Chapter Thirty Four THE BAR COCHBA REVOLT In the year C.E. 110, the Emperor Trajan formulated plans for a war against the Parthian Empire. The Parthians had established their empire over the territories comprising Babylon and Perisa, and Judea was a border province of the Roman Empire. Parthia itself had many Jews living in its western provinces. For his war effort, Trajan felt he needed the good will of the Jews. In order to secure their good will, he encouraged Jews to believe that he would allow the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem. Unfortunately for the Jews of Erets Yisrael, the war against the Parthians failed. Added to this, were the constant objections and complaints against the Temple rebuilding on the part of the pagans of Palestine and the Samaritans. Hence immediate plans for the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple were postponed, and the issue dragged on for twenty years. After the war which ended in C.E. 70, the Nazarene presence in Jerusalem was small and weakened. When Trajan finally came to visit the City, he found only one small church. Most of the Jewish believers had left the city prior to and after the war, and only a handfull returned. Hadrian succeeded Trajan as Emperor. In the year C.E. 130, he visited Judea to see the ruins of Jerusalem for himself. Impressed with the beauty of the local, he decided to rebuild Jerusalem, but as a pagan city named Aelia Capitolina. In it would be built a temple but it would be a temple dedicated to the head of the Roman pantheon, Jupiter. Jews had waited a score of years to see the promise of Rome fullfilled and were now both disappointed and insulted. Hadrian, a champion of pagan culture and Hellenistic aesthetics, also issued a ban against castration throughout the Roman Empire. Unfortuneately this law encompassed anything that was perceived as mutilation of the genitals, including circumcision. This law was not specifically directed against Jews but it affected them the most. Rabbi Akiva, the great religious leader of the generation, had believed Rome's promise to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple. Now, feeling personally betrayed and humiliated by Rome's treachery, he used the influence of his leadership to help stir up rebellion among the Jews of Judea and Galilee. In C.E. 132, a second revolt broke out against Rome in Erets Yisrael. Unlike the first one in the year C.E. 70, this war had the full support of the Jews of the Diaspora. More importantly, unlike the war of C.E. 70, this revolt was under the leadership of one man - who recieved the undivided loyalty of the Jewish people. Tihs man was called Simeon bar Kosevah. Rabbi Akiva nick-named him Bar Cochba. This name literally means "Son of a Star"; it is the commmon midrashic designation for the messiah, based upon the verse in Numbers 24:17-19: "I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. And Edom shall be a possession, Seir also shall be a possession for his enemies; and Israel shall do valiantly. Out of Jacob shall come he that shall have dominion, and shall destroy him that remaineth of the city." And this is the name that history has best remembered him by. In giving Simeon this name, Rabbi Akiva, the leading relgious light of his generation, was proclaiming him the promised messiah of Israel. Akiva's collegues vainly tried to point out the rashness of this proclaimation but Rabbi Akiva would not retract it. Bar Cochba's personality does not emerge clearly out of the Jewish sources, other than that he was a stern leader who demanded scroupulousness from his followers in all matters, religious, military, persoanl. Eusebius reports that Bar Cochba regarded himself as a saviour who had descended from heaven like a star. Regarding this, it is well to remember that Eusebius lived several centuries after Bar Cochba and that he, as a Church historian, would not have a friendly attitude towards a man who had himself declared that he was the messiah. The revolt of Bar Cochba became the actual point of no return for the Evyonim. Up to this time, Jewish leadership was rather unfriendly to Jesus' Jewish followers, yet the ordinary Jew of the Land of Israel continued to maintain friendly relations with the ordinary Evyon. It was during this war that this situation changed drastically. We havesaid that all Jews were united under Bar Cochba. The exception, however, were the Evyonim. To begin with, they believed that the only one capable, in a manifest destiny sense, of freeing Israel from Rome was Jesus, who would do so at the tiem of his return "with the clouds of heaven" as the Son of Man. For the Jews to actively try to accmoplish this by means of a political and military revolt was seen by them as trying to force the hand of G-d. As though that were not enough, the idea that the man leading the revolt actually called himself the messiah, and that the Jewish leadership also looked upon him as messiah, was intollerable to those who believed that the true messiah had suffered for Israel on the cross and that he would return to save Israel. The Evyonim, as a group, refused to rally to Bar Cochba and join the revolt. Some believe that they may actually have given aid to Rome in its war against their own people. Infuriated by this treason, Bar Cochba turned his fury against the Evyonim. With the backing of his followers, and of the leadership, he launched a campain of persecution against them in which many of them were put to death by the sword or driven out of Erets Yisrael, across the Jordan and into Syria and Egypt. All contact with those who survived was strictly forbidden under penalty of excommunication. They were no longer to be regarded as Jewish kinsmen but as beings as alien as the gentile Christians with whom the Jews completely identified them. Thereafter, the name of YESHU HANOTSRI, Jesus the Nazarene, became anathema to Jews. The war raged on for three years until in C.E. 135, the Romans finally succeeded in driving Bar Cochba's army out of each of its strongholds and in forcing the Jews to surrender. Before his defeat by the Romans, Bar Cochba had an altar erected at the site of the Temple ruins, and had the priests reinstate some of the sacrifices. But after his defeat, Hadrian had the altar torn down, completed the building of Aelia over the site of Jerusalem, caused all the relgious leaders, certainly including Akiva, to suffer the death of martyrs, and forbade the teaching of the Torah under penalty of death. No Jew was allowed to enter Jerusalem. All Jews, including Evyonim, were driven from the city. Up till that time, there had been 15 Jewish bishops sitting on James' seat as head of the Jerusalem Church (Eusebius, in chapter 5 of his HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, lists their names). Now for the first time, a gentile bishop, Marcus, presided over the church there. This second major defeat of the Jews reinforced anti-Jewish feeling in the gentile church, and reinforced the belief that G-d had abandoned the Jews and Judaism. As far as they were concerned, the major stumbling blocks, the false messiah and the revived altar, had been forever removed, and Jerusalem could now be looked upon by them as the Christian holy city. The defeated Jews remembered the treachercy of the Evyonim, that they were the only Israelites to turn their back on their Jewish brethren's last attempt to throw off the Roman yoke Thereafter they were considered APOSYNAGOGOI (John 12:42), "driven out" not only from the synagogue but from the Jewish nation. After a few short years, the Romans realized the futility of forbidding the practice of Judaism when they realized that in order to enforce this policy, they would have to anihilate nearly every Jew. The Jews again began to practice their religion openly. But these events marked the beginning of the decline of the Jewish presence in the Holy Land, and a geographic shift away to the East and the West. The Land named Palestine by the Romans would come under gentile sway for nearly two millenia until the "time of the gentiles" would be over, and the Jews would return to re-Judaize it in our own century. But these same events also marked the beginning of the decline of the Jewish folowers of Jesus the Nazarene. From this time on, the gentile Christian presence and influence in Palestine would increase. Becoming ever more the pariah in the eyes of both the Jews and gentile Church, the Evyonim would be forced to turn inward, more and more losing their power, losing the ability to proselytize new members to their sect till, by the end of the second century, they were no longer a threat either to Christianity or to Judaism Soon after the war's end, they became further weakened by breaking up into many different schismatic sects. One gentile Christian writer, Epiphanius, wrote that "Evyon was a many headed monster."
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