Jesus had won a few non-Jewish followers, but Paul was particularly successful among gentiles and the so-called God-fearers, those non-Jews who had embraced aspects of Judaism without undergoing circumcision. Paul’s Syrian converts in Antioch were the first to be known as ‘Christians’. Around AD 50, Paul returned to Jerusalem to persuade James and Peter to allow non-Jews into the sect. James agreed a compromise, but in the following years he learned that Paul was turning Jews against Mosaic Law.
An unmarried puritanical loner, Paul endured shipwrecks, robberies, beatings and stonings on his travels, yet nothing distracted him from his mission – to remodel the rustic Jewish Galilean into Jesus Christ, the saviour of all mankind who would imminently return in the Second Coming – the Kingdom of Heaven. Sometimes he was still a Jew himself and he may have returned to Jerusalem as many as five times, but sometimes he presented Judaism as the new enemy. In the earliest Christian text, his First Letter to the Thessalonians (Greek gentiles who had converted to Christianity), he ranted against the Jews for killing Jesus and their own prophets. He believed that circumcision, the Jewish Covenant with God, was a Jewish duty but irrelevant for gentiles: ‘Look out for the dogs! Look out for those who cut off the flesh! For we are the true circumcision who worship God in spirit and glory in Christ Jesus,’ he raged at Christian gentiles considering circumcision.
By now James and the elders in Jerusalem disapproved of Paul. They had known the real Jesus, yet Paul insisted: ‘I have been crucified with Christ. The life I live now is not my life but the life Christ lives in me.’ He claimed, ‘I bear the marks of Jesus branded on my body.’ James, that respected holy man, accused him of rejecting Judaism. Even Paul could not ignore Jesus’ own brother. In AD 58, he came to make peace with the Jesus dynasty.
THE DEATH OF JAMES THE JUST: THE JESUS DYNASTY
Paul accompanied James to the Temple to purify himself and pray as a Jew, but he was recognized by some Jews who had seen him preach on his travels. The Roman centurion, charged with keeping order in the Temple, had to rescue him from lynching. When Paul again started preaching, the Romans thought he was the fugitive Egyptian ‘sorcerer’, so he was clapped in chains and marched to the Antonia castle to be scourged. ‘Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman?’ Paul asked. The centurion was dumbfounded to find that this wild-eyed visionary was a Roman citizen with the right to appeal to Nero for judgement. The Romans allowed the high priest and Sanhedrin to question Paul, watched by an irate crowd. His answers were so insulting that again he was almost lynched. The centurion calmed the mob by sending him off to Caesarea.52
Paul’s exploits may have tainted the Jewish Christians. In 62, the high priest Ananus, son of Annas who had tried Jesus, arrested James, tried him before the Sanhedrin and had him tossed off the wall of the Temple, probably from the Pinnacle where his brother had been tempted by the Devil. James was then stoned and given the coup de grâce with a mallet.* Josephus, who was living in Jerusalem, denounced Ananus as ‘savage’, explaining that most Jews were appalled: Jesus’ brother had been universally respected. King Agrippa II instantly sacked Ananus. Yet the Christians remained a dynasty: Jesus and James were succeeded by their cousin or half-brother Simon.
Meanwhile, Paul arrived as a prisoner in Caesarea: Felix the procurator received Paul alongside his Herodian wife, the former queen Drusilla, and offered to free him in return for a bribe. Paul refused. Felix had more pressing worries. Fighting broke out between Jews and Syrians. He slaughtered a large number of Jews and was recalled to Rome,† leaving Paul in jail. Herod Agrippa II and his sister Berenice, ex-queen of both Chalcis and Cilicia (and supposedly his incestuous lover), visited Caesarea to greet the new procurator, who offered the Christian case to the king, as Pilate had sent Jesus to Antipas before him.
Paul preached the Christian Gospel to the royal couple who reclined in ‘great pomp’, cleverly adapting his message for the moderate king: ‘I know thee to be an expert in all customs among the Jews. King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know thou believest.’
‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,’ replied the king. ‘This man might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed to Caesar.’ But Paul had appealed to Nero – and to Nero he must go.53
JOSEPHUS: THE COUNTDOWN TO REVOLUTION
Paul was not the only Jew awaiting judgement from Nero. Felix had also despatched some unfortunate priests from the Temple to be judged by the emperor. Their friend, a twenty-six-year-old named Joseph ben Matthias, decided to sail to Rome and save his fellow priests. Better known as Josephus, he was to be many things – rebel commander, Herodian protégé, imperial courtier – but above all, he was to be Jerusalem’s supreme historian.
Josephus was a priest’s son, descended from the Maccabeans, a Judaean landowner, raised in Jerusalem, where he was admired for his learning and wit. As a teenager he had experimented with the three major Jewish sects, even joining some ascetics in the desert, before returning to Jerusalem.
When he arrived in Rome, Josephus made contact with a Jewish actor in favour with the pernicious but thespian emperor. Nero had killed his wife and fallen in love with Poppaea, a married beauty with red hair and pale skin. Once she was empress, Poppaea gave Nero the confidence to kill his own malignant mother Agrippina. Yet Poppaea also became one of the semi-Jewish ‘God-fearers’. Through his actor friend, Josephus reached the empress, who helped free his friends. Josephus had done well, but when he and his friends returned home, they found Jerusalem pervaded ‘with high hopes of a revolt against the Romans.’ Yet revolt was not inevitable: Josephus’ acquaintance with Poppaea shows how the lines between Rome and Jerusalem were still open. The city filled annually with vast numbers of Jewish pilgrims with little sign of trouble despite the presence of only one auxiliary Roman cohort (600–1,200 men) in the Antonia. The rich Temple city existed ‘in a state of peace and prosperity’, run by a Jewish high priest appointed by a Jewish king. It was only now that the Temple was finally completed, causing the unemployment of 18,000 builders. So King Agrippa created more work for them by commissioning new streets.*
At any time, a more diligent emperor, a more just procurator, could have restored order among the Jewish factions. While the empire was run by Nero’s efficient Greek freedmen, his posturings as actor and athlete, even his blood purges, were tolerable. But when the economy started to fail, Nero’s ineptitude spread down to Judaea, where there was now ‘no form of villainy’ that his procurators ‘omitted to practise’. In Jerusalem, the latest incumbent ran a protection-racket, taking bribes from the grandees whose thuggish retinues competed with the Sicarii to terrorize the city. No wonder another prophet, ironically named Jesus, loudly cried in the Temple, ‘Woe to Jerusalem!’ Judged insane, he was scourged but not killed. Yet Josephus recounts little anti-Roman sentiment.