Killing Jesus: A History

Joseph walk among a long line of pilgrims on their way back to Nazareth after the Passover festival in Jerusalem, a journey they are required by Jewish law to make each year. The couple leaves behind a city far different from when Jesus was born. King Herod is long dead, but rather than being better off—he was demented in his final hours, waving a knife and ordering the murder of yet another son—the Jewish people are actually worse for the tyrant’s demise.

    Intense rioting followed his passing in March of 4 B.C., and anarchy reigned once the people of Jerusalem realized that Herod’s heir was a weak and ineffectual version of his father. But Archelaus, as the new king was known, struck back hard, showing that he could be as cruel as Herod. The slaughter came during Passover, the celebration of the night when the angel of death “passed over” the houses of the Jews while they were enslaved in Egypt during the time of the pharaohs, killing the firstborn sons of Egyptians instead. The holiday symbolizes the freedom from slavery that later followed, when Moses led the people out of Egypt in search of the homeland that God had promised them.
    Passover is a time when Jerusalem is packed with hundreds of thousands of worshippers from all over the world, so it was horrific when Archelaus boldly asserted his authority by ordering his cavalry to charge their horses into the thick crowds filling the Temple courts. Wielding javelins and long, straight steel and bronze swords, Archelaus’s Babylonian, Thracian, and Syrian mercenaries massacred three thousand innocent pilgrims. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus saw the bloodbath firsthand and were lucky to escape the Temple with their lives. They were also eyewitnesses to the crucifixion of more than two thousand Jewish rebels outside Jerusalem’s city walls when Roman soldiers moved in to quell further revolts. In defiance of Jewish law, 1 the bodies were not taken down and buried, but left to rot or to be devoured by wild dogs and vultures as a symbol of what happens to those who defy the Roman Empire.
    Rome soon inserted itself completely into Judean politics. 2 By A.D. 6, Emperor Caesar Augustus deemed Archelaus unfit to reign and exiled him to Gaul. Judea is now a Roman province, ruled by a prefect sent from Rome. There are still Jewish rulers reigning over other portions of Herod’s former kingdom, but they are nothing more than figureheads and carry the title of tetrarch instead of king. A tetrarch is a subordinate ruler in the Roman Empire. The term refers to “fourths” and the fact that Herod the Great’s kingdom of Judea was split into four unequal parts after his death. Three of those parts went to his sons, one each to Herod and Philip and two to Archelaus. Upon the exile of Archelaus in A.D. 6, Rome sent prefects to be governors to oversee the land of the Jews.
    Jerusalem is ruled by the local aristocracy and Temple high priests, who mete out justice through the Great Sanhedrin, a court comprised of seventy-one judges with absolute authority to enforce Jewish religious law—though, in the case of a death sentence, they must get the approval of the Roman governor.
    In this way, Emperor Caesar Augustus balances the needs of his empire without insulting the Jewish faith. Nevertheless, he still demands complete submission to his domain, a humiliation that the Jews have no choice but to endure. This does not, however, mean they have stopped rebelling. In fact, their region is the site of more uprisings than any other part of the mighty Roman Empire, a sprawling kingdom stretching the length of Europe, across the sands of Parthia, and spanning almost the entire Mediterranean rim. The worst rebellion was in 4 B.C., when Jesus was just one year old. A rebel faction broke into the great palace fortress in Sepphoris, looted the royal armory, distributed its cache of weapons to the city’s residents, and then attempted a takeover of the local government. Under the orders of Caesar Augustus, Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, ordered his cavalry to slaughter the rebels, burn Sepphoris to the ground, and enslave its entire population of more than eight thousand residents.
    The Jewish people have also begun boycotting the purchase of all Roman pottery. As passive and understated as the act may be, it serves as a daily reminder that despite their oppression, the Jews will never allow themselves to be completely trampled beneath the heel of Rome. For,