Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

As during the Maccabean Revolt, the Jews who resented the invasion of a foreign army and the Jews who resented the invasion of a foreign way of life tended to overlap. The Jewish resistance was dismissed by the Roman authorities as “bandits” and “brigands,” but they called themselves “Zealots,” thus invoking the heroic example of the biblical heroes who were “zealous for the Law and the Covenant.” Again like the Maccabees, they took up arms against both the army of the occupation and the assimilated Jews who collaborated with the Romans. The Sicarii (“dagger-men”), for example, were urban terrorists who targeted Jewish collaborators for assassination in public places. And the apocalyptic ideas and images that were first written down during the Maccabean Revolt found a new readership in the latest generation of Jewish freedom fighters.

Perhaps the most potent (and poignant) of these apocalyptic ideals was the longing for a Messiah, the liberator who would be sent by the God of Israel to defeat the forces of evil and bring peace, security, and sovereignty to the Jewish people. Josephus may have been mindful of the passage in the book of Daniel where “one like the son of man” is granted “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom” when he describes the power of the apocalyptic idea during the Jewish resistance against Rome. 85“What more than all else incited them to the war,” writes the ancient Jewish historian, “was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would be become ruler of the world.” 86

Josephus, writing from the perspective of a collaborator with the Romans, was contemptuous and dismissive of the ideals that motivated the Jewish partisans. “Deceivers and impostors” is how Josephus describes the self-styled prophets “who, under the pretense of divine inspiration fostering revolutionary changes, persuaded the multitude to act like madmen.” 87He derisively notes that one such prophet, known only as “the Egyptian,” persuaded his followers—“about 30,000 dupes,” as Josephus puts it—that he could and would cause the walls of Jerusalem to collapse upon his command. 88But, almost inadvertently, Josephus also allows us to see exactly how powerful and provocative these ideas could be.

To rally the defenders of Jerusalem during the final battle of the Jewish War in 70 C.E., for example, the leaders of the Zealots and the other factions resorted to the same rhetoric that had worked so well during the Maccabean Revolt. “A number of hireling prophets had been put up in recent days by the party chiefs to deceive the people by exhorting them to await help from God,” writes Josephus, “and so reduce the number of deserters and buoy up with hope those who were above fear and anxiety.” When the Roman soldiers set fire to the colonnade of the Temple where some six thousand men, women, and children were sheltering, the most ardent among them chose to martyr themselves: “Some flung themselves out of the flames to their death, others perished in the blaze; of that vast number there escaped not one.” 89

The Jewish War ended in the utter defeat of the armed resistance against Rome. Yet again, the Temple was destroyed, and yet again the Jewish people were sent into exile. Over the next century or so, new Jewish freedom fighters—and new claimants to the crown of the Messiah—struggled against the Roman occupation, but none of them were victorious. The last major war of national liberation against Rome was fought under the leadership of a heroic guerilla commander named Simon Bar Kochba, who was hailed as “King Messiah” by Rabbi Akiva, one of the most revered of the ancient rabbinical scholars. But Bar Kochba, too, was defeated by the Romans. His torture and death in 135 C.E. was proof to his Jewish followers that he could not be the Messiah after all: “It will only be demonstrated by success,” explained one medieval rabbi, “and this is the truth.” 90And so the messianic idea in ancient Judaism began to turn from an urgent expectation into an attenuated and fatalistic longing.

“Grass will grow in your jawbones, Akiva ben Yosef,” one pragmatic rabbi is quoted in the Talmud as saying to Rabbi Akiva, “and the Messiah will not have appeared.” 91

Not all of the self-styled messiahs of the early years of the Common Era, however, can be so easily written off. Among the most charismatic and visionary figures of the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism was one whose mission and message were destined to change the history of the world. He, too, allowed his followers to believe that he was the Messiah, and he promised them that the prophecies of Daniel would soon be fulfilled.

His name was Yeshua bar Yosef but he is known to the world as Jesus.

The historical Jesus, in fact, “is best understood as a first-century Jewish apocalypticist,” according to contemporary Bible scholar Bart D. Ehrman. An “apocalypticist,” as the term is used by scholars, means someone who embraces most or all of the strange new ideas that we find in the book of Daniel and the apocalyptic writings that did not make it into the Bible: “Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, that God would intervene in the affairs of this planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment, and establish his own utopian Kingdom here on earth,” writes Ehrman in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium . “And this was going to happen with Jesus’ own generation.” 92

The idea that Jesus embraced the same urgent and dire expectations that we find in the first book of Enoch, Daniel, and Revelation has always been unsettling to some Christians. Indeed, most contemporary Bible scholars are more comfortable in regarding Jesus as a kind and gentle moral teacher who taught his followers how to lead decent lives here on earth rather than one of those prophets of doom who are depicted in New Yorker cartoons with a signboard that declares: “The End Is Near!” When cutting-edge Bible critics argue that we ought to understand Jesus as a crypto-communist, a proto-feminist, or a gay activist, they are seeking to paint over the portrait of Jesus that we actually find in the New Testament.

A plain reading of the Gospels, however, is the best evidence that Jesus believed and taught that the world was coming an imminent end. “Truly, I say to you,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” 93Taken literally, the passage openly and confidently predicts that the events described in the apocalyptic writings will take place within the lifetimes of his contemporaries. The same notion is found in the letters of Paul, which are among the earliest of all Christian texts and the ones whose flesh-and-blood author is most confidently identified by scholars.

“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God,” writes Paul in the First Letter to the Thessalonians. “And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.” 94

Indeed, the suggestion that Jesus was a believer in the apocalyptic idea is obliquely confirmed in the historical record. By a tradition common to both Judaism and Christianity, for example, it was held that the Messiah would be a direct descendant of King David—“a shoot out of the stock of Jesse,” according to a potent phrase from the prophecies of Isaiah. 95The Romans, mindful of the tradition, regarded the mere claim of Davidic blood as a claim to Jewish kingship. In fact, the Tenth Legion of the Roman army of occupation in Judea remained under standing orders from four successive emperors “to hunt out and execute any Jew who claimed to be a descendant of King David.” 96