Killing Jesus: A History

lashes. He was no common criminal. He was a traitor whose crime had been to “exhort the nation to assert their liberty” from Rome, as the great historian Josephus would write. But more important, Judas had sought to free the Judean people from the unfair taxation being inflicted by Rome and Herod. He had compared the taxation to a form of slavery and had encouraged his fellow Jews to rise up against their oppressors.
    Judas cried out in agony as a soldier delivered another blast of leather onto his flesh. But he knew better than to curse his executioners because that would only mean more blows. So he endured the torture. In moments, Judas was covered with blood.
    The most common modes of killing a condemned man in the Roman Empire were hanging, burning him alive, beheading, placing him inside a bag full of scorpions then drowning him, and crucifixion. As terrible as the four might be, the last is considered the worst by far. So even as crucifixion was now practiced throughout the Roman Empire, even by a tetrarch such as Herod Antipas, it was a death so horrible that it was forbidden to execute Roman citizens in this manner.
    Judas of Gamala lay limp and bleeding after his lashes were administered. Soldiers then brought out a rough-hewn piece of lumber and hurled it to the ground. Despite the blood pouring down his back, Judas was forced to stand. His executioners lifted this splinter-filled patibulum , as it was known, onto his shoulders. This would become the crossbeam of his crucifix, and, like all condemned men, Judas was to carry it outside the city walls of Sepphoris to a spot where a vertical pole in the ground would form the second part of his crucifix. He would be nailed to that cross and left to die. His legs would be broken to make the torturous process even more ghastly. He would hang in full view of the thousands that called Sepphoris home, helpless to stop the urination and defecation that would stain his cross and compound his humiliation. Judas would be dead by nightfall—if he was lucky.
    The story of Judas’s execution spread throughout Galilee. But he was not alone in his persecution. There were countless other would-be prophets who thought violence could bring an end to Roman occupation. They all paid for this conceit with their lives. And then they were forgotten, so that, generations later, few remember the story of Judas of Gamala.
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    Galilee is the northernmost province in what was called Canaan by the patriarch Abraham. One of Abraham’s grandsons was a man named Jacob, who also went by the name Israel and fathered the people who would come to be known as the Israelites. In time, the Roman-controlled territory now known as Judea will come to bear that name.
    A pair of “seas” anchor Galilee’s borders: the Mediterranean and the large inland lake often called the Sea of Galilee, dotted by fishing villages such as Capernaum. Syria lies to the north and west and Samaria to the south. It is an uncrowded landscape defined by rolling hills, wide fields, small villages, and farmers tending plots of land that were passed on to them as part of their inheritance.
    Since returning to Galilee a decade ago, Herod Antipas has devoted himself to rebuilding the city of Sepphoris. Antipas has made the revitalized city his home and is determined to make it even more regal than Jerusalem. The partition of his father’s empire between him and his siblings means not only that Judea is a divided nation, ruled by three separate individuals—Antipas in Galilee, his brother Philip in what is now Jordan, and his brother Archelaus to the south, in Jerusalem—but that, for the first time in history, the ruler of Galilee actually lives in Galilee. So it is that Sepphoris becomes the cosmopolitan hub of the region, juxtaposed with the agrarian lifestyle and landscape of rural Galilee. This is the city where Joseph of Nazareth finds steady employment in Antipas’s never-ending stream of building projects. Whether constructing one of the city’s elaborate new mansions or plastering walls or laying the mosaic floors of the basilica, a builder has plenty to do in this vast and shining limestone metropolis perched atop a hill.
    Sepphoris is so large that it has two markets, an upper and a lower. Anything a man could ever want is for sale: glass, pottery, dried fish, onions, herbs, cattle, and even sex, if one furtively strays away from the hustle and bustle and into the quiet of an