Killing Jesus: A History

alley.

    Sepphoris is walled, just like Jerusalem, and donkey caravans appear at the city gates each week begging for entry so they might sell their wares. It is a city unlike any other in Galilee. Since its repopulation and rebirth, it is home to doctors, lawyers, craftsmen, tax collectors, and entertainers who perform mime and comedic plays at the theater. But the building of this wondrous metropolis has come at a great cost. Thanks to Antipas, Sepphoris is also home to many people who have lost their farms to excessive taxation. With no fields to till or homes to call their own, they crowd into the poorest sections of the city, making a life by stealing, selling their bodies, or begging. So beneath the veneer of progress and sophistication, there is decadence and decay to this self-styled “ornament of Galilee.”
    For while Sepphoris is the very picture of prosperity, many in Galilee are starving.
    *   *   *
    Joseph and Mary, as do most other Jews, live in fear of Herod Antipas. With a dark beard covering the tip of his chin and a thin mustache wreathing his mouth, Antipas resembles a true villain. While his father, Herod the Great, had grave faults, he also performed many constructive acts. Not so Antipas, a callow man who has never known want and who always expected to be given a kingdom.
    Antipas was born in Judea but educated in Rome, a city he adores. He pays homage to Caesar Augustus and Rome not only by taxing the Jews blind but also by ordering a Roman-style form of execution for any who would dare defy him.
    Galilean outrage against Rome has been building for decades. The people have been levied with tax after tax after tax. Antipas is nothing if not “a lover of luxury,” and he uses these taxes both to rebuild Sepphoris and to finance his own lavish lifestyle. And the more luxury he needs, the higher the taxes climb.

Herod Antipas
    Actual money is scarce. Every adult male Jew has to pay his annual half-shekel tax to the Temple in coin. Farmers can pay the rest of their obligation in figs, olive oil, or grain. They have no way of skirting the taxes because they must travel to Sepphoris to sell their harvest. The hated taxman is always on hand when they arrive at their destination. Fishermen have it no better. They are levied special rights fees, in addition to a portion of their daily catch, for permission to drop their nets or to dock in a port.
    No men are more despised than the tax collectors, who not only extort funds from people with very little but also publicly abuse and even torture those who fall behind on their payments. There is no leeway. Those who can’t pay must borrow grain or oil from the storage silos manned by Antipas’s men. The interest rates are exorbitant—100 percent on oil and 25 percent on grain. And falling behind on these debts means ruin. Peasants are often forced to sell their children to creditors as debt slaves or to sell their farms and work the land as sharecroppers. Some lose their homes and inheritance and become beggars, the dignity of life as a Jewish landowner replaced by a degraded existence outside normal society.
    There is, however, a booming city of some forty thousand residents to which many of these people have migrated and are accepted, despite their lowly status. This place is called Magdala—“Magdalena” to the Romans and “Magdalene” in the Greek language of the Gospels—and even as Jesus of Nazareth walks the streets of Sepphoris, a vibrant young girl named Mary walks the streets of Magdala. Her parents have nothing. Mary’s innocence will inevitably be shattered in the shabby confines of that outlaw village. She will grow up to be a prostitute, doing what she must do to survive, though she longs for something better in this world.
    *   *   *
    Because Joseph is a skilled carpenter, he is able to pay his taxes. And, indeed, most people in Galilee can do the same—but just barely. Many Galileans suffer malnutrition because they have no food left with which to feed themselves. And in the throes of that hunger, as hair falls out and both muscles and hope wither, they quietly seethe. But rather than point the finger of blame at Rome or Caesar Augustus, the people of Galilee begin to vent their rage at one another. They stop loaning grain or oil to friends and relations, fearing that their own supply will run out. They ignore the Jewish tradition of forgiving debts. The tight-knit peasant community that has sustained itself for so