The Origin of Satan (4 page)

more pitiable, so did the mothers do to their infants.”6 Even old

peo-

6 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

ple and children were tortured for stealing food. Finally, when

the Jewish armies could hold out no longer, Roman soldiers

entered the city and swarmed over the great Temple. Titus and

his staff, apparently curious, entered the Holy of Holies, the

sacred room where the ark of the covenant was kept. Roman

soldiers looted the treasury, seizing its priceless gold furniture,

the golden trumpets, and the massive seven-branched

lampstand; then they set the Temple afire and watched it burn.

Later that night they hailed Titus’s victory and in triumph

desecrated the Temple precincts by sacrificing there to their own

gods. Having devastated the Jewish armies, they raped, robbed,

and massacred thousands of Jerusalem’s inhabitants and left the

city in ruins. Josephus, writing from his Roman retirement villa

ten to fifteen years later, no doubt hoped not only to express his

anguish but also to exonerate himself for collaborating with

those who destroyed Jerusalem when he wrote,

O most wretched city, what misery so great as this did you

suffer from the Romans, when they came to purify you from

your internecine hatred!7

Whatever Josephus’s motives, his writing conveys a powerful

impression of the factions that divided Jerusalem, as well as of

the horrifying devastation that the city’s inhabitants suffered.

What makes these events important for my purpose in this

book is that the first Christian gospel was probably written

during the last year of the war, or the year it ended.8 Where it

was written and by whom we do not know; the work is

anonymous, although tradition attributes it to Mark, a younger

co-worker of the apostle Peter. What we do know is that the

author of Mark’s gospel was well aware of the war and took sides

in the conflicts it aroused, both among Jewish groups and

between Jews and Romans.

Mark was writing, after all, about a charismatic Jewish teacher,

Jesus of Nazareth, who thirty-five years before had been

executed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea,

apparently on charges of sedition against Rome. Of all that his

followers later

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 7

claimed to know about him, these charges and his crucifixion are

the primary facts on which both Jesus’ followers and his enemies

agree. None of the surviving accounts of Jesus is

contemporaneous with his life, though many people told and

retold stories about him and recounted his sayings and parables.

Dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of accounts were written

about Jesus, including the long-hidden accounts found among

the so-called secret gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper

Egypt in 1945.9 But of these numerous accounts, only four

gospels are included in the New Testament. The great majority

of those who told and wrote about Jesus did so as his devoted

admirers, some even as his worshipers. But others, including

Josephus himself, as well as the Roman senator Tacitus, writing

c. 115 C.E., mention Jesus and his followers with hostility or

contempt.10 Yet nearly all of these, advocates and adversaries

alike, placed Jesus of Nazareth and the movement he started

within the context of “the recent troubles in Judea.”

According to Mark, Jesus protested at being arrested “like a

robber” (Mark 14:48). The author of Luke, writing some ten to

twenty years later, says that Jesus was charged, like those

crucified along with him, as a robber (Luke 23:40).11 This Greek

term
testes
, literally translated “robber” or “bandit,” was in the

early first century a catchall term for an undesirable, a

troublemaker or criminal. Josephus, however, writing after the

Jewish war against Rome, most often uses the term to

characterize those Jews who were inciting or participating in

anti-Roman activities or in the war against Rome itself.12 I agree

with many other scholars that Jesus himself is unlikely to have

been a revolutionary,13 although each of the four gospels

indicates that the Jewish leaders who brought him to Pilate

accused him of claiming to be “king of the Jews.” According to

Mark, Pilate’s soldiers, aware of the charge, mocked and abused

Jesus as a would-be king of the Jews; apparently the same charge

was inscribed over his cross as a warning to others that Rome

would similarly dispatch anyone accused of insurrection.

The narratives that we know as the New Testament gospels

were written by certain followers of Jesus who lived through the

8 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

war, and who knew that many of their fellow Jews regarded

them as a suspect minority. They wrote their own accounts of

some of the momentous events surrounding the war, and the

part that Jesus played in events preceding it, hoping to persuade

others of their interpretation. We cannot fully understand the

New Testament gospels until we recognize that they are, in this

sense, wartime literature. As noted before, the gospel we call

Mark (although we do not know historically who actually wrote

these gospels, I use their traditional attributions) was written

either during the war itself, perhaps during a temporary lull in

the siege of Jerusalem, or immediately after the defeat, in 70

C.E.14 Matthew and Luke wrote some ten to twenty years later,

each using Mark as his basis and expanding Mark’s narrative with

further sayings and stories. Most scholars believe that John

wrote his gospel, perhaps in Alexandria, about a generation after

the war, c. 90-95 C.E.15

Only one of Jesus’ followers whose writings were later

incorporated into the New Testament—Paul of Tarsus—wrote

before the war and could, of course, say nothing about Jesus in

relation to it. Paul mentions little that concerns Jesus’ biography,

repeating only a few “sayings of the Lord” (Acts 20:35 ).16 What

fascinated Paul about Jesus’ death was not the crucifixion as an

actual event, but what he saw as its profound religious

meaning—that, as he says, “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor.

15:3), that he became an atonement sacrifice, which, Paul

believed, transformed the relationship between Israel’s God and

the whole human race. If he knew the charges made against

Jesus—that he was one of many Galileans whom Josephus

regards as troublemakers17 for fomenting rebellion against

Rome—Paul apparently regarded these charges as so

transparently false or so irrelevant that they needed no rebuttal.

Paul died c. 64—65 C.E. in Rome, executed, like Jesus, by order

of Roman magistrates.

The catastrophic events of 66-70 permanently changed the

world in which Jews lived, not only in Jerusalem, where charred

rubble replaced the splendid Temple, but also for Jews

throughout the known world. Even those who had never seen

Jerusalem knew that the center of their world had been

shattered. The

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 9

hardships and humiliations of defeat exacerbated long-standing

divisions within the scattered Jewish communities, some of

which had persisted around the eastern Mediterranean for as

many as two hundred years, since the time when the armies of

the Jewish leader Judas Maccabeus had driven out the Syrian

dynasties established by Alexander the Great and had restored

the Jewish state. In 65-70 C.E., these divisions were most

obvious between those who had advocated war with Rome, and

the priestly party, which had worked to keep the fragile peace. In

the aftermath of the war against Rome, power relationships

among various groups within the Jewish communities scattered

around the world from Alexandria and Antioch to Rome shifted

to meet the changing situation. In Jerusalem itself, now that the

Temple was gone and thousands had been killed or had fled, the

priestly class lost much of its influence as other parties jockeyed

for position.

The war and its aftermath polarized followers of Jesus, too, in

relation to other Jewish communities. Followers of Jesus had

refused to fight in the war against the Romans, not because they

agreed with Josephus and others that the Romans were

invincible, or because they hoped for financial or political

advantage. Jesus’ followers believed that there was no point in

fighting the Romans because the catastrophic events that

followed his crucifixion were signs of the end—signs that the

whole world was to be shattered and transformed (Mark 13:4-

29). Some insisted that what they had seen—the horrors of the

war—actually vindicated his call “Repent, for the Kingdom of

God is near” (Mark 1:15). Mark shares the conviction,

widespread among Jesus’ followers, that Jesus himself had

predicted these world-shattering events— the destruction of the

Temple and its desecration:

And as he came out of the Temple, one of his disciples said to

him, “Look, rabbi, what wonderful stones, and what won-

derful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these

great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon

another, that will not be thrown down. . . . But when you see

the abominable sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the

10 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

reader understand!), then let those who are in Judea flee to the

mountains (Mark 13:1-14).”

This was exactly what had now happened. Others believed—

and some dared to say—that these very catastrophes occurred as

an angry God’s punishment upon his own people for the crime of

rejecting their divinely sent Messiah.

In any case, Mark insists that Jesus’ followers had no quarrel

with the Romans but with the Jewish leaders—the council of

elders, the Sanhedrin, along with the Jerusalem scribes and

priests—who had rejected God's Messiah. Mark says that these

leaders now have rejected Mark and his fellow believers, calling

them either insane or possessed by demons, the same charges

that they directed against Jesus himself.

Mark takes a conciliatory attitude toward the Romans,

although it was known that the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate,

had sentenced Jesus to death. Nevertheless, the two trial scenes

included in this gospel effectively indict the Jewish leaders for

Jesus’ death, while somewhat exonerating the Romans. Mark

virtually invents a new Pilate—a well-meaning weakling

solicitous of justice but, as Mark depicts him, intimidated by the

chief priests within his own council chamber and by crowds

shouting outside, so that he executes a man he suspects may be

innocent.

Other first-century writers, Jewish and Roman, describe a

very different man. Even Josephus, despite his Roman

sympathies, says that the governor displayed contempt for his

Jewish subjects, illegally appropriated funds from the Temple

treasury, and brutally suppressed unruly crowds.18 Another

contemporary observer, Philo, a respected and influential

member of the Alexandrian Jewish community, describes Pilate

as a man of “ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition,” famous

for, among other things, ordering “frequent executions without

trial.”19

Mark’s motives with regard to Pilate are not simple. Insofar as

he addresses his narrative to outsiders, Mark is eager to allay

Roman suspicions by showing that Jesus’ followers are no threat

to Roman order, any more than Jesus himself had been. Mark

may also have wanted to convert Gentile readers. Yet Mark is pri-

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 11

marily interested in conflicts
within
the Jewish community—

especially conflicts between his own group and those who reject

its claims about Jesus.

Despite the hostility and suspicion he and his movement

aroused among both Jews and Gentiles, including, of course, the

Romans, Mark wrote to proclaim the “good news of Jesus of

Nazareth, Messiah of Israel” (1:1). Yet Mark knows that to

justify such claims about Jesus, he has to answer obvious

objections. If Jesus had been sent as God’s anointed king, how

could the movement he initiated have failed so miserably? How

could his followers have abandoned him and gone into hiding,

while soldiers captured him like a common criminal? Why did

virtually all his own people reject the claims about him—not

only the townspeople in Galilee but also the crowds he attracted

on his travels throughout Judea and in Jerusalem? And wasn’t

Jesus, after all, a seditionist himself, tainted in retrospect by

association with the failed war, having been arrested and

crucified as a rebel? Attempting to answer these questions, Mark

places the events surrounding Jesus within the context not

simply of the struggle against Rome but of the struggle between

good and evil in the universe. The stark events of Jesus’ life and

death cannot be understood, he suggests, apart from the clash of