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5. AND THE JEWS MARVELED

Jesus' popularity with the ochlos or "multitude" is constantly mentioned in the New Testament gospels. Ochlos has a denotation of informality and spontaneity; it is the volatile crowd we see in Josephus' accounts, capable of rapid mood swings from idle curiosity to riot and revolt. And it is this ochlos that follows the New Testament Jesus wherever he goes. Matthew uses the term ochlos 47 times in describing the crowds around Jesus; only 5 of those references suggest any hostility. One such reference is to the crowd of retainers at Jairus' house, who laughed derisively when Jesus announced his intention to raise Jairus' daughter. Two additional ochlos's describe the crowd which arrested Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane; the remaining two describe the crowd which clamored for Barabbas' release and Jesus' death, though only with the persuasion of "the chief priests" and other influential members of the Sanhedrin (Mt 27.20). However, when the chief priests and their henchmen had previously wanted to arrest Jesus, they feared the outrage this same ochlos, which allegedly regarded Jesus as a prophet (Mt 21.46).

The admiring ochlos is most prominent in Matthew, which is the most sensitive of all the gospels to Jewish traditions. But it remains prominent in the other synoptic gospels. Only in John, the most virulently anti-Semitic gospel, is the crowd ambivalent. John shows us an ochlos angry because Jesus healed on the sabbath (Jn 5.16). When Jesus preached at the Temple during a festival, there "was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceives the people." Later, "there was a division among the people because of him" (Jn 7.43). Finally, even some of the high priests' "servants" -- whom we see in Josephus as thugs sent to forcibly collect tithes from the farmers' threshing floors (Ant. 20.181) -- fell under Jesus' spell, prompting their masters to remark, "Are you also deceived?" (Jn 7.47).

This divided crowd suggests the social dynamic we would expect to find at Jesus' time. The crowd that continued to receive patronage from the priests -- perhaps this included day-workers still employed in the ongoing Temple construction, the largest workfare program run by the Jewish authorities -- could be encouraged by the ruling hierarchy’s thugs to disrupt protests. The crowd that regarded itself as neglected and oppressed by the priests and the Sanhedrin would eagerly embrace a charismatic figure promising their deliverance.

The memory of these approving crowds posed a problem for the authors of the gospels, who were challenged to explain to their Gentile communities why Jesus' own people, the Jews, had not accepted him as their Messiah. The logical answer to this paradox is that the crowds accepted Jesus as a prophet or spokesman for God, but had little interest in his unfulfilled promises after his death; only an inner circle remained committed to Jesus' message, for reasons we will explore later. However, that would not have been a satisfactory answer for the authors of the gospels, so they invented a crowd that suddenly turned so overwhelmingly hostile that it forced the usually implacable Pilate to crucify the Messiah. But this ochlos, begging for Jesus' blood, is a particularly crude fiction, contradicting almost all the evidence in the gospels themselves.

In the commentarii of Pilate's wife, Jesus promises the ochlos their deliverance in the language of the intertestament -- the rich symbolic language more akin to the Old Testaments prophets or the New Testament Book of Revelations than the Jesus of the gospels. This raises the obvious question of whether the "false Joakanen" observed by Pilate's wife was one of Jesus' surrogates -- we have seen that Jesus' disciples and followers were more inclined to conventional apocalyptic discourse. Or would Jesus himself have adapted his imagery to suit his audience?

It seems unlikely that Jesus would have abdicated the most important public-speaking opportunities of his career to a surrogate. And it is an article of faith in the New Testament gospels that Jesus used one form of address for crowds, and another for his inner circle of disciples. So, after the parable of the sowers in Mark 4:10-11, addressed to a crowd by the sea of Galilee: "And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable. And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all [these] things are done in parables." Or Matthew 13.34-35: "All these things Jesus spoke to the multitude in parables; and without a parable he would not speak to them...." Mark 4:34: "When they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples."

This two-tier approach was hardly unusual. In the ancient world, teaching was often an intimate, even secretive dialogue between master and pupil. Aspiring philosophers undertook dangerous journeys to seek out their mentors; mere books could not be depended on to provide the fine points of wisdom. The master-disciple relationship was particularly valued and institutionalized in Judaism, where most day-to-day legal questions were subject to an oral law, the halakah, which could be passed on only from ordained masters to select scholars enrolled in a demanding, years-long course of instruction. (In the early third century A.D. the halakah was finally written down in the form that is today known as the Mishnah.)

The masters who taught the halakah were known as scribes (scholars, sages, and lawyers are alternative English terms, all of which describe certain roles of the scribes). After his course of study and ordination, the new scribe was qualified to decide any sort of religious question or dispute, as well as sit in judgement of criminal and civil proceedings; the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court, included a great many scribes. While some scribes came from the ranks of the Jewish aristocracy, they were more likely to be merchants, tradesmen, artisans, and even day-laborers. As Joachim Jeremias proposes in his classic study, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, the sharply rising power of the scribes at the time of Jesus was due not only to their legal authority, but to their guardianship of the "secret knowledge" contained in such intertestamental texts as 1 Enoch. "The pseudepigraphical writings... with their descriptions of eschatological events and the cosmic topography of the celestial and lower world, formed part of the esoteric tradition of the scribes.... From a social point of view [the scribes] were, as possessors of divine esoteric knowledge, the immediate heirs and successors of the prophets."

In the gospels, Jesus is sometimes addressed as rabbi, an honorific often used for scribes; by the end of the first century, when rabbinic Judaism had supplanted Temple Judaism, rabbi and scribe had become synonymous. But according to John 7.15, Jesus was not a formally schooled or ordained scribe: "And the Jews marvelled, saying, How does this man know letters, having never learned?" However, we hardly need this evidence to remove Jesus from the ranks of the scribes. The gospels are unrelenting in their denunciation of the scribes, who are often linked with that other nemesis of early Christians, the Pharisees. (Indeed many scribes were Pharisees, though scribes represented a number of sects or parties, including the Essenes and Sadducees.) The rhetoric is vehement: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for you neither go in yourselves, neither suffer you them that are entering to go in. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you devour widows' houses..." (Mt 23.13-14).

This anti-scribal rhetoric was a product of the increasing friction between the late first century rabbis and the Christian communities of Syria (where Matthew was written), which were often competing for control of the same synagogue. In the vastly different political climate of Jesus' time, some, if not many scribes were likely to be leaders of the opposition to the ruling class. That was demonstrably true at the end of Herod the Great's reign, when a group of student scribes, urged on by their mentors, climbed up on the Temple gate and threw down a golden eagle that Herod the Great had put up in violation of the Jewish prohibition against images. Herod responded by immolating forty scholars and their masters shortly before his own death (Ant 17.149-167, War 1.648-655). The martyrdom of the scholars so outraged the crowd that at the next Passover, they demanded that Herod's heir, Archelaus, depose the High Priest. The subsequent rioting eventually cost thousand of lives and set in motion the revolt of 4 A.D. (Ant 17.207-218, War 2.5-13).

When Jesus entered Jerusalem in the last days of his life, he was stepping onto the turf of these politically active scholars, many of whom might have shared his own devout nationalism but who were likely to be skeptical -- at best -- of a Galilean healer who had arrived from the boondocks still clutching the tail of John the Baptist's camel-hair shirt. Most of Jesus' ministry had been spent in the smaller cities, towns, and villages of Galilee; there is no evidence that he attempted to preach in the major cities of Sepphoris, Tiberias, and Scythopolis. Sean Freyne, author of the definitive study of Jesus' Galilean ministry (Galilee, Jesus, and the Gospels, Philadelphia: 1988), concludes that Galilee was socially and ideologically more sedate than Judea. There was less banditry; the peasants were less heavily indebted and more inclined to view the Temple as a symbol of God's beneficence rather than the enterprise of an exploitive ruling class. In short, the Galilean audience was less receptive to fire-breathing apocalyptic rhetoric than a Judean audience. Conversely, the more jaded Judean audience, led by the kind of radical intellectuals who fanned the 4 C.E. uprising, would have found Jesus' stock Galilean parables tepid and simplistic.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus seems to have been adept at anticipating and manipulating his public reception. Evidently he anticipated the particular challenge of the Jerusalem crowd, and so he addressed them in the same ornate, stridently apocalyptic language the scribes themselves used. Jesus' lengthy, phantasmagoric description of a journey through the heavens would at once have established his bona fides with the crowd: Here was a man of esoteric erudition, who could provide a detailed tour of the heavens with the eloquence of the few who had been privileged to that vision. Here was a stranger from Galilee, a man without letters, yet possessing the secrets of a venerated Jerusalem scribe. Only God could have sent such a messenger.

So it is likely that Jesus correctly anticipated the expectations of the tough Jerusalem audience. Evidently the only thing Jesus didn't anticipate was Pontius Pilate.

Next: A MAN OF VERY INFLEXIBLE DISPOSITION

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