Note: The purpose of this part is mostly to provide additional historical context of the Second Temple period in preparation for Part IV, where I focus my attention on the Pharisees and actually begin a deep-dive more akin to that of Part II. If you either already know the history or aren’t particularly interested, feel free to skim or move onto Part IV!

This is part three of a five-part series analyzing the saga of the crucifixion, the time of Jesus, and what it can teach us about conflicts we face in the modern day. Click here to begin at the introduction and also find the table of contents/bibliography.

But it was not just any place in Rome Jesus was arrested, but right within Jerusalem. Not just anywhere he started his ministry, but within the midst of Galilee. Just as he could trace his lineage all the way back to Jacob, so his context inseparably became that of Israel’s.

And it was in his time Israel found itself in the midst of an identity crisis: with no more temple, no more independence, the nation now had to grapple with the question of what it meant to be God’s chosen people. How essential is the temple to worship? Is there an Oral Torah? Can Jewish identity only be realized through political independence?

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Contrary to the assumptions of many Christians today, the Jews of Jesus’ time were far from united in their answers to these questions. As much as we love to joke about church infighting today, the environment in which Jesus found himself was not so different. Among the factions (Abramson 2020) you had:

• The Sadducees (Abramson 2022b), who traced their heritage back to the priest class of old. Their practice was at the heart of the temple, keeping the old rites, hierarchies, and scriptures. But in order to maintain their aristocratic status, they favored assimilating to the surrounding Roman culture politically, culturally, and spiritually. They held to the written Torah but not nearly as strongly to the Oral Torah. By extent, they also rejected a lot of the supernatural beliefs present in Jewish tradition: resurrection of the dead, angels, etc.

• You also had The Zealots, revolutionaries who resented Roman rule and believed Jewish identity could only be maintained through political sovereignty. They were a loose group, for whom political and religious motivations often blended. They believed Roman rule had to be overthrown at all costs, and a Messiah would come to lead them in their liberation. To them, the position of the Sadducees and Pharisees did not go far enough, as even the Pharisee separatism did not directly challenge Roman rule.

Also to be discussed later on in Part IV are the Pharisees:

• The Pharisees were the main foil to the Sadducees (Abramson 2022a), revivalist leaders who often represented the Jewish masses as opposed to the priestly elite. They saw the Sadducees as having compromised Jewish identity through their assimilation. Whatever claim they had to the temple and ritual was compromised by their capitulation. As a result they separated (their name, פרושים, literally means “to separate”) from the grounds of the temple, from Roman culture, and from “impurity” into the streets. They preached the oral tradition, putting an emphasis on halakhah not just in the temple but in daily life. They saw this tradition as instrumental towards preserving Jewish identity and separating it from the surrounding Roman culture.

3.1. The Sadducees

Of course, despite their disagreements, no matter how bitter the fighting got, they were still all Jews in the end: bound to the same God and bound to the same promise. The God of the Zealots, Sadducees, and Pharisees was still – unlike the Roman gods – wholly perfect, wholly indivisible, wholly transcendent. They disagreed on the meaning of identity, the meaning of approach, but neither of these factions questioned the link between Jewish identity and Jewish law. The hope of the Zealots, the tradition of the Pharisees, and the lineage of the Sadducees all found their roots in those fateful words spoken unto Moses. Israel was to be a “treasure unto [God] above all people”, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. (Exodus 19:5-6 KJV)

The laws delivered upon Sinai – which comprise the heart of the Torah – weave together notions of law, justice, and identity. When it is declared “justice, and only justice you shall follow” (Deuteronomy 16:20 RSV), it is done so right in the middle of Moses’ delivery of the law. Similarly in Leviticus, we see how God ties the keeping of his commands to Israel’s own separation (Leviticus 20:22-24). You are not to eat the same food as the others, not to marry their women, not to spend the seventh day as they do, not to worship their Gods. But you are also to not take bribes, not bear false witness, not make use of dishonest scales. Israel’s justification is to be in its separation, and its separation defined in terms of its pursuit of justice. To the Jew, the Law is the expression of the connection; under a system of halakhah, tradition, guidance, and law all become synonymous.

Where Israel failed to keep these commandments, one need only turn to the Book of Judges to see how easily adopting the customs of the surrounding nations became losing identity, losing the law, and losing God. (Judges 2:10-19) But no longer would there be any judges to rescue the people. No more prophets. No more kings. Israel had no sovereignty under Rome, neither did it before Rome. Neither this generation, nor their fathers’ generation, nor the generation before that could remember anything resembling national sovereignty. The throne went not to a David, but to a Herod: a puppet of Rome rather than a King of Jews. The old temple was reduced to rubble, the construction of the new one dependent on the patronage of Israel’s conquerors. So in this period – where even the moment of crisis, the time of Lamentations – had long been forgotten, where is the Jew to find his grounding?

For the Sadducees, the answer was the temple. As long as Israel had its temple, the temple they worked so hard since the time of Cyrus to rebuild, then that site in the center of Jerusalem could stand as the center of Jewish identity. They had the law, they had the rituals, they had the authority all of which they could insist upon: and as long as they kept it within the temple walls, they need not worry about the Romans giving them grief. Because of this logic, Israel’s own priests felt un-threatened by the forces of Hellenization. They readily accepted the Roman rule, culture, and ways of living because through doing so it would ensure good relations and thus the preservation of the temple. As long as Israel maintained its rituals, its Levitical laws, and its hierarchies, the tradition would carry. They took great pride in their lineage and connections, seeing themselves as the heirs of the Maccabean revolt which liberated Israel from the Greeks all those years ago.

Their identity, their religion, their status, all stood upon the rock of the temple. But even the most solid rock finds itself gradually eroded by the forces of war and decay. What is to happen when this temple – said to be the dwelling place of God (1 Kings 8:12-13, Exodus 25:8) – can no longer house him?

It was the Romans who granted protection to the temple, and the Romans who took it away. The purpose of all of the Sadducees’ appeasement was to to maintain favor; so it only followed that when Israel lost favor, the Romans would ensure they lose everything else too. The Sadducees, cloistered in their chambers, continued to ignore the voices of the Jewish masses who felt humiliated and erased in the face of Roman rule. With their kapos incapable of keeping a lid on the revolts, the Romans took matters into their own hands and set Jerusalem ablaze.

No more temple, no more scrolls, no more rituals, no more Sadducees. So completely and thoroughly annihilated that our only records of them come from their enemies. Even the picture I painted here – the picture history paints – is one framed by Pharisees and Christians. We’ll never fully know their perspective or see them speak for themselves, but to an extent the silence speaks for itself. We’ll never hear for ourselves the Sadduccees in their own words, precisely because whatever rock they stood upon was lost to the sands of time. Israel was to be a treasure unto the Lord, forever and ever (Psalm 135:4, 2 Samuel 7:12-16), so how can we speak of its soul in terms of wood and stone (Deuteronomy 4:28)? The only conclusion we can come to is that the Sadducees were wrong: wrong about identity, wrong about eternity, wrong about God.

3.2. The Zealots

Nothing I have said so far is new or the product of hindsight: this exact debate and these very ideas were actively going on at the time, perfectly within earshot of those involved. Echoing those criticisms of the Sadducees were the Zealots: revolutionaries who took the exact opposite approach to Rome. For them, the Jew could not co-exist with Hellenic society, much less integrate into it. The very fact of Roman rule was the threat: for what good was a temple when its people did not even own the ground upon which it stood? The Jews may have been free to worship, but the Romans were also plenty free to bring their own statues and idols onto temple grounds. To the zealot, domination was political, and land was freedom: not just merely the freedom to occupy, but to freedom to rule. If the Jews were to live in Jerusalem, it had to be on their own terms. For a Jew to be a Jew, he needed political independence, a nation to call his own. And to this end, the Zealots were willing to make any sacrifice of themselves and their own people.

They set fire to the country’s food stockpiles in order to induce starvation and revolts. They invited Israel’s enemies into her borders so that their opponents could be purged. (Eisen 2014) They inflicted a great deal of suffering, but no price is too high for independence. Once they won, it would all be worth it.

So, they continued time and time again to wage war against the Romans, each time finding themselves ruthlessly crushed. But they would pick themselves back up again, with an iron resolve and a renewed hope. Not just any revolutionary hope, as raw math gave them no chance against the world’s greatest empire. No, instead, it was a messianic hope. Isaiah spoke of a hero that would restore Israel. To stand in the midst of this moment, experiencing this humiliation but also hearing these words of redemption and liberation, how could one not be moved? Feeling this, the Zealots picked their arms back up one final time.

Leading the revolt would be Simon ben Kosiba (also known as Bar Kokhba), a great military leader who claimed to be the Messiah. Under the leadership of Bar Kokhba, the Jews managed to retake large parts of the country, including Jerusalem. As they beat back the Romans again and again, the fervor only grew stronger. (Jewish Virtual Library 2017). With their newfound independence, the Jews would minting coins proclaiming “year one of the redemption of Israel”. (Lendering 2001) If the Sadducees found their salvation in pure ritual stripped of any political relevance, for the Zealots justice was politics. The Zealots avoided the Sadducee mistake of taking refuge in symbols without appreciating what gives those symbols power.

In this sense, they were ahead of their time: we have seen these motifs recur with the various modern politics of revolution and national liberation. The tale of Exodus has served not just as an inspiration to the Jews it was written about, but the various other peoples throughout history who have come to see themselves as oppressed and colonized. Religion, piety, justice, these are not concepts which can be wholly individualized or divorced from the surrounding context. God created men not as souls inhabiting an abstract plane of existence, but as bodies in a world. We engage with these concepts not just via some asetic or otherworldly sphere, but within our lives. The slave in finding freedom comes to recognize justice as something personal, and the terms on which he is raised, the terms on which he worships, the terms on which he relates to other men are all deeply tied to his historical and political existence.

But even with all this in mind, one cannot find refuge from the historical within the historical. All wars have to come to an end, all strongmen eventually die, and here was no different. The revolution died with Bar Kokhba, zealotry died when its moment came to pass. The historian who wishes to study this saga is not met with a story of divine triumph but one of mortal math. The Romans had the numbers, the Israelites didn’t, simple as that. The tales they may have thought back to – where Gideon marches with an army of three-hundred or where Jesse’s youngest son bests Goliath – were stories of redemption not because the Israelites became strong again, but the opposite. They repented, recognizing their weakness and thus dependence upon God. This is the pattern present within the book of Judges: just as we often find ourselves turning back to the parts where God continually saves Israel, equally recurring is the are the moments in which Israel is brought to destruction.

And this is the blindspot for many theologies of liberation. When we speak of justice, we are speaking of something transcendent: it is personal, but it is also eternal. Many kings, many nations, many wars have come and gone: some have had better outcomes than others. But in each and every case, none provided the guarantee or refuge of justice. There is no principle by which one can truly speak of the events of the revolts as synonymous with Israel’s redemption: the latter implies a finality, an eternity whereas the former lasted approximately three years.

When someone like Malcolm X speaks of land as the basis of all justice, it is worth asking ourselves if that is really the case:

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is world-wide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution — that’s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia. Revolution is in Africa. And the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. (X 1963)

Speaking now years later, in these various countries across Africa, across Asia, across Latin America – countries which have won their independence and their land – have they realized these ideals? We continue to see corruption, we continue to see violence, we continue to see repression, and we continue to see inequality. The direct domination of the colonial powers has found itself supplanted by the indirect domination of the global market: independence only goes so far when the world is connected. Local elites are not inherently any less willing to exploit and abuse their people than foreign ones: national bonds only mean so much.

As soon as we hear someone mention the word “liberation” today, we must listen carefully and ask at least one pointed question. Not the traditional question, “liberation from what force, oppression, or slavery?” The problem no longer lies there. Rather, we must ask “liberate… for whose benefit?” Who will be the new oppressor, the new master? We must systematically destroy the childish ideology that follows this pattern: “Where you have a dictator and an oppressed people, kill the dictator to liberate the people. They will organize themselves and become their own masters. They will come of age and enter into their freedom” (at this point, since the unexamined goal has been attained, no reason remains for trying to ascertain what really happened). (Ellul 1979, 58)

While it is important to keep in mind how human beings are influenced by their situation, the reverse also holds true. Those systems of exploitation, domination, repression, whatever have you – are products of human nature. The fact that we can even draw a connection between what the Jews went through in antiquity and what has occurred in modernity should serve as a reminder that historical moments are not unique. Wicked governance is not the product of any one nation or period, but will exist in some form or another as long as human beings exist. Liberation theology has a tendency to lose sight of the fact that salvation is ultimately salvation from sin:

The paralytic needs forgiveness. We must not be dishonest at this point and try to transpose this term onto a sociopolitical plane. Jesus calls the others “sick,” after all (v. 12). These people do not just have the reputation of being ill: they are ill. Tax collectors are thieves and exploiters of the poor. They harm others. The issue is not only social and moral. These people are not judged just by others to be sinners: Jesus also has no doubt they are sinners.

He does not say to the paralytic or to the prostitutes that they have every reason to be what they are, that He accepts their actions, etc. No: to the paralytic He announces forgiveness (which he truly needs, so that we can perfectly well use the term sin!); to the others Jesus declares He is the physician and the one who calls. And in Israel, after all, call and vocation had a definite spiritual meaning. “Sin” is not an ordinary word Jesus uses for convenience’ sake. The Bible strictly defines the term, and nothing would authorize us to claim that in this context Jesus deviates from biblical usage, since He takes the position of God, who forgives sins. In no way does Jesus transpose sin onto the sociopolitical realm. He simply declares that He forgives sin in all its dimensions (including the political and social). (Ellul 1979, 67)

Whatever virtue we may choose to assign to resistance for its own sake, whatever catharsis they may have gained by fighting back, one thing is undeniable: Israel was not restored. This cannot be the essence of an eternal justice.