Читать книгу Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age - James Carroll, James Carroll - Страница 9
ОглавлениеOur images of God, man, and the moral order have been permanently impaired. No Jewish theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death camps.
—Richard Rubenstein1
By what logic is the claim sustained that the Holocaust provokes a major re-envisioning of Jesus Christ? Among other reasons, because, startlingly enough, a version of this catastrophe happened before, with just such re-envisioning a consequence.
The Nazi genocide against the Jewish people is unique. More than six million were murdered, not merely in the normal progress of the German death machine that mauled tens of millions of others. No, Jews were singled out, hounded, rounded up, transported, bludgeoned, gassed, and cremated expressly and only for beings Jews. The murdered included more than a million children. Nothing they could have done—no conversion, no betrayal, no bribe, no willingness to support the war effort, no embrace of Aryan ideology, no renunciation of Yahweh—would have led to their being spared. Their offense consisted in having been born. This sets what Hitler ordered apart from any other tyrant’s bloody decree. Other genocides have occurred, both before and since (and Joseph Stalin engaged in genocidal spasms of killing even as Hitler did), but no moral scale exists on which one group’s suffering can be measured against another’s. Nor is there a competition in victimhood. Every genocide is unique, and each one is a mortal crime. Yet what happened to Jews as Jews in the heart of twentieth-century Europe, at the hands of members of the most highly sophisticated culture in history carrying to an extreme basic tenets of Western civilization itself, remains a watershed of horror.
But the Jewish people, as a people, were previously the target not just of perennial discrimination and periodic violence but—once before—of an effectively eliminationist assault that also might have succeeded: the long-ago Roman War against the Jews, which was ignited not long after the lifetime of Jesus.2
What the Romans called Bellum Judaicum, “the Jewish War,” unfolded in three phases: first between the years 66 and 73, then between 115 and 117, and, finally, between 132 and 136. The scale of destruction—with perhaps millions of Jews killed,3 with Judea and Galilee laid to waste, and with Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean attacked—is alone enough to bear comparison to the twentieth-century barbarity. The pre-industrial Romans accomplished the killing man by man, woman by woman, child by child, not in mechanized mass-destruction factories. The mayhem, therefore, was, if anything, even more cold-blooded than what the bureaucratically minded Germans did. Yet it is true that the Romans were not motivated, as the Nazis were, by what moderns would regard as racial anti-Semitism. Romans were not operating out of an ontological or theological enmity, as twentieth-century Europe was in abetting—or ignoring—the “transport” of Jews. For Rome, the matter was one of simple imperial control, and that required submission on the part of subject peoples. Total submission, not elimination, was the purpose of total violence. A broad and consistent Jewish refusal to yield prompted levels of killing that were genocidal in effect, whatever the intent.4 Yet viewed from below, the carnage would surely have looked the same—from the point of view of the many thousands of men hung on crosses, the untold numbers of women raped and forced into slavery, the multitude of infants whose bodies were torn apart, the experience was no doubt comparable. On the ground, annihilation is annihilation.
Rome was just being Rome. Yahweh’s people were just being Yahweh’s people. Unlike most others under the yoke of the empire, the people of Israel found it impossible to sustain a spirit of submission, because the impositions were simply blasphemous, grotesque insults to the Lord: the ubiquitous offering of sacrifices to gods; requirements to acknowledge the emperor as divine; the intrusions of legionaries into sanctuaries; ultimately, the occupation by pagans of Eretz Yisrael—the Land. The territory of Israel had been given as the sign of the covenant, and therefore was itself sacred. The Roman heel set loose in that land was trampling upon God.
The rule for populations conquered by Rome, however, was straightforward: Submit or die. What motivated the refusal to yield mattered not at all. In the Christian memory, Jews have always brought trouble down upon themselves, a malign trait that would show itself across the centuries as stiff-necked stubbornness. Yet “stubbornness” fails to credit the true—and heroic—distinctiveness of this resistance. Jews were motivated not only by a religious self-understanding that set them apart, but also by the conviction that the liberation of Israel from Rome was willed by none other than the God of Israel. More than that, God could reliably be counted upon to bring that liberation about—and soon.
To the modern imagination, such an expectation seems cracked. Neither its genesis nor its urgency can be grasped—yet this holy political assurance was defining for all Jews, able to be reduced to neither mere fantasy nor mad enthusiasm. Messianic hope, more than any other single factor, set this people apart. It accounts both for the Jews’ survival as Jews and, equally, for the stunning reinventions—when history made them necessary—of Rabbinic Judaism and the Jesus movement.
The conflict with Rome became lethal when the strength of such belief confronted the strength of the empire’s determination to squelch it. An entire people unyielding in resistance could face only elimination. And it nearly came, beginning with the prelude to Rome’s Bellum Judaicum, a century before its actual start. In 65 B.C.E., two generations before the birth of Jesus, the legions, commanded by the Roman general Pompey—Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus—first swept into Palestine from Syria. Pompey, popularly known as “the vulture,” had brought Rome’s fist down on peoples from Hispania to the Caucasus, and now his armies were solidifying the empire’s southeastern frontier. For most of a thousand years, Israelites had been at home in the crossroads region between Syria and Egypt, centered on David’s city, Jerusalem. Though various powers had vanquished them and occupied their territory, they had survived as steady claimants of Palestine through accommodation (to a point), loose alliances, and periodic rebellions. But with Rome solidifying the borders of its sway, Eretz Yisrael’s turn under a new imperial wheel had come—this time with an unprecedented totality. Sixty years before the birth of Jesus, and a century before the official Jewish War, the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem. For three months, the Jews of the holy city held out, but then it was over. “Of the Jews,” writes Josephus about this first contest, “there fell twelve thousand, but of the Romans very few.”5 That was the beginning.
In subsequent decades, sporadic rebellions broke out against local Roman authorities and their client-rulers. For example, around the time of the birth of Jesus, in the power vacuum left by the death of Rome’s puppet king Herod the Great, Jews rose up, first in Galilee, then in Jerusalem. The Romans promptly slammed down, burning towns and villages in the environs of Nazareth, then killing and enslaving many in Jerusalem. Josephus says that in Jerusalem alone on this occasion, two thousand Jews were crucified.6 The Jews again submitted, but restlessly. They were waiting for openings, and for God’s deliverance.
That tension surely shot through the life of Jesus: he almost certainly would have grown up hearing stories of the local Roman rampages in his neighborhood at the time of his birth. Events then would have slid, as he came of age, into the all-defining myth of Roman violence, which showed up eventually in the Gospel story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.7 Jesus’ life span was bracketed, that is, by savage Roman violence against unyielding Jewish troublemakers—of whom, finally, he would be only one.
It was in train with this century-long experience of forced occupation8 that the climactic Jewish rebellion—the Great Revolt—came in 66 C.E., more than three decades after the death of Jesus. Such was the heat of smoldering resentment that a local dispute over defilement of a Jewish holy place in Caesarea, a Palestinian seaport city with a sizable population of Greeks and Hellenized Jews, escalated into a Judea-wide rebellion. In Jerusalem, Jews associated with the priestly caste attacked the Roman garrison and took control of the entire inner-city plateau on which the Temple stood. As word spread of this audacious action, Jews from all over Judea and Galilee rushed to Jerusalem to join in its defense, an onslaught sufficient to drive out the puppet ruler Agrippa II. The Roman historian Tacitus puts the number of these Jewish defenders of Jerusalem at 600,000; Josephus posited one million.9 The Roman legions regrouped, were reinforced, and were put under the command of Vespasian, conqueror of Britain. He invaded Galilee, systematically dismantled rebel defenses, destroyed towns, burned crops, and set his soldiers loose on women. Gradually, the Romans made their way to Jerusalem.
The suicide of Nero10 in 68 sparked a brief civil war in Rome. Vespasian returned from Judea to Italy and joined the succession fight, quickly emerging as the new emperor. His son Titus took over as the head of the legions in Judea. They laid siege to Jerusalem, cutting it off from resupply and reinforcement. In the beleaguered city, the Jewish rebels fell to attacking one another, with so-called Zealots executing any Jew who advocated surrender. One should note here, and later, that the term “zealot” is not just a generic synonym for die-hard enthusiasts. Zealots in first-century Palestine were religiously motivated political partisans (or politically driven religious sectarians) who included, for example, the Sicarii, killer squads whose name meant “knife wielder.” Zealots were like the Taliban, or even perhaps Al Qaeda.11
While the Romans patiently built ramparts for an eventual assault on the city walls, the Jerusalem defenders ran so low on food that many starved, and others began to flee. Those caught by the Romans were promptly and prominently crucified, so that the Jews could see—and, as the corpses rotted, smell—whom they were dealing with. The siege lasted most of a year, during which something like ten thousand crosses sprouted in a ring around the inner city, each with its stinking cadaver.
In May of 70, the Romans succeeded in breaching the city wall. The Zealots concentrated their forces in the Temple itself, where they made a last stand, holding out for more than two months. At the end of July, the Romans took the Temple, killed its last defenders, looted its treasury, and set it afire. Those Jews not killed were enslaved. On the Hebrew calendar, it was the ninth day of the month of Av, a date memorialized in a Jewish liturgy of mourning to this day.
Jewish resistance continued in the hills of Judea and in the Jordan Valley, high above which stood a butte—Masada—which served as the last Jewish stronghold. It took the Romans nearly three years to finish off the die-hard rebels. When the Romans finally stormed Masada, Josephus reports, they found that of the 967 resisters, 960 had killed themselves. In all, the Jewish dead in the Great Revolt numbered, according to Josephus, 1.1 million.12
As the Roman Empire expanded its control to the east across Asia Minor and west along the north coast of Africa, Jewish communities in various cities were loath to surrender their religious and cultural prerogatives. In the Diaspora, too, the integrity of worship of the one God, Yahweh, was at stake. It was inevitable that such smoldering religious steadfastness would become inflamed, and in the year 115, four decades after the Great Revolt, it did. The restiveness of Jews in the coastal city of Cyrene, in present-day Libya, flashed into open rebellion against newly re-established Roman authorities. The uprising was quickly imitated by Jews in various other Mediterranean cities—in Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq. This was expressly Jewish resistance, beyond the far briefer and less potent reactions of other peoples laid low by Roman expansion.
Soon enough, Jews in Judea joined in the assaults, making this the second large revolt in half a century. Once again, Rome reacted with crushing power. In this conflict, the Roman general Lusius Quietus led the campaigns; one of his deputies was a fierce military leader named Hadrian. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, with Jewish communities in Cyprus and Libya entirely wiped out. The violence finally ended in 117. This Mediterranean-wide sequence of Jewish uprisings is known as the Kitos War, from a corruption of the name of the Roman commander, Quietus. In Hebrew, though, the wars are known as the Rebellion of the Exile.
For the following decade or so, Jews bided their time, nurturing their faith-supported conviction that a Messiah would yet deliver them from Roman rule—and quietly preparing for the next conflict.13 Rome, meanwhile, was beset by perennial intrigues of imperial succession. After the death of the emperor Trajan, Hadrian outmaneuvered Quietus, his former commander, to become emperor. He began a new campaign of solidifying the far-flung boundaries of Roman control. He built, for example, what we call Hadrian’s Wall, which still stands in Britain. His visit to Judea in 130 occasioned his order to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem and restore the city that still bore the scars of the Great Revolt in 70. But he gave Jerusalem a new name, Aelia Capitolina, and declared that the new temple would be dedicated to Jupiter. When Jews protested, Hadrian resolved to eliminate the unyielding people once and for all. He cut to the quick of Jewish identity by outlawing circumcision, making yet another Jewish revolt inevitable.14
In 132, it came. A Jewish force led by a Galilean named Simon Bar Kosiba surprised the Roman garrisons in the countryside, and then quickly wrested control of Jerusalem from the unprepared occupiers. Kosiba was proclaimed by Jews to be the longed-for Messiah, and he was given the name Bar Kokhba, “son of a star”—a reference to the messianic prophecy “A star shall come forth out of Jacob.”15 For more than two years, Bar Kokhba, centered in Jerusalem, led a powerful resistance to Rome’s armies, presiding over a reclaimed, if not restored, nation. Coins were struck bearing the inscription “Freedom of Israel.”16 The revolt spread to Jewish communities under Roman control in Arabia and Syria. Those in the Mediterranean diaspora who had been subdued and enslaved during the Kitos War saw another chance. Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, writes that “Jews everywhere . . . were gathering together and giving evidence of great hostility to the Romans.”
Hadrian was having trouble with vassal peoples all across the empire, from Britain to Dalmatia to the Danube, and word of the revolt in Judea spread. “The whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.”17 Hadrian’s hatred of Jews was one thing, but now Roman imperial hegemony itself was at stake. He ordered an unprecedented mobilization, including the emergency conscription of males throughout Italy. From as far away as Britain he summoned “his best generals,” Cassius Dio reports, and dispatched them to Judea, together with six full legions and sizable parts of six others—tens of thousands of crack soldiers. They arrived with ferocious determination and set about the plowing under of towns and villages, the razing of cities. Jewish resistance matched the Roman ferocity, and the fighting went on for more than two years. The Talmud says that the Romans “went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils.”18
By the time the Romans managed to suppress the revolt in the summer of 135, according to Cassius Dio, nearly 600,000 Jews were dead and nearly a thousand towns, villages, and cities had been razed—most especially including, again, Jerusalem. Not just the Temple Mount but the entire urban area was laid to waste. Still, Hadrian was not finished. He ordered the execution of all Jewish scholars. He outlawed Torah, halachic practice, the Jewish calendar. He ordered the torching of Torah scrolls on the site of the former Holy of Holies, and, in addition to a statue of Jupiter, he ordered one of himself erected on the Temple Mount. In an unprecedented act, Hadrian commanded that the province of Judea be renamed, now to be known as Syria Palaestina. Jews were henceforth banished from its capital, Aelia Capitolina—except one day a year, when they would be permitted entrance for the sole purpose of expressing their grief over the loss of Zion. Cassius Dio concludes, “Nearly the whole of Judea was made desolate.”19
As noted, the mortality figures supplied by ancient historians are to be taken more as broad indicators than precise counts, but even so, the picture that emerges of the cost of this Roman war is clear and historically reliable. However much the motives of the Caesars differed from those of the Führer two millennia later, the consequences of their assaults against the Jewish people are comparable. Hitler killed one in three of all living Jews, a ratio the Caesars may well have matched.20 My purpose here is not to compare war statistics, but to emphasize the extreme human suffering—the evil—that formed the context within which both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism came into being. To read, as all Christians do, the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ without reference to the Roman War that raged exactly as those portraits were being composed, and first revered as Scripture, is like reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison without reference to events unfolding outside his cell as he wrote.
Return to the savage destruction of the Temple in 70—the event that began the slow-motion genocide we have tracked. Nothing defines the chasm separating Jewish and Christian perspectives more sharply than the difference between Jewish and Christian responses to what befell the Temple. For Jews, its destruction stands as the defining emblem of all Jewish suffering. The white woolen prayer shawl worn by Jewish men—a tallit—is marked with black stripes said to be a sign of mourning for the Temple’s destruction. The Jewish liturgical year is anchored, as noted, by the annual grief ritual Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av—the date on the Hebrew calendar on which the Romans set fire to the Temple. In the Christian memory, that event, if it registers at all, is celebrated as a proof of Christian claims made for Jesus. That the Temple was destroyed means that Jesus was right in his claim to superiority over Jewish authorities, and Jews were wrong to reject him. The Church Triumphant rose from the ashes on the Temple Mount.
To accept the destruction of the Temple as proof of Christian claims, one has to accept a particular view of Jesus as a future-foreseeing “prophet.” He is remembered in the Gospel of Matthew, for example, as having pointed to the buildings of the Temple compound and declaring, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.”21 Thus, words taken to have been uttered in the year 30 or so, about an event that occurred forty years later, are registered both as proof of Jesus’ power to foretell the future and as an indictment of those who “kill the prophets and stone those” who are sent from God.22 Despite his being shown weeping at what he foresees—“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—Jesus allegedly approves the destruction. Indeed, in the Gospel of John, he taunts his antagonists by saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” That claim is promptly explained by the Gospel writer: “But he spoke of the temple of his body.”23 Jesus was himself the replacement of the Temple—precisely in the way that the Church would replace the Synagogue. On Good Friday, at the very moment of Jesus’ death, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are alike in reporting that, in Matthew’s language, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom”—a symbolic destruction of the Temple.24 Jesus’ death means that the day of the Temple is over. An occasion not of mourning, but of celebration.
We saw earlier that meanings change when, instead of looking at Auschwitz through the lens of the cross, the cross is beheld through the lens of Auschwitz. A similar shift occurs when, instead of looking at the tribulations of Jerusalem in 70 from the vantage of “prophecies” offered by Jesus in 30, we look at the texts about Jesus from the vantage of the later context during which the texts were composed. Quite simply, when Jesus is remembered as describing in harrowing detail the events that will accompany the destruction of the Temple—“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another”25—he is not foretelling an apocalyptic end of the world. Rather, almost as an eyewitness, he is offering a journalistic description of precisely what happens when the Romans smash down on the Jews and when Jews themselves turn against one another. And “eyewitness” is to the point, of course, because, though Jesus did not see such things, the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and the people to whom he was writing, surely did.
It is possible, although far from certain, that in 30 or so, Jesus did use an imagined destruction of the Temple as a metaphor, but he was not “predicting.” This is a small but urgent point; the fully human Jesus could not and did not foresee the future. As an apocalyptic prophet, drawing on the deep legacy of Israel’s past, which had been defined by the Temple destruction at the hands of the Babylonians in 588 B.C.E., such an image could have occurred to him. Jeremiah’s lamentation for that destruction of the Temple might have come readily to his lips. But if Jesus invoked such a nightmare scene, the past was his point of reference, not the future—Nebuchadnezzar, not Caesar. Like all Jews, he would have found the literal destruction of the Temple a second time unthinkable, much as Americans, even remembering, say, the apocalyptic carnage of the Civil War, would have found unthinkable the events of September 11, 2001—until they happened, in all their horror.
Whether Jesus had in fact discussed the Temple destruction was less the point for the Gospel writers and readers than the harsh fact that, in their time, the Temple had been destroyed. We will take up the chronology of Gospel composition below; it’s enough here to note that all four of the Gospels were written during or after the destruction in 70. The writers would have invoked Jesus, and the destruction of his death, in connection with the Temple destruction whether he had literally made any such reference or not, precisely as a way of finding meaning in the midst of the meaninglessness of total violence. That the destruction now could be encompassed in the vision then of the one who was their hope made it tolerable. But such was the extremity of their experience in the thick of Roman war that, for a time, it was even possible to imagine these events as harbingers of nothing less than the end of the world. That dread, too, was given expression, transformed into hope, by the remembered Jesus; “And because wickedness is multiplied,” he is remembered to have said, “most men’s love will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.”26
The Gospels are obsessed throughout with the destruction of the Temple, and why not? Recall that all four of the canonical texts define the crime for which Jesus was crucified as a crime against the Temple.27 The content of the charge of blasphemy brought against Jesus is defined by his statement “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.”28 Whatever actually “happened” in the lifetime of Jesus, the momentous violence of the Roman War that was being indiscriminately inflicted on Jews even as the Gospels were written was enough to force the narrative into the form that it took—now with the “Jewish” enemies of Jesus getting what they deserved for rejecting him. The point deserves emphasis: the Gospels’ first purpose was to respond to the present crisis of those who wrote the texts and to whom the texts were addressed. The Temple dominates the story of Jesus in 30 because the Temple—in its destruction by Rome—dominated the story in 70 of those who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel.
Looked at from this vantage of torment decades after the death of Jesus, even the Passion narrative takes on a character unimaginable to later Christians who tell his story without reference to the Roman War. Instead of the usual way of seeing Jesus’ agony and death on the cross as unique, a one-time instance of transcendent suffering extreme enough to redeem the fallen cosmos, the view from the year 70—recall the ten thousand corpses hung on crosses ringing the Temple Mount—would necessarily have seen the crucifixion of Jesus as mundane. The consolation offered by the Passion account had to be less a matter of Jesus as the substitute sufferer than of Jesus as the fellow sufferer. What befell Jesus is befalling us! When, at the moment of his death, according to the three Gospels, the Temple is symbolically destroyed by that torn veil, the identification of Jesus with the horrors of Roman savagery would have been taken to be complete. One could imagine surviving the Temple-destroying savagery only because Jesus had. Here, of course, is the power of the proclaimed Resurrection, the hope that evolved into conviction that survival, even of the worst fate imaginable, was a possibility—nay, a promise.
The Temple as the Cause of the Gospel
By the time of Jesus, the Temple Mount had been the historic heart of Jerusalem for at least a thousand years, and the mythic tradition of Israel pushed the date of its sanctification perhaps twice that far into the distant past. Indeed, the “mount” was first associated with Mount Moriah, to which Abraham brought his son Isaac as a ready sacrifice, obeying what he took to be God’s brutal command. Abraham may or may not have existed, but if he did, he is dated to about the year 2000 B.C.E., a full millennium before King David. Abraham’s altar of sacrifice—where, in the Genesis account,29 an animal replaced a human as the preferred offering of Israel’s God—became the altar to which the people, in that neverland of myth, brought their lambs and doves. The mount entered history when, precisely there, David ordered the first construction of the Temple in about 1000 B.C.E., and his son Solomon accomplished that construction. Across the subsequent centuries, the Temple would be built and built again, although the Babylonian destruction in 588 would permanently mark the difference between the First Temple, attributed to Solomon, and the Second, built by those returned from Babylon in 515, and rebuilt by their descendants.
A century and a half before the birth of Jesus, a Jewish dynasty—the Hasmoneans—restored the independence of Israel after a period of Seleucid (or Greek) domination. They marked this triumph by undertaking a massive reconstruction of the Temple. Indeed, Hanukkah, the annual Jewish festival of light, recalls the joyous rededication of the Temple after that restoration. It had walls made of huge stones and broken by five stout gates, embellished palaces, a citadel, towers, courtyards; the ritual buildings themselves occupied a plateau that was about three hundred yards square.30 This construction repeated patterns and designs common in the Hellenized world, and the Jerusalem Temple began to loom as one of its great structures.
When the Romans, under Pompey, brought Israel’s independence to an end in 67 B.C.E., skirmishes, referred to earlier, were fought by resisting Jews in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount, but no lasting damage was done to the Temple as the dominance of Rome began. When the Roman client ruler, the quasi-Jewish Herod the Great, was elected “King of the Jews” by the Roman Senate in about 39 B.C.E., his challenge was to establish his legitimacy with a population that regarded him as an interloper. With a view to winning over his skeptical subjects—and to impressing his patrons in Rome—he undertook the project of making the Jerusalem Temple even grander. By about the year 20 B.C.E., having scrupulously commissioned more than a thousand Jewish priests as masons and carpenters, Herod had completed most of a major reconstruction, which indeed made the Temple of Jerusalem one of the most spectacular buildings in the world. Ad hoc construction on the compound would continue for another eighty years, until the catastrophe of 70 C.E., but the main redesign and renovation was accomplished quickly. Red-tiled roofs, colonnades, hundreds of pillars, grand stairways, a huge central sanctuary with looming columns, wall bridges, hundreds of finely hewn blocks, multiple courtyards, double and triple gates, porticoes—all made of gleaming gold-white Jerusalem stone and pale limestone, and positioned atop a spectacular butte visible for miles: the Temple was breathtakingly beautiful.
That the Temple magnificently enshrined the sacred precincts in which believers, gathering periodically by the hundreds of thousands, could make their joyous sacrificial offerings in petition and thanksgiving was what made the Temple precious to almost all Jews. Indeed, it was precious to non-Jews as well, with the so-called Courtyard of the Gentiles being one of the Temple’s most commodious spaces—an indication of Israel’s ecumenical openness that contradicts a later Christian disparagement of Judaism as exclusivist and clannish.
The glories of the Temple notwithstanding, Jews disdained Herod and his successors, and many were ambivalent about the Hellenized culture that stamped the architecture of his greatest achievement. But ambivalence drained away as they made “aliyah,” going up to the hilltop city for religious festivals, and from the city up to its sacred plateau. Jews were devoted to the Temple not for its physical splendor but for the devotion it inspired. That it brought them into intimate contact with the Holy One, in a setting whose magnificence could make the Holy One’s presence seem palpable, redoubled their love for this place. It was truly the navel of the cosmos, axis mundi, the house of God.
But where is God when God’s house is destroyed? As would happen in the twentieth century, scattered Jewish survivors of Rome’s mass violence in the year 70 were at the mercy of the dread that their God had abandoned them. Because their sanctuaries, religious symbols, and texts were destroyed in the Roman onslaught, and because they had been driven from the living center and seal of the covenant—Eretz Yisrael and its soul city, Jerusalem—the content of the Jewish religious imagination was in danger of being all but deleted.
But instead of simply disappearing, as so many peoples crushed by empire had and would again, the Jews, even as the Roman brutalizing continued intermittently for decades, retrieved from the tradition new meanings of old revelations, a fresh interpretation of the interpretations. They were able to do this only because once before, returning from Babylon six hundred years earlier, they had reinvigorated their religion around an equivalent experience of total loss. All first-century Jews, the followers of Jesus decisively included, were primed by an ancient tradition to transform that loss into a profound act of religious reinvention—spawning, ultimately, both Rabbinic Judaism and the Church.
I make these observations about expressly Jewish ideas—here and elsewhere in this book—from outside the Jewish community, aware of the dangers that adhere in Christian readings of Jewish history and thought. If I presume to do so, it is as a Christian aware of my own tradition’s essential tie to this legacy. When the Temple was destroyed, in sum, the sacred imagination was quickened, and something new happened between God and God’s people. Even if this was the initiating spark of Christianity as a separate religion, the phenomenon of renewal out of loss was Jewish to the core—because it had brought Judaism into being in the first place.
As the twentieth-century Holocaust can be said to have been at least analogously foreshadowed by events two millennia earlier, so with the Roman assault on Jerusalem. It, too, was a kind of replay. Jewish religion, after all, had its true beginning six centuries before, when armies of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, carted away the Ark of the Covenant, enslaved the people, and carried them off to exile. The Babylonian Captivity lasted about sixty years (597–538 B.C.E.), a period of time roughly duplicated by the Roman-Jewish war (and, coincidentally, roughly duplicated by the time elapsed from the liberation of Auschwitz until today). When the Jews returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, picking up the pieces of faith and tradition, they were—as this Christian reads the story—a different people, with a different God.
Out of the trauma of destruction and banishment, that is, they had created something new. Prophets, especially Ezekiel and Jeremiah, had recast the meaning of what happened—proclaiming a God who had used belligerent Nebuchadnezzar as a purifying instrument; a God who had accompanied His people into exile; a God, therefore, whose presence was no longer seen as restricted to the Temple of Jerusalem. Where, previously, the Holy of Holies had held the Ark of the Covenant, that sacred object, whatever it was,31 had been lost in the destruction. From now on, once the Temple was reconstructed, the Holy of Holies was to be left vacant—a numinous nonappearance that perfectly symbolized the new understanding to which the people had come. The God of Israel was seen as transcending place. A particular sanctuary defined by absence became the sacrament of God’s universal omnipresence. With that apophatic affirmation by means of negation, the imagination of Jewish religion sank its roots in paradox.
Editors and redactors, through the same experience of Babylonian exile, had recast the oral and written traditions that had long shaped the consciousness of this people—but now with a new order, a coalescence carrying a new meaning. Creation myths, ritual songs, poems, etymological tales, proverbs, parables, and narratives of memory were selected, discarded, reshaped—and composed. Only now did the people recognize in their rich store of tradition the collected revelation of God’s Word—the Bible, or Tanakh, an acronym for “Torah, Prophets, and Writings.” Returned from captivity, they became people of Torah—of the Book. And more: only now had editors arranged the revelation to begin with Genesis, a creation myth that accounted not, like others of the ancient Near East, for the origins of the tribe, but for origins of the cosmos. Genesis made the astonishing primordial claim that the God of this people, no mere local deity, was the Creator of the universe, the God of all people. Only now, that is, was the God of Israel understood to be one God, transcending not only place but time. Monolators had become monotheists.32 Such are the radical new religious convictions that came from prophetic reflection on the first of the Temple destructions. The religion of Jews was begun.
The second destruction of the Temple, in 70, was equally decisive. It sparked an immediate crisis in the life of every surviving Jew, and that crisis is the dominant—if not necessarily only—source of the Gospel preoccupations with the Temple. All Jews were forced to ask the great questions: how could the chosen people undergo such near eradication? And, in particular—now!—what is it to be a Jew without the Temple? The Temple was the seat of the priest-led theocracy established by God Himself! What is it to be Israel without that? Without priesthood, sacrifice, the Holy of Holies—sacred ritual that had brought Israel close to God for a thousand years?
Two surviving parties of Jews offered their answers—surviving parties, by the way, that were alike in having sought and found distance from the violent rebellion of the Zealots and from those who rallied to their revolution, which had brought down the wrath of Rome. Only such distance from Zealotry, which the Jews in the thick of combat had to experience as betrayal, enabled their survival as Jews. Thus, in 68 or 69, as the Romans were closing in on Jerusalem and the Temple, a Pharisaic party led by Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai petitioned the Romans to be allowed to leave the city. They were permitted to go, establishing themselves in Yavne, on the Mediterranean coast. This core would flourish as the center of a post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism. In a similar way, speaking generally, followers of Jesus decamped Jerusalem for Pella, across the Jordan, and for places in Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa. In Palestine, the Jesus movement remained centered in Galilee, where Roman legions raised havoc, but not with the brute totality of their assault against Jerusalem. Both groups, in line with previous prophetic readings of the Temple destruction wrought by the Babylonians, saw in the Roman destruction a purification willed by God, but they differed in their views of what constituted the behavior from which God took offense.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s call the first group “the rabbis,” attached to a party of Jewish leaders identified in the Gospels as Pharisees. They were inclined, even before the Temple destruction, to emphasize observance of the Law and study of the Torah more than, say, the priests of the Temple, who, given their ritual role at the altar, would have placed prime emphasis on cultic sacrifice. But with the Temple gone and the priests either killed or made superfluous, the rabbis insisted that to be a Jew now was to be focused more than ever on Torah, study of texts, and close observance of the Law. Their attachment to the study-centered institution of the synagogue came into its own. When the tradition of priestly sacrifice was replaced by the metaphoric sacrifice of “a broken and contrite heart,”33 manifest in Law observance, Rabbinic Judaism was born.
Let’s call the other group “the Jesus people.” They had an even more succinct answer to the question “What is it to be a Jew without the Temple?” Now, they said, Jesus is the Temple—“the new Temple.” Here, too, cult sacrifice has entered the realm of metaphor, with Jesus having accomplished the last sacrificial offering “once and for all when he offered up himself.”34 In this the Church was born. The first group said that the Temple had been destroyed because Israel was insufficiently faithful in observing God’s Law. The second said the Temple had been destroyed because Israel had rejected Jesus. The point is that both groups consisted of Jews searching for meaning in the midst of the Roman-generated catastrophe, centered on the destruction of the Temple.
These equally Jewish answers to the Jewish crisis both envisioned an imagined Temple and the necessary movement of sacrifice into the realm of metaphor,35 yet the answers seemed profoundly contradictory, and, in a context in which civil war among Jewish groups was rife, those proposing these answers became fiercely antagonistic. Such competition between factions of an oppressed people was deliberately stoked by the imperial overlords—the universal practice of empires.36 So Rome, too, is a factor in the conflict between the rabbis and the Jesus people.
Usually, the Christian story is told without reference to the fact that the approximate year of the first Gospel’s composition—Mark, in 70—was the same year as the destruction of the Temple.37 If the connection is noted by Christians today, it is assumed to be coincidence, since, in the Christian memory, the fate of the Jewish cultic center four decades after the death of Jesus could have no real bearing on Christians, who by the second century had come to regard their movement as having begun in Jesus’ own repudiation of the Temple.
It may well be that when Jesus of Nazareth arrived on the scene in the year 28 or 29, it was as part of a Temple purification movement. The facts that Herod the Great, the despised Roman lackey and puppet ruler, had rebuilt the Temple, and that his structure reflected the Hellenized style of grandiose pagan temples elsewhere in the Near East, had, as we saw, discomforted some Jews. It sparked full-bore opposition from certain Jewish critics, like the Qumran sect, puritanical ascetics who lived a communal life apart from Jerusalem, centered near the Dead Sea.38 These conscientious objectors to the moral compromises of urban life in a Hellenized world—let’s call them “arch-conservatives”—may have included John the Baptist. But they would have criticized Herod’s Temple in the name of God’s Temple—a point we saw, in brief, before. To resist Herod’s blasphemy, of course, was a mode of resisting the blasphemy of his patron, Rome. But such criticism of the Temple would have been for the Temple’s sake.
Jesus might have associated with the radicals of Qumran. If they included John the Baptist, he surely did. But it seems likely that, from a certain point on, Jesus kept his distance from such purists, including John. As Jesus came into his own, it was as anything but a Zealot. Indeed, the Gospels go out of their way to show him as a man not given to puritanical repudiations. He was not an ascetic, nor did he eschew the bustle of towns and cities. Accommodation marked his style. We will see more of Jesus’ difference from the Zealots below.
If we are, a priori, to take seriously Jesus’ character as a devout Jew, then his devotion to the Temple follows, and we should be very slow to imagine him as repudiating either the Temple itself or the transactions, like money changing, that would have been germane to it.39 There is every reason to believe that Jesus himself, as a devout Jew, was devoted to the Temple, and could not conceivably have repudiated it in total. If, as all four Gospels report, he committed a transgression there, it was more likely as a defense of the Temple than as an attack on it.40 The main evidence for believing that Jesus revered the Temple until the day he died is that his followers then continued to devoutly worship in the Temple as Jews for as long as the holy place survived.
Against the notion that the Gospels began to jell as written accounts of the story of Jesus without reference to the destruction of the Temple and the ongoing Roman War against the Jews that were simultaneous to the writing, I argue that the destruction of the Temple, and the attendant mass violence, were precisely what created the urgent need among the Jesus people for these texts just then. They needed the texts as Jews. That the oral traditions of the story of Jesus, combining memory, myth, interpretation, and literary invention, began to find written form at this moment was no coincidence. It was an answer. And if the Gospels are read in this light—as documents dated to 70 and after, instead of as prophecies dated to 30—they take on meanings that differ decisively from what Christians usually say and are usually told. We are closing in on the actuality of origins.
The most obvious instance of this is well known by now, although its implications have yet to be fully unpacked: the way in which the Gospels are read as setting Jesus not only against the Temple but against his own people. The intra-Jewish antagonism—rabbis versus Jesus’ followers—dating to the last decades of the century hugely influenced how the Gospels, describing events earlier in the century, were composed. The point is that all four canonical Gospels took form after the Roman destruction of the Temple, after the rivalry between surviving groups of Jews began to calcify, in the deadly context of massive war. The war with Rome sparked civil war among Jews, and the Gospels are the literature of that civil war.41 “The Jews” portrayed by evangelists as the mortal enemy of Jesus in about the year 30 were enemies of—if anyone—the followers of Jesus five decades later.
The point for us, though, lies in the way in which the Temple defines the very center of this conflict. Since the Gospels were all written during the catastrophic years in which Jews were traumatized by the loss of the Temple of Jerusalem, it would be odd if that crisis were not reflected in how the story of Jesus was told, since the entire point of composition just then was to put Jesus forward as the solution to the problem of the destroyed Temple. The Jewish experience during the savage violence of what I presume to call the first Holocaust, in other words, could be expected, in the scales of narrative composition, to weigh as much as, if not more than, the remembered actualities of Jesus’ life four decades earlier. The crisis of Temple destruction in 70 was enough for the Jesus people to put the Temple at the center of their explanations of his meaning—and they did. We will see more of this.
Humans are forever on the hunt for meaning, but brute experience can force radical breakthroughs into other orders of existence. The religious wars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, in which tens of millions of Protestants and Catholics slaughtered one another in the name of God, came to the hyper-violent climax of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). That paroxysm of killing, in which something like eight million persons died, led in short order to a new politics—distilled in the idea of the separation of church and state, a pillar of democratic liberalism—while simultaneously advancing a new intellectual culture: the scientific revolution.43 The total-war violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars, in which more than one hundred million died, led in Europe to a Continental repudiation of narrow nationalism and a broad rejection of war as an instrument of political power—the foundational principles of the European Union.
Savage war generates, in reaction, new ideas. This principle undergirds the line of thinking here—that the Roman War against the Jews prompted radical shifts in the religious imagination of Jews. The shifts were taken as revelations from God. But this was the pattern established in the religious DNA of Israel by the Babylonian War, which, as we saw, generated the essential character of Jewish religion in the first place. In the centuries after Babylon, Israel found itself under one heel after another, a succession of oppressors—Persians, Greeks, and Hellenized Egyptians—against whom Jews launched no significant resistance. But then came the Greco-Syrian Seleucids and the next Jewish war, the so-called Maccabean Revolt (167–160 B.C.E.), resulting in the next shift in the religious imagination of Jews.
Again, the war produced wartime literature, indeed a new genre of it—the so-called apocalyptic, epitomized by the book of Daniel.44 The author of that text, an unnamed pious Jew writing in Aramaic, presented a wildly imaginative rendering of otherworldly dreads, hopes, and expectations—redemptive interpretations of his present tribulations. In Daniel, six stories set during the Babylonian Captivity, centuries before the book was written, describe the ways in which Jews faithfully clung to their identity as God’s people during that previous Jewish war. Then, in four ecstatic visions, the coming triumph of the “saints” is promised. Daniel is full of dreamlike fancies and horrors, an almost psychedelic hallucination, with figures flying through the air, men surviving a fiery furnace, the man Daniel surviving lions because “God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths”45—visions so exotic as themselves to require deciphering by angels. The book of Daniel was sparked by an expression of enraged reaction to the Seleucid desecration of, yes, the Temple—“the abomination that makes desolate.”46
But at bottom, the apocalyptic vision was a mode of turning pure destruction into creative transformation. “And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered . . . and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.”47 Bracing and consoling a people who, when violence flared, inevitably found themselves endangered and beleaguered, the apocalyptic vision insisted that transcendent intervention was about to occur, changing a broken and suffering world into a realm of peace and joy, with Israel at its center. “Go your way till the end; and you shall rest, and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.”48 Violence would be redeemed by God’s act, and hopeless military odds would be reversed by God’s direct interruption of history. The vision was both realistic—acknowledging present violence—and hopeful, in that it insisted that the violence would not be vindicated in the end. The book of Daniel, usually dated to about 160 B.C.E., is the classic work of Jewish apocalypticism, searing the imagination of Israel across each of the two centuries before and after Jesus. Josephus, calling the figure Daniel “one of the greatest of the prophets,” said the book was hugely influential among Jews in that era.49 No surprise, therefore, that Jesus’ core meaning was constructed out of materials drawn from this work. We will see more of this.
The portrait of Jesus Christ given in the Gospels grows as much out of the stresses of war as did the already defining texts of Jewish religious understanding, from Jeremiah to Daniel. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Gospel of Mark, which is reliably dated by scholars, as noted, to about the year 70—a time when, after more than two years of Roman rampage throughout Palestine, all hell broke loose in Jerusalem. Mark is the main source of, and template for, the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark’s rendering of Jesus, and its proclamation of his meaning as the “Christ,” are the central pillars of the Christian imagination. Yet Mark is rarely read in the context of the war raging outside the cell in which it was composed—an omission we found unthinkable in the case of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison. A foregrounding eye on the Roman War against the Jews must change the Christian reading.
The point to emphasize is that the author of Mark was writing as the legion’s phalanxes closed in on Jerusalem, setting up the ring of crucifixes around the Temple Mount and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Jews.50 If in the Gospel of Mark, to start with the largest point, Jesus is portrayed as obsessed with the traumas of the End Time, it may be because, as an apocalyptic messianic figure, that was indeed the main note of his preaching when he was alive. The early sources on which the author of Mark drew seem to have emphatically interpreted Jesus within the Jewish apocalyptic genre, especially Daniel, whether that interpretation began with Jesus himself or with those who came after him.
Yet however much Mark drew on the visions of Daniel, his text could not be more different. While Jesus describes in vivid detail scenes right out of an apocalyptic End Time, he is shown doing so without a hint of hallucination—not “vision,” but dead-on description. The Gospel is starkly realistic, striking for its spare, objective reportage. Taking seriously the context out of which this text emerged leads inexorably to the thought that Jesus was rendered by Mark as obsessed with End Time traumas not only—or even mainly—because of literary influences from preexistent Jewish apocalyptic genres like Daniel, but because the catastrophic End Time seemed at hand as Mark’s story was told. The Roman assault of 70, that is, could well have felt, to those who experienced it, like the end of the world.
Chapter 13 of Mark is the heart of it, and what Jesus is shown offering at great length there can be read, in fact, as an almost literal description of what was happening to the people for whom Mark was written. Horrors—not hallucination. The chapter begins with verses already referred to, the “great buildings” of the Temple thrown down, “not one stone left upon another.” In fact, the Roman destruction of the Temple was by fire, not block-by-block demolition, but that takes nothing from the trauma Jesus describes. The ruination of the Holy of Holies is the point, and the factual destruction of the Temple in 70 is the historical background for the poignant advice that Jesus is shown offering to his frightened disciples, less to those in front of him than to his followers a generation later: “Take heed that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.”
Here we have reference to those war-generated disputes between and among Jews, with Zealots not hesitating to kill those they regarded as collaborators or as cowards. Self-anointed Messiahs appeared in abundance during the mayhem, and if you were not with them, they were against you. In the dominant Christian memory, these verses of antagonism are read as if the assaults are coming from “Jews” attacking the followers of Jesus as such, but the assaults at issue actually—that is, when Mark is written—come from two directions: from warrior Jews attacking Jews not as Jesus people, but as rejecters of the anti-Roman rebellion; and, always, assaults coming indiscriminately from Romans, who were crucifying five hundred Jews every day.51
Listen to Jesus, forewarning: “For they will deliver you up to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues . . . Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.”52
Unlike other Gospels, Mark does not offer any account of the origins of Jesus, but is satisfied simply to announce his arrival “from Nazareth of Galilee.”53 Recall that the Roman War against the Jews began in Galilee, a rocky, mountainous region difficult to subdue. In 67 and 68, some sixty thousand legionaries killed and enslaved something like 100,000 Jews, mostly in Galilee, before moving on to the siege of Jerusalem. Scholars are divided as to where Mark was written, and to whom it was addressed. One ancient tradition locates both the author and the readership in Rome, with the Gospel taken as an account reflecting the views and experiences of Jesus’ favored apostle, Peter, whose intimate friend “Mark” was taken to be.54 That tradition nicely serves the primordial purpose of elevating Peter as the Church’s mythic first leader, as if something like the papacy already existed. But the tradition does not address the contradiction embedded in Mark’s overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Peter, which alone is enough to cast doubt on the idea that the Gospel represents Peter’s point of view. We will see more of this below.
But, in fact, the author of Mark is necessarily anonymous, and the community for whom the text was written is uncertain.55 The Gospel was written in Greek, but internal evidence suggests that the writer was a Palestinian Jew whose first language was Aramaic. He was probably a resident of Jerusalem. Reading the texts in the light of what was befalling Jerusalem just then, it makes sense that those being addressed were actively involved in the trauma. If one assumes that they were Jesus people clustered in Galilee, at remove from the defense of Jerusalem but still at the mercy of Roman forces as well as roving bands of Jewish Zealots, the vividness of Jesus’ description of trouble takes on a compelling edge. For those people were, above all, in the tormented thick of the complications that went with both the Roman assault and the vengeful punishment inflicted on noncombatant Jews by fellow Jews engaged in the fight.
“Alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days!” Jesus laments. “For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation which God created until now.”56
If the Gospel of Mark represented the point of view of Peter, it is exceedingly unlikely that it would have portrayed Peter as it does. While effectively pictured as the one on whom Jesus most depended, Peter is also rendered as vain, buffoonish, impulsive, sadly lacking in courage. Peter is honored to have been given his special name by Jesus: “Simon whom he surnamed Peter.”57 But the resounding affirmation that accompanies that name change in the later text Matthew—“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”58—is nowhere in evidence in Mark. Peter, with James and John, is the special witness of the Transfiguration: “and there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking to Jesus.” But Mark’s Peter is immediately shown to misunderstand the meaning of this fleeting epiphany, for he responds by saying, “Master . . . let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” The author of Mark comments, “For he did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid.”59
It falls to Peter to answer the momentous question posed by Jesus: “ ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Christ.’ ” But no sooner has the apostle put this astounding understanding into words than he mortally offends Jesus, who has just forecast what is coming, for Jesus is soon to face suffering and persecution. Peter, who will have none of such tribulation, either denying it or wanting distance from it, “took him, and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he [ Jesus] rebuked Peter, and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.’ ”60
Then, in the thick of the suffering Peter wanted nothing to do with, he is, again with James and John, privileged, nevertheless, to be invited by Jesus to share in the moment of greatest anguish: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death,” Jesus confides, an extraordinary admission. He asks the three to “watch” with him, but then, “he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, ‘Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?’ ” Twice more, Jesus returns to find Peter and the others sleeping. “And he came a third time, and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough.’ ”61
If Peter fell asleep three times, that was nothing next to the threefold betrayal that came then. At the Last Supper, in response to Jesus’ prediction that “you will all fall away,” Peter arrogantly declares, “Even though they all fall away, I will not.” Jesus’ response is the most drastic personal statement in the entire Gospel: “And Jesus said to him, ‘Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ But he [Peter] said vehemently, ‘If I must die with you, I will not deny you.’ ”62 And then, of course, with exquisitely belabored detail, Mark renders the three denials of Peter—“I do not know this man of whom you speak”—as the worst blows struck against Jesus. When the cock crowed a second time, Peter “broke down and wept.”63 As a matter of narrative gravity, these denials weigh more than the betrayal by Judas.
All of the intimate friends of Jesus are portrayed in Mark as unreliable, doltish cowards. As Jesus hung on the cross, none of his chosen inner circle were present, only “women looking on from afar.”64 The Gospel of John, written three decades after Mark and in different circumstances, describes a poignant post-Resurrection reunion of the Lord with his dear friend Peter, where the threefold betrayal is reversed as Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?”—a beautiful ritual of forgiveness and reconciliation, of which we will see more. But Mark offers no such consoling denouement. Instead, Mark ends with the breach between Jesus and Peter, and the others—except for the women—entirely unhealed. This Gospel seems to have as its central subject the abject failure of the friends of Jesus to support him. What is going on here?
Mark’s overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Peter has not been highlighted in a Church that subsequently mythologized Peter as a first “pope.” Texts from other Gospels—especially Matthew’s resounding “keys of the kingdom” commission—are preferred. When Mark’s negative portrait of Peter has been directly reckoned with, the usual explanation has involved early Church rivalries, as if the Christian community based, say, in Syria and associated with the apostle John, or in Asia Minor and associated with the missionary Paul, was out to discredit the community most associated with Peter, whether Jerusalem or Rome. The denigration of Peter, in that case, would undercut the prestige of the community attached to him—rather like cities competing for the Olympics.
But if we keep our focus on the Roman War as the defining key to Jesus actually, there is a far simpler explanation for this frankly shocking portrait of Peter as a cowardly, unreliable man. If the Gospel of Mark was addressed to a frightened, demoralized collective of Jesus people holed up in Galilee, to people threatened on all sides by marauding Romans, revenge-seeking Jewish Zealots, or Jews associated with rabbis who insisted that acceptance of the false Messiah Jesus threatened the survival of what remained of Judaism; and if those Jesus people, additionally, bore the burden of guilt at their failure to join in the anti-Roman resistance, or were tempted to believe the accusations of cowardice hurled at them by their fellow Jews; and if they had even lost faith in their Lord, whose rescuing return had yet to come about—well, what in the world would good news look like to such people? In this context, the message of Mark was straightforward: Do not feel guilty because you have faltered in the faith; do not feel disqualified because you have lost hope; do not count yourselves lost—because look! The most intimate friends of Jesus behaved in exactly the same way, including, especially, the exalted Peter, whose name everyone reveres. What you need to hear in this time of grotesque tribulation is that Jesus extends his call not to heroes but to cowards, who fail him. An honest reckoning with such failure is the starting point of discipleship.65
In reading the Gospel of Mark, or hearing it read, such people would have had their fears transformed, for this Gospel’s very subject is the flawed condition of all. Peter’s rejection of the suffering and persecution that Jesus knows awaits him would have rung with pointed resonance for people who were—even as they read this text—themselves facing just such suffering and persecution, and wanting no more of it. Indeed, they would have taken special note of what Mark describes as following directly on the rebuke of Peter for his rejection of the Lord’s suffering, where Jesus called “to himself the multitude with his disciples and said to them, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ ”66
Recall that as this verse was written, ten thousand crosses were ringing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. That is what the Christians in Galilee would have known, and that is what would have defined their dread. The cross was no mere religious symbol to them, as the author of Mark knew very well when he put that word in Jesus’ mouth. Mark’s readers were themselves already undergoing what, in the Gospel, Jesus predicts for them, and that alone would have offered consolation. Their suffering itself was a way of drawing close to their Lord—“you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.”67 While such words did not relieve their suffering, the words changed its meaning.
Yet in Galilee, perhaps the violence of Rome was not what threatened most, nor was assault from parties of fellow Jews. What threatened most might have been the Jesus people’s own sense of unworthiness in the face of what they suffered; how it generated disputes among themselves; and how it made undeniable the recognition that, in the terrible context of omnidirectional wars—fratricidal and imperial both—they had failed and failed again. Instead of standing up to Rome, they hid. Instead of standing up to their fellow Jews, they equivocated. Perhaps they informed on one another. Became collaborators. Ran off to caves in the desert. Or committed suicide, or helped others to do so. Perhaps they betrayed members of their own families, as Jesus himself foresaw: “Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.”68
They looked out for their own skin. They behaved as beleaguered, terrified humans always do. They were sinners, and knew it. To that condition, the Gospel spoke directly. Peter was a sinner. And he was their hero. The Lord knew precisely what sort of man Peter was, and chose him anyway. More than that, Jesus loved him. If flawed Peter could answer the call to discipleship—this was not Mark speaking, but Jesus himself—so could they.69
The mass violence inflicted by the Romans in 70 demanded this text. The catastrophe, centered on the destruction of the Temple, was forcing the Jesus people to look back on their memories, prayers, collected sayings, and stories in a new light. So illuminated, the people saw themselves as never before, because, as never before, they saw their Lord. Mark was first to shine that particular light on the figure of Jesus. It was light cast by the fires of war.
