Epilogue: From Babylon to Rome: The Contexts of Jewish-Christian-Pagan Interaction through Porphyry

For its first three centuries, Christianity thrived as a religion of the persecuted. Jesus of Nazareth -- an itinerant preacher who became a disciple of John the Baptist just prior to the latter's arrest for treason -- had died as a Jewish victim of Roman administrative insecurity in a land always held in contempt by its neighbors and viewed with suspicion by its Roman governors. From the Roman standpoint he was one of hundreds of suspected Jewish "bandits" who suffered the exemplary death of crucifixion -- a public warning to the Jews that the protection granted to the practice of their religion was an act of largess which could be withdrawn or curtailed at any time.

The life-story of Jesus of Nazareth and the early church belongs to the history of anti-Jewish feeling in general and Roman anti-Judaism in particular. Judaism simultaneously intrigued and frustrated the Romans. It intrigued them because of its claim to represent religious traditions older than those of the Greeks and Persians, whose gods and observances had been imported piecemeal over the three centuries preceding the common era. It infuriated them because -- unlike the religions of other ancient cultures -- it had developed (in its orthodox form at any rate) an exclusive attachment to one god -- Yahweh -- which left no room for a casual approach to divine arithmetic. Yahweh was to be worshiped with one's whole heart, soul and mind, to the exclusion of all other powers in heaven or on the earth. This belief, however, was not based on philosophical premises, and for this reason the term "monotheism" fails to express the nature of Israel's faith.

THE GOD CONCEPT AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

The God concept with which Israel began was basically polytheistic (Exod. 20.3). God was limited in power (Exod. 4.24) and local in character (Exod. 18.5; 33.3; 14-16). The most that could be claimed for Yahweh was that as a national god he protected his people from neighboring peoples and their gods. His throne was on the high mountain; storm and volcanic phenomena were taken as manifestations of his presence (Exod. 19.16-19; 33.9f.; 40.34-38).

The transition from desert to settled life on the land (believed to be his gift to a "chosen" people) produced a change in the character of this God paralleling the change in the people's fortunes. Yahweh became the god of the armies of Israel, a war God -- the God of hosts -- who aided Israel in the subjugation of neighboring peoples or the defense of territory already taken. His other face, if not benevolent, was less severe: as giver of land, he was also the baal (fertilizer) of the soil and took responsibility for its fertility and for the rain, as well as for the famines that were occasionally used to winnow the population and the floods that might be sent to wash away the unrighteous, "as in the time of Noah" (Gen. 6.1f.).

As revealed in his political dealings with his chosen people, Yahweh was fickle. Peace and security are less thematic in the history of Israel than political instability, warfare and religious apostasy. Around 930 B.C.E Israel fell into political and religious pieces and in 721, the northern kingdom of Israel was overrun by the Assyrians. The comparatively weak tribe of Judah to the south carried the cult of Yahweh forward into the sixth century, but by 586 B.C.E. it had lost it political and religious identity. The warnings and wailing of the prophets, who began during this time to insist on God's interest in procuring justice and his moral character as "having no favorites," their assertion that divine approval could not be secured by sacrifices, offerings, and "bribes" is interesting in terms of the history of theology. From the standpoint of political history, however, the prophets are a distraction. They warned the little nation that its time was up, and up it was.

While it is obviously impossible to say when the inhabitants of Judah became "monotheistic," the political outcome of the kingdom's involvement with Babylon had the effect of discrediting the earlier God concepts. Although Yahweh never loses his military bearing -- as the later history of apocalyptic Judaism and the messiah faiths illustrate -- his ability to command armies, or for that matter the loyalty of his followers, is submerged beneath the new thinking that God invites, pleads, warns, chastises; above all, he can be offended -- hurt -- in his efforts to deal fairly with his own, to whom he prefers to show mercy.

Read back into the history of Yahweh, the new God concept suggested that the nation of Judah (Israel earlier) had fallen not because of a failure of the chosen people-ideal but as a penalty for disregarding the demands of an ethical God, one who invites obedience to his law because it is fundamentally good, right and just and who hates and spurns the pilgrim feasts and burnt sacrifices offered to him under the ancien regime. Monotheism, or, more precisely, the belief that Yahweh alone is God in the sense of having exclusive title to the name, arises from the ashes of the earlier God concept, according to which Yahweh was supposed to guarantee the political survival of the nation. That concept, self-evidently, had failed. "Second"-Isaiah (Isa. 42.18-22) pictured Israel as a deaf and blind pawn of rulers and tyrants who suffered, as slaves suffer, without hope of reward or rest (Isa. 53.7-8). The new belief in an ethical god had the effect of explaining political fortune as being due not to God's arbitrary exercise of power, but to his chosen people's failure to recognize his true character. It was they who had failed, not their god.

THE POLITICAL DIMENSION

This belief came at a political price. The many-godded nations of the ancient world, ranging from Babylon to Syria to Rome, found Jewish exclusivism a sticking point in their attempts to establish political rule over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. When political solutions and religious toleration wore thin, as with the Babylonians in 587, military options and direct rule were tried. While none succeeded entirely in wiping away the Yahwist cult, which centered on Jerusalem after the sixth century B.C.E., the physical size of the Jewish kingdoms shrank from an area extending from Ezion Geber in the south to Riblah in the north (a distance of about 350 miles and about 120 miles at its widest point) in the tenth century B.C.E. to an area of about 110 by 60 miles, extending from Galilee in the north to Masada in the south under the Roman procurators (ca. 54 C.E.). Between Judah's capitulation to Babylon and the deportation ("exile") in the sixth century and the burning of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. there were periods of remission and relative calm. The period of Persian domination, beginning with the Persian king Cyrus's conquest of Babylon in 539, is remembered as one such period. Cyrus encouraged the spread of Aramaic -- the language later spoken by the inhabitants of northern Judea around Galilee (and presumably also by Jesus) and ordered the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, which had been gutted by the Babylonians.

Those Jews who returned from exile to live under Persian "protection" in Jerusalem were a changed people. Grim experience had taught them that their religious customs were not well liked. The response to the Assyrian and Babylonian "conquests" of Palestine was retrenchment -- a hunkering down behind newly built city walls designed to keep the strangers out and the faith locked in. With Ezra and Nehemiah, whoever they may have been, and whose story is not recovered until the fourth century before Jesus, the face of Judaism changed: Whatever expansionist ambitions may still have defined the religious quest to make Yahweh king of kings, lord of lords, they were replaced in the fifth century by the more practical aim of survival and preservation of a faith under siege by its neighbors.

THE LAW

A cliche of the period is that the Jews "built a hedge around the Law" for its protection and their own. According to a tradition (which today is regarded as a simplification of a long historical process) the Jews who stayed on in Mesopotamia rather than return to Jerusalem favored a consolidation of Judaism in Jerusalem. This "consolidation" was reflected in three events: the rebuilding of the temple -- a slow, slipshod and arduous process -- the rebuilding of the walls around the city of Jerusalem, and the promulgation of the law of Moses as the law of the Jewish people and of the city of Jerusalem in particular. The extent, originality and antiquity of this "Mosaic law" is hard to determine since in its biblical form it is transparently a mixture of Babylonian law, tribal custom and (priestly) purification rules. Even a much later critic of Judaism and Christianity such as Porphyry thinks that the law of Moses was somehow mysteriously lost and "reinvented" in the time of Ezra.

What is clear even from the self-interested biblical sources is that the "application" and observance of the law prior to the Babylonian conquest were repeatedly thwarted by religiously ambivalent figures like Mannaseh and Amon, who had a custom of satisfying an apparently unquenchable religious appetite for altars and sacrificial poles devoted to the baals and their female companions, the asherahs (2 Chron. 33). Prior to the conquest, Judah was in a polytheistic spiral.

The ruler credited by tradition with turning things around is Josiah, supposedly eight years old when he came to the throne to rule Jerusalem for thirty-one years. Josiah is represented by the biblical writers and editors as the best king since David: At the age of twenty, he is reputed to have given the order to purge Jerusalem of the shrines, altars and poles devoted to "foreign" gods -- chiefly those of the Babylonians. With typical Middle Eastern hyperbole, he is depicted as ordering the altars destroyed in his presence, making dust of the molten images of the gods, then "strewing it over the graves of those who sacrificed to them" (2 Chron. 34.4). Faithful to the God of his fathers as he may have been, he seems to have extorted money for the rebuilding of the temple as a punitive tax on the Jews who had flirted with the worship of the baals -- especially the inhabitants of the northern reaches of the country, who were forever being accused of being soft on idolatry by their more orthodox southern cousins. The violations of Yahweh's cult are understood by the priestly writers, from their purview in Jerusalem, as grass roots rural or populist movements which needed periodically to be brought under control by those technically responsible for safeguarding ancient traditions. The Maccabean movement of the second century B.C. E., originally centered on the rural "shrines" of Lydda and Modein, the Essene and Baptist movements which may have sprung up shortly thereafter, suggest that the official view of Palestinian rural religion is not entirely accurate. The Yahwism of the Maccabeans declined steadily in relation to the Hellenized Yahwist movement in Jerusalem. Within Palestine generally, the rural areas were selectively and unpredictably more "conservative" and less observant of the law.

In two places the Hebrew bible recounts the legend of the "discovery" of the law of Moses under Josiah: 2 Kings 22.8- 10, copied by the author of 2 Chron. 34. The story has all the earmarks of a legend designed to conceal more mundane origins for the books of Moses. In fact, Judah had been only slightly more hostile to the worship of foreign gods than the northern kingdom of Israel. The centralization of the cult of Yahweh in Jerusalem, coupled with the tale of Josiah's razing of the altars, and the discovery of the law are designed to enforce the view that just prior to the catastrophe of exile the religion of Judah was its old self, for one brief, shining and atypical moment.

According to the biblical legend, the high priest Hilkiah finds "the book of the law of the Lord given by Moses" on a routine inspection of the building site. He presents it to a certain Shaphan, the king's secretary, who dutifully reads it to the king. In a gesture designed to show his anguish, Josiah rends his clothes upon hearing the words spoken for the first time, "because our fathers have not kept the word of the law [nor done what] is written in this book" (2 Chron. 34.21).

Like all legends, this story seems to have an historical core. But equally like all legends, the core is not the whole story. What would later be recognized as "orthodox" Jewish observance would have been as strange in the context of the mixed religious cults of sixth-century Jerusalem as the Judaism of the Ethiopian Falashas appeared in the twentieth. The scene of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem -- "both great and small" -- standing before Josiah at a massive Passover celebration to swear their loyalty to a scroll squirreled away by his forefathers is legendary, as is the tale of Josiah's cleanup operation. Yet beneath the legend lurks a fact or two concerning the lapse into ancient elohimist practices and the slovenly state of the temple cult. The ban on the worship of "foreign" gods and goddesses under Josiah serves a dramatic purpose. It is an episode required if the "tragedy" of the Babylonian conquest and deportation is to mean anything at all.

The interlude of "good king Josiah" is followed by the eleven-year reign of his sons, one of whom, Jehoiakim, was taken in fetters to Babylon along with a sizable number of the sacred vessels of the temple. Apparently his fate was considered just deserts for "the abominations which he did and what was found against him" -- capitulation to the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. Jehoiakim's sons are remembered chiefly for being even worse than their father -- in particular Zedekiah, "who did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet" and dragged the leading priests and people with him into apostasy.

The myth of a "faithful" Zion, a remnant of the patriarchal faith resistant to the idolatry of Babylon, Egypt, and Persia, grew out of the nostalgia for a golden age and the hope for its return. The latter would finally express itself in the messianic faith of the Roman period. Abraham, Moses, and David were the pillars of this memory, not Jeroboam, Ahab and Zedekiah who had driven the kingdoms into apostasy and who, according to the rabbis of Jesus' day, "would have no part in the kingdom of God" when it came.

After the fall of Babylon and following the exile this nostalgia was encouraged by the Persian king Cyrus. It was not the returnees who agitated to rebuild the city walls and the ruined temple of Yahweh, but Cyrus, the foreigner, the worshiper of other gods. Thus, the chronicler of this period of Jewish history reports Cyrus as saying, following the victory of the Persians over the Babylonians:

The Lord, the God of heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him.

So dependent was the Judaism of the sixth century and later on the initiatives of Cyrus and his successors that he is made an honorary Jew, a mashia (deliverer), a member of the Yahwist cult. It was the foreigner who ordered the temple rebuilt, the stranger who ordered that the law of Moses be proclaimed as the law of the region. He had done for the Jews what they could not do -- politically or religiously -- for themselves. He restored their cult, their temple, their city and their law to them.

Theological analysis of the religious situation during the time of the captivity seems to have flourished chiefly among the "leading men" in exile, probably those whose theological view of history persuaded them that their punishment had something to do with forsaking ancestral customs -- especially the keeping of a "national" Passover. It is doubtful that the Jews who were deported to Babylon were "monotheistic" in any speculative sense. They were men who tended to interpret historical events and political outcomes theologically by raising questions about the will, purposes and justice of God. In their collective view, bad times were the consequence of bad actions, of "sin" or a loss of national purity. Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah were interpreted to have foreseen the apostasy of the nation and its punishment as part of a divine plan. If the battle was lost, it was because Yahweh wished to chastise them (and so joined the opposing forces to fight with his brother gods against his own people); if famine came, it was because Yahweh had been cheated of his share of the harvest; and if exile came, it was because Yahweh had permitted the strange gods worshiped by his enemies to get the political upper hand. The romanticized summary of this, often attributed to the time of Josiah (ca. 621 B.C.E.), with its repetition of the law and ritual blessings and curses, was read back to the time of Moses, as a form of vitiated Yahwist orthodoxy, though in large measure it represents a much later reaction to the nation's apostasy and to the exile itself (cf. Deut. 27.15 and 29-30).

The exclusive worship of Yahweh, enshrined in the law, is advocated as a religious solution to the problem of political misfortune. Still burned deeply in the Jewish psyche of Jesus' day however, is the ancient vignette of Exod. 32.7, when the newly delivered children of Yahweh dance and prostrate themselves before a golden bull-calf -- the symbol of the Canaanite cults out of which Yahwism had emerged. Far from being purged or forgotten, it was preserved in the structure of the horned altar, such as the one at Megiddo, the sacrifice of bulls and the erection of sacred poles (Exod. 24.4ff.). Equally vivid was Jeremiah's description of Judah's religion before the fall: "You, Judah, have as many gods as you have towns; you have set up as many altars to burn sacrifices to baal as there are streets in Jerusalem. Offer up no prayer for these people: raise no cry or prayer on their behalf, for I will not listen when they call to me in their hour of disaster" (Jer. 11.13-14).

It was in the interest of the foreign overlords of Judah to promote and guarantee Jewish religious identity in exchange for Jewish political obedience. It took a royal decree to install the "law" of Moses as the law of Jerusalem and Judah, and it took Cyrus and his successor Darius to make it happen.

According to tradition, Ezra and Nehemiah had urged the "restored" Jerusalem community not to enter into any foreign alliances. In practical terms, the community held itself aloof from the mixed cult in Samaria in the north of Palestine. Samaria was seen as the "worst case" of religious mixing. Following the conquest of the region by the Assyrians, foreign settlers had moved into the land and married into the local population. Their descendants appear to have worshiped Yahweh as a fertility God (2 Kings 17), but the Jerusalem community did not recognize the Samaritans as Israelites and hostility -- leading finally in 128 B.C.E. to outright warfare -- existed between the two branches of the Yahwist cult from the fourth century onward. Ironically, the bond that might have held Jew and Samaritan together after the withdrawal of the Samaritan Yahwists to their temple on Mount Gerizim -- namely the Law of Moses -- did nothing to heal the ancestral wound. From the standpoint of the isolationist Judaeans, the Samaritans were lukewarm Yahwists at best and idolaters at worst. Jewish pilgrims en route to Jerusalem for festivals through Samaritan territory expected rough treatment (Luke 9.51-56) and usually got it. In Christian history, the Samaritans are remembered flatteringly as having accepted the gospel more readily than the Judaeans (Acts 8.4-25), and after some initial hesitation about launching the messianic preaching in the north of Palestine (Matt. 10.5-6), the region became fertile ground for converts to Christianity.

HELLENISM

In 333 B.C.E. at the battle of Issus, Alexander the Great defeated the Persian king Darius III. The Persian era, during which an articulated Jewish identity was established, came to an end. Alexander's goal was to open up a route by way of Syria and Palestine to Egypt. The effect on the Jews in Palestine was direct and immediate. The Jews submitted peaceably to Greek rule, and in recognition of their good sense they were permitted to continue practicing their cult without interference. Their legal status was unchanged, but nothing would remain the same.

Palestine swarmed with Greek traders, merchants, and travelers. Admiration of Greek manners, architecture, habits of thought, and literature was encouraged, and throughout the Near East ancestral languages were traded for the language of Sophocles and Plato or approximations of it. Greek settlements were founded; Tyre was repopulated with Greeks and Samaria with Macedonians (a penalty for having resisted the Greek advance into northern Palestine). Outside Jerusalem, Greek civil law was imposed and within Judaea Greek was introduced as the language of trade. Minor officials in Jerusalem, in their later dealings with Roman occupation forces, communicated in Greek not Latin, and Greek (not Aramaic or Hebrew) was the language in which the sayings of Jesus and later the missionary propaganda of the church -- the gospels -- were circulated. It has even been suggested with some plausibility, but no relevance, that Jesus knew a little Greek. Paul (or his secretaries, since he seems to have been illiterate: 1 Cor. 16.21) used only Greek in his letters to the newly formed Christian churches of the Graeco-Roman world.

With their language Greek colonists brought their own patterns of life, their own customs: Greek buildings, baths, gymnasiums, amphitheaters. rhetorical skills, and medical practice. The custom of debate and "didactic conversation" in pursuit of the truth -- the question-and-answer method now usually associated with rabbinical Judaism -- was a feature of Greek, not Near Eastern culture. The habit of reclining (i.e., resting on the left elbow while using the right hand for eating) for festival meals was also widely adopted. It was the customary "position" at mealtime by Jesus' day.

As a people who mistrusted the ways of the stranger but had become accustomed to his presence, the more cosmopolitan Jews of Jerusalem adapted quickly to Greek culture. By the second century B.C.E., there were Jews who earnestly believed that they were the kinsmen of the Spartans, and who equated the proverbial fairness of Spartan law with the law of Moses. In 1 Macc. 12.21 there is a description of a letter from Arius, king of Sparta, to Onias I. the high priest in Jerusalem (ca. 300 B.C.E.); the letter "reveals" that an ancient document has been discovered which identifies the Spartans and Jews as brothers, both descended from the tribe of Abraham. And while the Jews in Jerusalem flirted guiltily with Hellenistic civilization, the Philistines and Phoenicians surrendered themselves less cautiously to the Greek way of life.

Gymnasia were built where the youth of the city (priests among them) romped about -- in Greek fashion -- unclothed. Ridiculed for the "mark" of their circumcision by Greek spectators at these games, masses of the young men of Jerusalem underwent an improvised piece of surgery to create a new penile foreskin to disguise their identity (1 Mace. 1.15), an operation still performed in Jesus' day and among the Jews of the diaspora in the first century C.E. (1 Cor. 7.18).

In 175 B.C.E. the high priest in Jerusalem was Onias III. By this time, Jerusalem had fallen under Syrian control, following the death of Alexander in 323 B.C.E. and a period of rule by the Hellenized Ptolemies of Egypt. The Jerusalem community had experienced a century and a half of Greek culture by this point. More aggressive in their pursuit of "political Hellenization" -- the belief that the enforcement of Greek ways and styles would make for a stable empire (oikoumene, indicating Greek as opposed to barbarian culture) -- the Syrian protectors of Palestine manipulated the high priesthood, the main stay of Jewish orthodoxy. Onias is remembered as a devout observer of the Mosaic law. His brother Joshua, on the other hand, was a leader of a band of "renegade Jews" (1 Mace. 1.11) who wished to enter into a treaty with the gentiles "because disaster upon disaster has overtaken us since we segregated ourselves from them." After striking a deal with the Syrians to have his brother ousted and himself installed as high priest, Joshua changed his name to Jason and arranged for Onias' murder in Antioch. In 160, the deposed priest's son established a "temple" in the Egyptian city of Leontopolis modeled on the Jerusalem temple, under the protection of the Egyptian court. In Jerusalem, Jason sped along the process of integration.

After three years, another Hellenized priest, a certain Menelaus, offered the Syrian king a higher sum than Jason had offered for the high priesthood. Accordingly Jason was deposed and Menelaus installed. Jason then raised armed troops to recover the priesthood, which he did successfully in 170, with the intervention of the Syrian king Antiochus. Menelaus was restored and assumed the title "ruler" of Jerusalem. But the Syrians were firmly in control. The temple treasury was plundered as Menelaus tried to keep pace with increasing demands for the "protection" money desperately needed by the Syrians to fight their wars against Egypt. Impatient with the Jewish leadership, Antiochus decided in 169 to plunder the temple treasury outright to replenish his own; in the process he looted the temple, taking the seven-branched lampstand, and the altar of incense to Antioch (1 Mace. 1.20-24).

In the next two years a series of measures were taken to ensure the completion of the "Hellenization" of the Jewish homeland. The walls of Jerusalem were (again) torn down and a fortress was built on mount Zion; Jews were forbidden to keep the sabbath or to circumcize their children. Although pious memory has recorded these measures as "outrages," it is certain that many Jews of Jerusalem were sympathetic to this "final solution." The wealthy and the intelligentsia were tired of isolation from the good things the Greek world had to offer, not least prosperity and learning. Circumcision was already out of vogue among certain classes, especially the youth of the city, and the citified priests had often encouraged the identification of Yahweh with the Greek Theos Hypsistos -- the high God, equivalent to Zeus in the Greek pantheon. The erection of an altar to Zeus in place of the altar of burnt offering in 167 and the introduction of pigs as sacrificial animals were designed to make the equivalence of Zeus and Yahweh explicit. From the Greek point of view, religion had to do fundamentally with the worship of the "true" God. What one called him -- Zeus, Yahweh, El or Baal -- was a matter of no great importance.

The books of the Maccabees, the primary documentation for this cloudy period of Jewish history, are written (ca. 124- 100 B.C.E.) from the standpoint of those opposed to the religious innovations of the Syrian period in the rule of Palestine. Passionately written though they are, it is clear from what they say (and from what is not said) that Jerusalem was on the brink and that Judaism was dying, not through military action but through assimilation.

When opposition came, it came from beyond the rubble of the city walls, primarily as a reaction to Syrian political meddling but also as a response to the destruction of the temple cult. Syrian inspectors roamed the countryside ostensibly to enforce compliance with the new regulations concerning pagan sacrifice and also to facilitate setting up rural shrines. One clan in Modein, the Hasmoneans, led by their patriarch Mattathias, refused to comply and took to the hills where they formed a renegade army determined to fight a war of attrition against Syrian interference in the cult. Judas, the son of Mattathias, assumed leadership after his father's death and soon earned the name makkaba (hammer) for the band's devastating small-scale guerrilla attacks, many of them directed at apostate Jews rather than against the Syrians.

There is no evidence that the hellenized Jews of Jerusalem wanted saving from their apostasy, though the Book of Daniel, composed around the time of the Syrian occupation, seems to represent the view of some Jews that the end of history and the judgment of God would follow the desecration of the temple cult -- an apocalyptic vision of the world that remained popular well into the Christian era.

Whether the "renegade Jews" of Jerusalem wanted saving or not, Judas and his brothers successfully contained the Syrian forces in Palestine. It is probable that the Syrians had little money or energy to invest in the battles against the Maccabees in any case. They were occupied with fighting the Parthians in the east and containing Rome's advance from the west. On the 25th Kislev (the ninth month of the Jewish year) 164, Judas managed to enter the temple and rededicate the altar. The worship of Yahweh was technically restored; but the Maccabees were not successful in winning the war. The Syrians held fast to their fortified position and finally struck a deal with the Jews: worship of Yahweh in exchange for acknowledgment of Syrian sovereignty. Although Judas and his brothers Jonathan and Simon are remembered as heroes, their primary contribution was to pacify the chasidim, the pious Jews who worried about the purity of the temple cult and the priesthood, and to keep the burden of taxation light. Skirmishes between Syrian and Maccabean forces continued for the next twenty years as did contention over the priesthood.

Following the death of Judas, his brother Simon received certain concessions from the Syrians; minted his own coins; and assumed the offices of high priest, commander of the army, leader of Jerusalem and dynastic patriarch. In fact, by the year 140 the Hasmonean dynasty had become infected with the Hellenistic temperament of Jerusalem itself. Whatever its original interest, as a rural guerrilla movement, in restoring the worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem, its dynastic ambition as reflected in Simon's Pooh-Bah approach to government, finance and religion repelled many of the chasidim who had supported the Maccabean tax and temple revolt. From the time of Jonathan onward a steady stream of Jews "exiled" themselves in the Judaean desert in opposition to the "wicked priest" -- either Alkimus (d. 160) or perhaps Simon himself. These Essenes, whose habits are described by the Jewish historian Josephus, are now widely thought to be identical to the Dead Sea community at Khirbet Qumran. Whatever else their exodus may have represented, it betokened sharp opposition to the power politics of the Hasmoneans. The portrait of the "restoration of Judaism" under Simon given in 1 Macc. 14.8-15, where he is seen as a messiah figure and the fulfillment of prophecy (cf. Mic. 4.4.) cannot be true to the slovenly religious environment of late second-century B.C.E. Jerusalem.

Simon was murdered by an Egyptian assassin in 134. He was succeeded by his son John Hyrcanus, who managed to extend the power base of the Jewish kingdom. Using mercenaries along with local troops, Hyrcanus invade Samaria and demolished the ancient temple on Mount Gelizim, the "rival" to the temple in Jerusalem, and in 107 conquered and devastated Samaria itself. He thrust into Idumea (Edom) and flogged the local population into submission, "converting" them en masse to Judaism. Oddly, or perhaps not, these exploits do not seem to have been undertaken for religious reasons, and they were forthrightly rejected in pious Jewish circles. The Pharisees loudly disapproved of Hyrcanus' tactics, accusing him of behaving like the Antiochene kings he had opposed. Land-grabs were undertaken for prestige value, not in the interest of extending God's kingdom on earth, though the latter rationale was used to defend the adventures. The Sadducees were slightly more sympathetic than the Pharisees, the latter demanding that Hyrcanus give up the office of high priest on the reckoning that -- as his mother had been imprisoned and probably raped by the Syrians -- he might well be illegitimate and thus unfit for the task.

The further history of the Maccabees down to 107 is a "typical" history of dynastic infighting. On the death of Hyrcanus, rule was seized by his son Aristobolus. who promptly arranged for his brother Antigonus' assassination, the imprisonment of his other brothers, and the isolation of his mother, whom Hyrcanus had appointed to rule in his stead. If the names chosen by the Maccabees tell us anything about the religious temper of the times, it is clear that the Hasmoneans of the first century B.C.E. regarded themselves as the "Jewish" heirs of Alexander. Although they were not equipped to take on the superpowers of the Hellenistic world, they mimicked the Seleucid (Syrian) and Ptolemaic (Egyptian) kings in style, manners, and military bravado.

When Aristobolus died in 103 B.C.E., his wife, Salome Alexandra, freed her husband's brothers from prison and married Jonathan, the eldest. Jonathan thereupon changed his name to Alexander Jannaeus; after finishing his brother's subjugation of Galilee, Jordan and the Mediterranean coast, he thrust into the kingdom of the Nabataeans. Judaism was now imposed on the conquered peoples with boys and men required to undergo circumcision at swordpoint.

Unlike the nations who had accepted Hellenism and had learned to admire Greek civilization in its devolved form, the territories conquered by the later Maccabees deeply resented their Hellenized Jewish masters. And for their part, rulers like Jannaeus found the loyalty of the Samaritans and Galileans impossible to command. Worse, the chasidim in Jerusalem thought of Jannaeus as a Greek in Jew's clothing. He had disgraced the temple and the priesthood in insisting on retaining the office of high priest throughout his military exploits, returning to Jerusalem only long enough to wash the blood from his hands. On one occasion, Jannaeus brought 800 rebels back to Jerusalem, herded them through the town, then arranged a great feast for his lieutenants and concubines in a makeshift arena where the rebels were crucified. Once the crosses had been pulled aloft, the wives and children of the victims were brought to the foot of the crosses and were slain before the eyes of the crucified men.

ROME

By the time Salome Alexandra died in 67 B.C.E., the weakened and economically exhausted kingdom of the Seleucids had been incorporated into the Roman Empire as the province of Syria. Palestine would soon follow, after token opposition by Aristobolus II, Salome's ambitious and ill-tempered son. After a three-month siege the Roman general Pompey entered the temple and inspected the Holy of Holies, while the chasidim waited breathlessly to see whether this inspection would be a repetition of the Seleucid "abomination" of 167 -- the introduction of swine sacrifice and the abolition of the cult of Yahweh. Despicable and religiously marginal as the Hasmoneans had been, they had at least managed to protect the cult: the worship of Yahweh had survived alongside some highly questionable practices of distinctly non-Jewish origin. The Maccabees would soon join Abraham and Moses as pillars of Jewish nostalgia, though their excesses would also be remembered.

The best guess is that in entering the temple, the Romans did not wish to antagonize the feuding Jewish sects of Pharisees, Sadducees and others. They wanted loyalty and stability. The reaction of the pious at the time was to blame the whole affair on Jewish apostasy rather than on the Romans: "The sinners [Romans] insolently knocked down the strong walls with battering rams, and You, Lord, did not stop them. The strangers [Romans] approached your altar and walked on it with their shoes, because the sons of Jerusalem desecrated the sanctuary and defiled God's sacrifice in godlessness" (Psalms of Solomon 2.1-3). Although the reference may be to Aristobolus' unworthy tenure as high priest, the impression that mini-sanctuaries to foreign gods and sacrificial cults had flourished throughout the dying days of Hasmonean rule, just as they had before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, is unavoidable. Aristobolus II and his sons Alexander and Antigonus were brought as prisoners to Rome A puling Hyrcanus II, who had been ousted from the high priesthood, was reinstalled.

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"From Babylon to Rome," the history of Judah is a story of political instability and religious compromise. While the biblical story is remarkably clear in this respect, biblical mythology and theologically driven history have tended to see the same half millennium as a story of the survival of monotheistic faith against the strong odds that it would perish, a victim of the infidel cultures that encroached upon it. St. Paul would later summarize this history as an impossible attempt to keep laws that could not be kept, but which grew in number and rigor with each new priestly generation that could not keep them. The self-blame, the anguish, and religious angst engendered by the feeling that God was more often on the side of the stranger than of his own faithless people is a crucial part of this history, and it is well known that the prophets were not above raising poignant questions about the justice of this God (Jer. 8.18-22). But the answers that are reckoned to carry divine authority are echoes of the prophets' voices: "Why do [my people] provoke me with their images and foreign gods .... Adulterers are they all, a mob of traitors" (Jer. 8.19.2). The prophets might well talk about laws being written in the heart and not on stone, but even in Jesus' day, it was the law that was credited with staying power and that was seen as the essential data of God's revelation to his people.

The law is often seen to float above the heads of worldly events and actors as the proof that Judaism was quintessentially about the worship of the true God even if the Jews, in particular historical and political situations, habitually neglected the divine ordinances and feasts. The "true" story, insofar as it can be separated from the biblical account, is that the ordinances were a part of a struggle to maintain a dying cult against the lures and temptations of more powerful neighbors and empires. Rome was the last culturally imperialist civilization to come into contact with the depleted territory of Judah before its collapse. What survives this collapse religiously speaking is rabbinical Judaism, deprived of political power and aspiration, of land and kingship, and of a religious "center" in the form of a temple, and Christianity, a Jewish messianic sect, which begins in an equally stateless fashion but acquires Rome itself in the process of its development.

What survives, therefore, is not a coherent theological vision -- that had been made politically untenable -- but the law, understood to be a coherent prescription for righteousness in the eyes of a fundamentally righteous God.

In 57 B.C.E. the Roman provincial governor Gabinius split Palestine into five administrative units. Judaea was divided into three sectors: Jerusalem, Gazara and Jericho, while Galilee was united with the district of Sepphoris and Perea to the district of Amanthus. The divisions were designed to fracture Jewish nationalism, which whimsically vacillated between supporting Pompey and supporting Julius Caesar prior to Pompey's murder in Egypt in 48 B.C.E. The surviving Hasmonean, Hyrcanus, and Antipater switched their allegiance quickly to the victorious side; as a reward Caesar guaranteed the rights of the cultic community in Jerusalem with Hyrcanus as high priest and "ethnarch" -- a specially forged title -- of Jerusalem and Joppa.

Antipater was named an honorary Roman citizen and procurator of Judaea -- essentially a Roman civil servant put in place to inform the Romans of any suspicious goings-on among the rival Jewish sects. The move was not, at first, regarded as an outrage. Antipater was an Idumean, after all: an outsider but still technically "Jewish." The office he occupied, however, was effectively that of governor and administrator, and his loyalties were to Rome, not to the Jews. He acted in typical Maccabean fashion by ensuring a succession of like-minded administrators in the persons of his sons, Phaesel and Herod. Herod was given the territory of Galilee to administer; Phaesel ruled Judaea.

Herod acted decisively to rid Galilee of the "bandits," i.e., nationalistic Jewish partisans who had opposed Roman rule at the time of Judaea's subjugation. While he won applause from Rome for this cleanup operation, the Sanhedrin -- the legislative and judicial body to whom life-and-death questions should have been referred -- was outraged. When they called Herod to account for his summary execution of the bandits, he appeared, surrounded by bodyguards. The Sanhedrin were reminded how puny their power really was when confronted by an agent of Roman interests and Roman justice. In the time of Jesus, the Jerusalem synedrion's religious police had the right to arrest those charged with not keeping the law, but in matters involving the life and death of the accused, it was obliged to submit its action for the review of Roman authorities.

The power struggle that affected the empire between 44 and 37 following the murder of Julius Caesar ended with Herod alone in a bargaining position. He fled to Rome to make his case against rival claimants to power and was rewarded for his political sense with the title "King of the Jews" and Roman forces to help him win back his "kingdom" from Antigonus, the last of the pure-bred Hasmoneans. He was reconfirmed in this office after having switched allegiance from Marc Antony to Octavian (Caesar Augustus) following Antony's defeat at Actium in 31 B.C.E.

To secure the support of the surviving Hasmoneans and their sympathizers, Herod married into the old royal family, though he was never able to exorcise his fear that the family would again seize control and reestablish the Jewish state; hence, following the ritual mutilation of the old Hyrcanus (his ears were cut off so that he could not fulfill the office of high priest) he decided that the old man should be murdered. In his place Herod installed his wife's brother, Aristobolus, also of the royal lineage. When he grew suspicious of him, Herod hired murderers to kill him in his bath. This was followed by his ordering the murder of his own wife, Mariamne, and two of their sons. Only his firstborn, Herod Antipater, was spared -- until just before Herod's death, when even Antipater was accused of treachery and sentenced to die. Although stories of Jesus' birth in the New Testament are fraught with legend, the story of the slaughter of the male children recounted in Matt. 2.16 is a legend informed by contemporary assessments of Herod's character.

Religiously, Herod was suspected of being soft on paganism. His kingdom included Jews and Greeks, and he tried hard to be each to all. He failed. His sympathies were decidedly Greek and the tastes he cultivated originated in Rome. His inner circle consisted mainly of educated Hellenists, political advisors, philosophers, musicians and architects. His domestic policy was focused on building Greek cities throughout his territory, with baths, gymnasia, and theaters. And like a good Roman patron, he promoted the pagan cults with an active program that included the building of temples to adorn the new cities. As a consolation to his more pious clients, Herod arranged for the enlargement of the temple in Jerusalem (a project not complete in Jesus' day: cf. Mark 13.1) and respected the wishes of the priests that the sanctuary be covered at all times during the remodeling.

Herod's real effort was invested in proving himself a worthy, if somewhat junior, successor to Alexander. On the site of the ruined city of Samaria he created a new city in honor of Augustus, Sebaste ("The Exalted"), and on the coast he built a modern harbor-town and named it Caesarea. In Jerusalem itself he erected a fortress, the Antonia, located directly on the temple square where he could keep constant surveillance of the temple construction site, and on the western shore of the Dead Sea he built an almost impregnable fortification, Masada, set on top of a mountain. In the style of a Latin patron, Herod was eager to display his wealth and to guarantee his prestige.

JOHN AND THE BAPTISTS

According to the gospels, toward the end of Herod's life (4 B.C.E.) Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist were born (Matt. 2.1; Luke 1.5). The latter appears to have belonged to a radical sect of Jewish dissidents who, while opposed to the Herodians and to Roman domination of the Jewish state, advocated separation from mainstream Judaism as the only way to achieve a measure of religious purity. Their central sacrament was baptism, which was seen as a sign of repentance not only for the national apostasy represented by the Herodians, but also for the priesthood and the Pharisees. It is useless, if tempting, to speculate on their connections with the Qumran or Dead Sea Community. First-century Judaea was filled with apocalyptic prophets; the bandits were still active, along with shadowy groups like the Sicarii and the religio-political Zealots, each of which represented slightly different solutions to the political reality of Roman occupation.

Most felt powerless to deal with the problem in their midst; thus, solutions ranged from random assassinations carried out against apostate Jews, spies, and Jewish civil servants on the Roman payroll ("publicans") to capitulation, in the case of the Herodian party. The apocalyptic preachers such as John tended to see Jewish history as a story of irreversible decline, at the end of which God would come (or send his delegate, the Son of Man) to judge the gentiles and the unrepentant for their sins. John the Baptist belonged to this tradition. Alongside this solution, however, stood the "preferred" belief that God had not deserted his people and did not intend to settle accounts on a supernatural level. Instead, he would send a mashiah, a leader like David, a prophet like Moses -- a kingly deliverer who would redeem the nation from its enemies, restore the kingdom, regather the ancient tribes -- or such remnants as had remained faithful, wherever they might be -- and rule in peace and justice, like Augustus.

Taken literally, the two beliefs seem incompatible: would God save his people by destroying the world, or save the world by delivering his people? But messianic belief and apocalyptic belief were seldom distinctly separated in the popular mind. Many Jews believed in both divine judgment and messianic deliverance, and invented an ingenious literature to bring the two beliefs into conjunction. The remnants of this effort can be seen as early as the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, but include apocryphal sources like First Enoch, 4 Esdras, as well as the canonical Christian gospels, which belong in part to the literary world of apocalyptic thought (cf. Mark 13; Matt. 25.31-46).

JESUS

The pessimism of previous decades concerning what Jesus of Nazareth might have taught has now largely been set aside by developments in our understanding of the social and religious matrix of first-century Palestine. After John clashed with the Herodian party (Matt. 14.1-12), he was imprisoned in the fortress of Machereus by the Dead Sea (Josephus, Antiquities 18.2), and subsequently beheaded. Some of his followers continued to plague the Herodians with their purist interpretations of Judaism (Matt. 9.14) and their insistence on a baptism of "renunciation" or repentance (John 3.22). After his beheading, there was a rumor that John had risen from the dead (Mark 6.16). Some of his followers declared John the messiah and continued to follow a more or less rigorist interpretation of his teaching (Matt. 9.11f.). A slightly more liberal element, though one equally imbued with the spirit of apocalyptic enthusiasm, followed Jesus of Nazareth who declared himself, or was declared (John 1.37), the Baptist's successor. Jesus modified John's ethnocentric message of repentance and judgment (Luke 3.7-9) while building on his radical interpretation of the law (Matt. 5.17-20) and attacks on the Pharisees and (perhaps also) the Herodians (Matt. 22.16; Mark 12.13; 3.6). With the death of Jesus, the cult blended the strands of apocalyptic and messianic thinking to a degree then unparalleled in first-century Judaism. The crucified and defeated messiah would come again as deliverer and judge -- the victorious son of man.

Apparently Jesus declared the Pharisees beyond the scope of salvation for their interpretations of the law (Matt. 5.20), which tended to focus on technical requirements rather than personal conversion. The triumph of rabbinical Judaism after the destruction of the temple and the obliteration of the priesthood in 70 C.E. (which was a triumph for legal interpretation in the pharisaic style) marginalized Jesus' apocalyptic teaching to such an extent that early preachers like Paul had little option but to declare the law "fulfilled" in Jesus, a view then read back into the preaching of Jesus himself (Matt. 5.17-18).

Around the time of John's arrest it would seem that a dispute ensued about the meaning of baptism, John's followers declaring that those who wished to escape divine retribution should be washed as a token of their repentance. Jesus' followers, meanwhile, claimed that the baptism was a "spiritual" preparation for the dawning of God's kingdom -- a spiritual rebirth (John 3.8). Jesus' message of apocalyptic judgment was, at the outset, no different from John's (Mark 1.14). His early followers were disposed to look upon him as being -- in some sense -- the fulfillment of John's gospel of repentance, and only with difficulty were they able to separate his message from that of their original prophet. By the time Jesus removed himself from Galilee, having run afoul of popular feeling there (Mark 6.5), his followers had begun to think of him as a prophet in his own right, associating his rejection and defeat with the unwillingness of Israel to listen to the prophets who had come before (Mark 8.28).

The New Testament tradition also preserves the belief that Jesus was the messiah or christos, i.e., the anointed one of God who would restore the kingdom of Israel and defeat the enemies of God. Jesus' followers evidently included, besides the legendary twelve members of both theological and political camps, those who saw him as the prefigurement of an apocalyptic judge and those who saw him as a political savior. It may have included members of the Zealot party and members of the Sicarii, the assassins, if the names Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot are of historical significance.

The two competing but often indistinguishable traditions -- messianic and apocalyptic -- in popular Judaism merged into a single grand scheme in the gospels. Jesus was viewed as both son of man and messiah, the lord (king) Christ and savior; the son of God and prophet like Moses; the son of David, who would come again in glory to redeem the nation. In the Hellenistic preaching of the gospel, however, these "titles" were quickly decontextualized and subsumed within the widespread belief that Jesus was a savior god on the order of Asklepios and Mithras, despite the efforts of the preachers to keep this belief under control (Phil. 2.5-11).

This speculation took place against the background of rabbinical Judaism and an emasculated priesthood, not to mention a puppet Herodian dynasty that had to bear the insult of having a Roman governor deciding cases which, in better days, would have been decided directly by Jewish authorities.

The tradition that Jesus was betrayed by Jews in his own party and crucified by the Romans as part of a conspiracy is not fashionable. It remains, however, the most plausible explanation of the events leading to his death and is fully supported by the evidence of the gospels and non-Christian sources. According to the gospel tradition (Mark 14.50), not only Judas and Peter but the whole band of disciples deserted Jesus at the time of his arrest. Later attempts to rehabilitate the apostles through a post-resurrection "enlightenment" and the descent of the spirit on the feast of Pentecost bear the traces of second-century legend (d. Acts 2.3): Its function was to ensure that the deserters become official witnesses and teachers of a new messianic faith through the divine charisma, the gift of the "holy spirit."

The facts are probably more mundane. Jesus ran afoul of the Pharisees for his style of legal interpretation; of the Sadducees for his (apparent) contempt for the temple cult and perhaps also because of his origins; and of his own followers, or the bandits and zealots among them, for failing to liberate the Jewish nation from the yoke of foreign domination (cf. Luke 24.21). This is three-pronged Jewish opposition which could be resolved only through assassination or judicial despatch. While scholars clash on this point, the judicial process involved seems to have belonged to the Romans, since a sentence of death was officially requested by the Jewish opponents. By the same token, the mob scenes (d. Matt. 27.24-26) with the "Jews" begging Pilate for crucifixion and Pilate washing his hands of an innocent man's blood "in full view of the people," are self-serving fictions designed, insofar as possible, to remove the burden of guilt from the Roman protectors, upon whose unpredictable good will the Christian missionaries depended for the continuation of their mission. The crucifixion of Jesus from the standpoint of both sides was not an injustice but an agreement to remove a difficult character from public view. There was nothing complicated about such an arrangement.

Whether Jesus preached against the paying of taxes to the Romans or offended the priests with his not-so-veiled threat against the temple cult (Mark 11.17f.) cannot be decided. The actions of Pilate in "handing Jesus over" are in general alignment with the picture of the governor painted by Josephus. Pilate would not have been interested in the "theological" correctness of Jesus' position, but he would have gone out of his way to prevent an uprising instigated by an alliance of Pharisees, Sadducees, and disappointed Zealots.

What seems to have regathered Jesus' followers out of their retreat in Galilee was the "news" of his resurrection, a tale parallel to that originally circulated about John the Baptist. Jewish polemic immediately countered (Matt. 28.14-15) that Jesus' disciples had stolen his body. By this time, however, conflicting tales of Jesus' appearances -- to disciples in Galilee, to pilgrims along the road, to Mary of Magdala outside the tomb, to crowds in and around Jerusalem -- had begun to circulate wildly and continued for years after his death (1 Cor. 15.3-7). Jesus' last "public" appearance prior to his arrest, a Sabbath and possibly a Passover meal with his followers, became saturated with reminiscence and remembered promises: he had said he would die; he had predicted that he would rise; he had told his disciples that he would be away for a little while but had said he would come again. Slowly his life story began to take shape against the promises of apocalyptic fulfillment and the Jewish doctrine of the Son of Man. Past disappointment gave way to the hope of Jesus' quick return, a hope enhanced by a growing conviction that God had raised him from the dead because he was God's own son, the chosen one of Israel (Acts 2.22-36).

The New Testament presents this evidence in the context of a "salvation history" whereby prophecies after the fact are given as foreshadowings of a divine plan (e.g., Ps. 16.8-11). From the standpoint of a social and cultural history of the movement, however, there is little doubt that the attractive thing about Jesus of Nazareth was not his bizarre apocalyptic predictions, which after a while had been softened to the point of melting. It was rather the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead and the good news that the same fate awaited those who believed that he saved them from "sin and death," which had acquired a cause/effect relationship in early Christian preaching (1 Cor. 15.12-19). It was this message, enhanced by the teaching of the Greek salvation cults and augmented increasingly by "sayings" attributed to Jesus and "signs" he had performed as enticements to belief in him, that formed the nucleus of the gospel tradition.

NOTICES AND CRITIQUES OF THE NEW FAITH

The criticism of the resurrection faith was almost immediate, beginning with Jewish accusations that the followers of Jesus had fabricated the story of his resurrection (Matt. 27.15; 1 Cor. 15.14). This accusation passed quickly from rabbinical discussion to gentile ears and pivoted on two contingent pieces of information: first, no one -- not even Jesus' followers -- had witnessed the resurrection. Early on the Christians were hard pressed to deny this fact, and the earliest of the gospel reports, that of Mark, exhausts the primitive tradition by declaring that a group of women, finding empty the place where Jesus' body had been laid, ran away in terror to report the news to his confused (male) disciples in Galilee, where they had fled to avoid arrest.

No effort was made to alter this tradition, apparently, until Jewish speculation concerning the whereabouts of the body made it necessary to offer proof that the body of Jesus had been raised, not stolen and buried privately. The appearance stories grew in number and variety, careless of detail and geographical consistency. Paul knew a tradition current in the 50s and probably before, that Jesus had appeared to Peter (Cephas), the twelve (the number would have to include Judas), five hundred others, followed by James and finally to Paul (1 Cor. 15.4-7). What Paul does with exaggerated numbers Matthew does with literary hyperbole: Guards were posted by the Jews, with Pilate's approval; the tomb was sealed (Matt. 28.66). At daybreak on the Sabbath, however, an earthquake announced the descent of an angel, who broke the seal, opened the tomb, sat on the stone and declared Christ risen to the visitants, while the guards "shook with fear and lay like dead men" (Matt. 28.4).

The Gospel of John adds a male witness at the foot of the cross ("the beloved disciple") and makes this disciple race a disbelieving Peter to the tomb, to find neither Jesus nor an angel (John 20.2-9). The tales of Jesus' appearances following the resurrection -- the most famous of which involves an apostle named Thomas or "the Twin" inserting his fingers into the wounds of the risen Lord -- were similarly devised to "prove" the resurrection to nay-sayers of assorted varieties.

THE MESSIANIC PROBLEM

The second level of criticism of the resurrection faith was more parochial, at least from the standpoint of Roman perceptions of the affair. While gentiles were free to believe or disbelieve the preaching of the resurrection, they were less familiar with the hopes for the messiah and the disputes between Jews and Christians that surrounded it. Put bluntly, Jesus lacked the curriculum vitae of a messiah. He was from a region known as the Galil'ha goyim (i.e., Galilee) whose reputation for religious and ethnic mixing -- apostasy in the minds of some Jerusalemites -- was well established (cf. John 1.46). Jewish tradition and later pagan critics knew Jesus as the son of a woman named Miriam or Miriamne, who had been violated and become pregnant by a Roman soldier whose name often appears as Panthera in talmudic and midrashic sources. The "single parent" tradition, if not the story of Jesus' illegitimacy, is still apparent in Mark, the earliest gospel (Mark 6.3), as is an early attempt to show Jesus' freedom from the blemish of his background (Mark 3.33-4).

Late first- or early second-century tradition, however, took the same aggressive stance against Jewish reports concerning Jesus' birth and lineage as it did against the attacks on the resurrection. Editors of Matthew and Luke contrived genealogies designed to show that Jesus was descended from the requisite messianic stock, a true son of David. According to these improvised traditions, he had been born in Bethlehem -- a place named by the prophets as the provenance of the future king and deliverer (Mic. 5.2). To counter the reports of Jesus' illegitimacy more than to secure his divine stature, his mother was declared the recipient of a singular divine honor: Jesus was the son of Mary -- a virgin -- "through the holy spirit" (Matt. 1.20). As is typical of his writing, Matthew comes closest to revealing the argumentative purpose of his birth story and its links to Jewish polemic against Christian belief in his reference to Joseph's suspicion of Mary's pregnancy (Matt. 1.19). He is also careful in the birth story and elsewhere to provide evidence and proofs from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew bible -- as a running part of his narrative. Almost certainly, the texts Matthew uses, such as Isa. 7.14 ("A virgin [parthenos in Greek, although the original Hebrew means simply "girl"] shall conceive and bear a son ... ") were already favorite talking points in debates between Christian preachers and the rabbis.

Attached to the question of messianic credentials, which loomed large in early Jewish-Christian debate, was the related question of Jesus' fate or, more exactly, the fate of the messiah. One might be able to finesse if not erase a man's origins among the second-class Jews of Galilee; indeed, for some antagonists of the new cult, being from Galilee was slander enough, tantamount to being a bastard ("the son of a carpenter," Mark 6.3). That Jewish polemic is any more "factual" in this respect than Christian attempts to evade the slander is doubtful.

But the crucifixion of Jesus was a public event. That Jesus was executed is agreed upon by Jewish and Christian traditions, and more significantly perhaps by such "outsiders" as Josephus and Tacitus. Traditions preserved in the non-Christian sources differed, however. According to Tacitus, writing around 115 C.E., Jesus was "executed in Tiberius' reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate" (Annals 15.43). But in talmudic literature we find the following: "This they did to Jeshu ben Stada (Jesus] in Lud: two disciples of the wise were chosen for him, and they brought him to the Beth Din [place of judgment] and stoned him" (T.Sanh. X.ll and J. Sanh. 7.16/25c,d). In the Jewish tradition, which, measured against the chronology of the gospels and pagan sources, is full of anachronisms, the charges against Jesus were sorcery, the preaching of heresy, and leading the "whole world astray" (cf. Luke 23.2f.).

The Jewish tradition is driven by the conviction that Jesus had not been the messiah -- a question of little relevance to writers like Tacitus. His judicial killing according to the penalty described for a heretic and magician (b. Sanh. 43a) served as a proof that he had not been God's anointed, the deliverer of his people. A Roman execution would, according to the law, have left the matter undecided; hence, in the Jewish polemical tradition Jesus was stoned and thereby proved to be a false messiah bent on leading his people into the worship of false gods. He is equated elsewhere with Ahab, Jeroboam and Manesseh -- the kings who presided over the apostasy of Israel and Judah.

More difficult to explain, from the Christian side, was the death of their messiah in humiliating circumstances, deserted by his closest followers. There were very few, if any, references to a Christ who would fail spectacularly to achieve the this-worldly hopes of the nation. Indeed the term was used specifically to denote kingly heroism, military prowess and success, as its application to the Persian king Cyrus (Isa. 45.1) suggests. The term presupposed not only ancient Davidic lineage (Mic. 5.2-5) but also one who would restore and uphold the kingdom of David forever (Isa. 9.6-7). Jewish polemic was severe on this point: Jesus had failed, as had Theudas, a magician named by Josephus (Antiquities 20.5.1) as having attracted a following (beheaded ca. 44 during the procuratorship of Fadus), and Judas, another Galilean "messiah" mentioned by Josephus (Antiquities 18.1.1; cf. Acts 5.36f.) as having raised an insurrection over the enrollment ca. 4 B.C.E. Between the time of Theudas and the bar Kochba rebellion of 132 C.E. Judaism had grown suspicious of pretenders to the messianic title. Insofar as any claim of the sort was made on Jesus' behalf during his lifetime, the Jews of the city would have been suspicious of the "Galileans" as well (Acts 5.27-40).

FROM THE TEMPLE TO BAR KOCHBA

The messianic movement associated with bar Kochba in the second century, though later in point of origin than Christianity, provides the most edifying parallel to the Christian movement. The Hellenistic cities created by the Herods had become hotbeds of Jewish and Greek tension. Anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out repeatedly in Caesarea and reached such intensity that the Jewish inhabitants of the city were reduced to paying protection money to the Romans. When the Romans failed to respond effectively to put down the riots, scattered resistance to their misrule and partisan support for the Hellenists turned into armed rebellion. In Jerusalem the temple area was seized by the Zealot leader John of Gischala, the rest of Jerusalem by Simon bar Giora. After a series of shows of force, the Romans under Titus broke through the city walls on three sides, set fire to the temple, and managed to wrest from the holy of holies its seven-branched candlestick and the table of the unleavened bread, which were taken as trophies back to Rome along with the rebel leaders. The destruction of the temple meant the end of the Sadducean party. The Pharisees concentrated their energies on the developing synagogue movement, since with the burning of the temple the sacrificial cult had come to an end. The synagogues were under the protection of the civil authorities, and were left alone to develop a new and distinctive style of Judaism so long as they did not become centers for political discussion, and dutifully paid to Rome the tax which previously had been collected from Jews for the maintenance of the temple.

On a routine tour of the eastern province of Palestine in 130, the emperor Hadrian decreed that a temple to the Roman god Jupiter should be built on the site of Herod's ruined temple. In an unrelated edict, Hadrian ordered a stop to the practice of ritual castration, a ban which was understood to include the rite of circumcision. A rebellion against the decrees, led by a certain Simon bar Kochba (or bar Cosiba) succeeded in regaining Judah and Jerusalem. Sacrifices were offered on the temple site and coins were minted as a sign of "independence" from Rome, using the first year of the rebellion as beginning of the new era. Rabbi Akiba, one of the foremost biblical interpreters of the day, declared bar Kochba the promised messiah, the "son of the daystar" spoken of in Num. 24.17. Since the Jewish Christians in Palestine could not accept bar Kochba's messianic claims, they were pursued and bloodily persecuted if they refused to renounce Jesus as the messiah (Justin, Apology 1.31).

The Romans closed in slowly, forced to find the rebels in their hiding places. Bar Kochba entrenched himself in Beth-Ter in Judah, surrounded by his closest followers, but the Romans had little difficulty in breaching his defenses. His slaying by the Romans was seen as a compelling disproof of his messiahship, and rabbinical Judaism seldom referred to him thereafter by name. The rabbis who had sided with bar Kochba were executed; Akiba himself is said to have had his flesh raked with iron combs before being put to death. On the ruins of Jerusalem, Hadrian's "model city," Colonia Aelia Capitolina, was erected. A temple dedicated to Jupiter was constructed, and Jews were forbidden to enter the city.

CHRISTS AND CHRISTIC TITLES

The oblivion that encircled "false" messiahs from Theudas to bar Kochba did not touch Jesus of Nazareth. Three strands of argument and belief were woven together to prevent him from falling into obscurity. These can be summarized as (1) the belief in the resurrection. (2) the Christian use and interpretation of prophecy, and (3) Christological complexity of the movement's understanding of Jesus' person and work. These cannot be dealt with in detail here, but any understanding of the strokes and angles of later criticism of Christian doctrine and practice depends on knowing that from its earliest days, the church was an "apologetic" structure. This means simply that doctrines which are usually thought to be the defining ones of Christianity developed in an environment hostile to Jesus' messianic claims, beginning with the view that he lacked the Davidic credentials to fulfill the role, and ending with the view that his death was -- like bar Kochba's -- sufficient disproof of his followers' preaching. The pagan critics later embraced this fundamentally Jewish view enthusiastically.

The Christian missionary preaching of the mid-to-late first century C.E. was summarized by Paul's assurances that "Jesus, the messiah, is Lord" (Phil. 2.11). The proof of this was his resurrection, the overcoming of death, which, in line with Jewish atonement theology, was also seen as a conquest of sin by the incarnation of innocence or righteousness in the person of Jesus himself. He was the perfectly righteous victim, the spotless lamb of God, who took the sins of the world onto himself. Thus his death was the "climax" of the temple cult (on the verge of collapse when this theology developed). He could be called "high priest" and, with tortured logic, the "sacrificial victim" -- a "spiritual and eternal sacrifice" (Heb. 9.14) whose blood washed away corruption.

The death of Jesus could be frankly acknowledged, therefore, as a "moment" in a process, at the end of which stood the negation of death (1 Cor. 15.20-1). In this way, the historical data -- the failure of the messianic mission in this worldly terms -- were overturned by the belief that only one part of the mission had been fulfilled. The momentous events, beginning with a resurrection known only to his closest followers, was still to come and would be made known to all only in the "last days" (cf. Mark 13. 26-7). By then, however, it would be too late for the enemies of the gospel to repent and to accept Jesus as Lord, a calculation which introduced the element of threat into the call for conversion. Who Jesus had been would be made known unmistakably in the future -- a future calculated by using the standard symbols of Jewish apocalyptic thought. This amalgamation may have been more a confusion of images than a studied blueprint for converting masses to the new faith, but all the religions of the empire, from Judaism to the gnostic schools and mystery cults, were amalgamations of some sort.

In an obvious way, this stratum of messianic "proof" was untestable. No one could say precisely when the effects of the resurrection would be made known unmistakably or when Jesus would be revealed from heaven as the true savior of the nation and the world. Even the gospels and letters of Paul were remarkably indefinite about the timing of these events (cf. Mark 9.1; 13. 31-32; 1 Thess. 5.2f.). The hope of the small community, of course, was that the proof would come "soon" (1 Cor. 16.22), especially as expulsions from the synagogues of the empire exposed clutches of Christians to the discipline of Roman judges and to the contempt of the intellectual classes.

A related and more testable assertion was the claim that the death of the messiah had been prophesied and that, therefore, the death of Jesus conformed to Jewish messianic expectation. The resurrection would have been -- in terms of messianic claims, anyway -- an unnecessary addition to the Christian armory of proofs and cases if the tradition of a dying messiah could be maintained. Attention fell on the book of Isaiah as a storehouse of rabbinical speculation concerning the messiah. Isa. 53 (52.13-53.12), commonly known today as "the fourth servant song," speaks of a nation despised, tormented by its enemies, pierced, chastised, and tortured by God for the unfaithfulness of the people. The nation is Israel, personified as a suffering servant who is buried among the wicked but who will one day be restored (healed) by God and vindicated for having made itself a sacrifice for sin. In Christian interpretation, the story of Israel was dislocated from its historical context and applied to the life history of Jesus. The servant was Jesus not Israel; the restoration referred not to the political welfare of the nation but to the resurrection and reappearance of the Christ. The crucifixion narratives were actually constructed with the text of Isa. 53, Ps. 22, and perhaps the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon 2.10-24 in hand as "proof texts" in support of the claim that the messiah was ordained to die an ugly and seemingly meaningless death -- from which he would be rescued as a sign that he had redeemed others.

These texts would have been compelling had the Jews recognized them as "messianic" and if the idea of a dying and rising messiah had occurred in first-century Judaism. During the reign of Hadrian, it is true, certain rabbis seem to have read Deut. 33.16 (Moses' blessing of Joseph) as having to do with a kind of "proto-messiah" who would die in a victorious encounter with Gog and Magog (the powers of evil) after a glorious career. There was no notion that this figure would suffer, nor that his death would have a redemptive significance. By the same token, Isa. 53 was not taken by the Jews of Jesus' generation to refer to the messiah or to announce his coming. In his "Dialogue with Trypho," written toward the end of the second century, Justin Martyr strives to persuade his Jewish opponent that the death of Christ was foretold in prophecy. Trypho -- Justin's invention and his ideally agreeable opponent -- acknowledges the "truth" of most of what Justin has to say, with one exception: "Whether the messiah should be shamefully crucified, this we are in doubt about; for whoever is crucified is said to be accursed by the law. I am exceedingly incredulous on this point" (Dialogue with Trypho 89). Justin proceeds to put together a tangle of texts, including a reflection on Deut. 33.13-17, which may have influenced rabbinical thinking on the point. But it was only in conversation with Christian teachers that some texts acquired a messianic gloss. At the time the gospels were composed, the death of the messiah caused confusion (Mark 8.32; Matt. 16.22) and could only be substantiated on the testimony of the risen Jesus (Luke 24.46) or attributed to a deliberate design of God (Acts 2.23f; Eph. 3.9-13). An early Christian sermon defended the death of the Christ as the amortization of the devil's lease on the world, the canceling of a debt owed by God to Evil: "[God] has forgiven us of all our sins; he has canceled the bond which pledged us to the terms of the law. It stood against us but he has set it aside, nailing it to the cross. On that cross he discarded the cosmic powers [of wickedness] and authorities like a garment; he made a public spectacle of them and led them as captives in his triumphal procession" (Col. 2.14-15). Thus, from the end of the first century onward, the preaching strategy diverted attention from the visible proofs and signs of messiahship to the "unseen" and hence untestable assertion of what his death accomplished on a cosmic scale. It was Jesus' death, interpreted messianically, rather than his life that saved him from obscurity.

A final stratum of defense, which grew naturally out of the diffuseness of early Christian preaching, was the use of multiple titles to refer to Jesus. While the risen Jesus of Luke 24 can declare with authority that the "Messiah is to suffer death and rise from the dead," the earliest recorded "prophecies" of the death of Jesus prior to the crucifixion referred to the death of the "son of Man" (Mark 8.31; 9.13; 10. 34). Traditionally commentary on these passages has focused on the fact that Jesus speaks on these three occasions not of his own ("I must be betrayed and killed") but of the son of man's betrayal and death. In fact, the use of the apocalyptic title -- "son of man" instead of messiah -- may well have grown out of the need to divert attention from the latter usage.

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The political overtones of the messianic claim were so pronounced and the expectations attached to the feats of the messiah so numerous that the gospel of John, in a famous interrogation scene, actually presents Jesus repudiating messiahship: "My kingship is not of this world. If it were, my followers would be fighting to save me from the Jews .... 'King' is your word, my task is to bear witness to the truth" (John 16-7). Growing originally out of differing political and theological viewpoints, the son of man and the messiah became in Christianity a single figure: that of the risen and exalted Christ "who would come again." Titles such as "son of God" or "a son of God," "Lord," "son of David," "prophet [like Moses]" (Acts 3.22) and "servant of God" (after Isa. 53), despite their technical differences, were brought together instinctively in the preaching of the early missionaries. The titles represented at one level a multiple-choice approach to the divinity of Jesus: Jews and Greeks heard different things when confronted with phrases such as "son of God." But at a strategic level the titles could be used in debate as ways of qualifying what was meant, or what was implied, in the eccentric Christian understanding of who the messiah was, what was expected of him, and how his death should be interpreted. While there was nothing deliberate about the logic of this development, the result might be summarized as follows:

• Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the son of God
• who was also the son of man and thus God's preappointed representative on the day of Judgment;
• who would be revealed in glory on the last day, but whose glory had been hidden during his earthly ministry;
• and who had died in "accordance with scripture" (i.e., prophetic texts) as an atoning sacrifice for the sins -- not only of the Jewish people but of the world;
• and who, as the risen Christ, offered the gift of salvation (from sin) and eternal life (its reward) to everyone who believed in him.

Against the view that Jesus failed to conform to Jewish requirements for a messiah the Christian preachers could offer only vague scriptural retorts. An example survives from the late first or early second century in a speech attributed to Peter, and reportedly given in the Court of the Gentiles (the east colonnade of the temple) to a Jewish audience (Acts 3.17-24):

[Men of Israel] This is how God has fulfilled what he had foretold in the utterances of all the prophets: that his messiah should suffer .... Repent so that your sins may be wiped out. Then God may grant you a time of recovery and send to you the messiah he had already appointed. that is, Jesus. He must be received into heaven until the time of universal restoration comes, of which God spoke by the holy prophets.

The speech is important not because it can be plausibly ascribed to the apostle Peter (it is given a setting more appropriate to a speech delivered by a Greek rhetor on a public festival), but because it may preserve something of the argumentative thrust of actual preaching by early Jewish and Samaritan missionaries.

By the early second century, the churches of Syria and Palestine had grown more confident of their use and interpretation of prophecy. For the second-century Syrian bishop Ignatius, only those prophecies which corroborated Christian doctrine were to be accounted true, since "Jesus Christ is the door through which the prophets enter the church" (Ep. to the Philadelphians 9.1). This inversion made it possible for Christians to appropriate the Old Testament as a preparation for the gospel, though pagan and Jewish observers of the new religion were unsparing in their criticism of applying prophecies, in an exclusive way, to Jesus of Nazareth. Porphyry notes that what is said in Hebrew prophecy could as well apply to a dozen other figures, dead or yet to come, as to Jesus.

JEWS AND CHRISTIANS ADRIFT: FROM NOTICE TO POLEMIC

By the year 100 C.E., the religious split between Jews and Christians had been clearly defined, if not always clearly expressed, in every city or in the minds of Roman observers. Judaism was to continue as a licit religion (religio licita), approved if not encouraged by Rome. The problematical temple cult had been destroyed and, with it, the debates over the purity and descent of the priesthood which had plagued ceremonial Judaism since the Captivity. Judaism had lost its center, if not its spirit, but was as much a pilgrim religion in the Roman Empire as the foundling and illegal "congregations" of Christians.

Judaism was not inconsequential to antiquity-conscious Romans. From their standpoint, Jewish civilization, being older than their own, possessed an element of truth: "What is old is true, what is true is old" was a dictum which the Christians struggled to overcome in their efforts to persuade the Romans that their cult was not a discredited sect of Judaism (an opinion urged upon the Romans by Jewish lobbyists in their exclusion of Christian teachers from synagogues, in their ritual curse of the Nazarenes, and in slanderous propaganda such as the ben Panthera tradition). No Christian litterateur of the late first century commanded a Roman audience as extensive or influential as the Jewish historian Josephus. Indeed all the letters surviving from the earliest period of Christian history, from Paul to Clement of Rome (ca. 98), are attempts to bring the cult under control and to define the rudiments of its beliefs. It was not the kind of literature -- or message -- that could have assuaged Roman suspicions that Christianity was, above all, new, unproved, and potentially dangerous.

Josephus had fought against Vespasian toward the beginning of the Jewish war in 68. Suspected by the Jews of being a capitulator, he returned as an observer and court reporter for the final siege in 70 under the Roman commander Titus' protection. After the war, he returned to Rome and was awarded the rights of Roman citizenship for distinguished service as a translator, mediator and chronicler. In his treatise Against Apion, Josephus responds to the increasing anti-Semitism of late first-century Rome, a city that was destined to receive masses of Jewish immigrants dispossessed of their homeland between 70 and 135. Written around 94 C.E., with the Christian community itself beginning to make strides, the treatise performed the task of reminding the Romans (thinly disguised in his lecture as the "Greeks") of the antiquity of his own people. The Jews are more ancient than the Greeks, he observes. Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Babylonians all testify to his nation's history, though Greece is not mentioned and indeed is a relative latecomer in world affairs. Moreover, the laws of Moses and the ethical code of the Jews are far superior to the immoral myths of the Greeks and their inferior conceptions of the gods.

Hardly a defense used by Josephus and hardly a charge leveled against the Jews by Roman anti-Semites fails to resurface in the empire's war against the Christian church and its practices. Even Christian martyrdom, seen early on as the sublimest "proof" of the faith, is anticipated in Josephus' defense of the Law: "We have practical proof of our reverence for our own scriptures. For although long ages have now passed, no one has dared to remove or to alter a syllable: and it is an instinct with every Jew from the day of his birth to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them and, if need be, cheerfully to die for them. Time and again ere now the sight has been witnessed of prisoners enduring tortures and death in every form in the theaters rather than utter a single word against the law and the allied documents" (Contra Apionem 1.42f.). Both Josephus the Jew and Tertullian the Christian (cf. Apology 39. 40) make steadfastness and virtue their "proofs" of authenticity. What confessing Jesus as "lord" was to the Christian martyrs, adherence to Moses and the law was to the Jews.

As rabbinical Judaism and Christianity entered onto the Roman scene in harness, the one claiming legitimacy on the basis of history, the other on the basis of having fulfilled Judaism's historical purpose, there was predictable confusion and disarray of opinion. Writing around 115, Tacitus describes the beliefs and traditions of Judaism in a way that suggests the ineffectiveness of Josephus' defense: "[Jewish] customs owe their strength to their very badness.... They regard the rest of mankind with hatred and as enemies. They sit apart at meals; they sleep apart, and as a nation they are singularly prone to lust -- though they refrain from intercourse with foreign women. Among themselves nothing is unlawful. Circumcision was adopted by them as a mark of their difference from other men" (Hist. 5).

The same writer, commenting on the great fire of Rome (64 C.E.) which Nero attributed to the Christians, paints the following picture: "Nero fabricated scapegoats [for the fire] and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius' reign by the governor of Judah, Pontius Pilate. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judah but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital" (Annals 15.43).

For Tacitus, both Judaism and Christianity were "depraved" and immoderate: the charge of sexual immoderation would soon be transferred wholesale from Judaism to Christianity. Both were "degraded" and un-Roman in their exclusivism, which was tied to no national cult and was, therefore, unpatriotic from the standpoint of late Hellenistic understandings of religion as a set of beliefs that tie (ligare/religare) a nation together. It could be (and was) argued that Judaism had known a time when religion served precisely that function in subservience to the state cults of Rome. But that time had come and gone. Christianity, on the other hand, despite its protestations that it was the evolved form of Judaism, had never known the bond of religion and national identity. From the standpoint of Judaism, Christianity was minuth, apostasy. From the standpoint of Roman intellectuals, it was superstitio, religious enthusiasm, without historical credentials, or atheism because it seemed to worship "a man who has recently appeared" (thus Celsus [Contra Celsum 1.26]) as a god, without any relationship to the God worshiped by the Jews. Or (like Judaism) it was "hatred of mankind" (cf. Tertullian, Apology 37) for its refusal to do as the Romans did in matters religious.

Eventually Christianity found its counterblast in the belief that Christians were a "third race" and that the bond between particular nations and gods had been broken by the Christian doctrine of one God who watches over and deserves the allegiance of all nations (Tertullian, Apology 25). Occasionally, as from the mouths of Latin writers like Tertullian, bravado in the face of persecution could sound seditious and threatening and was regarded as such by conservative intellectuals such as Celsus: "On valid grounds," writes Tertullian, "I might say that Caesar is more ours than yours, for our God has appointed him .... [Yet] let it suffice him to bear the name of emperor. That, too, is a great name of God's giving. To call him a god is to rob him of his title. If he is not a man, emperor he cannot be" (Apology 33).

THE ERA OF ANTI-CHRISTIAN FEELING

It is difficult to say when Christians were singled out for special opprobrium by the Romans. Anti-Semitism had been centuries in the making and had passed as an inherited set of attitudes to the Romans from the common lore of the Hellenistic world. The Jews were "difficult, stiffnecked, religiously uncompromising." Yet their laws were acknowledged to be old, if eccentric, and their historical scholarship impressive.

On the other hand, Christianity's claim to have "completed" the law, while not an outright rejection of Judaism's claim to antiquity, was at least a rejection of antiquity's ability to serve as a means of testing the truth of a religious system. Furthermore, the apocalyptic vision of history prevented Christians from engaging in serious reflection on their historical situation: they stood "at the end of time" with their eyes turned heavenward for the coming of their savior. Only as this vision waned did they develop a historical "consciousness" of the world and their chronological location within it.

The attack on Christian belief in the resurrection and on the messianic teaching of the Christians, which included their interpretation of prophecy, had originated in the synagogue (cf. 2 Cor. 11.22-25). When Christian hopes for the speedy return of Jesus as the Son of Man did not materialize, a new target of criticism presented itself, one that was utilized first by Jewish opponents to show the incompetence of Christian scriptural interpretation, and then by pagan critics of the new religion. Christian defenses of their belief in the coming of the savior were already circulating in oral form before the fifties of the first century. Paul is aware of a movement in the church in Thessalonike to abandon or radically alter the new faith, apparently at the instigation of Jewish preachers, who come in for some unusually harsh criticism from Paul or his secretary (1 Thess. 2.12-15). In his letter to the Christians at Thessalonike, Paul claims to have been "driven away" by Jewish interlopers who have planted doubts in the mind of the Macedonian Christian churches about the "promise" of Christ's return (1 Thess. 4.15f.). As the mission progressed with its apocalyptic teaching persistently an issue in debates with itinerant Jewish teachers, the churches developed a variety of strategies for dealing with the delay:

• the gentiles would be converted before the last days (Mark 13.10)
• the power of pagan Rome and of the emperor would decline before God's son could be revealed in glory (Rom. 16.20; 2 Thess. 2.2-10)
• Jesus himself had professed ignorance about the time of this coming (Mark 13.32), or had refused to speculate about the signs of the last days (Mark 8.11-12)
• the kingdom of God was already working "secretly" and was being progressively realized through the success of the Christian mission (Luke 12.49-56; 17.22-37; Matt. 38-42).

It is best to regard these rationales as defensive and experimental. Jewish apocalyptic tradition itself had been mystically vague, studiously mysterious with respect both to the "timing" of the apocalyptic events and to the identity of the son of man. Christianity did not so much invent its imprecision as use it to advantage, having mimicked the style of its Jewish prototype (cf. 4 Esdras 5.1-8; Matt. 24.15-31, etc.). The fact that the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. was factored into this imagery at around the time the gospels were being transcribed (cf. Mark 13.14-15; Luke 21.20) suggests that many Christians associated the end of the temple cult with the imminent return of Jesus. A flimsy tradition suggests that the Jerusalem Christians fled from the city before Titus' final assault to await the coming of Jesus in Pella (Khirbet Fahil) in the Decapolis. But a competing tradition (which the Christians currying Roman favor would have wanted to mute) linked the killing of James "the Lord's brother" to the siege on Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple (Josephus, according to Origen, Contra Celsum 1.47 and 2.13; Comm. on Matthew 10.17). If the "Josephus" tradition is accurate, then the Christians withdrew from Jerusalem following the failure of apocalyptic signs to materialize after the burning of the temple.

Their disappointment is registered in a variety of late New Testament writings. A very late first or early second-century text attributed to James sees the beginning of persecution as a test of Christian endurance, but acknowledges that patience is required in the face of overwhelming disappointment and insult to the new faith (James 5.7-11). The attribution of the letter to James, the brother of Jesus and caliph of the Jerusalem church after the crucifixion, makes it difficult to know what direction the abuse was coming from, though the "style" of the letter would make encounters between Christian believers and Jews outside Palestine a likely source for the writer's counsel. At around the same time (ca. 110) a letter attributed to an aged Peter some two generations after his death comments on an increase of "scoffers" -- presumably Jewish and pagan writers who see the delay of the last days and Jesus' return as proof that Christians preached lies and practiced deceit: "We have not followed cunningly devised fables," the writer argues in defense of the churches (2 Peter 1.16), but acknowledges that his arguments are lost on "libertines" who have turned aside from the faith at the urging of skeptics (2.21). What the skeptics taught is made clear: "Where now [they ask] is the promise of [Jesus'] return? Because since the first believers fell asleep everything remains just as it was at the beginning of creation; nothing has changed" (2 Peter 3.4). While "Peter's" advice remained typical of Christian apologetic responses for a century thereafter -- those who have disbelieved have misunderstood the prophecies -- the attack on Christian apocalyptic rhetoric remains a feature of anti-Christian polemic until the fourth century and features prominently in Porphyry's assault.

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