Hallowed tradition tells of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, the city of David from whom he claimed inheritance through Joseph, his mother Mary’s husband. There is also tradition, narrated in Luke’s evocative account, that links his conception to the power of the Holy Spirit, thus making him ‘the Son of God’. Yet his family was resident in Galilee, a northern region of Palestine, in the village of Nazareth, a peasant community, and many of his listeners saw Jesus as purely Galilean with no links to Bethlehem (John 7: 41-2). Some scholars argue that the Bethlehem of his birth was in fact a prosperous town of the same name near Nazareth and it was the desire to tie his birth to prophetic passages that explains the transfer to the other Bethlehem. Little is known of Jesus’ life before he began preaching at the age of 30. It would have been unusual if he had never married but no mention is made of it in the Gospels and, in any case, he discarded his family when he began preaching (Mark 3: 31-5).
Galilee was governed by a series of Rome’s client kings, first, at the time of Jesus’ birth around 4 Bc, Herod, and then, from shortly afterwards, his son Herod Anti-pas. So, it was never formally a province of the empire during Jesus’ lifetime. Herod Antipas raised his own taxes and kept order himself, and archaeological evidence of any Greek or Roman influence is very limited. Jesus would only enter the Roman
Empire proper when he travelled south from Galilee into Judaea which had been made a Roman province in ad 6.
Even though Galilee was a reasonably fertile area and not cut off entirely from the outside world, the Galileans had the reputation of being a tough and rather unsophisticated people, looked down upon by the more highly educated Jews of Jerusalem to the south. (The depiction of Jesus as an outsider to Judaea is well caught in chapter 7 of John’s Gospel.) It was an unsettled time: the Herodian elite were exploiting their power, possibly taking land for themselves from the poor and disturbing traditional ways of life. Jesus responded to the distress. He began his preaching in about 27 Bc after a ‘baptism’ by John the Baptist, a popular itinerant preacher. He was charismatic and straight-talking, attracting the poor and dispossessed and teaching them through parables set in daily life. He had little in common with the devout Jewish sectarians such as the Pharisees who laid immense emphasis on rigid adherence to Jewish law, the Torah. He was more in the tradition of the Hasid, the holy man, an individual who has the power to cure illnesses, exorcize devils, and heal the sins which Jewish teaching believed was their root cause. In Mark’s Gospel especially his miracles are rooted in his compassion for others.
Yet the apocalyptic force of Jesus’ preaching was considerable. His God was more immediate than the traditional one of the Jewish world. His coming was promised soon. His kingdom might even be already on the way, and He would have special care for the poor and rejected. The news of Jesus’ healing powers and the urgency of his message spread quickly and crowds gathered to listen to him. Some of his followers, in tradition twelve in number, an echo perhaps of the lost twelve tribes of Israel, appear to have been especially close. Somehow the word spread that the kingdom might be coming to fruition in Jerusalem itself and eventually Jesus led his followers there to arrive for the feast of the Passover, probably in ad 30. They arrived with an immense sense of expectation but their pilgrimage to Jerusalem was to end in apparent disaster.
As was common with provincial administrations, the Romans had preserved the traditional elites in Judaea. The provincial governor, termed in Judaea a praefectus, ruled through the High Priest and did not even reside in Jerusalem but rather at Caesarea on the coast where he had inherited the luxurious palace of Herod. He only came to Jerusalem with his guards at major feasts such as the Passover when the crowds would be vast and the possibility of disorder all too real. Pontius Pilate, appointed as praefectus by the emperor Tiberius in ad 26, had outraged Jews by his insensitivity to their traditions. However, the High Priest Caiaphas, himself appointed some years earlier, in ad 18, proved Pilate’s match. He knew he would risk the outrage of his fellow priests and the Jewish community at large if he proved too subservient to Pilate but ultimately his position depended on Pilate’s support. Survival required a difficult balancing act but Caiaphas demonstrated his consummate political skills by remaining High Priest until ad 36, longer than any other recorded holder of the office.
Faced by the arrival of Jesus and his band of Galilean followers at the tensest time of the year, Caiaphas decided to act. Jesus offered an immediate challenge to the
Priestly hierarchy and he had to be dealt with effectively. Under Roman law only a governor could order a death penalty and this meant that Pilate had to be persuaded that Jesus offered a threat to Roman rule. So it was that priests argued that Jesus had proclaimed himself no less than ‘the King of the Jews, an affront not only to the hierarchy of the priesthood but to Roman sovereignty. Pilate may have hesitated but eventually agreed to give the order for Jesus to be crucified, the humiliating and prolonged execution method used freely throughout the empire against low-grade criminals. Sensitive perhaps to the risk that he might arouse popular anger, Caiaphas made no attempt to round up Jesus’ immediate followers and the Gospels suggest that they were free to visit the site where his mutilated body had been buried. Caiaphas arranged for Pilate’s troops to guard the tomb.
Jesus’ followers were shattered by his death, in particular by its humiliating form. (It was to be several hundred years before Christians could bring themselves to represent Christ dead hanging on the cross—the earliest known example is an eighth-century icon in St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai.) Yet from the despair arose hope. The Jews had already a conception of ‘resurrection’. A ‘resurrection’ of Jesus in particular is first talked of in the letters of the apostle Paul, especially the First Letter to the Corinthians (written in the mid-5os) where it is seen as the transformation of Jesus after his death from a physical to a spiritual body. ‘It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body’ (Corinthians 15: 44). Paul goes on to suggest that those committed to Christ, Christos, ‘the anointed one, will be likewise transformed at
Death. ‘We shall not all die, but we shall be changed at a flash____This perishable
Being [our mortal body] must be clothed with the imperishable and what is mortal must be clothed with the immortal.’ Paul claimed that there had been visions of the ‘risen Christ’ but he shows no awareness of an empty tomb.
Much later, in the Gospels, which were written well after Paul’s death, the emphasis is rather on the reappearance of Jesus as a physical body albeit in a form that could appear and disappear at will and pass through closed doors. These reappearances take place for up to forty days before Jesus is watched by his disciples ascending physically into heaven (Acts 1: 9). It is difficult to assess the background to the Gospel accounts—the resurrection appearances in Mark were only added in the second century and so the earliest accounts, those of Matthew and Luke, come well over fifty years after the crucifixion and depict different sets of first see-ers. For the historian there is certainly not sufficient evidence to talk of the coming to life of a dead body. (A resurrection narrative is not unique to Jesus even within the Gospels. Earlier, in the synoptic Gospels, for instance, Herod suggests that Jesus is John the Baptist reborn.) How far the belief in a physical resurrection was the catalyst for the founding of Christian communities is unclear. It cannot have been the only factor as important early sources, such as the Letter to the Hebrews, a text written earlier than the Gospels that provides a sophisticated statement of belief in a Jesus elevated to the highest point in heaven alongside God, and the hymn to Christ in the Letter to the Philippians (2: 5-11) hardly allude to the resurrection at all (only one reference in Hebrews at 13: 20). (See further on this Geza Vermes, The Resurrection, London, 2008. For the distinction between Paul and the Gospel accounts of the
Resurrection see chapters io and 11 in Alan Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West, New York, 2004.)
However, there must have been more to provide a foundation for the early Christian communities than simply the memories of Jesus, stories of his resurrection, and the charisma of the apostles. The Eucharist is clearly an important ceremony and it centred on the consumption of the ‘body and blood’ of Jesus as a ‘thanksgiving’. Early Christians believed that through this participation they too might be able to move towards the spiritual body that Paul talks of. In his letter to the Christians of Philippi, Paul tells how Christ ‘will change our lowly body into the likeness of his glorious body, by the power which enables him to subject all things to himself’ (Philippians 3: 20). By the beginning of the second century Ignatius, bishop of Smyrna, refers to the Eucharist as ‘the medicine of immortality and an antidote, that we do not die, but live forever in Jesus Christ’. The ritual of the Eucharist with its promise of transformation of the body may well have been the cohesive force that gave coherence to the early Christian communities and ensured their survival. The sacrament of baptism, the welcoming of a new member into the community through purification by water, must also have been important in consolidating an exclusive community. (The rituals involved in baptism were recorded perhaps as early as ad 60-80 in the Didache, ‘The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles’.) Above all, perhaps, the conviction that initiation would lead to eternal salvation gave a dimension to the movement that contrasted with the drab portrayals of the afterworld of the pagan world.
Paul uses the word Christ, ‘the anointed one’ or ‘messiah’, frequently in his letters so its use is clearly an early development in Christian worship. The coming of a messiah who would deliver the Jews from bondage had long been part of Jewish belief but the Jewish messiah had always been seen as a powerful king coming in triumph (and using force to achieve power). Jesus’ life and death could hardly give him this status and it is unlikely that he would have claimed the title during his lifetime as he would have been picked up much earlier by the authorities as a potential threat to Jewish (and Roman) authority. However, he could be seen in a different sense, as a messiah who redeemed (freed humans from the consequences of their own sins) through his own suffering. (Several of the Psalms of David provide precedents for a suffering messiah.) In this sense Jesus marked a fresh beginning in God’s plan for mankind. Christians now talked of a ‘new’ covenant between God and his people to replace the traditional one of the Hebrew scriptures.
The impulses which led to the acceptance of Jesus as the messiah were not unique to Christianity. On the north-western shore of the Dead Sea to the east of Jerusalem in 1947 some shepherd boys stumbled upon a cache of leather and papyrus manuscripts hidden in caves around Qumran, the first of the celebrated Dead Sea Scrolls. More manuscripts were discovered and gradually the life of a Jewish community, members of the Essene sect, was revealed. The Essenes rejected worship in Jerusalem and lived as small communities in monastic seclusion in the wilderness, rigidly observing Jewish law. They shared their property, may have practised celibacy, and identified themselves strongly with the poor. They saw themselves as a privileged
Group, God’s elect, who were also waiting for a messiah who would usher in the kingdom of God. Meanwhile the Essenes studied the scriptures assiduously for prophecies of the messiah’s coming (a vast amount has been learned about the formation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, from the surviving Scrolls). No direct links have been traced between the Qumran community and Christianity but the parallels are many. In one fragment the awaited ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ ‘shall be proclaimed the son of God, and the son of the Most High they shall call him, an echo of Luke i: 32-5. The Scrolls show that the Christian community was not alone in its sense of being a privileged people waiting for the coming of their God. (See Philip Davies et al. (eds.), The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls, London and New York, 2002.)
World History
