Yet even Agrippa struggled to manage Jerusalem’s tensions: he appointed three successive high priests in two years and acted against the Jewish Christians. This may have coincided with Claudius’ crackdown on the Jewish Christians in Rome – they were expelled for disorders ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’ (Christ). ‘Now about this time’, says the Acts of the Apostles, ‘Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church,’ and had James beheaded (not Jesus’ brother but the disciple of that name). He also arrested Peter, whom he planned to execute after Passover. Peter somehow survived: the Christians hailed this as a miracle but other sources suggest that the king simply released him, possibly as a gift to the crowds.
Agrippa’s making of emperors had gone to his head, for he called a summit of local kings to Tiberias without asking Roman permission. The Romans were alarmed and ordered the kings to disperse. Claudius halted the building of any more Jerusalem fortifications. Afterwards, Agrippa was holding court like a Greek god-king in gold-encrusted robes in the forum of Caesarea when he was taken ill with stomach pains: ‘he was eaten of worms’, says the Acts of the Apostles. The Jews sat in sackcloth praying for his recovery but in vain. Agrippa had the charisma and sensitivity to conciliate Jewish moderates, Jewish fanatics and Romans; there died the only man who might have saved Jerusalem. 50
HEROD AGRIPPA II: NERO’S FRIEND
The king’s death unleashed riots. Though his son and namesake Agrippa II was only seventeen, Claudius wanted to give him the kingdom, but he was advised that the boy was too young to govern his inflammable inheritance. Instead the emperor restored direct rule by Roman procurators and granted the late Agrippa’s brother, King Herod of Chalcis, the right to appoint high priests and manage the Temple. For the next twenty-five years, Jerusalem was run in an ambiguous partnership between Roman procurators and Herodian kings but they could not soothe the turbulence caused by a succession of prophetic charlatans, ethnic conflicts between Greeks, Jews and Samaritans, and the widening gap between the rich, pro-Roman grandees and the poorer, religious Jews.
The Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes, led by Jesus’ brother James, and their so-called presbyteroi or elders, survived in Jerusalem where the original disciples worshipped as Jews in the Temple. But Jesus was far from the last of the preachers who challenged Roman order: Josephus lists the eruption of one pseudo-prophet after another, most of them executed by the Romans.
The procurators did not help matters. Like Pilate, their reaction to this efflorescence of prophets was to massacre their followers while squeezing the province for profit. One year, at Passover in Jerusalem, a Roman soldier exposed his bottom to the Jews, causing a riot. The procurator sent in soldiers who started a stampede in which thousands suffocated in the narrow streets. A few years later, when fighting broke out between Jews and Samaritans, the Romans crucified many Jews. Both sides appealed to Rome. The Samaritans would have succeeded but young Herod Agrippa, who was being educated in Rome, won over Claudius’ powerful wife, Agrippina: the emperor not only backed the Jews but ordered the Roman tribune at fault to be humiliated in Jerusalem and then executed. Like his father with Caligula, Agrippa II was popular not only with Claudius but with his heir, Nero. When his uncle Herod of Chalcis died, Agrippa was made king of that Lebanese fiefdom with special powers over the Temple in Jerusalem.
In Rome, the now senile Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina,* supposedly with a plateful of mushrooms. The new teenaged emperor Nero awarded Agrippa II more territories in Galilee, Syria and Lebanon. Agrippa gratefully renamed Caesarea Philippi, his capital, Neronias and advertised his warm relations with Nero on his coins with the legend ‘Philo-Caesar’. However, Nero’s procurators tended to be corrupt and clumsy. One of the worst was Antonius Felix, a venal Greek freedman who, writes the historian Tacitus, ‘practised every kind of cruelty and lust, wielding the power of a king with the instincts of a slave’. As he was the brother of the secretary to Claudius and (for a time) to Nero, the Jews could no longer appeal to Rome. King Agrippa’s scandalous sisters personified the corruption of the elite. Drusilla, who ‘exceeded all women in beauty’, was married to the Arab king Azizus of Emesa, but Felix ‘conceived a passion for her. She being unhappy and wishing to escape the malice of her sister Berenice’ eloped with Felix. Berenice, who had been Queen of Chalcis (married to her uncle), left her latest husband, the King of Cilicia, to live with her brother: Roman rumours suggested incest. Felix milked Judaea for money while ‘a new species of bandit’ known as the Sicarii (after their short Roman daggers – the origin of the word ‘sickle’) started to assassinate Jewish grandees at festivals in the middle of Jerusalem – their first success was the killing of an ex-high priest. Faced with ethnic slaughter and repeated ‘pseudo-prophets’, Felix struggled to keepthe peace while enriching himself.
Amid this apocalyptic turbulence, the small sect of Jesus was now split between its Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and its gentile followers in the wider Roman world. Now the most dynamic radical of all Jesus’ followers, who more than anyone else would forge a new world religion, returned to plan the future of Christianity.
PAUL OF TARSUS: THE CREATOR OF CHRISTIANITY
Jerusalem was recovering from her latest spasm of apocalyptic violence. An Egyptian Jew had just led a mob up the Mount of Olives, announcing, with echoes of Jesus, that he was going to bring down the walls and take Jerusalem. The pseudo-prophet tried to storm the city, but the Jerusalemites joined the Romans in repelling his followers. Felix’s legions then killed most of them.51 There was a manhunt for the ‘sorcerer’ himself, as Paul arrived in the city he knew well.
Paul’s father was a Pharisee who prospered enough to become a Roman citizen. He sent his son – born about the same time as Jesus but in Cilicia (today’s Turkey) – to study in the Temple in Jerusalem. When Jesus was crucified, Saul, as he then was, supported the ‘threatenings and slaughter’: he held the cloaks of those who stoned Stephen ‘and was consenting to his death’. A tent-maker, this Greek-speaking Roman Pharisee served as an agent of the high priest until, around ad 37, on the road to Damascus, he experienced his ‘apocalypse’: ‘Suddenly there shined round him a light from heaven’ and he heard a voice ‘saying unto him: Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ The risen Christ commissioned him to become a thirteenth apostle to preach the good news to the gentiles.
James and the Christians in Jerusalem were understandably suspicious of this new convert, but Paul felt compelled to teach his message with all his obessional energy: ‘Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.’ Finally, ‘James, the Lord’s brother’ accepted this new colleague. For the next fifteen years, this irrepressible firebrand travelled the east, dogmatically preaching his own version of Jesus’ Gospel that fiercely rejected the exclusivity of the Jews. ‘The Apostle to Gentiles’ believed that ‘for our sake’ God had made Jesus ‘a sin offering, who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God’. Paul focused on the Resurrection, which he saw as the bridge between humanity and God. Paul’s Jerusalem was the Heavenly Kingdom, not the real Temple; his ‘Israel’ was any follower of Jesus, not the Jewish nation. He was, in some ways, strangely modern, for, contrary to the harsh ethos of the ancient world, he believed in love, equality and inclusiveness: Greeks and Jews, women and men, all were one, all could achieve salvation just by faith in Christ. His letters dominate the New Testament, forming a quarter of its books. His vision was boundless, for he wished to convert all people.