Nero had little reason to sing while Rome burned, though the ancient historian Suetonius reports that the emperor had exulted in the “beauty of the flames.” As the capitol was engulfed in fire he allegedly sang a lament about the fall of Troy. (31) “Fiddling while Rome burns” is a cliché about Nero, but contemporary historians question the objectivity of historians like Tacitus, Suetonius and Flavius Josephus, noting that their hostility to Nero reflected the political views of the emperors they worked under, as well as those with lingering republican sentiments who despised the absolute monarchy of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
Nero sings as Rome burns, Henry Altemus (1897)
So, we have good reason to suspect that pagan Romans like Tacitus and Suetonius were confusing these new groups of messianic monotheists, making no distinction between the militant and peaceful varieties.
During this time of civilizational conflict, the Zealots and the Sicarii were the leading groups of “messianic” Jewish rebels, according to the 1st Century historian Flavius Josephus. He describes them as religious fanatics and terrorists, readily bringing to mind today’s jihadists. (32)
Josephus was writing for the Romans, of course. A Jew himself who adopted his Roman name after being captured by General Vespasian during the Jewish War, Josephus relates that even under torture one contemporary Jewish sect called “Essenes” could never declare a man (Caesar) to be their Lord. Josephus also records how the rebels at Masada committed mass suicide rather than be captured by the Romans in 73 CE. He recounts a similar event involving himself years earlier at Jotapata, where as a Jewish general he had faced defeat by the Romans and participated in a similar suicide pact before arranging his own escape at the last moment. After narrowly avoiding death, Josephus turned against his countrymen and denounced them in his new role as, in essence, the Flavians’ court historian.
Whatever their exact dating, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm what Josephus relates, at least to some extent: the messianic Jews of this period were militant, xenophobic purists and strict adherents of the Mosaic Law. If the so-called “sectarian” documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls are any indication, they were not at all the peace-seeking, cheek-turning, enemy-loving, tax-paying, Roman-appeasing Christians of the sort who could possibly follow the New Testament. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that they constituted a religio-political powder keg about to explode—and that they would certainly have opposed Christ’s central message in the Gospels.
Today, these rebellious Jews are not normally called “Christians” even though they anticipated the arrival of a “christened” or “anointed” one (the Messiah or the Christ) to lead them in their holy war against Rome. To pagan Romans like Tacitus and Suetonius, who may have been ignorant of the finer distinctions between messianic Jewish groups, the term “Christian” may well have applied to messianic Jews as a whole. Suetonius’s confused mention of a Jewish “Chrestus” causing violence in Rome itself before 50 CE appears to confirm this conflation of terminology.
This confusion is important to keep in mind when reading the New Testament itself, especially when Paul clashes with a group of nominal “Apostles” who resemble militant rebels more than any idea of Christians today, as we will see.
The evidence suggests, therefore, that it was these messianic rebels and not Christians as we know them today who were martyred and persecuted by Romans during the first two centuries of the Common Era. There is ample evidence that the Romans crucified these followers of messianic Judaism by the thousands during this period. It is certain that they would refuse to acknowledge any Roman emperor as divine or in any way their master. The mystery of why Claudius and later Nero perceived these “Jewish-Christians” to be a military threat to Rome now makes perfect sense. They were not “Christians” as we understand the term today but violent insurgents.
Quite unlike these dangerous “christians,” another type of Christian seems to have immediately embraced pagan images among their first symbols, along with the dramatic modifications of traditional Jewish law this required, as well as adopting an accommodating attitude toward Romans themselves.
The troublemakers that Suetonius and Tacitus called followers of “Chrestus” or “Christians,” on the other hand, are far more like the oppositional orthodox Jews in the New Testament referred to by Paul as “apostles of Christ.”
The picture of Jesus’s followers portrayed in the New Testament makes it impossible to understand how the Romans could feel threatened by such mild and forgiving proponents of political peace. Indeed, they seem to be the fulfillment of a Roman wish-list for what messianic Jews in Rome would comprise.
The conflation of these two groups, along with the marked contrast between them, makes it easy to see why Pliny the Younger was in a quandary over what to do with what might be called “New Testament” Christians, with whom he was dealing only a few decades after the first Jewish War.
The rebellious “Jewish Christians,” as they can be designated, went to war with Rome one more time under Bar Kokhba in 132-136 CE (although violent disturbances started as early as 123 CE). They would continue to be a threat to the Roman Empire well after the first full-scale revolt. Throughout this time they were tortured and crucified in large numbers. The abundant evidence of their persecution by the Romans stands in stark contrast to the dearth of evidence that New Testament Christians were persecuted during Christianity’s first two centuries.
This distinction between “Jewish Christians” and Gospel-adhering Christians has been convincingly argued by the scholar Robert Eisenman in his books, James the Brother of Jesus and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians. (33) Eisenman, one of the important translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls, demonstrates that the first group of messianic Jewish believers may indeed be identified as a rebel sect similar to if not identical in religion and politics with the well-known Jewish Zealot movement itself. Professor Eisenman argues that the so-called “sectarian” documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that is, those specific texts that detail the lifestyle and history of a purist Jewish sect normally identified as “Essenes,” are likely to have been authored by the same ideological movement that instigated the revolt against Rome in the 1st Century.
Eisenman differs from the majority view of scholars here, who place the writing of some of the sectarian documents of the Scrolls as early as the 2nd Century BCE. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls were deposited in caves by messianic Jews at the time of the first rebellion even as war engulfed the region around 70 CE, however, Eisenman’s argument makes more temporal and logical sense. At the very least, and whether or not his dating is correct, these documents appear to have been important enough to the Jewish rebels to hide them in caves during their first war with Rome. Coins dating to that time were found in the same cache. The authors of these documents certainly shared with the rebels both their martial zeal and fervent messianic expectations. Their documents would be preserved until discovery 19 centuries later to much controversy.
Adding to that controversy, Professor Eisenman identified in those scrolls the early Christian leaders James the Just and the Apostle Paul, connecting them to figures referred to in the sectarian Dead Sea Scroll documents by the titles “the Teacher of Righteousness” and “the Liar,” respectively. (And it is curious how often Paul makes the special pleading that he is “not lying” in the New Testament, considering how often this bitter accusation appears in the Dead Sea documents recorded by the Jewish hardliners.)