History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental. Mark relates that, having ‘called all the people unto him’, Jesus stated solemnly: ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.’89 This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man’s obedience to the Torah which creates God’s response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.

  To most learned Jews, this was false doctrine because Jesus was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple—and it was on this that his enemies concentrated.90 False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behaviour at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offence of the ‘rebellious elder’, was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him ‘rabbi’. Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin—or whatever court it was—he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus’ doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion—Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome.91 The circumstances attending Jesus’ trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels.92 But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.

  What mattered was not the circumstance of his death but the fact that he was widely and obstinately believed, by an expanding circle of people, to have risen again. This gave enormous importance not just to his moral and ethical teaching but to his claim to be the Suffering Servant and his special eschatology. Jesus’ immediate disciples grasped the importance of his death and resurrection as a ‘new testament’ or witness to God’s plan, the basis on which every individual could make a new covenant with God. But all they were capable of doing to further this gospel was to repeat Jesus’ sayings and recount his life-story. The real evangelical work was carried out by Paul of Tarsus, a diaspora Jew from Cilicia, whose family came from Galilee, and who returned to Palestine and studied under Gamaliel the Elder. He possessed the Pharisaic training to understand Jesus’ theology, and he began to explain it—once he was convinced that the resurrection was a fact and Jesus’ claims to be the Christ true. It is often argued that Paul ‘invented’ Christianity by taking the ethical teachings of Christ and investing them in a new theology which drew on the intellectual concepts of the Hellenistic diaspora. His distinction between ‘the flesh’ and ‘the spirit’ has been compared to Philo’s body-soul dichotomy.93 It is also maintained that by ‘Christ’ Paul had in mind something like Philo’s ‘logos’. But Philo was dealing in abstractions. For Paul, Christ was a reality.94 By body and soul, Philo meant the internal struggle within man’s nature. By spirit and flesh, Paul was referring to the external world—man was flesh, the spirit was God—or Christ.95

  The truth seems to be that both Jesus and Paul had their roots in Palestinian Judaism. Neither was introducing concepts from the Hellenistic diaspora. Both were preaching a new theology, and it was essentially the same theology. Jesus prophesied a new testament by the shedding of his blood ‘for many’ and his resurrection.96 Paul taught that the prophecy had been accomplished, that the Christ had become incarnate in Jesus, and that a New Covenant had thereby come into existence and was offered to those who had faith in it.

  Neither Jesus nor Paul denied the moral or ethical value of the Law. They merely removed the essence of it from its historical context, which both saw as outmoded. It is a crude oversimplification to say that Paul preached salvation by grace as opposed to salvation by works (that is, keeping the Law). What Paul said was that good works were the condition of remaining eligible for the New Covenant, but they do not in themselves suffice for salvation, which is obtained by grace. Both Jesus and Paul were true Jews in that they saw religion as a historical procession of events. They ceased to be Jews when they added a new event. As Paul said, when Christ became incarnate in Jesus, the basis of the Torah was nullified. At one time, the original Jewish covenant was the means whereby grace was secured. That, said Paul, was no longer true. God’s plan had changed. The mechanism of salvation was now the New Testament, faith in Christ. The covenantal promises to Abraham no longer applied to his present descendants, but to Christians: ‘And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.’97 What Jesus challenged, and Paul specifically denied, was the fundamental salvation-process of Judaism: the election, the covenant, the Law. They were inoperative, superseded, finished. A complex theological process can be summed up simply: Jesus invented Christianity, and Paul preached it.

  Christ and the Christians thus took from Judaism its universalist potential and inheritance. Jesus Christ himself had sought to fulfil the divine mission as forecast: ‘In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.’ Paul carried this gospel deep into diaspora Jewry and to the gentile communities who lived alongside it. He not only accepted the logic of Jesus’ Palestinian universalism, and transformed it into a general universalism, but denied the existence of the old categories. The ‘old man with his deeds’, the former election and the Law, were ‘put off’; the New Covenant, and its new elect, the ‘new man’, formed in God’s image and limited by that alone, were ‘put on’. Men were eligible for faith and grace solely by their human condition, ‘Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all and in all.’98

  Here, then, in a sense was the universalistic reform programme of the Hellenistic reformers of Seleucid times. But whereas Menelaus and his intellectual allies had sought to universalize from above, in alliance with power and wealth, armies and tax-collectors—and so had inevitably driven the bulk of the community, not least the poor, into the arms of the Torah rigorists—Jesus and Paul universalized from below. Jesus was a learned Jew who said that learning was not necessary, who took the spirit and not the letter as the essence of the Law and who thus embraced the unlearned, the ignorant, the despised, the am ha-arez, made them indeed his special c
onstituency. Paul carried the message to those who were outside the law altogether. Indeed, unlike the Hellenizing reformers, he was able to draw upon an emotion deep in Judaism, deep in the ancient religion of Yahweh, a force which was almost the quintessence of the covenanting faith—the idea that God would overthrow the established order of the world, make the poor rich and the weak strong, prefer the innocent to the wise and elevate the lowly and humble. No Jew, not even Jesus, dwelt more eloquently on this theme than Paul. So the religion he preached was not only universalistic but revolutionary—a revolution, however, which was spiritualized and non-violent.

  The portion of humanity ready and waiting for this message was enormous. The diaspora, through which Paul and others eagerly travelled, was vast. The Roman geographer Strabo said that the Jews were a power throughout the inhabited world. There were a million of them in Egypt alone. In Alexandria, perhaps the world’s greatest city after Rome itself, they formed a majority in two out of five quarters. They were numerous in Cyrene and Berenice, in Pergamum, Miletus, Sardis, in Phrygian Apamea, Cyprus, Antioch, Damascus and Ephesus, and on both shores of the Black Sea. They had been in Rome for 200 years and now formed a substantial colony there; and from Rome they had spread all over urban Italy, and then into Gaul and Spain and across the sea into north-west Africa. Many of these diaspora Jews were pious to a fault and were to remain staunch observers of the Torah in its essential rigour. But others were waiting to be convinced that the essence of their faith could be kept, or even reinforced, by abandoning circumcision and the multitude of ancient Mosaic laws which made life in modern society so difficult. Still more ready for conversion were vast numbers of pious gentiles, close to the diaspora Jewish communities but hitherto separated from them precisely because they could not accept the rules which the Christians now said were unnecessary. So the slow spread of the new religion accelerated. Ethical monotheism was an idea whose time had come. It was a Jewish idea. But the Christians took it with them to the wider world, and so robbed the Jews of their birthright.

  The bifurcation of Christianity and Judaism was a gradual process. To some extent it was determined by the actions of the Jews themselves. The consolidation of Judaism round the rigorous enforcement of Mosaic law, as a result of the crushing of the reform programme by the Maccabees, was the essential background to the origin and rise of Jewish Christianity. Equally, the drift of Jewish rigorism towards violence, and the head-on collision with the Graeco-Roman world which inevitably followed in 66-70 AD, finally severed the Christian branch of Judaism from its Jewish trunk. The earliest followers of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem undoubtedly regarded themselves as Jews. Even Stephen, the most extreme of them, went no further than to resurrect some of the intellectual principles of the old reform programme. In the long speech of defence he made before the Sanhedrin, he echoed the reformers’ view that God could not be localized in the Temple: ‘the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? Hath not my hand made all these things?’ But in his very next breath he called his accusers ‘uncircumcised in heart and ears’—that is, bad Jews—and both his attack and his execution by stoning were made within the framework of Judaism.99 Chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles makes it clear that during Paul’s early mission the Jerusalem Christians included many Pharisees, who felt strongly that even gentile converts should be circumcised, and only with difficulty did Paul obtain exemption for his flock.100 In Judaea, Jewish followers of Christ—as they would doubtless have called themselves-continued to be circumcised and to observe many aspects of the Mosaic law until the catastrophe of 66-70 AD.

  Both the great Jewish revolts against Roman rule should be seen not just as risings by a colonized people, inspired by religious nationalism, but as a racial and cultural conflict between Jews and Greeks. The xenophobia and anti-Hellenism which was such a characteristic of Jewish literature from the second century BC onwards was fully reciprocated. It is anomalous to speak of anti-Semitism in antiquity since the term itself was not coined until 1879. Yet anti-Semitism in fact if not in name undoubtedly existed and became of increasing significance. From deep antiquity the ‘children of Abraham’ had been, and had seen themselves, as ‘strangers and sojourners’. There were many such groups—the Habiri, which included the Israelites, were only one—and all were unpopular. But the specific hostility towards the Jews, which began to emerge in the second half of the first millennium BC, was a function of Jewish monotheism and its social consequences. The Jews could not, and did not, recognize the existence of other deities, or show respect for them. Even in 500 BC, the Jewish faith was very old and retained antique practices and taboos which had been abandoned elsewhere but which the Jews, under the impulse of their increasingly rigorous leadership, observed faithfully. Circumcision set them apart and was regarded by the Graeco-Roman world as barbarous and distasteful. But at least circumcision did not prevent social intercourse. The ancient Jewish laws of diet and cleanliness did. This, perhaps more than any other factor, focused hostility on Jewish communities. ‘Strangeness’, in a word, lay at the origin of anti-Semitism in antiquity: the Jews were not merely immigrants, but they kept themselves apart.101

  Thus Hecataeus of Abdera, writing before the end of the fourth century BC—150 years before the clash with the Seleucids—in many ways approved of the Jews and Judaism but he attacked their abnormal way of life, which he called ‘an inhospitable and anti-human form of living’.102 As Greek ideas about the one-ness of humanity spread, the Jewish tendency to treat non-Jews as ritually unclean, and to forbid marriage to them, was resented as being anti-humanitarian; the word ‘misanthropic’ was frequently used. It is notable that in Babylonia, where Greek ideas had not penetrated, the apartness of the large Jewish community was not resented—Josephus said that anti-Jewish feeling did not exist there.103 The Greeks saw their œcumene, that is the civilized universe (as opposed to the chaos beyond it) where their ideas prevailed, as a multi-racial, multi-national society, and those who refused to accept it were enemies of man. In his great offensive against Mosaic Judaism, Antiochus Epiphanes swore to abrogate Jewish laws ‘inimical to humanity’, and he sacrificed swine over Jewish sacred books.104 In 133 BC the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Sidetes was told by his advisers that Jerusalem should be destroyed and the Jewish people annihilated because they were the only people on earth who refused to associate with the rest of humanity.

  Much of the anti-Semitic feeling which found its way into literature was a response to what was felt to be the aggressive Jewish presentation of their own religious history. In the third century BC, the Greek-speaking Egyptian priest Manetho wrote a history of his country, a few passages of which survive in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, attacking the Jewish account of the Exodus. Obviously he and other Egyptian intellectuals found it deeply offensive and responded in kind. He presented the Exodus not as a miraculous escape but as the expulsion of a leper colony and other polluted groups. Manetho reflected Greek notions of the Jews as misanthropic in his charge that Moses (whom he presents as Osarsiph, a renegade Egyptian priest) ordained that the Jews ‘should have no connection with any save members of their own confederacy’, but it is evident that Egyptian anti-Semitism antedated the Greek conquest of Egypt. From Manetho’s time we can see emerging the first anti-Semitic slanders and inventions. Various Greek writers echoed and embroidered them in saying the Jews were specifically commanded by the Mosaic laws to show goodwill to no men, but especially to Greeks. The volume of criticism of the Jews was greatly increased by the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom and its religious oppression of Greek-pagan cities. The Egyptian libels were circulated and the argument went that the Jews had no real claim on Palestine—they had always been homeless wanderers and their sojourn in Judaea was merely an episode. In reply, the Jews retorted that the land of Israel was God’s gift to the Jews: Chapter 12 of the apocryphal Wisd
om of Solomon, written in the first century BC, castigates its original inhabitants as infanticists, cannibals and murderers, guilty of unspeakable practices, a ‘race accursed from the very beginning’.105

  As in the modern age, fables about the Jews were somehow fabricated, then endlessly repeated. The statement that the Jews worshipped asses, and had an ass’s head in their Temple, goes back at least as far as the second century BC. Apollonius Molon, the first to write an essay directed exclusively against Jews, used it, and it later figured in Posidonius, Democritus, Apion, Plutarch and Tacitus—the last repeating it, though he knew perfectly well that the Jews never worshipped images of any kind.106 Another fable was that the Jews conducted secret human sacrifices in their Temple: that was why no one was allowed to enter it. They avoided pork because they were more liable to contract leprosy—an echo of Manetho’s smear.

  As in modern times, moreover, anti-Semitism was fuelled not just by vulgar rumour but by the deliberate propaganda of intellectuals. Certainly, in the first century AD anti-Jewish feeling, which grew steadily, was to a large extent the work of writers, most of them Greeks. The Romans, once allies of the Jews, initially accorded privileges to the Jewish communities in the big cities—the right not to work on the Sabbath, for example.107 But with the foundation of the empire and the adoption of emperor-worship, relations deteriorated swiftly. The Jewish refusal to practise the formalities of state worship was seen not merely as characteristic of Jewish exclusiveness and incivility—the charges always brought against them by the Greeks—but as actively disloyal. Official Roman hostility was eagerly whipped up by Greek intellectuals. Alexandria, where the Jewish community was exceptionally large, and Graeco-Jewish feelings tense, was a centre of anti-Semitic propaganda. Lysimachus, head of the Alexandrian library, was a notable trouble-maker. It was following a disturbance there that the Emperor Claudius, while confirming Jewish rights, warned the Jews publicly that they must be more reasonable towards other people’s religions.108 An edict of his to Alexandria, written on papyrus, has survived. It tells the Jewish community there that, if they prove intolerant, he will treat them as people who spread ‘a general plague throughout the world’—another echo of Manetho.109 Anti-Semitic Greek intellectuals not only circulated charges, like Apion, but systematically poisoned the minds of rulers. For example, the Emperor Nero showed no personal hostility to the Jews, and one talmudic tradition even presents him as a proselyte; but his Greek tutor Chaeremon was a notable anti-Semite.