Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

against the Jewish people is unique. More than six million were murdered, not merely in the normal progress of the German death machine that mauled tens of millions of others. No, Jews were singled out, hounded, rounded up, transported, bludgeoned, gassed, and cremated expressly and only for beings Jews. The murdered included more than a million children. Nothing they could have done—no conversion, no betrayal, no bribe, no willingness to support the war effort, no embrace of Aryan ideology, no renunciation of Yahweh—would have led to their being spared. Their offense consisted in having been born. This sets what Hitler ordered apart from any other tyrant’s bloody decree. Other genocides have occurred, both before and since (and Joseph Stalin engaged in genocidal spasms of killing even as Hitler did), but no moral scale exists on which one group’s suffering can be measured against another’s. Nor is there a competition in victimhood. Every genocide is unique, and each one is a mortal crime. Yet what happened to Jews as Jews in the heart of twentieth-century Europe, at the hands of members of the most highly sophisticated culture in history carrying to an extreme basic tenets of Western civilization itself, remains a watershed of horror.

      But the Jewish people, as a people, were previously the target not just of perennial discrimination and periodic violence but—once before—of an effectively eliminationist assault that also might have succeeded: the long-ago Roman War against the Jews, which was ignited not long after the lifetime of Jesus.²

      What the Romans called Bellum Judaicum, “the Jewish War,” unfolded in three phases: first between the years 66 and 73, then between 115 and 117, and, finally, between 132 and 136. The scale of destruction—with perhaps millions of Jews killed,³ with Judea and Galilee laid to waste, and with Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean attacked—is alone enough to bear comparison to the twentieth-century barbarity. The pre-industrial Romans accomplished the killing man by man, woman by woman, child by child, not in mechanized mass-destruction factories. The mayhem, therefore, was, if anything, even more cold-blooded than what the bureaucratically minded Germans did. Yet it is true that the Romans were not motivated, as the Nazis were, by what moderns would regard as racial anti-Semitism. Romans were not operating out of an ontological or theological enmity, as twentieth-century Europe was in abetting—or ignoring—the “transport” of Jews. For Rome, the matter was one of simple imperial control, and that required submission on the part of subject peoples. Total submission, not elimination, was the purpose of total violence. A broad and consistent Jewish refusal to yield prompted levels of killing that were genocidal in effect, whatever the intent.⁴ Yet viewed from below, the carnage would surely have looked the same—from the point of view of the many thousands of men hung on crosses, the untold numbers of women raped and forced into slavery, the multitude of infants whose bodies were torn apart, the experience was no doubt comparable. On the ground, annihilation is annihilation.

      Rome was just being Rome. Yahweh’s people were just being Yahweh’s people. Unlike most others under the yoke of the empire, the people of Israel found it impossible to sustain a spirit of submission, because the impositions were simply blasphemous, grotesque insults to the Lord: the ubiquitous offering of sacrifices to gods; requirements to acknowledge the emperor as divine; the intrusions of legionaries into sanctuaries; ultimately, the occupation by pagans of Eretz Yisrael—the Land. The territory of Israel had been given as the sign of the covenant, and therefore was itself sacred. The Roman heel set loose in that land was trampling upon God.

      The rule for populations conquered by Rome, however, was straightforward: Submit or die. What motivated the refusal to yield mattered not at all. In the Christian memory, Jews have always brought trouble down upon themselves, a malign trait that would show itself across the centuries as stiff-necked stubbornness. Yet “stubbornness” fails to credit the true—and heroic—distinctiveness of this resistance. Jews were motivated not only by a religious self-understanding that set them apart, but also by the conviction that the liberation of Israel from Rome was willed by none other than the God of Israel. More than that, God could reliably be counted upon to bring that liberation about—and soon.

      To the modern imagination, such an expectation seems cracked. Neither its genesis nor its urgency can be grasped—yet this holy political assurance was defining for all Jews, able to be reduced to neither mere fantasy nor mad enthusiasm. Messianic hope, more than any other single factor, set this people apart. It accounts both for the Jews’ survival as Jews and, equally, for the stunning reinventions—when history made them necessary—of Rabbinic Judaism and the Jesus movement.

      The conflict with Rome became lethal when the strength of such belief confronted the strength of the empire’s determination to squelch it. An entire people unyielding in resistance could face only elimination. And it nearly came, beginning with the prelude to Rome’s Bellum Judaicum, a century before its actual start. In 65 B.C.E., two generations before the birth of Jesus, the legions, commanded by the Roman general Pompey—Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus—first swept into Palestine from Syria. Pompey, popularly known as “the vulture,” had brought Rome’s fist down on peoples from Hispania to the Caucasus, and now his armies were solidifying the empire’s southeastern frontier. For most of a thousand years, Israelites had been at home in the crossroads region between Syria and Egypt, centered on David’s city, Jerusalem. Though various powers had vanquished them and occupied their territory, they had survived as steady claimants of Palestine through accommodation (to a point), loose alliances, and periodic rebellions. But with Rome solidifying the borders of its sway, Eretz Yisrael’s turn under a new imperial wheel had come—this time with an unprecedented totality. Sixty years before the birth of Jesus, and a century before the official Jewish War, the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem. For three months, the Jews of the holy city held out, but then it was over. “Of the Jews,” writes Josephus about this first contest, “there fell twelve thousand, but of the Romans very few.”⁵ That was the beginning.

      In subsequent decades, sporadic rebellions broke out against local Roman authorities and their client-rulers. For example, around the time of the birth of Jesus, in the power vacuum left by the death of Rome’s puppet king Herod the Great, Jews rose up, first in Galilee, then in Jerusalem. The Romans promptly slammed down, burning towns and villages in the environs of Nazareth, then killing and enslaving many in Jerusalem. Josephus says that in Jerusalem alone on this occasion, two thousand Jews were crucified.⁶ The Jews again submitted, but restlessly. They were waiting for openings, and for God’s deliverance.

      That tension surely shot through the life of Jesus: he almost certainly would have grown up hearing stories of the local Roman rampages in his neighborhood at the time of his birth. Events then would have slid, as he came of age, into the all-defining myth of Roman violence, which showed up eventually in the Gospel story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.⁷ Jesus’ life span was bracketed, that is, by savage Roman violence against unyielding Jewish troublemakers—of whom, finally, he would be only one.

      It was in train with this century-long experience of forced occupation⁸ that the climactic Jewish rebellion—the Great Revolt—came in 66 C.E., more than three decades after the death of Jesus. Such was the heat of smoldering resentment that a local dispute over defilement of a Jewish holy place in Caesarea, a Palestinian seaport city with a sizable population of Greeks and Hellenized Jews, escalated into a Judea-wide rebellion. In Jerusalem, Jews associated with the priestly caste attacked the Roman garrison and took control of the entire inner-city plateau on which the Temple stood. As word spread of this audacious action, Jews from all over Judea and Galilee rushed to Jerusalem to join in its defense, an onslaught sufficient to drive out the puppet ruler Agrippa II. The Roman historian Tacitus puts the number of these Jewish defenders of Jerusalem at 600,000; Josephus posited one million.⁹ The Roman legions regrouped, were reinforced, and were put under the command of Vespasian, conqueror of Britain. He invaded Galilee, systematically dismantled rebel defenses, destroyed towns, burned crops, and set his soldiers loose on women. Gradually, the Romans made their way to Jerusalem.

      The suicide of Nero¹⁰ in 68 sparked a brief civil war in Rome. Vespasian returned from Judea to Italy and joined the succession fight, quickly emerging as the new emperor. His son Titus took over as the head of the legions in Judea. They laid siege to Jerusalem, cutting it off from resupply and reinforcement. In the beleaguered city, the Jewish rebels fell to attacking one another, with so-called