Chapter Thirty Two THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE NAZARENES AND THEIR FELLOW JEWS The decade between 70 CE and 80 CE was a traumatic one for the Jewish people. The most important thing in the minds of the rabbis, who were now the undisputed leaders of the people, was to establish a modus vivendi with Rome. To that end, they perceived anything adding to the perilousness of their situation as a thoroughly defeated and subjugated nation under Roman hegemony, as a national threat, and did everything in their power to distance the people from it. Therefore, they completely eschewed the memory of the Zealots, whom they felt had brought disaster upon the nation. Rabbinic Oral Tradition, the Talmud, has nothing good to say about the Zealots. They are constantly described as men who tried to force G-d's hand by rebelling against the government that He had seen fit to give world domination to. The time of the messianic age was not yet, in spite of the Zealot belief that it was immanent. Any and all groups and movements that espoused the idea of the "End Time" were looked upon with growing suspicion and hostility. The rabbis admonished the people to avoid contact with any Jews who continued to preach that they had secret and/or power to bring about the advent of the messiah. Around the year 80 CE, there appeared a second "history of Jesus" which ultimately came to be known as the Gospel According to St. Matthew. It is commonly held by New testament scholars that the author of this book was a Jewish Nazarene, that it was written in the East, and that its original language was Hebrew or Aramaic. The Gospel According to St. Matthew, as it has come down to modern times, is a somewhat antisemitic work while paradoxically seeming to be the most "Jewish" of all the gospels. A probable reason for this is that the original author's reasons for writing it have been obscured by later editorializing by the gentile Church after it had been taken over and made part of Christian scripture. The Jesus of Matthew is much more Jewish than that of Mark, although to be sure, there is still much antagonism between him and Jewish leadership, and in the final analysis, between Jesus and the Jewish people. It is Matthew who writes those unahppy verses in the 23rd chapter, excoriating the Pharisees (rabbis) in the harshest of terms, making them appear to be so completely devoid of human compassion and caring. It is also Matthew who has given Christians the rationale to continue to throw the term of Christ-killer at Jews by his description of the Good Friday mob mindlessly screaming at Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (27:25). As a Jew, "Matthew" is outraged that "Mark" has presented Jesus as a messiah who does not identify with the Jewish people. Therefore he makes Jesus as Jewish as possible. He begins his book with an elaborate geneology showing Jesus' ancestry going back to David and Abraham. He traces this geneology through Joseph, the husbandof Mary, an indication that at the time of the original writing of the book, Joseph, and not G-d, was held by the Nazarenes to be the father of Jesus. Further, he has Jesus birthplace as Bethlehem without any indication that his family had come there from Galilee. Jesus is presented therefore as originally a Judean, not a Galilean, and therefore more believable as the messiah. According to Matthew, Jesus and his family only moved to Nazareth when Jesus was no longer an infant. It is Matthew who introduces Jesus as a lawgiver (Sermon on the Mount) much in the manner of Moses. That is, he presents Jesus as giving a more perfect Nazarene Torah, or better yet, a Nazarene "Mishnah" to the Torah of Moses, one which is to rival the Mishnah of the Pharisees. He does not try to cover up the fact, as Mark does, that among Jesus' followers were several Zealots. And he STRESSES the idea that Jesus' mission was only to the House of Israel (10:6). But in that very same 10th chapter, words are put into Jesus' mouth that there shall arise conflict between his followers and the rabbinic Jews, someting that was actually taking place at the time of the composition of the book. He continues to "prophesy" in the name of Jesus those things that were presently occuring; the social and religious ostracization of Nazarenes by their fellow Jews. Indeed, at this time, the Nazarenes were being forced out of the synagogues and reviled as men of Satan. Shortly, the antagonism between Nazarenes and other Jews began to reach the point whereby each group referred to the other as "children of hell" (Matthew 23:15;Tractate Avodah Zarah 17a). In the middle of the following century, this expression was still being used by each group toward the other as evidenced by the story of the controversy between the wife of Rabbi Meir and a certain "Min" (see below) in which she flung that curse at him. (Tractate Berachot 10a). In the that fatefull decade between 70 and 80 CE, the Nazarenes refused to give up the belief that Jesus was the messiah, and that he would descend from heaven as some semi-divine being to save Israel, only now the Israel that would be saved would not be the entire nation of Israel but only the "true believers", the true remnant of Israel. For by now, the Nazarenes had come to believe that the reason for Jesus' failure to appear at the time of the destruction was the UNBELIEF of Israel and its leaders. Therefore, as "Jewish" as Matthew protests to be, he is enraged at his people's refusal to recognize the king of the Jews in Jesus. When Matthew sets up the antagonism between Jews and Jesus, he does it with a twinge of sadness and regret that Israel will continue to suffer for its refusal to recognize Jesus. He even interjects a note of compassion for the suffering of Jerusalem (23:37). Yet Matthew's anger at his fellow Jews is a family quarrel. But the words that he uses in that quarrel were taken up by a non Jewish church which incorporated them into its sacred scripture, and used them in the antisemitic way that matthew never dreamed would ever happen. For one of Matthew's reaons for writing his gospel was to counteract the unJewish portrayal of Jesus by Mark. There was one important difference in the timesof the writings however. When Mark wrote there was as yet no antagonism between Jews and Nazarenes. When Matthew wrote, mutual hostility was becoming a fact of life. The continued presence and attitude of the Nazarenes as an anti-Roman secret society was a threat to the Jewish nation which wanted to de-emphasise messianism of any kind. The growing adoration of the absent Jesus, on the part of the Nazarenes, as some divine figure, somehow sharing the glory belonging only to G-d added to the growing antipathy on the part of rabbinic Israel to their Nazarene brethren. A complete separation between the two was becoming inevitable. So about the year 90 CE, the rabbinic leadership in Erets Yisrael called for the complete separation from the people of Israel, the sectarians kown as "Minim". This is a vague term, meaning simply people who belong to an "unorthodox" sect. It was also a euphemism for Nazarenes. At this time, a special prayer was added to the synagogue liturgy. (Tractate Berachot 28b-29a) Known as the Malediction Against the Minim, it was designed to keep them apart from the religious life of the Jewish people. The reconstructed original formula was as follows: "May the apostates have no hope, may the dominion of wickedness be speedily uprooted inour days, may the Nazarenes and the Minim quickly perish and not be inscribed together with the righteous." Since this malediction became a required prayer, and the Nazarenes (as MINIM) were unable to say it, it added to the antipathy they already were feeling from their fellow Jews, and it kept them out of the religious life of their people, and hence out of the social life of their neighbors as well. After this time, the Nazarenes began to form their own synagogues, most of these in the Galilee where they lived in larger numbers than the south. Among the common people of the Jews, there may have still existed friendships between Nazarenes and non-Nazarenes, but the rabbis felt the Nazarenes to be a threat to the people, and they constantly admonished them to have nothing to do with the followers of Jesus. The religious difference between Nazarenes and other Jews however was not the sole, or even perhaps not the most important reason, for rabbinic antipathy to them. There were at least two other logical reasons for the continuing widening of the gulf between Jesus's Jewish followers and the rest of Israel. The first reason was that, now after nearly six decades after the death of Jesus, there was a steadily growing non Jewish religion which apparently WORSHIPPED Jesus as a deity. The adherents of this religion not only claimed that Jesus was the long awaited messiah of the Jews. They openly and brazenly excoriated the nation of Jesus as spiritually blind and satanic for continuing to reject him as the messiah. To the people of Israel, this meant that the Jewish Nazarenes, by their belief in Jesus as messiah, were religiously in league with the gentile antagonists of Israel. Add to this, the fact that the Nazrarenes and the Christian gentiles both claimed that the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple was the result of the failure of Israel to accept Jesus as the messiah. Many Jews still alive were able to remember the glory of the City and the Temple as they stood, and the ruins of the City and Temple now were still painfull reminders of Jewish humiliation at the hands of the uncircumcized Romans. To have to hear from Jewish voices, even if they were the voices of Minim, that the rejection of Jesus was the ultimate cause of this national humiliation was just pouring salt on wounds. Whatever doctrinal differences separated Nazarenes from Christians, these were not taken note of by the people. But the common pointing of the accusing finger by both groups, regarding the rejection of Jesus was looked upon by Jews as equivalent, no matter that the Nazarene accusation arose from frustration and the Christian, from antipathy and hate. The second reason had to do with politics more than religion. The Nazarene movement was still powerfull enough in the East to be able to gain converts among both Jews as well as gentiles. Although the "Pillars of the Church",that is, Peter, John, and James, were gone, there still sat at the head of the Nazarene Church, a man of the family of Jesus. (Eusebius, the famous historian of the Catholic Church, wrote in the fourth century that, from the time of the death of Jesus to the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (CE 132), 15 men of the house of Jesus ruled over the Nazarenes. He gives a list of their names in Book 4 of The History of the Church.) There were still living relatives of Jesus in Nazareth as well as Capernum, and the Romans brought them in for interrogation from time to time. (Eusebius: HISTORY, Book 3) Hegesippus, another Church historian, who lived before Eusebius, tells that Jesus' great-nephews, of the line of the line of his brother Judah, were arrested and subjected to an inquisition by the Emperor Domitian himself. Domitian questioned them about their belief in the so-called Kingdom of G-d. When they replied that the knowledge of G-d's Kingdom was G-d's alone, and that He would reveal this knowledge to men at the Last Times, the Emperor decided that they were nothing more than ignorant peasants and he released them. This political messianic focus from the Roman overlords was most uncomformtable to a people trying to distance themselves from political friction between themselves and Rome. At a time when the Jews of Israel were attempting to prove themsleves as docile and obedient sunjects of Caesar, the presence of a political messianic organization within the country, whose power reached out into the Eastern diaspora and who actively proselytized in the face of Roman antagonism, was disquieting. The Nazarenes were now no longer what their name implied, - no longer a "secret society", but rather a visible and vocal entity to be reckoned with both by Jew and Roman. So the first Christian century drew to a close. It was a century unlike any other, one that had seen great and dramatic events; - the destruction of the greatest of jewish shrines, the Temple at Jerusalem, and the rise of a new religion which, springing out of Judaism, was to change the course of history, and to spread the knowledge of the G-d of Israel throughout the world while paradoxically simultaneously spreading the greatest of animosities towards the people of Israel thorughout the world. As the century ended, it became increasingly evident that the Jewish people as a whole, and those who were followers of the original Nazarene, whether Jewish or gentile, were headed for an irrevocable parting of the ways. Israel would continue on, wedded to its Torah. The gentile followers of Jesus the Christ would grow to become the Roman Catholic Church. The Jewish followers of Jesus would drift away from both, would be pushed away by both to their ultimate extinction.
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