Chapter 1
JESUS' JEWISH WORLD
Jesus was born in Roman-ruled Palestine, a small, predominantly Jewish backwater in a vast empire that completely encircled the Mediterranean, encompassing Egypt, Greece, the Balkans, and the entire Near East, and extending far into northern Europe and even Britain. We of the modern world know a great deal about the Holy Land during the first century, including its politics and religions, its incessant civil unrest, its constantly changing procession of rulers both local and Roman, and its humiliating fate after the Jewish population's revolt against Rome led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. This knowledge does not come solely from the New Testament. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37-100 C.E.), commander of the Galilean forces during the early years of the revolt, and later a protégé of the emperor Vespasian (9-79 C.E.), wrote four long historical and autobiographical works in which he recounted the story of the Jews, especially during his own fateful century, when the Second Temple, the proud handiwork of a people returning to their land after the Babylonian captivity, was burnt to the ground, never to be rebuilt.
Josephus had little interest in Jesus, whom he referred to briefly as a wonder-working wise man, said by some to be the Messiah, who had been betrayed by Jewish leaders and was survived by a corps of devoted followers in Jerusalem and elsewhere. What gripped Josephus was the total destruction of the Jewish world into which Jesus and Josephus himself had been born. His was the tragic tale of Jerusalem's fall at Roman hands following a grisly starvation siege and the wholesale slaughter of its inhabitants, which nearly destroyed Judaism in the process, and the parade of imperious, eccentric, brave, ruthless, and fanatically patriotic personalities who had played out their parts in the city's demise. Some of the Zealot Jewish nationalists who had governed Jerusalem during the siege fled to the deserts and caves around the Dead Sea, where Roman troops hunted them down like animals. Their last stand was in 73 C.E. at Masada, a mountaintop fortress near the Dead Sea, where 1,000 men, women, and children committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Roman Tenth Legion.
Many modern historians accuse Josephus of having exaggerated his country's importance to Rome and its rulers, probably out of a sense of religious loyalty. By contrast, the Roman secular historians who covered the century -- Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius -- dealt with Palestine only in passing. By their accounts, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea and Samaria who sentenced Jesus to death, was essentially a nobody who had a few good friends in Rome. Pilate's title of "prefect," which was later upgraded to "procurator," denoted a second-rate civil-service post awarded to members of the equestrian, or knightly, class of Roman nobility, whose bloodlines were considered inferior to those of the ruling senatorial class. Even more humbling, the governor of Judea answered to the governor of Syria, a blueblood of the senatorial class, as Syria was a larger and more important Roman province whose chief cities, Antioch and Damascus, were major trade entrepôts with the East.
The Caesars consistently made poor or mediocre choices for the governors they assigned to the Jewish homeland during Jesus' time. Stationed not in Jerusalem but in Caesarea, a port city on the Samaritan coast, most of the Judean prefects and procurators served suspiciously short terms of two or three years, either because the post was hardship duty or because they were unfit administrators. Pilate, appointed by the emperor Tiberius, was probably in the middling ranks of competence. He lasted a full 10 years, an extraordinarily long term for a Judean prefect. There was no love lost between Pilate and his Jewish subjects. Josephus and another first-century Jewish intellectual, Philo of Alexandria, report several bloody crackdowns on religious Jews, and the Gospel accounts of Jesus' passion depict a Pilate who taunted Jewish officialdom by dangling in front of it the prospect of freeing Jesus. For the most part, however, Pilate did what was necessary in order to keep the peace. Tacitus, who devotes part of his Histories to Jewish affairs, notes that Pilate's term, as well as that of his predecessor, Gratus, another Tiberian appointee, was by and large uneventful. "Sub Tiberio quies," comments Tacitus in the terse Latin style for which he is famous: "Under Tiberius, all was quiet."
The last of the Roman procurators, Gessius Florus, who served from 64 C.E. until war broke out in 66 C.E., was a dismal failure. Incapable of maintaining law and order (raging nationalist sentiment had spawned terrorist attacks on officials and civilians), he was also unspeakably brutal. According to Josephus, Florus levied punishment for a riot in Jerusalem by randomly arresting, flogging, and crucifying 3,600 residents, including women, children, and even Roman citizens of Florus's own equestrian class, who were supposedly exempt from crucifixion. "The Jews' patience lasted until Gessius Florus became procurator," notes Tacitus in another of his dry comments. The only Roman governor of Judea who made an effort to understand Jewish religious beliefs and customs was Tiberius Julius Alexander (46-48 C.E.), during whose reign escalating Jewish-Roman hostilities enjoyed a brief respite. The succession of inept Roman rulers indicated that the Caesars troubled themselves little to find appropriate governance for Palestine.
Although small and relatively remote, the Jewish homeland was nonetheless vital to Roman interests as a strategic frontier territory. In the desert just beyond its boundaries (and those of Syria to the north) lay Parthia, Rome's most powerful enemy, and the only significant contender for hegemony over the Eastern Mediterranean. Parthia's empire extended from the head of the Euphrates River (nearly abutting Syria) to the Indian Ocean, encompassing nearly all of present-day Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, as well as parts of northern India and Pakistan. With occasional allies in the independent kingdom of Armenia to its north and several small buffer-kingdoms along its borders, Parthia completely controlled the overland trade routes that brought raw silk from China and spices from India to the Roman Empire via Syria. In the vast Arabian desert and along the approximate boundary of today's Turkey (then called Asia Minor), Rome's writ stopped running and Parthia's began.
A semi-nomadic people famous for their horsemanship and skill with the bow and arrow, the Parthians had originally come from a region south of the Caspian Sea that had belonged successively to the Assyrian and Persian empires, and to the "Macedonian" empire that Alexander the Great had patched together from his conquered territories in the early fourth century before Jesus. Around 250 B.C.E., the Parthians wrested their independence from the Greek-speaking Seleucid monarchy that Alexander had established in Syria to govern the Near East. They then embarked on their own course of empire-building.
The Parthians practiced a monotheistic but highly dualistic religion (featuring a powerful devil-figure named Ahriman) founded by the teacher Zoroaster, who had lived in Persia during the sixth century B.C.E. Mitra (who had originated as the Hindu god Mitra), one of the subdivinities of the Parthian heaven, was worshipped as an independent deity from Assyria to India, in Armenia and Asia Minor, and among the numerous Asians serving in the Roman army.
During Jesus' time, the Jewish Diaspora was extremely widespread. Some six million of the eight million Jews of his day resided outside the Holy Land, the majority of them living under Parthian, not Roman, rule. More than three million Jews inhabited the Mesopotamian cities at the western end of the Parthians' domain, including an enormous Jewish population in Babylon. These were descendants of the Jews whom the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had deported from Judea after his sack of Jerusalem during the early sixth century B.C.E.
About 50 years before Jesus was born, the Romans, who had been pushing their way east ever since the Parthians had bolted from the Seleucids, set their sights on the Parthian Empire. Under the leadership of the warlord Pompey (108-48 B.C.E.), they had already annexed Syria in 64 B.C.E. and Palestine in 63 B.C.E., taking boatloads of captured Jews back to Rome as trophies. Pompey's wealthy and glory-hungry rival Marcus Licinius Crassus, best known for his friendship with Julius Caesar and his crushing of Spartacus's slave rebellion in southern Italy, had led a massive Roman army into Parthian-ruled Mesopotamia in 54 B.C.E. After several easy victories, Crassus's troops had been routed and nearly destroyed by Parthian archers, resulting in his disgrace and eventual murder. The Romans and Parthians continued to battle sporadically over Mesopotamia and Syria for the next 250 years. By the time of Jesus' birth, although the Parthians were on a course of slow decline, they were still a formidable enemy.
Palestine was thus an important border state that kept the Parthians and their Armenian allies out of the Mediterranean and secured Rome's domination of Syria's important trade centers. There was no natural geographic border between Palestine and Syria, whose boundaries encompassed all of present-day Syria and Lebanon (known as Phoenicia), as well as parts of today's Iraq. The Roman treasury was fat with revenues from Syria's trade connections with the East and the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Sidon.
In Jesus' day, the Jewish homeland covered considerably more territory than the current state of Israel. It was even larger than the ancient kingdom of David and Solomon, which had extended down both sides of the Jordan River to the Dead Sea and well up into what are now Lebanon and Syria all the way to Damascus. Only certain portions of the coastal plains along the Mediterranean had belonged to non-Israelite peoples in the days of King David. These were the Philistines to the south around Gaza and the Sidonians around Tyre to the far north. After Solomon's death, the Hebrew kingdom had split into two separate monarchies: Israel, encompassing the land north of the Dead Sea, including Samaria and Galilee, and Judah, embracing Jerusalem and the hilly region between the Dead Sea and the Philistine coastal cities.
In 722 B.C.E., the Assyrians had conquered the kingdom of Israel and deported some, but probably not all, of its Hebrew population. More than 100 years later, in 597 B.C.E., after having annexed most of the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar absorbed the kingdom of Judah, destroyed the Temple built by Solomon, and deported many of Jerusalem's inhabitants. In 539 B.C.E., 24 years after Nebuchadnezzar's death, Cyrus the Great of Persia overthrew the Babylonians and allowed Babylonian Jews to return to Judah. Under the Persians, Judah -- or Judea, as the Greeks and Romans came to call it (the word "Jew" comes from the Greek ioudaios, meaning inhabitant of Judea) -- was reduced to no more than a strip of towns and villages clustered around Jerusalem. Judea remained under Persian rule after the fall of Babylon, but the Persian kings allowed the Jews to restore the Jerusalem Temple and manage their internal affairs through the high priest. In 333 B.C.E., Alexander the Great wrested Judea from the Persians on an upward swing from Egypt to Tyre. The tiny territory of the Second Temple Jews fell first under the control of the Ptolemaic monarchs whom Alexander had set up to rule Egypt, and then under that of the Seleucids.
Except for the Jews of Jerusalem and its environs, the Ptolemaic and Seleucid rulers of Palestine nearly obliterated the land's ancient Hebrew identity. (Greek and Roman writers of the time combined Syria and Solomon's old kingdom geographically under the name Coele-Syria.) In Jerusalem, many members of the Jewish upper class adopted Greek names and customs, and some highborn young Jews even tried to reverse their circumcisions with an operation so as to compete naked in athletic contests without being ridiculed by the Gentiles. In 169 B.C.E., the Seleucid king Antiochus IV attempted to push assimilation a step further by abolishing Jewish holidays, banning Jewish observances, and setting up an altar to Zeus in the Temple. This perceived blasphemy sparked a guerrilla revolt led by Judas Maccabeus ("Judah the Hammer"), the son of a rural priest. Judas took Jerusalem from Antiochus, rededicated the Temple, and established a tiny, Seleucid-beleaguered theocracy centered in Jerusalem. After the scepter had passed from Judas to his four brothers and their heirs, known as the Hasmoneans (after their ancestor, Hashmon), the new Jewish rulers of Judea gained independence from the Seleucids, and began calling themselves both kings and high priests.
They also set out to reconquer Solomon's old kingdom, pushing north to annex Samaria and Galilee, south to annex Idumea (biblical Edom and part of the old kingdom of Judah), west to the Mediterranean coast, and east across the Jordan. By this time, the religion and culture of these sections of the former Judah, Israel, and Philistia were largely Syrian-Hellenistic. Ten cities along the Jordan -- independent city-states known collectively as the Decapolis -- were famous centers of Greek literature and philosophy. Gadara, across the Jordan River from Galilee, spawned several important Hellenistic poets and philosophers. The major coastal cities of Palestine -- Gaza, Jamnia (or Yavneh), and Joppa (modern Haifa, now part of Tel Aviv) -- had never been part of Solomon's kingdom. In Samaria, where many descendants of the old Israelites still worshipped the God of Israel in their own temple on Mount Gezirim, hatred of the Jews and their Temple in Jerusalem was rampant. Even in Judea, the Hasmoneans, who had also begun to adopt Greek names and ways (such as the keeping of royal concubines), were regarded by many of their pious Jewish subjects as decadent and irreligious.
The Hasmonean monarchs were not descendants of David, nor were their high priests of the hereditary line of Zadok, who had been high priest under David and Solomon, causing certain Jews to refuse to accept their legitimacy. However irreligious, when it came to fighting for Judaism and their ancient land, the Hasmoneans were persistent to the point of ruthlessness. They tried to stamp out the Samaritans' religion by demolishing the alternative temple at Mount Gezirim, and forced the Idumeans and Galileans to covert to Judaism (by having them circumcised) on pain of deportation. They also dissolved the independent governments of the Decapolis cities, dispersed their inhabitants, and installed Jewish settlers throughout the recaptured lands. As noted by historian E. Mary Smallwood, when the aggressive Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (Yannai in Hebrew) died in 76 B.C.E., the Jewish kingdom was almost as extensive as it had been under David and Solomon.
During the reign of Herod the Great, an Idumean chieftain who had used Roman support to seize the monarchy from the Hasmoneans in 37 B.C.E., and presided over Jerusalem as a Roman client-king when Jesus was born, the Jewish territory became more vast. Because Herod had proved himself adept at suppressing brigandry, his patron, the emperor Augustus (63 B.C.E.-14 C.E.), transferred a long swath of bandit-plagued land to him in southern Syria that ran eastward from the Golan Heights (then called Gaulanitis) into the Arabian desert. This entire region remained more or less in the hands of Herod's numerous descendants for several generations after his death in 4 B.C.E. Judea, Idumea, and Samaria, which Herod had willed to his son Archelaus, were the only Jewish domains of Jesus' time to fall under direct Roman rule as an imperial province. Archelaus had proved to be so brutal, slaughtering thousands of Jews and Samaritans alike, that Augustus removed him in 6 C.E., replacing him with a line of prefects that included Pilate.
Just to the south of Herod the Great's kingdom, spanning the Sinai desert and northern Arabia, lay the fabulously wealthy kingdom of Nabatea, which controlled the north-south spice-trade routes between the Red Sea and Syria. Nabatea was theoretically another Roman client-monarchy like that of Herod, but the Nabatean kings, ruling from their splendid Greek-style city of Petra, exercised a good deal of independence from Rome. They occasionally made war on their own initiative (strictly verboten under the Roman magisterium), and forged various alliances with the Parthians. Malchus, one rather truculent Nabatean ruler, especially enjoyed persecuting Herod. Because Nabatea was not entirely under Rome's thumb in Jesus' day, Roman control over Palestine was all the more critical.
During Judas Maccabeus's time, the Jews of Palestine had considered Rome a benevolent ally against the Seleucids. Rome, in turn, needed Maccabeus and his family; the militarily powerful kingdom of Judea was a Roman thorn in Syria's side. Syria grew progressively weaker, however, wracked by dynastic quarrels that led to its invasion and occupation by Tigranes, the king of Armenia, in 83 B.C.E. Tigranes and his self-aggrandizing father-in-law, King Mithridates VI, who reigned over the tiny monarchy of Pontus on the Black Sea, soon loomed as a greater threat to Rome than Seleucid Syria. After gradually annexing most of Asia Minor to his Black Sea mini-kingdom, Mithridates began skirmishing with the Roman army in Greece, only to be squelched (along with Tigranes) by Rome in the end. It was in an effort to batten down security that Pompey took Syria from Tigranes as part of his spoils in 64 B.C.E. and turned it into a Roman province.
It was only a matter of time -- one year, in fact -- before Pompey initiated similar action in Palestine. Alexander Jannaeus's two sons, Hyrcanus (the elder and heir to Jannaeus's titles) and Aristobolus (the younger and more aggressive), were threatening the Pax Romana as they warred bitterly over which of them would assume his late father's throne and high priesthood. Ignoring a century of Jewish-Roman friendship, Pompey marched into Jerusalem and stormed the Temple itself. He then divided the Jewish kingdom into four administrative districts, "liberated" the Syrian-Hellenistic coastal cities from Jewish control (although all had sizeable Jewish populations), restored self-governance to the Decapolis, and forced Palestinian Jews to start paying Roman taxes for the first time in history. Aristobolus, who had forced Hyrcanus to abdicate from his dual office four years earlier as part of their fraternal feud, was sent with his family in chains to Rome as part of Pompey's triumphal parade. Thousands of his supporters were also transported to the imperial city and sold into slavery. Pompey gave the high priesthood back to Hyrcanus, a more pliant character than his younger brother, but refused to let him reassume the monarchy.
The economic damage suffered by the Jews from the loss of their maritime ports was heavy, and the humiliation of having their homeland politically dismantled was crushing. Even under Herod the Great a generation later, when the Romans restored much of the Jewish kingdom to Jewish hegemony, they never returned the Decapolis, which remained under the Syrian governor's administration throughout Jesus' youth and ministry.
The Jewish kingship went to Herod thanks to the manipulations of his father, Antipater. Antipater's own father had maneuvered his way into Alexander Jannaeus's favor, and Jannaeus had rewarded him by naming him governor of Idumea. Antipater had continued the family tradition of cozying up to the powers-that-be by ingratiating himself first with Hyrcanus and later with Pompey, who gave him the title "governor of the Jews" after taking over Palestine in 63 B.C.E. When Pompey died and his rival, Julius Caesar, gained control of Italy, Antipater (and Hyrcanus) rapidly switched their allegiance to Caesar by sending him Jewish reinforcement troops for an Egyptian campaign. Out of considerations of political expediency as much as gratitude, Caesar traveled to Palestine, where he granted Roman citizenship to Antipater, conferred on Hyrcanus the title of "ethnarch" (a close approximation to kingship), restored the port of Joppa to the Jews, and allowed the rebuilding of the Jerusalem walls, which Pompey had destroyed in his ravages.
By judiciously performing favors for whichever Roman happened to be holding the reins, over a period of about 75 years Antipater and Herod the Great threw their weight behind a total of five different Roman strongmen: Pompey, Caesar, Caesar's assassin Cassius (who gave Herod permission to launch a personal vendetta after Antipater was murdered in a palace intrigue in 43 B.C.E.), Caesar's avenger Mark Antony (who made Herod and his elder brother, Phasael, administrators over Palestine), and Mark Antony's nemesis, Octavian, a nephew of Caesar who later became the emperor Augustus and Herod's most generous benefactor.
Not long after Antipater's death, Hyrcanus, by then quite elderly, gave the hand of his granddaughter Mariamme to Herod, at the same time naming him legal guardian of Mariamme's 10-year-old brother Aristobolus, the heir-apparent to the Hasmonean kingship. As well as being a titled Hasmonean, Mariamme was considered a great beauty. Herod already had a wife, Doris, but no matter: he divorced Doris overnight. He now had a ticket to the Judean throne. However, there were others ambitious for the kingship besides the boy Aristobolus. One of the pretenders was Antigonus, son of the other Aristobolus, Hyrcanus's exiled and now dead younger brother Antigonus raised an army from a Palestinian Jewry overwhelmingly supportive of his royal claims. In 40 B.C.E., three years after Antipater's death, the Parthians overran Syria and invaded Galilee, where they joined forces with Antigonus's rebel troops. Together they stormed the countryside of Herod's native Idumea and marched on Jerusalem, where they promptly installed Antigonus as king. They also cut off the ears of Hyrcanus, thus rendering him unfit to serve as high priest, and captured Herod's brother Phasael, who took his own life.
Herod managed to escape from Jerusalem and rushed to Rome, where Antony and Octavian named him "king of the Jews" and led him to the Capitoline Hill to offer a sacrifice to Jupiter. It was rather an odd ceremony for a Jewish monarch, but Herod wore his Judaism lightly (his mother, an Arabian, was not even Jewish). The Roman army then drove the Parthians out of Syria and installed Herod on the Jerusalem throne after bombarding the city and slaughtering countless numbers of its inhabitants. Antigonus, who had personally surrendered to the Roman commander Sosius, was taken to Rome, where he was executed by Mark Antony.
Herod still had powerful enemies, both real and perceived, many of whom were his own Hasmonean relatives (via marriage to Mariamme) and their sympathizers. One of his first acts of state was to execute 45 well-placed supporters of Antigonus, in the process ravaging the Sanhedrin, an administrative body drawn from the Jerusalem religious aristocracy that held court, levied taxes, and performed whatever other governmental functions the Romans permitted. This bloody purge, accompanied by Herod's stripping the Sanhedrin of certain powers, fatally weakened the local Jewish leadership class, which never fully recovered. Such acts paved the way for the takeover of Jerusalem by the intransigent Zealots and other rebels many decades later, which led to the city's eventual destruction.
Herod's next target was his brother-in-law and ward, Aristobolus, then 16 and an obvious candidate for the high priesthood and even the kingship itself. Herod arranged a fatal swimming accident for the teenager and appointed an apolitical candidate who was not of the Hasmonean family as high priest. With Aristobolus gone, the aged and earless Hyrcanus, whom Herod had rescued from the Parthians and brought back to Jerusalem, proved to be immensely popular with the Jews of Palestine who persisted in viewing their new Idumean king as a foreign interloper. Herod had Hyrcanus executed on a trumped-up charge of collaborating with his archenemy, Malchus of Nabatea. Next to go was Mariamme. Hyrcanus's granddaughter had never cared much for her Idumean husband, and after her brother's murder, she despised him. Herod's initial infatuation with her had evolved into a complex passion in which love alternated with sexual jealousy and suspicion of her Hasmonean family loyalties. In 29 B.C.E. he had Mariamme executed on a specious adultery charge. Remorse over her death tormented Herod for the rest of his life, but he consoled himself somewhat with at least nine other wives and concubines, including Doris, whom he had reinstalled in the palace, and a second Mariamme, who was the daughter of one of his hand-picked high priests.
Herod's Jewish subjects never stopped loathing him. Nonetheless, he was a generally fair ruler, even if brutally intolerant of anyone who challenged his legitimacy or disturbed the public order. At his own expense, he rebuilt the Second Temple on a lavish scale, and commissioned other public works that provided employment to many Jerusalemites. According to certain scholars, he even reduced his subjects' tax burden to Rome.
Toward the end of his life, Herod deteriorated both mentally and physically. He fell out of favor with Augustus after having launched an unauthorized military foray against his nemeses in the Sinai, the Nabateans. He felt constantly threatened by the growing numbers of Hasmonean pretenders, including his own five children by Mariamme I. While still in Augustus's good graces, he had tried to persuade the emperor to have his two eldest sons by Mariamme executed for treason. When Augustus refused to comply, Herod called for a trial of the two princes before the Roman governor of Syria, who duly condemned them to death. He also had Antipater, his son by Doris, executed on charges of plotting his murder. In a moment of rage, he ordered a group of young Pharisees to be burnt alive because they had destroyed a golden eagle (a Torah-forbidden graven image with symbolic overtones of Roman imperialism) that he had affixed over the Temple doorway. Finally, he stipulated that a number of prominent Jews whom he had imprisoned in Jericho were to be killed immediately following his death so as to ensure that people would mourn. The story in Matthew's Gospel of his massacre of baby boys in Bethlehem after having learned of a likely rival's birth is in line with the bloodthirstiness and paranoia that marked his last days on the throne. Upon his demise, there were nationwide riots that required three Roman legions under the Syrian governor to dispel.
The stories of Herod the Great and his father Antipater are graphic examples of the way in which the fortunes of Jewish monarchs, and even ordinary Jews, were intertwined with those of influential Romans of their day. Indeed, during Jesus' time the Holy Land was hardly the remote outpost that tradition would have us believe. The sea voyage from Rome via Alexandria to the ports of Joppa and Caesarea (the latter of which Herod had built and named after his patron, Augustus) took only two weeks or so at the height of the summer season. Thanks to Roman muscle, anyone with means could -- and did -- book passage on a boat or join a trade caravan and traverse the Mediterranean periplus with very little fear of molestation. As Yale University professor of religion Wayne Meeks has pointed out, it was not until the invention of the steamboat in the 19th century that Mediterranean travel would become more brisk than it had been during the first few centuries after Jesus' birth. Every good-sized city in the Roman Empire bustled with official emissaries, itinerant craftsmen, traders in goods and slaves, wandering poets and philosophers, and religious pilgrims. Mail delivery was also remarkably efficient for an era in which there was no government postal service. Records of contemporary Egyptian papyruses, for example, indicate an active correspondence with Rome, the Arabian peninsula, and Cilicia in Asia Minor.
The friendship between Augustus and Herod was genuine enough while it lasted, although always colored by expediency and decidedly tilted in Augustus's favor. Herod, who considered himself a proper, cosmopolitan Hellenistic monarch, avidly promoted Greek culture and architecture, even building a theater and stadium in Jerusalem. He financed public works all over Greece, even in Athens and Sparta, and once sponsored the Olympic Games. On the island of Rhodes, where he subsidized the restoration of a temple to Apollo that had been destroyed by fire and helped underwrite the maintenance of the world-famous Rhodian fleet, his name may well have been as familiar as that of Augustus. In Sebaste, a Greek-style city he founded in Samaria and named after Augustus (Sebastos is Greek for "Augustus"), as well as in Caesarea, he installed theaters, stadiums, gymnasiums, and other Hellenistic accouterments. Thanks to his industry, the kingdom of Judea enjoyed a short-lived international panache.
Herod traveled frequently to Rome and other sites where Augustus happened to be encamped. He sent at least six of his many sons to the imperial court for a combination of education and political palm-greasing. One of his grandsons (by the first Mariamme), a charming profligate named Agrippa after Augustus's favorite general, spent his entire early manhood in Rome, where he ran up debts and became an intimate of Tiberius's son Drusus and the future emperor Claudius. When Drusus died, Agrippa turned his attentions to Tiberius's grandnephew Gaius, nicknamed Caligula, who succeeded Tiberius as emperor and rewarded Agrippa handsomely for his solicitousness. Agrippa's mother and grandmother had both been confidantes of Claudius's mother Antonia and grandmother Livia. Except for Cleopatra of Egypt, an archrival of Herod who had persuaded a besotted Mark Antony to give her a huge tract of revenue-generating balsam groves in Herod's territory, no ancient royalty other than the Herods hobnobbed so extensively with the rulers of Rome. The ministry of Jesus thus took place not on the sidelines of history, but on a great world stage where Pompey and Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula trod the boards at various times.
When Herod died in 4 B.C.E., Augustus, who had never reconciled with him after his unauthorized Nabatean incursion, refused to ratify his will, which had left his entire kingdom to his son Archelaus by a Samaritan wife, Malthace. Augustus limited Archelaus's realm to Judea, Idumea, and Samaria, and divided the northern half of Herod's territory into two independent "tetrarchies," one of which went to Archelaus's elder brother Antipas, and the other to his half-brother Philip. As I noted previously, Archelaus proved to be both unnecessarily harsh (at one point he sent a detachment of troops into the Temple, provoking a riot during which his soldiers killed 1,000 Jews) and impolitic with his peers. He even quarreled with Sabinius, the Roman military head of Syria, who thought he also had a mandate to assume trusteeship over the whole of Herod's former domain.
By 6 C.E., the situation in Jerusalem had become so poisonous that Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, installed a garrison of Roman troops to maintain law and order, touching off a Palestine-wide guerrilla war that was especially fierce in Galilee, where the bandit chieftain Judas the Galilean led an insurgent army from his headquarters in Sepphoris, four miles from Jesus' hometown of Nazareth. When Varus finally squelched the rebellion, he ordered Sepphoris burnt to the ground, and 2,000 of Judas's troops were crucified. The boy Jesus might have seen the crosses. Archelaus was so universally hated that the Jews and Samaritans temporarily buried their religious antagonisms and sent a joint delegation to Rome to lodge a protest with Augustus and petition for direct Roman rule. The emperor complied, cashiering Archelaus to Gaul, and creating a new Judean-Samaritan province called "Judea."
Augustus allowed Antipas and Philip, who had demonstrated capable leadership, to retain their tetrarchies. Antipas's territory encompassed Galilee, a rural area of approximately 750 square miles with a population of around 200,000, and Perea, an 850-square-mile tract running along the east side of the Jordan River down to the Dead Sea. Philip had inherited a sprawling swath of southern Syria, including Gaulinitis. Antipas's two realms, Galilee and Perea, were not contiguous. Between them, spanning the Jordan where it flowed out of the Sea of Galilee, lay the Syrian-ruled city-states of the Decapolis.
Like his father before him, Antipas astutely flattered whoever ruled in Rome: first Augustus, and then his successor, Tiberius. He gave the name Tiberias to a new capital city he built on the Sea of Galilee's western shore. Earlier he had founded a city in Perea called Livias Julias after Augustus's empress Livia. While Philip's tetrarchy was mostly Gentile (with a sizeable Jewish minority), and thus disinclined to resent the Herodian dynasty and the Hellenophile culture it championed, this was not the case in either Galilee or Perea, where Antipas tried to respect his subjects' religious sensibilities. Unlike his half-brother, Antipas did not have graven images stamped on his coins. Although not a particularly observant Jew, especially in private life, he was careful not to flaunt his impieties.
Once again like his father, Antipas would brook nothing that smacked of political dissent. The famous bandits of Galilee, half insurgents and half highwaymen in the tradition of Judas, kept a low profile during his 44-year rule. Both the Gospels and Josephus recount that Antipas imprisoned and decapitated John the Baptist, who had centered his ministry along the Jordan in Perea, because he considered the popular prophet a threat to his sovereignty. Also according to the Gospels, Antipas kept a wary eye on Jesus, who in turn gave him a wide berth. (As related by Luke, Jesus once paid Antipas a backhanded compliment, calling him "that fox" in reference to his cunning wit and his relatively minor status in the Roman order.) Antipas's attitude toward Jesus was undoubtedly a mixture of fear that he might be another putative threat to his throne and curiosity about his supposed miracles and exorcisms.
Philip managed to die on his throne in 34 C.E. Antipas would probably have done so as well had he not decided after Tiberius's death that he wanted to be a real king, not just a tetrarch. Early in his career, he had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Augustus to appoint him sole ruler of Herod's kingdom. Egging on Antipas was his social-climbing niece and second wife, Herodias, another of Mariamme I's grandchildren. Herodias had been married to her uncle Herod Philip, one of Mariamme II's sons by Herod the Great, but had divorced this obscure prince (not the same man as Philip the tetrarch) in order to marry Antipas, by far the most fortunate of her uncles. Marriages between close relatives of different generations were a common occurrence among the Herodians. Herodias's daughter by Herod Philip, Salome -- the girl in the Gospel stories who danced in front of Antipas and was rewarded with the head of John the Baptist on a platter -- married first her uncle Philip the tetrarch, and then a cousin of the Hasmonean line who was in all probability young enough to be her son.
Gaius Caligula, who became emperor after Tiberius, was not sympathetic to Antipas's royal aspirations. After Philip's death, Gaius named his former mentor Agrippa, who was Herodias's brother, as heir to Philip's tetrarchy, giving him the title of king that Antipas himself had so desperately craved. As Tiberius had recalled Pontius Pilate to Rome just before he died, it appeared likely that Gaius's next move would be to restore the Jewish throne in Jerusalem and seat Agrippa upon it. Herodias decided that the moment had arrived for her husband to make his own bid for the monarchy. When Agrippa learned of Antipas's maneuvers, he retaliated by bringing charges of treason against him, including complicity with the Parthians. Gaius promptly deposed Antipas (in 39 C.E.), exiled him to Gaul (where Augustine had sent Archelaus), and handed Galilee and Perea over to Agrippa. Antipas died in obscurity in a village on the Spanish frontier. Despite his humiliating end, however, he had managed to reign for an unusual length of time amid the political turmoil of his age. He had also afforded Galilee the same measure of relative peace in Jesus' day that Gratus and Pilate had provided for Judea. Thanks to the pro forma independence he had secured for his tiny domain, no Roman troops were garrisoned in Galilee, even though its inhabitants undoubtedly saw Roman soldiers marching along the Jerusalem-Damascus highway that wound through its center.
Other than the politics of Antipas's reign, surprisingly little is known about first-century Galilee, a hilly agricultural region of the old kingdom of Israel that had been surrounded on three sides by Gentiles since the first Hebrew occupation. (In Hebrew, Galilee's name meant "circle" or "district.") Geographically, Galilee was part of southern Syria, and in ancient times the Syrian port of Ptolemais lay due west of Galilee's orchards and fields. Due to the Assyrian deportations in the eighth century B.C.E., the centuries of Gentile occupation, and the Hasmoneans' forced conversion of many Galileans when they had reconquered Galilee 100 years before Jesus' birth,certain scholars have speculated that the Galileans were not related to the Jews of Judea,and that their Judaism was superficial and separatist. Fueling these suppositions is an ongoing debate among archaeologists as to whether or not there were any synagogues in Galilee in Jesus' day. The custom of using the synagogue as a place of worship outside the Temple, which was a consequence of the Diaspora, came late to Judea. To date, archaeologists have unearthed only three pre-70 Palestinian synagogues. One of these, however, is at the site of the ancient town of Gamla in Gaulanitis, the birthplace of Judas the Galilean, which suggests that adjacent Galilee in all likelihood had synagogues of its own and that its residents were conventionally observant Jews.
Furthermore, unlike the Samaritans, who genuinely hated the Jews, the Galileans did fight the Romans alongside the Judeans throughout the First Jewish War. The efforts of Antipas, at least in public life, to accommodate his subjects' prohibition against graven images also indicates that they took their religion seriously. Following Antipas's exile, a Galilean mob led by a radical name Jesus of Tiberias burnt down his palace in order to destroy certain animal murals,graven images that had been painted on the inside walls. Most Galileans seem to have faithfully paid the tithes that supported the Temple. Those who could afford it regularly walked 75 to 100 miles south to Jerusalem for the Jewish festivals. Finally, they often named their children after nationalist Jewish heroes. One of the most popular of these names was "Judas," in memory of the Maccabean leader as well as one of Israel's twelve patriarchs. Jesus had two or perhaps three apostles called Judas (the Syrian Christian tradition lists Judas as the real name of the apostle Thomas, whose byname was the Aramaic word for "twin"). Jesus' own name, a variant of Joshua, after the great Jewish general, was also highly popular in Galilee and Judea. The early Christian belief that Jesus was of the tribe of Judah and the house of David, mentioned both in Paul's letters and in the Gospels,may well have stemmed from his being the offspring of Jewish settlers in Galilee during Hasmonean times.
In matters other than religion, Galilee was surprisingly cosmopolitan for such a rural hinterland (it had no coastline, and Sepphoris and Tiberias were its only real cities). Major trade routes linking Egypt, Syria, Jerusalem, and the Palestinian ports crisscrossed Galilee, doubtless providing a constant stream of fresh news and entertainment. The Jerusalem-Damascus highway ran through Nazareth's urban neighbor Sepphoris (rebuilt under Antipas) before swinging eastward to Tiberias and then due north. Even the most isolated farmers probably caught glimpses of exotic caravan goods and shambling gangs of chained slaves being driven to the markets of Alexandria or Antioch. Directly abutting Lower Galilee was the Decapolis,with its pronouncedly Greek culture. Galileans had far more direct exposure to the languages and customs of the Gentiles than did the Judeans to the south.
It is safe to speculate that even the lowliest Galilean peasants knew at least a few words and phrases of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the ancient Mediterranean world. Anyone having regular dealings with Gentiles probably spoke Greek fairly fluently; those who were literate most likely wrote serviceable Greek as well. It is not inconceivable that Jesus and his disciples, although mere fishermen and farmers, were fluent both in their local tongue, Aramaic, and in Greek. Given the fact that Gentiles and Jews lived side by side in first-century Palestine and its environs, even the most devout Jews imbibed Hellenistic culture and ways of thinking. Moderns are accustomed to viewing ancient Western societies through the eyes of the second-century Christian theologian Tertullian, who characterized "Athens and Jerusalem" as symbolic polar opposites, the one Hellenic, intellectual, and agnostic, and the other anti-Hellenic, anti-intellectual, and pietistic. In many ways, Jerusalem was Athens in Jesus' day. Thanks to Herod, all its public buildings except for the Temple were constructed in the international Hellenistic style. Its wealthier residents also saw to it that their children were given classical educations, as did upper-class Jews elsewhere in the Roman Empire.
Greek was indubitably the first language of Diaspora Jewry in the Roman world. Especially during Passover, as many as half a million pilgrims inundated Jerusalem, large numbers of whom spoke Greek. In his 1968 book titled Do You Know Greek? How Much Greek Could the First Jewish Christians Have Known? J. N. Sevenster presents evidence of widespread fluency and even literacy among first-century and early-second-century Jews from a wealth of funerary inscriptions, government edicts, business records, legal documents, and personal letters found within and without Palestine. With the exception of the cities of Jerusalem, the cities of ancient Palestine founded by the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, and the Herods were predominantly non-Jewish, while the countryside was overwhelmingly Jewish. However, even Caesarea, where the Roman prefect had his headquarters and Roman troops were garrisoned, maintained a large Jewish community; Tiberias and Sepphoris, despite their Hellenistic architectural trappings, were heavily Jewish in population. Andrew and Philip, two of Jesus' Galilean disciples mentioned in the Gospels, had Greek names. Only in the smallest, most remote villages did Jews and Gentiles live separate lives. The few Jews who were not directly exposed to Greek culture almost certainly had contact with others who were.
According to Duke University scholar E. P. Sanders, the Jews of Palestine probably dressed like Greeks as well. Textile remnants found in the Dead Sea caves of Judea, and wall paintings depicting members of the Jewish community of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Dura-Europos, suggest that first-century Palestinian Jews wore the same Graeco-Roman clothing that had been common to the Mediterranean world and its environs for hundreds of years. Men's wear consisted of a belted tunic (chiton in Greek), a garment made from two pieces of fabric sewn together (more expensive tunics were made from a single, seamless piece of cloth). Depending on the length of the tunic and the way in which it was folded, it fell either above or below the knee. Over this garment they wore a long cloak (himation in Greek) that was wrapped around the body and thrown over the head in cold or inclement weather, or even used as a blanket. Winter apparel was usually made from woolen fabrics that were sometimes dyed in a rainbow of yellows, browns, reds, blues, maroons, and purples. In summer, they dressed in linen that had been bleached as white as they could afford (flax was a major Palestinian crop), or perhaps imported cotton (which the climate of Palestine was too dry to cultivate domestically). Underneath these garments they wore loincloths. Their feet were shod in sandals, or if the paintings from Dura-Europos are any guide, short leather boots. Again, judging from these wall paintings, which date from the third century but depict attire that had been used for centuries, men wore their hair fairly short, and had either shaven faces or short beards.
First-century Jewish women garbed themselves in longer, more colorful, and more generously cut tunics. When elaborately folded over and under several belts, these became graceful, ankle-length gowns. Wool and linen were also their most popular fabrics (only royalty and the very rich could afford silk, which was fabulously expensive, imported raw from China, and then rewoven into cloth of gossamer fineness). Footwear was generally embroidered, trimmed with beads, or dyed in bright colors, with cork or wooden "platform" soles, and accessories were as sumptuous as money could buy. Rabbinic literature (admittedly from centuries later) speaks of the "golden city," or "golden Jerusalem," an elaborate hair ornament worn by the women of Jerusalem that was probably a type of crown or high comb. Most women covered their heads with a veil, or a hairnet resembling a Victorian snood that held up their long tresses at neck or shoulder level, or both.
According to later rabbinic literature (which may be anachronistic), upper-class Jewish women were not permitted to leave their homes unless they were swathed in veils to the point of unrecognizability. Among the wealthiest women of Jerusalem, some may even have been sequestered entirely in luxurious domestic quarters. However, Josephus, the Gospels, and the letters of Paul, as well as letters and legal documents found in the Judean deserts, all suggest that first-century Jewish women of the lower classes, perhaps out of economic necessity, enjoyed remarkable independence, sartorially and otherwise. Many of them worked alongside their husbands as farmers, artisans, street hawkers, traders, and shopkeepers, while others operated their own businesses. They also filed lawsuits, funded charitable works, and traveled freely with or without their mates, both in the cities or on pilgrimages and visits to distant kin.
Galilee was a cultural crossroads due in part to an astonishing abundance of crops that fed the entire Middle East and beyond. Thanks to excellent soil (which is still the case today, despite centuries of deforestation and erosion), a mild climate, and a long growing season, the valleys north of the Sea of Galilee produced so much wheat that the Roman and Herodian royal families maintained granaries of their own. The land was such a valuable agricultural resource that it was rarely used for pasturage, and herds of sheep and goats were far more common in Syria and Judea. Galilee also had the finest wines in Palestine, and its vast date-palm, fig, and walnut orchards were famous throughout the ancient world. Most lucrative of all for the export trade, however, were the Galilean olive groves. As historian Fernand Braudel has noted, their fruit was an integral part of a distinctly "Mediterranean" way of life in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the lands that lay between the northern-most habitat of the olive tree and that of the date-palm. People not only cooked with olive oil and ate the fruit pickled in brine, but they also lit their homes and public places with olive-oil lamps, rubbed olive oil on their wounds, and bathed in olive oil when they were ill. The town of Gischala in Upper Galilee produced such huge huge quantities of oil that it was sold in bulk as far away as Laodicea in the western part of Asia Minor. In Jotapata, which was not far from Gischala, there were so many vats of oil on hand during the First Jewish War that the town's defenders heated large pots of it to the boiling point and poured them over the walls onto the Roman attackers.
The fishing industry, which figures so prominently in the Gospels (there are 45 references to fishing boats and fishermen in connection with Jesus, most of them uncannily accurate in detail), was Galilee's other mainstay. Under the early Israelites, most of whom were farmers and herdsmen, the Sea of Galilee (now Lake Kinnaret) had been little more than a geographical marker. During the third century B.C.E., the region's Ptolemaic governors recognized the lake's commercial potential, and began stocking it with fish (some which come from Egypt) and curing the catch for export. Their staple was a species of fresh-water sardine (Anocanthobrana Terrae Sanctae) that was sold in every marketplace in Palestine, and possibly exported to markets as far away as Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, in salted, pickled (in jars), or smoked form. Other popular fish included several species of carp and Tilapia Galilaea, or Saint Peter's fish. Wherever one looked along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, there were probably hundreds of single-masted fishing boats, 20 to 30 feet in length, docked at the villages strung around the lake. These were first-century Cannery Rows whose inhabitants were mostly engaged in some aspect of fishing and fish-processing industries.
One of the towns on the Galilean side of the lake, where the emperor Vespasian would convene a hasty treason trial for Galilean rebels during the war, was Magdal Nunia (or "tower of fish," from the Hebrew magdal and the Aramaic nunia). Its Greco-Roman name was Taricheae, from the Greek word tarichos, "smoked fish." Given her surname, Jesus' follower Mary Magdalene may well have been a fish-monger's runaway daughter. At the top of the lake lay the larger town of Capernaum, where according to Luke's Gospel, the fisherman Zebedee, father of Jesus' disciples James and John, owned a boat in partnership with two of Jesus' other disciples, Simon Peter and his brother Andrew. Other than their proprietorship of the boat, which implies some modest means, it is difficult to understand the social status of these first-century fishermen. Unlike the herding and butchering of animals, fishing and fish-processing were not among the large number of "despicable trades" that relegated Jews to an inferior social class (as affirmed by the later-written Mishnah).
Nonetheless, working with one's hands and the sweat of one's brow has never been a mark of exalted social standing. Fishing was also an occupation with somewhat disreputable connotations: off-again-on-again work schedules, especially for the pickup crews of day laborers who manned the boats, and leisure hours whiled away in dubious company at the dockside taverns that abounded in the ancient world as they do now. In any case, there was probably good money to be made in Jesus' time from fishing. The catch of 153 "large" fish (most likely carp and tilapia) made in less than 10 minutes, which John's Gospel describes as Jesus' last miracle, would have retailed for at least $5,000 at today's prices.
One result of the thriving agricultural industry was "agribusiness," which came early to Galilee (and even more markedly to Judea), where it persisted as a social blot on a landscape that must once have seemed like a rustic paradise. (The term "agribusiness" was used by the biblical scholar Seán Freyne to denote a concentration in land ownership and rise in state-run monopolies in Palestine that had been widely promoted by the Ptolemies and Seleucids three centuries before Jesus was born.) The kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been commonwealths of family farms, and this ancient pattern of smallholding was undoubtedly still prevalent in Jesus' day. Josephus regularly referred to the "Galileans" as independent-minded rural yeomen who lived comfortably, if primitively, on their own land (the father of the prodigal son in Luke's parable was probably an example of such an individual). However, Alexander the Great had already begun the tradition carried on by the Ptolemies and Seleucids of confiscating land in conquered territories, claiming it for the crown, and distributing it in large tracts as a reward for military service. As time went on, more and more of Palestine was transformed from small farms into vast estates worked by tenant farmers, hired hands, and even slaves, a system that continued through Hasmonean and Herodian times. Some of the huge landholdings, especially in Judea, were the property of the crown (at one point, Herod the Great personally owned two-thirds of Judea).
Furthermore, grain, oil, and other commodity markets were strictly regulated by the governments in power, which granted trade monopolies to local brokers in return for pledges of loyalty and services rendered. Under the Ptolemies, this policy was to become blatantly mercantilistic: Egypt literally milked Palestine for foodstuffs. Although the governors from Alexandria and Antioch introduced Greek-style innovations in livestock breeding, cultivation, irrigation, and marketing, it is unlikely that anyone but the brokers, large landholders, and government officials benefitted much from enhanced productivity and expanded international markets. In contrast to the Ptolemies and Seleucids, the Romans tended to respect traditional land-holding arrangements, and neither Herod the Great nor Antipas was inclined to upset the peace by dispossessing peasants. In Galilee, numerous independent, family-tilled plots coexisted with a handful of large estates. In Judea, there were far fewer autonomous farmers. In his studies of first-century Galilee, Freyne paints a dismal picture of the Galilean fishing industry, with large-scale enterprises siphoning off profits from those who actually caught the fish.
In all likelihood, conditions were somewhat less grim and more entrepreneurial than Freyne makes them out to be. As already noted, the Gospels depict Zebedee and Simon Peter as business partners who co-owned a fishing boat. According to Luke's Gospel, Simon was also a homeowner. If the Gospels are to be believed, he and the other disciples fished when they felt like it rather than every day, indicating that their condition was not destitute. Recent excavations of a first-century fisherman's house in Bethsaida, a town on the Sea of Galilee just across the Galilean border in Philip's realm (which, according to John's Gospel, was the birthplace of Peter, Andrew, and the two Zebedee brothers), reveal that its owners lived a comfortable life in relatively spacious quarters. Its larders and others like it in Bethsaida also contained large numbers of animal bones and wine jars, suggesting plentiful amounts of food and drink.
It is equally clear from reading Josephus, however, that many lower-class Galileans were only one bad harvest away from destitution, despite the richness of their soil and the profusion of its crops. Taxes were high. The precariousness of economic life undoubtedly accounted for the persistence and popularity of the bandits who infested the hills of Galilee and Philip's tetrarchy across the lake. These were probably local Zapatas -- highwaymen who doubled as guerrilla warriors.
What was the lifestyle of the average Galilean -- or Judean -- in Jesus' day? By modern standards, it would be considered rather squalid. There was virtually no middle class, although in the cities skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers made decent livings, and some merchants became quite wealthy by acquiring monopoly rights in commodities or making shrewd investments in luxury goods and spices. Outside the cities, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Jews were small farmers or sharecroppers. Like peasants elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin, they undoubtedly inhabited a one-room, mud-brick structure above a ground-level barn that housed their domestic animals. They had almost no furniture, and slept on mats or mattresses laid on the floor. Those who were farther up on the social ladder owned larger homes with rooms arranged around a central courtyard. The truly wealthy possessed imposing dwellings fitted with swimming pools.
Except for the poorest of the poor, few people went hungry in Galilee, even though most ate red meat only on feast days, and chicken and fish only on the Sabbath. Bread, beans, eggs, olives, and sheep or goat cheese were the dietary staples, supplemented by vegetables and fresh or dried fruit. Wine, which was the chief beverage, was in plentiful supply. Presumably few people went cold either, as Palestine abounded in sheep, especially in the hill country of Judea. The Mishnah, while admittedly not a document contemporary with Jesus, prescribes working with wool -- spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidering, and mending -- as a pursuit with which all Jewish housewives, rich and poor alike, should fill their spare time, since "idleness leads to unchastity." There is no reason to believe that the production of wool clothing by local womenfolk was not as ubiquitous in Jesus' day as it was when the Mishnah was codified in approximately 200 C.E.
Daily life, even for the most humble, was certainly not all drudgery. Once a week, Jews relaxed on the Sabbath, a practice otherwise unknown in the ancient world. In addition, there was a liturgical calendar of holy days that were occasions for celebration. Weddings were another frequent and pleasant excuse to take a day off. As the Gospels point out, nuptials were village-wide social events involving every shirttail relative and friend of a friend who could claim some relation to the bride or groom. Another diversion was making pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the three great Jewish festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and Sukkot. Indeed, the Book of Deuteronomy commanded Jews to partake in the Passover feast in Jerusalem if they could afford to do so, and allowed them to count the money they had spent entertaining themselves in the holy city as a tithe. Entire families or groups of families made the Passover journey on foot along the dirt roads leading to Jerusalem from Galilee or Idumea, camping out at night. The poorer classes doubtless had neither time nor money for more than one pilgrimage a year (a travel rate of 15 miles per day and a week spent in Jerusalem took three weeks out of their lives). Religious junkets therefore doubled as annual vacations for those of modest means. These were times for praying in the Temple, but also for gabbing with relatives and gawking at the luxury wares of the merchants and skilled craftsmen whose shops lined the narrow streets of a city swollen with wealth from a Temple tax that Jews around the world were obliged to pay. To some extent, such sojourns probably resembled the pilgrimage in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: a combination of praying, hymn-singing, joshing, tall-tale-telling, eating, drinking, and camaraderie. E. P. Sanders writes: "Jewish festivals were like Christmas: a blend of piety, good cheer, hearty eating, making music, chatting with friends, drinking and dancing."
Thus, while it can be said that the ordinary Jews of Jesus' time lived under physical conditions resembling those of southern sharecroppers during the Great Depression -- primitive housing, few changes of clothing, simple food, and truncated educations, if any -- their existence, centered on kinship, worship, the land, and the festive cycles of the agricultural and liturgical year, was far from miserable. The vast majority of people in the ancient world were no better off than they, and even the wealthiest took for granted living conditions that moderns would find intolerable. The upper classes' swarms of servants, lavish meals, and bejeweled apparel hardly compensated for the dusty roads, insects, uncomfortable beds, lax sanitation, dearth of central heating, and untreatable diseases.
It is safe to say that there were no atheists, or even agnostics, among the Jews. Atheism was the ultimate evil for an ancient, giving license to amoral acts. However, it is difficult to generalize about the kind of Judaism that Jesus' contemporaries practiced. Until recently, most biblical scholars tended to read the directives of the Mishnah and the two Talmuds, all three codified several centuries after Jesus, as though they described the religious norms of his own time. Scholars also once assumed that the Judaism practiced by the Pharisees (the forebears of the rabbis of today's Judaism) was the "orthodox" Judaism of Jesus' day. They surmised that the many prescriptions and proscriptions of rabbinic tradition were in full force when Jesus preached several decades before there were rabbis. They contrasted the teachings of Jesus, which emphasized love and forgiveness, with the rigid Judaism that hypothetically prevailed at the time, which they called "late" Judaism because to them it represented a lapse into decadent legalism. They were aided in this misperception by the Gospels, which give the Pharisees a central role as "hypocrites" who are Jesus' chief debating opponents. Early biblical studies, some of which had an overt anti-Semitic bent, and later works by Jewish scholars aiming to restore the Pharisees' good name as proto-rabbis, both reached the conclusion that the Pharisees actually controlled Palestinian Judaism in Jesus' day. They indiscriminately identified all pious Jews mentioned by Josephus as "Pharisees," and used the words "Pharisee" and "rabbi" interchangeably.
However, the Judaic scholar Jacob Neusner has ably demonstrated that the anti-Judaic 19th-century experts who cast Jesus as a free-thinking opponent of lifeless legalism, as well as the pro-Judaic authorities who came to the Pharisees' defense, were probably wrong. Neusner concluded -- and most scholars nowadays agree -- that there was no concept of "normative" or "orthodox," much less "late" Judaism, during Jesus' time. Instead, there were many forms of "Judaism" within and without Palestine, encompassing a wide variety of sects, philosophies, and interpretations of the Jewish Scriptures. In Neusner's view, the Pharisees, who probably never exceeded 10,000 in number, exemplified only one of these "Judaisms."
The Pharisees were the spiritual descendants of the pious, learned Hasidim, whose outrage at the Seleucid pollution of the Temple had eventually led to the Maccabean revolt. Lay people devoted to the Law (or Torah), they were not of the highest social standing. The Judean aristocracy, including the Temple priests, belonged to the Sadducees (so called after Zadok, David's high priest), a religio/socioeconomic faction whose Judaism was focused solely on Temple ritual and cared little about morality or the hereafter. The Sadducees also believed in accommodation at all costs with occupying foreign powers, as any other stance was a threat to the continued existence of the Temple. Although highly erudite, the Pharisees probably struck the sophisticated Sadducees and the rest of the Hasmonean court as rather brash and self-righteous.
The Pharisees were the first to develop the idea of an "oral Torah," a tradition of interpreting and supplementing the written Torah, which they said dated back to Moses himself. They believed as well that the complex rules and regulations laid down by the Book of Leviticus for the Temple priests applied to all Jews, and that strict observance would set them off from their neighbors as God's chosen people to preserve them from corruption by an alien Hellenistic civilization. Most important, they thought that obedience to Torah laws was the result of proper teaching (ironically, the notion of inculcating virtue through education, or paideia, was actually Greek).
The Pharisees had begun as a political faction in the Hasmonean court, hoping to influence the monarchy to make their doctrine of the oral Torah the law of the land. As politicians, they were unsuccessful. After falling out with Alexandra Jannaeus during the early first century B.C.E., some 800 were crucified en masse. While Alexander's queen and successor, the pious Alexandra Salome, had restored them temporarily to privilege and power, by t