What little is known to be true is that in the year of Yeshua’s birth there were riots in Jerusalem at the Passover and more than three thousand people were massacred, cut down by horsemen. The troops rode through the tent villages outside the Temple, slashing people to the ground and trampling them beneath hoofs. And following this barbarity, tens of thousands of Judaeans rose up, the garrison of the Antonia Fortress was attacked and long battles were fought for control of the city. Fire blackened the streets; Romans tumbled the cloisters of the Temple and looted its treasure; sieges were thrown up and destroyed again. And at the finish another two thousand of the defeated Israelites were crucified at a single time. It is impossible even to speculate as to how many men must have lost their lives in combat or fled into the deserts and the diaspora, if two thousand were taken alive, knowing they would face the agonizing state-terror of crucifixion.
Two thousand men were hanged and nailed from beams and trees, many surviving the suffering for days, cursed to cling to life without hope of release, in delirium and pain beyond measure. But large numbers conceal rather than express true horror. It was not two thousand men who were tortured to death, it was one man: a man who liked to stroke the palm of his wife’s hand, to touch a little thimble of flesh, which remained soft, though all the rest was calloused by work; a man who knew just how to make his imp children squeal like goslings when he tickled them; a man who spat pips for accuracy with his father when they ate fruit, and pissed for distance when he drank too much wine with his friends; a man who didn’t sing out of tune, only because he never knew what the tune was; a man who sobbed with joy on his wedding night, because he had not fully understood how great the gift he was to receive would be; a man with a laugh funnier than any joke and eyes warm as simmering soup. It was one man, only one man, to each family who lost one man; but this murder was repeated two thousand times.
And in the year of Yeshua’s birth, at least three Israelites declared themselves to be a messiah; declared themselves to be an anointed king, that is.
There was Simon of Peraea, who temporarily took the royal palace at Jericho and was crowned with a diadem. His men were eventually slaughtered by Roman soldiers and Simon himself beheaded in battle. Though some of his followers believed that, at the command of the angel Gabriel, Simon rose from the dead three days later.
And there was Athronges the Shepherd, who had four brothers, like Yeshua had, and was a tall man, like Yeshua would become, and was put to death by the Romans, as Yeshua would eventually be.
And there was Judas bar Hezekiah who seized Sepphoris, which lay just a sunset’s walk from Nazareth, where Yeshua and his family lived, their closest town. Judas spread the arms captured there among the multitudes that followed him. And in revenge the Romans burned Sepphoris to the ground and sold into slavery every surviving man, woman and child who dwelled there, perhaps twelve thousand souls. Doubtless the families in Nazareth all had friends and relations in Sepphoris — barely three miles away — who were massacred, or incinerated alive, or sold into slavery. The hills all about and humble Nazareth itself must have harboured that fraction who managed to escape alive.
In the year of Yeshua’s birth, two whole Roman legions with auxiliaries — twenty thousand war-brutalized soldiers — marched unstoppably through Galilee, destroying towns and villages and killing in such swathes that the soil itself wept blood. The night sky of Yeshua’s nativity was lit not by guiding stars but by burning flesh. Yet all this is curiously absent from the book called the Bible, with its strange tales of virgins and journeys and censuses.
There was a census; that much is true. But it was held when Yeshua was about ten years old. So it did not, of course, affect the place or the manner of his birth. The memory of it as an important event must have lingered, though, because the census was resented bitterly by the trampled people. It was conducted to assess the level of tribute the Judaeans would have to pay and it represented subjugation and humiliation, as well as fear of the crippling taxes that would inevitably fall heaviest on the poor: head tax; land tax; income tax; salt tax; meat tax; house tax; road tax; boundary tax; bridge tax; water tax; market tax; town tax. Roman levies were legion and the tax-farmers cruel, and the monies taken were shipped to the distant blasphemy of a demi-god emperor in a foreign state; there was no pretence that the funds were for the benefit of those people who were bled white. Rome was not big on pretence: its origin myths were of fratricide and rape; its first citizens, criminals and outcasts; its sacred animals, the wolf and the vulture; its murderous founder, a son of the god of war.
Another Judas: Judas the Galilean — a countryman of Yeshua — began the rebellion against the census. This Judas was a rabbi, learned in scripture and resolved to call no one master but Yahweh, even should that mean death. With a Pharisee, he founded the Zealots and once again the Israelites rose in vast numbers, against the census and against the Roman domination it represented.
They did not fail utterly, because they started a movement that survived. And they knew from the beginning that the odds were incalculably against them. Judaea was not a land Imperial Rome could ever allow to be free, sited as it was between the breadbasket of Egypt and the vital cedar forests of Syria. To push the Romans from Judaea, you needed almost to push them from the world. But the Zealot rebels were pious and righteous men and they fought in expectation that God was with them. They took their name from the Prophet Phinehas in the Book of Numbers who was ‘zealous’ for his God and defeated the entire Midianite army and five Midianite kings without losing a single comrade, because the God of Israel was on Phinehas’s side.
So the Zealots fought with every hope that their God would help those who helped themselves, as they were convinced that He had in the past. They believed that their bravery and piety would prevail, if God willed it.
They were, of course, annihilated.
Decimation is a term inadequate: it means just one in ten stolen, when probably some villages of Galilee were left all but devoid of men of fighting age after the Zealot rising. Perhaps in Yeshua’s little Nazareth there was a generation virtually missing as Yeshua was turning into a man. Many, maybe all, of the adolescents Yeshua had looked up to as a small boy were killed in battle or nailed alive.
Yeshua’s father might well have been an old man by the time of his birth — too old to fight — but many of Yeshua’s friends must have grown up fatherless from the rebellions that arose in that year. And all of them would have had kin and friends butchered in Sepphoris. And then another constellation of men was wiped out when Yeshua was ten, crucified in such numbers that, for years afterwards, carpenters built doorframes and well-hoists from trees that had once upborne convulsed and broken patriots.