Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine

3. Jesus and Imperial Violence

3. Jesus and imperial Violence The politics of Roman Palestine was set up and maintained by imperial violence. In Galilee during the century before the mission of Jesus, the people suffered repeated conquest, with the slaughter of people and the destruction of villages leaving collective trauma in their wake. When the Galilean and Judean people persistently resisted Roman rule and periodically revolted, Roman armies reconquered them with ever-greater vengeance. The mission of Jesus and the emergence of Jesus movements were framed by popular revolts and Roman reconquests in 4 b.c.e. and again in 66–70 c.e. Beyond that, they were framed by the initial Roman conquest in 63 b.c.e. and by the Bar Kokhba Revolt and the final Roman reconquest in 132–35 c.e. That period of more than two centuries of Roman rule, moreover, featured protests and resistance movements and regular acts of military repression by the Roman authorities. The Jesus books that proliferated during the 1990s, however, give little attention to this military violence and its effects or to the way(s) in which Jesus may have been responding.1 Given the proclivity of interpreters of Jesus to avoid political issues, one often finds reassurances that things were quiet at the time of Jesus’s ministry, that there were no occupying Roman troops in Galilee or Judea at the time. This lack of interest in imperial violence among interpreters of “the historical Jesus” is puzzling; it leaves out of consideration the harshest realities of life in the context in which Jesus lived and worked. From the more candid recent discussions of the Romans’ brutal treatment of conquered peoples by historians of ancient Rome it is increasingly clear that Roman military violence created the very conditions of and for Jesus’s mission and the emergence of Jesus movements.2 The most obvious illustration is the ending of Jesus’s mission through his execution by crucifixion, carried out by the Roman governor and his military.3 Prior to the recent proliferation of Jesus books the issue of Jesus and violence received a good deal more attention. Pacifists, whether individuals or members of traditionally pacifist churches such as the Mennonites, had looked to Jesus as a teacher of nonviolence (“turn the other cheek”), even nonresistance (“do not resist [the] evil [one]”). Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders understood Jesus as the prophet of nonviolent direct action guided by the principle “love your enemies.” JeSUS and imPerial violenCe 55 After the social-political turmoil of the 1960s, leading New Testament scholars argued strongly for an apolitical as well as a nonviolent Jesus.4 At the level of academic debate, they were responding to the argument by that outsider from the history of religions S. G. F. Brandon, who suggested that Jesus might have been sympathetic to “the Zealots.”5 But more was at stake in that time of “national liberation movements” against European imperial rule in the “Third World” and also of widespread protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam and other counterinsurgency wars. In retrospect, it seems like no mere coincidence that European scholars constructed an elaborate synthetic picture of “the Zealots” as a long-standing and widespread movement of violent revolt against Roman rule, as a kind of ancient Jewish “National Liberation Front.”6 As practitioners of anti-Roman violence, “the Zealots” provided a useful foil against which Jesus could be portrayed as a sober teacher of pacifist nonresistance. It seems no mere coincidence, moreover, that New Testament scholars thus focused the issue of violence on resistance to foreign imperial rule rather than on the violence of imperial rule itself. Like many other academic fields, New Testament studies originated in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western European countries during the heyday of imperialism . Western imperial rule of subject peoples was simply assumed as the order of things.7 Roman imperial rule was viewed as a benign civilizing influence, even idealized, as Western imperial powers understood themselves to be the successors of Rome. It was also assumed that the Gospels belonged to European Christians, whose responsibility it was to take them as the Word of God to subject peoples. Thus, as colonial rule was being effectively challenged, the portrayal of Jesus as a sober advocate of nonresistance in opposition to the revolutionary violence of “the Zealots” was an argument against the use of violence by anticolonial movements in the Third World as well as by student demonstrations...