Jerusalem: The Biography

  For those who do not share this faith, the facts are impossible to verify. Matthew reveals what was surely the contemporary alternative version of events, ‘commonly reported among the Jews to this day’: the high priests immediately paid off the soldiers who were meant to be guarding the tomb and ordered them to tell everyone that ‘his disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept’.

  Archaeologists tend to believe that the body was simply removed and buried by friends and family in another rock-cut tomb somewhere around Jerusalem. They have excavated tombs, with ossuaries that bear names such as ‘James brother of Jesus’ and even ‘Jesus son of Joseph’. These have generated media headlines. Some have been exposed as forgeries but most are genuine first-century tombs with very common Jewish names – and with no connection to Jesus.*

  Jerusalem celebrated Passover. Judas invested his silver in real estate – the Potter’s Field on the Akeldama south of the city, appropriately in the Valley of Hell – where he then ‘burst asunder in the midst and all his bowels gushed out’.† When the disciples emerged from hiding, they met for Pentecost in the Upper Room, the Cenacle on Mount Zion, ‘and suddenly there came from heaven a rushing mighty wind’ – the Holy Spirit that allowed them to speak in tongues to the many nationalities who were in Jerusalem and to perform healing in the name of Jesus. Peter and John were entering the Temple through the Beautiful Gate for their daily prayers when a cripple asked for alms. ‘Rise up and walk,’ they said, and he did.

  The Apostles elected Jesus’ brother as ‘Overseer of Jerusalem’, leader of these Jewish sectaries known as the Nazarenes. The sect must have grown because not long after Jesus’ death, ‘there was a great persecution against the church at Jerusalem’. One of Jesus’ Greek-speaking followers, Stephen, had denounced the Temple, saying that ‘the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands’. Proving that the high priest could order capital punishment, Stephen was tried by the Sanhedrin and stoned outside the walls, probably to the north of today’s Damascus Gate. He was the first Christian ‘martyr’ – an adaptation of the Greek word for ‘witness’. Yet James and his Nazarenes remained practising Jews, loyal to Jesus, but also teaching and praying in the Temple for the next thirty years. James was widely admired there as a Jewish holy man. Jesus’ Judaism was clearly no more idiosyncratic than that of the many other preachers who came before and after him.

  Jesus’ enemies did not prosper. Soon after his crucifixion, Pilate was sunk by a Samaritan pseudo-prophet who preached to excited crowds that he had found Moses’ urn on Mount Gerizim. Pilate sent in the cavalry who culled many of his followers. The prefect had already driven Jerusalem to the edge of open revolt; now the Samaritans too denounced his brutality.

  The Governor of Syria had to restore order in Jerusalem. He sacked both Caiaphas and Pilate, who was sent back to Rome. This was so popular that the Jerusalemites jubilantly welcomed the Roman governor. Pilate vanishes from history. Tiberius was meanwhile tiring of Herod Antipas.49 But this was not the end of that dynasty: the Herodians were about to enjoy an extraordinary restoration thanks to the most adventurous of the Jewish princes, who would befriend Rome’s demented emperor and regain Jerusalem.

  12

  THE LAST OF THE HERODS

  AD 40–66

  HEROD AGRIPPA: CALIGULA’S FRIEND

  Young Herod Agrippa grew up in Rome amid the imperial family and became best friends with the emperor Tiberius’ son Drusus. This charming, high-rolling extrovert – the grandson of Herod the Great and Mariamme, child of their executed son Aristobulos – amassed huge debts to keep up with the emperor’s son and the fast crowd.

  When Drusus died young in AD 23, the heartbroken emperor could no longer face his son’s friends and Herod Agrippa, now broke, retreated to Galilee, ruled by Antipas who was married to his sister Herodias. Antipas gave him a drab job in Tiberias, but drabness was not Agrippa’s style and he fled to Idumea, the family’shomeland, and there contemplated suicide. With this prodigal rogue, however, something always turned up.

  Around the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, Philip, the tetrarch of the family’s northern lands, died. Antipas asked the emperor to expand his principality. Tiberius had always liked Herod Agrippa; so he rushed to the emperor’s residence on Capri to stake his own claim and undermine his uncle’s. He found Tiberius residing gloomily at the Jupiter Villa, his jaded appetites, according to the historian Suetonius, fed by boys known as his ‘minnows’, trained to suck his privates as he swam in the pool.

  Tiberius welcomed Agrippa – until he heard about the string of unpaid debts he had left around the Mediterranean. But Agrippa, a born gambler, persuaded his mother’s friend Antonia to lend him money and appeal to the emperor. Severe and chaste, Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony, was respected by Tiberius as the ideal Roman aristocrat. He took her advice and forgave the Jewish rascal. Agrippa used the cash not to pay off his debts but to give a generous present to another bankrupt princeling, Caligula, who with the child Gemellus, son of Agrippa’s late friend Drusus, was Tiberius’ joint heir. The emperor asked the Herodian to look after Gemellus.

  Instead the opportunistic Agrippa became best friends with Gaius Caligula, who ever since being paraded before the legions as a child mascot in a mini-military uniform (including army boots, caligae – hence the nickname ‘Bootkins’), was beloved for being the son of the popular general Germanicus. Now twenty-five, balding and gangly, Caligula had grown up spoilt, dissolute and quite possibly insane, but he remained the people’s darling and he was impatient to inherit the empire. Caligula and Herod Agrippa are likely to have shared a life of extravagant debauchery, a million miles from the piety of the latter’s brethren in Jerusalem. As they rode around Capri, the two fantasized about Tiberius’ death, but their charioteer was listening. When Agrippa had him arrested for stealing, the charioteer snitched to the emperor. Agrippa was thrown into jail and bound in chains but, protected by his friend Caligula, he was allowed to bathe, receive friends and relish his favourite dishes.

  When Tiberius finally died in March 37, Caligula, having murdered young Gemellus, succeeded as emperor. He at once released his friend, presented him with gold fetters to commemorate his time in real shackles and promoted him to king, giving him Philip’s northern tetrarchy. Quite a reversal of fortune. Simultaneously Agrippa’s sister Herodias and Jesus’ hated ‘fox’, Antipas, travelled to Rome to undo this decision and win their own kingdom. But A grippa framed them, alleging that they were planning a rebellion. Caligula deposed Antipas, the killer of John the Baptist – who later died in Lyons – and gave all his lands to Herod Agrippa.

  The new king scarcely visited his kingdom, preferring to stay close to Caligula whose homicidal eccentricities rapidly turned him from Rome’s favourite to its oppressor. Lacking the military kudos of his predecessors, Caligula tried to bolster his prestige by ordering his own image to be worshipped across the empire – and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple. Jerusalem was defiant; the Jews prepared to rebel, with delegations telling the Governor of Syria that ‘he must first sacrifice the entire Jewish nation’ before they would tolerate such a sacrilege. Ethnic fighting broke out in Alexandria between Greeks and Jews. When the two parties sent delegations to Caligula, the Greeks claimed that the Jews were the only people who would not worship Caligula’s statue.

  Fortunately, King Agrippa was still in Rome, ever more intimate with the increasingly erratic Caligula. When the emperor launched an expedition to Gaul, the Jewish king was one of his entourage. But, instead of fighting, Caligula declared victory over the sea, collecting seashells for his Triumph.

  Caligula ordered Petronius, the Governor of Syria, to enforce his orders and crush Jerusalem. Jewish delegations, led by Herodian princes, begged Petronius to change his mind. Petronius hesitated, knowing that it was war to proceed and death to refuse. But King Herod Agrippa, the prodigal time-server, suddenly showed himself to be the surprising champion of the Jews, writing courageously to Caligula in on
e of the most astonishing letters written on behalf of Jerusalem:

  I, as you know, am by birth a Jew and my native city is Jerusalem in which is situated the sacred shrine of the most high God. This Temple, my Lord Gaius, has never from the first admitted any figure wrought by men’s hands, because it is the sanctuary of the true God. Your grandfather [Marcus] Agrippa visited and paid honour to the Temple and so did Augustus. [He then thanks Caligula for favours granted but] I exchange all [those benefits] for one thing only – that the ancestral institutions be not disturbed. Either I must seem a traitor to my own or no longer be counted your friend as I have been; there is no other alternative.*

  Even if the stark bravado of this ‘death or freedom’ is exaggerated, this was a risky letter to write to Caligula – yet the king’s intervention did apparently save Jerusalem.

  At a feast, the emperor thanked King Agrippa for the help he had given him before his accession, offering to grant him any request. The king asked him not to place his image in the Temple. Caligula agreed.

  HEROD AGRIPPA AND EMPEROR CLAUDIUS:

  ASSASSINATION, GLORY AND WORMS

  After recovering from a strange illness in late 37, the emperor became increasingly unbalanced. During the next years, the sources claim he committed incest with his three sisters, prostituted them to other men and appointed his horse as a consul. It is hard to assess the truth of these scandals, though his actions certainly alienated and terrified much of the Roman elite. He married his sister, then, when she became pregnant, supposedly ripped the baby out of her womb. Kissing his mistresses, he mused, ‘And this beautiful throat will be cut whenever I please’ and told the consuls, ‘I only have to give one nod and your throats will be cut on the spot.’ His favourite bon mot was ‘if only Rome had one neck’, but unwisely he also liked to tease his macho Praetorian Guards with saucy passwords such as ‘Priapus’. It could not go on.

  At midday on 24 January 41, Caligula, accompanied by Herod Agrippa, was leaving the theatre through a covered walkway when one of the Praetorian tribunes drew his sword and cried, ‘Take this!’ The swordblow hit Caligula’s shoulder, almost filleting him in half, but he kept shouting, ‘I’m still alive.’ The conspirators cried, ‘Strike again,’ and finished him off. His German bodyguards marauded through the streets, the Praetorian Guardsmen ransacked the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill and murdered Caligula’s wife, dashing out the brains of his baby. The Senate mean-while tried to restore the republic, ending the despotism of the emperors.

  Herod Agrippa took control of Caligula’s body, winning time by declaring that the emperor was still alive but wounded, while he led a squad of Praetorians to the palace. They noticed a stirring behind a curtain and discovered the lame, stammering scholar, Claudius, Caligula’s uncle and son of Agrippa’s family friend Antonia. Together, they acclaimed him as emperor, carrying him to their camp on a shield. Claudius, a republican, tried to refuse the honour, but the Jewish king advised him to accept the crown and persuaded the Senate to offer it to him. No practising Jew, before or since, even in modern times, has ever been so powerful. The new Emperor Claudius, who proved a steady, sensible ruler, rewarded his friend by presenting him with Jerusalem and the whole of Herod the Great’s kingdom, as well as granting him the rank of consul. Even Agrippa’s brother received a kingdom.

  Herod Agrippa had left Jerusalem as a penniless ne’er-do-well; he returned as king of Judaea. He made a sacrifice in the Temple, and dutifully read Deuteronomy to the gathered people. The Jews were moved when he wept for his own mixed origins and dedicated Caligula’s gold fetters, the symbol of his good fortune, to the Temple. ‘The holy city’, which he saw as ‘the mother-city’ not just of Judaea but of Jews across Europe and Asia, was won over by this new Herod, whose coins called him ‘Great King Agrippa, Friend of Caesar’. Outside Jerusalem he lived like a Roman-Greek king, but when he was in the city he lived as a Jew and sacrificed each day in the Temple. He beautified and fortified the expanding Jerusalem, adding a Third Wall to enclose the new Bezetha suburb – the northern section of which has been excavated.

  Yet even Agrippa struggled to manage Jerusalem’s tensions: he appointed three successive high priests in two years and acted against the Jewish Christians. This may have coincided with Claudius’ crackdown on the Jewish Christians in Rome – they were expelled for disorders ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’ (Christ). ‘Now about this time’, says the Acts of the Apostles, ‘Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church,’ and had James beheaded (not Jesus’ brother but the disciple of that name). He also arrested Peter, whom he planned to execute after Passover. Peter somehow survived: the Christians hailed this as a miracle but other sources suggest that the king simply released him, possibly as a gift to the crowds.

  Agrippa’s making of emperors had gone to his head, for he called a summit of local kings to Tiberias without asking Roman permission. The Romans were alarmed and ordered the kings to disperse. Claudius halted the building of any more Jerusalem fortifications. Afterwards, Agrippa was holding court like a Greek god-king in gold-encrusted robes in the forum of Caesarea when he was taken ill with stomach pains: ‘he was eaten of worms’, says the Acts of the Apostles. The Jews sat in sackcloth praying for his recovery but in vain. Agrippa had the charisma and sensitivity to conciliate Jewish moderates, Jewish fanatics and Romans; there died the only man who might have saved Jerusalem. 50

  HEROD AGRIPPA II: NERO’S FRIEND

  The king’s death unleashed riots. Though his son and namesake Agrippa II was only seventeen, Claudius wanted to give him the kingdom, but he was advised that the boy was too young to govern his inflammable inheritance. Instead the emperor restored direct rule by Roman procurators and granted the late Agrippa’s brother, King Herod of Chalcis, the right to appoint high priests and manage the Temple. For the next twenty-five years, Jerusalem was run in an ambiguous partnership between Roman procurators and Herodian kings but they could not soothe the turbulence caused by a succession of prophetic charlatans, ethnic conflicts between Greeks, Jews and Samaritans, and the widening gap between the rich, pro-Roman grandees and the poorer, religious Jews.

  The Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes, led by Jesus’ brother James, and their so-called presbyteroi or elders, survived in Jerusalem where the original disciples worshipped as Jews in the Temple. But Jesus was far from the last of the preachers who challenged Roman order: Josephus lists the eruption of one pseudo-prophet after another, most of them executed by the Romans.

  The procurators did not help matters. Like Pilate, their reaction to this efflorescence of prophets was to massacre their followers while squeezing the province for profit. One year, at Passover in Jerusalem, a Roman soldier exposed his bottom to the Jews, causing a riot. The procurator sent in soldiers who started a stampede in which thousands suffocated in the narrow streets. A few years later, when fighting broke out between Jews and Samaritans, the Romans crucified many Jews. Both sides appealed to Rome. The Samaritans would have succeeded but young Herod Agrippa, who was being educated in Rome, won over Claudius’ powerful wife, Agrippina: the emperor not only backed the Jews but ordered the Roman tribune at fault to be humiliated in Jerusalem and then executed. Like his father with Caligula, Agrippa II was popular not only with Claudius but with his heir, Nero. When his uncle Herod of Chalcis died, Agrippa was made king of that Lebanese fiefdom with special powers over the Temple in Jerusalem.

  In Rome, the now senile Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina,* supposedly with a plateful of mushrooms. The new teenaged emperor Nero awarded Agrippa II more territories in Galilee, Syria and Lebanon. Agrippa gratefully renamed Caesarea Philippi, his capital, Neronias and advertised his warm relations with Nero on his coins with the legend ‘Philo-Caesar’. However, Nero’s procurators tended to be corrupt and clumsy. One of the worst was Antonius Felix, a venal Greek freedman who, writes the historian Tacitus, ‘practised every kind of cruelty and lust, wielding the power of a king with the instincts of a s
lave’. As he was the brother of the secretary to Claudius and (for a time) to Nero, the Jews could no longer appeal to Rome. King Agrippa’s scandalous sisters personified the corruption of the elite. Drusilla, who ‘exceeded all women in beauty’, was married to the Arab king Azizus of Emesa, but Felix ‘conceived a passion for her. She being unhappy and wishing to escape the malice of her sister Berenice’ eloped with Felix. Berenice, who had been Queen of Chalcis (married to her uncle), left her latest husband, the King of Cilicia, to live with her brother: Roman rumours suggested incest. Felix milked Judaea for money while ‘a new species of bandit’ known as the Sicarii (after their short Roman daggers – the origin of the word ‘sickle’) started to assassinate Jewish grandees at festivals in the middle of Jerusalem – their first success was the killing of an ex-high priest. Faced with ethnic slaughter and repeated ‘pseudo-prophets’, Felix struggled to keepthe peace while enriching himself.