It is hardly necessary to point out that in the contemporary Western world the idea of the death penalty is generally abhorred. Many see it as judicial murder. Disapproval of capital punishment is quietly backed by the United Nations’ call for a moratorium on executions in the countries where it is still on the statute book, and the European Union has outlawed it. However, this 21st-century outlook stands in stark contrast with the worldview expressed in biblical and late antique Judaism, whose religious and social ethics were inherited by nascent Christianity.

The legal systems of Jewish antiquity were developed in two periods: the biblical era, reflected in the books of the Hebrew Scripture (c. 1000-500 BCE), and the age of the Rabbis, based on the earliest code, the Mishnah, and further developed in the Talmud (c. 200-500 CE). The intervening epoch, known also as the Second Temple period, represented by the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha or pseudonymous extra-biblical writings, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the monumental literary output of Flavius Josephus (37-c. 100 CE), takes us down to the end of the first century of the Common Era. The question of crucifixion, as part of Jewish penal law, arose during those centuries and left copious marks not only in Josephus, but also in the Targums, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Scriptures, which although reaching their finally redacted form between the third and seventh centuries CE, preserve much earlier, at times pre-Christian, traditions.

The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament of the Christians, does not provide a systematic presentation of criminal law and the relevant passages must be collected from various places in four books of the Pentateuch: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Dispersed in them figure no fewer than eight types of offence punishable by death.

The first category comprises transgressions against God and the Jewish religion: idolatry, blasphemy, sorcery and the breaking of the Sabbath. Idolatry in its various forms entails the worshipping of deities other than the God of Israel, or the attempt by false prophets or even by members of one’s family to induce Jews to embrace the cult of other gods. Blasphemy amounts to cursing or reviling the name of God by an Israelite or even an alien. Sorcery, enacted by male or female practitioners, consists of prohibited rites with a view to obtaining forbidden effects, such as recalling the spirit of the dead from the underworld. Finally, the breaking of the Sabbath is achieved by the performance of acts qualified as work. 

The second class of capital sentences punishes offences committed against human beings. To these belong premeditated murder legislated on in Exodus, Leviticus and in greater detail Numbers, and the kidnapping of a free Israelite with the intention to turn him into a slave. The death sentence also awaited the youth who gravely misbehaved towards his parents, one who hit or cursed his father or mother or constantly disobeyed them, and thus became what the Bible calls a “stubborn and rebellious son”. 

The last category includes various sexual transgressions: the death penalty was pronounced on both parties found guilty of adultery. The same fate was decreed for the man guilty of incest with his stepmother, his daughter-in-law or his sister, whether the daughter of his father or his mother, and for someone who had married both a girl and her mother; for a priest’s daughter who had become a whore; for people, either male or female, who had committed bestiality, that is, sexual contact with an animal. Death was to be inflicted on both humans and beasts. Finally — dare I formulate this in this age of homosexual rehabilitation? — anyone committing a male homosexual act was to be executed. The Hebrew Bible (and St Paul) considered gay sex an abomination, although curiously lesbianism is nowhere legislated against in Scripture. 

Only two forms of capital punishment are specified in the Bible-stoning and burning. Stoning was the most common mode of execution. It was administered by the whole community, with the two prosecution witnesses starting the stone-throwing. It was laid down as the punishment for idolatry, blasphemy, the profanation of the Sabbath, the crime of being a “stubborn and rebellious son”, the non-disclosure by a bride that she was no longer a virgin, and sexual intercourse forced on an engaged virgin by a man in town. The reference to the town as opposed to the countryside implies that if the woman had cried out for help someone might have come to her rescue.

It should be noted that, according to Deuteronomy, the dead body of the person executed by stoning was to be “hanged” on a tree to serve as an example to the community, and was to stay there until sunset when it had to be taken down and buried. The important distinction between hanging a cadaver and hanging a living person as a death penalty will come up presently. 

Death by burning was pronounced for two kinds of sexual offences: for marrying simultaneously a woman and her mother, and for the adoption of the lifestyle of a prostitute by a priest’s daughter. 

No doubt because the priestly legislators of the Bible were focused on religion rather than on civic duties, no crimes against the Jewish state or its ruler are dealt with in the Mosaic Law.

After the closure of biblical legislation, new customs developed and are reflected in the literature of the Second Temple era (c. 500 BCE-100 CE), some Dead Sea Scrolls, Flavius Josephus and the Aramaic Targums supplying important sporadic evidence, but for a more systematic presentation of the legal concepts of the rabbis we have to wait until the compilation of tractate Sanhedrin of the Mishnah somewhere around 200 CE.

As a preliminary to the evaluation of the earliest stages of rabbinic legislation formulated in Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:1, it must be recalled that after the destruction by the Romans in 70 CE of Jerusalem and the consequent disappearance of the Judaean state institutions, Rome deprived Jewish law courts of capital jurisdiction. However, these courts quietly pretended that they still possessed it. Hence they continued to legislate and redefined stoning and burning. They even added two new forms of death penalties to those of the Bible: beheading and strangling. At the same time, the rabbis shied away from the idea of actually condemning a Jew to death and described as bloodthirsty the tribunal that imposed one capital sentence a year.

The rabbinic stoning process takes the condemned outside the town, to the edge of a slight elevation twice the height of a man, say 3.5 metres. One witness pushed the guilty person so that he/she fell down from the ridge. If the fall resulted in death, the “stoning” was completed. If not, the second witness dropped a large stone on the heart of the condemned. If this was still not enough, the whole community went on throwing stones until death ensued. Stoning was followed by the ritual hanging of the body on a tree or gibbet until the evening.

While the Bible takes the burning to death of a criminal in the literal sense on a pile of wood, Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:2 defines this mode of execution differently. The condemned was immobilised by being put into dung up to the knees. The two witnesses then started to strangle him/her, forcing the man or woman to gape and thus allow the insertion of a lethal burning “wick” into the mouth. According to the Talmud, this wick was in fact hot melted lead.

Beheading was a mode of execution reserved for the civil authority. The Bible never refers to decapitation, but we know that it was practised not only by Rome but also by Herodian rulers. King Herod Agrippa I (41-44 CE), for example, is reported to have ordered the execution with the sword of the apostle James, son of Zebedee.

Strangling was the second rabbinic innovation without scriptural precedent. Herod the Great used it against members of his family. Hyrcanus II, the grandfather of his wife Mariamme, and two of his sons by Mariamme, Alexander and Aristobulus, were the victims of this kind of execution. The Mishnaic strangulation, like burning, entails the immobilisation of the condemned in dung, with the two witnesses acting as executioners by pulling the rope until the condemned’s breathing stopped.

Why did the rabbis introduce this new manner of execution? Paul Winter came up with the interesting suggestion that after 70 CE, when Rome no longer granted capital jurisdiction to Jewish tribunals, strangling, unlike stoning, could be performed in secret. He notes that as late as the middle of the third century CE, the Church Father Origen (c. 185-254 CE) mentions that Jewish courts continued to condemn and execute criminals in a half-secret, half-open manner. “Trials are held secretly according to the Law,” he writes in his Letter to Julius Africanus (§20), “and some are condemned to death. This is done neither in complete openness, nor without the knowledge of the [Roman] ruler.”

From the beginning of the Common Era, crucifixion as a form of death penalty was lurking in the extant Jewish literature, but for a combination of reasons was swept under the carpet. It evoked bitter memories among Jews during the late Second Temple era, when many patriotic inhabitants of the Holy Land ended their lives on Roman crosses. We learn from Josephus that the violent repression of the rebellion which followed the death of Herod the Great (4 BCE) involved mass crucifixions, 2,000 in one case, ordered by the general of the Roman forces, Varus, the governor of Syria. 

During the final stages of the siege of Jerusalem in 69-70 CE, when crowds of rebels sought to escape from the city, no fewer than 500 captured Jews were crucified every day so that, to quote Josephus, “there was not enough room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies”. Whether the remains of a crucified man whose bones were discovered in Jerusalem in 1968 in an ossuary inscribed with the name of Yohanan son of Ezekiel were one of these we cannot say, but the nail piercing his anklebone, to which bits of olive wood are still attached, and his broken shinbones clearly indicate how Yohanan died.

Not surprisingly, the words “cross” and “to crucify” turned into a kind of taboo until, it would seem, quite recent times. For instance, the commonly used Hebrew/Aramaic dictionary to rabbinic literature compiled by Marcus Jastrow (1903) translates the relevant terms (tslb, tslybh) as “to hang, impale” and “hanging, impaling”, whereas Michael Sokoloff’s parallel work, published in 1990, almost always gives “crucifixion” as the appropriate meaning. If the connection between the cross and Jesus, and its anti-Semitic reverberation inspired by the popular cry, “Crucify him, crucify him”, are also taken into account, it is easy to grasp why the subject was kept under cover in Jewish circles.

Nevertheless two significant references to crucifixion from outside the Mishnaic-Talmudic tradition survived in the sources. One is buried in the rarely used Targum of Ruth. Commenting on Ruth 1:17, the Aramaic interpreter lists the death penalties codified in the Mishnah-stoning, burning, beheading — but substitutes for strangling tselibat qissa, “crucifixion on the tree”, thus turning the cross into a Jewish instrument of death penalty. The second source is Flavius Josephus, a non-rabbinic author, who reports that the Hasmonaean priest-king Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE) crucified 800 of his political opponents. The episode could be taken, not as the outcome of due legal process, but as a horrible act of cruelty, and some Jewish historians of the last century, mistrusting Josephus, declared the anecdote unhistorical. However, the discovery of two Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-20th century has completely changed the perspective. 

The Qumran Commentary on Nahum, officially published in 1968 in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert V by John Allegro, but released in a preliminary study already in 1956, contains according to Allegro’s interpretation a reference to the death on the cross of the Teacher of Righteousness, the founder of the Dead Sea community, who in Allegro’s understanding prefigured the crucified Jesus. Unanimously rejecting Allegro’s interpretation, scholarly consensus maintains that the Commentary speaks in the usual figurative language of the Qumran exegesis of prophecy, of the Jewish group of the Pharisees, called “the seekers of smooth things” (teachers pretending to present the harsh truths of the Law as easy and appealing). This party is said to have invited the Seleucid (Syrian Greek) king Demetrius (named in the fragment and identified by historians as Demetrius III) to attack Jerusalem and defeat their enemy, the Jewish ruler alluded to with the sobriquet, “the furious young lion”, that is, Alexander Jannaeus. The plan of the Pharisee “seekers” misfired and Jannaeus took his revenge on them and “hanged men alive on the tree”. 

This metaphorical imagery neatly reflects the gruesome account of the historian Josephus, who reports that after the withdrawal of Demetrius, Jannaeus crucified 800 of his Pharisee adversaries for the crime of encouraging the Syrian king to attack Jerusalem, and made them watch from the cross the massacre of their wives and children. In legal terms, this macabre story presents crucifixion as the penalty for betraying king and country.

The publication of the Nahum Commentary was followed in 1977 by that of the Qumran Temple Scroll, purporting to be direct revelation by God to Moses, and representing a rearranged and enlarged version of the Law from the first half of the second century BCE. Among the many previously unregistered rules included in it, one concerns the Jew who “delivers his people to a foreign nation”, and another someone who “curses his people” among foreigners. Both are to be sentenced to the same capital punishment: “You shall hang him on a tree and he shall die.” In the light of this legislation, Jannaeus simply applied to the 800 Pharisees the existing Jewish law for treason: crucifixion.

But does “to hang” (the Hebrew talah of the Dead Sea texts) mean “to crucify” rather than to hang someone by the neck? To the best of my knowledge, hanging by the neck never appears as a Jewish method of execution either in Scripture or in the Mishnah and is not a synonym for rabbinic strangling. All the three extant examples describe suicides, intended or actual: the New Testament reference, from Matthew, concerns Judas. 

To find the clue, one has to start with Deuteronomy 21:22, ordering the display of the dead body of a stoned person tied to a tree or some kind of pole. By contrast, execution by “hanging” entails the affixing of someone alive to the wooden gibbet until death ensues. Whether the criminal was attached to the tree by means of a rope or with nails is not specified. Judging from Josephus’s numerous mentions of Roman executions, the Pharisees executed by Jannaeus were crucified. By his time and in his writings, late first century CE, the Greek anastaurôsai = crucify from stauros = cross, left no possible room for doubt. 

A survey of Josephus’s use of the Greek verbs (stauroô and anastauroô) shows that they do not occur only apropos of executions from the Roman era, but cover the entire narrative of Jewish Antiquities. Josephus used the word to render the “hanging” of the chief baker by Pharaoh, as do also the Aramaic Targums with their translation of “to hang” by tselab. In Josephus’s terminology, the Persian kings Cyrus and Artaxerxes also threaten or actually implement crucifixion. In the well-known scriptural story of the capital sentence pronounced on Haman by the Persian king, the Hebrew talah (to hang) on a 50 cubit (22.5 metre) high tree, Jewish Antiquities once more opts for the Greek verb “to crucify” as it does also in the case of Haman’s sons. In Maccabees, the Syrian Greeks simply cause faithful Jews to “die”; in Josephus they crucify them. Finally in the momentous Jannaeus account the same word describes the same death penalty.

In the episode of idolatry committed by a large group of Israelites, seduced by Moabite women in Numbers 25, Moses himself issued the following capital sentence for the guilty leaders: “Take all the chiefs of the people and put them to death.” Here the Palestinian Targums as well as the early rabbinic commentary Sifre unhesitatingly interpret Numbers 25:4 with the help of the Hebrew/ Aramaic verbs tsalab and tselab, words that by the early period of the Christian era definitely meant “to crucify”. If so, in their eyes crucifixion was a death penalty ordered by God and implemented by Moses, as the divine Law rewritten in the Temple Scroll later restated. Also in the Second Book of Samuel, King David hands over for execution the seven sons of his predecessor Saul. Once again the Aramaic Targum assumes that they were crucified (tselab). In short, the hypothesis is confirmed that in the late Second Temple period, during the Maccabaean-Hasmonaean rule (c. 160-60 BCE), death penalty by crucifixion was part of Jewish penal legislation. 

I believe that many of my general statements about the employment of the Greek and Aramaic terms by Josephus and the Targums as strictly applicable to crucifixion would be strongly contested by the Swedish scholar Gunnar Samuelsson, author of a very learned, not to say pedantic, recent doctoral dissertation on the subject published in 2011. Crucifixion in Late Antiquity: An Inquiry into the Background and Significance of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion presents a full survey of the entire Greek, Latin and Hebrew, biblical and early Jewish literature, from Homer (c. 8th century BCE) to Josephus and the New Testament (c. 100 CE).

Yet his conclusion, to me rather unsatisfactory, questions whether any of the descriptions, even the Gospel records of the execution of Jesus, contain a reliable definition of what crucifixion really was. A journalist’s reading of Samuelsson’s thesis led to the weird headline in the Daily Telegraph that it was not on the cross that Jesus died. 

The trouble with the method of Samuelsson and of similar sceptics is that, like the typical 19th-century German academic, they sit at their desks and absorb the smallest details discoverable in books, but have no time or inclination to face up to reality. Josephus and the early Targumists knew what crucifixion was from eyewitness experience. During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Josephus used to walk among crosses and one day he even obtained the release of three of his friends from the gibbet. For two of them it was too late, despite the efforts of the physicians, but the third survived. So when he speaks of crucifixion, he means what he says, though he may use the first-century CE notion anachronistically about the “crucifixion” of Pharaoh’s head baker.

Finally, let us speculate for a moment and ask whether the chief priests of Jerusalem, if they had the power in c. 30 CE to apply the Jewish law incorporated in the Qumran Temple Scroll, might have condemned Jesus to crucifixion. Could Jesus have been charged with betrayal, endangering the wellbeing, or even survival, of the Judaean people? In their view, pretending to be the promised Messiah, Jesus could easily have inspired a rebellion against the Emperor, provoking a massive and violent Roman repression. He would thus have betrayed the interests and endangered the survival of his people. His political crime should have been punished by crucifixion in the light of the legislation enacted in the Temple Scroll.

Clearly, the chief priests of the Gospels were not familiar with this legislation, nor would they have accepted it as binding in their day. Nevertheless they sought to avoid personal responsibility, and according to the New Testament trial accounts of questionable historicity, they decided to pass the buck and let Pilate do the dirty work.

The post Was Crucifixion a Jewish Penalty? appeared first on Standpoint.

According to biblical tradition the principal part of the Law, the Decalogue was chiselled on two stone tablets by God himself. He even re-engraved them after Moses had smashed the first set of tablets to pieces on witnessing the Jews worshipping the golden calf. The rest of the Torah, the five scrolls of Pentateuch, was spoken by God to Moses, who recorded the divine revelation in the Book of the Law, referred to later as the Law of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). This Law was kept in the Temple before its destruction in 586 BCE. It was taken to exile in Babylonia by the priests and brought back to Jerusalem by Ezra the Scribe in the fifth century BCE. He promulgated it to the people and the Levites read it out and followed up the reading by an interpretation (Nehemiah 8:1-8).

As far as the Prophets are concerned, thanks to chapter 36 of the Book of Jeremiah, we learn details regarding the production of a prophetic book. Jeremiah, having received the divine message, dictated its words to his scribe Baruch, who wrote them down with ink on a leather scroll. The prophet presented this scroll to King Jehoiakim but the monarch disliked the message critical of Jerusalem, when it was read to him by one of his courtiers. He cut the scroll to pieces and threw them in the fireplace. Jeremiah repeated the prophecies to Baruch who prepared a new scroll. 

A further important detail about the preservation of the Bible in antiquity is mentioned in the Talmud, which reports that three master copies of the Torah were deposited in the Temple for consultation in case of doubt about a reading. This implies that the ancient rabbis were aware of the existence of variants in the biblical manuscripts. 

The oldest documents that include a scriptural citation are two silver amulets with minor variations of the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24-26. They are dated from c. 600 BCE and were found in a tomb at Ketef Hinnom, southwest of Jerusalem in 1979. The earlier discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 11 caves in the region of Qumran yielded a substantial amount of Old Testament remains. The most ancient leather fragment belongs to the Book of Samuel and is dated from the middle of the third century BCE. Another manuscript of the same book originates from 100-75 BCE. The complete Isaiah scroll comes from 50-25 BCE. On the whole, the 225 Qumran biblical documents surviving as scrolls and fragments, range from the middle of the third century BCE to 68 CE when, following the Roman conquest, sectarian life and scribal activity came to an end on the Qumran site. All the books of the Old Testament with the exception of Esther are attested in the 11 caves. There are four scrolls (Leviticus, two Isaiah and Psalms) and thousands of fragments. Some of the biblical books existed at Qumran in several copies. We have 36 manuscripts of the Psalms, 35 of Deuteronomy, 23 of Genesis, 21 of Isaiah.

These discoveries between 1947 and 1956 and in 1979 have entirely altered our perception of the biblical text. Before Qumran, the earliest known complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, came from 1008 CE. The highly authoritative but incomplete Aleppo Codex was copied in the tenth century. Earlier biblical manuscripts were discarded by the Jews as they lacked the work of the early medieval biblical experts, the Masoretes or guardians of tradition, who in order to fix the meaning of the scriptures, provided the original consonantal text with vowel signs. Consonants suffice to read and understand Hebrew and even modern Hebrew texts are devoid of vowels. 

Codices containing the whole ancient Greek translation of the Bible, known as the Septuagint, are considerably older than the Hebrew Leningrad Codex from the 11th century: the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus go back to the fourth century CE. In fact, most Qumran biblical remains precede by more than a millennium the oldest complete Hebrew Bible previously known. 

During the Babylonian captivity (586-539 BCE) Hebrew largely ceased to be the vernacular spoken by the exiled Jews and was soon replaced by Aramaic, the international language of the Persian empire. Even some parts of the Old Testament (sections of Ezra and Daniel) exist only in Aramaic. If the interpretation of the Law of Moses by the Levites, members of the priestly tribe, at the great ceremony presided over by Ezra signifies translation, the Aramaic rendering of the Bible, called Targum, goes back as far as the mid-fifth century BCE. The earliest Targum texts come from Qumran. Two small Aramaic fragments from Leviticus and Job have been found in Cave 4. The Polish Scrolls scholar, J.T. Milik, dates the former to the late second century BCE and the latter to the middle of the first century CE. Cave 11 has yielded a somewhat longer fragmentary Targum, of Job, which originates from the middle of the first century CE. All the Qumran Targums display some variations compared to the original Hebrew. One renders “the Holy” as “the House of Holiness”, as do also the later Targums. The translation is not always literal. As none of the corresponding Hebrew extracts has survived at Qumran, it is impossible to establish whether the differences are due to the translator or to variant readings in the original text.

Jewish tradition places the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch by Onkelos to the late first or early second century CE and the Targum of the Prophets by Jonathan to the first century CE. Both Onkelos and Jonathan are fairly literal, except in the poetic passages. The present form of the Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch (Codex Neofiti, Fragmentary Targum and Pseudo-Jonathan), filled with exegetical supplements, are somewhat later. Pseudo-Jonathan was revised up to the seventh century CE, but they were all redacted between the second to the fourth century CE and have preserved much earlier tradition. Onkelos is sometimes associated with Aquila, the second century CE literal translator of the Greek Bible. 

The Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures was produced for the use of the Jews living in the Hellenistic diaspora. It appears to have started in Alexandria in Egypt probably in the third century BCE. According to the legendary account included in the Letter of Aristeas, a Jewish-Greek document from 150-100 BCE, the translation of the Torah of the Jews into Greek was prompted by King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-247 BCE), who wanted to store the legal wisdom of all the nations in his library. Therefore he asked the High Priest in Jerusalem to supply him with translators. Seventy-two Greek-speaking learned men were dispatched to the nearby island of Pharos to work undisturbed. Supervised by Demetrius, the Alexandrian head librarian, they consulted each other and, after comparing their renderings, produced an agreed translation.

Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BCE-40 CE) offers a more miraculous account. King Ptolemy decided to have the Law of the Jews translated from Chaldaean (Hebrew) into Greek. The High Priest of Jerusalem sent wise interpreters and they were installed on the peaceful island of Pharos. There, possessed by the Spirit, they all ended up with literally the same correct Greek rendering, produced not by translators but by prophets and priests of mysteries. The purpose of the story was to present the Septuagint as an inspired work of the same significance and standing as the Hebrew Bible. The completion of the enterprise was annually celebrated with a Septuagint festival at Pharos. 

In the course of the second and first centuries BCE the Prophets and the Writings were also turned into Greek and the Septuagint was further enriched by the Apocrypha, some of which was originally composed in Greek (Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees), others being translations into Greek from Hebrew (e.g. the Wisdom of Ben Sira or Sirach and others) or Aramaic (possibly Tobit).

Contrary to the claim of Philo, the Septuagint is not always a strictly literal rendering. To bring the Greek closer to the Hebrew, in the second century CE three new Greek versions were produced. 

Before the discovery of the first Qumran scroll in 1947, no Hebrew manuscript of the Bible belonging to the age of Jesus was known, with the sole exception of the small Nash papyrus containing the Ten Commandments and other scriptural extracts, and dated from between the mid-second century BCE and the first century CE. No rules relating to the making of biblical manuscripts have been preserved before the Talmud and the post-Talmudic tractate on the Scribes, the Massekhet Soferim. With the discoveries at Qumran, Masada, and other caves in the Judaean desert, we have now a considerable amount of written documents on leather and papyrus. They offer direct evidence of what ancient Hebrew manuscripts were like. Qumran alone has yielded remains of 930 original documents. We can now deduce from concrete evidence how they were manufactured.  

The main writing material was leather, mostly sheep and goatskin, or papyrus, all specially prepared by craftsmen. The leather used for some of the scrolls found in the caves was probably treated in the two tanneries, one at Qumran and the other at nearby Ain Feshkha. Being more durable, leather was preferred for literary works, especially for biblical manuscripts. We have only a single papyrus fragment of a scriptural book (Isaiah). The rabbis later formally prohibited the use of papyrus for copying the Bible. By contrast, letters, deeds of sale, acknowledgments of debt, and non-biblical religious works were often recorded on papyrus.

As a rule, biblical texts were copied on the hairy side of the skin and rolled up with the text inside so as to be protected. Before setting out to write, the scribe lined the leather sheets horizontally with the help of a reed. Papyrus sheets were often covered with writing on both sides and not lined. Contrary to our custom, the Qumran scribes did not write on the lines, but attached the top of the letters to them. Two vertical lines determined the width of the columns. To protect the writing from repeated finger marks on the opening sheet of a scroll, the scribe left a larger first margin blank. 

A sheet usually contained five columns of text. For a longer work several sheets were needed and, to ensure that they would be sewn together in the correct order, their sequence was discretely marked by the scribe. Some of these numberings are still visible. Mistakes were regularly corrected: either erased or signalled by correction dots. Missing words were inserted between the lines or in the margins.

The title of the work was indicated on the verso of the first sheet. Some of these relating to non-biblical texts have survived and consist of the first few words of the document. As a result, the rolled-up scrolls could be easily identified. The scribes used vegetable ink kept in inkwells made of clay or metal, six of which have survived. Ink containing acid damaged the leather as can be seen in the scroll of the Genesis Apocryphon. The copyists wrote with reed pens which they sharpened with the help of a “scribe’s knife”. 

Most Hebrew and Aramaic Qumran manuscripts were written with the “square” alphabet, which is still in use in modern Hebrew. Twelve biblical manuscripts display the archaic Hebrew alphabet and there are also a few documents employing cryptic scripts. In a number of Qumran scrolls, in order to make it stand out, the four-lettered divine name-YHWH-was written with archaic Hebrew letters, or marked by four prominent dots. 

According to Jewish tradition, it was through direct speech that God conveyed the Bible to its authors. They recorded the dictation and thus the later users, according to strict Jewish (and Christian fundamentalist) orthodoxy, had God’s own words in front of them in the Holy Scriptures. The earliest manuscript evidence we possess varies and does not support the idea of divine dictation. Qumran testifies to a considerable textual elasticity. Unification resulted only later from the intervention of rabbinic authority. First the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible was established and subsequently the meaning was further determined through the introduction of “pointing” or the Masoretic vowel signs, which eliminated equivocation. For example, without vowel signs, the three consonants MLK can be read as MeLeK (king), MaLaK (he reigned) or MoLeK (Molech, a pagan god).

The Qumran biblical manuscripts attest many notable variations. Some of them, called proto-Masoretic, roughly prefigure the later traditional (Masoretic) text. Others recall the somewhat different Hebrew underlying the Samaritan Pentateuch or the Greek of the Septuagint. Fifteen per cent of the texts are non-aligned: they differ from the three previously listed patterns. The Qumran evidence demonstrates that variety preceded textual unity.

How should one judge these textual variants? One must assume that the scribes intended to transmit what they believed to be the correct form of the sacred text and intended to put in their scrolls what was for them the word of God even when these differed from the commonly accepted version. Consequently, unusual readings, which are not obviously interpretative, represent texts preferred by the copyists. 

Some of the variants have doctrinal basis. The Samaritans substitute Samaria for Jerusalem and Mount Gerizim, their sacred mountain, for Mount Zion. The manuscripts mirroring the Hebrew used by the Greek translators of the Septuagint prefer to speak of “angels” rather than “sons of God”. The same verse may exist in shorter and longer versions. For instance for Exodus 10:5 the Masoretic Bible and the Septuagint assert that the locusts “shall eat every tree”. By contrast, the Samaritan Pentateuch and a Qumran fragment substitute for it: the locusts “shall eat every grass of the land and every fruit of the tree”.  

In the case of a poetic passage (Deuteronomy 32:43), the medium length Qumran text constitutes a halfway house between the long Septuagint and the short traditional Masoretic version.

Septuagint Greek

Rejoice, O heavens with him and let all the angels of God worship him.

Rejoice, O nations with his people 

and let all the sons of God declare him mighty.

For he shall avenge the blood of his sons

and shall take revenge on, and pay justice to, his enemies

and shall reward them that hate him. 

Qumran Hebrew

Rejoice, O heavens, with him and all you “gods”, worship him.

For he shall avenge the blood of his sons

and shall take revenge on his enemies

and shall reward them that hate him. 

Masoretic Hebrew

Rejoice, O nations, with his people;

for he avenges the blood of his servants

and takes vengeance on his adversaries. 

In general, biblical poetry allows for more textual freedom than prose, whether it is in the Hebrew itself or in Greek or Aramaic translation. The hand of the ancient Jewish scribe of the Bible was not tied. These scribes were not servile copyists but felt entitled to exercise creative liberty. Flavius Josephus also declared that in retelling the scriptural story he did not add to or omit anything from the Bible. In fact he was regularly doing the opposite to convey what he thought to be the correct meaning of the text. 

A biblical text differing from what has become traditional may have two causes. Either the scribe (or the Greek or Aramaic translator) employed a model, which was not the same as the “official” version. Or the scribe/writer deliberately re-edited his prototype and created a new genre, the “Rewritten” Bible.

The four Qumran manuscripts of the Reworked Pentateuch, dating from the second half of the first century BCE, are considered as an intermediary stage between a re-edited version of the Bible-using synonyms, additions and omissions or changing the word order-and a traditional text enriched with interpretation. The most striking example is the enlarged Song of Miriam. At Exodus 15:22 we read: “Sing to the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” 

However, in the Reworked Pentateuch we have a longer poem in which this opening is followed by seven more lines which are incompletely preserved: “. . . you have despised . . . For pride . . . You are great, a saviour . . . The hope of the enemy has perished and . . . They have perished in the mighty waters, the enemy . . . And lifts up to their height. You have given [a r]ansom . . . he who acts proudly . . .”

Considering the length of similar scriptural songs, those of Moses (Exodus 15:1-17), Deborah (Judges 5:2-31) and Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1-10), it is most unlikely that Miriam’s inspiration dried up after a single verse. In the mind of the scribe the extra lines represented the authentic continuation of the poem, omitted from the traditional Bible. In short, the Reworked Pentateuch should be classified as a revised text of scripture rather than as interpretation.

The Temple Scroll from Cave 11 is considered by some as a sample of Reworked Pentateuch, though it can also be defined as a work of interpretation or a substitute composition for the traditional Jewish Law, the Qumran Torah. Generally dated to the mid-second century BCE, it is probably pre-sectarian, but its close links to the Qumran Damascus Document and to the sect’s liturgical calendar suggests that it was adopted and adapted by the Dead Sea community. 

The Temple Scroll, all 26 feet of it, is the longest Qumran manuscript. It is a fresh composition mostly made up of rearranged long excerpts from the Pentateuch. One of its chief characteristics is the author’s switch: he replaces the biblical revelation of the Torah by the Deity to Moses with a direct presentation of the commandments by God in the first person to the people of Israel. 

See for example Deuteronomy 21:5 set against Temple Scroll 63:3.

Deuteronomy       Temple Scroll 

And the priests, And the priests,

the sons of Levi, the sons of Levi,

shall come forward, shall come forward,

for YHWH your God for I

has chosen them have chosen them

to minister to him to minister to me

and to bless and to bless

in the name of YHWH. in my name.

Moreover, the author of the scroll eliminates duplicate commandments, reorders the biblical laws by topic, as do the later rabbis in the Mishnah (c.200 CE), and introduces new laws such as that regarding the festival of the new oil. The compulsory monogamy imposed on the Jewish king and the introduction of “hanging” (probably crucifixion) as a Jewish death penalty are also novelties of the Temple Scroll. 

There are four types of scripture exegesis among the Qumran writings. The first takes the form of an interpretative synopsis of biblical books. It allows the reader a quick grasp of Genesis and Exodus with regard to the creation, the flood, Pharaoh’s attempt to exterminate the newborn Jewish boys, Moses at the burning bush, the encounter of Moses and Aaron with Pharaoh and the ten plagues of Egypt. 

The Qumran pesher (fulfilment interpretation) belongs to the second type. It is construed with a scripture quotation followed by an introductory formula and an interpretation usually associating the biblical prediction with its realisation in a recent event of the history of the Dead Sea community. We have such exegetical works on Genesis, Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Malachi and Psalms as well as 13 columns of the almost complete commentary on Habakkuk. Such fulfilment interpretation is occasionally found in rabbinic literature too, but it is more common in the New Testament.

Legal exegesis constitutes the third type. It reinterprets various biblical commandments, as does also frequently the Temple Scroll. 

Fourthly, selections of scripture passages are employed to develop messianic and eschatological doctrines.  

The term the “Rewritten Bible” has been hotly debated during the last quarter of a century. I use it here in the meaning I gave it when I first launched the concept in Scripture and Tradition in Judaism in 1961: 

In order to anticipate questions, and solve problems in advance, the midrashist (interpreter) inserts haggadic (descriptive or doctrinal) developments into the biblical narrative . . .

The essential feature of the Rewritten Bible is that instead of reproducing separately the biblical text followed by exegetical comments, as does the pesher, the Rewritten Bible incorporates the interpretative remarks into the scriptural text itself. The commentator literally “rewrites” the Bible. This kind of composition may be found throughout the whole of Jewish literature from the Bible itself (Deuteronomy reuses the earlier books of the Pentateuch and Chronicles re-edits Samuel and Kings) to the works Philo, Josephus and the rabbis. However, in recent years transatlantic scholars have tended to restrict research on this topic to the Dead Sea Scrolls. A number of them also object to my phrase “Rewritten Bible” and prefer “Rewritten Scripture”. They argue that in the Qumran age the notion of “Bible” was still in a fluid state. But this literary category extends beyond Qumran. Furthermore, is there any difference in meaning between Bible and scripture? Finally, according to Josephus, in his time in the first century CE, Jews recognised as authoritative 22 books precisely. This signifies that there existed a canon, a definite list of works consisting of the five books of the Law (Genesis to Deuteronomy), the 13 books of the prophet-historians (Joshua, Judges-Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah-Lamentations, Ezekiel, Minor Prophets, Daniel) and the four books of Hymns and Wisdom (Psalms, Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes). They made up the Bible, so the phrase “Rewritten Bible” is fully justified.

Before the Dead Sea Scrolls, the principal representatives of the Rewritten Bible were the Book of Jubilees (mid-second century BCE), which retells with inserted comments the story of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus; Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities (end of first century CE), covering the whole biblical history; and Pseudo-Philo’s Book of Biblical Antiquities (first century CE), concerned with the Bible account from the creation to David. To these are to be added in the world of the rabbis the Palestinian Pentateuch Targums (Pseudo-Jonathan, Fragmentary Targum and Targum Codex Neofiti), all dating from the second to the fourth century CE, but containing much old material. Read out during the synagogue services, the Palestinian Targums performed the same role for the somewhat literate Jews as the visual narration of the biblical story in the frescoes and statues of the medieval churches did for the largely illiterate Christians.  

The Qumran caves have yielded a few manuscripts that belong to the Rewritten Bible class. Some 20 fragmentary Hebrew manuscripts of the Book of Jubilees, previously known only from Ethiopic, Greek, Latin and Syriac translations, were discovered in Caves 1, 2, 3, 4 and 11. But among the Qumran finds, the pride of place is occupied by the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon of the first century BCE, an extended Aramaic paraphrase with substantially enriched interpretative supplements. The section relating to the story of Abraham is fairly well preserved. The adduced example concerns the account of the healing of the plague (impotence), which had been inflicted on Pharaoh and his men, due to Abraham’s intervention after Sarah’s forcible transfer to the royal palace.

Gen 12:19

Why did you say, “She is my sister”, so that I took her as a wife for myself. Now here is your wife. Take her and depart!

GA 20:26-29

You told me, “She is my sister”, whereas she is your wife. And I took her to be my wife. Behold your wife who is with me. Depart and go hence from all the land of Egypt. And now pray for me and my household that this evil spirit may depart from me. I prayed for him, and I laid my hands upon his head, and the plague went from him, and the evil spirit departed from him, and he lived.

Two columns of a Genesis commentary yielded by Cave 4 transmit the story of the flood (Gen. 6:3-9:25). The redactor adds to the biblical dates of the various events their equivalents in the 364-day solar calendar of the Qumran community. It thus becomes a standard example of the Rewritten Bible.

In the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month—on the first day of the week—on the seventeenth day (of the month), on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights—until the twenty–sixth day of the third month, the fifth day of the week. 

The Jewish Antiquities by Josephus (37-c.100 CE) and the Book of Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo are the two major samples of the Rewritten Bible surviving, the first in Greek and the second in Latin. Their style of exegesis recalls the Genesis Apocryphon. In Jewish Antiquities, the decree ordering the destruction of the Jewish boys born in Egypt is explained as follows.

 One of the sacred scribes-persons with considerable skill in accurately predicting the future-announced to the king that there would be born to the Israelites at that time one who would abase the sovereignty of the Egyptians and exalt the Israelites, were he reared to manhood, and would surpass all men in virtue and win everlasting renown. Alarmed thereat, the king, on this sage’s advice, ordered that every male child born to the Israelites should be destroyed by being cast into the river (Ant. 2:205).

Likewise Pseudo-Philo supplements the Genesis account of the sacrifice of Isaac by asserting that Isaac not only did not resist his father, but willingly and gladly agreed to become a sacrificial victim.

Don’t you remember what happened in the days of our fathers, when the father was to sacrifice his son and the latter did not object but joyfully consented (Bibl. Ant. 40:2). 

The Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch, written in Galilean Aramaic close to the language of Jesus, constitute a peculiar exegetical phenomenon. Sometimes their supplementation is terse, but quite often highly elaborate and expresses rich theological thinking prevalent among the authors of these Aramaic paraphrases. A particularly significant illustration may be found in the story of the Passover attached to Exodus 12:42:

That was for the Lord a night of vigil, to bring them out of the land of Egypt. That same night is a vigil to be kept for the Lord by all the Israelites throughout their generations.

 A fragmentary Targum combined with Neofiti: 

 Four nights are recorded in the Book of Memorials.

On the first night the Word of the Lord was revealed on the world to create it . .

On the second night the Word of the Lord was revealed upon Abraham . . . that the Scripture might be fulfilled: “Abraham aged one hundred years can beget and Sarah aged ninety can bear.” Was it not on our father Isaac’s thirty-seventh birthday that he was offered on the altar? The heavens were let down and descended and Isaac saw their perfection . . .

On the third night the Word of the Lord was revealed upon the Egyptians . . . His right hand slew the firstborn of the Egyptians and his left hand spared the firstborn of the Israelites . . . He called this the third night.

On the fourth night the world shall reach its end to be delivered . . . Moses shall come out of the wilderness and the King Messiah shall come out of Rome. One shall lead the flock and the other shall lead the flock and the Word of the Lord shall lead between them and they shall advance together . . . 

This Rewritten Bible episode relies on the Jewish liturgical tradition, which places the sacrifice of Isaac on the 15th day of Nisan, the future date of Passover. Its antiquity is confirmed by its mention in the mid-second century BCE Book of Jubilees. However, by the beginning of the second century CE the view prevailed in rabbinic circles that the sacrifice of Isaac took place on the future New Year’s day, the first of Tishri. In this reinterpretation the connecting link is the blowing of the shofar (ram’s horn) at New Year’s day, recalling the ram substituted for Isaac as a sacrificial victim. 

Parabiblical literature, previously called pseudepigrapha or works falsely attributed to biblical personalities, is a group of writings with biblical background comprising compositions associated with a scriptural character, but with no continuous link with the sacred text. For instance the Book of Enoch, preserved fully in Ethiopic, but originally written in Aramaic as the numerous Qumran fragments reveal, is 72 chapters long. Yet Enoch figures only in five verses of Genesis (5:20-24). To the same class pertain the Testament of Levi, Amram, and Qahat, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as well as the various apocryphal works ascribed to Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Elisha, Jeremiah, Elisha, and Zedekiah from the Qumran caves and numerous other compositions collected in the two volumes of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha by James H. Charlesworth (1983). The existence of these parabiblical writings proves that Jewish religious imagination was scripture inspired, but this literature is not part either of the Bible or of its exegesis. 

The foregoing survey of the Bible and its interpretation in the late Second Temple period (250 BCE-100 CE) may offer both Jews and Christians fresh insights into the development of their religion. Traditional Jewish education is restricted to the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic corpus (the Mishnah and the Talmud), with emphasis on the latter, and Christian religious training is New Testament-based, with a vague familiarity with the Old Testament and within the framework of Church tradition. Christians will discover with astonishment how much the New Testament’s use of the Hebrew Bible resembles that found in non-biblical Jewish writings in the age of Jesus.

It is especially the Qumran pesher that sheds light on the evangelists’ effort to demonstrate the realisation in Jesus of the prophetic visions of the Hebrew Scripture. Thus the New Testament doctrine of the virginal conception of the Messiah is based on Matthew’s peculiar understanding of Isaiah 7:14: 

All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be Emmanuel.” 

Like the Qumran authors, the evangelists handle freely the scriptural evidence with a view to arriving at the conclusion they need. Not infrequently both have recourse to special twists. The author of the Qumran Damascus Document cleverly transforms the divine threat of destruction addressed to Israel in Amos 5:26-27 into a promise of salvation. In turn, Matthew, focusing on the Septuagint’s term of parthenos (virgin), deliberately ignores that the Hebrew Isaiah speaks of young woman (‘almah) rather than of a virgin (in Hebrew betulah). St Paul exaggerates even more in his handling of Genesis in Galatians 4:22-31. Turning the argument on its head, he deduces from the story of Abraham that the Jews are the children of Hagar, his concubine, whereas his wife Sarah is the mother of the Christians. 

Whether in the church or in the synagogue, scripture was interpreted with equal freedom. This observation indicates that the study of the Bible in the age of Jesus is likely to supply the best approach road for the understanding of the aims and teachings both of traditional Judaism and early Christianity.

The post Writing and Rewriting the Bible in the Time of Jesus appeared first on Standpoint.

To make their stories understandable, I will have to provide a brief autobiographical sketch. I was born in Makó, Hungary, in1924 into a non-religious, totally assimilated Jewish family. My father was a journalist and my mother a schoolteacher. In 1928 we moved to the not distant city of Gyula and in 1931, shortly before my seventh birthday, the whole family was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. I received a Catholic primary and grammar school (gymnasium) education from 1930 to 1942. By that time recently enacted anti-Jewish legislation prevented me from entering university. The only possible academic opening was theology, implying a clerical future. I first applied to the Jesuits, but was promptly turned down: unknown to me, in those days the Society of Jesus did not admit candidates of Jewish origin. I lowered my aim and was accepted in the theological college of my diocese of Nagyvárad in Transylvania, which between 1940 and 1945 belonged to Hungary. The first two years of a five-year course were taught in Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare), followed by three years in Nagyvárad. In May 1944, when the deportation of provincial Jewry began, I was ordered to leave Szatmár and go on the run with church help, a peregrination which took me across the whole of Hungary as far as the Austrian border. From there I traced back my steps to Budapest, and on Christmas Eve 1944 I was liberated from Nazi tyranny by the Red Army. I studied for two more years in Nagyvárad, but in 1946 I said goodbye to my theological college and left Hungary to join the French order of the Pères de Notre Dames de Sion, and started my serious theological and Semitic studies in Louvain, Belgium. I was ordained priest in 1950. By 1952 I obtained a doctorate in theology and a “licence” in oriental history and philology. 

After a brief trip to Israel and Jordan I was sent to Paris in 1953 and continued there as a scholar until 1957. This was the year when I said goodbye to the priesthood, the Fathers of Zion and France, and started a new married life, becoming a university teacher in Britain, first in Newcastle (1957-1965) and then in Oxford. Having left Christianity, I decided to revert to my Jewish roots without embracing the practices of Judaism. My first wife Pamela died in 1993. In 1996 I married Margaret and adopted her son, Ian. We happily live in a charming house on the outskirts of Oxford, surrounded by a glorious garden, backing onto 700 acres of Bagley Wood.

John Scheffler was born into a family of agricultural labourers on October 29, 1887, in the village of Kálmánd, close to the city of Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare) in north-eastern Transylvania. Transylvania was part of Hungary until 1920 when the Trianon peace treaty transferred the whole region to Romania; in 1940, it was restored to Hungary, but in 1945 reverted to Romania.

Scheffler received his schooling and theological training at Szatmár, but in 1906 he entered the Divinity Faculty of the Péter Pázmány University of Budapest. He was ordained priest in 1910. Next followed two years in Rome, devoted to specialisation in canon law. By 1915 he was a doctor of theology and taught canon law, church history and theology in the seminaries of the dioceses of Szatmár and Nagyvárad (Oradea). He published a few conventional volumes of religious textbooks for schools, but was never engaged in advanced theology.  If he had, he would never have tolerated the abysmal level of instruction to which the Szatmár students were subjected in the seminary under his ultimate control. 

In 1942, when Transylvania was again Hungarian, he was made bishop of the diocese of Szatmár. In 1945 the territory came under Romanian Communist rule. Scheffler could have escaped the ensuing upheaval by accepting the appointment offered him by Pius XII to succeed the assassinated William Apor as bishop of Győr in western Hungary. He, however, successfully begged the Pope to allow him to stay among his own people. 

The religious policy of the post-war Romanian Communist government was to unite the country’s Eastern Orthodox church and the Latin Catholics into a single national institution, and to force the Catholics to sever their links with Rome. Scheffler refused the headship of the new church. Deep-seated hostility reigned between the Orthodox Romanians and the Hungarian Roman Catholics, so that the governmental proposal was a non-starter. 

In 1950, the communist security police detained all the un-cooperative Catholic bishops. Scheffler was first sentenced to a not particularly onerous two-year house arrest in a Franciscan convent. However, as he still refused to play the government’s game, in 1952 he was moved to a prison in Bucharest and, during the last two months of his life, to the dreaded Jilava jail. He, like all the other inmates, clerics and non-clerics, had to undergo deprivation and ill-treatment and his already deteriorating health was affected. (According to some accounts, he was repeatedly subjected to showers by boiling water. According to another version, the boiling shower happened only once.) He died on December 6, 1952.

John Scheffler behaved during the last two years leading to his death as a pious, traditional Catholic prelate of his generation. If at the end, he had been set free, his memory would have survived as that of a courageous man who stuck to his convictions whatever the circumstances.  His beatification is entirely due to the fact that he ended his days in a prison of the hated regime.

In his anti-communist zeal, Pope John Paul II redefined martyrdom. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a martyr is a person who is put to death. For example, the greatest luminary of the ancient Church, Origen of Alexandria, who was severely tortured under the persecution of Decius in AD 250, but died of the ill-treatments four years later, was never recognised as a martyr. John Paul made the notion more elastic by removing execution as an essential ingredient of martyrdom. For him, it was enough that clerics, especially bishops, died in Communist jails. With the new definition in mind, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed John Scheffler a martyr and the ceremony of beatification took place in the cathedral of Satu Mare on July 3, 2011.

My personal knowledge of John Scheffler is rather superficial. It is linked to my arrival in September 1942 in the Szatmár seminary. We lived under the same roof as the bishop, and our paths crossed from time to time. If I remember correctly, soon after the start of the first academic year, we were introduced to Bishop Scheffler and had to kiss his pastoral ring. But the main venue of meeting was the nearby cathedral where the bishop celebrated solemn mass on major feast days and delivered sermons. I cannot recollect anything of his preaching. In September 1944 he survived the bombing by Soviet planes of the episcopal residence in which several priests, canons and theological students lost their lives. 

In sum, I remember the Blessed John Scheffler as a brave, conventionally pious Hungarian bishop, wholly dedicated to church and Pope, whose elevation to martyrdom resulted from his imprisonment in Jilava that he courageously bore during the final two months of his life. 

Szilárd Bogdánffy was was born on February 21, 1911, in Feketetó (Crna Bara), then southern Hungary and now part of Serbia. Both his parents were teachers. In 1925 he entered the gymnasium of the Piarists in Temesvár (now Timişoara in Romania) and after graduation, he was accepted as a student of theology in the diocesan seminary of Nagyvárad, where he was ordained priest in 1934. By this time Nagyvárad, renamed Oradea, had become part of the Romanian kingdom. He was sent to continue his theological studies at the University of Budapest and gained a doctorate with a dissertation on “Apocalyptics in the Synoptic Gospels”. (During our daily contact for the best part of two years, I never heard from him anything to suggest that he was an expert in the New Testament.)

On his return to Szatmár, he joined the staff of the local seminary and held the office of spiritual director when I was there between 1942 and 1944. I lost touch with him after May 1944. 

As I mentioned earlier, after the end of the second world war the anti-religious campaign of the Romanian communist government sought to abolish  all links between the Romanian Catholic Church and the Vatican. To counteract the communist persecution of the Church, the Holy See authorised  the clandestine ordination of new bishops. The stratagem was soon detected by the Securitate police. Szilárd Bogdánffy was chosen by Rome and was secretly consecrated in February 1949 by the papal nuncio in Bucharest. His task was to work underground as auxiliary bishop of Satu Mare and bishop of Oradea. But he was an inexperienced agent and his cover was soon blown. Like Scheffler, he too was first invited to lead a separatist Church with no Vatican connections, but like Scheffler he declined the offer. As a result, two months after his episcopal ordination he was arrested and spent the next four years in various prisons, where he, like the other political inmates, was inhumanly treated. He suffered with humility. His last jail was at Aiud (Nagyenyed), where he died without medical attendance of pneumonia on October 3, 1953. 

Bogdánffy’s fate was the mirror image of that of Scheffler. He behaved as a devout Catholic cleric was expected to do. He withstood Communist pressure and piously accepted the foreseeable consequences of his resistance: a premature death at the age of 42 after four years of imprisonment. Benedict XVI hailed him as a martyr of Communism.

The ceremony of beatification took place in the cathedral of Oradea on October 30, 2010, conducted by Cardinal Peter Erdő, Hungarian Archbishop of Esztergom, in association with Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

How do I remember Szilárd Bogdánffy? I was 18 years old when we first met in September 1942 and we were in daily contact until May 1944. He was a good-looking and friendly young priest, but his behaviour was that of a strictly conventional Hungarian clergyman. He became my confessor and spiritual adviser during those two years and I confided to him my problems and received textbook solutions.  

On one occasion, however, matters became more serious. To give it in context, I must sketch my life in the Szatmár seminary. Having passed the final examination in my gymnasium with the highest honours, I set out starry-eyed to start my  “higher” education in philosophy and theology. I was deeply disappointed. Apart from Bogdánffy’s non-academic talks on spirituality, I had to attend classes on scholastic philosophy and Christian apologetics, taught by the bursar, and a course on Church history delivered by the director of the seminary. The level of instruction was primitive. The lecturers read aloud from the textbooks, very occasionally adding a comment. They were bored and deadly boring.  

I first decided to put up with the unavoidable and spent about one tenth of my time on coursework, enough to gain top marks in the twice-yearly examinations. In the rest of my time, I read literature, wrote poetry and, having found some books by Henri Bergson, tried to familiarise myself with his philosophy. That kept me reasonably pacified during the first year. However, by the start of the second year my patience snapped and I became profoundly unhappy. The only person I could approach was Bogdánffy.

I screwed up my courage, told him how I felt and that my sole intention was to give my best to the Church. To achieve this, I needed a greater challenge and timidly asked for transfer to the Central Seminary attached to the theological faculty of the University of Budapest, where Bogdánffy himself had obtained his doctorate. I was put in my place in no uncertain terms and felt totally devastated and humiliated. Bogdánffy did not try to placate me by telling me that there was no such provision in the budget, but maybe later on something might be done, or that in the worsening circumstances with anti-Semitism increasingly affecting all walks of life, it might be safer for me to lie low until the dawning of better days. 

He appeared to be unable to grasp anything unconventional. Instead, he bluntly told me to exercise humility and obedience and accept without question, as was my duty, the decision of my superiors. The man whom I trusted showed not an ounce of sympathy. Never again did I seek his guidance. The close relationship between spiritual adviser and advisee abruptly came to an end. If I had been asked then whether Bogdánffy was or ever would become a saint, my answer would have been predictable. Today my milder reply to the same question would be: pass, but RIP.

William Apor constitutes a special case. Unlike Scheffler and Bogdánffy, he was a towering Church figure and my personal indebtedness to him is immeasurable.

Baron William Apor of Altorja was born on February 29, 1892, at Segesvár in Hungarian Transylvania of a noble family whose records are traceable back to the 13th century and possibly earlier. The Apors were granted the baronial title in 1713. The future bishop’s father was a high Hungarian official who shortly after William’s birth was transferred to the Habsburg imperial/royal administration in Vienna. It is there that the boy first went to school. He continued in an Austrian Jesuit college at Kalksburg, but to counteract his wholly German education he was sent for the final two years of grammar school to another Jesuit institution in Kalocsa in Hungary. At the end of his schooling he was admitted as a student for priesthood by his relation Count Nicholas Szécheny, the Hungarian bishop of Győr, who promptly despatched Apor for the next five years to the theological faculty of Innsbruck, also run by Jesuits. He gained (apparently just) a doctorate in theology in 1916. Meanwhile Bishop Szécheny was transferred to Nagyvárad and took Apor with him. Ordained priest in 1915, he served as prefect of the Nagyvárad theological seminary between 1917 and 1921. But his main place of attachment was to the city of Gyula, where he was curate from 1915 to 1917 and then parish priest for 20 years from 1921 to 1941. In 1929, he was given the title of “abbot-parish priest” to commemorate an extinct medieval abbey in the neighbourhood, granting him the right to wear an abbot’s hat and carry a crook during solemn church services. It was in Gyula that our paths first crossed after my family setted there in 1928. Concern for the poor was his distinctive mark during the years of depression, accompanied by a determination to protect the persecuted, i.e. the Jews, during the late Thirties and the war years. Finally, in 1941 the news that Pius XII had nominated Apor bishop of Győr both saddened and delighted  the people of Gyula. He was consecrated in his parish church by Cardinal Justinian Serédi, prince-primate of the Hungarian Catholic Church, assisted by two other bishops. Apor left for his new seat and it was there that in October 1944 I met him for the last time in dramatic circumstances. 

Apor played a leading role in the Hungarian episcopal assembly  through his whole-hearted rejection of the anti-Jewish measures introduced by the government, and especially  after the German takeover of the country in March 1944. As president since 1943 of the Holy Cross Society established to protect baptized Jews, he understandably displayed a particular concern for the members of his flock. He nevertheless condemned without reservation any legal discrimination based on racial theory. When the civil authorities ordered everyone considered Jewish to move into the newly-formed local ghettos, Apor openly pilloried from the pulpit those who claimed that there were people, groups or races that could be hated or tortured. To deprive innocent people of their freedom and civic rights was a flagrant denial of human and divine justice. He firmly remonstrated with the minister for home affairs, and when a priest sent by him to offer solace to Jews was refused entry to the ghetto by the police, he wrote to the prime minister and personally appproached the local Gestapo. When told that they were simply obeying Hitler’s orders, Apor retorted: “Tell the Führer that the divine law of justice is obligatory even for him.” Obviously all his efforts were of no avail.

After news from Auschwitz had reached the bishops, Apor — who had privileged information, his brother being Hungarian ambassador to the Vatican and his sister the head of the Hungarian Red Cross — urged the primate, Cardinal Serédi, to issue a pastoral letter condemning the persecution of the Jews. As the primate was dilly-dallying — he feared that such an intervention might engender increased cruelty and even  endanger the Church — Apor wrote three further letters to the cardinal, pressing him to send an ultimatum to the government. Finally, by the end of June 1944 the letter was ready and was printed. But the plan was reported to the authorities (by Serédi?) and predictably its distribution was forbidden, so that it was never read in the churches. 

By April 1945 Soviet troops were besieging Győr. Apor generously offered shelter to a large number of frightened civilians in the cellars of the bishop’s castle. On Good Friday, April 30, a group of drunken Russian soldiers burst into the episcopal residence looking for women. With noble courage, the bishop confronted them and ordered them to get out. One of the soldiers shot him three times and they all ran away. He died a martyr three days later on May 3, but the women were saved.

I first met William Apor in June 1931, when I was six years old. He explained to me what would happen at the baptismal ceremony. He had already been instructing my parents. I was already towards the end of my first year in a Catholic primary school where I was prepared for the great event. The baptism took place without witnesses. I suppose my parents wanted to keep it secret. Some years later I became an altar boy serving during mass and from time to time, on major feast days, we were invited to breakfast with the parish priest and the clergy. Glorious cups of coffee with frothy cream and delightful cakes are unforgettable memories and so are also the friendly words of  “Mr Baron” as we used to refer to him. My father occasionally invited Father Apor to write articles in his newspaper on festive dates. The last memorable event connected with Gyula is my attendance at his episcopal ordination on February 24, 1941.

My next and definitely most momentous encounter with William Apor took place three years later, in October 1944. Having been sent away from my relatively safe seminary in Szatmár, I criss-crossed the country to end up in Sopron at the western end of Hungary. There I attended lectures at the theological college of the Dominicans and lived in private rented accommodation with bed and board.  On October 15 all hell broke loose. While the Russian army was approaching Budapest, the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, was removed from office and the leader of the extreme Nazi Arrow-Cross party was made head of state. In the circumstances, to remain on my own in Sopron looked foolish. I had to move eastward towards the approaching Russians, but how? Then I remembered William Apor. His episcopal seat in Győr was less than 50 miles from Sopron. I quickly packed my belongings and caught a train for Győr. I was directed to the bishop’s palace, summoned all my courage and requested an audience with Apor. “Have you got an appointment?” I was asked, to which the answer was no. A thousand worrying thoughts passed through my mind. Was he there? Was he free? Above all, would he remember me? The secretary returned with a smile on his face: His Excellency would receive me at once. Of course he remembered me. He asked about my parents and expressed sorrow when I told him that they had both  been deported and that I had no news from them. Then he inquired about me. I told him that I had been sent away from the seminary with an exemption certificate. He wanted to see it and and looked completely perplexed. In a mixture of legal and ecclesiastical gobbledegook it claimed that I was exempted from the anti-Jewish legislation because I was a deacon in the Church on account of having performed the role of a deacon at mass. I was, of course, not an ordained deacon, but it was hoped that the policeman reading the document would not know the difference. Fortunately I was never asked to produce it, so we will never know. 

Bishop Apor in his noble simplicity would never have invented something so circuitous as my phoney document. Indeed, his inability to twist the truth led to the deportation and death of the only Jewish convert student at his seminary, the brother of  Joseph Stiassny, my future colleague at the Fathers of Zion. It is on the record that later on Apor ordered his priests to provide Jews, if requested, with baptismal certificates. Did our meeting have anything to do with this?

At the end of a cordial audience, Apor inquired with a gentle smile whether he could do anything for me. Yes, I answered, please help me to get lost among the hundreds of students in the Central Seminary in Budapest. Without further ado, he went to his desk and wrote a longhand letter of recommendation, no doubt accepting responsibility for all the fees and living expenses I would incur. He signed the letter, sealed the envelope and gave me his blessing. I arrived in Budapest and was admitted to the seminary with no questions asked, regaining my freedom two months later thanks to the same Soviet army, some of whose soldiers assassinated my saintly benefactor.

So: Ave atque vale, Bishop Baron William Apor of Altorja. Or, to use the traditional Hebrew formula: Zikhronkhah livrakhah! May your memory be a blessing!

The English candidate for beatification, John Randal Bradburne, son of an Anglican clergyman and cousin of the playwright Terence Rattigan, was born on June 14, 1921, in Skirwith, Cumbria, and educated at Gresham’s School in Norfolk between 1934 and 1939. In 1940, he joined the 9th Gurkha Rifles of the Indian Army and faced the Japanese invasion of Malaya. After the fall of Singapore, he escaped, spent a month in the jungle and managed to sail to Sumatra, whence he was rescued by the Royal Navy and returned to India. Apparently he was awarded the MC for his heroic escape, though he said he never received it. He ended the war in Burma with Orde Wingate’s Chindits, small special forces operating behind enemy lines.

After the war he took on odd jobs. He worked in forestry and did some schoolmastering, but to use the colloquial expression he was bitten by the religious bug.  In 1947 he was received into the Catholic Church by the Benedictines at Buckfast Abbey and tried without success to become a monk. Then he had a love affair which nearly led to marriage, but nothing lasted with John. During the Holy Year of 1950 someone gave him a small sum of money to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Once there, he decided to continue to Jerusalem. He set off, apparently with £5 in his pocket, and somehow got as far as Cyprus. There he approached an official for a loan to take him on to Haifa in Israel (Cyprus was then still a British colony). “Do you have a guarantor?” he was asked. “Why don’t you cable the British consul in Tripoli, who is my brother?” John replied. Philip Bradburne bailed him out. 

He arrived in Haifa and hitch-hiked to Jerusalem, hoping to shelter with the Benedictines, who had a monastery on Mount Zion. So he asked the first woman he met the way to Zion. She directed him to the house of the Fathers of Zion, my then religious order. The superior, Father Pierre de Condé, received him cordially. John at once felt convinced that his arrival at the house of the Zion Fathers was a sign of divine vocation and expressed his wish to join the congregation. He was quickly shipped to Louvain, where the noviciate was rather short of fresh blood. 

John arrived in late December 1950, the day after I was ordained priest, and attended my first mass. Full of joie de vivre, he had little understanding of what the congregation was about and was equipped only with an English public schoolboy’s French. He was truly a fish out of water and my colleagues did not have much time for him. His palpable assets were a beautiful singing voice, an all-pervasive musicality and a powerful though unbridled piety. I was his only friend and he became my first native English teacher. The kindly and patient novice master tried his best to train him, but John could not tolerate the “stuffy” life of the noviciate and after 18 months he decided to leave. He came to Paris, where I spent the summer of 1952, to say goodbye before setting off on a hitch-hiking trip to Jerusalem. He never got further than Naples, where he spent two years as sacristan and general factotum for an Italian village priest. He entertained himself and the locals by playing Bach on his recorder. On my return from my first visit to the Holy Land, we were supposed to meet at the port of Naples, but John did not turn up. I learned later that he had set out for the rendezvous but taken the wrong bus.

His father’s death put an end to John’s Italian escapade and he was summoned to look after his mother in the charming Devon town of Ottery St Mary. It was there that we met again on my first visit to England to attend an international orientalist congress in Cambridge in 1954. I stayed with him for a couple of days and discovered that he spent most of his time as a hermit: praying, making music and churning out reams of doggerels in a hut at the end of a large garden belonging to a friendly couple. John insisted that I should visit his hermitage and meet his friends, especially the lady. After a long discussion on religion she and I discovered that we shared the same ideas and I was invited to visit Ottery the following year for a holiday. It dawned on me then that what was happening was more than friendship. After two years of struggle I decided to join Pamela in March 1957, leaving behind priesthood and Church. Stateless, jobless and penniless, I launched into a seemingly hopeless adventure. Yet by providential accident, within six months I had embarked on a promising academic career, first at Newcastle and from 1965 at Oxford. By 1962 I had obtained British citizenship.

Poor John was totally devastated and blamed himself for what had happened to me. We remained in occasional contact until 1958 or 1959 by which time he was in London, employed as sacristan at Westminster Cathedral and housekeeper at the archbishop’s country residence in Hertfordshire. Then he disappeared and we learned that in 1962 he had left for what was then still Southern Rhodesia to join an old army friend who had become a Jesuit. John looked for a hut or a cave in Africa to pursue his hermit’s life as a member of the third order of St Francis, his spiritual hero. 

He ended up in charge of the leper colony at Mtemwa. He lovingly cared for these outcasts and was loved by them in return. However, he was soon dismissed by the authorities as he refused to follow their rules: he referred to the lepers by name and not by registration number and insisted that each should receive one loaf of bread per week. Demoted, he returned to his hermitage, but continued to look after his lepers.

In the mid-1970s I helped a friend to get a professorship in theology at the University of Salisbury (now Harare) in Southern Rodesia. A couple years later he and his wife returned to England for a term’s leave at my college in Oxford. On our first meeting, he reported that a short while ago he had attended a dinner in Salisbury and set next to an odd-looking fellow, who told him that he knew me and my wife. It was John. 

Sure enough, on May 15, 1978, a letter came from John written by hand and, as may be expected, in versified form, which after some initial personal remarks, developed into a disquisition on the Holy Trinity, but ended inconsequentially with a heartfelt last line: “Forgive me if I ever was unkind.”

He was forgiven and Pam’s poem in reply, mimicking John’s style and correcting his trinitarian theology, lovingly finished on behalf of both of us:

Heaven keep you safe and sound dear John
And bless the bed that you lie on.

This prayer was not heard in heaven. By 1979 the situation in Southern Rhodesia, soon to become Zimbabwe, had fast deteriorated. The colonial authorities advised all the whites to evacuate the region, but John was not going to abandon his beloved protégés. We learned from the British newspapers that on September 3, 1979, the “lepers’ saint”, “a man of love and peace who could not hurt a fly” — the words of an African friend — was shot dead by Mugabe’s marauding guerrillas while kneeling in prayer. 

Two weeks later a requiem mass was celebrated in Salisbury Cathedral by the local archbishop. The process potentially leading to John’s beatification was launched by the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe, supported by the John Bradburne Memorial Society, which also collects money to support the Mtemwa leper camp. 

Only heaven knows whether John Bradburne will eventually join the Blessed William Apor, Szilárd Bogdánffy and John Scheffler on the register of martyrs. This extraordinary character was very close to me. I have never forgotten his inimitable French, describing himself as “un vieux clou fou, mais toujours votre ami” (a crazy old nail, but always your friend). I can only conclude my reminiscences with:

Rest in peace, dear John! May the choir of the angels make you rejoice with Bach cantatas in your heavenly hermitage.

John Bradburne called himself a religious jester, a buffoon and a troubadour, to whom the epithet “God’s Fool”, coined by Julien Green for St Francis of Assisi, truly applied.

The post Among the Saints: An Essay in Hagiography appeared first on Standpoint.

To understand the genesis of these notions, the first point to note is that during his days of preaching, Jesus of Nazareth addressed only Jews, “the lost sheep of Israel” (Mt 10:5; 15:24). His disciples were even expressly instructed not to approach Gentiles or Samaritans (Mt 10:5). On the few occasions that Jesus ventured beyond the boundaries of his homeland, he never proclaimed his gospel to pagans, nor did his disciples do so during his lifetime. The mission of the 11 apostles to “all the nations” (Mt 28:19) is a “post-Resurrection” idea. It appears to be of Pauline inspiration and is nowhere found in the Gospels apart from the spurious longer ending of Mark (Mk 16:15), which is missing from all the older manuscripts. Jesus’s own perspective was exclusively Jewish; he was concerned only with Jews. 

Indeed, we learn from the Acts of the Apostles that the primitive community of Jesus followers consisted of 120 Jewish persons, including the 11 apostles and the mother and brothers of Jesus (Acts 1:14-5). This is incidentally the last reference to Mary in the New Testament, although there are further allusions to the male siblings of Jesus in the Acts and in Paul. James, “the brother of the Lord” as Paul refers to him, is presented as the leader of the Jerusalem church (Acts 15:19; Gal 1:19) and according to another Pauline passage, the married brothers of Jesus also acted as missionaries of the Gospel (1 Cor 9:5). 

On the feast of Pentecost that followed the crucifixion, Peter and the rest of the apostles were metamorphosed under the influence of the divine Spirit from a group of gutless fugitives into born-again champions of the faith in Jesus, the risen Messiah, and their charismatic proclamation to the Jerusalem crowds instantaneously increased the original nucleus of 120 Jesus followers by 3,000 new Jewish converts. All they were asked to do was to believe in Peter’s teaching about Jesus and be baptised in his name. 

The individual members of the Jerusalem Jesus party did not call themselves by any specific name, but their religious movement was known as “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9; 24:14), short for “the Way of God”. Only at a later date, after the establishment of a community in Antioch in northern Syria, do we encounter in the Acts of the Apostles 11:26 the specific designation Christianoi (“Christians” or Messianists), applied to the members of that particular church. 

How did the original Judaeo-Christians of Jerusalem compare to their Jewish neighbours? In some essential ways they did not differ from them at all. The Judaeo-Christians considered themselves Jews and their outward behaviour and dietary customs were Jewish. In fact, they faithfully observed all the rules and regulations of the Mosaic Law. In particular, the apostles and their followers continued to frequent the religious centre of Judaism, the Temple of Jerusalem, for private and public worship, and it was there that they performed charismatic healings (Acts 3:1-10; 5:12, 20, 25, 42). According to the Acts, the entire Jesus party assembled for prayer in the sanctuary every day (Acts 2:46). Even Paul, the chief opponent of the obligatory performance of Jewish customs in his churches, turned out to be a temple-goer on his occasional visits to Jerusalem. He once fell into a trance in the course of his prayer in the House of God (Acts 22:17) and on a later occasion he underwent the prescribed purification rituals before commissioning the priests to offer sacrifice on his behalf (Acts 21:24-6). 

In addition to their attachment to the Law of Moses, including worship in the Temple, the religious practice of the first Jewish Christians also included the “breaking of the bread” (Acts 2:46). This breaking of the bread was not a purely symbolical cultic act, but a real meal. It had the double purpose of feeding the participants and symbolically uniting them with one another as well as with their Master Jesus, and with God. The frequency of the rite is not immediately specified, but the initial impression is that it took place daily, not unlike the sacred dinner of the fully initiated Essenes, described by the Jewish writers Philo, Flavius Josephus and the Community Rule of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous heart” (Acts 2:46). On the other hand, according to Acts 20:7, Paul in Troas broke the bread on the first day of the week, and the Didache, the earliest Christian treatise (late first century CE), also orders that the bread should be broken and thanksgiving (Eucharist) performed each Sunday (Did. 14:1). 

Another distinguishing mark of the Jerusalem Jewish Christians was religious communism. “No one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common” (Acts 4:32). They were not formally obliged to divest themselves of their property and goods, as was the case with the Essenes, but there was strong moral pressure and not to do so would have been judged improper.

So prior to the admission of Gentile candidates, the affiliates of the Jesus party appeared to ordinary people in Jerusalem as representatives of a Jewish sect. They reminded them of the Essenes, who were comparable in number, and exhibited similar customs such as the daily solemn meal and life from a common kitty. Indeed, the followers of Jesus were referred to in the late Fifties of the first century as the “sect [hairesis] of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5, 14) and in later patristic literature the Judaeo-Christians were designated as the Ebionites or “the Poor”. The Church Fathers, who counted the Ebionites as heretics, sarcastically (and mistakenly) interpreted the title as pointing to the poverty of the Ebionites’ beliefs. If the final sentence of the Jesus notice of Josephus is accepted as genuine then the Palestinian Jewish-Christian community still existed in the Holy Land after the war against Rome in 66-73/4 CE. The Testimonium Flavianum (Jewish Antiquities 18. 63-4) in fact speaks of them as a tribe (phylon) of the Jewish nation. In his turn, the church historian Eusebius (260-339 CE) reports that up to the war of Bar Kokhba (132-5 CE) all the 13 bishops of Jerusalem, starting with James, the brother of Jesus, came from the “circumcision” (Ecclesiastical History 4. 3, 5).

The author of the Acts of the Apostles identifies the big demographic watershed regarding the composition of the Jesus movement. I do not allude here to the admission, despite Jesus’s earlier prohibition, of the Samaritans into the church by Peter and John (Acts 8:16-7), for the Samaritans were Jews, inhabitants of the former northern kingdom of Israel, notwithstanding their differences from the Judaeans in religious traditions (they worshipped on Mount Gerizim and not in Jerusalem and their Bible was restricted to the Law of Moses, without the Prophets and the Writings). Nor was the baptism of an Ethiopian official, the finance minister of Queen Candace (Acts 8:26-38), by the deacon Philip against the accepted rules, because he was already a Jewish proselyte. 

The revolution started around 40 CE with the admission into the church of the family of the Roman centurion Cornelius in Caesarea, and later that of the Gentile members of the mixed Jewish-Greek church in Antioch, not forgetting the many pagan converts of Paul in Syria, Asia Minor and Greece. With them the Jewish monopoly in the new movement came to an end and Jewish and Gentile Christianity was born.

The Cornelius episode (Acts 10), in which the Pentecost-like ecstasy affecting the Roman centurion and his entourage persuaded the astonished Peter to baptise them without further ado, seems to have been an exceptional event; no further conversion of a Gentile is recorded in the Holy Land anywhere in the New Testament. 

It was in the Syrian city of Antioch in the late 40s CE that the novelty set in. Emigré members of the Jerusalem church were joined there by Gentiles evangelised and baptised by Judaeo-Christians originating from Cyprus and Cyrene. The mother church of Jerusalem dispatched Barnabas to run the new mixed community, and Barnabas hurried to Tarsus in Cilicia to persuade his friend Saul/Paul, already a believer in Christ, to join him in looking after the new church. The Jewish and the Gentile Christians of Antioch coexisted happily and ate together. When visiting the community, Peter willingly participated in their common meals. However, when some extra-zealous representatives of the Jerusalem church headed by James the brother of Jesus, members of the so-called “circumcision party”, arrived in Antioch, their disapproving attitude compelled all the Jewish Christians, including even Peter and Barnabas, but with the notable exception of Paul, to discontinue their table fellowship with the brethren of Greek stock (Acts 11:2). As a result, union, fraternity and harmony in the new mixed church was abolished. The outraged Paul confronted Peter and publicly called him a hypocrite (Gal 2:11-4), creating the first major row in Christendom.   

After Paul’s first successful missionary journey to Asia Minor, the entry of pagans into the Jesus fellowship became a particularly acute issue. A council of the apostles, attended by Paul and Barnabas, was convened in Jerusalem, at which James the brother of the Lord, the head of the mother community, overruled the demands of the extremist members of his congregation and proposed a compromise solution (Acts 15:19-21). Gentiles wishing to join the church would be exempted from the full rigour of the Law of Moses, including circumcision, and would merely be required to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from the consumption of blood, from eating non-ritually slaughtered meat, and from certain sex acts judged particularly odious by Jews. 

These rules were necessarily intended for Gentile converts in the diaspora. In Jerusalem different conditions prevailed, for Gentile Christians could not join their Judaeo-Christian co-religionists in the Temple as non-Jews were prohibited under threat of instant death to set foot in the area of the holy precinct reserved for Jews. 

The Jerusalem council of the apostles marked the beginning of the separate development of Jewish and Gentile Christianity. They both agreed on some essentials and ardently expected the impending second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. Paul himself insisted that it would happen in his own lifetime (1 Thess 4:15-7). But in other respects they saw things differently. The original Judaeo-Christian baptism, a rite of purification, and the breaking of the bread, a solemn communal meal, were transformed in the Gentile church under the influence of Paul. The former developed into a mystical participation in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, and the latter became a sacramental reiteration of the Last Supper. The perceived differences soon led to animosity and to an increasing anti-Jewish animus in the Gentile church. 

Among the oldest Christian writings, two in particular offer a splendid insight into the divergences between the two branches of the Jesus followers. The 16 chapters of the Didache, or Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, probably composed in Palestine or Syria, is our last major Jewish Christian document preserved in full, and the Epistle of Barnabas is one of the earliest expressions of Gentile Christianity, filled with anti-Jewish strictures.  

The existence of the Didache was known as long ago as the fourth century. Eusebius mentions it. However, the full Greek text was first published by Philotheos Bryennios in 1883 from an 11th-century manuscript identified by him ten years earlier. It contains no identifiable chronological pointers, but is generally assigned to the second half of the first century CE, thus probably antedating some of the writings of the New Testament.

Its religious programme is built on the essential summary of the Mosaic Law, the love of God and of the neighbour, to which is added the so-called “golden rule” in its negative Jewish form, “Whatever you do not want to happen to you, do not do to another” (Did. 1.2), instead of the positive Gospel version, “Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Mt. 7:12; Lk 6:31). The lifestyle recommended is that of the primitive Jerusalem community described in the Acts, including religious communism: “Share all things with your brother and do not say that anything is your own” (Did. 4.8). The Didache seems to recommend the observance of the entire Mosaic Law or at least as much of it as is possible (Did. 6.2).

Baptism is presented as an ablution, a purification rite, and aspersion may be substituted for immersion if no pools or rivers are available. Communal prayer entailed the recitation of “Our Father” thrice daily and the thanksgiving meal (Eucharist) was celebrated on the Lord’s Day (Sunday) (Did. 14:1). It was a real dinner as well as the symbol of spiritual food. It also had an eschatological ingredient, signifying the reunification of the dispersed members of the church, and ended with the Aramaic cry, “Maranatha” (Come, our Lord!). No allusion is made in Pauline fashion to the Lord’s Supper.

Teaching authority in the Didache lay in the hands of itinerant prophets, whom we know also from the Acts of the Apostles 11:27-8. They were supplemented by bishops and deacons. However, these were not appointed by the successors of the apostles, as became the rule in the Gentile churches, but democratically elected by the community. 

Perhaps the most significant element of the doctrine handed down in the Didache concerns its understanding of Jesus. This primitive Judaeo-Christian writing contains none of the theological ideas of Paul about the redeeming Christ or of John’s divine Word or Logos. Jesus is never called the “Son of God”. Astonishingly, this expression is found only once in the Didache where it is the self-designation of the Antichrist, “the seducer of the world” (Did. 16.4). The only title assigned to Jesus in the Judaeo-Christian Didache is the Greek term pais, which means either servant or child. However, as Jesus shares this designation in relation to God with King David (Did. 9.2; see also Acts 4:25), it is clear that it must be rendered as God’s “Servant”. If so, the Didache uses only the lowliest Christological qualification about Jesus.

In short, the Jesus of the Didache is essentially the great eschatological teacher, who is expected to reappear soon to gather together and transfer the dispersed members of his church to the Kingdom of God. The Pauline-Johannine ideas of atonement and redemption are nowhere visible in this earliest record of Judaeo-Christian life. While handed down by Jewish teachers to Jewish listeners, the image of Jesus remained close to the earliest tradition underlying the Synoptic Gospels, and the Christian congregation of the Didache resembled the Jerusalem church portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles. 

The switch in the perception of Jesus from charismatic prophet to superhuman being coincided with a geographical and religious change, when the Christian preaching of the Gospel moved from the Galilean-Judaean Jewish culture to the pagan surroundings of the Graeco-Roman world. At the same time, under the influence of Paul’s organising genius, the church acquired a hierarchical structure governed by bishops with the assistance of presbyters and deacons. The disappearance of the Jewish input opened the way to a galloping “gentilisation” and consequent de-judaisation and anti-judaisation of nascent Christianity, as may be detected from a glance at the Epistle of Barnabas.

This letter — falsely attributed to Barnabas, the companion of Paul — is the work of a Gentile-Christian author, probably from Alexandria. It was most likely written in the 120s CE and almost made its way into the sacred books. It is included in the oldest New Testament codex, the fourth-century Sinaiticus, but was finally declared non-canonical by the church. A reference to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem definitely dates it after 70 CE, but the absence of any allusion to the second Jewish war against Rome suggests that the epistle was written before 135 CE. It is a hybrid work, in which moral instructions (Barn. 18-21) based on a Jewish tractate on the way of light and the way of darkness, attested to also in the Didache 1-5, and ultimately in the first-century BCE Community Rule among the Dead Sea Scrolls, is preceded by a lengthy anti-Jewish diatribe (Barn. 1-17). The author depicts two quarrelling parties designated simply as “we” and “they”, the first representing the Christians and the second the Jews, and the dispute is founded on the Greek Old Testament, which both factions consider their own property.

The aim of Barnabas is to instruct his readers in “perfect knowledge” (gnosis) by revealing to them the true meaning of the essential biblical notions of Covenant, Temple, sacrifice, circumcision, Sabbath, and food laws. He insists that the Jews are mistaken in taking the institutions and precepts of the Old Testament in the literal sense; they are to be interpreted allegorically in conformity with the exegesis in vogue in Alexandria. In fact, the laws of Moses have been spiritualised in the new law revealed by Jesus (Barn. 2.5). Sacrifice should not amount to cultic slaughter, but demand a broken heart, nor is forgiveness of sin obtained through the killing of animals, but through the mystical sprinkling of the blood of Christ (Barn. 5. 1-6). The ideas of Paul, ignored by the author of the Didache, are in the forefront of Barnabas’s thought. According to him, those endowed with gnosis know that the grace of the true circumcision of the heart is dispensed, not by the mutilation of the flesh, but by means of the cross of Jesus (Barn. 9. 3-7).

For Barnabas and his Gentile Christian followers, the covenant between God and the Jews was a sham; it was never ratified. When, bringing down the Law from Sinai, Moses saw that the Jews were engaged in the worship of the golden calf, he smashed into pieces the two stone tablets inscribed by God’s hand, and thus rendered the Jewish covenant null and void. It had to be replaced by the covenant sealed by the redemptive blood of the “beloved Jesus” in the heart of the Christians (Barn. 4. 6-8; 14. 1-7).

Barnabas’s portrait of Jesus is considerably more advanced than the Didache’s “Servant” of God. He calls Jesus “the Son” or “the Son of God” no less than a dozen times. This “Son of God” had existed since all eternity and was active before the creation of the world. It was to this pre-existent Jesus that at the time of “the foundation of the world” God addressed the words, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness” (Barn. 5.5; 6.12). The quasi-divine character of Jesus is implied when Barnabas explains that the Son of God took on a human body because without such a disguise no one would have been able to look at him and stay alive (Barn. 5. 9-10). The ultimate purpose of the descent of “the Lord of the entire world” among men was to enable himself to suffer “in order to destroy death and show that there is resurrection” (Barn. 5. 5-6). We are in, and perhaps slightly beyond, the Pauline-Johannine vision of Christ and his work of salvation.

The type of outlook represented by the Didache has no place in the religious vision of Barnabas. The parting of the ways between Jewish and Gentile Christianity is manifest already at this stage and the Epistle of Barnabas marks the start of the future doctrinal evolution of the church on exclusively Gentile lines. Half a century after Barnabas, for the bishop of Sardis, Melito, the Jews are judged guilty of deicide: “God has been murdered…by the right hand of Israel” (Paschal Homily 96). Jewish Christianity makes no sense any longer. 

The Didache is the last flowering of Judaeo-Christianity. In the second century, and especially after the suppression of the second revolt of the Jews by Hadrian in 135 CE, its decline began. The story is well documented in Edwin K. Broadhead’s recent study, Jewish Ways of Following Jesus (Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2010). In the mid-second century, Justin Martyr (executed in 165 CE) proudly noted in his First Apology that in his day non-Jews largely outnumbered the Jewish members of the church. 

Thereafter, Judaeo-Christianity, the elder sister, sticking to the observance of the Mosaic precepts and combining it with a primitive type of faith in Jesus, progressively became a fringe phenomenon. For a while some Jewish Christians went on believing in a miraculously conceived Christ, but the remainder, while accepting the messianic status of Jesus, maintained that he was the normal son of Joseph and Mary, the charismatic teacher and prophet of biblical tradition. They had the unpleasant experience of falling between two stools, or as St Jerome’s sharp pen puts it in a letter to St Augustine: “While they wish to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither Jews, nor Christians.” They progressively vanished, either rejoining the Jewish fold or being absorbed in the Gentile church.

Gentile Christianity, on the other hand, having survived two centuries of persecution by the state, triumphed in the fourth century to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. In the Nicene Creed, drawn up at the Council of Nicaea in 325, it proclaimed Jesus “consubstantial with the Father”-a far cry from the “Servant of God” of the Judaeo-Christian Didache.

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The extensive secular chronicles provide a more nuanced biography, one that is almost as detailed as those of Roman emperors. Our chief informant is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37-c.100CE), who devoted most of Book I of his Jewish War and Books XIV to XVII of Jewish Antiquities to the life and times of Herod. Josephus uses as his main source the universal history of Nicolaus of Damascus, the well-informed teacher, adviser and ambassador of Herod. The fact that Josephus often criticises the king suggests that beside the court historian’s pro-Herod chronicle, he had also at his disposal another account sympathetic to the Hasmoneans, the Jewish priest-kings, who from 152 BCE ruled the Holy Land, first independently and after 63 BCE under the aegis of Rome, until Herod took their throne in 37 BCE. 

We do not know what Herod looked like. In obedience to Jewish law, he did not allow his effigy to appear on coins. Nor has any statue of his survived away from home. The nearest we come to a Herodian face is through the coins of his more liberal grandson, Agrippa I (10 BCE-44 CE) and great-grandson Agrippa II (27/28-92/93 CE). Josephus depicts Herod as a strong, attractive, and sensual man. He was outstanding as rider, hunter and soldier. Few could match the precision of his javelin or arrow. Extremely ambitious, he wished to be second to none. This eagerness probably stemmed from an inferiority complex implanted in him by two women of royal descent: his haughty wife Mariamme and mother-in-law Alexandra. One of his cheeky sons by Mariamme gossiped that standing beside his father he had to stoop as he was taller than him, and felt obliged to miss at hunting to make Herod appear the better shot. He also let it be known that to disguise his age, Herod was dying his hair black. 

Gladly availing himself of the Mosaic privilege of extensive royal polygamy, Herod took altogether ten wives. Apart from Mariamme, who was both beautiful and princely, they were all chosen for their looks rather than their rank, according to Glaphyra, Herod’s sharp-tongued daughter-in-law, herself daughter of the king of Cappadocia. Family prattle had it that Herod fancied Glaphyra. We learn from Josephus that Herod had at least one male lover, Karos, “a young man of unrivalled beauty”, who later came to a sticky end.

Herod was born between 74 and 72 BCE into a leading Idumean family. The Idumeans, who lived south of Judea, were forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hasmonean ruler, John Hyrcanus I, in the 120s BCE. Herod’s grandfather Antipas and his father Antipater held high offices in the Hasmonean kingdom: the former was governor of Idumea, and Antipater acted as military aide and political adviser to the priestly ruler, Hyrcanus II (63-40 BCE). Antipater and his young son rose to prominence in the stormy days of the Roman republic, first under the leadership of Pompey, the conqueror of Jerusalem in 63 BCE, and then under Julius Caesar after Pompey’s defeat in 48 BCE. They both gained Roman citizenship.

We have no record of Herod’s childhood and upbringing, though it may be assumed that he learned Greek. Remarkably, his main education came late in life from the already mentioned Nicolaus of Damascus, who joined his court in 14 BCE when Herod was nearing 60. In a surviving passage of his autobiography, Nicolaus records that Herod’s first enthusiasm was for philosophy, then he preferred rhetoric which he practised with his teacher. 

Next he fell in love with history and bullied Nicolaus to complete his universal history. Finally, when he sailed to Rome to meet Augustus, he took Nicolaus with him to discuss philosophy. 

Herod first revealed his strong arm in 47 BCE when, appointed governor of Galilee by his father, he cleared the country of brigands. After Caesar’s violent removal three years later, Antipater and Herod collaborated for a short while with Cassius, one of Caesar’s murderers, who took over Syria. In 43 BCE, Antipater was poisoned by one of his enemies. When Caesar’s friend, Mark Antony, and Octavian, Caesar’s heir, defeated Brutus and Cassius, leaders of the anti-Caesar faction at Philippi in 42 BCE, Herod cleverly switched to Antony’s side. In turn, Antony persuaded Octavian and the Roman senate in 40 BCE to entrust Herod with the kingship of Judea. He was thought to be the man able to reconquer the country recently invaded by Rome’s chief enemies, the Parthians. 

With Roman help, it took Herod three years to expel the Parthians and their puppet king, the Hasmonean Antigonus, from Judea and Jerusalem. Thanks to the support of Samaias, an influential Pharisee, Herod was welcomed by the inhabitants of the capital. In gratitude to them, he did his best to stop the Romans from pillaging the city. On the other hand, he made himself exceedingly rich by confiscating the land owned by the hostile Jewish upper classes. 

The Egyptian queen Cleopatra was the immediate threat to Herod. She was ambitious to expand her domain eastwards. She successfully urged Mark Antony, her husband, to transfer to her Herod’s rich palm and balsam groves at Jericho. Cleopatra even visited Judea in 34 BCE and was toying with the idea of seducing Herod — seduction being something she regularly enjoyed, according to Josephus. She may also have envisaged the bed as a trap that would expose Herod to Antony’s fury and result in Judea’s takeover by Cleopatra. Herod, in turn, was tempted to destroy the Egyptian queen while she was in his power. However, he abstained for fear of risking Antony’s displeasure. In the end, Cleopatra unwittingly contributed to Herod’s political survival. Thanks to her greed for the land of the Nabateans — in the south of modern Israel and Jordan — she persuaded Antony to launch Herod and his army against them. So he and his main forces were kept away from fighting on Antony’s side against Octavian at Actium in 31 BCE.

From 37 to 4 BCE, with firm Roman backing, Herod ruled over Judea, Idumea, Samaria and Galilee, as well as over further regions in southern Syria and northern Transjordan. Not since David and Solomon in the tenth century BCE had there been a Jewish kingdom as large as Herod’s, not a mean achievement for the Idumean parvenu. The first 12 years of Herod’s reign (37-25 BCE) saw the consolidation of his power. He built fortifications in Jerusalem, Samaria and at Masada, silenced all opposition to his rule and eliminated his Hasmonean rivals, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus II, the brother and the grandfather of his second wife, Mariamme. The former drowned in an arranged swimming pool accident and the latter was strangled. The middle period of Herod’s rule (25 to 13 BCE) is characterised by his spectacular building activities at home and abroad, culminating in the reconstruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple and the creation of the city and port of Caesarea. 

The last years of his life (13-4 BCE) were poisoned by increasingly bitter family feuds, which ultimately sprang from his marriage to Mariamme. To understand the situation, we must go back to 37 BCE, the start of the monarchy. After becoming master of Jerusalem, Herod dismissed his first wife Doris and their son Antipater, in order to marry later in that year Mariamme, the granddaughter of the former high priest/king Hyrcanus II. Not only was he passionately in love with her, but through the marriage bond with Hasmonean royalty he sought to improve his popularity with his Jewish subjects. Their bliss was short-lived, however, due to intrigue, jealousy and hatred between the female in-laws, Mariamme and her mother Alexandra on the one side, and Cypros and Salome, Herod’s mother and his sister, on the other. The Hasmonean royals openly despised the “lowborn” Idumeans. The Idumeans were craftier. The infighting climaxed with a charge of adultery against Mariamme, which unhinged Herod and led to her execution in 29 BCE. 

In the following year, Alexandra, the much-disliked mother-in-law, shared her daughter’s fate. Alexandra twice earned Herod’s displeasure for plotting his overthrow. First, in collusion with her intimate friend Cleopatra, she arranged for Antony to summon Herod and demand that he account for the drowning of Alexandra’s son, the young high priest Aristobulus, but Herod managed to extricate himself from trouble. After the execution of her daughter, Alexandra tried to seize the power for herself and Mariamme’s sons, but the plan was reported to the king and revenge followed. 

After Mariamme, who bore him three sons, one of whom died young, and two daughters, Herod took eight further wives and had numerous children. In 14 BCE, even the repudiated first wife Doris was readmitted to the court only to be dismissed again about nine years later.

In the final stage of Herod’s reign, the family drama reached its apogee. After enjoying five years of princely education in Rome between 23/22 and 18/17 BCE, part of the time staying with Augustus, Alexander and Aristobulus, Mariamme’s children, fell foul of the machinations of Antipater, who rejoined the family together with his mother Doris. He was aided and abetted by the king’s brother and sister who falsely accused the young men of plotting parricide. Antipater’s aim was to remove the favourite sons from the line of succession. Herod, in order to teach a lesson to the turbulent Alexander and Aristobulus, proclaimed Antipater his heir, but the firstborn felt insecure as long as Mariamme’s sons lived. The scandalmongering continued and in 12 BCE Herod, in desperation, took his two sons to Rome to charge them with treason before Augustus, but the peace-loving emperor managed to effect reconciliation. Herod, quite relieved, proclaimed his three sons kings, a solution that displeased them all. The smear campaign by Antipater persisted and by 7 BCE the fate of Alexander and Aristobulus was sealed. Augustus with a heavy heart allowed Herod to try his two sons, who were found guilty and executed by strangulation in Sebaste/Samaria, where 30 years earlier their father and Mariamme had celebrated their wedding. Antipater’s path to kingship was cleared, but he was too impatient for power and decided to poison his father. Herod became suspicious again and servants privy to the plan confessed under torture. The arch schemer Antipater was tried in court and reaped his just deserts five days before Herod’s death.

In 4 BCE, approaching 70, Herod’s body was totally disintegrating. By then, he realised that despite his lifelong yearning for admiration and love he had become the object of general hatred. His unpopularity reached boiling point when he sentenced to death two respected religious teachers and 40 of their pupils for destroying the golden eagle, symbol of Rome, attached to the new Temple. On his death bed, he devised an insane finale for himself. He instructed his sister to arrange for the imprisonment of all the leading men of Judea in the hippodrome of Jericho, and to give the order for their execution at the moment of his death. That would ensure countrywide wailing on the day of the royal funeral. Salome, however, released the prisoners, pretending that the king had changed his mind.

The splendour of Herod’s burial rites stands in stark contrast to the wretchedness of his last years. His body, clothed in crimson, with crown and diadem on his head and sceptre in his hand, lay on a solid gold bier covered with royal purple. His surviving sons and relatives walked beside the bier, preceded by a military detachment and followed by fully-armed Thracian, German and Gaulish bodyguards. The cortège proceeded from Jericho to the final resting place at Herodium. In 2007, the Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer, who died last October when he fell off a platform at the site, discovered there a large sarcophagus, made of reddish Jerusalem limestone and decorated with rosettes that probably contained the earthly remains of Herod the Great, king of the Jews. 

This sketchy portrait reveals that Herod was a split personality in whom the two extremes of evil and good met. Josephus hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

When we have regard to his…benefactions that he had made to mankind in general, even his detractors would be forced to admit the remarkable generosity of his nature. Yet when we consider his unjustified and vengeful treatment of his subjects and his closest relatives, and observe the unrelenting harshness of his character, we must regard him as a brute.

More than once he displayed signs of momentary madness. After executing his wife, he went on imagining that she was still alive and instructed servants to summon her. Later, he fantasised that his son, with sword in hand, was rushing to kill him. The murderous scenario he devised as an accompaniment to his funeral is also attributable to an insane mind.

By contrast, throughout his long career, Herod was a brilliant general whose armies, if they followed his orders, never lost a battle. On various occasions, he also proved himself a political genius. Nothing illustrates better his farsightedness, courage and perspicacity than his risky venture to meet, uninvited, Octavian at Rhodes after his victory over Mark Antony at Actium in 31 BCE. As Antony’s creature, Herod realised the precariousness of his situation and concluded that his only chance of survival consisted in taking the bull by the horns. Removing the diadem from his head, he faced the hostile Octavian and attempted to gain his sympathy by being totally frank with him. He emphasised his close friendship with Antony and admitted that he had supported him to the end with auxiliary troops and large quantities of foodstuff, quietly reminding Octavian of the absence of his main army and himself at Actium as they were fighting the Arabs in southern Transjordan on Antony’s orders. 

He further confessed that even after Octavian’s victory he remained Antony’s counsellor and advised him in vain to get rid of Cleopatra, the femme fatale, and cause of his misfortune. Then came a masterful peroration reported by Josephus which deserves to be quoted:

I am come to rest my safety on my integrity…I am not ashamed to declare my loyalty to Antony. But if you would disregard the individual concerned, and examine how I requite my benefactors, and how staunch a friend I prove, then you may know me by the test of my past actions. I hope that the subject of inquiry will be not whose friend, but how loyal a friend, I have been. 

The clever gambit worked. Octavian replaced the diadem on Herod’s head with the words: 

So staunch a champion of the claims of friendship deserves to be ruler over many subjects…Antony did well in obeying Cleopatra’s behests rather than yours; for through his folly we have gained you.

From then on, Herod became one of Augustus’s best friends, second only to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. This friendship was marred only once, in 7 BCE, during Herod’s conflict with the Nabateans. The war was considered unauthorised by the emperor, but the tactful diplomacy of Nicolaus of Damascus ironed out the misunderstanding. 

Generally speaking, loyalty and gratitude are virtues definitely to Herod’s credit. He never rebelled against Hyrcanus and proved a devoted friend of Mark Antony through thick and thin. As Augustus’s client king, his fidelity to the emperor remained steadfast to his death. Even though no favour could be expected in return, in his last will Herod left Augustus ten million silver coins as well as gold and silver vessels and luxurious articles of clothing; he also bequeathed to the empress Julia five million pieces of silver. To see these legacies in proportion, he left his beloved sister Salome only 500,000 silver coins. 

In the domain of social policy, Herod could be harsh to his Jewish subjects, confiscating the wealth of rich opponents and collecting tributes with moderate severity from the general population. However, he was sometimes remarkably generous towards the needy. At the time of a great famine in 24-23 BCE, Herod did all he could to rescue his people. Being without ready cash to purchase food in Egypt at inflated prices, he sold all the gold and silver objects in his possession and fed the starving at home and even in cities beyond the frontiers of his kingdom. We learn from Josephus that twice he substantially reduced taxes (by one third in one case and by a quarter in another) to help the stricken economy to recover. Yet once he admitted that he never felt totally at home with Jews and preferred the more congenial company of the Greeks.

In fairness to Herod, one must also stress that thanks to him Judea became a richer, more civilised and definitely more beautiful country. In particular, Caesarea greatly contributed to the growth of international commerce and his great architectural projects provided employment and improved the circumstances of large segments of the working population of his kingdom.

Herod excelled in the promotion of culture, both Jewish and Hellenistic, especially through grandiose architectural projects. Jerusalem and the countryside were transformed and became incomparably more pleasant to live in after Herod than before his reign. Profoundly devoted to his Idumean family, he erected the cities of Antipatris on the coastal plain, Cypros and Phasaelis in the region of Jericho, to perpetuate the names of his father, mother and elder brother. 

Herodium, not far from Bethlehem, was to bear Herod’s name and serve as his burial place. His most prestigious architectural enterprise on the non-Jewish Mediterranean coast was the transformation, with no expense spared, of the derelict town of Strato’s Tower into the magnificent new city of Caesarea in celebration of Caesar Augustus. It comprised a theatre and an amphitheatre for quinquennial games in the emperor’s honour as well as a statue and a temple dedicated to him. Above all, Caesarea became a large port, equal in size to Piraeus, the harbour of Athens. Imported white marble was used for the construction of the palaces and the temples. 

Herod considered himself a Jew and at home he behaved as one despite his frequent participation in Graeco-Roman worship outside Judea. He also observed Jewish dietary laws. Snidely alluding to his cruel treatment of Mariamme’s offspring, Augustus remarked: “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.” A first-century CE Latin poet referred to the Jewish Sabbath as “Herod’s day”. He strictly adhered to Jewish rules governing mixed marriages and required circumcision of non-Jewish men before they were allowed to marry into his family. If they refused, the engagement was called off. Some of the pools discovered in Herodian palaces served for ritual purification, according to archaeologists.

His formal adherence to the Jewish religion did not stop him, however, from contributing to cultural modernisation. He promoted Greek-style entertainment thought to be attractive to progressive Jews, though hated by religious zealots. He built a theatre in Jerusalem, a hippodrome in Jericho and an amphitheatre in the coastal plain, where four-yearly games celebrated Augustus. Beyond the frontiers of his kingdom, at Paneas, near the sources of the River Jordan (the Caesarea Philippi of the Gospels), he dedicated another sanctuary to Augustus. Other temples were erected in Berytus (Beirut), Tyre and Rhodes. In Antioch, Herod provided marble to pave the main street and build colonnades. The councillors of Elis in Greece, the city of the ancient Olympics, greeted Herod as a generous benefactor and elected him life president of the Games, a role that he personally fulfilled during his visit in 12 BCE. 

The jewel in the crown of his exclusively Jewish creative activity was the reconstruction of the Second Temple. It started in 19 BCE and was financed by him. The Western Wall of Herod’s Temple still stands and is the holiest site in Judaism. The building was substantially larger and higher than the original Second Temple erected at the end of the sixth century BCE. To reassure the inhabitants of the city, Herod assembled in advance all the building materials, and hired and trained the stonemasons and carpenters. 

To allay religious worries, he associated the Jewish clergy with the project, and to please them he ordered sumptuous robes for 1,000 priests. The main sanctuary, completed in 18 months, was inaugurated in a grandiose ceremony entailing the sacrifice of 300 oxen. The Temple was one of the marvels of the ancient world. According to a Jewish saying, “He who has not seen the Temple of Herod, has not seen a beautiful building in his life.” Work continued long after Herod’s death and did not end until the procuratorship of Albinus in 62-64 CE, a few years before its destruction in the first rebellion against Rome in 70 CE. 

As far as the Jewish religion was concerned, the enlarged and embellished Temple added extra attractiveness to cultic worship and thus increased the number of pilgrims who came from the four corners of the ancient world to worship in Jerusalem. Just over three decades after Herod’s death, Jewish pilgrims present in Jerusalem for the feast of Shavuot or Pentecost included, according to the Acts of the Apostles (2:9-11), people from Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphilia, Egypt, Cyrene, Rome, Crete and Arabia. Moreover, Herod’s liking for the learned Pharisees, who endorsed him when he was most in need of support, and his fondness of the Essenes, whose prophet Menachem predicted that one day Herod would become king, further contributed to the active promotion of the intellectual and spiritual life of Judaism. 

How can one explain Herod’s duality? Josephus thought that the conflicting propensities arose from a single source and had a single motivation. Herod always endeavoured to please because he wanted to be admired by everyone. Josephus wrote:

Herod loved honour, and was dominated by that passion, and his magnanimity revealed itself wherever there was hope of a lasting memorial or of immediate fame.

His overriding aim was to glorify himself, and his ambition was to leave to posterity ever more imposing monuments of his reign; and this was the spur that drove him to build cities and lavish such enormous expense on the work.

There was a reverse side to Herod’s open-handedness. He spent beyond his means to please his patrons and on good causes at home or abroad. 

His lavish expenditure on the recipients of his bounty made him a source of misery to the people from whom he took the money. Well aware that he was hated for the injustices…He could see no easy way to redress these wrongs…Instead he remained defiant, using the resentment (of the exploited) as an excuse to satisfy his wants.

His insecurity produced a constant longing for adulation. Any apparent questioning of his authority opened the floodgates of reprisals. So Josephus concludes:

These excesses he committed from a desire to be uniquely honoured. To support my contention that this was his overriding motive I can refer to the ways in which he gave honour to Caesar, Agrippa and his other friends. He expected to receive the same deference himself…The Jewish people, however, have been taught by their Law…to admire righteousness rather than the pursuit of glory. As a result, they incurred his displeasure, finding it impossible to flatter the king’s ambition with statues, temples and marks of honour.

Josephus’s reasoning may be superficially correct, but it cannot fully account for the actions of Herod that are not all reducible to self-interest. The benevolent measures he took to alleviate his subjects’ misery at the time of the famine went far beyond the call of duty and with one foot in the grave he could not expect any return for his exceptional liberality towards Augustus and Julia. While one contemporary Josephus expert calls Herod an “infamous king”, more perspicacious observers will retrieve his complex true self. For them, Herod is a tragic hero whose good intentions and far-reaching political wisdom come to naught because of the frightening flaws of his personality and the nefarious influence of his family. 

He strove for an undreamt-of improvement of the social, cultural and economic standards of the Jews, and longed for, but failed to harvest, gratitude and love. Seeing in Rome God’s gift to mankind, and in Augustus the universal saviour, Herod tried his best to ensure the integration of his Jewish kingdom into the new world order. 

His great dream collapsed for two reasons. For the Jews, the Roman Empire was not the new creation forecast by the prophets, nor was Augustus the final redeemer. They preferred to await their own Messiah and his Kingdom of God. And the bloodbath inflicted by Herod on the respected Hasmoneans, including his wife and sons, completely offset the impact of his generosity towards the Jewish nation. 

Fate caught up with the erring tyrant and his undoing, like that of all tragic heroes, became inevitable. He expired in loneliness after a painful illness and in full knowledge of the hatred he had generated in his people. 

In 70 CE, with the end of the Jewish state and the Herodian dynasty, and after the destruction of Herod’s masterpiece, the Temple, his name faded away. The Talmud, ignoring Herod’s ancestry and attainments, downgrades him to the status of a “wicked slave of the Hasmonean kings”, and the Nativity story of Saint Matthew has transformed him into a monster who massacred the innocent babes of Bethlehem in an effort to extinguish the budding life of Christianity’s Son of God. 

In short, both Jewish and Christian traditions treat him as Herod the Terrible. The historian, however, is fully aware, despite Herod’s grave shortcomings, of his unparalleled political and cultural accomplishments. In particular, his long friendship with Augustus was highly beneficial to the inhabitants of Judea and the Jewish religion. Moreover, while Herod enjoyed the enviable status of a “client king, friend of the Roman people”, none of his descendants, if the short reign of Agrippa I (41-44 CE) is discarded, was sufficiently esteemed by Augustus and his successors to receive the title “king of the Jews”. All in all, in view of these unquestionable achievements Herod deserves to be known as the one and only Herod the Great.

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Josephus belonged to the Judaean priestly aristocracy. He lists among his forebears the daughter of the Jewish high priest and king, Alexander Jannaeus (Yannai). Born in 37 CE and educated in Jerusalem, Josephus boasted of precocious expertise in the Law. Between the ages of 16 and 19, he studied the “philosophies” of the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, as well as the wisdom of the Jewish hermit Bannus, finally choosing to become a Pharisee. In 64 CE, he sailed to Rome where Poppaea, the second wife of the Emperor Nero, was his benefactress.

He returned to Jerusalem before the outbreak of the Jewish rebellion (66 CE) and like many of his upper-class, land-owning compatriots, he first opposed the war. A prompt U-turn soon followed and, aged 29, Josephus became the officer in command of the revolutionary forces in Galilee. His short military career ended ingloriously in 67 CE, when he was captured by the Romans at Jotapata (Yodfat). Taken before Vespasian, the commander of the Roman forces, Josephus predicted that he would become emperor. Two years later, the prophecy came true and Josephus was freed. Vespasian returned to Rome, leaving his son Titus in charge of the war. Josephus was then used as an interpreter and negotiator by Titus in his talks with Jerusalem’s Jewish defenders. 

Although in the eyes of the revolutionaries he was a traitor, Josephus believed he was serving his compatriots and used his influence with Titus to liberate many Jewish prisoners. He even rescued three crucified acquaintances, one of whom survived. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Josephus followed Titus to Rome, where he was granted citizenship. The financial support he received from Vespasian and his successors, Titus and Domitian, allowed Josephus to lead a leisurely life as a man of letters. He was married four times and his third and fourth wives bore him five sons.

Josephus’s works, aimed at glorifying the Jewish people, were primarily addressed to educated Greeks and Romans. The seven books of The Jewish War, covering the period from Antiochus Epiphanes (175 BCE) to the fall of Jerusalem (70 CE) and Masada (74 CE), were drafted in Aramaic and translated by Josephus into Greek with the help of assistants in the late 70s. He tells his readers that both the Emperor Titus and the Jewish king Agrippa II praised the reliability of his history in private correspondence. All his other books were written in Greek.

His major work, The Jewish Antiquities, completed in 93/4 CE, consists of 20 books and retraces biblical and Jewish history from the creation to the start of the anti-Roman war in 66 CE. The first ten books summarise the Bible and embroider the accounts with popular Jewish interpretative traditions. The last ten rely on Greek and Roman sources and on Jewish texts such as 1 Maccabees, the Letter of Aristeas, etc. The third writing of Josephus, entitled Life, dates after 93/4 CE and is an apologia for his conduct as military commander in Galilee in 66-7 CE.  

Against Apion is Josephus’s last surviving work, written in the late 90s. It defends the Jewish religion against the ridiculous attacks of the Alexandrian grammarian and sophist Apion and other anti-Jewish writers. It also includes the first impressive synopsis of the Law of Moses for non-Jews. He died in Rome around 100 CE.

As an historian, Josephus is thought to be generally trustworthy except when he deals with matters in which he himself was involved. Also, like many classical historians, he often places apocryphal speeches on the lips of personalities and gives Greek colouring to Jewish schools of thought — the Pharisees were Jewish Stoics and the Essenes resembled the Pythagoreans. He plays down bellicose messianism in order not to provoke Roman suspicions, blaming the war against Rome on a revolutionary minority. Josephus’s reputation as an historian has noticeably improved in recent scholarship. Fergus Millar, perhaps the greatest living Roman historian, wrote in the 1987 Journal of Jewish Studies that the Jewish Antiquities was “the most significant single work written in the Roman empire”. 

The survival of Josephus’s writings is due largely to the respect with which they were held by Christians because of the references to New Testament characters in the Antiquities. He almost enjoyed the dignity of a fifth evangelist and had a statue in Rome in the fourth century. By the Renaissance, some doubts began to surround the genuineness of the paragraph relative to Jesus — known as the Flavian Testimony (Testimonium Flavianum), or the Jesus notice of Flavius Josephus — yet in 1737, Josephus’s translator, William Whiston, still defended his veracity. He quoted Joseph Justus Scaliger, the prince of 16th-century Humanism, for whom Josephus was “the most diligent and greatest lover of truth” who was “more safe to believe…than all the Greek and Latin writers”. 

The critical revival since the 19th century brought about a shift of opinion among leading scholars, tending towards the denial of the authenticity of the Jesus notice, and less frequently of those about John the Baptist and James. Nowadays, opinions are divided. Hence the question must be asked: Are the three notices the work of Josephus, or have they, or some of them, been produced wholly or partly by a Christian forger?

The three passages appear in separate sections of the Antiquities. The short Jesus notice comes first, followed by the longer accounts of John and the execution of James. Leaving the controversial Testimonium to last, let us first examine John and James, both in their Josephan context and in comparison with the corresponding Christian sources.

John the Baptist

In the Gospels, John, an eremitic prophet, preached repentance and baptism in the wilderness of the Jordan. He was the forerunner of Jesus, his follower and successor in Galilee. John was imprisoned and beheaded on the occasion of the birthday feast of the ruler of Galilee, Herod Antipas, for disapproving of his marriage to Herodias, his sister-in-law.  Josephus mentions no link between John and Jesus, places the venue of John’s execution not in Galilee, but in Machaerus (Mukawir), a fortress in contemporary Jordan, and does not connect the downfall of the Baptist with his disapproval of the union between Antipas and Herodias. For Josephus, John was an exemplary character, a “good man”, who “had exhorted the Jews…to practise justice towards their fellows and piety towards God, and so doing to join in baptism”. He noted, however, that John “aroused” his followers to the highest degree by his sermons. The word “aroused” implies that he was a powerful and fiery preacher, and as such capable of igniting a revolt. 

So, Josephus continued, Antipas decided to “strike first and be rid of him before his work led to an uprising”. The eloquent John was seen by Antipas — like Jesus, one may add, by the high priests after he had caused mayhem in the merchants’ quarter in the Temple — as a potential threat to civic order. In consequence, both were eliminated. 

Josephus included John’s story in his narrative because the annihilation of Antipas’s army by Aretas, the Nabatean king and the enraged father of the wife abandoned by Antipas for Herodias, was interpreted by the Jews as a divine vindication that fairly closely followed John’s murder. There is no reason to suspect here a Christian hand. The account fits Josephus’s narrative style and explains the tragedy just as well as the anecdote of Herodias’s dancing daughter, Salome, demanding the head of the Baptist on a platter. Against the Gospel version note that Machaerus on the distant Nabatean border would be a rather unsuitable location for a royal birthday party intended for the Galilean nobility (Mk 6:21).

James, the brother of Jesus

The authenticity of the mention of James is the least questionable of the three anecdotes. Josephus identifies James not as the son of “X”, but as “the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ”. Paul also refers to him as “James the brother of the Lord”. The atmosphere of the story reflects the political situation in Jerusalem in the first century CE, with Roman governors and Jewish high priests constantly vying with one another for power. 

For Josephus, the James episode serves to illustrate the violent career of the high priest Ananus. In the gubernatorial vacuum — the procurator Festus (60-62 CE) was already dead and the incoming Albinus (62-64) still on his way — Ananus attempted to flex his political muscles. He brought his opponents, James “and certain others”, before the Sanhedrin and sentenced them to be stoned for transgressing the Law. The fair-minded and strictly observant representatives of the ruling classes — no doubt the leading Pharisees who opposed Ananus and his heartless Sadducees — were outraged and appealed to King Agrippa II. Agrippa, who had been granted the privilege to appoint and dismiss high priests by the emperor Claudius, promptly sacked Ananus, a mere three months after his elevation to office.

Fraternal love: Jesus and his brother, James (right) 

Josephus’s notice possesses all the appearances of authenticity. It lacks New Testament parallels that might have inspired a forger. Moreover, the church fathers, Origen (185-254) and Eusebius (260-340), not only attest to the existence of the passage, but also assert that Josephus saw in the fall of Jerusalem divine punishment for the murder of James. Unfortunately, no surviving Josephus manuscript contains such a statement and its authenticity is doubtful. 

Christian tradition presents a substantially different version of James’s killing. According to the second-century chronicler of the early church, Hegesippus, James was pushed from the parapet of the Temple but survived the fall and the subsequent stoning. 

Finally, he was clubbed to death. Josephus’s interest is wholly centred on Ananus’s misconduct and has nothing to say about the admirable virtues heaped on the victim by Hegesippus: James “the Righteous” was holy from birth, was teetotal and vegetarian, never cut his hair or beard and shunned cosmetic oil and bath water. Compared to this, the sober picture of Josephus appears all the more believable.

As a final comment, Josephus’s identification of James as “the brother of Jesus called Christ” would have made no sense unless there was an earlier mention of Jesus in Antiquities. The Testimonium Flavianum is likely to be this prior reference.

Jesus

The Jesus story is presented by Josephus as one of four misdeeds that Josephus blamed on Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea 26-36 CE. The first was the introduction of Roman standards bearing the emperor’s effigy into Jerusalem (26 CE). The second was the misappropriation of Temple funds (date unknown). The third was the sentencing of Jesus (30 CE), while the last was the upheaval in Samaria (35 CE), which led to Pilate’s dismissal from office.

Regarding the authenticity of the Testimonium, three stances are possible: 

1. One may accept it lock, stock and barrel, as did all the pre-16th-century authorities. 

2. With more recent scholars, one may reject the entire passage as a Christian interpolation. 

3. In the company of an increasing number of recent students, it is possible to recognise some parts of the notice as authentic and discard the remainder as spurious. 

I belong to the third group and will argue the case for a partial authenticity. The textual evidence — the Greek manuscripts of Josephus, the quotation of the passage in Eusebius, and the Latin, Syriac and Arabic translations — contains no significant variants. Consequently, only historical and literary-critical analysis can serve as a filter to separate the authentic from the inauthentic elements. I reproduce here Antiquities 18:63-64 in English:

(63) About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed paradoxical deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many Greeks. He was the Christ. (64) When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

The Christian passages, those that cannot be ascribed to the Jew Josephus, are easily distinguishable. 

• The gloss, “If indeed one ought to call him a man”, is the interpolator’s reaction to the superhuman/divine Jesus being called a mere “wise man”.
• “He was the Christ” is a common Christian interpolator’s confession of the messianic status of Jesus. Nevertheless, the original text must have contained the epithet, “Christ”, to account for the later statement about “the tribe of the Christians” named after the founder. The most likely original version read, “He was called the Christ”, as Josephus puts it in the James passage. 
• The reference to Jesus attracting to himself “many Greeks” is without Gospel support. Nevertheless, if Josephus knew of a mixed Jewish-Gentile church in Rome, he may have believed that a similar structure existed at the time of Jesus. 
• The resurrection appearances on the third day, together with the relevant prophecies, are part of the apologetic arsenal of the early church and have nothing to do with Josephus. 

Once the Christian supplements are removed, the original notice is reduced to the description of Jesus as “wise man” and “performer of paradoxical deeds”, the epithet “Christ” attached to the name of Jesus; the crediting of the death sentence to Pilate; and the mention of the existence of the followers of Jesus at the time of the writing of the Testimonium in the 90s CE.

Both “wise man” and “performer of paradoxical deeds” take us to plain Josephus territory. Great biblical and post-biblical characters like the priest Ezra, the miracle-worker Honi-Onias (Hame’agel, the circle-maker), and the Pharisaic leader Samaias are regularly portrayed as “just men” and John is called a “good man”. More specifically, the legendary King Solomon and the Prophet Daniel carry the title of “wise man”, and the miracle-working prophet Elisha is said to have performed “paradoxical deeds”. The notion of a paradox is commonly used by Josephus in relation to extraordinary events caused by God (the manna or the burning bush) and to miracles performed by Moses (Ant. 3:37-38) and by the prophet Elisha (Ant. 9:182).

In contrast, the phrase “wise man” has no New Testament parallels in reference to Jesus and falls far short of an honorific title that a Christian forger would choose to describe the divine Christ. Note that in Paul “wise man” has a pejorative connotation (1 Cor 1:18-31) and in a saying of Jesus “the wise” are unfavourably compared to “babes” (Mt 11:25; Lk 10:21). Furthermore, a Christian interpolator would be presumed to use phrases borrowed from the New Testament such as “mighty deeds” or “signs” instead of the neutral “paradoxical deeds”. The term “paradoxical” is found only once in the New Testament on the lips of uncommitted witnesses of a Gospel miracle (Lk 5:26). 

The fact that Josephus makes Pilate responsible for the crucifixion is highly significant. It is perfectly in line with Josephus’s critical attitude towards the prefect of Judaea, the perpetrator of a series of dreadful acts. One would imagine that a later Christian forger would try to exculpate him and place the blame for the death of Jesus on the shoulders of the Jews, as do the New Testament and especially later church tradition. Finally, the detached picture of the followers of Jesus is in harmony with the attitude of an outsider, but would be odd in the case of a Christian apologist. 

The Jesus notice is a veritable tour de force. Josephus plays the role of a neutral witness. We know that when he wants to disapprove of someone, he knows how to do it. In his description of two pseudo-Messiahs, Theudas and “the Egyptian”, both mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (5:26; 21:38), Josephus calls them “imposters”. 

So by portraying Jesus not unsympathetically, yet without fully embracing his cause, he achieved what none of his ancient Jewish successors managed to do: he sketched a non-partisan picture of Jesus. The Testimonium lies half way between the reverential portrait of the early church and the caricatures of the Talmud and of the early medieval Jewish lives of Jesus (Toldot Yeshu).

In conclusion, what seems to be Josephus’s authentic portrait of Jesus depicts him as a wise teacher and miracle worker, with an enthusiastic following of Jewish disciples who, despite the crucifixion of their master by order of Pontius Pilate in collusion with the Jerusalem high priests, remained faithful to him up to Josephus’s days.

Let me offer therefore the text that I believe Josephus wrote. The Christian additions, identified in the paragraph that follows the earlier reproduction of the English translation of Antiquities 18: 63-64, are excised and the deletions are indicated by [……]. The dubious authenticity of the phrase “[and many Greeks?]” (see the same paragraph above) is signalled by the question mark. Finally, the word [called] is inserted into the sentence “He was [called] the Christ” on the basis of Josephus’s description of James as “the brother of Jesus called the Christ”.

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man…For he was one who performed paradoxical deeds and was the teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews [and many Greeks?]. He was [called] the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him…And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

The post Jesus in the Eyes of Josephus appeared first on Standpoint.

Having no idea where the event is to take place, except that it must be in the region of Mount Moriah, he embarks on a trek with Isaac. On the third day of the trek, he sees the mountain from afar. Father and son carry the wood, the fire and the knife for the sacrifice while Abraham reassures the curious boy that God will provide the sacrificial lamb. On the mountaintop, he makes ready for the deed, binding Isaac on the altar. But just as he is about to plunge the knife into Isaac, an angel suddenly intervenes and substitutes a ram for the child. 

What did ancient Jewish Bible interpretation deduce from this account? Two explanations have been preserved. One is contained in the Palestinian Targum (Aramaic translation of the Bible) and the other in the Talmud, a collection of legal rules mixed with Scripture interpretation, and Midrash consisting of scriptural exegesis with illustrative stories. 

The targumic account of the sacrifice or Binding (Aqedah) of Isaac comprises five significant peculiarities:

(1) Isaac learns from his father that he will be the victim. Instead of the biblical wording (Gen 22:8), the Targumist writes: “The Word of the Lord shall prepare a lamb for himself, but if not, my son, you will be the burnt offering.” 
(2) Isaac is no longer a child. 
(3) He willingly accepts his role and begs his father to bind him. “Bind my hands properly that I may not struggle in the time of my pain and disturb you and render your offering unfit.” 
(4) He is granted a heavenly vision. “Abraham’s eyes were fixed on the eyes of Isaac, but the eyes of Isaac turned to the angels of heaven. Isaac saw them but Abraham did not see them. In that hour the angels of heaven said to each other, ‘Let us go and see the only two just men in the world. The one slays and the other is being slain. The slayer does not hesitate and the one being slain stretches out his neck.'”
(5) After sacrificing the ram, Abraham prays that his obedience and his son’s self-sacrifice may benefit Isaac’s descendants. “I pray before you, O Lord God, that when the children of Isaac come to a time of distress, you may remember on their behalf the binding of Isaac, their father, and loose and forgive them their sins… so that the generations which follow may say: On the mountain of the Temple of the Lord Abraham offered Isaac his son, and on the mountain of the Temple the glory of the Presence of God was revealed to Isaac.”

The story handed down in the Palestinian Targum may be supplemented by details preserved elsewhere in the Jewish interpretative tradition. The targumic version merely implies that Isaac is an adult participant and not a boy as in Genesis 22:12. In midrashic sources, we are told that he is 37 years old. This figure is derived from a Jewish legend reporting the sudden death of the 127-year-old Sarah (Genesis 23:1) when she is mendaciously told by Satan that Abraham has killed their son. Sarah was 90 when she bore Isaac: hence the figure 37. Without explaining the difference, the first-century CE Jewish historian Flavius Josephus makes Isaac 25 years old. 

According to Pseudo-Jonathan, a shining cloud and a pillar of smoke lead Abraham to the chosen mountaintop. Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, a midrashic composition dating from the ninth century CE, also mentions a pillar of fire resembling the one that directed the Jews in the wilderness in the Book of Exodus. Similarly, the cloud appears in the representation of the Binding of Isaac in Jewish art, on a fresco in the third-century CE synagogue of Dura Europos in Syria, and on the mosaic floor of the fifth-century Galilean Bet Alpha synagogue. 

In another ancient Midrash, Rabbi Akiva (martyred by the Romans in 135 CE) appended to Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might” the words, “In the same way as Isaac who bound himself on the altar.” 

This type of Scripture exegesis did not originate with Akiva. First-century CE Jewish sources are already aware of it. Flavius Josephus (37 – c. 100 CE) in his Jewish Antiquities recounts that Isaac, informed by his father about God’s demand, joyfully runs to the altar. Another first-century CE writer, Pseudo-Philo, the author of the Book of Biblical Antiquities, emphasises that Isaac explicitly agrees to become a sacrificial victim and that God’s election of the Jewish people is the reward for the shedding of Isaac’s blood. There is no reference to the shedding of blood in the Bible. Finally, in the Fourth Book of the Maccabees (mid-first century CE), Isaac is the proto-martyr, who with fearless courage stares at the threatening knife. 

Since the main theme of the Fourth Book of the Maccabees is Jewish martyrdom under Antiochus Epiphanes in the early second century BCE, and the death of martyrs is viewed as expiation for all the sins of Israel, Isaac’s action is presented as atonement offered for the Jewish people and seen as a source of merit earning their future salvation.

Why did God subject Abraham to a trial in the first instance, wondered the Jewish Bible commentators. From the Book of Jubilees (second century BCE), through Pseudo-Philo and the rabbis, we are told that both Satan and the angels envied Abraham and Isaac. 

According to Jubilees, when Abraham’s love of God was praised in heaven, Satan sarcastically remarked that the patriarch’s infatuation with his son exceeded his love of the Almighty. In his foreknowledge that he would remain faithful, God accepted Satan’s challenge and subjected Abraham to the ordeal.

The rabbis sought further clarification regarding the nature of Isaac’s self-sacrifice and the effects of the atonement obtained through it. 

Was the binding of Isaac a real sacrifice? After all, according to the Talmudic principle, “Without blood there is no expiation”, a principle formulated already in the first century CE as shown in the Epistle to the Hebrews (9:22): “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” The rabbis assumed therefore that Isaac had lost at least a few drops of blood, having accidentally been scratched by Abraham’s knife. In the early second century CE, Simeon ben-Yohai claimed that Isaac had shed a quarter of his blood. In the previous century, Pseudo-Philo ascribed the election of Israel to Isaac’s blood. 

The rabbis were also preoccupied by the impact of the Binding of Isaac on Temple worship. For them, the lamb sacrifice offered twice daily in the sanctuary until 70 CE, derived its efficacy from the belief that it reminded God of the Binding of Isaac. This is explained in the Palestinian Targums on Leviticus 22:27: “Our sacrifices atone for our sins. The lamb has been chosen to revive the memory of Abraham’s lamb who bound himself on the altar and stuck out his neck in order to honour your holy name.” 

In contemporary Jewish liturgy, the Binding of Isaac is commemorated at the New Year festival. The blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn, on that day recalls the animal that was offered in Isaac’s stead. 

However, the Binding of Isaac is associated also with the feast of Passover. According a rabbinic interpretation of Exodus (Mekhilta of R. Ishmael), the survival of the firstborn sons of the Jews in Egypt was due to the merit of Isaac. “When Israel entered the sea, Mount Moriah was moved from its place, with the altar of Isaac built on it, the pile of wood placed on it, and Isaac as it were bound and put upon the altar, and Abraham as it were stretching out his hand and holding the knife to slay his son.”

According to the Book of Jubilees (second century BCE), keen on chronological details, the sacrifice of Isaac occurred on the 15th day of the first month (Nisan), the calendar day of the future Mosaic feast of Passover. 

The full meaning of the tradition is compressed in the Palestinian Targums commenting on the “night of vigil” on 15 Nisan (Exodus 12:42). 

We are told that four different nocturnal events happened or will occur on that date: the creation of the world, the birth and binding of Isaac, the escape from Egypt, and the coming of the Messiah.

“On the first night, the Word of the Lord was revealed upon the world and created it… 
On the second night, the Word of the Lord was revealed on Abraham…Abraham was one hundred years old and Sarah ninety years that the saying of Scripture might be fulfilled, ‘Abraham aged one hundred can beget, and Sarah aged ninety can bear. Was not Isaac our father thirty-seven years old when he was offered on the altar? The heavens were let down and descended and Isaac saw their perfection… God called this the second night. 
On the third night, the Word of the Lord was revealed upon the Egyptians in the middle of the night. His left hand slew the firstborn of the Egyptians, but his right hand spared the firstborn of the Israelites, to fulfil the saying of Scripture, ‘Israel is my firstborn son’. He called this the third night.
On the fourth night, the world shall reach its end to be delivered.  The bonds of wickedness shall be destroyed and the iron yokes broken. Moses shall come out of the wilderness and the king Messiah out of Rome. The one shall be led upon a cloud and the other shall be led upon a cloud, and the Word of the Lord shall lead between them and they shall go forward together. This is the night of the Passover before the Lord, to be observed and celebrated by Israel in their generations.”

In my view, the oldest exegesis of the Aqedah makes Isaac the first redeemer of Israel and envisages the event as the prototype of messianic salvation. If true, this is a highly significant doctrine for both Jewish and Christian theology. 

To place this complex issue into perspective, let me introduce a personal ingredient into the story. I first advanced these ideas nearly half a century ago in Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Brill, Leiden, 1961). They met with general sympathy in scholarly circles but, unavoidably, along came also dissenting voices (see P.R. Davies and B.D. Chilton, Catholic Biblical Quarterly. 40, 1978, pp. 514-546). 

The critics objected to my dating of the basic exegetical tradition to the first century CE and even earlier. They came up with a different definition of the “Binding of Isaac”. Its essence is not a voluntary self-offering, but the shedding of the blood of Isaac, that is, the most advanced and latest of the rabbinic ideas. This would mean that the concept of the Aqedah did not arise before the fourth century CE. 

It cannot therefore be considered as the source of New Testament ideas, but is a rabbinic counterclaim against the Christian doctrine of redemption. Omitting to mention that Isaac’s carrying of the wood on his shoulder already appears in the Bible, Davies and Chilton imply that it is a feature that imitates the cross of Jesus.  

The active role of Isaac in the drama is dated by them after the destruction of Jerusalem. The ideas of Josephus, Pseudo-Philo and the Fourth Book of the Maccabees cannot be taken as representing the pre-70 CE period. All three wrote, according to Chilton and Davies, at the end of the first century or at the beginning of the second, whereas mainstream scholarly opinion holds that Josephus, whose work dates to the second half of the first century CE, used preexistent Jewish interpretative traditions and that the Book of Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo and 4 Maccabees were composed in the first half of the first century CE.

Then out of the blue, 24 years after the publication of Scripture and Tradition in Judaism, previously unknown Dead Sea Scroll fragments (4Q225-226) surfaced from Cave 4 (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, XIII, 1995), in which important details of the Aqedah story have survived. The work is definitely pre-Christian: the script belongs to the second half of the first century BCE, but the composition most likely comes from the mid-second century BCE. I give here my translation of the poorly preserved document. 

Some of the gaps are filled in with the help of the Bible or the Book of Jubilees. Essential comments are inserted between square brackets.

And a son was born af(ter)wards (to Abraha)m and he called his name Isaac. And the prince Ma(s)temah (=Satan) came (to G)od and accused Abraham on account of Isaac. 
[On hearing the heavenly praises of Abraham’s love of God, Satan suggests that Abraham should sacrifice his son.]
And (G)od said (to Abra)ham, ‘Take your son, Isaac, (your) only (son) (whom) you (love) and offer him to me as a burnt offering on one of the … mountains (which I will tell) you.’ And he ro(se and he we)n(t) from the Wells
[The author probably interprets the name of the town of Beer Sheba as “seven wells”.]

to Mo(unt Moriah)…. And Ab(raham]) lifted up his (ey)es (and behold there was) a fire. 
[The Palestinian Targums speak of a “cloud of glory” that identifies the mountain. The Midrash, Pirke d’Rabbi Eleazar reads: “He saw a pillar of fire (rising) from the earth to heaven.”] 
And he placed (the wood on Isaac, his son, and they went together). And Isaac said to Abraham, (his father, “Behold there is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb) for the burnt offering?” And Abraham said to (Isaac, his son, “God will provide a lamb) for himself. Isaac said to his father, ‘K(pwt)…” 
[There is no second address of Isaac to Abraham in the Bible. By contrast the targumic and midrashic traditions testify to such an additional speech by Isaac. Of Isaac’s opening word only the first letter, is legible, but there is space for 15 more letters. This opening letter is a K (kaph). 
In all the surviving Targums and in the Midrash on Genesis Isaac’s speech begins with the verb kpwt: “Tie”, namely, “Tie my hands properly.”]
... the holy angels standing (and) weeping over…
 [No mention of holy angels is found in Genesis 22, but it is standard in the Palestinian Targums: “The eyes of Isaac were looking on the angels on high.” Other texts allude to the tears of the ministering angels.]
…his sons from the earth.
And the angels of S(atan)…were rejoicing and saying, “Now he (Isaac) will be destroyed…
 [Satan’s associates are delighted by the prospect of Isaac’s death.]
whether he will be found weak and whether A(braham) will be found unfaithful (to God. And he called,) “Abraham, Abraham.” And he said, “Here am I.” And he said… he (Abraham) is not a lover (of God). 
[The missing words are probably those of God to Satan, e.g. “Now I know that you have lied that he is not a lover (of God).” The Midrash on Genesis positively formulates the statement: “I have made it known to all that you (Abraham) love me.”]
And the Lord God blessed Is(aac all the days of his life and he begot) Jacob, and Jacob begot Levi (in the (third) genera(tion. And all) the days of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Lev(i were…years).
[In the Bible God blesses Abraham. The change of subject suits well the leading role granted to Isaac in the Targums.]

Fragmentary though it is, the Qumran manuscript comprises all the important elements of the targumic account of the Binding of Isaac. Mount Moriah is signalled by fire. Isaac twice addresses Abraham and almost certainly he asks his father to tie his hands. The presence of weeping angels is mentioned. Finally, God blesses not Abraham, but Isaac. 

We must conclude, therefore, that the targumic Aqedah tradition arose in the second half of the first century CE at the latest, but possibly in the middle of the second century BCE. Consequently, the hypothesis that the story of the Binding of Isaac was familiar among Jews during the period of the formation of the New Testament may now be taken for granted. 

The evangelists and St Paul seem to have made use of the “targumic” Aqedah tradition. In the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) the words of the heavenly voice heard at the moment of the baptism of Jesus appear to be influenced by Genesis 22. “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” (Mk 1:11; Lk 3:22; Mt 3:17) recalls God’s words concerning Isaac: “Take your son, your only son, whom you love” (Gen 22:2). Also the Fourth Gospel, “Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29) is inspired by the story of Isaac, “the lamb of Abraham” sacrificing himself for the redemption of Israel. Finally, in the thought of Paul, the Binding of Isaac prefigures the redemption by Christ. “He who did not spare his own Son, but surrendered him for us all, will he not grant us every favour with him?” (Rom 8:3-32). 

In conclusion, let it be underscored that the contribution of a tiny Qumran fragment to the pre-Christian dating of the Binding of Isaac tradition cannot be overestimated. The theological significance of this tiny, badly preserved text incommensurably exceeds its size.

The post Isaac, the First Lamb of God appeared first on Standpoint.

I was enormously privileged to witness from its initial stages the story of the Scrolls and to play an active part in their investigation and in their communication to the world. I first learned about them in 1948, the year after an Arab shepherd accidentally stumbled on seven rolls in a cave by the Dead Sea in British mandatary Palestine, not yet divided into Israel and Jordan. I was reading biblical studies in Louvain (Belgium) and keenly followed the press reports about Jewish manuscripts purported to date to the end of the pre-Christian era. The story seemed unbelievable: it flatly contradicted the accepted wisdom according to which no ancient document written on leather could survive in the Palestinian climate.

The decisive moment came one sunny morning, still in 1948. My professor of Hebrew turned up in class with the photograph of one of the manuscripts: it arrived that morning from Jerusalem and represented chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah. I stared at the picture, slowly deciphered the strange script, and felt in my bones that the document was genuine. At once I became captivated, and after tasting sweet novelty for a few months, I decided with youthful recklessness to devote my life to the study of what was immediately proclaimed “the greatest ever Hebrew manuscript find of all times”. Against advice, I resolved to write my doctoral dissertation on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ever since then they and my life have been intertwined.

The scrolls, discovered by the Bedouin Mohammed the Wolf, were acquired for peanuts by the Syrian monastery of St Mark in Jerusalem and by Eleazar Sukenik, the Hebrew University’s professor of archaeology. On the eve of the outbreak of the first Jewish-Arab war in 1948, the Syrian archbishop, head of St Mark’s, smuggled his scrolls to America and advertised them in the Wall Street Journal. In due course, an anonymous buyer, secretly representing the new State of Israel, purchased them for $250,000, a quarter of the asking price. Thus, all seven scrolls were reunited and housed in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. Their publication (facsimile edition of the original text with facing transliteration, but without translation or commentary) swiftly followed. American scholars, commissioned by the Syrian monastery, issued in 1950-1951 the complete manuscript of Isaiah and two unknown documents, a Commentary on the Book of Habakkuk and the Community Rule, giving the regulations of an ancient Jewish sect. They were followed in 1953 by Professor Sukenik’s posthumous edition of a fragmentary Isaiah Scroll, a collection of Hymns and the Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. The most legible parts of the poorly preserved seventh scroll, an apocryphal paraphrase of the Book of Genesis written in Aramaic, was published in 1956 by Sukenik’s son, Yigael Yadin. By the mid-1950s, literary Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship was successfully launched.

Meanwhile, the archaeologists had entered the scene. In 1949 a bored Belgian member of the United Nations Observer Corps persuaded the Jordanian Arab

Legion to look for the cave of the Scrolls. They found the hole in the cliff and the French Dominican Roland de Vaux, director of the Ecole Biblique et Archéologique of Jerusalem, collected from its floor hundreds of manuscript fragments, some of which belonged to the Scrolls that the Arab shepherd had removed from there two years earlier. Between 1951 and 1956, ten further caves containing five more scrolls and tens of thousands of fragments were discovered, mostly by clandestine Arab treasure hunters. The fragments, some large, some small, originally belonged to 900 scrolls, about one quarter of them biblical. They were written mostly on leather, 15 per cent on papyrus, a few on potsherds and one on copper sheets. The texts are chiefly in Hebrew with some Aramaic and a handful of Greek manuscripts. With the help of palaeography, carbon 14 analysis, archaeological data and, when possible, the examination of their content, the texts are dated from the end of the third century BC to the first century AD.

The work of the archaeologists was not exhausted by the 11 manuscript caves. Having first ignored the nearby ruins, known as Qumran, in the mistaken belief that they were the remains of a fourth-century Roman fortlet, Roland de Vaux and his colleagues set out to excavate this ancient settlement as well as a nearby farm further south at Ein Feshkha. The ruins lie within a stone’s throw from Cave 4, which yielded nearly two-thirds of the Qumran fragments. De Vaux concluded that the main period of occupation of the site fell between the late second century BC and its destruction by the Romans in AD 68; that the communal character of the establishment was indicated by a large assembly hall and dining room and over a thousand pots, bowls, plates, etc; that the adjacent cemetery of some 1,200 graves contained mostly male skeletons (but only five per cent of the tombs have been examined); and that numerous reservoirs, several furnished with steps, served for ritual purification. The site revealed also a manuscript workshop with inkwells and a potters’ installation. Hence, de Vaux’s surmise that Qumran was a religious settlement and that its occupiers were members of the Jewish sect of the Essenes. The first-century AD Jewish writers Philo and Flavius Josephus report their daily purificatory baths, male celibacy and religious communism and their Roman contemporary, Pliny the Elder, places the Essenes to the western shore of the Dead Sea, between Jericho and Ein Gedi. The Essene theory adopted by de Vaux – it was already guessed in 1948 by Eleazar Sukenik and strongly argued by the French scholar André Dupont-Sommer – quickly gained general acceptance, although during the last 30 years it has been contested, in my opinion largely on questionable grounds.

The latest assault on the Essene origin of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls comes from Professor Rachel Elior, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her views, not yet published but given in interviews, have been loudly trumpeted in the media and may be summed up as claiming (according to the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz of 13 March) that the scrolls were written by Jerusalem Sadducee priests and not by Essenes; and that the Essenes never existed, but were invented by Flavius Josephus.

While a proper assessment of Professor Elior’s ideas will have to wait until she backs them with scholarly argument in a forthcoming book, the following points need to be made. Josephus was not the first, let alone the only, author to describe (in great detail) the Essenes. He gives two separate accounts of the sect in his Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities and refers to various Essene individuals involved in Palestinian Jewish history from the mid-second century BC to the war against Rome in AD 66-70. Moreover, in his autobiography he states to have himself joined for a time the Essene community. These texts do not look like the figment of someone’s imagination. Furthermore, Josephus was preceded by two other first century AD writers, the Jew Philo of Alexandria and the Roman Pliny the Elder, both providing a picture of the Essenes essentially the same as that of Josephus, and listing the uncommon features of religious communism and renunciation of marriage. (The Qumran Community Rule also refers to common ownership of property and lays down a way of life unsuitable for married people. Both are contrary to what we know about Sadducee priests.) Finally, Pliny the Elder asserts that the Essenes lived on the western shore of the Dead Sea somewhere between Jericho in the north and Ein Gedi and Masada in the south (corresponding to the area where Qumran lies). The two unique characteristics (common ownership and male celibacy) and the geographical location remain the solid grounds on which the theory of the Essene identity of the Dead Sea sect continues to stand.

After the release of the original scrolls between 1950 and 1953, the publication of the fragments from Cave 1 in 1955 promptly inaugurated the collection Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD), the final volume of which has just appeared.

The snail’s pace progress of this series over more than three decades up to 1991 constitutes what I once called the academic scandal of the century.

Let me return to 1951. While I was furiously working on my doctorate, I received a visit from one of de Vaux’s young Jerusalem collaborators, Dominique Barthélemy, who informed me about the yet unrevealed novelties resulting from the start of the archaeological excavation of Qumran and the discovery by the Bedouin of further scroll caves. On the promise that his identity would be kept secret, he let me use the valuable information he disclosed. So I completed the first ever doctoral thesis on the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1952, which among many other things identified the mid-second century BC Maccabee brothers, Jonathan and Simon, as the opponents of the Teacher of Righteousnes, founder of the Qumran community, a theory that soon became mainstream opinion among scholars. However, before sending my manuscript to the printers, I set sail for Israel to gain first-hand experience of the Scrolls.

The great adventure started badly. I was unable to inspect the manuscripts of the Hebrew University; Professor Sukenik was by then gravely ill and died the following year. So I was forced to opt for the riskier alternative, which entailed an illegal crossing from Israel to Jordan with false documents. I spent four weeks in Arab East Jerusalem at Roland de Vaux’s Ecole Biblique. At the school, I was greeted by my “secret informant”, Barthélemy, and also made friends with the man who was to become the greatest decipherer of Qumran manuscripts, the Pole Joseph Milik. The two young scholars were engaged on editing the fragments discovered in Cave 1. They generously permitted me to study the texts and we shared our ideas about the Scrolls. While there, I also witnessed Bedouin nervously approaching de Vaux and pulling out from under their burnous matchboxes filled with freshly looted scroll fragments which they tried to sell to him. Before leaving Jordan, I had the privilege of making my first pilgrimage to Qumran. After only a single season of digging, the site was very different from what it looks like today. Throughout my stay, Father de Vaux appeared kind and helpful. I was soon to discover his other face.

My book, Les Manuscrits du Désert de Juda (The Manuscripts of the Judaean Desert), published at the end of 1953, was warmly acclaimed in the French press. I was floating in the clouds, but was soon catapulted down to earth by Father de Vaux, the top man in the field. On receiving the copy of the book I sent him and reading in the foreword my thanks to the school and himself, he bitterly reproached me for publishing “friendly” information that was not for release. He even added that simply by mentioning my visit to the school, I gave undue authority to my statements, some of which were inexact. Totally shattered, I asked him to point out my errors as the second edition of the book was shortly due to appear, but he declined to do so as it would have taken up too much of his time. This reaction of de Vaux gave a foretaste of things to come during his dictatorial tenure as chief editor of the Scrolls. Nothing was ethical or correct unless it bore his seal of approval.

When with the help of the indefatigable Bedouin, ten further caves disgorged their manuscripts, the Barthélemy-Milik cottage industry could no longer cope with the accumulated material. So in 1953/54 de Vaux’s brainchild, the “international and interconfessional” (though Jew-free) team of editors was created. Its privileged members were to take charge of the fragments, including the colossal heap retrieved in Cave 4. Barth-élemy having pulled out, the brilliant Milik became the pillar of the group and seven further, mostly young, researchers were recruited two from France, two from the US, two from Britain and one from Germany. There was no supervisory body to oversee the performance of the team. They and de Vaux were a law unto themselves. Last, but not least, no proper funding was raised for the continuation of the project. Worst of all, de Vaux set up a “closed shop” – access to the unpublished texts was denied to Hebraists from the outside world until the team had completed their editorial work. This far from satisfactory arrangement did not bode well for the future.

Yet at the beginning the prospects were not gloomy. During the 1950s, the still enthusiastic team assembled, transcribed and largely identified the hundreds of original works and a word concordance was prepared on index cards. Preliminary publications filled the pages of scholarly journals and by 1962 the contents of the “minor” caves (2-3, 5-10) appeared in DJD III. It comprises insignificant texts with the exception of the Copper Scroll with its list of 64 hiding places crammed with silver and gold. A maverick member of de Vaux’s team promptly undertook a treasure hunt, but came back empty-handed. Two factors had a deleterious effect on the editorial project. The lack of finance obliged the members of the team to seek academic appointments away from Jerusalem and turn into part-time or hardly-any-time editors. (Two Harvard University professors practised slow-motion editing by proxy, subletting their unpublished texts to clever graduate students.) In June 1967, the Israeli victory in the Six Day War completely altered the political circumstances. De Vaux and most of the members of the editorial team were pro-Arab, and at the prospect of the Israeli archaeological establishment becoming the chief authority in Scroll matters, de Vaux withdrew to his tent and until his death in 1971 the project remained at a standstill. Only one slim and poor-quality volume dealing with the massive Cave 4 material was published during de Vaux’s life.

In 1972, the ill-qualified Pierre Benoit, another French Dominican who was not a Hebraist, inherited de Vaux’s editorial mantle. Playing the gentlemen, the Israeli archaeological establishment short-sightedly abstained from interfering. I felt it was my turn to step into the breach. By then, I held the senior post in Jewish Studies at Oxford. Having since 1962 The Dead Sea Scrolls in English to my credit, I was in a position to approach Oxford University Press, a body with real muscle as they were the publishers of the Scrolls. The head of the press, the great Greek papyrologist C.H. Roberts, was convinced at once and told Benoit to get a move on. The weak chief editor made a semblance of effort. Half of his collaborators simply did not reply and the other half politely promised delivery of the goods between 1974 and 1976, but nothing happened. In despair, I uttered in 1977 my oft-quoted soundbite about “the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century”.

Nothing much happened during Father Benoit’s reign: only two further Cave 4 volumes trickled in. In 1984, he resigned and was replaced by John Strugnell, an academically capable Oxford graduate, but a highly inefficient person. Publishing was not his forte. In 1987, on the 40th anniversary of Qumran, two British colleagues and I tried to breath fresh life into the moribund editorial process. We organised an international conference in London to which we enticed the editorial team. The aim was to shame them into action. With one exception, they all turned up, made further promises, but my proposal at a public meeting that the photographs of the unpublished documents should be released at once met with blunt refusal from Strugnell. By then, general dissatisfaction with the editorial delays had reached boiling point and media speculation was rife. Instead of blaming the team, journalists and popular writers dished out a conspiracy theory: the Vatican had decided to prevent the publication of the Scrolls because they contained compromising material for Christianity.

While revolution was brewing, Strugnell was finally demoted on account of an unforgivable faux pas. Neither his team-mates nor the Israeli archaeological establishment could stomach his characterisation of Judaism, in an interview with a Tel Aviv daily, as a horrible religion which should not exist. He was relieved of his office on health grounds – he suffered from manic depression aggravated by alcoholism. The sensational opening move of the next chief editor, Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University, chosen by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), was to appoint 60 new members (myself included) to the team. But sadly the IAA carried on with de Vaux’s “closed shop”: no one except the selected editors could as much as peep at unpublished texts. This was intolerable, but de Vaux’s policy was already doomed. Its downfall was caused by the IAA and Strugnell.

Following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, photographic archives of the Scrolls were deposited in “safe” countries: two in the US (in Cincinnati and in Claremont, California) and one in the UK (at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies). The institutions were obliged to keep the unpublished documents under lock and key. Strugnell, in turn, published privately for the use of his editorial team 25 copies of a handwritten word concordance of the Qumran texts. Both of these leaked.

The concordance came into the hands of a professor in Cincinnati, who with the assistance of a computer-savvy graduate student succeeded in reconstructing from the word list several complete Qumran texts. The Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) of Washington published them in September 1991. The photo archive given to Claremont was the other source of the leak. All hell broke loose after the unauthorised publication by BAS, and Jerusalem threatened legal proceedings. Meanwhile, in secret, the director of the powerful Huntington Library of Pasadena was getting ready to announce that its photographic collection of the Scrolls would be placed on open shelves. How did it obtain these photos? Elizabeth Bechtel, a Californian philanthropist and founder of the Claremont Centre for Ancient Manuscripts, was given by the IAA two sets of Scroll photos, one for the centre under the usual conditions of inaccessibility, and the other for her private collection of memorabilia. After a quarrel with the trustees of her institute, she donated her own archive to the Huntington with no restrictive clauses. A press conference was called in New York on 21 September 1991 to announce the end of the Scroll embargo, but the news came out earlier. The archaeology correspondent of The Times interviewed me on 19 September and next day, 24 hours before the American press, he broke the story, quoting my warm approval of the Huntington. The IAA soon threw in the towel and after four decades of restrictive practices, freedom of inquiry finally triumphed. Hostilities ceased and the images of the manuscripts were made available in photographic, microfiche and CD-Rom form. DJD also obtained a new lease of life.

In 1956, Joseph Milik, de Vaux’s right-hand man, promised a yearly output of two to three DJD volumes. De Vaux, Benoit and Strugnell managed a bare eight volumes in 35 years. Tov and his team produced 32 from 1992 to 2009. To mark the completion of the magnum opus, Tov has been awarded the much-coveted Israel Prize in Biblical Studies. As for my 250-page Dead Sea Scrolls in English of 1962, it became in 2004 The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, a more than 700-page volume installed among the Penguin Classics.

To begin with the Hebrew Bible, 200 mostly fragmentary Qumran manuscripts represent the whole Old Testament except possibly the Book of Esther. They agree in substance with the traditional Scripture, the oldest complete Hebrew copy of which dates to AD 1008. But the Qumran Bible discloses numerous stylistic differences, textual additions or omissions and changes in the order of the passages. The Scrolls prove that the unified traditional text of the Bible was preceded by countless variations and that we owe the definite form of Scripture to the authoritative intervention of Jewish religious authorities around AD 100.

In addition to the Bible, a large collection of further religious books circulated among Jews prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Before Qumran, we knew some of these from translation into Greek, Syriac, Ethiopic, etc. The Scrolls have revealed several works in their original form and language, in Hebrew or Aramaic. Previously unknown religious writings have also turned up, considerably enlarging our knowledge of Jewish literature from the age of Jesus.

Many of these works, though present among the Dead Sea Scrolls, are thought to have been written by Jews unconnected with the Qumran community. The caves also produced a large number of hitherto unknown compositions, religious rules, poetry, biblical interpretation and a peculiar liturgical calendar, the literary legacy of a sect founded by dissident priests who turned their backs on the Temple of Jerusalem. The rulebooks present an ideal picture of the community next to practical descriptions. The idealised portrait identifies the group as a miniature Israel. The members believed they were living at the end of times and prepared themselves as sons of light to confront the sons of darkness in a final battle under the leadership of several Messiahs.

On the practical level, the majority of the documents legislate for a community of ordinary Jewish families who followed a stringent regime concerning ritual purity and sexual morality. Members owned property, but were obliged to contribute monthly to a charitable fund. Children born within the community received a strict sectarian education and became full members at the age of 20.

The Community Rule, legislating only for male members, substitutes communal existence for family life. Fresh recruits came from the outside Jewish world. They were subjected to an initiation lasting more than two years. Their life was characterised by secrecy in regard to the esoteric teachings of the community, by religious communism entailing the obligatory transfer of private property to the sect, and by the adoption of celibacy. The two distinctive characteristics, life out of the common purse and the unmarried state, have persuaded the majority of scholars that the sect was identical with the Essenes, known through the writings of Pliny, Philo and Josephus. Josephus, the author of the most detailed account, mentions two Essene branches, one celibate and the other married, echoing the Scrolls.

Qumran has shed fresh light on primitive Christianity, too. Fringe opinion has advanced the theory that Cave 7 housed Greek papyrus fragments of the New Testament, but the weightiest mainstream scholars reject this. The parallelism between Qumran and Christianity is subtler. Both the Dead Sea community and the early church considered themselves the true Israel, heirs of the biblical promises. Messianism flourished in both groups, but at Qumran two if not three messianic figures were expected, royal, priestly and prophetic, while in the New Testament, as in mainstream Judaism, these various figures coalesced into one person.

In my view, the most significant contribution of Qumran to the understanding of the New Testament is in the expectation of the instant coming of the Kingdom of God in the two communities. Both the Essenes and the early church believed that their respective Masters, the Teacher of Righteousness and Jesus, received from God all the mysteries concerning the final age and passed them on to their followers. They both considered the biblical prophecies fulfilled in the persons and events of their communities. Qumran Bible interpretation, especially the fulfilment exegesis, has thrown invaluable light on the Gospels. Both Essenes and Christians eagerly expected in their own days the appearance of the two Messiahs of Aaron and Israel and the reappearance of the Christ respectively. When they had to admit that their eschatological hopes had failed, both attempted to justify the delay, the Essenes through invoking the impenetrable mysteries of God, and the Christians through the comforting idea that the deferred Second Coming provided more time for repentance and was in fact a blessing in disguise.

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For instance, the Gospel of John gives a historically acceptable account of the condemnation of Jesus: he was arrested a day before Passover and, without the mention of a Passover meal and a formal Jewish court process, he was brought before Pilate, accused of being a revolutionary and sentenced to crucifixion.

In the other Gospels, in a historically unlikely fashion, the arrest of Jesus, followed by a trial by the Jewish Sanhedrin on the charge of blasphemy, took place after the Passover meal (the Last Supper), and Jesus was pronounced guilty on the night of the feast itself. Yet no believing Christian asks how the supreme tribunal of Judaea could try a capital case during one of the major festivals – or, more simply, how the two stories hang together.

The second kind of truth is less certain than faith and is approximated by means of “scientific” historical inquiry. This quest strives to discover the TRUTH, but succeeds in retrieving only morsels of it. The historian’s task is to assemble a monumental jigsaw puzzle of which many parts are still missing. My catchy title for this article promises more than anyone can deliver. A more modest “Towards the truth about the historical Jesus” would be closer to what will follow.

Until the mid-18th century, Gospel truth wholly dominated the Christian world and it has continued to do so in conservative ecclesiastical circles up to the present day. This certainty did not result from the blinding effect that faith exerted on the historical evidence. As early as the second century, divergences among the New Testament records were noted by perspicacious Church fathers and a deliberate attempt was made to harmonise them, producing the so-called Diatessaron, the four Gospels in one. But after some initial success the innovation failed and the traditional four Gospels survived.

Thus later Church fathers were perfectly aware that the two genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and in Luke were incompatible, but they launched the seemingly brilliant idea that Matthew traced the ancestry of Jesus through Joseph, while Luke did so through Mary. They turned a blind eye to the fact that among Jews a genealogy was expected to follow the male line.

The quest for the human figure of Jesus began with Samuel Reimarus in the mid-18th century and has characterised academic Gospel criticism up to the present day. For the first 200 years it was essentially a German academic pursuit, although from the late 19th century onwards there was a smattering of British, French and American contributions. It aimed at the rediscovery of the “historical Jesus” and sought to distinguish him from the “Christ of faith”. Its initial stage ended with the anticlimactic Geschichte der Leben Jesu Forschung (Quest of the Historical Jesus) by Albert Schweit­zer, who in 1906 described the whole process as far too subjective to be worthy of continuation. According to Schweit­zer, each scholar produced a Jesus in his own image and resemblance.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, research into the historical Jesus became rather unfashionable under the influence of Rudolf Bultmann, the great German scholar, and his new literary-­critical school of Formgeschichte or form criticism. In 1926, he advanced the memorable statement that in effect excommunicated Life of Jesus inquiry in the wide academic circles over which he ruled: “We can know almost nothing about the life and personality of Jesus since the early Christian sources show no interest in either”. For Bultmann the setting of the Gospel message was not the life of Jesus; the evangelists were catering for the needs of the nascent church. After a 30-year silence the historical interest was slowly rekindled in Germany; it was shortlived and without noteworthy results.

In the 1970s, for the first time in two centuries, the main scene of activity left Germany. It first moved to England, and soon after to the United States. The principal emphasis lay not on the Hellenistic background of the early church as in form criticism but on the Jewishness of Jesus in the wake of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the renewal of research into post-Biblical Judaism and Flavius Josephus, the Jewish ­historian of the 1st century AD.

The trend is clearly shown by the new titles: Jesus the Jew (1973), Jesus and Judaism (1985), The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991); A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (1991-2001) and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (1999).

Indeed, during the past quarter of a century, in one way or another, the Jewish Jesus has become the dominant figure in New Testament scholarship, pursued by all researchers with or without religious belief.

Now let’s face the main issue. The student investigating the problem of the historical Jesus is confronted with a concatenation of difficulties.

Everyone except the desperately naive knows that the Gospel sources are not strictly historical and postdate the events by decades. The earlier letters of St Paul won’t help as their author never knew, or showed interest in, the Jesus of flesh and blood. The four Gospels, written between some 15 to 55 years after Paul, in the form of biographies, formulate Jesus’s teaching adapted for the needs of the early church.

Moreover, their readers had a Greek linguistic background and a Graeco-Roman cultural background, yet they were to receive a Jewish religious message originally formulated in Aramaic. We are facing the traduttore traditore syndrome.

The historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of 1st-century Galilean Judaism. The Gospel image must therefore be inserted into the historical canvas of Palestine in the 1st century AD, with the help of the works of Flavius Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature.

Against this background, what kind of picture of Jesus emerges from the Gospels? That of a rural holy man, initially a follower of the movement of repentance launched by another holy man, John the Baptist. In the hamlets and villages of Lower Galilee and the lakeside, Jesus set out to preach the coming of the kingdom of God within the lifetime of his generation and outlined the religious duties his simple listeners were to perform to prepare themselves for the great event.

An eloquent popular preacher, Jesus manifested his spiritual power by exorcisms and healing. His audience remarked that “he taught with authority” – namely, curing the sick and liberating the possessed – and “not as the scribes”, who could only quote the Bible to prove their sayings. His cures consisted in faith-healing: they required trust on the part of the sick. He invited them to believe in his healing power as a man of God. Indeed, he went so far as to identify this faith as the cause of the recovery: “Your faith has made you well,” he reassured a sick woman (Mk 5:34).

In behaving as he did, Jesus conformed to a pattern of charismatic behaviour attested among Jews throughout the ages and down to his own time. The Biblical prophets Elisha, Elijah and Isaiah are credited with miraculous healings and resuscitations. Similar phenomena are ascribed in rabbinic literature to holy men living in the age close to the New ­Testament.

Honi in the 1st century BC and the Galilean Hanina ben Dosa in the 1st century AD were renowned for their miraculous rain-making power; Hanina’s fame also comprised healing, including healing from a distance like Jesus, and general wonderworking. Flavius Josephus (AD 37–c.100) reports not only on thaumaturgists of Old Testament vintage, such as Elisha, but explicitly mentions Honi, whose wondrous intervention ended a disastrous drought shortly before Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem in 63 BC. He also refers to Jesus in the days of Pontius Pilate and calls him a “wise man and performer of astonishing or paradoxical deeds”.

The reliability of Josephus’s notice about Jesus was rejected by many in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it has been judged partly genuine and partly falsified by the majority of more recent critics. The Jesus portrait of Josephus, drawn by an uninvolved witness, stands halfway between the fully sympathetic picture of early Christianity and the wholly antipathetic image of the magician of Talmudic and post-Talmudic Jewish literature. “Wise man” and “performer of paradoxical deeds” are genuinely Josephan phrases that no Christian interpolator would have found potent enough to describe the divinised Christ of the later church.

The contour of the historical Jesus, lifted from the Synoptic Gospels, suggests a magnetic prophetic figure who was convinced that the aim of his mission was to bring his repentant Jewish followers into God’s new realm. This kingdom of heaven was foreseen in many of Jesus’s parables as the outcome of a quiet and imperceptible change rather than a cataclysmic transformation in the not too distant future. It would seem, according to the evangelists, that Jesus considered himself, and his well-disposed contemporaries depicted him, along such prophetic-charismatic lines.

For example, Jesus explains his rejection by his family and fellow citizens of Nazareth by the well-known saying that at home no one is recognised as a prophet. He was also regularly alluded to by non-local contemporaries as the great prophet from Nazareth. In the anecdote of Caesarea Philippi, Peter’s answer to Jesus’s question, “Who do men say that I am?”, follows a similar turn. Jesus, Peter said, was believed to be a prophet, or the returning Elijah or John the Baptist revived.

But when pressed to reveal what the circle of disciples thought of Jesus, Peter confessed, according to Mark, that he was the Messiah, or, according to Matthew, the Messiah, with the added synonym of “the Son of the living God”. The latter phrase was understood in Gentile-Christian theology as a move towards the recognition of the divine status of Jesus.

In the course of my research that led to the writing of Jesus the Jew, it was impossible not to notice that church tradition tended to attribute the maximum of significance to the honorific titles applied to Jesus by the evangelists. I decided therefore to set up a quasi-­scientific experiment. I said to myself: let’s try to establish the correlation between the features of the Jesus portrait of the Gospels and the meaning of the designations such as “Messiah”, “Lord” and “Son of God” in the mind of the contemporaries of Jesus.

To achieve this, we must forget the Greek understanding of the terms by the Gentile readers of the Gospel; get rid of 2,000 years of superimposed Christian interpretation of the New Testament, and switch instead the searchlight on Jesus’s Aramaic-speaking Jewish audience on the shore of the Lake of Galilee. What was the original meaning of the message and what did the original addressees make of it?

To start with “the Messiah”, the Greek Christos, if a pollster had interrogated the men in the street in Palestine two millennia ago, asking for a definition of “Messiah”, he would have heard people mumbling about the greatest Jewish king, who would defeat the Romans. The more religiously minded would have added that the Messiah would also be just and holy, and would subject all the nations to Israel and to God. In more peripheral circles, such as the Dead Sea sect, several Messiahs were expected, one royal, one priestly and possibly one prophetic.

But even the don’t-knows would have had an idea about the messianic age, filled chock-a-block with miraculous events. According to the words put into the mouth of Jesus, this would be the time when “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear?.?.?.” (Mt 11:5).

Did Jesus present himself or did the evangelists portray him as a warlike royal pretender? The answer must be no. Jesus always forbade his disciples to proclaim him the Messiah, and when confronted with the question “Are you the Christ?”, his regular reply was evasively negative: “That’s what you call me,” he kept on saying, “not I.”

By contrast, the non-­bellicose wonderworking figure standing in the shadow of the messianic age fits him perfectly. It tallies with the picture of the Galilean healer, exorcist and preacher so prominent in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. In his answer to the question of John the Baptist whether he was the one who was to come, Jesus simply pointed to the events surrounding him: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the lepers are healed (Mt 11; Lk 7:22).

The title “Lord”, Kyrios in Greek, carried high associations at this time. It pointed to the emperor, the Lord Caesar, whose Latin epithet was “divine”, as in divus Augustus. In turn, among Greek-speaking Jews, whose Bible the early church appropriated, Kyrios (Lord) was the regular substitute for the Hebrew four-lettered sacred and secret name of God. Quite naturally, in the Gospel read in the Greek churches, “the Lord Christ” (Kyrios Christos) promptly acquired divine flavour. By contrast, in Jewish circles, with an infinite gap between the divine and the human reality, such a combination was well-nigh inconceivable.

Beside Caesar and God, what other meanings did the title “Lord” possess? What did the Galileans imply when they addressed Jesus as “Lord”, or Mar in Aramaic? The title, reminiscent of “Sir” in English, could refer to a variety of persons: to a secular dignitary, to the head of the family, to an authoritative teacher, to a prophet and to a miracle-worker. The last three nuances perfectly suit the Jesus portrait of the Synoptic Gospels.

Finally, the appellation “Son of God”, the title in the Hellenistic world of the deified Roman emperor and synonymous with God in early Christianity, is nowhere attested in that sense in Judaism. It is, however, capable of carrying at least five other meanings. It can designate an angel in the superhuman world. In the terrestrial domain, each Jew was entitled to call himself “son of God”. But the term underwent a series of restrictive interpretations. In the post-exilic age only the Jews whose heart was circumcised and filled with holy spirit were allotted that name. Also, both the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls assign filial status to the Messiah, metaphorically the son of the living God. Moreover, some charismatic contemporaries of Jesus were referred to as sons of God. For example, Honi, who managed to produce rain by pestering God, was compared to a son importuning his long-suffering and loving father.

Finally, there is the image of the divine voice from heaven proclaiming someone the “son of God”. This is reported about the Galilean Hanina ben Dosa. Both sayings indicate that in Jewish parlance “son of God” implies divine favour rather than the sharing of the divine nature.

To recapitulate, the philological, literary and historical analysis of the Semitic meaning of Jesus’s titles corroborates his image as it emerges from the Synoptic Gospels. Hence the only reasonable conclusion to draw from a combined study of the Gospel picture and the honorific titles is that the historical Jesus was a Galilean charismatic whose aim was to conduct his repentant Palestinian Jewish contemporaries into the spiritual realm called the Kingdom of God through preaching, healing and exorcising.

Traditional Christianity does not stop at this portrait of the human Jesus, but overlays it with the majestic image of the Christ of faith arising from the mystical meditations of Paul and John and the Hellenistic philosophy of the Greek Church Fathers.

In a nutshell, Jesus’s preaching was centred on God, the heavenly Father, on the dignity of all human beings as children of God, on life turned into worship by total trust, on an overwhelming sense of urgency to do one’s duty without procrastination, on the sanctification of the here and now, and above all on the love of God through the love of one’s neighbour.

To conclude, because of the cross, the task of Jesus remained unfinished. Yet despite the apparent failure of his mission, his magnetic impact was so profound that, instead of abandoning the cause, his disciples began to look forward to his imminent second coming. When by the mid-2nd century Jesus failed to return, Jewish Christianity progressively faded away, while St Paul’s Gentile church survived and after Constantine set out to flourish – albeit in a form that I believe would have perplexed Jesus the Jew.

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