[Continuing Chapter 8: Jesus from Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason; this book is downloadable from amazon.com on the kindle app. Reformatting and highlights ours.–—Admin 1]
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Jesus came to prominence only in the last years of his life, and the story essentially begins in Galilee in around A.D. 27 with his baptism by an itinerant preacher, John the Baptist, “a voice crying in the wilderness,” who called on sinners to show repentance in view of the imminent approach of God’s kingdom.
Throughout Jesus’ life Galilee was ruled by client kings of the Romans, first Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.) and then as tetrarch (a subordinate ruler) his son Herod Antipas (4 B.C.-A.D. 39).
(Contrary to popular belief, Jesus’ ministry did not take place within the “official” Roman empire, until he moved into Judaea, which, as we have seen, had been a directly ruled province of the empire since A.D. 6.)
Galilee was a relatively prosperous area with fertile land and good fishing in “the sea of Galilee,” yet Galileans were remote from the more sophisticated centers of Judaism and conscious that the peoples surrounding them, largely Greek and Phoenician, were of very different cultures. There is some evidence that there was an increasing Greek presence in Galilee in these years, but as the Greeks tended to consider themselves superior to local cultures and kept themselves distinct from them (Greeks seldom bothered to learn native languages, for instance), this is only likely to have exacerbated the feelings of exclusion among the native Galileans. Furthermore, as has been persuasively argued by Richard Horsley, the impact of taxation, a growing population and Herodian rule was resulting in the fragmentation of peasant land holdings and placed increasing pressure on traditional family structures. Studies of Judaism in Galilee and Judaea at the time suggest that there was relatively little difference between the two areas in terms of religious belief and practice, but, as Horsley again has argued, the pressures on peasant life may have led to a more passionate defense of traditional religious values in Galilee and an attraction to charismatic spiritual leaders who espoused them (in this Galilee would have been typical of areas of peasant unrest through the ages where social change or oppression result in resistance grounded in traditional beliefs).
Judaism in Jesus’ Time
Judaism was not a monolithic religion, and recent research has served to stress the diversity of Jewish practice in the 1st century A.D. There were, of course, beliefs common to all Jews, above all belief in a single providential God who had a special relationship with Israel exemplified by the covenant he had made with his people. Even if the covenant were broken, which it often was in the troubled history of Israel, God would always forgive (a point stressed by Matthew).
- The requirements of the Law (central to Jewish life and ethical behavior), the sayings of the Prophets and the history of Israel were recorded in scriptures that were studied by all educated Jews.
- Rituals shared by Jews included circumcision, dietary restrictions (in practice tied to those foods that most easily carried disease — pork, shellfish and carrion –although the ban was held to be instituted by God) and a strict observance of the Sabbath.
- As laid down in the Ten Commandments, there was an absolute prohibition on the worship of God through idols.
- A commitment to Jewish Law, which was believed to have been instituted directly by God (in the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses, for instance), covered every aspect of life, with detailed prescriptions for living laid down in scriptures such as the Book of Leviticus.
- There was a strong emphasis on the value of family life and traditional family structures.
- Those who offended could redeem themselves through repentance, achieved through sacrifice.
The central focus for the worship of God was the great Temple at Jerusalem, and male Jews were required to visit the Temple 3 times a year, at the times of the major festivals, although in practice the diaspora of Jews throughout the ancient world had made this impossible for many.
- The Temple was staffed by a large class of priests, perhaps some 20,000 in total, if the assistant priests, the Levites, are included.
- The priesthood was an important and influential class—it was said that the Jewish revolt of A.D. 66 broke out at the moment when the priests refused to accept any more sacrifices on Rome’s behalf.
- The priests alone had the right to sacrifice (on behalf of themselves and those who had come to the Temple as penitents). they took it in turns to officiate in the Temple, but all would be on duty there during the major festivals.
- The Temple had recently been rebuilt in magnificent style by Herod the Great, but in the eyes of the Jews the Temple elite had compromised itself in accepting the patronage of Herod and, after his death, through acquiescing in Roman imperial control.
Because the Law was so fully set out in the Hebrew scriptures, most Jews knew its requirements well.
- There were, however, groups such as the Pharisees, who had originated int he 2nd century B.C. and who may have numbered some 6000 in Herod’s day, who had made their own interpretations of how the Law should be observed. They studied it intensively and insisted on its strict observance. One particular belief associated with the Pharisees, but not shared by all Jews, was that there was an afterlife and a final resurrection of the bodies of the dead. While the Pharisees had no political power (very few were actually priests) and did not proselytize, they were respected for their beliefs. Nevertheless, it was natural that they would feel threatened by groups or religious leaders who had a more relaxed attitude to the Law than they did or who claimed their own differing interpretation of the Law.
- Another group with distinctive beliefs, in this case that there was no afterlife, were the Sadducees, who were essentially conservative in their support of traditional priestly ritual and appear to have been well represented in the aristocratic priesthood. (This was one reason why they came into conflict with groups such as the Pharisees, who threatened to take the interpretation of the Law both outside the priesthood and also outside of Jerusalem.)
The majority of Jews, like all other peoples of the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East, were poor, susceptible to illness (much of it incurable), subject to taxation (whether from Jewish authorities, a king or directly by the Romans) and vulnerable. In extreme cases these hardships could lead to agrarian unrest or even outright revolt, such as the disastrous uprisings against the Romans of A.D. 66 and A.D. 132.
- By contrast there was also the possibility of spiritual withdrawal. This was the path taken by the Essenes, a sect that seems to have formed in the 2nd century B.C. Members of this sect whose lifestyle and beliefs have been recovered from the Dead Sea Scrolls, were extreme in the strictness with which they observed the Law.
- They held property in common,
- encouraged celibacy (at least in the Qumran community, which produced the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- and believed that the soul, but not the body itself, would have an afterlife.
- They saw themselves as the only true believers,
- the “sons of light,” while all others, including their fellow Jews, were “sons of darkness.” One should “love all the children of light, each one according to his lot in the council of God, and abhor all the children of darkness, each one according to his guilt, which delivers him up to God’s retribution.”
- They had a deep-rooted distrust of outsiders, and newcomers were accepted into the group only after 2 or 3 years of spiritual instruction.
- The Essenes were millennarians, waiting for some form of liberation. As one of their texts put it:
“The heavens and the earth will listen to His Messiah . . .
He [the Lord] will glorify the pious on the throne of the eternal Kingdom. He who liberates the captives, restores sight to the blind, straightens the bent . . . For He will heal the wounded, and revive the dead and bring good news to the poor.”
Although there is no evidence to connect Jesus with the Essenes, their teachings show that expectations of a Messiah with a special message for the poor who would introduce the eternal kingdom were active in the Jewish world of the 1st century. As we will see later, Paul appears to have been influenced by them.
The concept of Messiah (Christos in Greek, hence Christ) is so central to Judaism that it deserves to be explored here. The word was used in general of one who was anointed by God for some special purpose (it was even accorded to a Gentile, Cyrus of Persia, who liberated Israel from Babylonian rule), but it tended to be associated with King David and his royal line (God had promised the prophet Nathan that the throne of David’s “seed” would be established “for ever” [2 Samuel 7:12-13]). The conviction that a descendant of David would come to power as a wise and secure ruler ran deep in Jewish thought.
According to another tradition, the Messiah would be a priest, and it appears from one text that the Essene community in Qumran may have been waiting for two Messiahs, one a king and one a priest. In neither case was a Messiah seen as divine; rather, he was a human being who had been exalted by God.
Continued in #3, Jesus — “All things to all men”
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