Meanwhile in Rome, during that same year, Augustus Caesar had decided to divide Judaea among Herod’s sons, each of whom would rule with a lesser title than king. He gave the richest half of the kingdom, including Judaea and Samaria, to Archelaus, who ruled as an ethnarch; he divided the other half into two tetrarchies (from the Greek meaning “rule over one-fourth of a territory”), giving one tetrachy each to two other sons, Philip and Herod Antipas. Herod Antipas held Galilee and lands across the Jordan; Philip received lands north and east of Galilee.
Two points need to be noted here: first, while Josephus seems to suggest on the surface that the demands for a pure and pious high priest came from a loosely gathered, even impromptu mob that was simply part of the usual crowd in the Temple assembled for the coming Passover, it is clear, given the extent of the fighting and the opposition mounted in both Jerusalem and beyond, that this opposition group was well led and its network extensive. It was no accident that they had gathered at the Temple on the day of the funeral feast. They had come deliberately, prepared for trouble. In fact, they must surely have expected trouble. This begs two questions: Who were these people? And what if anything can we glean about their ideology from their deep desire to see a “pure and pious” high priest put in place?
It seems that these events provide an essential context for Jesus’s early life: in 4 B.C., when Herod died, Jesus was, according to the most widely held estimates, approximately two years old. Thus, we can be sure that his birth and life occurred against a background of agitation against the corrupt and hated Herodian dynasty. And though his birthplace was Bethlehem, in Judaea, Matthew (2:22-23) records that Jesus was taken to Nazareth in Galilee as a child. After a long period of silence in the gospel record, Jesus is said to have emerged from Galilee to be baptized by John the Baptist. And it is from Galilee that he gathered his disciples—at least two of whom were Zealots. Certainly he was commonly called Jesus of Galilee. As we have seen, Galilee was a hotbed of revolt, and it was from here that Judas, the leader of a large group of rebels, came. What then was the relationship of Jesus with these political agitators, these crowds bent upon sedition? Was he later to become their leader? Clues once again come from Josephus.
The opposition Josephus describes was reaching a wide movement that he takes great pains to play down while at the same time disparaging as “sedition.” Yet Josephus also records that the opposition did not end with the vicious slaughter in Jerusalem. In fact, he notes, it became worse with time. Archelaus proved so brutal in his rule that after ten years Caesar exiled him to Vienne in France. The lands of Archelaus were then ruled directly by Rome as the Province of Judaea. Since Philip and Herod Antipas were elsewhere, ruling their respective tetrarchies, a prefect, Coponius, was appointed and dispatched from Rome to rule Archelaus’s domains from his capital, the coastal city of Caesarea. Traveling with him was the new governor of Syria, Quirinius. Rome wanted a full accounting of the regions it now had to rule, and so Quirinius undertook a census of the entire country. This census was, to say the least, deeply unpopular. The date was A.D. 6. Trouble was inevitable.
Judas of Galilee led an uprising. He accused all men who paid a tax to Rome of cowardice. He demanded that Jews refuse to acknowledge the emperor as master, claiming that only one master existed and that was God. This question of the tax was the key means of knowing who was for Judas and who was against him. At the same time, Josephus reports, the hotheaded Sicarii first appeared. They were the faction behind all the violence. Josephus hints that Judas of Galilee either founded the group or led them, and it is clear from his accounts that Josephus hated them. He accuses them of using their politics as a cloak for their “barbarity and avarice.”11
Amazingly, a mention of Judas in the New Testament corroborates this profile. “After…rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished” (Acts 5:37). Josephus further explains that Judas, along with another fighter, Zadok the Pharisee, was responsible for adding a fourth faction to Judaism after the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes: the Zealots, so called because they were “zealous in good undertakings.”12 The term “Zealot” occurs only in the history of Josephus; no other Roman author mentions them, and even Josephus is reluctant to name them. Instead, he prefers to refer to them negatively as Lestai (brigands) or Sicarii (dagger-men).
This too finds a mention in the New Testament, within the Book of Acts. Speaking of a meeting between Paul and James in Jerusalem after Paul returned from many years of preaching in Greek and Roman cities such as Tarsus, Antioch, Athens, Corinth, and Ephesus, James and his companions mention the “many thousands of Jews” who were all “zealous of the law” (Acts 21, 20). Later in the same book (Acts 21, 38), another more sensitive term is used. Paul was accused of being the leader of “four thousand men who were murderers” by the Romans and then arrested. But when we look at the original Greek text, we find that “murderers” is not what the text says at all. In fact, Paul was being accused of leading four thousand sicarion—Sicarii.
Despite the labels—“Zealots” or “murderers”—or maybe even because of them, we are still left to ask: who were these Jews who were prepared to die rather than serve the Romans? Again Josephus would have us believe that they were a small band of hotheaded individuals bent upon sedition. Yet the revolts he chronicles suggest that they fought with fury and vigor and significant manpower. The inherent contradiction leads us to believe that he was not telling the truth about this faction. They were obviously more serious than he wished to admit. And this is crucial to our story and to our understanding.
So why did Josephus hate the Zealots so much? A look at his career makes it quite plain to us: Josephus had actually begun his career as a Zealot. He was even a Zealot military commander. Amazingly, he was in charge of all of Galilee—the Zealot heartland—at the start of the war against Rome. But after the loss of his base, he defected to the Roman side and became a close friend of Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus, the army commander. Finally, Josephus ended up living in Rome within the emperor’s very own palace, with a pension and Roman citizenship. But his treachery against his own people cost him dearly. For the rest of his life he had to watch his back because he was hated by even those Jews living in Rome.
In his first book, The Jewish War—written around A.D. 75 to 79 for a Roman and Romanized audience—Josephus blames the Zealots for the destruction of the Temple. Although he had access to all the Jewish records that survived the siege and the Temple fires and access to Roman records, we find that we cannot entirely believe what he says. Despite his excellent source material, he had joined the enemy and was writing for the enemy—a Roman Gentile audience. Josephus’s writing of The Jewish War is analogous to a Nazi writing a history of Poland that justifies the invasion of 1939. Since one man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot, we need to be careful with our use of his works. We must keep his reporting in perspective.
For now let us turn our attention to an extraordinary event that occurred in 1947. A Bedouin shepherd named Mohammad adh-Dhib was roaming on the northern end of the Dead Sea searching for some lost goats. Thinking that they might be in a cave he had come upon, he threw a rock in to frighten them and drive them out. Instead of the outraged bleat of a goat, he heard the shattering of pottery. Intrigued, he crawled through the small cave entrance to see what was there. Before him lay some large clay pots—one now broken—in which he found the first collection of documents