Jewish hope for redemption from slavery and
tyranny was a story pregnant with contemporary relevance. For Jesus and his
students, like for other Jews, the story of the Exodus from Egypt provided
the comfort that no matter the suffering of the present; the future
promised redemption.
With the conclusion of the Seder, Jesus left his students, crossed the
Kidron, and ascended the Mt. of Olives. At the garden of Gethsemene
(Hebrew: Gat Shmanim - an area of olive trees and presses for the
production of olive oil.), Jesus is arrested, and taken to trial.
The process of the trial and the ultimate execution of Jesus, as told in
the Gospels, is highly improbable. Basic elements of the story contradict
both Jewish and Roman legal tradition. Haim Cohn, past Chief-Justice of the
Israeli Supreme Court, presents a brilliant analysis of the
legal-historical aspects of the arrest, the trial, and the execution of
Jesus.
In Cohn's The Trial and Death of Jesus, he raises the following points to
introduce his argument:
"1. No Sanhedrin was allowed to sit as a criminal court and try criminal
cases outside the Temple precincts, in any private house.
2. The Sanhedrin was not allowed to try criminal cases at night: criminal
trials had to be commenced and completed during daytime.
3. No person could be tried on a criminal charge on festival days or the
eve of a festival.
4. No person may be convicted on his own testimony or on the strength of
his own confession.
5. A person may be convicted of a capital offense only upon the testimony
of two lawfully qualified witnesses.
6. No person may be convicted of a capital offense unless two lawfully
qualified witnesses testify that they had first warned him of the
criminality of the act and the penalty prescribed for it.
7. The capital offense of blasphemy consists in pronouncing the name of
God, Yahweh, which may be uttered only once a year by the high priest in
the innermost sanctuary of the Temple; and it is irrelevant what
'blasphemies' are spoken as long as the divine name is not enunciated."
(Cohn. p.98)
The following morning, a Friday, Jesus is brought before Pontius Pilate.
Pilate, the Roman prefect, offered the Jewish crowd the chance to release
Jesus. The Gospels claim that "at the festival season it was the Governor's
custom to release one prisoner chosen by the people." (Matt 27:15-16) Such
a custom does not exist neither in the Jewish nor in the Roman legal
traditions. Pilate, who historically was a cruel, petty despot is painted
by the Christian tradition as a meek agent of mercy. According to John
19:4, the Jews of Jerusalem rejected Pilate's appeal for mercy and cried
out, "Crucify him! We have no king but Caesar." There is no way, based on
the history of the persistent political struggle against Roman rule waged
by the Jewish people that a Jewish crowd in Jerusalem for Passover would
publicly proclaim their allegiance to Caesar. From the beginnings of Roman
rule in the Land of Israel, revolt followed revolt, and even in the decades
following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Jews of the Diaspora
and of the Land of Israel continued to openly defy Roman power. Beyond the
sudden, extremely uncharacteristic Jewish pronouncement of allegiance to
Rome, how is it that the same Jewish crowd who welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem
in exultation, now repudiated him before the hated Pontius Pilate?
Haim Cohn offers the following summation: "Over the span of the second half
of the first and the beginning of the second century, the Christians were a
small community, struggling desperately for some measure of tolerance from
their Roman overlords, who regarded Christian refusal to worship the
deified emperor, Christian insistence on worshipping God and his Messiah,
the Christ, as a capital offense. . . .It was, therefore, in the vital
interest of the Christians, at the time, to represent the contemporary
Roman powers-that-be as favorably inclined to the Christ, his activities
and teachings, and with no hand at all in the trial and its sequel: if it
could be made out that the roman governor in Jerusalem had been satisfied
of the legitimacy and harmlessness of Jesus' works and doctrines, there
would be no sense o justice in persecuting Christians in Rome for adopting
or following them. This, we hold , is the motive which prompted the
evangelists to depict the passion story in a manner calculated to discharge
the Roman governor of any responsibility for the crucifixion, placing it
squarely upon the shoulders of the Jews, who were anyway an object of
intense and equal hatred to Romans and Christians." (Cohn. p. xvi)
Jesus was arrested and crucified by the Roman occupation forces as a
rabblerouser and political dissident. Crucifixion was a popular Roman
punishment for political dissension. The cross was emblazoned, as was Roman
custom, with the charge - "King of the Jews." Under Roman law, crucifixion
was not only the punishment for rebels and army deserters, but could be
applied to anyone found guilty of "causing injury to the majesty of the
emperor." (Cohn p.171) The two bandits crucified along with Jesus were
probably Jewish rebels, who like Jesus, were crucified for crimes against
he Roman state. In an age where the crushing might of the Roman armies
proclaimed that might is right, Jesus' vision, a very Jewish one, of
compassion, of social justice, and of a nearing age of Jewish freedom in a
new world order was political-religious gunpowder in a country on the verge
of explosion.
For further reading:
1. Haim Cohn. The Trial and Death of Jesus. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972).
2. A.N. Wilson. Jesus. (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992).
Special thanks to Mel Riesfield.
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>From Eddie:
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Obviously the newsgroup does not agree with all the points
discussed but it is nice to understand how some Jews view the
historical Jesus.
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