Texts in Context:
Once, Now, and Forever
By Gabriel Blanchard
O Fortūna, velut lūnā, statū variābilis ...
Nero Claudius Cæsar Augustus Germanicus Etceterus1
49-44 BC Dictatorship in perpetuo of Julius Cæsar (“zeroth Emperor,” as it were)
43-32 BC Second Triumvirate (rule of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus in conjunction with Senate)
31 BC-14 AD Reign of Octavian Augustus (conventionally considered the first Emperor)
14-37 Reign of Tiberius
33? Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth2
37-41 Reign of Gaius Caligula (from calīga, soldiers’ footgear—thus, “Bootsie”)
41-54 Reign of Claudius
54-68 Reign of Nero
64 Great Fire of Rome (summer); late this year or early next, Christianity criminalized
66 Outbreak of First Jewish War
68 Suicide of Nero; end of Julio-Claudian dynasty
68-69 Reign of Galba
69 Reign of Otho
. Reign of Vitellius
. Accession of Vespasian; beginning of Flavian dynasty
70 Fall of Jerusalem; isolated fighting drags on until 73, ending at Masada
Nero was not one of history’s great monarchs. He was not anything like so bad as his predecessor’s predecessor, the worst of the volatile Julio-Claudians, Caligula (whose sanity went up like a lead balloon not long after his accession). In fact, Nero’s reign opened with reforms, putting a check on the powers of tax farmers and allowing slaves to make formal complaints of mistreatment from their masters. At first, his worst quality—other, of course, than the whole “matricide” business, which is only the kind of attention-seeking behavior history has come to expect of the ill-bred Ahenobarbus family—was that he was one of those people who is deeply, yet not quite sincerely, convinced of his own artistic talent. One of his retinue (a general from the respectable sub-patrician Flavian family, Vespasian by name) fell decidedly from favor during an imperial tour of Greece; in fairness to the Emperor, we must admit that, while one may presumably do as one likes during one’s own, falling asleep during somebody else’s lyre recital is rather rude.
In any case, after his mother’s murder if not before, such character and good sense as Nero had plainly began to deteriorate. When a fire ravaged the city in 64, a rumor began to spread that the Emperor was responsible; the infamy would not be put out, and he eventually turned to pinning the arson (if it was arson) onto a new Jewish sect (or were they Jewish?), who were rumored to be atheists and “haters of mankind”: adherence to it was criminalized. Thus Christianity joined the religion of the Druids3 as one of the exceedingly few religions banned by law in the Roman Empire.
The First Jewish War (66-73)
Two years after the fire, coincidentally, trouble broke out in Judæa. The Jews were strained by Roman taxation and, from their own perspective, Gentile insolence toward their religion. Under an especially tactless and ham-handed governor, discontent boiled over into revolt. Nero commissioned Vespasian to put it down. The general came in from Syria in the north, while his son Titus brought more men from Egypt in the southwest.
In about three years, the countryside was mopped up, leaving only a few fortified citadels resisting. Jerusalem endured a siege too brutal to relate. It finally broke in 70, and Titus sacked the city, enslaved the inhabitants, and razed the Temple to the ground; nothing was left but a portion of the western retaining wall that had secured the Temple Mount, artificially expanded by Herod the Great, adjacent to the place where the Holy of Holies had stood. Its most precious vessels were taken with Titus and paraded (no doubt as “quaintly Eastern”) during his triumph; the commemorative Arch of Titus still stands in Rome, and the seven curving branches of the Menorah can be clearly distinguished in its relief. What happened to this and any other spoils is unknown. Probably they were stolen and melted down or otherwise destroyed some time in the fifth century, when sacking Rome became fashionable in turn.
And yes, by the way: Titus. Vespasian had left for the capital the previous year, following the disgrace and suicide of Nero and the accession of the new Emperor Galba. Sorry, Emperor Otho. No, it’s Vitellius now—wait, Vitellius? Really? Caligula’s old pal, the one who thinks “bribing your soldiers to behave” counts as “martial discipline,” with the double chins?4 At this point, why not try for “Emperor Vespasian”? The general was hailed as emperor by his troops, and a local priest (an ex-leader of the Galilean branch of the late rebellion) persuaded him that the words of some old Jewish seer about a ruler arising in the east were about him. Setting out from Egypt, Vespasian handily defeated Vitellius, and was acclaimed the ninth Roman Emperor by the Senate with just a few days left in anno Domini 69, the “Year of the Four Emperors.”5 Thus began the Flavian dynasty.
Here we conclude our history. ... Its literary merits must be left to the judgment of its readers; as for its consonance with the facts, I do not hesitate to assert that I have aimed throughout to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
The local priest (who happened to be a descendant of the Maccabees on the distaff side) was absorbed into Titus’s entourage for a while. His name was יוֹסֵף בֵּן מַתִּתְיָהוּ [Yōsēf bēn Matithyāhū], which might have come down to us as something like Joseph ben Matthias, if the half-Hellenized forms common in the New Testament had prevailed in his case; as it was, Latinate influence predominated, and he was known (combining his own name with the house name of his patrons) as Flavius Iosephus, modernized Josephus.
The Life and Times of Flavius Josephus
Though he observed the Torah to the end of his days, Josephus was ruined beyond hope of recovery in the eyes of many fellow Jews, due to his surrender to the Romans in 67. It may have been to regain some scrap of their good will, or merely for his own satisfaction, that he undertook his subsequent literary career, most of which fell in the 90s of the first century. He documented the late revolt in The Jewish War (first in Aramaic, then in a second Greek edition). His magnum opus gave a comprehensive account of, and vigorous apologetic for, the Jewish nation and religion. This was his twenty-volume Antiquities of the Jews: the first twelve volumes primarily summarized the contents of the Septuagint,6 while the remaining eight provided a zoomed-in account of the last couple of centuries of Jewish history and lore. It remains one of the few ancient texts that discusses first-century Judaism written by a contemporary and eyewitness. Even fewer were composed by actual participants in the still-operant Temple. Josephus later composed a lengthy autobiographical pamphlet, defending his conduct before and during the rebellion, which he appended to the Antiquities.
He also wrote Against Apion, a rebuttal of anti-Semitic stories and accusations made by an infamously vain rhetoric professor from Alexandria, earlier in the first century. Decades before, Apion reputedly headed an embassy to Caligula—opposite a Jewish embassy led by a fellow Egyptian, Philo, a celebrated Hellenistic Jewish philosopher—in the course of which he, Apion, tried to excite the Emperor’s anger against the Jews, reminding him that they would not put up statues of him or swear by his divinity. Caligula’s response is not known; for all we know he may, as Robert Graves suggested in his novel I Claudius, have expressed his ire to the Jews by quoting to them “You shall have no other gods before me”; he was in any case assassinated less than four years later. Evidently this did not sate Apion’s appetite for spreading vile stories backed by “evidence” of the kind that tends to run, “I mean, I’m not saying, I’m just saying, people are saying, you know,” etc. Josephus contradicted and refuted a laundry list of his accusations, up to and including blood libel7—this being perhaps the first, and certainly an ominous, appearance of a hideous lie that would pursue the Jews for centuries to come.
Only one other influential source (a collection of sources, really) on late Second Temple Judaism merits brief mention here, that being the New Testament. NT scholarship can be a minefield, and, for reasons we adduced last week, we do not propose to feign that we can treat the subject neutrally! But we would be remiss not to take note of the four canonical Gospels—widely, albeit not universally,8 dated to roughly the same time as the writings of Josephus—along with the Pauline corpus, the Apocalypse, and the handful of further letters in between: books which, whatever else is said about them, have assuredly changed the world.
1Nero’s birth name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. When his mother married the Emperor Claudius, he also adopted young Lucius, whose name was changed to Nero Claudius Cæsar Augustus Germanicus (which made sense for dull, gossipy reasons that need not detain us).
2This date has been disputed for centuries. However, there is reason to think 30 and 33 are the most credible dates (based on the terms of figures like Pilate and Herod Antipas, peculiarities in and variants of the Hebrew calendar, etc.); Cambridge professor Colin Humphreys has put forward reasons to tinker slightly with the chronology of the traditional narrative, which map better to the year 33 than to 30.
3The Druids were banned because, the Romans alleged, they practiced human sacrifice. Some scholars are skeptical of this as Roman propaganda; however, archæological evidence squares with it, the accusation is quite consistently made, and the Romans only leveled the charge of human sacrifice at a few of their enemies and rivals (mainly the Carthaginians, the Druids themselves, the Jews, and Christians). It is probably best to treat it as plausible but unproven.
4The present was not kind to Vitellius either; his supernumerary chins appear even on his coins.
5Oh, it gets worse. There’s a Year of Five Emperors waiting in the wings.
6In this context, “the Septuagint” is the least-bad way to put it. “The Tanakh” leaves out material Josephus covers (in substance, I and II Maccabees). “The Old Testament” prompts the question, which Old Testament? A majority of Christians (those of the Catholic, Ethiopic, and Orthodox traditions) accept an OT canon derived from the Septuagint; however, the Protestant OT canon—with which our readers are likely most familiar—aligns with the Judaic canon in content (rearranged in Septuagint order), and the Ethiopic canon also lacks I and II Maccabees (I, II, and III Meqabyan are related but distinct). And if you still feel smart, decide how to describe the Books of Esdras; I dare you.
7Blood libel is a form of conspiracy theory, overwhelmingly directed against Jews though occasionally used against other groups (Christians were victims of blood libel in the second and third centuries), claiming the libeled group has some custom of secretly capturing outsiders and ritually murdering them. The slander usually goes on to include cannibalism, because why not. (Naturally, not all accusations of murder are blood libels: the purported secrecy and ritualism are key here.)
8An alternative to the present academic consensus appears in John A. T. Robinson’s Redating the New Testament; a more “orthodox” scholarly view is presented in Bruce Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, whose fourth edition has been revised by Bart D. Ehrman.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Thank you for reading the Journal. If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like our series on “the Great Conversation”—you can navigate to any of its topics (and find suggestions for further reading) from this index.
Published on 30th September, 2024. Page image of a celebrated ikon of Christ Pantokrator (“Christ Almighty”) preserved in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, Egypt. Author thumbnail photograph of a stained glass window at St. John the Baptist Church in Yeovil, England, taken by Wikimedia contributor GadgetSteve, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (source).
