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CHAPTER THREE - BEGINNINGS
Rome invaded Judea in 63 BCE, and immediately began the intrigues of the Herodian family to gain power under the Roman aegis. Antipater was assassinated in 43 BCE, and his son Phasel in 40 BCE. Herod was made king of Judea by the Roman senate in 37 BCE, and he reigned until his death in 4 BCE. One of the first things he did as king was to put 45 members of the Sanhedrin to death for suspected disloyalty. By that act, he took away the political power of both the Pharisees and the Saducees. Thereafter the Sanhedrin became no more than a religious court with no real voice in the government of the Jews. One of his more magmanimous acts as king was to rebuild the modest Temple that had been erected after the return from Babylon. In doing so, he provided many of the citizens of Jerusalem with labor for many years. The new Temple was bgun in 19 BCE and was not completed until sometime after Herod's death, and not very long before its utter destruction in the year 70 CE. But even in this he was not able to leave well enough alone. In spite of the fact that Jews felt graven images to be an abomination, Herod had the emblem of Rome, an eagle, placed on its leading gate. When a group of Jews attempted to pull the eagle down, Herod had them killed as rebels against Rome. During his reign, Herod always placed the economic interests of his pagan subjects over those of his Jeiwsh ones, probably to please Rome. This, plus the fact that he personally had had the last members of the Hasmonean family killed, caused him to be hated by the Jewish people whose king he was. His actual historically recorded crimes against his own people were sufficient to darken his name in Jewish tradition even without the apocgryphical account of the so-called "Slaughter of the Innocents" found in the Gospel story. This tale of the killing of all babies in the land of below the age of two years by Herod is fictional. It is not found in any source outside the New Testament. Josephus knows nothing of it, and surely such a henous crime, on such a large scale, would have been recorded in the Talmud and other Jewish documents, but they are all silent regarding it. In any event, if Jesus were born during the census of 6 CE, Herod would have been dead for some ten years. Herod's sons ruled the land of Israel after his death but their in-eptitude caused Rome to remove the kingship from them. In the year 6 CE, Judea received its first procurator, or Roman governor. Judea was to be ruled directly by Rome from that time on.
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From the beginning of the gospel story, we are informed that there existed an inexorable tie between Jesus the Nazarene and a man who became known as John the Baptizer. We are informed by the gospel writer Luke that, in fact, they were first cousins. Whether or not this is so is moot and not relevant to the course of events in the story of Jesus. Nevertheless John the Baptizer is the one named by New Testament tradition as the one to begin to preach the coming of the Kingdom of G-d and the "remission of (the) sins" of the Jewish people before the arrival of the Kingdom through repentance and immersion in water. The heavenly call of John to this mission is recounted in the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke, which, by the way, also informs us of an early Nazarene tradition of what was originally expected of Jesus. Zacharias, the father of John, is "filled with the Holy Ghost" and prophecys the approaching birth of Jesus:
"Blessed be the L--d G-d of Israel: for he hath visited and
redeemed his people, and hath raised up an horn of salvation
for us in the house of his servant David; as he spake by the
mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world
began: That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the
hand of all that hate us; to perform the mercy promised to our
fathers, and to remember his holy covenant; the oath which he
sware to our father Abraham, that he would grant unto us, that
we being deliveredout of the hand of our enemies might serve
him without fear."
Luke 1:68-74
There is no mention here that Jesus will be born to remove the sins of the world by his death and become a saviour by his resurrec-tion. What is expected here is a Jewish messiah to be born who will save the Jewish people from the hands of their enemies and enable them to serve G-d without fear of restraint from the pagans. This is clearly STILL the Jewish Annointed One whom is being described. There is no explicit mention that the hated enemy is Rome, but either a direct reference to Rome has been expunged by a later editor or the explicit mention of Rome is superfluous.
So far, in his first chapter, it seems that Luke is creating a Jewish book. It is with the second chapter of his gospel that he begins to deviate from any semblance of Jewishness and follows the theological thread of the rest of the New Testament which is the tale of the saving Christ who is the son of G-d rather than the Jewish messiah.
I have remarked that the Jews completely lost self-rule and came under direct Roman sovereignty in the year 6 CE, and that this event was marked by a Roman census in the land of Israel. This surely has to be considered one of the blackest days in Jewish history, especially in the light of the fact that this event is directly tied up with the destruction of the second Temple and the dispersal and subsequent torture of the Jewish people over the following two thousand years. One would expect a truly Jewish document to express this as a national catastrophe just as all previous subjugations of the people of Israel have been viewed. Perhaps we might even expect to see a religious Jewish book repeat the formula found so often in the Book of Judges that "the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the L--d and He delivered them into the hands of their enemies" but there is no such. What we find is a simple uneditorialized statement of historical fact.
"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree
from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And
this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.
And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city."
Luke 2:1-3
The status quo of a dominant Rome is accepted without protest by a writer supposedly recounting a Jewish story. It is completely in consonance with the attitute toward things Roman found throughout the entire New Testament. The Romans are the masters of the world. They are not the enemies, either of G-d or the Jewish people. They are barely mentioned in the gsopels at all, and the few times that they ARE spoken of, it is with respect for their nobility. It is a Roman who washes his hands of any implication on the death of Jesus, although Jesus' death sentence of crucifixion is solely Roman, and the charge against insurrection against Caesar and the Roman Empire, and it is a Roman who first proclaims, "Truly this man was the Son of G-d" (Mark 15:39). Jesus and his Jewish followers are Galileans, the most zealous of all Jews against pagan Rome, yet no word of con-demnation against the Romans ever leaves his lips. On the contrary, he bids the Jews "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's", a piece of advice that, in the REAL Jewish world of his day, would have lost him his complete following. More than one New Testament scholar has noted the "eeriness" of the gospel narrative in which Jesus and his followers persue their minsitry completely oblivious to the turmoil of the Jewish religio-political events of the day. It is not a real Jewish Palestine that the gospel describes but a dream one in which oppressor and oppressed are mutually neutral towards each other, and only concerned with Jesus, most often nega-tively. The day to day brutality of Rome against the people is ignored, as is the resentment and defiance of the people towards their Roman overlords. Against this background of lack of affect, the story of Jesus and his Jewish followers enfolds.
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