Militant Tendencies –

Jewish Resistance to Roman Rule

Sources:
Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (Phoenix Grant, 1987)
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew (Harper Collins,1992)
Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews (Everyman, 1939)
Josephus, The Jewish War (Penguin, 1959)
Leslie Houlden (Ed.), Judaism & Christianity (Routledge, 1988)
Karen Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem (Harper Collins, 1999)
Gaius Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (Penguin, 1957)
Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain - A History of the Jews (Harper Collins, 1994)
Robin Lane Fox, Pagans & Christians (Viking, 1986)
Michael Baigent, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (Simon & Schuster, 1993)
Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail (Delacorte Press, 1982)

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Kenneth Humphreys
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27.12.04 

 

Exploitation

Silver shekels
 
 
 
 
 
 

Insurrection

'From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most ferocious massacres and insurrections.'
Edward Gibbon (The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

600,000 Besieged

'I have heard that the total number of the besieged,of every age and both sexes amounted to six hundred thousand.'
Tacitus (5.13)
 
 
Massada – Last Stand of National Liberation Front

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Sion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.
The house of our sanctuary has become a curse...'



Romanticised view of the Fall of Jerusalem

 

 

Fragment from southern wall of the Herodian temple.
Note that curious crooked-cross design ...
(Jerusalem Revealed, Israel Exploration Society, 1975, p29)

 

50 - 135 AD: The End of Judaea

Roman commercial exploitation of Judaea began in earnest after the territory became a minor province in 6 AD. Rome's rapaciousness was extended into Galilee following the death of Herod Agrippa I in 44.

His son (Herod Agrippa II) was given the throne of Galilee in 53 and with it, the right to nominate the High Priest. Herod Agrippa sided with the Romans during the First Jewish War. His sister Berenice became the mistress of the Emperor's son and general – Titus.

Agrippa II remained a client king of Rome for many years. Vespasian rewarded him with the rank of praetor in 75. The Herodian line died with him 97.

"Judaea was sentenced to be portioned out to strangers – the capital was destroyed, the Temple demolished, the royal house almost extinct, the High-priesthood buried under the ruins of the Temple ... The political existence of the Jewish nation was annihilated; it was never again recognised as one of the states or kingdoms of the world."

– Milman (History of the Jews, p102)


Most Jews were not members of Rabbi Saul’s ‘alternative’ synagogues. Very few Jews, in the 1st century, showed any interest in a Judaised version of the Dionysian birth-and-rebirth story, even with the embellishment of eternal life promised by the heretical Rabbi Saul. Within Palestine, national resistance and militancy were in the ascendancy. In the late 40s disturbances in Judaea led to severe reprisals against Zealots and Nazarenes by Roman forces.

In 52 the situation had grown acute enough for the Roman Legate of Syria – the immediate superior of the prefect of Judaea – to intervene. But terrorism continued.

"Radical Zealots in the late 50s began assassinating Jews who collaborated with the Romans."
– Clouse, Pierard, Yamocuhi (Two Kingdoms, p25)

In the heartland of Judaea many Jews were determined to raise the banner of revolt, incensed by the ruthless avarice of successive procurators. Ironically, the first, hopeless, war began only a few years after the triumphant completion of the eighty-year project to build the temple precinct – a vast platform covering thirty five acres upon which stood the Temple of Herod itself. This work – at its height requiring 18,000 labourers – had been permitted by the Romans, even though the temple itself was a redolent symbol of the Nation of Israel.’ Now the Romans had to deal with that ‘Nation.’

 

The Road to Massada

Riots broke out in Caesarea when, with Nero’s blessing, the Greeks took control of the the city. War followed in May of 66 when the most truculent faction of Jews – the Sicarii – seized Herod’s mountain fortress of Massada and exterminated the Roman garrison. Encouraged by this success, Zealots in Jerusalem entered the Temple and coerced priests into abolishing the official sacrifices to Rome and the Emperor. Overcoming the resistance of rival factions, opposed to war, the Zealots took control of the city and expelled the occupying forces.

Roman troops in the province were initially caught off guard by the fanaticism and size of the rebellion. Their initial response – a legion dispatched from Syria to retake Jerusalem – was repulsed. It was not until the accomplished general Vespasian arrived early in 67 that Jewish successes were checked.

Samaria and the coastal cities submitted without a fight. Then Galilee and its cities of Jotapata and Gamala were subdued. Here, a tenacious resistance had been led by the thirty-year-old Josephus, although he had personally opposed the rebellion. Josephus so impressed the Roman general that he lived to tell the tale – quite literally, in his History of the Jewish War. Subsequently, most of the provinces of Judaea, Idumea and Peraea, including the fortresses at Qumran and Jericho, were subdued.

However, in June 68, back in Rome, Nero committed suicide and the imperial instability which followed – three new emperors rose and fell within the year – appeared to be a sign of divine intervention and ‘The Last of Days.’ The resistance of the revolutionaries stiffened.

Indeed, on the island of Patmos an exiled Jew at this time was writing a fantasy of horrors, a lurid and supposedly prophetic document, which foretold the fall of the ‘Whore of Babylon’ – Rome – and the final conflict of good and evil (Armageddon). We know it today as Revelation. Unfortunately for the soothsayer it was not Rome that was about to fall but the city of Jerusalem. Vespasian, proclaimed emperor by his troops, returned to Rome leaving his son Titus to complete suppression of the rebels.

Fevered Mind

About the year 68 AD one particular revolutionist wrote (or collected together) the book we know as the Apocalypse of St John.
This Revelation is the outpouring of a Jew seriously embittered by Roman imperialism. The writer invokes retribution for his enemies from that old, vicious god of Hebrew scripture, who rips into humanity (the Romans) with poetic abandon.
Revelation, and other fiery tracts of the same genre, no doubt strengthened the resolve of first century Jewish resistance. The rebels failed, as did the Apocalypse in its prediction of the imminent fall of Rome and of the Millennial Reign that would follow.
The anticipated ruler was a Jewish warlord, a Christ born in Heaven, who ‘doth judge and make war’.
This celestial war god bore little in common with a Galilean carpenter!

Jerusalem, besieged by sixty thousand Roman troops in the spring of 70, was ruthlessly retaken during the summer, by which time the defenders had been reduced to civil war, starvation and (according to Josephus) even cannibalism.

The religious fanatics made their last stand at the fortress they had taken first – Massada. When faced by inevitable defeat (in 73) they met it with a defiant act of mass suicide. The terrible price the Jews paid for their revolt was the total destruction of their temple and the city in which it stood.

No Temple – Now what?

A conciliatory Vespasian – now emperor – allowed a Pharisee, Johanan ben Zakkai, a pupil of Gamaliel, to set up an academy at Jabneh (Jamnia) in Syria in 76 and even to re-establish the Jewish council, the Sanhedrin.

But it was only Pharisaic (or now, ‘rabbinic’ ) Judaism that survived. The temple and the city of Jerusalem had been reduced to a pile of rubble.

Yet even in this dark hour the rebellious spirit never left the Jews, so convinced were they of their messianic hopes. Even in the late 70s the province of Cyrenaica (in north Africa) smouldered.

We know in graphic detail the course of the first Jewish War because – remarkably – the history recorded by Josephus somehow survived. Whereas whole libraries of antiquity were torched by the Christians, curiously, this testimony of a Jew made it through the centuries. A subsequent work by Josephus, The Antiquity of the Jews, which iterated and extended his story of the 'chosen people' also survived.

The survival of these two overlapping works was no coincidence because they rather too well 'confirm' from a 'non-Christian source' the existence of the godman.

In short, sometime in the 4th century, while most else of ancient scholarship was being thrown into bonfires, a Christian scribe – probably Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea– 'rescued' the histories of Josephus and doctored them to provide convenient 'proof' that Christ had been flesh-and-blood and was neither a fiction, as pagan critics maintained, nor solely a spiritual being, as gnostics reasoned.

 

Home Page
Trajan Conquers the East– 'Wars & Rumours of Wars' (Mark 13.7)
 
The Piety and Vengeance of Hadrian The End of Judaea
 
68 AD - The Apocalypse of John – The Angry Jew
 
Non-Christian Testimony? – From the authentic pen of lying Christian scribes !!
 
Rabbinic Judaism Inc – A Portable God for the World’s First Multinational Business


Copyright © 2004 by Kenneth Humphreys.
Copying is freely permitted, provided credit is given to the author and no material herein is sold for profit.