My sources for this part were N.T. Wright, Thomas Cahill and Richard Horsley. Wright has been the most enlightening for me when it comes to the historical Jesus. Horsley is big on viewing Jesus and Paul against the politics of Caesar and Rome rather than viewing them against Judaism. I find this stuff extremely interesting. My understanding of Christianity has been greatly changed by learning about the historical context of Rome, so I apologize if anyone reading this finds it boring.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Jewish people lived in the promise that their god, YHWH, had chosen them to be his instrument in saving the world. They were a nation that would bless the nations. Yet, the Jewish people spent an enormous amount of time as conquered people, under the oppressive thumbs of various empires. Most notably, they lived as slaves under the Egyptians, and after their stint oppressing their own people under Solomon and subsequent kings; they were captured by the Babylonians in 597 B.C (Wright 1999). After their exile in Babylon, they were freed by the Persian king Cyrus and allowed to return to their homeland, where they rebuilt their temple (Cahill 1999). Fast forward to Jesus’ day, and the Jewish people lived under the oppressive Roman Empire. Rome ruled over the Jews via a puppet government, the Herods, who were part of a Jewish line known as the Hasmoneans (Cahill 1999). In sum, this was the political and religious conundrum of Jesus’ day: The Jewish people, chosen by the one, true God over heaven and earth to be his means in saving the world, were living under the rule of pagans. While they were technically free, they might as well have been back in Egypt.
The ministry of Jesus was set against an explosive backdrop where the spheres of religion and politics completely overlapped. Unlike our day, there was no concept of separation of church and state. N.T. Wright (1999), a new testament scholar and bishop of Durham, puts it this way: “And the popular frustration with the overall rule of Rome and the local rule of the priests and Herod brought together what we must never separate if we are to be true to the biblical witness: religion and politics, questions of God and of the ordering of society. (p. 36)” Israel’s religious identity and Roman imperialist oppression were interconnected.
During this period, there were at least five different Jewish factions: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, the Zealots and the Essenes. And out of these sects there were at least three divergent views on how to deal with the Romans: complicity, violence and isolation (Wright 1999). The Herodians and the infamous tax collectors worked with the Romans, becoming wealthy and powerful on the backs of their fellow Jews. This enraged the Zealots and, mostly, Zealot-sympathizing Pharisees who took the view that Rome needed to be conquered (Wright 1999). The Zealots were freedom-fighters and continually turning out new messiahs and attacking the Romans. The third way came from the Essenes, who took to the desert, lived in caves, assiduously studied the law and waited on God’s judgment (Cahill 1999). It doesn’t take a stretch of one’s imagination to find similarities and parallels with these Jewish factions and the religious factions in our day. Westboro Baptist Church, headed by Fred Phelps of the infamous “God Hates America,” and “God Hates Fags” campaigns, share the extreme zeal and intense anger of the Zealots. The tendency of the some Christians to retreat into their own little communities and sub-cultures resembles the Essenes. And the Christian Right and Christian Left in their, at times, intense alignments with the Republican and Democratic parties can look like the Herodians. Jesus, however, sided with none of these views.
No comments:
Post a Comment