Given the events unfolding today, it is perhaps more important than ever to realize that it was the Roman wars with Jewish fanatics that begat what we know as Christianity and shaped the relatively apolitical form of modern Judaism that enabled it to survive. Indeed, all three monotheisms today echo this same ancient and largely forgotten conflict that cracked the foundations of the Western World.
Many friends of the Emperor Titus who are commonly identified as “Jews” are actually better understood as Christians—at least as the term was defined at that time.
For example, Titus’s Jewish friends must have publicly acknowledged that he and his father were Jewish messiahs, which made them all messianic Jews.
Also, Titus’s Jewish friends undoubtedly were not rebellious against Rome. Jews such as Josephus, Epaphroditus, Agrippa, Bernice or any of the other Jewish confidants of Titus could hardly follow their radical brothers while remaining friends with the emperor.
Finally, although they were from Jewish families, they must have been renegades of a sort, simply by attaching themselves to Titus, the man who would be reviled forever in the Talmud and by their fellow Jews for reducing God’s Temple to a Wailing Wall.
Titus’s loyal Jewish friends were therefore of a non-observant kind and yet still messianic—the rather paradoxical combination of ingredients that comprises a Pauline Christian. Titus’s Jewish friends in particular would have found it most convenient to embrace the Gospels themselves since they so readily accommodate their own non-Kosher but still nominally Jewish lifestyles. Moreover, the prophecies of Jesus in the Gospels readily lend themselves to establishing Titus as the Jewish Messiah.
Emperor Titus, the Vatican
And, as it turns out, Titus’s Jewish associates were some of the most powerful and influential people in the Roman Empire.
Among the emperor’s personal friends was King Herod Agrippa II (properly, Marcus Julius Agrippa), the son of the famous Herod Agrippa I, who had himself been raised at the Julio-Claudian court and was a childhood friend of the Emperor Claudius.
This younger Agrippa inherited his crown from the “client” kings of Judea loyal to Rome. These kings were descended from Herod the Great, a Roman-installed monarch on what was then the Empire’s eastern frontier and who had famously expanded and remodeled the Temple that Titus would destroy. Marcus Antonius (Mark Anthony), the famous Roman triumvir who married Cleopatra, had appointed Herod the Great as ruler of the Jews even though Herod hailed from an Idumaean family who had only recently converted to Judaism.
Courting both sides of Roman politics, Herod had deftly kept and augmented his position after Augustus became the first Emperor of Rome. Although Herod had married into royal and priestly Jewish families, he and his heirs were Roman appointees and, as such, became objects of hatred for nationalist Jews.
Such was the background of Herod’s great-grandson Herod Agrippa II, one of Titus’s personal friends.
Marcus Julius Agrippa (Herod Agrippa II)
Titus’s elite acquaintances also included Agrippa’s sisters. In fact, Agrippa’s sister Bernice was his mistress for a time, though she was ten years his senior. In fact, Bernice even became Titus’s fiancée before conservative Senatorial opinion against a “new Cleopatra” in Rome prevented the politically ambitious Titus from following through with that marriage, according to our surviving sources. (23)
Both Bernice and her brother, Agrippa, were actually present with Titus as his legions sacked Jerusalem and razed the Temple that had been lovingly embellished by their great-grandfather.
Julia Bernice, 18th Century bust
Bernice’s sister, Drusilla, was the wife of a well-connected (and Gentile) Roman governor of Judea named Felix.
We will hear more about Felix, Agrippa and Titus’s one-time mistress, Bernice, later. All of them appear in the New Testament.
The third sister of Titus’s friend Agrippa, Mariamne, married first her Herodian cousin, Archelaus, and later one Demetrius, who was a wealthy Jewish “Alabarch” (a kind of tax collector) in the bustling Egyptian port of Alexandria.
Herod the Great and his son Antipas, and the whole Herodian dynasty, are criticized liberally in the New Testament. Titus was friendly with some of the Herods. So—is this evidence against a Flavian provenance for the New Testament?
Herod the Great killed not only strangers but members of his own family, as well, including three of his own sons. And one of those sons was the father of Agrippa I and the grandfather of Herod Agrippa II and Bernice.
Herod the Great by Theophile Lybaert (1883)
The Jewish historian working for the Flavians, Flavius Josephus, exhibits the same mixed relationship toward the early Herodian kings that appears in the New Testament. Josephus condemns the cruelty of Herod the Great as well as the unjust execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas. And yet he, too, simultaneously shares a close personal friendship with Titus’s friend, Herod Agrippa II, who, as we shall see in the New Testament, was also friendly toward St. Paul.
As for the Flavian emperors, they were likewise critical of previous Roman rulers, such as Nero. What is remarkable is not the way both Josephus and the Bible depict Herod, but how early Christian literature seems to be sympathetic to any later Herodian, as well, in the same unique pattern that matches Titus’s personal biases.
Another important Jewish figure in Titus’s inner circle was a man named Tiberius Julius Alexander. For a time he was the Roman-appointed governor of Judea and later the Governor of Egypt. He was also a general who gave his early support to the Flavians’ ambitions in both Judea and Rome. He, too, was present with Titus, as his second-in-command, at the Siege of Jerusalem and the sacking of the Temple.
Tiberius Alexander was the brother of Marcus Alexander, who was a husband of the aforementioned Princess Bernice before his unfortunate death. Their father, Julius Alexander, once an Alabarch himself in Alexandria, is described by Josephus as "an old friend” of the Emperor Claudius and a “steward” of the emperor’s mother, Antonia. (24)
This relationship may suggest that connections between the Flavians and this family of Alexanders existed long before the Jewish War, since Vespasian’s own long-time mistress was Antonia’s secretary. Antonia was a daughter of the triumvir Marcus Antonius, a niece of Augustus, and the mother of the Emperor Claudius. It was Claudius who had appointed Vespasian and his brother to their commands in the conquest of Britain during the early 40s, resulting in military successes that advanced the Flavians to the front ranks of Roman politics. (25)
Antonia
The Flavian family may have had connections to other high-ranking Jews in the East, as well, according to Vespasian biographer Barbara Levick. (26) These relationships with important eastern Jews who were collaborating with official Rome could actually help explain why Nero appointed Vespasian the task of quelling the Jewish revolt in 66 CE.
Vespasian
The elder Alabarch, Alexander, who was the Emperor Claudius’s friend, was also the brother of the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. This means that his sons, including Titus’s second-in-command at Jerusalem, were nephews of this famous sage.