Politics, Conflict, and Movements in First-Century Palestine

By Richard A. Horsley

This volume brings together groundbreaking essays that laid the foundations of several of Horsley's later works. The initial aims of these essays were, first, to ferret out evidence from our sources, primarily from the histories of Josephus, evidence for the lives of ordinary people living in Judean and Galilean villages. A second purpose was to explore as precisely as possible the fundamental conflictual division between the Roman, Herodian, and high priestly rulers in Palestine and the Judean and Galilean villagers they ruled. A third purpose was to explore more particularly how the popular and scribal opposition to the rulers was manifested in a remarkable diversity of movements and their leaders. And the fourth purpose, entailed in the first two, was to wriggle out from under some of the controlling constructs of New Testament/biblical studies that had been hiding the considerable complexity of the historical context. This was necessary even to begin to discern more precisely the fundamental political--economic--religious conflict between the rulers and the villagers manifested in a diversity of social movements attested in the sources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Sep 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666722543

Richard A. Horsley

Richard A. Horsley is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His numerous publications include these recent works from Cascade Books: Empowering the People: Jesus, Healing, and Exorcism (2022), You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (2021), Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine, 2nd ed. (2021), Jesus and Magic (2014), and Text and Tradition in Performance and Writing (2013).

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Introduction

In this series of articles published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was pursuing four interrelated purposes:

One purpose was to ferret out evidence from our sources, primarily from the histories of Josephus, evidence for the lives of ordinary people living in Judean and Galilean villages, in particular their collective actions of resistance and revolt against their Roman and Jerusalem rulers, from the death of Herod in 4 BCE to the great revolt in 66–70 CE. This evidence had been obscured underneath the controlling synthetic constructs of New Testament studies and Jewish history of the Second Temple Period. What was needed was a more careful and critical analysis of the historical sources, particularly of the histories of the wealthy Judean priest who despised the peasants living in the countryside (chora) of Judea and Galilee.

A second purpose was to explore as precisely as possible the fundamental conflictual division between the Roman, Herodian, and high priestly rulers in Palestine and the Judean and Galilean villagers they ruled. The Romans had established political control of this structural division by military conquest (and the threat or reconquest) and maintained control in indirect rule through the Herodian kings and Jerusalem high priestly aristocracy that they imposed. The structural conflict was exacerbated by economic extractions from the villagers; the Jerusalem high priests collected the tribute for Caesar in addition to taking taxes and tithes and (supposedly forbidden) interest on loans from the villagers. In response, the villagers, who comprised the vast majority of the population, periodically mounted active collective opposition to their rulers, most tellingly in the widespread revolts in 4 BCE and again in 66–70 CE that frame this period. Far from acting as representatives and leaders of their subjects, the high priests as well as the Herodian kings, owing their positions of power and privilege to the Romans, almost always acted in complicity with their imperial patrons. This led to further complications as some circles of scribes/sages trained for service in the administration of the temple-state also mounted active opposition to the rulers.

This fundamental division and its complication should be of particular interest to the field of ancient Jewish history because it led directly to the great revolt and devastating Roman re-conquest of Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. It should be of particular interest to the field of New Testament studies because it was the immediate context of the mission of Jesus of Nazareth and the ensuing rapid expansion of movements of Jesus-loyalists.

A third purpose of these articles was to explore more particularly how the popular and scribal opposition to the rulers was manifested in a remarkable diversity of movements and their leaders. Thus, as social-economic conditions for the villagers deteriorated, desperate peasants formed bands of brigands, which is common in traditional agrarian societies. More significantly, in the widespread peasant revolts that frame the period and in the decades in between, the people formed movements of renewal and rebellion that took social forms distinctive to Israelite tradition.

The fourth purpose, entailed in the first two, was to wriggle out from under some of the controlling constructs of New Testament/biblical studies that had been hiding the considerable complexity of the historical context. This was necessary even to begin to discern more precisely the fundamental political–economic–religious conflict between the rulers and the villagers manifested in a diversity of social movements attested in the sources. Most obvious among these constructs was the standard old synthetic construct of the Zealots as a long-standing Jewish sect that supposedly agitated for rebellion against the Romans until it touched off the great revolt, a construct that was derived from a less-than-critical reading especially of Josephus. In the course of these articles, however, it was also necessary to challenge some of the more central controlling constructs of New Testament studies.

The Context in New Testament Studies in the 1960s and 1970s

New Testament studies developed as a branch of Christian theology. The field focused on interpreting the sacred texts of Christianity. And insofar as it was a division of Christian theology its controlling constructs and interpretive apparatus were derived from Christian theology.

Central in the field’s agenda was to ascertain the scriptural basis of key doctrines such as Christology, soteriology, and (since the late nineteenth century) eschatology. In short, New Testament studies dealt primarily in ideas. Until recently the field devoted little attention to social context, either of the texts or of modern interpreters. Developed mainly in modern Western European countries, New Testament studies accepted the modern reduction of Christianity to a religion confined mainly to individual faith or belief. The field of New Testament studies or Christian origins was aware of historical development, but conceived it in ideological terms: Christianity was understood as a more universal and spiritual religion that originated in—but superseded—the supposedly more parochial and legalistic religion of Judaism. Since Christianity had rapidly become Gentile, its sacred texts written in Greek, New Testament studies focused mainly on the ideas of the Greek/Hellenistic world as the cultural context for understanding ideas in the texts of early Christianity. Nevertheless, because of Christianity’s origins in Judaism, it was of some importance in the Christian theological curriculum to know something of the Jewish background of late Judaism in intertestamental texts as well the earlier texts of the Old Testament.

Lest this seem a caricature of New Testament studies, it is my best recollection of the field into which I was introduced in theological school in the early 1960s and then doctoral studies in the field in the late 1960s. The interpretive apparatus of New Testament studies consisted of an interrelated set of synthetic intellectual constructs.¹ Most basic of course were Judaism and Christianity that in turn consisted of an interlocking net of other intellectual constructs or doctrines. Theological students and more advanced doctoral students were trained to discern the terms, symbols, phrases, lines, or statements in the Scriptures that attested or expressed these constructs or particular aspects of them. The Scripture, of course, had long since been understood as divided into separate fragments coded into chapter-and-verse.² Because the fragmentation of scriptural texts had become a deeply ingrained reading-habit in New Testament/ biblical studies, other texts such as intertestamental texts were codified and read in the same way, that is, as separable verses, terms, lines, or statements.

The most significant example of how the interrelated synthetic constructs were expressed and attested in separate verses or phrases of Scripture is the synthetic construct of the Messiah, insofar as Jesus had become the Messiah (christos in Greek), as expressed in numerous phrases and statements in the New Testament. A central aspect of the doctrine of Christology was that Jesus had fulfilled the Jewish expectations of the Messiah that were expressed in key phrases and statements in the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms and the Prophets. In these text-fragments it was revealed that the Messiah was (expected to be) the divine Son of God, the son of David, who had been the original Anointed One, the divinely begotten King whose reign would be forever. These Jewish expectations, of course, were somewhat problematic insofar as the Messiah that Jews expected was too militant and violent, whereas Jesus Christ was more spiritual, the Prince of Peace.

Jesus Christ was not only the fulfilment of the Jewish expectations of the Messiah; he was the final fulfillment of those expectations. In this connection another, integrally related construct had developed in New Testament studies: that of eschatological. Eschatology (Greek-derived term) became the Christian doctrine of last things, final in the fulfillment of expectations. Insofar as eschatological was closely associated with the Messiah, messianic and eschatological became virtually synonymous, with messianic (and perhaps even eschatological) implying that the Messiah was involved in some way.

Another construct that was closely related was the eschatological prophet. Verses in the New Testament present Jesus explicitly or implicitly as (a/the) prophet. Accordingly, New Testament studies had found statements or phrases in the Old Testament that expressed a Jewish expectation of an/the eschatological prophet. It was official Judean doctrine that the succession of genuine prophets had ceased after Malachi (1 Macc 14:41; Josephus, Against Apion 1.40–42). But Moses had promised that God would send a prophet like me (Deut 18:15). And insofar as Elijah had been taken up into the heavens, Judaism had come to expect that Elijah would return (as supposedly in Mal 4:5–6 [MT 3:23–24]; Sir 48:10). Insofar as Jesus had been the fulfilment of both the expectations of the Messiah and of the eschatological prophet and the two had become closely linked in certain early Christian text-fragments, the eschatological prophet was closely associated with the Messiah and was often virtually fused into New Testament Christology.

Yet another construct closely related to and often virtually synonymous with eschatological, "apocalyptic/apocalypticism, had become most prominent in New Testament studies. In the twentieth century this highly synthetic construct came to dominate interpretation of many intertestamental Judean texts, of the Gospels and Paul’s letters, and of Jesus’ teaching and mission. The discovery of new documents in the late nineteenth century that seemed similar to previously known texts such as Daniel 7–12 that had been categorized as apocalyptic," led to the development of this construct from phrases and images taken from a variety of texts that were taken somewhat literally. In the final chapter of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer laid out a highly composite portrayal of the end of the world pieced together not only from fragments of Judean texts but also passages in Paul’s letters and the Gospels. He insisted that apocalypticism pervaded ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

Then Rudolf Bultmann, who became one of the most influential New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, systematized the supposedly pervasive apocalypticism in an apocalyptic scenario of three major features of the End of the World that Jews, including Jesus and his followers, supposedly expected to happen imminently: the Great Tribulation; the Last Judgment; and the Resurrection of the dead (to a heavenly paradise).³ The apocalypticism that (supposedly) pervaded Judaism and New Testament texts expected not a change in historical social-political circumstances but a cosmic catastrophe that would destroy the present world.⁴

The field of New Testament studies and, to an extent, the field of Jewish history as well, thought of ancient Judaism as focused on the study and keeping of the Law/Torah. The principal sources for this construct were the extensive rabbinic tractates of the Mishnah, Tosefta, Babylonian Talmud, and Jerusalem Talmud. We were taught that to protect (the keeping of) the commands of the Torah, the rabbis built a fence around the Torah by formulating more particular rules and regulations that applied the commandments to particular contingencies. This rabbinic elaboration on law-keeping was projected backward into Judaism at the time of Jesus, assumed to be happening, in a kind of essentialist construction in which especially the Pharisees were already engaged in such legalism and casuistry. Passages in the Gospels appeared to fit this construction of Judaism in which the Pharisees are the principal spokespersons for the legalistic specification of the Law in application to multiple contingencies.

Unclear in its relation to the obsession with law-keeping, Judaism was also understood to be comprised primarily of different sects or philosophies: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Fourth Philosophy." This part of the construction of Judaism was derived from brief summary accounts of the Judean historian Josephus (and the Alexandrian Judean theologian Philo).⁵ Again the focus was on ideas: the principal doctrines of the sects were different conceptions of free-will vs. determinism, and of the afterlife, resurrection of the dead, or immortality of the soul. In this connection there appeared at least minimal mention of the relative social position of the sects in Josephus’ brief accounts: the Sadducees were closely associated with the high priestly aristocracy; the Pharisees were experts in the Law who were supposedly influential with the people; and the Essenes were rigorous ascetics withdrawn from normal societal interaction.⁶ The conceptualizations of these sects were, like Jewish expectations of the Messiah and apocalypticism, intellectual constructs based on brief fragments from much later texts and involved a good deal of speculative reasoning. Most extreme of all was the synthetic construct of the Zealots as the sect that advocated armed revolt against the Romans, based on Josephus’ editorializing (Ant. 18.6–9) following his account of the Fourth Philosophy that resisted payment of the tribute to Caesar in 6 CE (Ant. 18.3–4, 23–24).

Extra-Curricular Activity

In our exploration of a set of relatively abstract theological constructs expressed and attested by verses and phrases from Scripture, virtually no attention was given to the people who may have believed or thought in terms of these ideas. Ironically enough, the New Testament field was giving virtually no attention to the ordinary people who were not aristocratic priests or had not acquired advanced training in the Law or had withdrawn into enclaves of asceticism away from societal interaction. From tutorials and courses in my undergraduate history major, I had learned that history is more than what people in power were doing. Having moved well beyond the old kings and wars focus, historians were dealing with what was happening at every level of a society. New Testament studies, however, seemed to be focusing on a narrow level of texts and ideas.

But this was the 1960s, in which events and movements outside theological and graduate schools were commanding students’ attention and often involvement (while the faculty was relatively clueless). From the beginning of theological school, I was heavily involved in the civil rights movement, organizing residents of a segregated housing project in Boston and engaging in sit-ins in North Carolina (one of which resulted in a week-long experience of conditions inside a town jail.) Living and interacting with people who had been penned-in all their lives led to more of an acute sense of the differences in life-experiences and perspectives between ordinary people and the cultural elite teaching and learning in the university. Also, having spent a year studying in Germany while living in a small attic room in a village just outside of Tübingen, a month living in mountain villages in Austria and hiking in the Alps, and another month driving through villages in the Balkan countryside, I had gained at least an elementary sense of what village life was like.

In the later 1960s, while in graduate school, I joined students from other universities organizing against the US war of counterinsurgency in Viet Nam where the US military was dropping napalm bombs to defoliate the forests in which the Viet Cong and their peasant supporters were hiding. Many of the MDiv students (for whom I was then the TA in the New Testament department) were faced with personal-ethical crises: whether to resist the draft, which might require escape into Canada. Students gradually came to realize that much of the university’s annual budget came from the US Defense Department and other agencies of the US government and that in serious ways the university was complicit in US military engagement around the world. These events and movements could not help but provoke questions about who believed certain ideas and how intellectual and cultural constructs in effect determined people’s lives and actions.

Although the dominant approach in graduate training in New Testament studies was narrowly-focused word-study, I found it much more compelling to read whole texts, such as a Gospel or an Epistle, and sustained narratives, such as the histories of Josephus. At that time in the fields of New Testament studies and ancient Judaism, the multivolume works of Josephus were an underutilized historical source, and it would be another decade or two before critical reading of Josephus’ histories developed. This seemed strange insofar as he had been heavily involved in the events of the great revolt that he recounts as an eyewitness in the Jewish War and the Life, and the events he recounts in the later books of the Antiquities would have been relatively fresh in his memory. His extended narratives focused on the lives and interactions of the ruling elites, such as the Judean high priests and the Herodian kings that the Romans set in place to control the people and extract payment of taxes and the tribute. But at points he also mentioned the people of Jerusalem (the demos) who were frequently in conflict with the Herodians and/or the high priests (the wealthy, the most distinguished, the principal ones); and occasionally he even mentioned the countryside (chora) and the hundreds of villages in which the vast majority of the people lived. It was clear that, as a wealthy priest himself, he despised the city-people and especially the villagers, both of whom he mentions when they made trouble for their rulers.

It seemed clear, however, that in using Josephus’ histories as historical sources, it was necessary to read past or through his hostile rhetoric about the Jerusalemites and groups of villagers and to focus on his descriptions of their collective actions, usually of resistance.⁷ With this approach I was discovering descriptions of a whole new and much more complicated concrete historical context of the lives of ancient Judeans and Galileans who were subjected to rulers imposed by the Roman warlords such as Pompey and Julius Caesar who had recently conquered eastern Mediterranean areas such as Palestine. According to Josephus’ accounts, moreover, the Judean and Galilean villagers and often the people of Jerusalem and even some of their revered teachers, experts in the laws, resisted their rulers’ control relatively often. That is, Josephus was supplying information about the relative social positions of the Judean and Galilean people and their rulers, the primary division being between the people and their rulers, complicated by the frequent conflicts between the Jerusalemites and the high priestly aristocrats installed by the Romans. His descriptions, moreover, suggested that some of the popular movements took social forms distinctive to Israelite tradition—although these could only be discerned by those already familiar with Israelite tradition, legends and stories in and behind books of the Old Testament and intertestamental texts.

During the years in graduate school I found time to work through Josephus’ Jewish War and the later books of his Antiquities, pulling together the passages in which he denigrated but also described movements of resistance among Judeans and Galileans in early Roman Palestine, and I began to reflect on their implications.⁸

Three other sorts of extracurricular reading were helpful in the process of analysis and reflection.

Recognizing that some of the figures and movements Josephus was describing were rooted in Israelite tradition, I began reading books of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible more carefully. The graduate curriculum in New Testament studies paid little attention to the Old Testament except for the lines and verses that offered expressions of Jewish expectations of the Messiah and other central constructs in the field. I was now interested in how those books may have adapted earlier legends and stories, something that had been touched on earlier in OT 101: for example, stories of Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, Samuel, Elijah-Elisha, and the young brigand-chieftain David who was acclaimed messiah by the Israelites desperate to resist the Philistine advances. I suspected that these legends and stories might still have been alive in the collective memory of the people centuries later.

During those graduate-school years I also expanded my reading outside the New Testament field, mainly in history, anthropology, and historical sociology. I revived and expanded my reading of studies of peasant movements, mainly in medieval England and elsewhere in Europe, where peasants had their own traditions that had amalgamated biblical lore with their own experience. When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? was an old English peasant proverb. Prior to the Peasant War in southwestern Germany in 1524–25, groups of peasants in different regions had formulated the Twelve Articles and similar articles listing what had been their traditional social-economic rights to the land, forests, and streams, upon which their lords had been encroaching. The language of these articles was a mix of paraphrases of certain biblical commands and Gospel statements and indigenous traditions from their own collective memory. Such reading reinforced my review of Israelite traditions adapted in books of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. In particular, I found historian Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels and his more extensive study of social banditry in largely peasant societies, Bandits, particularly suggestive for Josephus’ many accounts of brigands and I read some of the other historical studies he mentioned (or inspired).

At the time, I was particularly interested in studies of popular movements in other times and parts of the world. During the late 1950s and 1960s there had been intense interest among historians and anthropologists in what were called revitalization, nativist, or millenarian movements. Particularly suggestive, the influential review essay, Pursuit of the Millennium by Yonina Talmon and studies of cargo cults in Melanesia, such as Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound,⁹ commanded a great deal of attention in social-science circles. Under Worsley’s and others’ influence, Hobsbawm classified the movements of nineteenth-century Andalusian anarchists and Sicilian peasant communists as millenarianism,¹⁰ and in his Bandits he found that millenarianism, synonymous with apocalypticism, was a crucial factor in how epidemic social banditry might lead into wider social revolt.

In the library and lunchroom I talked excitedly about these studies and movements with a couple of graduate students a few years ahead of me, especially John Gager, who occupied an adjacent carrel. Once he completed his dissertation and began teaching, Gager branched out into such studies, especially studies of the cargo cults. He soon produced the influential survey, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (1975), in which he basically replaced apocalypticism with millenarianism, presenting earliest Christianity as a prolonged millenarian movement. But I had already developed doubts about the construct. The cargo cults were responses by Melanesian peoples to the suddenly overwhelming recent incursion of European imperial forces. By contrast, the ancient Judean and Galilean movements, including the different movements of Jesus-loyalists, however, were rooted in deep, centuries-long traditions of resistance and revolt against a whole succession of dominant imperial invasions, judging from the Israelite traditions adapted in the Old Testament.¹¹ The developing construct of millenarianism as synonymous with apocalypticism did not seem applicable to what I could reconstruct from Josephus’ description of any of these movements. By contrast, Israelite tradition and the presumed people’s collective memory of legends and stories of ancient figures and movements were suggestive of how these movements were culturally rooted. But millenarian as a synonym for apocalyptic quickly became yet another standard construct in New Testament studies, one that supposedly had cross-cultural credibility.

In one unusual case, a required graduate course became suggestive in its implications for my extracurricular project, undermining the most central construct in New Testament studies and Christian theology. The Dutch scholar Marianus de Jonge had recently published an article pointing out that there were precious few references to the term messiah in Judean texts after the books of the prophets. Following his lead, our professors focused one of the required New Testament graduate seminars on the critical examination of the few occurrences of the term mešiaḥ/christos in intertestamental texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Hellenistic Jewish texts. In the New Testament field at that time word-study was the dominant approach in handbooks and in dissertations and seminar papers.¹² In this case, however, focused survey of the rare occurrences of the term mešiaḥ/christos had ominous implications for the central construct in Christian New Testament studies: Jewish expectation of the Messiah and its fulfillment by Jesus Christ. It was not difficult to draw the implications: except for Psalms of Solomon 17 and a few brief references in scrolls left by the dissident scribal-priestly community at Qumran, Judean scribes and high priests were evidently not expecting a messiah of some sort. They would have known that the imperial patrons who appointed them to their positions of power and privilege would not have been pleased. By contrast, Judean and Galilean peasants had evidently formed several fairly large concrete movements in which they acclaimed their leaders as kings to lead them in revolt against Roman rule and the client rulers installed to maintain control in Palestine.

The long-standing standard synthetic construct of the Messiah remained resilient in New Testament studies, of course, sustained by Christian Christology in which several originally separate traditional figures and images had become fused.¹³ But if one of the principal controlling constructs of New Testament studies turned out to lack evidence, what evidence was there for other synthetic constructs?

The Extracurricular Project Gradually Taking Shape

If we read Josephus’ histories as historical narrative, however elitist their concerns, rather than pull text-fragments and certain terms out of their literary context, the result is a clearly demarked sequence of different movements (and types of movements) in a clear historical sequence. By the end of graduate school I had sketched out in drafts and notes a historical typology of the diverse resistance movements, most comprised of villagers and some derived from scribal circles, drafts that I later developed more fully into this series of articles—although I was afraid of showing them to the professors for not sticking to the graduate school agenda.¹⁴

Throughout the period from well before 4 BCE to 70 CE, according to Josephus’ histories, social banditry had flared up in both Galilee and Judea. It escalated to epidemic proportions as one of the factors that led into the great revolt. Some of the bandit-chieftains became widely known among the villagers (and notorious among the elite). Hezekiah, who evidently enjoyed popular support in Galilee, had been murdered by the brash young military strong man Herod, which caused widespread outcry among the Galileans. In mid-first century Judea, villagers looked to the brigand-chief Eleazar ben Dinai, who had gained an almost magical aura for his elusiveness, for leadership midst the inability of the high priests and the Roman governor to impose order. At the outbreak of the great revolt, Josephus mentions large hordes of bandits in Judea and especially in Galilee.

At the death of Herod in 4 BCE widespread popular revolt erupted in each of the principal districts of his realm, Galilee, Perea, and Judea. Josephus describes these revolts as all having more or less the same social form: large coalitions of villagers acclaimed their respective leaders as kings as they seized Herodian fortresses and took control of the countryside for months and in one case three years before the Romans succeeded in suppressing them. The characteristics of the leaders and their acclamation by the people seem reminiscent of the biblical accounts of the messiahing of the young David by the Israelites. The popular king in Judea was a shepherd, Athronges. The movement in Galilee, for example, acclaimed Judas, son of the famous bandit-chieftain Hezekiah whom Herod had murdered a generation previously.

In 6 CE, after the Romans had imposed Herod’s son Antipas as ruler in Galilee and placed the high priests in charge of Judea under a Roman governor, with a renewed imposition of the tribute, Josephus mentions the Fourth Philosophy that opposed payment of the tribute led by the teacher (sophistes) Judas from Galilee (or Gaulanitis or Gamala) and the Pharisee Saddok (Ant. 18.4–5, 23). Earlier scholars had mistakenly identified this Judas with the popularly acclaimed king, Judas son of Hezekiah in Galilee ten years earlier. But while the earlier Judas was active in Galilee in 4 BCE, the later Judas was a well-educated teacher in Judea ten years later in 6 CE, just after the Romans had reimposed the tribute.

Starting in mid-first century, Josephus recounts a series of movements led by figures he explicitly calls prophets, who led followers out of their villages into the wilderness to experience new acts of liberation (eleutheria) that corresponded to the ancient acts of deliverance led by Moses and/or Joshua. Theudas promised that the waters of the Jordan would be parted giving access into the wilderness, and a prophet from Egypt led his followers to witness the collapse of the walls of Jerusalem, giving them access to the city in a new battle of Jericho led by a new Joshua. There was also a prophet in Samaria who led his followers up the sacred mountain, Mt. Gerezim, where they would find the sacred vessels hidden there by Moses. As with the movements led by kings, these prophetic movements all appear to be of the same type, deeply rooted in Israelite tradition, collective memory of formative stories of liberation from imperial rule.

Later in mid-first century, after describing another band of bandits, Josephus launches into an account of a different form/species of banditry, the Sicarii (the dagger men), who engaged in selective assassination of high priestly figures who had been collaborating closely with the Romans. He describes their leaders as descendants of Judas, one of the leaders of the fourth philosophy, which may be a link that led to earlier scholars’ confusion of these different movements. The Sicarii attempted to seize leadership at the outset of the great revolt in Jerusalem, but were rejected and attacked by the populace—whereupon they fled to the fortress of Masada where they sat out the rest of the great revolt.

The social form that the great revolt took in southeastern Judea was yet another movement that acclaimed its leader, Simon bar Giora, as king. Having come to control the territory in southeastern Judea and Idumea, this movement later became perhaps the strongest fighting force resisting the Roman siege of Jerusalem, and after the Roman destruction, the Flavian Emperors formally executed Simon as the King of the Judeans in their massive ceremonial triumph in Rome.

As the Roman forces exercised their scorched-earth devastation of northwest Judea in 67–68, slaughtering peasants and burning their villages, Judean peasants who headed to the hills and formed bands of brigands fled into Jerusalem as the only imaginable fortified place where they could resist the Roman reconquest. This coalition of peasants-turned-bandits, who were called or called themselves the Zealots, attacked the priestly aristocrats who were attempting to negotiate with the Romans. And they audaciously elected by lot a crude peasant as their own popular high priest, presumably as the symbolic head of a new more egalitarian order. They became one of the principal fighting groups who held out to the end against the Roman siege.

Of all of these movements, the easiest type to explain were the many groups of brigands, some smaller and some larger, sometimes endemic and sometimes epidemic. Hobsbawm and others had supplied plenty of comparative material and analysis of the historical and political-economic causes of banditry. From what I/we already knew about the context in ancient Palestine, significant parallels, along with some differences, jumped to mind. The popular movements that took distinctively Israelite social forms, the messianic and the prophetic movements, however, were difficult to explain, at least on the basis of standard New Testament studies.

That these movements took distinctively Israelite social forms required some serious rethinking of how Israelite tradition was functioning in village communities in which the participants lived. In established biblical/New Testament studies even allusions in the Gospels or Epistles were understood as references to particular verses in the Bible/Scripture. From my own experience and that of acquaintances,¹⁵ however, I knew that this was not the way the traditions taken up into the biblical books functioned in social and cultural life. We remembered Israelite traditions not in individual verses but as stories and legends and customs and ritual recitations (e.g., prayers, or commemorations such as the Lord’s Supper or the Passover Seder/exodus). How much more would this have been true of ordinary people in a traditional peasant context such as ancient Judea and Galilee. Moreover, from Old Testament/Hebrew Bible 101 in theological school we had learned that the scribes who composed books such as Exodus or Joshua had taken up and adapted earlier legends, stories, customs, and ritual commemorations. From my limited knowledge of peasant societies, moreover, it seemed highly unlikely that Judean and Galilean villagers had scrolls of scriptural books, which they probably could not have read anyhow, in their simple two-room houses. No, the Israelite villagers must have cultivated collective memories of ancestral stories and customs in their village communities from generation to generation. What little I had read in sociological or anthropological studies offered at least a provisional conceptualization: in traditional agrarian societies, villagers cultivated their own little tradition that paralleled to varying degrees the great tradition of the cultural and/or dominant elite. This became my explanation for how the popular movements had taken their distinctive Israelite social forms: the people were deeply rooted in their own Israelite popular tradition that included, in some prominence, memories of the young David and of Moses, the founding prophet, and of Elijah, the prophet of renewal.¹⁶

While working through this project the synthetic construct of the Zealots standard in the field had been hovering in the background. From older critiques such as the brief Appendix A: The Zealots by Kirsopp Lake,¹⁷ I knew that this construct was based on a less than critical reading of fragments from Josephus’ works taken out of context. Meanwhile, apparently to consolidate the view that the Zealots were the long-standing party of armed revolution, Martin Hengel produced a massive synthetic construction (Die Zeloten), that marshalled every imaginable fragment of potential evidence. As in earlier constructions, he lumped together Josephus’ accounts of different movements and leaders as references to the Zealots. His seemingly magisterial research gained a good deal of attention in the New Testament field. It was clear that his use of sources, especially of terms and fragments taken from Josephus, were often uncritical. But I did not want my broader project to appear as merely an attempted refutation of the construct of the Zealots in Hengel’s or earlier studies. Far more was at stake.

Bringing the Project to Publication

By 1970, however, before I could bring the project closer to completion, responsibilities of life had caught up with me. It was time to rewrite my dissertation in a more traditional form acceptable to the adviser, begin teaching in two universities, in one of which I was to develop a new Study of Religion Program, and to raise two children together with my wife who was also pursuing an academic career.

Not until forced to publish or perish at tenure decision seven years later did I return to these articles. I sought advice from a couple of older mentors (who had not been my professors). They strongly suggested that posing the articles as at least partly a deconstruction of and an alternative to the Zealots construct would enhance the chances of publication in the standard refereed journals. A few established scholars had already sharply criticized Hengel’s massive synthesis.¹⁸ But, typical of scholars in New Testament and other fields, they simply were not interested in discerning the deep division between the rulers and the ordinary people evident in Josephus’ works and other texts.

Meanwhile, another factor had entered academic discussion of the Zealots. Like some other senior professors in New Testament studies, Hengel had become intensely concerned about the many students who had been demonstrating opposition to the military suppression of anticolonial movements by Western imperial powers, from Algeria to Viet Nam. Building on his less-than-critical construction of the the Zealots, Hengel published two booklets clearly aimed at anti-colonial movements and widespread student protest of their suppression by France and the United States: Was Jesus a Revolutionist? (1971) and Victory over Violence: Jesus and the Revolutionists (1973). These booklets presented the Zealots as advocates of violent revolution explicitly as a foil for Jesus as a sober prophet of non-resistance—i.e., evidently as a paradigm for those who might be tempted to join in the protests. Perhaps I had been naïve about how conservative the New Testament field had been previously in its (a-)political stance, but Hengel’s booklets seemed to be a misuse of New Testament scholarship. It seemed all the more important to present the considerable diversity of popular and scribal resistance movements as a replacement for the synthetic construction of the Zealots: the Zealots could not be used as a foil for an apolitical construction of Jesus as an advocate of non-resistance insofar as they never existed historically.

I was apprehensive about submitting these articles for publication