A rabbi asks a priest a question... part 8

Continued from last week…

There were three uprisings by Israel against the Romans. The first resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem. In 70 AD, the second, the Kitos uprising in 115 AD which ended in the death of hundreds of thousands and more in Alexandria, Cyprus and the Holy land and then in 132AD the third Jewish war, the re bar Kochba revolt which ended in the complete destruction of Jerusalem, the definitive end of the temple sacrifice and the building of a Roman city on the ruins of Jerusalem to which Jews were forbidden entrance.  It was probably at this period that a steady flow of Israelites, or as we would call them, Jews, accepted the messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth. The Pharisees continued to reject the possibility that Jesus might be the messiah, but things were not going very well for Israel. The idea that the rejection of Jesus had been the cause of the disaster, seems to have taken root among the Nazarenes now universally called Christians. 

Some of these first and second century Christian came from non-Israelite nation, but many, perhaps most for the first century were ethnically and genetically Judean and Israelite. Take for instance, Melito of Sardis, a bishop of the Greek speaking city, located in present day Turkey, just west of Ephesus. Melito was possibly born around 100AD and died around 180.  He was ethnically Jewish, but probably grew up in that period when Christianity and Israel were not thought of as completely opposed to each other. The stresses of the destruction of the temple and the three Jewish wars put an end to the less hostile relationship. Melito, someone we would call a Jewish Christian, could seem remarkably anti-Semitic. Here is an excerpt from his Sermon on Easter:

 “Why was it like this, O Israel? You did not tremble for the Lord. You did not fear for the Lord. You did not lament for the Lord, yet you lamented for your firstborn. You did not tear your garments at the crucifixion of the Lord, yet you tore your garments for your own who were murdered. You forsook the Lord; you were not found by him. You dashed the Lord to the ground; you, too, were dashed to the ground, and lie quite dead.”

Pretty strong stuff!  It is clear that there was an increasing hostility between the Nazarenes and the rabbinic Pharisees. It is now that conclusively we can begin to talk about Jews and Christians. They are no longer part of the same household.

Take for instance, Marcion of Sinope (85-160 AD). He was a bishop in Pontus, now a region of northern Turkey. He taught that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was not the God of the New Testament. Jesus came to defeat the evil Hebrew God. Around 144, Marcion developed a canon of scripture that excluded the Old Testament and some of the New Testament. He would not be the last to do so. The other bishops denounced Marcion, so he started his own church. It is thought that Marcion’s rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures is a major cause of the development of the Christian canon that emphatically includes the Hebrew Scriptures. Melito criticized his own. Marcion was a true anti- Semite. 

Romans believed that a religion of antiquity should be respected. Novel superstitions were not to be tolerated. They defined an ancient religion as one that existed before the founding of the city of Rome in 753 BC.  By that definition, the religion of Israel was a venerable and tolerated religion, no matter how difficult its adherents had been for the Roman Empire. In most of the empire the community of Israel produced good citizens who caused no trouble. Christianity was a different matter altogether.

Christianity was something new and something troubling. Israel pretty much kept to itself and didn’t publicly condemn the religious system of the Greco Roman world. Christians however loved to tell the Romans that they were all going to hell and that the world would end in fire. When the city of Rome had burned in 64 AD, the Emperor Nero found it convenient to blame this new sect for the tragedy. The Roman historian Tacitus writes the following his book the Annals of the History of Rome:

 “Therefore, to stop the rumor (that he had set Rome on fire), he (Emperor Nero) falsely charged with guilt, and punished with the most fearful tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were (generally) hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, in the reign of Tiberius, but the pernicious superstition - repressed for a time, broke out yet again, not only through Judea, - where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also…. Accordingly first those were arrested who confessed they were Christians; next on their information, a vast multitude was convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of ‘hating the human race.’  In their very deaths they were made the subjects of sport: for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights.”

Christians were now a proscribed sect in the empire. They insisted that they were part of the ancient religion of Israel, and therefore legally entitled to the rights conceded to Israel, which included freedom from emperor worship and from military service.  The Romans were smart enough to know that they would never get the Hebrews to worship a mere human being even if he were the divine emperor of Rome and, still worse, they would not, fight or even carry a pack on Sabbath, so they were wisely exempted from any military service.  It was just the Christians and the Jews left, and now the Romans were hell-bent on destroying this religion of Christ which both the exiled Judeans and the Romans agree was a novel superstation. 

So the Pharisees were the last group left standing after the chaos in the Holy Land had swept away the temple, the priestly party of the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Zealots who had started the wars. No matter what the Christians said, Rabbinic Phariseeism was legally the only form of the religion of Israel. To be an Israelite, was to be a Jew was to be a Rabbinic Pharisee, and so it remained until our times.

Next week: More history, more weeping

A rabbi asks a priest a question... part 7

Continued from Last week…

Jesus could most certainly not have been the messiah, yet here were these Nazarenes insisting that he was, and that he had come back from the dead.  Now they were being called Christians by the Greek speakers, a name that meant “those belonging to the messiah”, christos being the Greek word for the anointed chosen one. (In Hebrew/Aramaic “meshiach.”) In addition to claiming that Jesus the Nazarene was the messiah, the Christ, they made outrageous claims for him. He was the great high priest as well as the king of Israel, he had died on a cross, but had risen from the dead, and worst of all, some of them blasphemously claimed that he was both human and divine, his mother being Mary, a hair dresser or seamstress or something like that, having been a virgin and they claimed that the Almighty, blessed be He, was his father.

Such a mingling of human and divine is a repulsive blasphemy worthy of Zeus or Apollo or one of the other demons that the Greeks worshiped.  There is no priest-king, dying and rising, human and divine messiah in the Torah. The messiah will be a man, a descendant of David who will rebuild the temple, establish peace and righteousness and then die. There is nothing about doing away with circumcision or dietary laws, or the inclusion of the goyim in the Torah. These fanatics went about the communities of Israel not only in the Land itself, but throughout the Roman and Persian empires. They had even reached the trading communities of Hebrews in Arabia and far away India, where they infected the gullible with their blasphemies.

Normally, sane people wouldn’t give this nonsense about a crucified, human, divine, virgin- born, day-laborer being the Messiah, king of Israel, but these charlatans claimed to work miracles and to heal the sick. What nonsense! This Saul was the worst of them, the most aggressive. The man never slept. He practically lived on the road, travelling everywhere, disturbing the communities of Israel throughout the empire, as well as any gentiles who would listen. He even claimed to have raised the dead! Now he was calling himself Paul and putting on the airs of a Roman citizen. 

There had been a riot in the Hebrew community of Rome. “Since the Judeans constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, (the Emperor Claudius) expelled them from Rome.” (Suetonius, Divus Claudius 25) The Romans could tolerate almost anything except civil disorder, especially in their beloved city. Now these Nazarenes were rioting in Rome and the Romans had called these rioters “Judeans” (Jews). The dangerous gaze of Rome turned evermore intently on the religious feuds of faraway Judea. The elimination of the founder of this sect had clearly not worked. The sect now had a second founder: Paul. Something more had to be done.

Right around this time, (about 57 AD) Saul/ Paul had returned to Jerusalem and had been arrested by the Romans after causing a riot in the Holy Temple itself. This provided an opportunity. Some members of the Judean faction took a solemn oath “…that they would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul.” (Acts 23:12) Paul was taken into protective custody and hustled off to Caesarea, the thoroughly Greco/Roman city on the coast. There he was kept in protective custody for more than a year. He was about to be released, but knowing that his life was in danger, he claimed Roman citizenship, and appealed to the Emperor and, by law, he had to be sent to Rome under armed guard.

He lived under house arrest in Rome for two more years and was finally acquitted, having preached this Christian blasphemy in Rome during a comfortable imprisonment in his own rented home. He seems to have travelled to Spain according to the early Christian authors. Then he probably went back to Jerusalem and then returned to Rome where he was re-arrested during the great persecution of the Christians by Nero after the burning of the city in July, 64 AD. He was executed, as was St. Peter, in Rome, probably in the year 65or 66.  But the harm had been done. It was already too late.

The deaths of the ringleaders of the Nazarenes did nothing to stop the inevitable. Disturbingly, there had been strange omens in Jerusalem.” Forty years before the destruction of the Temple, the western light went out, the crimson thread remained crimson, (meaning that the Yom Kippur sacrifice was unacceptable) and the lot for the Lord always came up in the left hand. They would close the gates of the Temple by night and get up in the morning and find them wide open” (Jerusalem Talmud).

Coincidentally, the Temple was destroyed in 70AD, 40 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. In Josephus’ history, the Wars of the Jews (Book VII, Chapter II, Section 1) We read:

“(A) certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared; I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities. Moreover, at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner [court of the] temple, as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying, “Let us remove hence.”

In the same year, 66 when Peter and Paul were executed in Rome, in retaliation for attacks on their representatives and anti-tax protest in Judea, the Romans plundered the temple and slaughtered 6,000 residents of Jerusalem.

That was the final straw, Judea rose up in revolt and after four years of war, Jerusalem was reduced to rubble and the temple was destroyed. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people died in the siege of Jerusalem and 90, 000 plus were taken to Rome to be sold as slaves. The enslaved exiles and gold plundered from the Holy Temple built the great Roman colosseum, whose ruins stand to this day. The Romans destroyed the temple on Tisha b’Av the anniversary of its destruction by the Babylonians, six centuries earlier. Whether this was by design, coincidence or divine plan, who knows?

This was not quite the end. Israelite life continued in the rest of the Holy Land and throughout the Greek and Middle Eastern worlds, but rebellion still simmered. The Kitos war, or the “Rebellion in the Diaspora”, broke out in 115. Perhaps a million more died in these Israelite rebellions in Libya, Egypt and Cyprus, as well as in the Holy Land and even in Iraq and Iran where Israelite life had been established for more than 500 years. During these years there were sporadic attempts to reestablish sacrifice on the temple mount in the ruins of the great temple, but things were never the same.

Things finally came to a head in the revolt of Bar Kochba (132-136). The revolt initially met with success, but, in the end, the Romans triumphed. Jerusalem was utterly destroyed and the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina was built on its ruins. Israelites, including Nazarenes of Israelite origin, were banned from the city.  It was at this point in history that Christianity and Judaism diverged and ultimately became inimical.

Rabbi Akivah ben Joseph, one of the foremost thinkers of Judaism, in his late 90s gave Simeon bar Kosevah the name “bar Kochba” or “son of the star.” This is a reference to the one possible messianic prophecy in the Torah: “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel.”  (Numbers 24: 17) In changing the name Kosiva to Kochaba (star) the aged rabbi was proclaiming him the messiah. Others weren’t so sure. They called him bar Koziva, son of the lie. The Nazarenes who believed Jesus of Nazareth had been the messiah were probably among them. Thus they were expelled from the territory controlled by the rebels, and if they didn’t leave they were killed for not assisting the rebellion, according to a later Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea.

 In 136, the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple were complete and there has been no temple sacrifice for two thousand years. The consequences changed not only the life of Israel, but the future of the entire globe. Two types of the religion of Israel were positioned to survive the end of the temple and its rituals of sacrifice: rabbinic Phariseeism which revolved, not around priest and sacrifices, but around rabbis and synagogues; and Christianity, the absurd heresy of the Nazarenes, which claimed to be a temple not made with stones in which the Messianic thanksgiving sacrifice was offered by its new priesthood, the bishops and their assistant the elder (presbyter in Greek, hence priests). 

The rupture was final at this point. Israel was forgotten. The Pharisees and their rabbis assumed that they had the only claim to the heritage of Israel. The Christians, however claimed to be Israel, and at the beginning of the Christian era, they probably were, at least genetically. The religion of the Pharisees became what we know as Judaism. The heresy of the Nazarenes became the world wide religion called Christianity that today embraces a third of the world’s population.

Judaism persisted by means of its synagogues and rabbis. Christianity flourished by means of its hierarchical structure, its universal interpretation of the religion of Israel and the Hebrew Scriptures by claiming that the Torah had taken flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Next week: History, Read it and Weep.