Jerusalem: The Biography

  Amid this apocalyptic turbulence, the small sect of Jesus was now split between its Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and its gentile followers in the wider Roman world. Now the most dynamic radical of all Jesus’ followers, who more than anyone else would forge a new world religion, returned to plan the future of Christianity.

  PAUL OF TARSUS: THE CREATOR OF CHRISTIANITY

  Jerusalem was recovering from her latest spasm of apocalyptic violence. An Egyptian Jew had just led a mob up the Mount of Olives, announcing, with echoes of Jesus, that he was going to bring down the walls and take Jerusalem. The pseudo-prophet tried to storm the city, but the Jerusalemites joined the Romans in repelling his followers. Felix’s legions then killed most of them.51 There was a manhunt for the ‘sorcerer’ himself, as Paul arrived in the city he knew well.

  Paul’s father was a Pharisee who prospered enough to become a Roman citizen. He sent his son – born about the same time as Jesus but in Cilicia (today’s Turkey) – to study in the Temple in Jerusalem. When Jesus was crucified, Saul, as he then was, supported the ‘threatenings and slaughter’: he held the cloaks of those who stoned Stephen ‘and was consenting to his death’. A tent-maker, this Greek-speaking Roman Pharisee served as an agent of the high priest until, around ad 37, on the road to Damascus, he experienced his ‘apocalypse’: ‘Suddenly there shined round him a light from heaven’ and he heard a voice ‘saying unto him: Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ The risen Christ commissioned him to become a thirteenth apostle to preach the good news to the gentiles.

  James and the Christians in Jerusalem were understandably suspicious of this new convert, but Paul felt compelled to teach his message with all his obessional energy: ‘Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.’ Finally, ‘James, the Lord’s brother’ accepted this new colleague. For the next fifteen years, this irrepressible firebrand travelled the east, dogmatically preaching his own version of Jesus’ Gospel that fiercely rejected the exclusivity of the Jews. ‘The Apostle to Gentiles’ believed that ‘for our sake’ God had made Jesus ‘a sin offering, who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God’. Paul focused on the Resurrection, which he saw as the bridge between humanity and God. Paul’s Jerusalem was the Heavenly Kingdom, not the real Temple; his ‘Israel’ was any follower of Jesus, not the Jewish nation. He was, in some ways, strangely modern, for, contrary to the harsh ethos of the ancient world, he believed in love, equality and inclusiveness: Greeks and Jews, women and men, all were one, all could achieve salvation just by faith in Christ. His letters dominate the New Testament, forming a quarter of its books. His vision was boundless, for he wished to convert all people.

  Jesus had won a few non-Jewish followers, but Paul was particularly successful among gentiles and the so-called God-fearers, those non-Jews who had embraced aspects of Judaism without undergoing circumcision. Paul’s Syrian converts in Antioch were the first to be known as ‘Christians’. Around AD 50, Paul returned to Jerusalem to persuade James and Peter to allow non-Jews into the sect. James agreed a compromise, but in the following years he learned that Paul was turning Jews against Mosaic Law.

  An unmarried puritanical loner, Paul endured shipwrecks, robberies, beatings and stonings on his travels, yet nothing distracted him from his mission – to remodel the rustic Jewish Galilean into Jesus Christ, the saviour of all mankind who would imminently return in the Second Coming – the Kingdom of Heaven. Sometimes he was still a Jew himself and he may have returned to Jerusalem as many as five times, but sometimes he presented Judaism as the new enemy. In the earliest Christian text, his First Letter to the Thessalonians (Greek gentiles who had converted to Christianity), he ranted against the Jews for killing Jesus and their own prophets. He believed that circumcision, the Jewish Covenant with God, was a Jewish duty but irrelevant for gentiles: ‘Look out for the dogs! Look out for those who cut off the flesh! For we are the true circumcision who worship God in spirit and glory in Christ Jesus,’ he raged at Christian gentiles considering circumcision.

  By now James and the elders in Jerusalem disapproved of Paul. They had known the real Jesus, yet Paul insisted: ‘I have been crucified with Christ. The life I live now is not my life but the life Christ lives in me.’ He claimed, ‘I bear the marks of Jesus branded on my body.’ James, that respected holy man, accused him of rejecting Judaism. Even Paul could not ignore Jesus’ own brother. In AD 58, he came to make peace with the Jesus dynasty.

  THE DEATH OF JAMES THE JUST: THE JESUS DYNASTY

  Paul accompanied James to the Temple to purify himself and pray as a Jew, but he was recognized by some Jews who had seen him preach on his travels. The Roman centurion, charged with keeping order in the Temple, had to rescue him from lynching. When Paul again started preaching, the Romans thought he was the fugitive Egyptian ‘sorcerer’, so he was clapped in chains and marched to the Antonia castle to be scourged. ‘Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman?’ Paul asked. The centurion was dumbfounded to find that this wild-eyed visionary was a Roman citizen with the right to appeal to Nero for judgement. The Romans allowed the high priest and Sanhedrin to question Paul, watched by an irate crowd. His answers were so insulting that again he was almost lynched. The centurion calmed the mob by sending him off to Caesarea.52

  Paul’s exploits may have tainted the Jewish Christians. In 62, the high priest Ananus, son of Annas who had tried Jesus, arrested James, tried him before the Sanhedrin and had him tossed off the wall of the Temple, probably from the Pinnacle where his brother had been tempted by the Devil. James was then stoned and given the coup de grâce with a mallet.* Josephus, who was living in Jerusalem, denounced Ananus as ‘savage’, explaining that most Jews were appalled: Jesus’ brother had been universally respected. King Agrippa II instantly sacked Ananus. Yet the Christians remained a dynasty: Jesus and James were succeeded by their cousin or half-brother Simon.

  Meanwhile, Paul arrived as a prisoner in Caesarea: Felix the procurator received Paul alongside his Herodian wife, the former queen Drusilla, and offered to free him in return for a bribe. Paul refused. Felix had more pressing worries. Fighting broke out between Jews and Syrians. He slaughtered a large number of Jews and was recalled to Rome,† leaving Paul in jail. Herod Agrippa II and his sister Berenice, ex-queen of both Chalcis and Cilicia (and supposedly his incestuous lover), visited Caesarea to greet the new procurator, who offered the Christian case to the king, as Pilate had sent Jesus to Antipas before him.

  Paul preached the Christian Gospel to the royal couple who reclined in ‘great pomp’, cleverly adapting his message for the moderate king: ‘I know thee to be an expert in all customs among the Jews. King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know thou believest.’

  ‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,’ replied the king. ‘This man might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed to Caesar.’ But Paul had appealed to Nero – and to Nero he must go.53

  JOSEPHUS: THE COUNTDOWN TO REVOLUTION

  Paul was not the only Jew awaiting judgement from Nero. Felix had also despatched some unfortunate priests from the Temple to be judged by the emperor. Their friend, a twenty-six-year-old named Joseph ben Matthias, decided to sail to Rome and save his fellow priests. Better known as Josephus, he was to be many things – rebel commander, Herodian protégé, imperial courtier – but above all, he was to be Jerusalem’s supreme historian.

  Josephus was a priest’s son, descended from the Maccabeans, a Judaean landowner, raised in Jerusalem, where he was admired for his learning and wit. As a teenager he had experimented with the three major Jewish sects, even joining some ascetics in the desert, before returning to Jerusalem.

  When he arrived in Rome, Josephus made contact with a Jewish actor in favour with the pernicious but thespian emperor. Nero had killed his wife and fallen in love with Poppaea, a married beauty with red hair and pale skin. Once she was empress, Poppaea gave Nero the confidence to kill his own malignant mother Agrippina. Yet Poppaea also became one of the
semi-Jewish ‘God-fearers’. Through his actor friend, Josephus reached the empress, who helped free his friends. Josephus had done well, but when he and his friends returned home, they found Jerusalem pervaded ‘with high hopes of a revolt against the Romans.’ Yet revolt was not inevitable: Josephus’ acquaintance with Poppaea shows how the lines between Rome and Jerusalem were still open. The city filled annually with vast numbers of Jewish pilgrims with little sign of trouble despite the presence of only one auxiliary Roman cohort (600–1,200 men) in the Antonia. The rich Temple city existed ‘in a state of peace and prosperity’, run by a Jewish high priest appointed by a Jewish king. It was only now that the Temple was finally completed, causing the unemployment of 18,000 builders. So King Agrippa created more work for them by commissioning new streets.*

  At any time, a more diligent emperor, a more just procurator, could have restored order among the Jewish factions. While the empire was run by Nero’s efficient Greek freedmen, his posturings as actor and athlete, even his blood purges, were tolerable. But when the economy started to fail, Nero’s ineptitude spread down to Judaea, where there was now ‘no form of villainy’ that his procurators ‘omitted to practise’. In Jerusalem, the latest incumbent ran a protection-racket, taking bribes from the grandees whose thuggish retinues competed with the Sicarii to terrorize the city. No wonder another prophet, ironically named Jesus, loudly cried in the Temple, ‘Woe to Jerusalem!’ Judged insane, he was scourged but not killed. Yet Josephus recounts little anti-Roman sentiment.

  In 64, Rome caught fire. Nero probably oversaw the fire-fighting and he opened his gardens to those who had lost their homes. But conspiracists claimed that Nero had started the fire to enable him to build a larger palace and that he had neglected to fight the fire because he was plucking on his lyre. Nero blamed the fast-spreading semi-Jewish sect, the Christians, many of whom he caused to be burned alive, torn to pieces by wild animals or crucified. Among his victims were two arrested in Jerusalem years earlier: Peter was said to have been crucified head down; Paul beheaded. Nero’s anti-Christian pogrom earned him his place in the Christian Book of Revelation, the last in the canon of what became the New Testament: Satan’s ‘beasts’ are Roman emperors and 666, the number of the beast, probably a code for Nero.*

  The ‘exquisite tortures’ he devised for the Christians did not save Nero. At home, he kicked his pregnant empress Poppaea in the stomach, accidentally killing her. As the emperor killed enemies real and imagined while promoting his acting career, his latest procurator in Judaea, Gessius Florus, ‘ostentatiously paraded his outrages upon the nation’. The catastrophe started in Caesarea: Syrian Greeks sacrificed a cockerel outside a synagogue; the Jews protested. Florus was bribed to support the gentiles and then marched down to Jerusalem, demanding a tax of seventeen talents from the Temple. When he appeared at the Praetorium in the spring of 66, Jewish youths collected pennies and tossed them at him. Florus’ Greek and Syrian troops attacked the crowds. Florus demanded that the Temple grandees hand over the hooligans, but they refused. His legionaries ran amok, ‘plunged into every house and slaughtered the inhabitants’. Florus flagellated and crucified his prisoners, including Jewish grandees who were Roman citizens. This was the last straw: the Temple aristocrats could no longer count on Roman protection. The brutality of Florus’ local auxiliaries inflamed Jewish resistance. As his cavalry clattered through the streets with ‘a degree of madness,’ they even attacked King Agrippa’s sister, Queen Berenice. Her guards bundled her back into the Maccabean Palace but she resolved to save Jerusalem.54

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  JEWISH WARS: THE DEATH OF JERUSALEM

  AD 66–70

  BERENICE THE BAREFOOT QUEEN: REVOLUTION

  Berenice walked barefoot to the Praetorium herself – the same route Jesus would have taken from Herod Antipas back to Pilate thirty years earlier. The beautiful Berenice – daughter and sister of kings, and twice a queen – was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to thank God for her recovery from an illness, fasting for thirty days and shaving her head (surprising in this Romanized Herodian). Now she threw herself before Florus and begged him to stop, but he wanted vengeance and booty. As his reinforcements approached Jerusalem, the Jews were divided between those keen on reconciliation with the Romans and the radicals who were preparing for war, perhaps in the hope of winning a limited independence under Roman suzerainty.

  The priests in the Temple paraded the holy vessels, sprinkling the dust of mourning in their hair, in a bid to restrain the young rebels. The Jews marched out peacefully to greet the Roman cohorts, but on Florus’ instructions the cavalry rode them down. The crowds ran for the gates but many suffocated in the stampede. Florus then charged towards the Temple Mount, hoping to seize the commanding Antonia Fortress. In response the Jews bombarded the Romans with spears from the rooftops, occupied the Antonia and cut down the bridges that led into the Temple, turning it into a fortress of its own.

  Just as Florus left, Herod Agrippa arrived from Alexandria. The king called an assembly of the Jerusalemites in the Upper City beneath his Palace. As Berenice listened from the safety of the roof, Agrippa begged the Jews to stay the rebellion: ‘Don’t venture to oppose the entire empire of the Romans. War, if it be once begun, is not easily laid down. The power of the Romans is invincible in all parts of the habitable earth. Have pity, if not on your women and children, yet upon this metropolis – spare the Temple!’ Agrippa and his sister wept openly. The Jerusalemites shouted that they wished only to fight Florus. Agrippa told them to pay their tribute. The people agreed and Agrippa led them to the Temple to arrange these peaceful gestures. But on the Temple Mount, King Agrippa insisted the Jews obey Florus until a new procurator arrived, outraging the crowd all over again.

  The priests, including Josephus, met in the Temple and debated whether to stop the daily sacrifice to the Roman emperor that signified loyalty to Rome. This decisive act of rebellion was approved – ‘the foundation of war with the Romans’, wrote Josephus, who himself joined the revolt. As the rebels seized the Temple and the moderate grandees took the Upper City, the Jewish factions bombarded each other with slingshot and spears.

  Agrippa and Berenice left Jerusalem, sending 3,000 cavalry to back the moderates, but it was the extremists who triumphed. The Zealots, a popular party based around the Temple, and the Sicarii, the dagger-wielding brigands, stormed the Upper City and drove out King Agrippa’s troops. They burned the palaces of the high priest and the Maccabees as well as the archives where debts were recorded. For a short moment, their leader, a ‘barbarous, cruel’ warlord ruled Jerusalem until the priests assassinated him and the Sicarii escaped to the Masada fortress near the Dead Sea and played no further part until Jerusalem had fallen.

  The priests were back in nominal control but from now on, the factions in Jerusalem and their warlords, often provincial opportunists and local adventurers as well as religious fanatics, embarked on a savage and chaotic Jewish civil war. Even Josephus, our sole source, fails to clarify who formed these factions and what they believed. But he traces the strain of religious anti-Roman zealotry all the way back to the Galilean rebellions after Herod the Great’s death: ‘they have a passion for liberty, which is almost unconquerable since they are convinced God alone is their leader’. They ‘sowed the seed from which sprang life’. During the next few years, he says, Jew fought Jew ‘in a perpetual slaughter’.

  The Roman garrison of 600, still holding Herod the Great’s Citadel, agreed to give up their arms in return for safe passage out of the city but these Syrians and Greeks who had massacred so many innocent Jews were then ‘savagely butchered’. King Agrippa abandoned his attempts to mediate and threw in his hand with Rome. In November 66, the Roman Governor of Syria, backed by Agrippa and allied kings, marched down from Antioch and fought his way into Jerusalem. Yet he abruptly retired, perhaps having been bribed, and his retreat under ferocious Jewish attack cost the lives of more than 5,000 Roman soldiers, and the eagle of a legion.

  The di
e was cast. Roman pride had to be avenged. The rebels chose the former high priest, Ananus, as the leader of independent Israel. He strengthened the walls, while the city echoed to the hammering and forging of armour and weapons. He also appointed generals, among them Josephus, the future historian, who now left the city as the commander of Galilee, where he found himself fighting a warlord, John of Gischala, more viciously than either of them fought the Romans.

  The new Jewish coins celebrated ‘The Freedom of Zion’ and ‘Jerusalem the Holy’ – yet it seemed this was a liberation that not many had wanted and the city waited like ‘a place doomed to destruction’. Nero was in Greece to perform his songs and compete in chariot-races in the Olympic Games (he won even though he fell out of his chariot), when he heard that Israel had rebelled.

  JOSEPHUS’ PROPHECY: THE MULETEER AS EMPEROR

  Nero feared victorious generals, so he chose as the commander of his Jewish War a dogged veteran from his own entourage. Titus Flavius Vespasianus was in his late fifties and often annoyed the emperor by falling asleep during his theatrical performances. But he had made his name in the conquest of Britain and his nickname – The Muleteer – revealed his unglamorous dependability and the fortune he had made by selling mules to the army.

  Sending his son Titus to Alexandria to collect reinforcements, Vespasian mustered an army of 60,000, four legions plus Syrian slingers, Arab archers and the cavalry of King Herod Agrippa. Then he marched down the coast to Ptolemais (Acre). In early 67, he methodically started to reconquer Galilee, resisted fanatically by Josephus and his Galileans. Finally, Vespasian besieged Josephus in his fortress of Jotapata. On 29 July that year, Titus crept through the shattered walls and seized the city. The Jews fought to the death, many of them committing suicide.