Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine PDF
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Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine Richard A. Horsley The University of South Carolina Press © 2014 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and the politics of Roman Palestine / Richard A. Horsley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61117-293-5 (hardbound : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61117-294-2 (ebook) 1. Jesus Christ—Historicity. i. Title. BT303.2.H675 2013 232.9'5—dc23 2013015100 contents Preface vii 1. Getting the Whole Story 1 2. Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine 26 3. Jesus and Imperial Violence 54 4. Illness and Possession, Healing and Exorcism 80 5. Renewal of Covenantal Community 108 6. Conflict with the Scribes and Pharisees 128 7. The Crucifixion as Breakthrough 154 Notes 169 Bibliography 187 Index 199 Preface The core chapters of this book are expansions of the 2010 Hall Lectures at the University of South Carolina and associated institutions. The Nadine Beacham and Charlton F. Hall Sr. Lectureship in New Testament Studies and Early Christi- anity, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University, was established by alumnus and Columbia businessman Charlton F. Hall Jr. in memory of his father and mother. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have delivered these lectures and for the opportunity to have become acquainted with the donor, Charleton Hall. I am also specially grateful to Professor Donald Jones for arranging the Lectures and for his and the university’s warm hospitality. The overall theme of the 2010 Hall Lectures was “Jesus and Empire.” The particular lectures were titled: I. “Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine” II. “Jesus’ Healing and Exorcism” III. “Jesus and the New World (Dis)Order” Insofar as new research in several related areas is challenging the standard as- sumptions of historical Jesus studies and the standard approach has come to a pro- cedural dead end, it is necessary to explore new possibilities that take the recent research into account. Violence and Jesus’s response to it are issues that were debated long before serious attention was given to political economic dynamics in the Roman imperial world. Recent books on Jesus, however, have almost avoided the subject. More critical and candid recent treatment of Roman military practices by Roman histo- rians, on the other hand, suggests that imperial violence may have been more of a factor in the context in which Jesus worked than previously recognized. Jesus’s conflict with the scribal “retainers,” including the Pharisees, continued to play an active role in the politics of Roman Palestine under the rule of Herod the Great and the high priestly aristocracy, contrary to the recently influential hy- pothesis that they had withdrawn from politics to emphasize piety. Recent books on the historical Jesus have almost avoided the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees that is so prominent in the Gospel sources. viii PrefaCe Since crucifixion played a key role in the politics of Roman Palestine, it seemed not only appropriate but also important to discuss the Romans’ crucifixion of Je- sus, which is often not dealt with in books on the historical Jesus. The crucifixion of Jesus in the historical context is considered in connection with Jesus’s mission of renewal of the people in opposition to the rulers. Readers will find the assumptions, approach, analysis, and discourse in this volume to be different in many ways from what has been standard in investigation of the historical Jesus. For this I should deliver an apology, in the double sense that I apologize to readers for being “out of step” and presenting “revisionist” history and that I offer an explanation of what I am doing. Coming from undergraduate study of history into New Testament studies and other subfields of theology in divinity school (in the 1960s) required some “reori- entation.” Here was a field of ostensibly historical study in which the sources were read and studied piecemeal, verse by verse, with a good deal of “word study.” Peo- ples, the state, movements, historical actors, and events were (and are) dissolved into “-isms,” such as “Judaism,” “Hellenism,” and “apocalypticism.” Diversity and dynamics were dissolved into theological constructs and schemes. Focused on a quest for doctrines, such as “christologies” or “soteriologies,” New Testament scholars neglected the overall narratives of the Gospels and their contingent his- torical contexts as irrelevant for the ideas they were abstracting from texts. My generation of New Testament scholars began casting about for alternative approaches during the 1970s and 1980s, often reverting to approaches learned in our undergraduate majors. New approaches began emerging in the field, such as a more sophisticated literary criticism and various kinds of social scientific analysis. But this usually meant reading the Gospels as if they were modern novellas or bor- rowing structural-functional anthropological or sociological models that had been abandoned in those fields a decade or so earlier. With the give-and-take of critical discussion, however, several “criticisms” gradually gained in sophistication as New Testament studies diversified (and splintered). During the past few decades, more- over, research proceeded into areas that had not even been imagined before, such as oral performance and scribal practice. The emergence of diverse “criticisms” and specializations in New Testament studies, however, has meant that specialists do not stay abreast of developments in other specialties. The study of the historical Jesus that developed in the 1980s and expanded in the 1990s built largely on standard previous criticisms, especially form criti- cism. And as interest in the historical Jesus mushroomed, “Jesus scholars” worked mainly at developing increasing sophistication in the already familiar criticisms, for example in refining the criteria by which the “authenticity” of the separate say- ings of Jesus were evaluated. Studies of the historical Jesus, moreover, continued to work within the general Christian theological scheme of Christian origins ac- cording to which Jesus was a unique individual revealer who addressed individuals PrefaCe ix who withdrew from “Judaism” and organized a movement (“the church”) after his resurrection. Interpreters generally accepted the modern Western assumptions that Jesus was a religious figure who dealt with (“Jewish”) religious matters, such as “the Torah/Law” and “the Temple” and “synagogues” and “religious leaders.” And they continued to work within and perpetuated the standard synthetic con- structs of New Testament studies, such as “(early) Judaism,” “(early) Christianity,” “apocalypticism,” “wisdom,” and “miracles.” This scheme and these general synthetic constructs, however, tend to obscure historical particulars, including diversities and complexities. Like many others, I was never comfortable with the standard assumptions, constructs, and procedures in the field. In my own historical investigations over nearly a half-century I criticized and abandoned many of the standard concepts and modern assumptions in the field as they appeared to obscure the diversities and complexities and dynamics evident in primary sources. In this volume I draw upon these previous investigations on various interrelated fronts and refer to them for further discussion of analyses, procedures, and the new assumptions based on close examination of those sources in historical context. For example, “Judaism” had been discussed as “sectarian,” with the fourth of the “sects” identified as “the Zealots,” a long-standing “party” that advocated revolt against Roman rule. Closer reading of Flavius Josephus’s histories, however, indicated that such synthetic concepts were hiding a number of movements that had taken different social forms and pursued different agendas.1 Many in the field came to acknowledge the diversity of movements (and the inapplicability of the construct “the Zealots”). Few scholars of Jesus and the Gospels, however, have recognized the other main point about those diverse movements, the difference between popular movements of villagers (led by “kings/messiahs” or “prophets”) and the protests by dissident circles of scribes, who had no wider following among the people.2 My ensuing investigation into the historical Jesus, attempting to discern how Jesus’s mission would appear if he were no longer contrasted with the historically false foil of “the Zealots,” also led to criticism and abandonment of other standard scholarly constructs and procedures.3 The differences between elite scribal culture and protests and popular culture and movements—what anthropologists called the contrast between the “great tradition” and the “little tradition”—led to the recognition that the “apocalyptic” and “wisdom” texts produced by scribal circles were not good sources for the views of popular movements and leaders such as Jesus. It was also evident in that investigation that apocalyptic texts were some- times being misread or misrepresented, for example, as attesting an expectation of a rebuilt Temple (as subsequent study of those texts have shown). More important, however, my initial investigation into the social context evident in the content of Jesus’s teachings led to the recognition that Jesus was
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