Understanding Local Autonomy in Judaea between 6 and 66 CE (review)

Martin sets out to answer a straightforward, though not simple, question: when Jewish Palestine was ‘directly’ under Rome, following the annexation of Judaea in 6 ce and prior to the War in 66 ce, did Jewish authorities have the power to judge and execute those guilty of capital offences under Jewish law? Underlying that question is the larger problem of Jewish autonomy: the extent to which Roman imperial administrators permitted the Jews to live according to their laws, a right guaranteed them in the edicts of Roman magistrates from Julius Caesar onward. Administratively, Roman rule was in fact indirect. Direct, day-to-day, governance was by the Jewish (priestly) aristocracy. To answer his question, then, Martin maps out the articulation of the two administrative structures.

Martin’s project is constrained by the dearth of evidence. Beside the remains of the warning inscriptions, against Gentile violators of the soreg, that were placed in the Jerusalem temple, the extant evidence is literary. Even so, ancient historians offer no details about the administration of the province. There are no Roman or Jewish documents either, apart from Josephus’s fortuitous remark in War 2.117 that Coponius was appointed procurator of Judaea (6 ce) ‘with full powers, including the infliction of capital punishment.’ Martin relies on Josephus’s and Philo’s summaries and apologetics for Jewish law and customs, these authors’ narrative of events, the Gospels and Acts, and the extra-canonical Acts of Pilate and Gospel of Peter.

Apart from the introductory and concluding chapters, the book’s eight chapters discuss these sources, organized around the two best-known instances of the use of the death penalty during this period: the trials and executions of Jesus under Pilate and of Jesus’s brother, James, by the high priest Ananus in 62 ce during the interregnum between Festus’s death and the arrival of his replacement, Albinus. Martin concludes from his analysis of Josephus’s Antiquities 20.197–203 that James’s case does not show that the high priest was previously prevented by Roman governors from judging and executing capital offenders. Rather, the charge by Ananus’s opponents that he ‘had no authority to convene the Sanhedrin without his [Albinus’s] consent’ was a clever misrepresentation of the freedom with which the high priest had hitherto acted.

Taken together with the governor’s angry threat against the high priest, this episode represents the occasion when Rome introduced this innovative restriction on the high priest’s erstwhile authority. There is merit to this conclusion, especially in light of Martin’s analysis of extant sources to show that capital punishment, theoretically, was an essential part of Jewish understanding of their law and, practically, was sometimes, if rarely, carried out, for example, against Stephen in Acts. However, his argument is weakened by the contention that Josephus consistently disdained Ananus’s opponents (Pharisees) as religious usurpers and, therefore, intended their complaints to be understood as a ‘creative fabrication.’

Two problems dominate Martin’s discussion of the trial(s) and execution of Jesus. First, the contentious declaration by the Jews in John 18:31 (‘we are not permitted to put anyone to death’), he argues, was not ‘a gratuitous assessment’ of the conditions imposed by Rome. Rather, it serves belatedly to explain why Jesus was handed over to and executed by Romans. Moreover, considering John’s overall treatment of ‘the Jews,’ this statement belongs to John’s effort to depict the Jews as deceitful murderers. Second, John 18:31 aside, the Gospels and Acts provide no reason why Jesus was transferred to Roman authorities, if he were guilty under Jewish law. The accounts of the transfer were an essential aspect of early Christian messianic self-understanding. Moreover, there is no extant evidence that Jewish authorities cooperated with the Romans in the arrest, prosecution, and punishment of political offenders against Roman rule. Jesus, in fact, may not have been handed over to the Romans by the Jews.

Martin’s best...