Jews and Romans

Moving to wordpress

2011-10-11T09:35:00.001-04:00

To focus on 'The Gospel According to the Romans', I have moved blog activity to http://robinhl.com

Jewish Monotheism, Roman Polytheism. Atheism

2011-09-24T23:51:00.000-04:00

It is amusing to think that many religious Jews and Romans saw each other as atheists. The Jews felt that polytheism showed that Romans had no concept of the supreme Creator, and were therefore atheists. The Romans felt that Jews acknowledging only their one tribal god showed that Jews had no concept of the rich and diverse spiritual nature of the universe, and were therefore atheists.
So it goes.
The Jews had a point: the Roman gods didn't look like they were capable of creating a planet, yet alone an entire Universe. They weren't an orderly or spiritually uplifting bunch.
The Romans had a point: the Jews were claiming that there was only one God, and that He was their tribal god, and no one else's counted. That's a no-win situation for anyone but Jews.
Presumably a real atheist, whether Roman or Jew, didn't give a damn either way.

The Legacy of Genocide

2011-08-02T19:14:00.003-04:00

The problem with Deuteronomy 20 is that the religious requirement for the genocide of the previous inhabitants of Palestine leaves a cultural legacy that continues today with ongoing ethnic cleansing.

I see only two ways around it:

1) the corruption apology: agree that Moses was a prophet who was communicating God's word, but decide that the words we have today are only an unfortunate corruption of the original message, and God would not have called for genocide;

2) the monotheist apology: decide that the polytheism of the original Palestinians was the reason for calling for their slaughter (and a legitimate reason for uprisings against the Roman Empire), and that the Palestinians of today should be treated more equably because they are monotheists who - whether Muslim or Christian - recognize Moses as a prophet.

The first of these is in accord with Islam, but not acceptable to religious Jews. The second one might work for everyone, however. I don't know if anyone is advocating it within Israel, but I assume someone must have thought of it.

Whose Palestine?

2011-07-31T20:02:00.004-04:00

‎When the Romans incorporated Palestine into their Empire, they expected that - as with other conquests - the inhabitants would accept the new reality within a couple of years or a couple of generations, and would value the peace and stability and enhanced economic opportunities. The Romans had no intention of wiping out local inhabitants. They were happy to incorporate local gods into their pantheon, and expected the Jews to allow the worship of whatever anyone felt like worshiping. Many Jews were fine with this.

But religious Jews had a different attitude, religiously and historically. When they had conquered Palestine over a thousand years previously, their leader relayed a message from their god on how to treat the Palestinians of those days, a message that remains in the Bible to this day, in Deuteronomy 20, 16-18:

"But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:
That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God."

So the Romans saw Palestine as a province or kingdom or whatever, that anyone should be able to live in and follow their own customs so long as they paid taxes and didn't cause trouble; while the more religious of the Jews saw Palestine as their land alone, given to them along with a requirement to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against anyone else who wanted to live there.

There was no room for compromise. The resistance against the Western Occupation continued for a couple of centuries, until the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, and finally kicked the Jews out of the province.

New writings from the year dot

2011-03-29T20:07:00.003-04:00

So metal books of credit-card-sized lead sheets have turned up in Jordan... If they're genuine, they could be from the years immediately before or after Jesus. "The year 'dot'," some call it. And, written in coded ancient Hebrew, they could be about Judaism or - as some of the patterned drawings hint - they might be about very early Christianity.

How nice to think that there might still be new writing to be found, about those very early years of Christianity - back before Christianity began, back before St. Paul, back when Jesus was a Jewish rabbi.

Roman Religion and Success

2010-08-16T19:33:00.004-04:00

The quality of Roman culture changed dramatically over the many centuries of its growth and decline.

Growth was associated with (and arguably caused by) representative and elected government; a sense of probity, honor and self-sacrifice; and tolerant syncretist polytheism.

Decline was associated with (and arguably caused by) dictatorial monarchy; greed, corruption and dissolute behavior; and intolerant monotheism.

If historians tease these aspects apart, their books may be useful. However, many pick and choose qualities from different centuries in order to reinforce their own biases, saying for example that Rome's greatness was caused by its culture of self-sacrifice and its adoption of Christianity. But the former trait was part of Rome's Republican culture of growth, while the latter event occurred several hundred years later, and was part of the Imperial decline.

If historians pick and choose whatever qualities they want from among many pairs of opposites that were culturally prevalent in different centuries, unaware of the timescale they are working with and the cultural shifts that happened, they should shift their title from "historian" to "story-teller".

2010-06-12T20:28:00.000-04:00

The Gospel According to the Romans - ABNA 2010

2010-04-30T22:34:00.004-04:00

The Gospel According to the Romans is in this year's ABNA, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, and has now reached the Semifinals on the strength of a review by Publisher's Weekly and others.

The novel will now be read, assessed and reviewed by Penguin... we'll find out what they think at the end of May.

In the meantime, Amazon is offering a free download here.

Please leave a comment there, or here, or on its Facebook page.

Who was St. Matthew?

2009-12-29T17:17:00.003-05:00

Matthew Levi was a tax collector 'sitting at the receipt of custom' in Capernaum. By definition he was a Roman agent, appointed ultimately by Pontius Pilate.
The Romans faced Jewish uprisings every ten or twenty years in their Occupation of Palestine.
It was very risky for Jesus to invite Matthew, or to allow him, to become a disciple.
After Jesus led a failed uprising, trying to take over the Temple in Jerusalem at Passover, he was executed along with two Zealot leaders.
The Romans seem to have been fully prepared for the event. Presumably they had someone on the inside of Jesus' movement.
After Jesus' execution, the movement had no clear leadership and began to disintegrate. Matthew hung around long enough to observe this, and then disappears from the record.
He apparently told people he was going to "Ethiopia, south of the Caspian Sea". Ha ha, very funny.

ABNA 2009 Review of 'The Gospel According to the Roman Occupation'

2009-03-18T17:40:00.004-04:00

ABNA 2009: "The Gospel According to the Romans" made it to the Quarterfinals.

Here is one of the professional reviews:

"This is exceptionally erudite, flawless, and subversively delicious. The author blends an almost vicious comedy to some serious history for a compelling historical fiction. The characters are richly drawn, the narrative fierce, muscular, compelling. The author has mastery of prose and story and knows how to mold the English language into an empire of a story. The action and dialogue move the story forward as well as develop the characters. The setting is atmospheric with the era pitch perfect. This is a story I would like to read in full."

Surplus children

2008-06-18T09:49:00.002-04:00

Romans could never understand why Jews, Egyptians and Germans never 'exposed' children. I.e. why they never drowned or abandoned newborns that were unplanned, surplus, illegitimate or slightly deformed - but instead decided to raise them all. The Romans considered this very inefficient management. You could always buy, adopt or arrange a marriage for the child (or adult) you actually wanted to bring into your family.

Calendar Conflicts

2007-12-02T20:46:00.000-05:00

The Jews continued to use their religious calendar for everyday use under the Roman Occupation. Six days were just called 'First day', 'Second day', etc, with only the seventh day having its own name, and being special: the Sabbath. (The origin of the word is probably Babylonian, and dates from that Exile.) That gave them the seven-day week with a regular weekend that is so familiar to us that we tend to think of it as universal. As no work, including cooking, could be done on the Sabbath, the 6th day was the logical one for major food-shopping and food-preparation.

The Romans had neither weeks nor weekends. They had, as we do today, months of varying length that did not coincide with the moons, but they did not subdivide them into weeks. Instead, individual days were deemed lucky or unlucky, workdays or holidays, or holidays for some people but workdays for others, and other complications that required priests to post calendars in public places to tell people the quality of the individual days of the next year. The Kalends (first day of the month), Nones (fifth or seventh, depending on the month) and Ides (thirteenth or fifteenth) had names as being particularly important, and the other days were counted forwards or backwards from them, but you couldn't tell much about them just from that fact.

But the Romans did have a regular market day, standardized throughout the Empire, once every eight days. This was a legal requirement; and no legislation could come into effect until it had been publicly posted for three consecutive markets.

Unfortunately, throughout the Roman province of Palestine, that meant that once every seven market days no practicing Jews would show up because it was their Sabbath. Farmers wouldn’t sell food, craftsmen couldn’t buy supplies and wouldn’t sell products, Jews would refuse to shop for the next week, and the Romans couldn't buy anything from the locals. Then they each blamed the other for being inflexible!

Any Jews who chose to attend the market on those days were seen as renouncing their religion and becoming traitors to both their people and God – and the Zealots had no more qualms about killing them than about killing Romans.

Any Jews who refused to perform normal market duties on the Sabbath were seen as actively resisting the Roman attempt to bring uniformity, progress and stability to the whole Empire, and risked being labeled as hostile.

The attempt to impose the Roman calendar on the Jews was one of the key, and constant, flash-points, from the time of the Roman conquest in 63 BCE to the destruction of Jewish life in Palestine after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE.

Jews and Romans: contextualizing Jesus

2007-11-20T16:38:00.000-05:00

Let me explain this "contextualizing Jesus" phrase with a story:

My childhood involved 5 years of Church of England boarding school in Jamaica, followed by 5 more years of the same in England. From age 7 to 17, for most of the year, I had 15 minutes of chapel every day, with an hour on Sundays. Scripture classes in Jamaica covered the Old Testament, the New Testament, the description of the Temple, the differences between Sadducees and Pharisees, food, clothing, etc. But no mention of the Romans.

In my last year or so of school I also studied Ancient History, specifically the period in Rome from the Gracchi to Nero, covering the turbulent transition from Republic to Empire and the acquisition of all the provinces around the Mediterranean. But no mention of Jesus.

This is like telling the story of Osama Bin Laden without mentioning the Americans; and then telling the story of the US occupation of Iraq without mentioning Islam or religious insurgents!

Historians are apparently scared of dealing with historical realities that bear upon the creation of religions; the talking snakes and virgin births and going up to heaven in chariots don't mesh coherently with the sociopolitical narrative, so historians ignore them.

Priests and theologians are equally scared of contextualizing their stories, because the stories only make sense if they exist as detached fairytale bubbles, realities that are complete in themselves, self-referential, living in a preliterate world where gods and angels walk the earth and perform magic, where demons are the cause of illness or misfortune, and where life will somehow continue after the body wears out and dies.

The mission of this blog, then, is to explore the context of the life of Jesus:

the attempt by the Romans to subjugate the troublesome Jews in a strategically important part of the world, and bring them the benefits of international law, trade, peace, and education, while extracting wealth from them;

the attempt by the Jews to rid themselves of the ungodly forces of oppression and corruption and establish a theocratic kingdom for God's Chosen People.

This is the world that Jesus was born into. This was the daily reality throughout his life. There was a province-wide uprising shortly after his birth, led by Judas of Galilee, with the Galilean city of Sepphoris (Zippori, 4 miles from Nazareth) captured by the rebels and then burnt down by the Romans. When he was 12, Judas of Galilee led another uprising, as a result of which the Roman Legions crucified 2,000 Galilean insurgents.

This was the Galilee of Jesus' childhood. No responsible historian who discusses early Christianity can ignore the Roman Occupation, the Jewish insurgency, and their formative impact on the character, teachings and actions of Jesus.