Searching for the Real Jesus. Geza Vermes

(161–143/2 BCE) defeated the enemy and restored a Jewish state. Jonathan, though not a scion of the sacerdotal dynasty which held the pontificate since the time of King David, proclaimed himself high priest in 153/2 BCE, and Simon, another of the Maccabee brothers, established himself as hereditary religious and political head of the Jewish nation in 143/2 BCE.

      His son John Hyrcanus I (135/4–104 BCE) and John’s successors, Judas Aristobulus I (104–3 BCE) and Jonathan or Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE) extended the frontiers of the new Jewish state and compelled the neighbouring peoples, the Idumaeans in the south and the various foreign clans in and around Galilee, to recognize them as their rulers and embrace Judaism as their religion. This entailed submission to circumcision as far as the male population was concerned. Their Judaizing missionary activity did not stop these Hasmonaean priest kings from practising harsh secular tyranny at home. Alexander Jannaeus is in particular notorious for his cruelty in wreaking vengeance on his political opponents, the Pharisees. He ordered 800 of them to be crucified while he and his mistresses, eating, drinking and merrymaking, were mesmerized by the unholy spectacle.

      On Alexander’s death his widow, the pious Shelamzion or Alexandra Salome, a great friend of the Pharisees, occupied the royal throne with her elder son, John Hyrcanus II inheriting the high priesthood (76–67 BCE). His more vigorous and envious younger brother Judas Aristobulus II was however determined to dispossess him of his office. When Queen Alexandra died, civil war broke out between the two priestly rivals and with the ensuing conflict opens a new era leading to the age of Jesus.

      From Pompey to the End of the Hasmonaean Priestly Rule (63–37 BCE)

      The attempt by Aristobulus II to unseat Hyrcanus II, the legitimate holder of the high priesthood, and the forceful riposte by Hyrcanus, backed by the clever Idumaean strong man Antipater, the father of Herod the Great, and the Nabataean king Aretas III, formed the preamble to the Roman invasion of Judaea by Pompey in 63 BCE. The trio of Hyrcanus, Antipater and Aretas laid siege to Jerusalem where Aristobulus was forced to withdraw. The innocent victim of the battle was the renowned miracle working man of God, Honi, whom the partisans of Hyrcanus stoned to death for refusing to put a curse on Aristobulus and his party. Here we are faced with a politically motivated murder with religious undercurrents. The trend repeated itself in the case of John the Baptist, Jesus, James, the brother of the Lord and others.

      The stalemate between the two forces induced both Aristobulus and Hyrcanus to ask for Pompey’s intervention. Each hoped to find favour with him. Instead, Pompey, accompanied by the army of his general Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, conquered Jerusalem and without further ado they turned the Hasmonaean state into the Roman province of Judaea. Hyrcanus was reinstalled in the high priesthood, but the title of king was removed from him, while the deposed Aristobulus was sent to Rome as a prisoner. A little later he escaped and began to organize resistance to Rome at home, but he was soon arrested and returned to captivity in the imperial capital. At the start of the Roman civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, Caesar released him as he saw in Aristobulus a potential ally, but the Jewish leader was poisoned by Pompey’s partisans before he could set sail and support Caesar in Syria.

      After the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BCE, where Pompey was defeated, Hyrcanus and Antipater switched their allegiance to the victor. Caesar, who generally showed himself sympathetic to the Jews both in Palestine and in the diaspora, rewarded them by reappointing Hyrcanus II as nominal head of state or ethnarch of the Jews and placing the administration of the province in the hands of the Idumaean Antipater, who shared his duties with his two sons, Phasael and Herod.

      While governor of Galilee, the young Herod overstepped the boundaries of legality and ordered without trial the execution of the rebel leader Ezechias and his men. He was summoned before the Jewish Sanhedrin, but with Roman help and the connivance of Hyrcanus, the president of the court, Herod escaped conviction and was confirmed in his position by Caesar’s colleague Mark Antony, the Roman plenipotentiary in the eastern Mediterranean provinces. In 40 BCE the mighty Iranian tribe of the Parthians invaded Judaea and gave their patronage to Antigonus, the son of Aristobulus II, and a rival of Hyrcanus II. On his coins, Antigonus called himself high priest and king. To ensure his position as high priest, he maimed his uncle Hyrcanus, apparently by biting off one of his ears, with a view to making him unfit to act as a pontiff. However, the ephemeral rule of Antigonus came to an end in 37 BCE, when the Romans captured and beheaded him by order of Antony, who in 40 BCE had already nominated Herod as king of Judaea. In 37 BCE, after his conquest of Jerusalem with the helping hand of Sosius, the Roman governor of Syria and of his legions, Herod, the Idumaean upstart, actually became the ruler of the Jewish nation and terminated the century-long dominion of the Maccabaean-Hasmonaean dynasty.

      The Reign of Herod the Great (37–4 BCE) – The Birth of Jesus (c. 6/5 BCE)

      The reign of Herod covers the decades of Jewish history which directly open the ‘age of Jesus’, who was born shortly before Herod died. The friendly Roman oversight of the government of Judaea and the iron fist of the new monarch substantially affected the Jewish society in which Jesus lived. Herod was a cross between a genius and a monster; he was a master tight-rope-walker whose steps seem to have constantly been protected by Fortune. His climb to power was hard. Suspect as the protégé of the Roman Mark Antony, Herod was first looked on with suspicious eyes by the Jews, but he managed to gain their approval thanks to the help of Pharisees, whose leaders, Samaias and Pollion, spoke up for him out of gratitude for sparing their lives when Herod took revenge on the judges of the Sanhedrin who had tried him in Galilee. The clever king also succeeded in softening the opposition of the pro-Hasmonaean Sadducee upper classes, for whom he was no more than a ‘half-Jew’, by marrying the Jewish princess Mariamme, the granddaughter of the ethnarch and high priest Hyrcanus II. In addition to the Pharisees and Sadducees, Herod was also on good terms with the Essenes, a by then long-established community, first mentioned in Josephus in mid-second century BCE. They owed this favourable treatment to the prophecy of the Essene Menahem who foretold Herod’s elevation to the kingship of Judaea. With the death of Antigonus and Hyrcanus II, the Hasmonaean hereditary pontificate came to an end and Herod, being the secular head of state, arrogated to himself the right to appoint and dismiss Jewish high priests. This right was granted in New Testament times to his grandsons, Agrippa I and Agrippa II, by the emperor, and exercised in the meantime by the Roman governors of Judaea between 6 and 41 CE.

      To secure his position, Herod had to ensure friendly relations with Rome and overcome the continuing hostility of some members of the Hasmonaean family. Remaining on good terms with Mark Antony became rather tricky because of the influence of Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, on Herod’s patron. This femme fatale, first the lover and later the wife of Antony, had cast an envious eye on the Judaean kingdom. Herod succeeded in minimizing his territorial losses, only some coastal towns and the area of Jericho were annexed to Egypt, while briefly contemplating, but wisely abandoning, the idea of a love affair with Cleopatra which he thought might provide him with an opportunity to get rid of her. The deteriorating relationship between Antony and Octavian, the future Augustus, created a new dilemma for Herod, but with his customary good luck he contrived to gain first the trust and later the close friendship of Augustus.

      His feud with the Hasmonaean royalty was harder to settle as it was kept alive by the continuous intrigues of the female members of the court led by the king’s Idumaean mother Cyprus and his sister Salome on the one hand and, on the other, his Hasmonaean wife Mariamme, with whom he was passionately in love, and her mother Alexandra. The outcome was bloody for the Hasmonaeans. The long list of family members executed by Herod include his beloved wife Mariamme and her two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus; her brother, the young high priest Aristobulus III, drowned in an arranged swimming pool accident; Mariamme’s mother and her old grandfather, the harmless former high priest Hyrcanus II. The king’s sister Salome also used her brother’s good services to get rid of three of her husbands, one of them Herod’s own uncle. Nevertheless, shortly after the execution in 4 BCE of Antipater, Herod’s eldest son by the first of his ten wives, Salome and her fourth husband frustrated the dying king’s final mad murder project by setting free a large group of Jewish notables whom they had been instructed by Herod to assassinate on his death so as to guarantee widespread mourning at the moment of the royal funeral in 4 BCE.

      Herod the Murderer, a suitable