Killing Jesus: A History Read online

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  Mary and Joseph lead their son from the Temple and back home. The roads are unpaved, and the village is not protected from invaders by walls or other fortifications. At that time, various families shared dwellings, sometimes separated by small courtyards. Nazareth is situated in a hollow formed by the rolling hills of rural Galilee. An ancient caravan route passes within six miles, but no major highways go through Nazareth. It is a small town that is destined to remain that way, thanks not just to the topography but also to the fact that the only water source is a single freshwater spring.

  And yet Nazareth is a wondrous place for a young boy to grow up.2 There are hills to climb, caves to explore, and fields through which to run. In the summer, when the air is so hot that Jesus sleeps on the flat dirt roof of the family home, figs and olives grow fat on the trees. Spring is a time for planting the wheat that will provide their daily bread. Nazareth is only twenty miles from the Mediterranean Sea, but it might as well be a thousand, because fish is almost as rare as red meat in young Jesus’s diet. So while it is not a life of excess, there is always enough: the trees and fields produce wheat, olives, onions, lentils, the occasional piece of lamb, and eggs that can be poached in that most precious of all staples: olive oil. This is also used for lighting lamps, rubbing into chapped skin, and cooking meals.

  Mary and Joseph are devout in their faith and have gone to great lengths to pass this love of God on to Jesus. A small wooden box containing a parchment scroll hangs on their doorpost. On it is written the Shema, that most elemental of Jewish prayers: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It is a prayer that the family recites upon rising in the morning and after bringing the animals into the house at bedtime each night. Jesus is circumcised, in keeping with God’s covenant with Abraham. His clothing is adorned with tassels, in accordance with the writings in Numbers,3 and he attends synagogue every week. There, Jesus wears a prayer shawl while sitting on a bench with his back against the wall of the small square room, reading from the sacred scrolls and singing the Psalms. It is in the synagogue that, as a young boy, he learns to read and write, because during this time of Roman occupation, holding on to their traditions has become an even greater priority to the Jewish people. A group of pious teachers known as the Pharisees has helped to ensure a system of schools in synagogues, teaching the children Hebrew and instructing them in Jewish law.

  It is in the Nazareth synagogue that Jesus sits beside Joseph on the Sabbath, surrounded by those who call Joseph a friend. These men of Nazareth have all made the long walk to Jerusalem together as part of the great Passover caravan, and many can even remember the sight of a pregnant and unwed Mary enduring the pilgrimage before Jesus was born. These men remember the shame attached to the early days of that relationship between Mary and Joseph, when it was announced that she was pregnant out of wedlock. They recall Joseph’s stubborn loyalty and his refusal to shun her. The village of Nazareth eventually followed his example, accepting the eventual union between Joseph and Mary. In this way, Jesus came of age, growing into a hardworking man of the Jewish faith, intent on living a spiritual life, just like the other men and women of Nazareth.

  The history of the Jews is a litany of resisting the oppression brought by foreign invaders who conquered the land now known as Israel. In a way, the Roman occupation links the people of Galilee to a centuries-long tradition. Thus, the worsening situation under Caesar Augustus is quietly accepted, but with a growing bitterness.

  There is nothing exceptional about Jesus’s upbringing. To the people of Jerusalem, where he returns each year for Passover, his thick Galilean accent is noticeable. He labors six days a week as a carpenter alongside his father, building the roofs and doorposts of Nazareth and laying the foundation stones of sprawling nearby Sepphoris. Jesus seems destined to remain here always, raising his own family and building his own home into the slope of a Nazarene hill.

  But the young Jesus is not long for this small town. The holiness and magnificence of Jerusalem call to him. He comes to know the smells and music of the city during his annual visits, even as he becomes comfortable navigating his way through such local landmarks as the Mount of Olives, the garden at Gethsemane, the Kidron Valley, and the Temple itself. With every passing year, as Jesus grows from a small child into a man with a carpenter’s square shoulders and callused hands, his wisdom and awareness of his faith increases. He develops the gifts of serenity and powerful personal charisma, and he learns to speak eloquently in public.

  Yet Jesus is cautious when he talks to crowds. As a full-fledged member of the Jewish religious community from the age of thirteen on, he knows he is accountable for his behavior and that blasphemous talk about being the Son of God will lead to a very public execution. The Jews would stone Jesus for such language, and the Romans might kill him for suggesting he is their divine emperor’s equal. Stoning would seem a tame way to die in comparison with the evils of which the Romans are capable—evils Jesus has seen with his own eyes.

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  It was just a year earlier that Judas of Gamala4 was likely crucified in Sepphoris. Jesus and every other Galilean bore witness to that horror. Judas was a learned man, and also a husband and father, who longed to raise his children in a better world—a Galilee ruled by Israelites instead of Roman puppets who crippled the people with unbearable taxes. Judas traveled through the farming villages and fishing ports of Galilee preaching a message of sedition to the impoverished peasants, urging them not to pay taxes to Rome or to tithe to the Temple in Jerusalem. He even founded a new sect of the Jewish faith, one that espoused a radical new theology of unwavering devotion to the Israelites’ one true Lord. Bowing down to Caesar Augustus and Rome is sinful, Judas told all who would listen.

  The Romans might have overlooked Judas as an overzealous religious crank if he had not raised an army of displaced peasants to attempt a violent overthrow of the Roman-sponsored government in Galilee. That action brought an immediate response: Judas must die.

  It was on the order of Herod Antipas, the fifth-born son of Herod the Great, who himself had once hunted the baby Jesus. Both father and son had done everything in their power to brutalize and fleece the good people of Galilee.

  Of course, Caesar Augustus got the first cut of all tax proceeds. He had mellowed since his younger days. Absolute power became him, and the vainglorious heir of Julius Caesar who was jeered for cowardice at Philippi was now a seventy-year-old monarch renowned for erecting opulent buildings and temples throughout his empire. He even had an admiration for the Jews and their reverent adherence to their teachings. Caesar Augustus lived in splendor, though not overt decadence. That fondness for the abundant and perverse was preferred by Tiberius, his adopted son and heir.

  But it was Caesar Augustus who had allowed Herod the Great to remain on the throne of Judea for almost four decades, just as it was he who had personally divided the kingdom after that tyrant’s death and granted control of Galilee to Herod Antipas.

  The soldiers of Antipas quickly captured Judas of Gamala and began the crucifixion process by stripping him naked in the palace courtyard.

  A crowd had been let in to watch and could clearly see the agony of Judas. Among them were Judas’s sons, Jacob and Simon. Little did the boys know then, but they were destined one day to be crucified themselves for trying to avenge their father’s death.

  The soldiers of Antipas forced Judas of Gamala to his knees, facing a low post. He was tied to the wooden shaft with his hands above his head. Two soldiers retrieved short-handled whips, whose three leather tendrils were tipped with lead balls and mutton bones. The soldiers stood ready to take turns laying the leather across Judas’s back, leaning into each blow with all their might. As each lash was inflicted, the leather thongs tore open the skin and muscles, even as the lead and bone created deep bruising. This, in turn, led to profuse internal bleeding. As with all aspects of Roman execution, the stripping and lashing had a specific purpose: the public nudity humiliated,
while the whip broke Judas’s will so that he would offer no resistance when hurled to the ground and nailed to the cross. Crucifixion, Roman-style, was not just a barbarous way to kill, but also a process of mentally and physically destroying the victim—whether it be man, woman, or child. Judas would be nothing but an empty husk by the time he hung from the cross.

  Jewish law says that a man can be lashed only thirty-nine times—“forty minus one,” as it is written. Not so with the Romans—or, in Herod Antipas’s case, Gentile mercenaries behaving like Roman soldiers. These non-Jews could lash a man as long as they liked. The only requirement was that their victim be able to carry his crossbeam to the site of crucifixion. So even as a soldier counted each and every time the flagrum was brought down upon Judas’s back, upper legs, and head, it was understood he would receive far more than thirty-nine lashes. He was no common criminal. He was a traitor whose crime had been to “exhort the nation to assert their liberty” from Rome, as the great historian Josephus would write. But more important, Judas had sought to free the Judean people from the unfair taxation being inflicted by Rome and Herod. He had compared the taxation to a form of slavery and had encouraged his fellow Jews to rise up against their oppressors.

  Judas cried out in agony as a soldier delivered another blast of leather onto his flesh. But he knew better than to curse his executioners because that would only mean more blows. So he endured the torture. In moments, Judas was covered with blood.

  The most common modes of killing a condemned man in the Roman Empire were hanging, burning him alive, beheading, placing him inside a bag full of scorpions then drowning him, and crucifixion. As terrible as the four might be, the last is considered the worst by far. So even as crucifixion was now practiced throughout the Roman Empire, even by a tetrarch such as Herod Antipas, it was a death so horrible that it was forbidden to execute Roman citizens in this manner.

  Judas of Gamala lay limp and bleeding after his lashes were administered. Soldiers then brought out a rough-hewn piece of lumber and hurled it to the ground. Despite the blood pouring down his back, Judas was forced to stand. His executioners lifted this splinter-filled patibulum, as it was known, onto his shoulders. This would become the crossbeam of his crucifix, and, like all condemned men, Judas was to carry it outside the city walls of Sepphoris to a spot where a vertical pole in the ground would form the second part of his crucifix. He would be nailed to that cross and left to die. His legs would be broken to make the torturous process even more ghastly. He would hang in full view of the thousands that called Sepphoris home, helpless to stop the urination and defecation that would stain his cross and compound his humiliation. Judas would be dead by nightfall—if he was lucky.

  The story of Judas’s execution spread throughout Galilee. But he was not alone in his persecution. There were countless other would-be prophets who thought violence could bring an end to Roman occupation. They all paid for this conceit with their lives. And then they were forgotten, so that, generations later, few remember the story of Judas of Gamala.

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  Galilee is the northernmost province in what was called Canaan by the patriarch Abraham. One of Abraham’s grandsons was a man named Jacob, who also went by the name Israel and fathered the people who would come to be known as the Israelites. In time, the Roman-controlled territory now known as Judea will come to bear that name.

  A pair of “seas” anchor Galilee’s borders: the Mediterranean and the large inland lake often called the Sea of Galilee, dotted by fishing villages such as Capernaum. Syria lies to the north and west and Samaria to the south. It is an uncrowded landscape defined by rolling hills, wide fields, small villages, and farmers tending plots of land that were passed on to them as part of their inheritance.

  Since returning to Galilee a decade ago, Herod Antipas has devoted himself to rebuilding the city of Sepphoris. Antipas has made the revitalized city his home and is determined to make it even more regal than Jerusalem. The partition of his father’s empire between him and his siblings means not only that Judea is a divided nation, ruled by three separate individuals—Antipas in Galilee, his brother Philip in what is now Jordan, and his brother Archelaus to the south, in Jerusalem—but that, for the first time in history, the ruler of Galilee actually lives in Galilee. So it is that Sepphoris becomes the cosmopolitan hub of the region, juxtaposed with the agrarian lifestyle and landscape of rural Galilee. This is the city where Joseph of Nazareth finds steady employment in Antipas’s never-ending stream of building projects. Whether constructing one of the city’s elaborate new mansions or plastering walls or laying the mosaic floors of the basilica, a builder has plenty to do in this vast and shining limestone metropolis perched atop a hill.

  Sepphoris is so large that it has two markets, an upper and a lower. Anything a man could ever want is for sale: glass, pottery, dried fish, onions, herbs, cattle, and even sex, if one furtively strays away from the hustle and bustle and into the quiet of an alley.

  Sepphoris is walled, just like Jerusalem, and donkey caravans appear at the city gates each week begging for entry so they might sell their wares. It is a city unlike any other in Galilee. Since its repopulation and rebirth, it is home to doctors, lawyers, craftsmen, tax collectors, and entertainers who perform mime and comedic plays at the theater. But the building of this wondrous metropolis has come at a great cost. Thanks to Antipas, Sepphoris is also home to many people who have lost their farms to excessive taxation. With no fields to till or homes to call their own, they crowd into the poorest sections of the city, making a life by stealing, selling their bodies, or begging. So beneath the veneer of progress and sophistication, there is decadence and decay to this self-styled “ornament of Galilee.”

  For while Sepphoris is the very picture of prosperity, many in Galilee are starving.

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  Joseph and Mary, as do most other Jews, live in fear of Herod Antipas. With a dark beard covering the tip of his chin and a thin mustache wreathing his mouth, Antipas resembles a true villain. While his father, Herod the Great, had grave faults, he also performed many constructive acts. Not so Antipas, a callow man who has never known want and who always expected to be given a kingdom.

  Antipas was born in Judea but educated in Rome, a city he adores. He pays homage to Caesar Augustus and Rome not only by taxing the Jews blind but also by ordering a Roman-style form of execution for any who would dare defy him.

  Galilean outrage against Rome has been building for decades. The people have been levied with tax after tax after tax. Antipas is nothing if not “a lover of luxury,” and he uses these taxes both to rebuild Sepphoris and to finance his own lavish lifestyle. And the more luxury he needs, the higher the taxes climb.

  Herod Antipas

  Actual money is scarce. Every adult male Jew has to pay his annual half-shekel tax to the Temple in coin. Farmers can pay the rest of their obligation in figs, olive oil, or grain. They have no way of skirting the taxes because they must travel to Sepphoris to sell their harvest. The hated taxman is always on hand when they arrive at their destination. Fishermen have it no better. They are levied special rights fees, in addition to a portion of their daily catch, for permission to drop their nets or to dock in a port.

  No men are more despised than the tax collectors, who not only extort funds from people with very little but also publicly abuse and even torture those who fall behind on their payments. There is no leeway. Those who can’t pay must borrow grain or oil from the storage silos manned by Antipas’s men. The interest rates are exorbitant—100 percent on oil and 25 percent on grain. And falling behind on these debts means ruin. Peasants are often forced to sell their children to creditors as debt slaves or to sell their farms and work the land as sharecroppers. Some lose their homes and inheritance and become beggars, the dignity of life as a Jewish landowner replaced by a degraded existence outside normal society.

  There is, however, a booming city of some forty thousand residents to which many of these people have migrated and
are accepted, despite their lowly status. This place is called Magdala—“Magdalena” to the Romans and “Magdalene” in the Greek language of the Gospels—and even as Jesus of Nazareth walks the streets of Sepphoris, a vibrant young girl named Mary walks the streets of Magdala. Her parents have nothing. Mary’s innocence will inevitably be shattered in the shabby confines of that outlaw village. She will grow up to be a prostitute, doing what she must do to survive, though she longs for something better in this world.

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  Because Joseph is a skilled carpenter, he is able to pay his taxes. And, indeed, most people in Galilee can do the same—but just barely. Many Galileans suffer malnutrition because they have no food left with which to feed themselves. And in the throes of that hunger, as hair falls out and both muscles and hope wither, they quietly seethe. But rather than point the finger of blame at Rome or Caesar Augustus, the people of Galilee begin to vent their rage at one another. They stop loaning grain or oil to friends and relations, fearing that their own supply will run out. They ignore the Jewish tradition of forgiving debts. The tight-knit peasant community that has sustained itself for so many generations, through rule by the Greeks and Persians and Assyrians, begins to unravel under the reigns of Augustus and Antipas.

  The great legends of the Jewish people tell of heroes of their faith rising up to defeat foreign invaders. The people long for the glory days of King David, so many hundreds of years ago, when the Jews were their own masters and God was the undisputed and most powerful force in all the cosmos. The residents of Galilee are independent thinkers. Their persistent belief that they will ultimately control their destiny is one reason Judas of Gamala’s demand that they rise up against Rome had such a profound effect.