Jesus the Jew. Geza Vermes
of its life, is likely to have nourished the pride and independence of its inhabitants.
Galilean Rebels
From the middle of the last pre-Christian century it was the most troublesome of all Jewish districts. Simon Dubnov exaggerates only slightly when he writes:
From Galilee stemmed all the revolutionary movements which so disturbed the Romans.16
In fact, if the identification of Judas the son of Ezekias as Judas of Gamala, known as Judas the Galilean, is correct,17 the main inspiration of the whole Zealot agitation sprang from the same rebellious Galilean family.
Ezekias, described as a ‘chief brigand’, was the patriarch of the revolutionaries who in the middle of the first century BC ravaged Upper Galilee. Captured and summarily executed in about 47 BC by the young Herod, the then governor of Galilee,18 his activities were carried on by his son Judas, a man with royal aspirations, who when Herod died broke into the king’s arsenal in Sepphoris in 4 BC and ‘became an object of terror to all men’.19 Ten years later this same Judas surnamed ‘the Galilean’ incited his compatriots to revolt at the time of the census, enjoining them to pay no taxes to Rome and, in general, to recognize no foreign masters. With a Pharisee named Zadok, he thus became the co-founder not only of a band of agitators, but also of a politico-religious party, that of the Zealots.20 Some forty years later still, during his procuratorship of Judea from AD 46 to 48, the wholly Romanized Tiberius Julius Alexander, nephew of the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, tried and sentenced to crucifixion two of Judas the Galilean’s sons, Jacob and Simon.21 His last surviving offspring, Menahem, captured from the Romans the stronghold of Masada and attempted, in AD 66, at the beginning of the first Jewish War, to assert his supreme authority among the rebels by entering the Temple in royal apparel. However, he and most of his followers died in the feud which raged at that time between the various revolutionary factions in Jerusalem.22 One of those who escaped the massacre was another descendant of Judas the Galilean. This was a nephew of Menahem, Eleazar, the son of Jairus, the legendary captain of Masada, who at the head of a few hundred Zealots continued resistance against Rome for four years after the fall of Jerusalem.23
The struggle against the Empire was nevertheless not just a family business, but a full-scale Galilean activity in the first century AD. Those pilgrims whose blood Pontius Pilate mingled with their sacrifices must have been Galilean revolutionaries,24 and it was again a group of Galileans who, in AD 49, urged the Jewish masses in Jerusalem to resort to arms, assert their liberty, and reject the intolerable slavery imposed on them by Rome.25 Furthermore, one of the bloodiest leaders of the AD 66–70 war was John the son of Levi from Gischala (Gush Halab) in Upper Galilee.26 He and his supporters, ‘the Galilean contingent’, acquired particular notoriety in besieged Jerusalem for their ‘mischievous ingenuity and audacity’.27 Thus, all in all, it is not surprising that to the first-century AD Palestinian establishment the word ‘Galilean’ ceased merely to refer to a particular geographical area and took on the dark political connotation of a possible association with Judas the Galilean.28 Even the Mishnah’s ‘Galilean heretic’ is an extreme nationalist who reproaches the Pharisees for including the name of the emperor in the dating of a Jewish legal document, a bill of divorce.29
Staunch nationalists and lovers of freedom who, in Josephus’s words, had ‘always resisted any hostile invasion’ and were ‘from infancy inured to war’,30 the Galileans according to rabbinic evidence were also quarrelsome and aggressive among themselves;31 though even their critics admitted that, in contrast to the Judeans who ‘cared for their wealth more than for their glory’, they preferred honour to financial gain.32
Galilee and the Gospels
Furnished with this largely contemporary information concerning Galilee and its inhabitants, it is now possible to see the extent to which the Jesus of the Gospels conforms to the specifically Galilean type. He is to begin with an appreciative child of the Galilean countryside. The metaphors placed in his mouth are mostly agricultural ones, as would be expected from a man who spent the major part of his life among farmers and peasants. For him the ultimate beauty is that of the lilies of the field, and the paradigm of wickedness the sowing of weeds in a cornfield, even in one belonging to an enemy.33 The city and its life occupy scarcely any place at all in his teaching. It is in fact remarkable that there is no mention whatever in the Gospels of any of the larger Galilean towns. Jesus for example is never seen in Sepphoris, the chief city and only four miles distant from Nazareth, or in other regional centres such as Gabara (Araba) or Tarichaeae.34 The Synoptic Gospels do not even refer to Tiberias, the new town built on the lake-side by Herod Antipas and quite close to the heart of Jesus’ ministry.35 By contrast, Jesus’ ‘own town’ Capernaum,36 the place which saw most of his activity, is definitely mentioned only once in the entire writings of Josephus; in an idyllic description of the rich district of Lake Gennesaret, he alludes to a ‘highly fertilizing spring, called by the inhabitants Capharnaum’!37 Nevertheless this place Capernaum, and the slightly better known, but not much more important, townlet of Bethsaida (Julias), and Corazin – unmentioned by Josephus – were the ‘cities’ of Jesus. At heart, he was a real campagnard. At home among the simple people of rural Galilee, he must have felt quite alien in Jerusalem.
It may have been Galilean chauvinism that was responsible for Jesus’ apparent antipathy towards Gentiles. For not only did he feel himself sent to the Jews alone;38 he qualified non-Jews, though no doubt with oratorical exaggeration, as ‘dogs’ and ‘swine’.39 When the man from Gerasa (one of the ten Trans-jordanian pagan cities) whom he had freed from demonic possession begged to be allowed into his fellowship, Jesus replied with a categorical refusal:
‘Go home to your own folk . . .’40
Moreover, the twelve apostles charged with proclaiming the Gospel were expressly forbidden to do so either to Gentiles or to Samaritans.41 The authenticity of these sayings must be well-nigh impregnable, taking into account their shocking inappropriateness in an internationally open Church. The attitude that inspired them was in any case clearly inherited by those disciples who, to start with, instinctively rejected the idea of accepting the Roman Cornelius among their ranks,42 and displayed continuing suspicion towards the supra-nationalist Paul. To quote a modern writer: ‘Had Jesus championed or evidenced a point of view where Jew and Gentile stood alike, it is extraordinarily difficult to understand how his followers could have proved so obtuse.’43 Be this as it may, a slant of such a kind in a man otherwise influenced by universal ideas, a teacher who encouraged his followers to love not only their friends but also their opponents in imitation of the God who causes the sun to rise on good and bad alike, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust,44 requires some explanation.
Having confronted the facts and accepted a certain degree of xenophobia in Jesus, is it going too far to suggest that he might have been a Galilean revolutionary, a Zealot? This theory has recently been advanced systematically and with force;45 yet it still fails to convince. All that is known for sure is that his whole interest was centred on Jewish affairs and that he had no great opinion of the Gentiles, but can this have been equivalent to a serious political involvement?
Zealot or not, Jesus was certainly charged, prosecuted and sentenced as one, and that this was due to his country of origin, and that of his disciples, is more than likely. It appears that in the eyes of the authorities, whether Herodian or Roman, any person with a popular following in the Galilean tetrarchy was at least a potential rebel. Josephus’s account of the fate of John the Baptist is most apposite and illuminating. He is depicted as a ‘good man’ who ‘exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives . . . and so doing join in baptism’. But when large crowds began to be moved by his sermons,
Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead to some form of sedition, for it looked as though they would be guided by John in everything that they did. Herod decided therefore that it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him before his work led to an uprising.46