Because Judaea was a smaller province, its administration was the responsibility not of a legate, who was usually a senior senator, but of a procurator. The procurator of Judaea came from the more junior order of knights, and both he and his staff were based in the Graeco-Roman city of Caesarea on the coast. Here, surrounded more by Gentiles than Jews, he lived in one of the luxurious palaces built by Herod the Great. Again in contrast to the larger province of Syria, there was no Roman legion in Judaea; there were just 3000 auxiliary troops made up of five infantry units and one cavalry unit, each five hundred strong and drawn mostly from the local population. But for successful administration of Judaea the Romans relied on the locals in other ways too.
Politically, Rome did not govern Judaea on a day-to-day basis. Some towns and villages were run as they traditionally had been, by a small group of elders; others, in the Greek style, elected councils and magistrates. Rome depended on them not only for the smooth management of the province, but also, more importantly, for the execution of the key contract between province and emperor. In return for relative peace, protection and the freedoms associated with being part of the great commonwealth of Rome, the people of Judaea, as in all provinces, collected and paid taxes. This was the cornerstone of the pax Romana, the fundamental basis of running an empire. There was a tax on the produce of the land, and also a poll tax. The procurator of Judaea, as both governor and financial officer, was charged with collecting both. However, because the bureaucracy of the Roman empire was so small in proportion to the vast territory it controlled, the Roman procurators needed help in tax-gathering. In Judaea, as in many parts of the empire, they turned to the local élite.
The more lucrative direct taxes were collected by the Jewish high priests and a council of rich Jerusalemite Jews; the indirect taxes were collected by wealthy local businessmen.2 In practice, only the wealthy could be tax-gatherers. The right to collect taxes was sold at auction, and the successful bidder was required to pay to the procurator a significant sum in advance, with the expectation that he would earn more money through the conscientious execution of his task. This same wealthy élite provided the magistrates in many towns and local councils. Consequently, with a small bureaucratic staff, a small garrison, and dependence on the local élites for the collection of taxes, successful rule in Judaea depended not on Roman force or power, but on the passive compliance of the provincials. Roman administration was, in reality, a delicate balancing act. However, it was an act that time and again the Romans got wrong.
One flashpoint was citizenship. Being a Roman citizen brought with it certain protections from magistrates. St Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia in southeast Turkey, was famously about to be flogged in public after his arrival in Jerusalem in AD 58 stirred up a riot. At the last minute, he was saved from punishment for the simple reason that he was a Roman citizen and as such had the right to a trial in Rome. Jesus provoked a similar reaction in Jerusalem, but because he was not a Roman citizen, he was handed over for crucifixion, even though he had done no wrong. The reality of the pax Romana was that it was often easier for Roman officials to put the preservation of order before justice and the protection of the weak against the strong. The tie of citizenship to the Roman commonwealth was then a highly desired prize from which many in Judaea were excluded.3 Yet Roman administration was far from sensitive to this fact.
When, in AD 63, Jews gathered in Caesarea to protest en masse over systematic discrimination against them, they clashed with the local Greek citizens and a riot broke out. The Roman procurator, Marcus Antonius Felix, responded with extreme repression and sent in the army. To make matters worse, Felix was a Greek as were many of the locally recruited soldiers. As a result, it was the Jews who were violently attacked. Many of them were killed and their property plundered. The fracas, which lasted for days, caused such a controversy that it was given a court hearing before the emperor Nero in Rome. Crucially, Nero, a philhellene, found in favour of the Greeks, and the procurator was deemed not guilty. The Jews were outraged by the verdict.4
An even greater source of tension was religion. To the Jews there was only one lord over Judaea, and that was God – Yahweh. Nonetheless, the Jews accommodated the divine Roman emperor by agreeing to sacrifice twice a day to both him and the Roman people.5 In the Gospels Jesus himself acknowledged that Caesar and God could coexist. But once again the Romans crossed the line of what the Jews could tolerate. In AD 26 the Roman prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, ordered military standards to be displayed in Jerusalem, to which the Roman soldiers would offer sacrifices. Such a display ran contrary to the Jewish Torah, the ancient book of laws central to Judaism, which decreed that there could be no graven images of a pagan deity in the Holy City. Only after five days of protest did Pilate give in and agree to take the standards down. In his desire to promote emperor worship in Judaea, however, the next emperor was determined to go much further.
In AD 38 Caligula ordered Publius Petronius, the legate of Syria, to march on Jerusalem and erect cult statues of himself not just in the city; the emperor wanted one to be put in the Temple enclosure itself. In the face of protest, came the order from Rome, objectors were to be executed and the rest enslaved. In Jerusalem, Galilee and Tiberias diehard protesters gathered in their thousands to confront the soldiers and the carts carrying the imperial marbles. Week after week they told the commander that the whole Jewish race would have to be killed before a statue of the emperor would be allowed to stand in Jerusalem. Petronius was faced with a dilemma: either to put the obstructing Jews to death, or to put his own life on the line by disobeying Caligula’s orders. He chose the latter and returned to Antioch, expecting an early demise. Fortunately for Petronius, by the time the imperial order for his execution arrived from Rome Caligula had already been murdered, and the more conciliatory Claudius proclaimed emperor in his place. For the time being, the fire was subdued, but it was far from extinguished.
Similarly, the economic reality of Roman occupation continued to smoulder. Perhaps the greatest source of tension between Romans and Jews was money. In the republic, Roman administration of a province was synonymous with the extortion, fleecing and exploitation of provincials. ‘Words cannot describe how bitterly we are hated among foreign nations owing to the wanton and outrageous conduct of the men whom we have sent to govern,’ wrote the senator Cicero in 66 BC.6 Laws passed by Julius Caesar and Augustus to curb the excesses of Roman governors and grasping soldiers had tackled the problem of corruption, although many cases now went unreported. In Judaea, according to the Gospels, a consensus was reached and advocated by Jesus. When he told the Pharisees in Jerusalem to ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,’ Jesus was acknowledging the acceptable coexistence of taxes paid to Rome and taxes paid to the Jewish Temple. Similarly, when Roman soldiers approached John the Baptist for guidance, his reply did not challenge their presence in Judaea, but recognized it on the following terms: ‘Do not extort money and do not accuse people falsely – be content with your pay.’7 Nonetheless, his answer assumes that the occupying forces, more often than not, did find ways to extort.