Jesus the Jew. Geza Vermes
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of the tetrarch’s unorthodox marriage, as the Gospels assert, John owed his downfall to his powers of eloquence, which, it was suspected, might have been used by himself or others for political aims.47
It is hardly a coincidence that the Fourth Gospel ascribes an almost identical motive to the priestly plot against Jesus.
‘What action are we taking?’ they said. ‘This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone like this the whole populace will believe in him. Then the Romans will come and sweep away our temple and our nation.’
Whereat the high priest, Caiaphas, remarks:
‘It is more to your interest that one man should die for the people, than that the whole nation should be destroyed.’48
The last saying anticipates, as it were, the controversial legal maxim that any Jew whose extradition on a political charge was demanded by Rome under the threat of an ultimatum was to be surrendered ‘lest the entire community should suffer on his account’.49
If it is permissible to read between the lines of Josephus’s account of Jesus, the famous Testimonium Flavianum,50 a text apparently enlarged in places and shortened in others by Christian copyists, it would seem in effect that during a period of riots in Jerusalem the unspecified charge levelled against Jesus by the civic leaders was that as a teacher he had won over many Jews. From the epithet ‘wise man’, applied by Josephus to Jesus, and from his use of the word ‘outrage’ in connection with the crucifixion, it would appear that the historian himself did not find Jesus guilty.51
Potential leadership of a revolutionary movement would have afforded sufficient grounds for adopting radical ‘preventive measures’, but some members of Jesus’ movement were bound to have compromised him even further. Among the apostles at least one, Simon the Zealot, bore an ominous political surname;52 but many of his other Galilean followers appear to have been imbued with a spirit of rebellion and to have expected him to convert his religious leadership into the political role reserved for the royal Messiah. When he entered Jerusalem they greeted him:
‘Hosanna! . . . Blessings on the coming kingdom of our father David!’53
As he approached the descent from the Mount of Olives, the whole company of his disciples . . . began to sing . . .: ‘Blessings on him who comes as king in the name of the Lord!’54
Moreover, the very last question put by Luke in the apostles’ mouths testifies to the survival of their political aspirations even in the ‘post-Easter’ period:
‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?’55
It would also follow, as will be argued in a later chapter, that the first Jewish-Galilean version of Jesus’ life and teaching was conceived in a politico-religious spirit likely to account, at least in part, for its powerful Messianic emphasis.56
Galilee and Rabbinic Literature
If certain features of the Gospel portrait acquire new life when set within the Galilee described by Josephus, others are provided with fresh meaning when complemented by rabbinic literary sources. The warning must nevertheless be repeated that, although Galilean in geographical origin, the Mishnah may not be employed indiscriminately to describe Galilean life as such prior to the end of the Bar Kosiba rebellion (AD 135). As one of the recently discovered letters dictated by the leader of the second Jewish War indicates, regional differences remained clear-cut until then,57 but from the middle of the second century AD Galilee was the only lively Jewish centre in Palestine and the distinction between Judean and Galilean became largely anachronistic. Comparative material must therefore be restricted to those sections of rabbinic literature in which Judean and Galilean customs, language and way of life are deliberately contrasted. The texts themselves often show that the situation envisaged in them is that which prevailed before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.
Josephus’s image of the Galilean as the indomitable fighter has little in common with the rabbinic portrait of the Northerner as a figure of fun, an ignoramus, if not both. One of the commonest jibes directed against the Galileans is that they did not speak correct Aramaic: U-Aramaic in other words. According to a well-known anecdote preserved in the Talmud, a Galilean went to the marketplace in Jerusalem to purchase something which he called amar. The merchants ridiculed him:
You stupid Galilean, do you want something to ride on (a donkey = ḥamār)? Or something to drink (wine = ḥamar)? Or something for clothing (wool = ‘amar)? Or something for a sacrifice (lamb = immar)?58
The distinction between the various gutturals almost completely disappeared in Galilean Aramaic; the weaker guttural sounds, in fact, ceased even to be audible. Put differently, in careless everyday conversation the Galileans dropped their aitches. Third-century AD Babylonian rabbis maintain that it was because of the slipshod speech of Galilee that Galilean doctrine disappeared, whilst Judean teachings, in the precise enunciation of the southern dialect, survived.59 Apparently people from certain northern towns – Tib‘on, Haifa and Beth Shean are singled out – were so notorious for their mispronunciation of Hebrew that they were not called on to read the Bible in public when they were away from home.60
Even the Greek New Testament refers to the distinctive dialect of Galilee. In the courtyard of the high priest’s house Peter is recognized as a follower of Jesus as soon as he opens his mouth.
‘You are also one of them, for your accent betrays you.’61
Again, the name Lazarus in one of Jesus’ famous parables62 is the ‘incorrect’ dialectal form of Eleazar as attested both in the Palestinian Talmud and in Greek transliteration of the name surviving in inscriptions in the celebrated Galilean necropolis of Beth Shearim.63
Although the subject of precise dialectal differences is complex and still under debate, there can be little doubt that Jesus himself spoke Galilean Aramaic, the language, that is to say, surviving in the popular and somewhat more recent paraphrase of the Pentateuch, the Palestinian Targum, and in the Talmud of Palestine. Practically all the terms which the Synoptic Gospels preserve in Aramaic before rendering them in Greek point in that direction. In the command addressed to the daughter of Jairus, Talitha kum, ‘Get up, my child’, the noun (literally, ‘little lamb’) is attested only in the Palestinian Targum.64 Another Aramaic word, mamona, ‘money’, used in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6: 24, mostly occurs in the Targums. The rabbis, even in Aramaic phrases, usually employ the Hebrew word, mamon. Targumic parallel is similarly decisive in determining that when Jesus said Ephphetha, ‘Be opened’, he spoke Aramaic and not Hebrew.65 Yet although Jesus expressed himself in dialect, it would be wrong to argue from the misunderstanding of his words on the cross, Eloi Eloi lama sabachtani, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ as ‘Hark, he is calling Elijah’, that he was unintelligible to the people of Jerusalem.66 Clarity cannot be expected of the cry of a crucified man at the point of death.
Far graver, however, than the criticisms provoked by their regional accent were the accusations levelled at the Galileans by the Pharisees and their rabbinical successors concerning matters related to sacrifices and offerings in the Temple of Jerusalem, to levitical cleanness and uncleanness, and to the rabbinic code of proper behaviour in general. The Mishnah, for example, ordains that imprecisely formulated vows regarding the Temple and its priests are binding in Judea. In Galilee, by contrast, because of the presumed local ignorance of ritual, only those vows were acknowledged valid which included every detail of the undertaking.67 Furthermore, Palestinian rabbinic sources refer to pious men (Ḥasidim) ignorant in the field of ritual purity.68 Even eminent Galilean rabbis such as Hanina ben Dosa and Yose the Galilean are reported to have disregarded the laws of seemly conduct. Hanina is tacitly criticized for walking alone in the street by night;69 and Yose has to endure the indignity of a reprimand by a woman for being too talkative when enquiring the way to Lydda.
You stupid Galilean, have the Sages not commanded: ‘Do not engage