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12. IN THE COMPANY OF BANDITS

        The vast preponderance of the Jews crucified by the Romans were revolutionaries captured in the field.  Josephus describes the use of crucifixion in the 4 B.C. revolt:  "Varus sent a part of his army into the country, to seek out those that had been the authors of the revolt; and when they were discovered, he punished some of them that were the most guilty, and some he dismissed:  now the number of those that were crucified on this account were two thousand."  (Ant 17.295-296)  War 2.75 offers an almost identical account, except that those who were spared were imprisoned, not "dismissed."  But the process in one important respect remains the same:  Many were crucified, many weren't.  The process of selection cannot have been by separate trials for many thousands of prisoners.  Evidently the sentencing was determined by some sort of quasi-judicial, extremely hasty battlefield triage.  It should also be noted that after the uprising had been put down, Varus permitted the Jews to send an embassy to Caesar, to plead for greater self-government -- the iron fist and the velvet glove.

        The next crucifixion Josephus mentions is that of Jesus; we have already seen the relevant passage (Ant 18.64), which gives no details except that it was done by Pilate.  Then we advance to somewhere around 46-48 A.D., under the procuratorship of Tiberius Alexander, an apostatized Jew from a powerful Alexandrian family (Philo was his uncle).  We learn that Alexander "commanded to be crucified" Simon and James, the sons of Judas the Galilean -- the same Judas the Galilean Josephus credits as founder of the despised "Fourth Philosophy"  (Ant 20.102).  We have no other details, but we can reasonably assume that Simon and James, whose father and grandfather may have been bandit chiefs (see Ant 17.271), and whose brother became a guerilla leader during the 66 A.D. revolt, were also important bandit leaders.  

        Then, in War 2.232-244 and the parallel account Ant 20.118-136, Josephus describes an incident occurring around 50 A.D.  A Galilean Jew was murdered in Samaria on his way to the festival of Tabernacles (in Antiquities "many Jews" were murdered).  "When the affair of this murder came to be told at Jerusalem, it put the multitude into disorder, and they left the feast; and without any generals to conduct them, they marched with great violence to Samaria."  The leader of these "brigands and rioters" was a certain Eleazar; in Antiquities 20.121 he is described as "a bandit who had many years made his abode in the mountains."  Eleazar's band burned the Samaritan village where the murder(s) had taken place and massacred its entire population.  At this, Ventidius Cumanus, the procurator of Judea, sent the Sebastene troops out of Caesarea, which "seized a great number of those that followed Eleazar, and slew more of them."  Evidently Eleazar and some of his people remained in the countryside, however, bringing about more "robbery, raids, and insurrection."  The Samaritans and Jews both sent embassies to the governor of Syria, Ummidius Quadratus, appealing for him to intercede.  Declining to bring his legions into Judea, Quadratus "went to Caesarea, and crucified all those whom Cumanus had taken alive."  He then went on to Lydda, where held a hearing, identified eighteen men as the leaders of the mob (in Antiquities 20.130 the leaders are a "Dortus" and four other men), and ordered them beheaded.  Quadratus then sent to Rome a number of leading Samaritans and Jews, including the High Priest, to settle the matter before Caesar; he also sent the procurator Cumanus to Caesar to explain his role in the trouble.

        Of interest is the deliberate, cautious manner in which Quadratus' proceeded -- except for the crucifixions of the bandits in Caesarea.  We have no mention of a hearing to determine their fate, and the fact that all were executed suggests that there wasn't any trial.  

        Quadratus replaced Cumanus with a procurator named Antonius Felix.  "This Felix took Eleazar, the brigand chief, and many that were with him, alive, after they had ravaged the country for twenty years together, and sent them to Rome; but as to the number of bandits whom he caused to be crucified, and of the common people who were punished for complicity with them, they were a countless multitude" (War 2.253).  Again mass crucifixion of bandits, again no mention of trials.

        Finally we have Gessius Florus, procurator of  Judea at the outbreak of the 66 A.D. revolt, the man Josephus described as a "partner of bandits."  Caught dipping into the Temple treasury -- reminiscent of Pilate's troubles regarding the aqueduct funds -- Florus was jeered by the crowd.  He sent for additional troops and assembled a tribunal, calling on the Sanhedrin to hand over the men who had insulted him.  The leading Jews, no doubt well aware of the revolutionary mood of the crowd, implored Florus to pardon the offenders; Florus became so enraged that he ordered his soldiers to sack the Upper Market and the adjacent neighborhood.  Many Jews were massacred in the streets.  The soldiers "also caught many of the peaceful citizens, and brought them before Florus, whom he first scourged and then crucified....  The whole number that were destroyed that day, with their wives and children (for they did not spare even the infants themselves), was about three thousand and six hundred" (War 2.306).  What made this atrocity even more appalling in Josephus' eyes was that Florus also crucified Jews who had been awarded equestrian rank by the Romans (this was an increasingly common honor for wealthy provincials).  Having Roman citizen status, they should have had the same right of appeal to Caesar as any capital defendant -- the same right of appeal that the apostle Paul had exercised.  Of course that would assume that the hundreds who were probably crucified that day had received trials; almost certainly they had not.

        Later, when the legions under the future emperors  Vespasian and his son Titus besieged Jerusalem, captured Jews were crucified hundreds at a time -- Josephus says five hundred a day -- before the walls of Jerusalem.  Despite the unrelenting horror of these executions, which Josephus says moved Titus to pity, they were allowed to go on because Titus "hoped the Jews might surrender at the sight" (War 5.450).  But by then, of course, the object lesson of crucifixion had already failed.

        What we see in the preceding catalogue of crucifixions is a simple pattern:  Crucifixion as used in Judea was a military tactic, not a judicial punishment.  Its purpose was to deter sedition by making an example of the para-military opponents of the Roman regime -- what Josephus called bandits and what we call guerillas, terrorists, or freedom fighters.  In times of peace, this dreadful retribution was applied solely to bandits; in times of open revolt, innocent civilians were also crucified.  Almost always, it was a mass execution.  We have no evidence that any crucified Jew was ever tried beforehand, and considerable reason to believe that none ever was.

        This leads us to an equally simple historical probability:  Jesus was never tried, and Jesus was executed in a fashion reserved for bandits and revolutionaries.  This conclusion is underscored when we recall the two men the gospels tell us were crucified beside Jesus, the two lestes -- not mere thieves, but bandits.  It is highly probable that Jesus died in the company of men considered bandits.  And it is equally probable that there were more than two of them.

        This is not to say that Jesus was a bandit chief, although some of his followers may well have been bandits.  Luke 6.15 identifies an apostle named Simon Zelotes, or Simon the Zealot.  The term zealot is certainly an anachronism, as the zealots did not exist until after the outbreak of the 66 A.D. revolt.  But certainly the term describes a type of violent idealogue -- and patriot -- found well before and during the time of Jesus.  And some of Jesus' own sayings are startlingly violent.  Mark and the Sayings Gospel Q both provide versions of Jesus' saying from The Gospel of Thomas:  "No one can enter into a strong man's house and wreck it without first tying that person's hands.  Then one can ransack the house" (Th 35).  Q and Thomas both have versions of Luke 10.34:  "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."  The Gospel of  Thomas (Th 98) also provides one of the most remarkably violent images attributed to Jesus (a saying accepted as authentic by the Jesus Seminar):  "Jesus said, 'What the kingdom of heaven resembles is a man who wanted to assassinate a member of the court.  At home, he drew the dagger and stabbed it into the wall in order to know whether his hand would be steady.  Next, he murdered the member of the court."

        Still, Jesus almost certainly did not directly espouse violence.  But the coming of the kingdom of heaven was not going to be a gentle consummation, and Jesus drank from the same wellspring of violent, apocalyptic imagery that nourished the bandits and made them avenging angels, not thieves, to the common people.  Jesus did not live by the bandits' sword, but he did live by a similar belief in God's violent retribution and ultimate victory.  And, like many bandits, he died for that belief.

Next: FALLING UPON THEM UNEXPECTEDLY

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Copyright (C) 2004 Michael Ennis
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Claudia Procula, or Claudia Procle, the name given Pilate's wife in such popular fictions as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, is based solely on preposterous legends and forgeries long discredited by biblical scholars.