History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The truth seems to be that both Jesus and Paul had their roots in Palestinian Judaism. Neither was introducing concepts from the Hellenistic diaspora. Both were preaching a new theology, and it was essentially the same theology. Jesus prophesied a new testament by the shedding of his blood ‘for many’ and his resurrection.96 Paul taught that the prophecy had been accomplished, that the Christ had become incarnate in Jesus, and that a New Covenant had thereby come into existence and was offered to those who had faith in it.

Neither Jesus nor Paul denied the moral or ethical value of the Law. They merely removed the essence of it from its historical context, which both saw as outmoded.

What Paul said was that good works were the condition of remaining eligible for the New Covenant, but they do not in themselves suffice for salvation, which is obtained by grace. Both Jesus and Paul were true Jews in that they saw religion as a historical procession of events. They ceased to be Jews when they added a new event. As Paul said, when Christ became incarnate in Jesus, the basis of the Torah was nullified. At one time, the original Jewish covenant was the means whereby grace was secured. That, said Paul, was no longer true. God’s plan had changed. The mechanism of salvation was now the New Testament, faith in Christ. The covenantal promises to Abraham no longer applied to his present descendants, but to Christians: ‘And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.’97 What Jesus challenged, and Paul specifically denied, was the fundamental salvation-process of Judaism: the election, the

covenant, the Law. They were inoperative, superseded, finished. A complex theological process can be summed up simply: Jesus invented Christianity, and Paul preached it.

Christ and the Christians thus took from Judaism its universalist pote...

Palestinian universalism, and transformed it into a general universalism, but denied the existence of the old categories. The ‘old man with his deeds’, the former election and the Law, were ‘put off’; the New Covenant, and its new elect, the ‘new man’, formed in God’s image and limited by that alone, were ‘put on’. Men were eligible for faith and grace solely by their human condition,

Here, then, in a sense was the universalistic reform programme of the Hellenistic reformers

Jesus was a learned Jew who said that learning was not necessary, who took the spirit and not the letter as the essence of the Law and who thus embraced the unlearned, the ignorant, the despised, the am ha-arez, made them indeed his special constituency. Paul carried the message to those who were outside the law altogether.

the idea that God would overthrow the established order of the world,

So the religion he preached was not only universalistic but revolutionary–a revolution, however, which was spiritualized and non-violent.

Ethical monotheism was an idea whose time had come. It was a Jewish idea. But the Christians took it with them to the wider world, and so robbed the Jews of their birthright.

Both the great Jewish revolts against Roman rule should be seen not just as risings by a colonized people, inspired by religious nationalism, but as a racial and cultural conflict between Jews and Greeks. The xenophobia and anti-Hellenism which was such a characteristic of Jewish literature from the second century BC onwards was fully reciprocated.

the specific hostility towards the Jews, which began to emerge in the second half of the first millennium BC, was a function of Jewish monotheism and its social consequences. The Jews could not, and did not, recognize the existence of other deities, or show respect for them.

increasingly rigorous leadership, observed faithfully. Circumcision set them apart and was regarded by the Graeco-Roman world as barbarous and distasteful. But at least circumcision did not prevent social intercourse. The ancient Jewish laws of diet and cleanliness did.

As Greek ideas about the one-ness of humanity spread, the Jewish tendency to treat non-Jews as ritually unclean, and to forbid marriage to them, was resented as being anti-humanitarian;

The Greeks saw their œcumene, that is the civilized universe (as opposed to the chaos beyond it) where their ideas prevailed, as a multi-racial, multi-national society, and those who refused to accept it were enemies of man.

it is evident that Egyptian anti-Semitism antedated the Greek conquest of Egypt.

The statement that the Jews worshipped asses, and had an ass’s head in their Temple,

Another fable was that the Jews conducted secret human sacrifices in their Temple:

They avoided pork because they were more liable to contract leprosy–

The Jewish refusal to practise the formalities of state worship was seen not merely as characteristic of Jewish exclusiveness and incivility–the charges always brought against them by the Greeks–but as actively disloyal.

Indeed, the revolt itself began in 66 AD not in Jerusalem but in Caesarea, following a Graeco-Jewish lawsuit, which the Greeks won. They celebrated with a pogrom in the Jewish quarter, while the Greek-speaking Roman garrison did nothing.

Jerusalem was filling up with angry and vengeful Jewish refugees from other cities where the Greek majority had invaded the Jewish quarters and

burnt their homes. This element turned the tide in favour of the extremists, and the Roman garrison was attacked and massacred.

These two catastrophes, of 70 and 135 AD, effectively ended Jewish state history in antiquity. There were two immediate consequences of great historical significance. The first was the final separation of Judaism

and Christianity.

The notion that gentiles and Jews could both subscribe to Christianity as a sort of super-religion could not survive the events of 66-70, which effectively destroyed the old Christian-Jewish church of Jerusalem.129 Most of its members must have perished. The survivors scattered. Their tradition ceased in any way to be mainstream Christianity and survived merely as a lowly sect, the Ebionites, eventually declared heretical. In the vacuum thus created, Hellenistic Christianity flourished and became the whole. The effect was to concentrate Christian belief still more fiercely on Paul’s presentation of Christ’s death and resurrection as the mechanism of salvation–itself clearly foreshadowed in Jesus’ teaching–and on the nature of this anointed saviour.

To the question Was Jesus God or man?, the Christians therefore answered: both. After 70 AD, their answer was unanimous and increasingly emphatic. This made a complete breach with Judaism inevitable. The Jews could accept the decentralization of the Temple:

many had long done so, and soon all had to do so. They could accept a different view of the Law. What they could not accept was the removal of the absolute distinction they had always drawn between God and man, because that was the essence of Jewish theology, the belief that above all others separated them from the pagans. By removing that distinction, the Christians took themselves irrecoverably out of the Judaic faith.

Moreover, they did so in a way which made antagonism between the two forms of monotheism inevitable, irreconcilable and bitter. The Jews could not concede the divinity of Jesus as God-made-man without repudiating the central tenet of their belief. The Christians could not concede that Jesus was anything less than God without repudiating the essence and purpose of their movement. If Christ was not God, Christianity was nothing. If Christ was God, the...

The quarrel was all the more bitter because, while differing on the essential, the two faiths agreed ...

There is nothing in the early church, other than its Christology, which was not adumbrated in Judaism.

The collective guilt charge in Matthew, and the ‘sons of the devil’ charge in John, were linked together to form the core of a specifically Christian branch of anti-Semitism which was superimposed on and blended with the ancient and ramifying pagan anti-Semitic tradition to form in time a mighty engine of hatred.

The collapse of the Jewish-Christian church after 70 AD and the triumph of Hellenistic Christianity led the Jews, in turn, to castigate the Christians. Jewish daily prayers against heretics and opponents date from the Hellenistic reform programme of the second century

The second consequence of the final failure of state Judaism was a profound change in the nature and scope of Jewish activities. From 70 AD, and still more so after 135 AD, Judaism ceased to be a national religion in any physical and visible sense, and the Jews were depatriated. Instead, both Jewry and Judaism became coextensive with the study and observance of the Torah.

Was this providential or not? In the short-term perspective of the second century AD, the Jews appeared to have been a powerful national and religious group which had courted ruin, and achieved it.

In the diaspora, the expanding Christian communities not only purloined the best Jewish theological and social ideas, and so the role of ‘light to the gentiles’, but made increasing inroads into the Jewish masses themselves, diaspora Jews forming one of the chief sources of Christian converts.

there was an equally dramatic narrowing of the Jewish horizon.

It was engaged, with passionate concentration and sincerity, on a solitary form of literary work: commentary on the religious law. And it continued this task, oblivious of its richer past, unaware of any intellectual ferment in the world outside, for hundreds of years.

Having lost the Kingdom of Israel, the Jews turned the Torah into a fortress of the mind and spirit, in which they could dwell in safety and even in content.

Henceforth the Jews formed

themselves into a cathedocracy: they were ruled from the teacher’s chair. This had always been inherent in Judaism–for were not prophets instruments through whom God taught his people? But now it became explicit. Tradition says that the Pharisaic rabbi, Johanan ben Zakkai, the deputy head of the Sanhedrin, was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin. He had opposed the revolt and spoke for the long-established element in Judaism who believed that God and the faith were better served without the burden and corruption of the state. He obtained permission from the Roman authorities to set up a centre for the regulation of the Jewish religion at Jabneh (Jamnia), near the coast west of Jerusalem.

The rabbi and the synagogue became the normative institutions of Judaism, which from now on was essentially a congregationalist faith.

The new spirit of Judaism was in marked reaction to the violent exaltation of the zealots and nationalists.

At Jabneh, the sword was forgotten, the pen ruled. The system was a self-perpetuating oligarchy, the academy selecting or ‘ordaining’ new rabbis on the basis of learning and merit.

Dynasties of scholars existed even in the period of the Second Commonwealth, when they are classified as zugot or ‘pairs’.

Their descendants and followers, and other scholars who joined the elite, are known as the tannaim. Hillel’s grandson, Gamaliel the Elder, was the first of six generations, Judah Ha-Nasi the last. The next generation, beginning with Rabbi Hiya Rabbah about 220 AD, inaugurated the age of the amoraim, which lasted five generations in Judaea, up to the end of the fourth century, and eight generations in Babylon, up to the end of the fifth.

Pharisee or rabbinical

Judaism came to Babylonia as a direct result of the Bar Kokhba revolt, when refugee scholars fleeing from Judaea established academies in what was then the territory of the Parthians. These schools were centralized at Sura, south of what is now Baghdad, and at Pumbedita to the west, where they flourished until the eleventh century.

Jewish sacred scholarship should be seen as a series of layers, each dependent on its predecessor. The first is