The first black Gospel group to make an impact in Britain were ‘The Singing Stewarts’. They were originally from Trinidad and Aruba, where the five brothers and three sisters of the Stewart family were born. They migrated to Handsworth in Birmingham in 1961, part of the second major wave of Windrush migrants who came to Britain just before the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 ended the ‘open door’ policy for British overseas nationals. This was the period when many families were settling in Britain, many rejoining ‘menfolk’ who had come on their own some years earlier (see picture below). Many people moved to Britain before the Act was passed because they thought it would be difficult to get in afterwards. Immigration doubled from fifty-eight thousand in 1960 to over 115,000 in 1961, and to nearly 120,000 in 1962. The Stewarts were all members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and under the training of their strict and devoted mother began to sing in an a cappella style songs that mixed traditional Southern gospel songs written by composers like Vep Ellis and Albert Brumley. To this material, they added a distinctly Trinidadian calypso flavour and by the mid-sixties were performing all around the Midlands. In later years they were joined by a double bass affectionately referred to as ‘Betty’. From childhood growing up in the church, they would refuse all offers to sing ‘secular’ music.

Above: Caribbean families arriving in Britain in the early 1960s

Settling in Handsworth, they quickly made a name for themselves in West Birmingham and what is known as Sandwell today (then as Smethwick and Warley), especially among the nonconformist churches where most of the Caribbean immigrant families were to be found. They also appeared at a variety of cross-cultural events and at institutions such as hospitals, schools and prisons. They performed on local radio and TV which brought them to the attention of a local radio producer and folk-music enthusiast Charles Parker, who heard in the group’s unlikely musical fusion of jubilee harmonies, Southern gospel songs and a Trinidadian flavour something unique. In 1964 they were the subject of a TV documentary produced by him which brought them to national attention. Parker helped them to cultivate their talent, and to become more ‘professional’, opening them up to wider audiences. They took his advice and guidance on board and reaped dividends on the back of their TV appearances and national and European tours that increased their exposure and widened their fan base. The most significant TV project was a documentary entitled ‘The Colony’, broadcast in June 1964. It was the first British television programme to give a voice to the new working-class Caribbean settlers.

For a while, in the early sixties, they were the only black Gospel group in the UK media spotlight. It was difficult to place them in a single category at the time, as they sang both ‘negro spirituals’ and traditional Gospel songs, which made them a novelty to British and European audiences. The Singing Stewarts were able to undertake a European tour where they played to crowds of white non-churchgoers. Thousands warmed to them, captivated by their natural and effortless harmonies. They possessed a remarkable ability to permeate cultural barriers that was unprecedented at the time, due to the racial tensions which existed in West Birmingham, Warley and Smethwick in the late sixties and seventies, stirred up by the Wolverhampton MP and Government Minister, Enoch Powell, who made his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham in 1968, and in local election campaigns in Smethwick run by the National Front. Meanwhile, in the US in 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, a Berkeley-based ensemble called the Northern California State Youth Choir found that a track on their independent album – a soulful arrangement of a Victorian hymn penned by Philip Doddridge – started getting plays on a San Francisco pop station. The choir, renamed as the Edwin Hawkins Singers, were quickly signed to Buddah Records and “Oh Happy Day” went on to become a huge international pop hit.

In Britain the British record companies alerted to the commercial potential of US gospel music, looked around for a British-based version of that music and in 1968 The Singing Stewarts were signed to PYE Records. The following year, they were the first British gospel group to be recorded by a major record company when PYE Records released their album Oh Happy Day. Cyril Stapleton, PYE Records’ leading A&R executive, and a legendary big band conductor had invited the family to his London studio, where he produced the new classic and extremely rare album.  Hardly surprisingly, The Singing Stewarts’ single of “Oh Happy Day” didn’t sell, since pop fans were already familiar with the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Nor did the album sell well, partly because it was given the clumsy, long-winded title of Oh Happy Day And Other West Indian Spirituals Sung By The Singing Stewarts. It was released on the budget line Marble Arch Records. Also in 1969, they appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, where they were exposed to a wider and more musically diverse public. Their folksy Trinidadian flavour delighted the arts festivalgoers. The family went on to make more albums which sold better, but they never wavered from their original Christian message and mission. They continued to sing at a variety of venues, including many churches, performing well into retirement age. Neither did they compromise their style of music, helping to raise awareness of spirituals and gospel songs. They were pioneers of the British Black Gospel Scene and toured all over the world helping to put UK-based black gospel music on the map.

My own experience of  ‘The Singing Stewarts’ came as a fourteen-year-old at the Baptist Church in Bearwood, Warley, where my father, Rev. Arthur J. Chandler, was the first minister of the newly-built church. We had moved to Birmingham in 1965, and by that time West Birmingham and Sandwell were becoming multi-cultural areas with large numbers of Irish, Welsh, Polish, Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean communities.

My grammar school on City Road in Edgbaston was like a microcosm of the United Nations. In the early seventies, it appointed one of the first black head boys in Birmingham, and was also a community of many faiths, including Anglicans, Nonconformists, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and followers of ‘Mammon’! Our neighbourhood, which ran along the city boundary between Birmingham and the Black Country in Edgbaston (the ‘border’ was literally at the end of the Manse garden), was similarly mixed, though still mostly white. Birmingham possessed a relatively wealthy working class, due to the car industry, so the distinctions between the working class and middle-class members of our church were already blurred. There were no more than a handful of ‘West Indian’ members of the congregation at that time, from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, though after my father retired in 1979, it shared its premises with one of the new black-led congregations. During the sixties and seventies, there were also more black children in the Sunday School, Boys’ and Girls’ Brigades and Youth Club, who attended these local facilities independently of their parents. These children and youths were especially popular when we played sports against other Baptist congregation in the West Birmingham area, except perhaps when it came to the annual Swimming gala!

The Stewart Family came to our church, at my father’s invitation, in 1970. Previously, my experience of Gospel music had been limited to singing a small number of well-known spirituals, calypso and gospel songs in the school choir or accompanying my sister on the guitar in a performance of ‘This Little Light of Mine’ and other songs which had not yet made it into an alternative to ‘the Baptist Hymn Book’.  I guess I must also have heard some of the renditions by Pete Seeger and the popular English folk group ‘the Spinners’, on the radio and TV. Then there were the Christmas songs like the ‘Calypso Carol’ and Harry Belafonte’s version of ‘Mary’s Boy Child’. Most of the ‘pop’ songs performed by ‘northern soul’ singers were massively over-produced, and even the ‘folk songs’ sung by white folk seemed to lack authenticity. I don’t think I’d heard a group sing a capella before, either, and it wasn’t until some years later, in Wales, that I heard such beautiful, natural, improvised harmonies again. I was inspired and moved by the whole experience, transformed by the deep ‘well-spring’ of joy that the Welsh call ‘hwyl’. There isn’t a single English word that does this emotion justice. At the end of the ‘service’, a ‘call’ to commitment was made, and I found myself, together with several others, standing and moving forward to receive God’s grace.

This was unlike any other experience in my Christian upbringing to that date. The following Whitsun, in 1971, I was baptised and received into church membership. In 1974, a group of us from Bearwood and south Birmingham, who had formed our own Christian folk-rock group,  attended the first Greenbelt Christian Music Festival, where Andrae Crouch and the Disciples were among the ‘headline acts’. Thus began a love affair with Gospel music of various forms which has endured ever since. We were inspired by this event to write and perform our own musical based on the Gospel of James, which we toured around the Baptist churches in west and south Birmingham. In 2013, I attended the fortieth Greenbelt Festival with my ten-year-old son, at which the London Community Gospel Choir (formed by Rev Bazil Meade and others in 1982, pictured below) ‘headlined’, singing ‘O Happy Day!’ among other spirituals and hymns (like ‘The Old Rugged Cross’) …

The service led by the Stewart Singers in Bearwood also began, more importantly, my own ministry of reconciliation. I have heard and read many stories about the coldness displayed by many ‘white Anglo-Saxon’ churches towards the Windrush migrants, and they make me feel guilty that we did not do more to challenge prejudiced behaviour, at least in our own congregations, to challenge prejudiced behaviour among our fellow Christians. However, I also feel that it is all too easy for current generations to judge the previous ones. You only have to look at what was happening in the southern United States and in ‘Apartheid’ South Africa to see that this was a totally different time in the life of the Church in many parts of the world. It was not that many Christians were prejudiced against people of colour, though some were, or that they were ‘forgetful to entertain strangers’. Many sincerely, though wrongly (as we now know from Science) that God had created separate races to live separately. In its extreme forms, this led to the policies of ‘separate development’ of the South African state, underpinned by the theology of the Dutch Reformed Church, and the belief in, and practice of, ‘segregation’, supported by Southern Baptists and others in the United States.

I remember discussing these issues with my father, who was by no means a white supremacist, but who had fears about the ability of Birmingham and the Black Country, the area he had grown up in and where he had become a Jazz pianist and bandleader in the thirties before training for the Ministry, to integrate so many newcomers, even though they were fellow Christians. However, rather than closing down discussion on the issue, as so many did in the churches at that time, mainly to avoid embarrassment, he sought to open it up among the generations in the congregation, asking me to do a ‘Q&A’ session in the Sunday evening service in 1975. There were some very direct questions and comments fired at me, but found common ground in believing that whether or not God had intended the races to develop separately, first slavery and then famine and poverty, resulting from human sinfulness, had caused migration, and it was wrong to blame the migrants for the process they had undergone. Moreover, in the case of the Windrush migrants (we simply referred to them as ‘West Indians’ then), they had been invited to come and take jobs that were vital to the welfare and prosperity of our shared community. In the mid-seventies to eighties, I became involved in the Anti-Nazi League in Birmingham. At university in north Wales, I campaigned against discrimination experienced by Welsh-speaking students, despite experiencing anti-English prejudice from some of them. In the early eighties, I joined the Anti-Apartheid movement, welcoming Donald Woods to Swansea to talk about his book on Steve Biko, and leading the South Wales Campaign against Racism in Sport in opposition to the tour by the South African Barbarians at the invitation of the Welsh Rugby Union.

The singing Adventists continued to perform to black and white audiences and even performed on the same stage as Cliff Richard. In 1977 the group were signed to Christian label Word Records, then in the process of dropping their Sacred Records name. The Singing Stewarts’ Word album ‘Here Is A Song’ was produced by Alan Nin and was another mix of old spirituals (“Every time I Feel The Spirit”), country gospel favourites (Albert Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away”) and hymns (“Amazing Grace”). With accompaniment consisting of little more than a double bass and an acoustic guitar, it was, in truth, a long, long way from the funkier gospel sounds that acts like Andrae Crouch were beginning to pioneer. The Singing Stewarts soldiered on for a few more years but clearly their popularity, even with the middle of the road white audience, gradually receded. In his book British Black Gospel, author Steve Alexander Smith paid tribute to The Singing Stewarts as one of the first black gospel groups to make an impact in Britain and the first gospel group to be recorded by a major record company. They clearly played their part in UK gospel’s continuing development.

In the mid-1980s, while working for the Quakers in the West Midlands, I ‘facilitated’ a joint Christian Education Movement schools’ publication involving teachers from the West Midlands and Northern Ireland. Conflict and Reconciliation (1990) based on examples of community cohesion in Handsworth.  The ‘riots’ there in the early 1980s, partly stage-managed by the tabloid press, had threatened to unpick all the work done by the ‘Windrush generation’.  David Forbes, a black community worker living in Handsworth, visited ‘white flight’ schools in south Birmingham and Walsall to talk about his work and that of others in Handsworth, contrasted with the negative stereotyping which his neighbourhood had received. More recently and since moving to Hungary, I have supported international campaigns against anti-Semitism.

Frank Stewart (one of the brothers, pictured right) was also one of the first black people to play gospel music on a BBC radio station with The Frank Stewart Gospel Hour on BBC Radio WM. Sadly, his The death in Birmingham on 2nd April 2012 was the closing chapter in a key part of the development of British gospel music over half a century and more. For although in recent years it was Frank’s radio work where for more than a decade he presented The Frank Stewart Gospel Hour on BBC Radio WM, it was the many years he spent running The Singing Stewarts which was arguably his most significant contribution to UK Christian music history and black music history.

My experiences with the Windrush migrants shaped my interests and actions in opposing racism in a variety of forms over the subsequent decades, and they continue to do so today. In particular, I continue to research into migration and to argue the case for channelling and integrating migrants, rather than controlling and assimilating them. Like the Singing Stewarts, and the Welsh Male Voice choirs before them, working-class migrants are often able and willing to contribute much from their own cultures. Multi-cultural Britain has not been made in a ‘melting pot’ but through the interaction of cultures and identities in mutual respect. That is the reconciliation through integration and integration through reconciliation which I believe that Christians must work towards.

The Singing Stewarts:

Gospel & Negro Spirituals

Label: Impacto ‎– EL-205

Format: Vinyl, LP

Country: Spain

Released: 1976

Genre: Religious (Soul)

Style: Gospel, Spiritual, Calypso

Tracklist

A1	Oh Happy Day
A2	Ezekiel Saw The Wheel
A3	I Know The Lord Laid His Hands On Me
A4	Every Time I Feel The Spirit
A5	There Is Joy Down In My Heart
A6	Noah Found Grace In The Eyes Of The Lord
A7	On The Wings Of A Snow White Dove
B1	I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray
B2	Swing Them Chariots Round And Let Ride
B3	We’re Climbing
B4	Where Could I Go
B5	No Grave’s Going To Hold My Body Down
B6	Go Down Moses – Let My People Go

Unfortunately, there are no CDs or online recordings of this LP, or these songs. However, there is a youtube recording of the group in concert, the link for which is given below.

Sources:

crossrhythms.co.uk/artists/16786

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Stewarts

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAqHSHOUC6bXWedFymWiMsA

British Black Gospel: The Foundations of this Vibrant UK Sound

https://books.google.hu/books?isbn=1854248960

Jewish-Christian relations in the time of the first churches:

The penultimate chapter in the ancient history of Jerusalem has to do with the relations between Jews and Christians in the mid-first century. Despite the fact that many, if not most, of the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth, were, like him, Jews, and although the early church borrowed much from Judaism, Christians were also reacting against it. This resulted in a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, Christians claimed to be the true Israel; on the other, they made light of many of the distinctive features of the ‘chosen people’ – the law, circumcision, the temple and the Sabbath. Moreover, they took to meeting together in their own houses and adopting other attitudes which were considered anti-social by their Jewish neighbours throughout the Roman Empire. Since Jesus had been executed by a Roman governor under Roman law, local governors had little alternative but to take action when they received complaints. As the century progressed, relations seem to have got worse. One reason was undoubtedly the great pressure under which Judaism suffered as a result of the Jewish war, the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Christians were looked on as hybrid Jews and were therefore unpopular. Before AD 70, as far as we can tell from ‘listening to the silences’, the Jews showed remarkable restraint. Paul, as an active missionary, found many of them stirring up trouble for him wherever he went, but they were not alone in this, and we need to be wary of Luke’s stereotypes of them, which were written in Acts from an obvious Greek Gentile bias. Paul escaped with his life, and only three martyrdoms were recorded for this period; those of Stephen, James, son of Zebedee, and James, the brother of Jesus.

The first Christian communities which grew up between AD 29 and 65, were in Jerusalem, Samaria, Caesarea and other Palestinian cities and also, largely as a result of Paul’s missionary activities, in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome. At this time the leaders of these communities were mainly Jews and their understanding of the teachings of Jesus was partly coloured by their Jewish inheritance. These communities possessed no Gospels so that their knowledge came from oral traditions; from memories of what Jesus had said and done, passed on by word of mouth in public addresses, instruction classes for new converts and in private discourses and conversations. Some of the deeds and words of Jesus were probably written down quite early, including the parables, the aphorisms and the proclamations of the kingdom of God, almost as they were spoken for the first time. However, for the most part, Christians at this time relied for their knowledge upon the shared memories of those who had known Jesus at first hand.

The message of Jesus as it is presented in the four gospels was written for the newly established churches of the Roman empire, churches stretching from Antioch in Syria to Rome. This was the world of the Gospels as written in the form in which we possess them. They are church books, written in the second half of the first century AD to meet the needs of the early followers of Jesus gathered together out of a pagan environment in their Christian communities. These early churches were not, for the most part, Palestinian, and after AD 70 when the country had been laid waste and Jerusalem destroyed, Christians in Galilee and Judaea must have been few and disorganised. The growing churches were in the great cities of the Graeco-Roman world, Antioch in Syria, Ephesus in Asia Minor (now in south-west Turkey), Corinth, Philippi and Thessalonica in Greece and in Rome itself. The members of these churches were Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Egyptians and Asiatics, though a significant number of Jews also converted to the new religion. These centres of Christianity and these church members were far away in distance from the world Jesus knew and very different from him in culture and upbringing.

Above: The Western or Wailing Wall, the only remnant of the Second Temple rebuilt by King Herod. It once stood on the adjacent Temple Mount and remains the most significant devotional site for Jews, who believe that they are in physical connection with the divine when they pray at it and kiss it.

Nazarene heretics:

By the end of the first century, however, there were growing signs of a clear break between church and synagogue. It may well have been the case that many Jews blamed the Christians for the destruction of Jerusalem, since Vespasian’s reconquest of first Galilee and then Judaea could have been seen as acts of vengeance for the burning of Rome, which Nero had alleged was the work of the Christians. Before AD 70, the Romans drew little distinction between the two alien, Judaistic faiths. To them, they were all the same, troublesome provincial people. It was after this period that the Birkat ham-minim, the ‘Heretic Benediction’ was added to the Eighteen Benedictions: 

May the Nazarenes (Christians) and the minim (heretics) perish as in a moment and be blotted out from the book of life. 

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the gospels, especially that according to Matthew, contain many biased statements against the Jews in general, and that these statements were used to justify anti-Semitism among Christians in the Middle Ages and Early Modern times. All three Synoptic Gospels appear to have been written after Nero’s persecution (AD 64), and all three emphasise the message of a powerful Christ, breaking with Judaism. They were also clearly written after the fall of Jerusalem, to which they all refer (Mark 13. 1-2; Matthew 22. 7; Luke 21. 20). It is necessary, therefore, to disentangle the original message spoken by Jesus in Palestine from the meaning drawn out of it by Christian teachers and the four evangelists. The Christian communities in AD 29-65 had a real zeal for evangelism. They looked outward to a world which desperately needed the message of Jesus, so they were missionary churches. In these years, there was a particular reason why evangelism could not wait. The great decisive moment – the return of Jesus to earth in great power and glory – was, so they believed, imminent. While they waited for the Day of Judgement and Reward the Christians evangelised fervently among mostly pagan peoples. An evangelist needs a message, and therefore the task of separating the original message of Jesus from the later additions and interpretations is difficult and often uncertain.

Above: Portraits of Jesus from Roman-era frescoes to modern forensic reconstruction.

Source: National Geographic, December 2017.

Apocalyptic Poetry:

Remembering that Jesus was a poet with an inward vision and a gift for handling words, using vivid images from everyday life, not abstract arguments helps us to get to the heart of his teaching. It is often a clue to those passages of the Gospels where someone has added an explanation of his words. Poets do not explain their poems. They offer us their vision and leave us to discover the meaning. Jesus is a visionary whose eyes are fixed upon a dramatic future in which the old order of the world will disappear and a new order will take its place:

And then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. (Mark 13. 26f.)

Poets are not usually interested in creating logical systems of thought in which every single part fits the whole. They speak or write about that which at a particular moment captures their imagination and stirs their soul. If we think, for example, of the poet and illustrator William Blake, writing about John Milton, the author of the great epic poems, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, we do not need to demythologise and strip away his powerful, apocalyptic imagery in order to understand his fundamental message in his Jerusalem:

And did the countenance divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among those dark satanic mills?

 

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

 

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green a pleasant land.

The four verses which make up the now well-known hymn, set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1917, first appeared in the preface to one of Blake’s last poem’s, ‘Milton’, which was written in 1804. Underneath them he wrote, would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, quoting Numbers 11.29. In the rest of the poem, the seventeenth-century poet is depicted as returning from eternity and entering into Blake to preach the message of Christ crucified and the doctrines of self-sacrifice and forgiveness. Some of the complex imagery in the poem is borrowed from the Bible, such as the ‘chariots of fire’ which are taken from 2 Kings 2. 11, but much is of Blake’s own invention. In suggesting, in the first verse, that Jesus may have set foot in England, Blake is resurrecting the old legend, and myth, which tells of Jesus’ wanderings as a young man with Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant and member of the Sanhedrin whom Jesus accompanied on a visit to Cornwall. The tale was, at one time, popular with the British Israel movement, which claimed that the British were one of the lost tribes of Israel.

There are two very different interpretations of the main message in ‘And did those feet’. One school of thought regards it as a plea for intuition and imagination in the face of scientific rationalism. From this interpretation, we get the idea that the ‘dark, satanic mills’ represent the cold logical approach of philosophers such as Locke and Bacon that Blake deplored, while Jerusalem represents the ideal life of freedom. The other, more common way of interpreting the poem is as a call for the rule of those social values of social justice and freedom which will build a new Jerusalem in Britain. This message, like that of Jesus himself, has no tidy outward shape but has an inner unity centred upon the proclamation of the kingdom of God. We recognise that inner unity, or message, through the allusions and imagery, without interpreting them as literal events either in the past or the future.

 

 

Much of Jesus’ teaching was directed to the immediate needs and problems of the men and women to whom he talked in small groups in the marketplace, or in large crowds gathered to listen to him. Yet, in all the Gospels there is teaching which seems, on the face of it, to refer to dramatic and even cataclysmic events in the future. Some of these are predictions; forecasts about the future. We have already noted some of these, in particular, his well-known lament over Jerusalem, the Holy City.  (Luke 19. 41-44). This is a terse and vivid prediction of the siege and destruction of the city which began in September AD 70. Since this event took place some forty years after the time of Jesus, it is often argued that such a description of the great catastrophe must have arisen within the early church. However, the prediction does not describe in detail the actual siege of Jerusalem as the Jewish historian Josephus recorded it after the event. The words of Jesus describe a typical siege; a city encircled, siege engines battering at the wall, and so on. Indeed, it took no special insight or vision to predict that if the revolutionary elements continued to resist the government of Judea by violent acts, the Romans would reinforce their troops around Jerusalem.

Did Jesus predict the rejection of Israel as the chosen instrument of God’s purpose? It is clear that this view was held in at least some quarters of the early church. The part played by the Jewish authorities in his arrest, trial and execution; the hostility displayed by some Jews towards the new Christian communities, both played their part in shaping the belief that the ‘Old Israel’ had been rejected and the ‘New Israel’ – the Christian church – had taken its place.This belief has certainly left its mark upon the form in which some of the sayings and parables of Jesus have come down to us. In Matthew 23 there is a sustained and bitter condemnation of the Pharisees and scribes. This was certainly put together in its present form by an editor, prefacing the parable of the vineyard as told by Mark (12. 1. 1-11.), and copied by Matthew and Luke. Matthew’s ‘preface’ contains seven accusations against the lawyers and Pharisees, each beginning, ‘Woe to you’ in a recognisable literary form. This is followed by the lament over Jerusalem, the centre of unfaithfulness, killing the prophets and stoning the those who are sent to you (Matthew 23. 13-37.). The evidence of the Gospels as a whole makes clear that Jesus did attack the religious authorities, declaring that they embodied the kind of religion which would soon be rejected.  Whether he predicted the rejection of Israel and Judah as God’s chosen people depends largely on the interpretation of two parables, that of the Vineyard, which I have already referred to, and that of the Marriage Feast, which tells a similar story (Matt. 22. 1-14.). The invited guests make various trivial excuses and refuse to attend the banquet, and their places are taken by people, both bad and good, collected at random by the king’s servants; the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you (Matt.  21. 31). It seems clear that it is not the nation as a whole which is rejected but the religious leaders, the scribes and the Pharisees.

Another controversial question is whether Jesus predicted that he would come again in glory; that there would be a final Day of Judgement and an end of the world. This was a belief strongly held by Christians during the early years of the first century (1 Thess. 5. 1-11; II Thess. 1. 5-12). The belief waned as the years went by, but in medieval times it gained great popularity. The belief finds expression in Mark 13 and is expanded in Matt. 24-25 and in Luke 21. 5-36. Here the predicted events are dramatic and terrifying  – wars, earthquakes, famine and persecution, the rise of bogus messiahs and false prophets precede the appearance of Christ as judge of the world. There is a different picture in Luke, who uses a third source. Men and women are going about their daily routine when, suddenly, like a flash of lightning, the Day of the Son of Man is upon them. This teaching from the Gospels and Epistles is known as eschatology and uses language which is largely alien to our ‘western’, scientific way of thinking. Many Christians ignore this element in the New Testament, and some biblical scholars deny that Jesus ever thought in these terms, or that he expected his own second coming. Eschatological thinking arises when there is a contradiction between the harsh realities of life and man’s faith in God’s power and justice. In this kind of situation, The words of Paul (depicted below) in Romans VIII were meant to comfort and console…

… the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us (Rom 8. 18).

Eschatological teaching therefore brings hope to men, and when present sufferings are severe then the hope of a glorious future is often expressed in imaginative pictures. Sometimes the language is both poetic and pastoral, as in Isaiah’s prophecies about the coming of the Messiah (11.7). Sometimes it is dramatic, ‘technicoloured’ language to match the drama of the moment, like in the Book of Daniel:

Behold, with the clouds of heaven,

there came one like a son of man,

and he came to the Ancient of Days

 and was presented before him.

And to him was given dominion 

and glory and kingdom

that all Peoples, nations and languages

should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,

which shall not pass away, 

and his kingdom one

that shall not be destroyed 

(Dan. 7. 13 f.)

It was natural that the first Christians, often isolated from the rest of their fellow citizens because of their faith, usually under suspicion, taunted for worshipping a crucified Saviour, and at times persecuted, should rest their hopes on Christ’s return to power and glory. They believed that this hope was founded upon the teaching of Jesus, and they made collections of sayings which supported their faith and included them in their church books – the Gospels.

In the final months and weeks of his life, Jesus knew that his enemies would turn the full force of their power against him, but he also he was alarmed and sorrowful at the political situation of his nation. He knew that armed rebellion could only end in national disaster. Yet his faith in the purposes of God and in the realities of God’s kingship did not waver. Whether or not he believed in his own ‘second coming’, he knew that he had been chosen by God to fulfil a particular role in history. The sayings and parables which he used when he thought about the future were his way of expressing his confident faith in God’s undefeated purpose. He expressed his hope for the future in vivid and dramatic language, that of a poet dreaming dreams and seeing visions.

 

The Book of Revelation, to many the most enigmatic in the New Testament, was written in a similarly poetic and visionary form by a certain ‘John the Divine’ (depicted above) in exile on Patmos, possibly during the Domitian persecution. It is full of a bitter hatred of Rome, but although the author was in exile, he had not suffered a particularly harsh penalty, and his banishment did not even include the loss of property or other rights, as one might expect had Patmos been a penal colony. His one reference to past martyrdom, the mention of Antipas, gives no details of how he met his end. Recent persecution seems to have been more limited and local: John’s fears are for the future. Domitian was despotic, like Caligula before him, but his main anti-Christian actions, against prominent citizens, were taken on the grounds that ‘they had slipped into Jewish customs’. The main threat to Christianity in the New Testament period came from the hostility or malice of the people among whom they lived, whether Greeks, Romans or Jews. Tertullian commented that…

… if the Tiber rises too high or the Nile too low, the cry is: “The Christians to the lion”. 

(to be continued…)

 

Jerusalem and its Temple in the time of Christ:

Until it was destroyed by Romans in AD 70, the temple at Jerusalem was the official centre of Jewish worship, a great place of pilgrimage and an immensely powerful symbol. Although Jewish theology had increasingly stressed the transcendence and otherness of God, the temple was still regarded as being in a special way a divine dwelling place: the scenes reported by Josephus immediately before its fall suggest a confidence, even then, that God would not allow it to be harmed. The temple in the first century was, in fact, the third to be built, following Solomon’s temple destroyed in 587 BC and the one that replaced it after the return from Babylon. Herod the Great began work in 20/19 BC on the same site but according to a different ground plan, in the prevailing Roman-Hellenistic style of architecture. Construction went on for a long time, certainly until AD 64, and it may have been the case that the temple was still unfinished at its destruction. Nothing remains of the temple proper today, apart from the great platform now surmounted by the Dome of the Rock and the substructure of the massive surrounding walls. However, it can be reconstructed in the mind’s eye through the contemporary descriptions of Josephus and others.

The site of the temple was on a hill in the south-eastern part of the present Old City. A great paved court was laid on the temple platform, surrounded by magnificent collonades against the outside walls. This court was accessible to people of any race or faith, Gentiles included and was by no means reserved for purely religious activities. In common with other ancient temples, the Jerusalem temple was used as a safe-deposit for valuables and other quasi-commercial transactions were carried on there. Within the court was an enclosure surrounded by an embankment, with steps going up to a wall with nine gates. Inscriptions, the Greek text of one of which has been found, warned Gentiles against going further:

No foreigner may enter inside the barrier and embankment. Whoever is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.

At the heart of the temple lay the Holy Place, elevated by twelve steps. Within was a vestibule which gave on to the main doorway of the sanctuary.  Here were the sacred objects in gold, the seven-branched lampstand, the menorah, the table for the shew-bread and the altar of incense.> a curtain screened the Holy of Holies, containing no furniture whatsoever, which only the high priest might enter, once a year, on the Day of Atonement. Thus the elevation of the temple and its holiness increased progressively towards the centre, as did the elaborateness of its ornamentation. Built of great blocks of gleaming white stone and decorated with all possible splendour, it must have been a breath-taking sight. Josephus’ praise is lavish; he remarks that the outside of the building was covered with so much gold that the onlooker could scarcely look directly at it in bright sunlight. He adds that after the sack of Jerusalem the market of gold for the whole province of Syria was completely flooded so that the standard of gold was depreciated to half its value.

The foundation of the worship offered at the temple was the daily sacrifice, offered morning and evening on behalf of the people. It was never interrupted once during the rebuilding of the temple. A positive understanding of the joy taken in the ritual sacrifice of animals and the significance attached to it is perhaps the hardest thing for modern western Christians to understand, but there is abundant evidence of that joy and of the belief that sacrifice could bring forgiveness. This system was at its height in the last days of the temple, when more care and money was lavished on it than at any other time. Public sacrifice was accompanied by lengthy ceremonial and was followed by private sacrifices, both sin-offerings and votive offerings. The whole of Palestine was divided into twenty-four divisions, each of which was ‘on duty’ in turn for one week (Luke 1. 8f.). Priests and Levites from the course on duty were responsible for offering the sacrifices, and lay representatives were deputised to be witnesses on behalf of the whole people. A yearling lamb was killed and then followed a service of prayer: incense was offered and the lamb solemnly burnt; the priests pronounced a benediction and the choir of Levites sang the appointed psalm, the ceremony being accompanied by the blowing of trumpets.

More numerous sacrifices were offered on the Sabbath and on major festivals. The more important of these were the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), the Feast of Tabernacles (Succoth) following the Day of Atonement, and the Feast Of Passover. The feasts were of great antiquity, having accumulated many overtones of meaning. The Feast of Weeks was a thanksgiving for the grain harvest, but also commemorated the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai; the Feast of Tabernacles, or ‘booths’, recalled the time when the Israelites were wandering in the desert and lived in tents, but also contained an ancient prayer-ceremony for rain: the Passover, Pesach, while commemorating the deliverance from Egypt, was also associated with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which originally also had an agricultural significance. Pilgrims came to all these festivals, often covering vast distances to be present. Passover was the annual peak; one estimate gives the total number of pilgrims likely at that time as about 125,000 compared with the approximately 55,000 permanent residents of Jerusalem. The Passover meal was eaten in domestic surroundings, in table-fellowships of between ten and twenty; pilgrims had by law to stay that night within the limits of Jerusalem itself, as they were ritually interpreted. Despite the flexibility of this interpretation, the crush must have been immense. The ritual was carried out by twenty-four courses of priests and the same number of Levites, who were not in permanent residence. It has been estimated that there were some 7,200 priests involved, and a rather larger number of Levites, who functioned as singers, musicians, servants and guards.

 

The temple and its priesthood may have been the most striking symbol of Jerusalem, but had they been its exclusive centre, Judaism would never have survived their fall. The way in which it adjusted to the situation after AD 70 shows that there were other strengths; these had as their common basis the Law, and to a considerable degree the history of the different parties within Judaism is the history of different interpretations of the Law. Even while the temple still stood, even within Judaea itself, there seems to have been an increasing preoccupation with the scriptures and their implications, and this focus will have been even more characteristic of the Jews of the Diaspora. A movement like that found at Qumran would have been unthinkable without the scribal tradition of ‘the book’ in Rabbinic Judaism. The beginnings of this trend are to be found in the Babylonian exile and the post-exilic period. During this period the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, took final form and was accorded its place of honour as the Torah, the Law; the Prophets had taken a place beside it by the beginning of the second century BC and the scriptures were recognised during the first century AD.

‘Law’ is an inadequate translation to give a clear idea of the written basis of Judaism; the Hebrew word Torah means rather ‘instruction’ or ‘doctrine’ rather than ‘law’, since the Pentateuch is far more than a ‘dry’ book of laws, of ‘do’s’ and ‘dont’s’. Nevertheless, that is what it became as it was subjected to more and more intensive study. It is essential to try to see the positive elements which such detailed methods of study were believed to bring out, despite Jesus’ criticisms of some of the more life-denying aspects of the process. The Sadducees’ interpretation of Scripture was literal in contrast to that of the Pharisees, whose oral tradition they rejected. From this basic position stemmed their well-known denials of resurrection, future rewards and punishments, angels and spirits, and Providence. The Sadducees were more interested in their control of land and material resources than in spirituality; they seem to have been more concerned with politics of the Sanhedrin than theology.

The supreme Jewish council was known as the Sanhedrin, a Graeco-Aramaic term for an assembly. It consisted of seventy-one members. The sources differ over its composition and nature: Josephus and the writers of the Gospels and Acts present it primarily as a political institution, whereas Rabbinic literature presents a more religious aspect. The latter sources were probably reading back into it features which it took on after the fall of the temple, but the very nature of Judaism meant that political and religious questions were inextricably intertwined. The Pharisees were a broader, lay movement, which set out to embrace the whole of the Jewish people and had developed out of the earlier movement of Hasidism. Many Pharisees were Scribes by occupation, but they were more preoccupied with ritual matters than with theological concerns. Being a ‘separated one’ meant striving to be separated from impurity of all kinds. At the same time, the Law and the understanding of it were the means of avoiding impurity, so that the basic work of the scribe was indispensable. The leaders among the Pharisees were, therefore ‘middle-class’ scribes, whereas the Sadducees, although having their own scribes, had a leadership which was dominated by noble families.  By 70 BC the Pharisees had gained access to the Sanhedrin and from then onwards they never altogether lost power, while the Sadducees declined in importance, especially following the fall of the temple.  It was the Pharisaic/ Rabbinic development which shaped the future of Judaism.; the heightened prominence of the Law after the fall of the temple was accompanied by an institution which had been increasing in importance for some time before AD 70, the synagogue and its worship.

The Jewish Dispersion of the First Century:

During the first century, as ever since has been the case, there were more Jews living outside Palestine than within it. Estimates vary, but a rough guess would be that there were rather more than two million Jews in Judaea and about four million elsewhere. The diaspora had taken place in different stages and for a number of reasons; there were, of course, the forced deportations to Babylon, where about a million Jews lived, but trade had also taken Jews all around the Mediterranean well before that time. There were particularly close connections with Egypt, where there was a large Jewish community, but there were also Jews in North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy. These Jews had to preserve their identity in a culture which was predominantly Greek. They therefore organised themselves into communities, living in distinct quarters in cities, with considerable autonomy. Both the Greek states and the Roman government allowed a great deal of freedom to religious minorities, but the privileges of the Jews went far beyond this. In return for the favours of the state, however, they had to suffer the constant antagonism of their neighbours, which on occasion damaged official relations. Although the language of the Dispersion was Greek, these Jews still looked to the temple while it stood, and paid a great deal of money to support it. The synagogue, however, had become a far more regular influence in their day-to-day life. While Pharisaic Judaism culminated in the Rabbinic tradition, Hellenistic Judaism gave way to Christianity. It had no future in the context of Judaism, just as Jewish Christianity had no future in the context of the church. A modern Jewish comment is apt:

Jewish Christianity withered since it lacked survival power; Hellenistic Judaism withered since it lacked survival value.

The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans:

When Emperor Tiberius died in AD 37, the new emperor, Caligula, made his friend Herod Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great, king of Philip’s former tetrarchy. He accused Herod Antipas of being in league with the Parthians. Antipas was duly banished, and his tetrarchy and revenues were given to Agrippa. Although Judaea had been a Roman province for thirty-three years, it was in a thoroughly unsettled condition. The Jews felt themselves to be a unique people, and though the basis of this claim was religious, under conditions of foreign occupation its manifestations were bound to be political. Each of the main religious sects thus had its own political ‘line’, most obviously expressed in the extreme nationalism of the Zealots. The disturbed situation of the province, with these insurgents active in the countryside and with continual sectarian conflict among the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, resulting in frequent changes in the high priests now appointed by the governor, needs to be remembered as the background to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Agrippa had used his friendship with Caligula to persuade the latter to abandon his orders for the erection of a large statue of himself in the temple in Jerusalem in AD 41. In the same year, Caligula was assassinated, and Agrippa was largely instrumental in securing the succession of Claudius. The new emperor rewarded him by abolishing the province of Judaea and adding it to his territories, thus reconstituting the kingdom of Herod the Great. Agrippa reigned for only three years, but during that time he demonstrated considerable ability. He made Jerusalem his official residence once more, signifying that Judaea was once more Jewish, and he became popular with his subjects. He had James, son of Zebedee, executed, and arrested Peter, two of the leaders of the growing and widely unpopular Christian community (Acts 12. 1-18). On his death, Claudius wished to appoint his son, Herod Agrippa II, to the throne of Judaea, but the boy was only seventeen, and Claudius was persuaded to make the area a province once more, though this time it included the whole of his father’s kingdom. The first two Roman governors, according to Josephus, left native customs alone and kept the nation at peace, but with the third, Cumanus, troubles began again, his government being marked by disturbances and further disasters to the Jews. These continued under the fourth and fifth governors, and on the death of the fifth, the Sanhedrin again took the law into its own hands, executing James, the brother of Jesus, who was the leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem.

According to Tacitus, the endurance of the Jews lasted until Gessius Florus was governor, of whom Josephus claimed that it was he who compelled us to take up arms against the Romans, thinking that it was better to be destroyed at once than by degrees. Florus became governor in AD 64, and the Jewish War began in AD 66. Its short-term causes were a clash in Caesaria between Jews and Greeks, in which Florus supported the latter. Shortly afterwards, he provoked further antagonism in Jerusalem by demanding a large sum of money from the temple treasury on the grounds that it was required by the emperor. In the demonstrations which followed, Florus allowed his troops to loot, and many innocents were killed, including Jews with Roman citizenship. At this stage, Agrippa II sought to intervene, but his attempt to calm his citizens ended with them stoning him, forcing him to leave Jerusalem. Within a month the rebels had taken control of Jerusalem and the greater part of Judaea and had captured the fortress of Masada with its huge arsenal. The disturbances then spread to the predominantly Greek cities of the Decapolis and the coast, and even to Alexandria. In all of them, there were violent clashes between Greeks and Jews, until the governor of Syria, was compelled to intervene and marched south with an army of thirty thousand. Despite early successes, he failed to control the uprising.

Emperor Nero appointed Vespasian, an experienced general, to the command of Judaea. In AD 67 he reconquered Galilee, where the young Josephus was in command, and the next year pressed on into Samaria and Transjordan. Meanwhile, factional struggles in Jerusalem, amounting to a civil war, seriously weakened the ability of the inhabitants to resist the Roman advance. In AD 70, Titus, Vespasian’s son, who had been left in command of the army when his father returned to Rome to become emperor, laid siege to the city. The story is graphically told by Josephus. An attack was only possible from the north or north-west, where the assailants would have to breach three walls in turn. ; even then, there remained the temple itself and the upper city, both of which could serve as well-defended inner citadels. The siege began in May, with the Romans deploying all their resources in siege warfare, building huge ramps and towers, attempting to mine the walls or battering them with huge boulders thrown by their artillery. They eventually constructed a wall of five miles in length running right around the city.  Nevertheless, it was not until the end of September that the whole city was in Roman hands. City and temple were razed to the ground.

Mopping-up operations continued for a further three years, culminating in the long siege and heroic defence of Masada, the great fortress which towers over the western shore of the Dead Sea. When further resistance proved impossible, the surviving defenders of nearly a thousand set fire to the fortress and killed themselves, with only two women who hid in underground water cisterns living to tell the tale to Josephus. The result of the war brought to an end the Jewish state. The Sanhedrin and the high priesthood were abolished, and worship in the temple was forbidden. There were further Jewish rebellions and revolts in AD 115 and 132, but the final guerrilla war, led, with some initial success, by Simon bar Kochba, was finally defeated in AD 135, following which Emperor Hadrian built a new city for Gentiles, from which the Jews were excluded, and a pagan temple was built on the site of Herod’s temple. Zion was no more.

According to Josephus, it was chiefly the belief in the imminent advent of a Messianic king that launched the Jews upon their suicidal war in 66 AD. Even after the destruction of the temple, Simon bar-Kochba was still greeted as Messiah. But the bloody suppression of that rising and the annihilation of political nationality put an end both to the apocalyptic faith and to the militancy of the Jews.  Although in later centuries a number of self-styled messiahs arose among the dispersed communities, what they offered was merely a reconstitution of the national home, not an eschatological world-empire. Moreover, they very rarely inspired armed risings, and never amongst European Jews. It was no longer Jews but Christians who cherished and elaborated prophecies in the tradition of Daniel’s dream and who continued to be inspired by them.

The Samaritans:

Had it been prophesied around AD 30 that the only movements to survive the next two thousand years would be the successors of the Pharisees, the followers of Jesus and the Samaritans, such a forecast would have been worthy of ridicule by contemporaries. Yet this was precisely what happened.

A group of the despised Samaritans still lives and worships near Mount Gerizim, despite the long-troubled history of Palestine. Their survival represents a thorn in the side for those Christians and Jews who view Jerusalem as the sole, exclusive and undivided capital of the Jewish people as represented by the modern state of Israel. The Samaritans were the inhabitants of what was once the northern kingdom of Israel. In New Testament times it is clear from both Jewish and Christian sources that there was hatred and hostility between them and the Jews in Judaea and Galilee, so much so that Galileans on pilgrimage to Jerusalem avoided Samaria by crossing the Jordan rather than using the Jericho Road which Jesus described in his parable of ‘the Good Samaritan’.

The Samaritans regard themselves as the true Israel, separated from the rest of the people when the latter were tainted by the sin of Eli, a priest at Shiloh in the time of Samuel. Though they were deported at the fall of the northern kingdom in 722 BC, they returned fifty-five years later. The Judaeans and Galileans, on the other hand, regard the Samaritans as descendants of gentile colonists who repopulated the northern kingdom after the Assyrian conquest. They therefore regarded Samaritan religious observances as totally tainted. The Samaritan view may not be historically accurate, but the ‘Jewish’ view is also exaggerated in the opposite direction. It is not possible, at the present time, to establish the truth of exactly what happened, but it seems that it was post-exilic concerns which led to the constant rivalry between the ethnic groups. It probably began with the extent of inter-marriage between Samaritan ‘Jews’ and gentiles during the period of the two exiles, accentuated by the different experience of exile encountered by the Judaeans in Babylonia. The conflict reached its climax when the Samaritans built their own temple to replace the earlier one at Bethel. This new temple was erected on Mount Gerizim. The exact date of its construction is unknown, but it was certainly there by the early second century and does not appear to have been totally new then.

In 129 BC, John Hyrcanus destroyed the temple on Gerizim, adding to Samaritan hatred. Herod married a Samaritan woman, suggesting that relations might have been slightly easier during his reign, and it is even possible that the Samaritans had access to the Temple in Jerusalem. However, Josephus reports that a new act of defilement, the scattering by Samaritans of human bones in the temple grounds, once more stirred up tensions. The first century was a bad period for Galileans on pilgrimage when they were set upon and attacked. In the end, Galileans and Judaeans alike regarded the Samaritans as Gentiles. This may be one reason why Mark describes Jesus and his disciples as crossing into Transjordan to teach before his final week in Jerusalem. Earlier references to the Samaritans contain a number of vivid sayings about their impurity; John 4. 9. has an old comment about the practice of Jews and Samaritans not using the same water vessels for this reason. Yet the Samaritans shared the same Torah with the Judaeans, though not the same prophetic and other literature. These were the people whom Jesus chose to illustrate gratitude and love, deliberately choosing to identify the hero of his story by his ethnic origin and ‘label’.  They provide yet another example of how ancient and first century Palestine was a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic region comprising a patchwork of territories under Roman rule, far different in nature from a twenty-first-century nation-state.

(to be continued…) 

Roman Occupation, the Pharisees and Zealot Resistance:

 

In relation to Rome, the Pharisees were advocates of ‘passive resistance’. By contrast, the chief characteristic of the Zealots, who otherwise had much in common with the Pharisees as fervent nationalists, was their advocacy and use of violence in defence of their faith. There are also probable connections between the Zealot movement and the Maccabees, but its beginning is usually taken to be a revolt against Quirinus’ census in AD 6. Judas, the leader of the revolt, was a Galilean, the son of Eleazar who was executed by Herod; his son led the last stand of the Zealots at Masada. The Zealots take their name from their zeal for the temple and the Law, as illustrated in the writings of Josephus, who writes very disapprovingly, labelling them Sicarii (‘assassins’). He could hardly do otherwise in his position, as they also refused to pay Roman taxes. Luke’s list of Jesus’ apostles includes Simon, called ‘the Zealot’ (Luke 6.15; Acts 1. 13); the parallel passages in Mark (3.18) and Matthew (10. 4) refer to him as ‘the Canaanaean’, an Aramaic form of the same word.

Simon had been a member of the Zealot resistance movement, and Jesus must have known others. The very name by which He became known, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean’, meant, to the people of Judaea, something like ‘rebel’ or ‘anarchist’ from the home of the Zealots, or freedom fighters, and Galileans were renowned as ‘born fighters’. The presence of a Zealot among Jesus’ followers, coupled with recorded actions of Jesus like the cleansing of the temple and the fact that he was crucified by the Romans on a quasi-political charge has prompted elaborate theories about the connection between Jesus and the Zealots. There is not enough evidence to make out a case, one way or the other, but what evidence there is, is intriguing. The gospels record him meeting, early in his ministry, with several thousand of them hiding in the hills above the fishing port of Capernaum, on Lake Galilee. The ‘crowd’ of hill villagers and fishermen from the lakeside towns were also men of the Resistance Movement, ‘freedom fighters’ whenever the chance came. Jesus felt they were like sheep without a shepherd, a leaderless mob, an army without a general. Though some of them wanted to become that ‘shepherd’ or ‘general’, he refused the offer to join them. Instead, he got them to sit down, under command, in companies of fifty to a hundred, rank by rank and shared a common meal with them. Jesus had come to believe that violence was not God’s way, and he became their critic. Many of his stories were aimed at them as well as at the Pharisees. Many of them abandoned him, and whenever he returned to Galilee from Judaea, he travelled ‘incognito’.  He continued to be appalled by the suffering that even a just cause brought, and referred to the poems of the prophets which were ignored by the Zealots, poems which spoke of an alternative form of resistance:

If only today you knew how to live for peace instead of war!

You cannot see what you are doing.

The time will come when

your enemies will throw up a palisade round you,

besiege and attack you on all sides,

dash down your buildings and your people,

leave not a wall upstanding;

all because you did not see that God has already come to you

in love, not war.

Luke 19, 42-44.

For the Zealots, as well as for the Pharisees in Jerusalem and his own people in the synagogues, Jesus of Nazareth was no-one special. But neither public debate in the hills, or on street corners, nor sermons in the meeting houses, were how he got his message across. Years later, his friends reflected on the man they knew and remembered Isaiah’s poem (42. 3-4) about God’s ‘servant king’ which seemed to describe him precisely:

His is no trumpet call,

no demagogue he, 

holding forth at street corners!

He is too gentle to break a bruised stalk,

to snuff a flickering wick!

 

But his no flickering wick,

his no timid heart;

honest and plain-spoken

he makes the heart of religion clear. 

Yet, even at the time of his last visit to Jerusalem, Jesus’ friends still had great difficulty in getting out of their heads the widespread Jewish conviction that God’s chosen leader, when he came, would establish some kind of national kingdom, with its king and government. They had grown up with this idea and took it for granted. The Zealots thought of this leader as a military ruler, establishing his power by military conquest, as David and the Maccabees had done. Many others who were not zealots thought in much the same way, though some believed that God alone would defeat the Romans. Jesus would have nothing to do with such ideas. He had not come to be that kind of king or to establish that kind of kingdom. After his death, his followers, calling themselves Christians, came to accept this and abandoned the path of violent resistance. The Jews in general, and the Zealots, in particular, did not.

The Synagogues of First-century Palestine and the Middle East:

According to the Gospels, the synagogues of Galilee were important focal locations for Jesus’ ministry in the north, though some scholars have questioned whether they even existed at this time. The Greek word synagogue is used in the Greek Old Testament to translate the Hebrew word, Eda, meaning ‘congregation’. In such cases it does not, of course, refer to a building at all. So when did groups of people begin to meet together for prayer and the study of Scripture, and when did these meetings begin to take place in a building specially designed for the purpose? Jewish sources trace the institution of the synagogue, like everything else, to Moses; the earliest beginning, however, is likely to be the movement with which  Ezra was connected in the first century BC, and there will have been other contributory factors in different places.

 

In Alexandria, Jews encountered Greek religious associations which met regularly; in many places, Jews may well have had regular meetings as part of municipal life. It is even possible that there may be some connection between the local synagogues and the meetings of members of the course on duty at the temple in Jerusalem. Those who did not go to Jerusalem are thought to have met together in their homes for prayer when the sacrifice was being offered in the Temple. By the first century AD, there was certainly a strong tradition of regular meetings for prayer and study of the Scriptures held in specially appointed buildings. There is written evidence to suggest that throughout the first century, synagogues were widespread. In addition to the New Testament references to synagogues in Galilee and throughout the Mediterranean world, Josephus makes special mention of synagogues in Caesarea and Tiberius, and Rabbinic writings mention synagogues in Jerusalem itself. The archaeological evidence suggests no set pattern or sequence of architectural development. Those closer to Jerusalem were influenced by the external decorations of the Temple, whereas in Babylon more attention was paid to interiors.

 

The synagogue was more than a place of worship; it was also something of a village centre with secular uses, a place for judicial, political and religious gatherings. It was certainly a centre for education, where children received elementary instruction and where teaching was given to adults who wanted help in reading the Scriptures. Above all, in the Dispersion, the synagogue was an important factor in unifying the Jews who lived in a particular place. There was no permanent ‘minister’ of a synagogue; the principal officer was the ‘head of the synagogue’, who played a chief role in all the synagogue functions and was ultimately responsible for the conduct of services, and may have chosen the lessons. The synagogue also had its ‘council of elders’ who, in predominantly Jewish villages, would also have been civic officials. The central act of worship was the reading of the Scriptures, both from the Torah and the prophets. In Palestine, this would be in Hebrew, sometimes accompanied by a translation into Aramaic; in the Dispersion, Greek was used. The reading of the lessons was followed by a sermon, and there seems to have been a custom of inviting any visiting teacher to deliver this address (Acts 13. 14).

Recent archaeological evidence has shown that Galilee was not the rural backwater and isolated Jewish enclave in the hills that scholars once imagined. They have plumbed the political, economic. and social currents of first-century Palestine to discover the forces that gave rise to the man and his mission. He has been viewed variously as a religious reformer, a social revolutionary, an apocalyptic prophet and even as a Jewish ‘Jihadist’. By far the mightiest force at the time shaping life in Galilee was the Roman Empire, which had subjugated the whole of Palestine some sixty years before Jesus’ birth. Almost all Jews felt oppressed by Rome’s excessive taxation and idolatrous religion, and this seething undercurrent of social unrest set the stage for the ‘Jewish agitator’ to burst onto the scene denouncing the rich and powerful and pronouncing blessings on the poor and marginalised.

Others have imagined the onslaught of Greco-Roman culture moulding Jesus into a less Jewish, more cosmopolitan champion of social justice. In 1991, John Dominic Crossan published his seminal book, The Historical Jesus, in which he put forward the thesis that the real Jesus was a wandering sage whose countercultural lifestyle and subversive sayings bore a striking resemblance to those of the ‘Cynics’ of ancient Greece. Like Jesus, they had little time for social conventions and the pursuit of wealth and status. Crossan’s unorthodox thesis was inspired partly by archaeological discoveries in Galilee which showed that the whole region was becoming more urbanised and romanised during Jesus’ day than scholars once imagined. Jesus’ boyhood home of Nazareth was just three miles from Sepphoris, the Roman provincial capital. Although the city isn’t mentioned in the Gospels, an ambitious building campaign sponsored by Galilee’s ruler, Herod Antipas, would have attracted skilled workers from all the surrounding villages. It’s therefore not unreasonable to imagine Jesus, as a young craftsman, working at Sepphoris and testing the boundaries of his Judaistic upbringing.

In Capernaum, the fishing port on the northwest shore called the Sea of Galilee where Jesus met his first followers, Franciscan archaeologists were, in 1968, excavating an octagonal church built 1,500 years ago, when they discovered that it had been built over the remains of a first-century house. There was evidence that this private home had been transformed into a public meeting place over a short span of time. By the second half of the first century, just a few decades after the Crucifixion of Jesus – the home’s rough stone walls had been plastered over and household kitchen items replaced with oil lamps, characteristic of a community gathering place. Over the following centuries, entreaties to Christ were etched into the walls, and by the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the dwelling had been expanded into an elaborately decorated house of worship. Since then the structure has commonly been known as Peter’s House, though it’s impossible to say whether the disciple actually inhabited the home. The Gospels record Jesus curing Peter’s mother-in-law at her home in Capernaum. Word of the miracle spread rapidly, we are told, and by evening a suffering crowd had gathered at her door.

 

Another dramatic discovery occurred at the site of ancient Magdala, the hometown of Mary Magdalene. Again, it was Franciscan archaeologists who began excavating part of the town during the 1970s, though the northern half lay under a defunct lakeside resort, who was building a pilgrims’ retreat in Galilee. As construction was about to begin in 2009, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority arrived to survey the site. They discovered a synagogue from the time of Jesus – the first such structure to be unearthed In Galilee. This find was especially significant because it put to rest an argument made by sceptics that no synagogues existed in Galilee until decades after Jesus’ death and that synagogues were few and far between in Israel and Judah in general in the first half of the first century. Had the sceptics been right, their claim would have shredded the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus as a devout Jew who often proclaimed his message and performed miracles in these meeting places.

As archaeologists excavated the ruins, they uncovered walls lined with benches and a mosaic floor. More importantly, at the centre of the room, they found a stone about the size of a foot rack that revealed carvings in relief which showed some of the most sacred elements of the Temple in Jerusalem. This has come to be known as the Magdala Stone, and its discovery struck a death-blow to the once-fashionable notion that Galileans were impious country ‘bumkins’ detached from Judaea’s centre of ‘civilised’ devotion. Moreover, as archaeologists continued to dig, they discovered an entire town buried less than a foot below the surface. The ruins were so well-preserved that some began calling Magdala the Israeli Pompeii. The remains include storerooms, ritual baths and an industrial area where fish may have been processed and sold on an open market, the stone stalls of which remain intact. Considering the fact that the synagogue was active during the ministry of Jesus and was only a brief sail from Capernaum, there is no reason to deny or doubt that Jesus was in Magdala, preaching in the synagogue and walking with his fishermen friends.

Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem and his ‘Last Week’:

His journey south and his movements until the last week in Jerusalem are shrouded in obscurity. Mark summarises them in one sentence, short yet significant (10. 1):

On leaving those parts (in the north) he came into the regions of Judaea and Transjordan; and when a crowd gathered around him once again, he followed his usual practice and taught them. (NEB)

 

The quoted words seem to imply a wider ministry than the account which follows seems to allow for. They suggest that he may have moved down south in the late spring, passing down the eastern side of the Jordan River, finally arriving in Jerusalem at the beginning of the Passover festival week. The account as we now have it had been used in the worship of the church where all the events of the Passion week were celebrated together, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. The journey may, in reality, have taken much longer, and have involved longer sojourns east of the river before the visit to Jerusalem. Some scholars have suggested that the Gospel accounts comprise two visits to the city, the first in October for the Feast of the Tabernacles, when he dealt with the shopkeepers in the Foreigners’ Court of the temple and was involved in an open debate with the religious authorities.

Whatever the evidence for this, Jesus had made up his mind to make his final appeal to his people when they gathered for the feast of Passover the following spring. He did not intend to have his hand forced, so he spent the winter outside the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem authorities in Transjordan and returned to the city a few days before he was arrested. It is probable that the elaborate preparations that were made to secure his arrest away from potential popular intervention by ensnaring one of his friends would have taken more than a few days, and would have had to involve Pilate (depicted above), as governor, at an early stage.

During the first part of The Last Week, Jesus lodged outside the city at the house of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus, at Bethany, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. From Bethany to Bethpage is a steep walk of about half an hour up a stony path. It was here, at the top of the Mount of Olives that Jesus mounted the ass on which he rode towards Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It was at this spot that he paused and wept over the coming fate of the city. When Jesus took his last journey from Bethany into Jerusalem, he went up the stark Jericho road whose loneliness had given such point to his parable of the Good Samaritan; he knew the way; his disciples followed apprehensively behind. At the highest point of the road, just behind the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem appears suddenly in all its beauty, dominated by the magnificence of the temple. With a facade 150 feet high, facing eastward, it was made of light marble with decorations of pure gold. Surrounding the main building were collonaded courts and vestibules; in the very centre crowning the whole edifice was the Tabernacle, which, according to the historian Josephus, sparkled like a snow-capped mountain. The massive walls of the city, rising 250 metres high above the surrounding valley, embraced other well-known buildings: the Roman fortress Antonia on the north-east side, Herod’s palace on the west with its three enormous towers, 130, 100 and 80 feet high, a little below that was the house of the high priest, also a strong-hold with its own prison. These four buildings were to play their part in the drama that followed. Today none of them remain, since the destruction of the city by the Romans in AD 70, but the sites are there and modern archaeology has revealed evidence of their authenticity; while the breathtaking beauty of the city remains, for the Muslims erected on the site of the Jewish temple two magnificent mosques, which scintillate, the one with golden and the other with silver decorations, even as the original temple must have done. The first is ‘The Dome of the Rock’, the second ‘The Mosque of Al-Aqsa’.  Christian pilgrims today are invited by their Arab guides to stop and praise God when they first set eyes on this most Holy City, even though it bears little resemblance to the place where Jesus walked and taught.

 

Further on, He would have passed the Garden of Gethsemane, and then down into the valley of the brook, Kedron, and on up the steep slope into the city itself. During this week he preached in the courtyards of the temple, where he challenged the authorities. It was during these final visits to the Temple in Jerusalem, whether they happened in the autumn or the following spring of his southern ministry, that Jesus carried out two ‘acted parables’ which showed that, while he followed a path of nonviolent resistance, he was also willing to challenge the temple authorities over, and at, the heart of their religion. The entry into the city made clear his whole approach to God’s work. He had made secret preparations for it, arranging for the hire of a donkey with a farmer in a village near to the city, possibly Bethany itself, or Bethpage. He rode in to claim his right as God’s chosen leader, perhaps recalling the days of a thousand years before when his ancestor David, following the southern rebellion, rode back on a warhorse to reclaim the city, along the same road (II Sam. 19. 15.-20.2). He was no such military leader, and the words of Zechariah’s poem were probably in his mind:

Lo, your King comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on an ass,

on a colt, the foal of an ass (Zech. 9.9)

All he had said and done in the preceding ministry was symbolised in this act. It must have been intended for his friends, as was the symbolism of ‘the Last Supper’. If it happened in October, he would have joined pilgrims coming into the city for the feast of Tabernacles, using the occasion for his own purposes. Had it been a public claim to Messiahship, it is strange that the authorities, looking around for evidence to incriminate Jesus, did not seize upon this occasion as the kind of evidence they were looking for. The significance of the ‘acted parable’ was quite clear.

Jesus’ ‘Cleansing of the Temple’ was the second acted parable and was also a very public one, this time inside the city and the Temple itself. In the Temple were several open courts, one of which was known as the Court of the Gentiles. This was a large area where sympathetic foreigners could share in Jewish worship. It was being used in Jesus’ time as a market, a bank and a shortcut through the Temple, anything but a place of worship for foreigners. It looked as if nobody bothered whether foreigners worshipped there or not. Jesus cleared the courts, his very righteous indignation took the stall-keepers and bankers by surprise; foreigners, Jesus was saying, had a place in God’s worship. The Temple was not exclusively for the use of Jews. He made a declaration of the universality of the Good News – My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a robbers’ cave. The Jewish leaders confronted him afterwards:

As he was walking about the Temple, Jewish leaders came up to him. ‘Who told you to do this sort of thing?’ they asked. ‘Who gave you the right to act like this?’ 

‘I’ll ask you a question first,’ said Jesus. ‘You answer my question and I’ll answer yours. You remember John the Baptist; was he God’s messenger, or just another of these mob-leaders? You tell me.’

They didn’t know what to say… They were frightened of the crowd, for everybody thought that John was one of God’s messengers.

‘We don’t know,’ they said at last.

‘Well, I’m not telling you, then, who gave me power to do what I’m doing,’ said Jesus…

The Jewish leaders now made up their minds to get hold of Jesus,… but they were frightened of the crowd; so they left Jesus and went away. 

Mk. 11. 27-33, 12. 1-12.

Rather than answer their question, which he suspected was not really a genuine question, but one intended to trap him (he didn’t intend to be caught out as simply as that), Jesus had told them a parable about a landowner who let out his estate to farmers when he went abroad. At harvest-time, he sent a slave for his share of the market, but they beat the slave and sent him away empty-handed. So he sent another slave, but the farmers hit him on the head and shouted insults at him. So the landowner sent his only son, thinking that they would respect him. But the farmers saw this as an opportunity to claim the estates for themselves, so they killed him and threw his body outside the walls of the estate. Jesus then asked them what the landowner would do, answering his own question by telling them that the landowner would come himself and destroy the farmers and give the estate to others.

In challenging his critics, he adapted a story which Isaiah had once told to his people about a farm where only wild grapes would grow. The Jewish leaders would recognise immediately what he was doing and also see that the estate was a picture of the Jewish people and that he was criticising them directly by casting them as the farmers who had wanted to take over the estate and exploit it for themselves.; the Jewish leaders were now making the Temple their temple, not God’s. They weren’t asking what God really wanted them to do. No wonder that, then and there, they made up their minds that they weren’t having any more radical talk like this, and resolved to get rid of him somehow. If this took place in October, by the spring they were ready for him.

They were frightened that the common people would take him seriously, as they had John the Baptist. If they did, the whole Jewish way of life and their leadership hopes would disappear, or be changed into something its current leadership could hardly recognise. The Jewish leaders saw his intentions more clearly than his own friends did. If this incident took place in October, by the spring they were ready for him. They caught him at night in the orchard on the side of the Mount of Olives. His trial and execution could happen swiftly afterwards.

 

Matthew 2 vv19-23 (Good News):

‘After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go back to the land of Israel, because those who tried to kill the child are dead.” So Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went back to Israel.

‘But when Joseph heard that Archelaus had succeeded his father Herod as king of Judea, he was afraid to go there. He was given more instructions in a dream, so he went to the province of Galilee and made his home in a town named Nazareth. And so what the prophet had said came true: “He will be called a Nazarene” ‘

English: Herod Archelaus was the ethnarch of Samaria, Judea, and Edom from 4 BC to 6 AD. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As an historian, I find this piece both fascinating and puzzling, because it underlines the differences between the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke’s gospels. Up until the end of Matthew’s account, the accounts can interlace. However, Luke ends his account with the passage above, whereas Luke concludes with Jesus’ naming and presentation in Jerusalem, which he dates, according to ‘the Law of Moses’ as a week after the child’s birth and the visit of the shepherds. Also, this is the first mention Matthew makes of Nazareth. All his ‘reports’ come from Bethlehem, and here he feels the need to explain why the family settled in Nazareth and not in Bethlehem. Of course, he doesn’t say they were a Judean family either, but whereas Luke makes clear the reason they were ‘only visiting’ Bethlehem at the time of the birth, Matthew seems to suggest that they had to settle in Galilee because Judea was far too dangerous, despite the death of ‘Herod the Great‘. This also seems to suggest that, at the very least, Joseph had strong family ties to Bethlehem, which would have made an ‘undercover’ return to Judea possible. Indeed, the fact that Matthew does not refer to the birth taking place in the ’emergency accommodation’ of Luke’s ‘manger’ suggests that they had a family home in ‘the little town’ where they could stay, and that perhaps they had been on their way there when the baby arrived ‘prematurely’.

This view finds support from the apocryphal Gospel of James, which focuses in detail on the birth narratives, recording the birth as taking place in a cave used for keeping livestock, by the road to Bethlehem. For me, that makes the story even more human, having been through the ‘will we make it to the hospital before baby arrives’ scenario, like many other ‘expectant’ fathers!

English: This is a map of first century Iudaea Province that I created using Illustrator CS2. I traced this image for the general geographic features. I then manually input data from maps found in a couple of sources. Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar. The Acts of Jesus. HarperSanFrancisco: 1998. p. xxiv. Michael Grant. Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels. Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1977. p. 65-67. John P. Meier. A Marginal Jew. Doubleday: 1991. p. 1:434. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, the more important difference, since the basis of the Christian faith is the historical Jesus, the incarnation in Earth’s space and time, is that, for the flight to Egypt, Herod’s death, the return and the presentation in the Temple to have all taken place within a week, would have been meant an action-packed week for a young mother and child, even if they had not gone much further along the road to Egypt than Gaza, as first century Palestinian refugees. Certainly, right up until the time of his death, which has been accurately dated to the end of March/ beginning of April 4 B.C., Herod was committing terrible atrocities on his own people. The following comes from the biblical scholar, Daniel B Wallace from www.bible.org, on the record of these provided by the Jewish historian:

‘Josephus tells us much about Herod. The best word to describe his reign is ‘overkill.’ He murdered his favourite wife’s father, drowned her brother–and even killed her! He executed one of his most trusted friends, his barber, and 300 military leaders–all in a day’s work! Then he slew three of his sons, allegedly suspecting them of treason. Josephus tells us that “Herod inflicted such outrages upon (the Jews) as not even a beast could have done if it possessed the power to rule over men” (Antiquities of the Jews 17:310). Killing babies was not out of character for this cruel king. And killing them up to two years old–to make sure he got the baby Jesus lines up with his insane jealousy for power.

‘Josephus might have omitted the slaying of the babies for one of two reasons: first, he was no friend of Christianity and he left it out intentionally; or second, just before Herod died he locked up 3000 of the nation’s leading citizens and gave orders that they were to be executed at the hour of his death. He wanted to make sure that there would be mourning when he died. . . Israel was so preoccupied with this that the clandestine murder of a few babies might have gone unnoticed. . .’

Watching again the scenes from North Korea at this time of year, three years ago, it was easy to see how, even in a world of mass and instantaneous communication, how it’s possible for dictators to hide the real truth of their tyranny behind a thin veneer of carefully choreographed, if seemingly spontaneous, devotion to a leader. When Jesus was born in the late winter or early spring of 4 B.C. he came into a country, Judea, which was a state living under terror, likely to continue under Herod’s successor. So, he became a refugee on the road through Gaza to Egypt, and grew up ‘in exile’ from his father’s ancestral home, in northern Palestine, or the kingdom of Israel, outside the jurisdiction of Archalaus, Herod’s son. There’s both a contemporary and timeless message in all that history somewhere, isn’t there? That’s what makes Christianity so unique as a faith. Emmanuel. God with us in every human experience.