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5. THE FOURTH PHILOSOPHY

Caesar, the only man with the authority to confirm a king in Roman-occupied Judea, withdrew that sanction from Herod's heir Archelaus in 6 A.D., after "both his brothers and the principal men of Judea, and Samaria" protested Archelaus' "barbarous and tyrannical usage of them" (Ant 17.342). Archelaus' brother, Herod Antipas, remained ruler of Galilee and Perea, but Archelaus' former territories -- Judea, Idumea, and Samaria -- were placed under the stewardship of a new governor of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, and an equestrian named Coponius, who had been appointed the first Prefect of Judea. Quirinius entered Judea to register the property of the Jews for tax purposes (this is the same registration mentioned in Luke 1.80-82, which refers to Quirinius by name and which establishes the pretext for Joseph's return to his putative ancestral home, Bethlehem -- not coincidentally, the birthplace of David -- with the pregnant Mary; however, in Luke 1.5, the evangelist incorrectly places this registration in Herod's reign).

The Jews regarded the registration as an outrage, but were convinced to "leave off any farther opposition to it" (Ant 18.3) by the High Priest Joazar, who had been deposed by Archelaus and was evidently beholden to the Romans who had restored his office. Thus the majority of Jews "gave an account of their estates, without any dispute.... But a certain Judas... of a city whose name was Gamala, who enlisted in his cause Saddok, a Pharisee, became determined to lead them into rebellion. These two said that the tax was no better than slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty.... So men received what they said with great pleasure... and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree.... Judas and Saddok inspired among us a fourth philosophic sect, to which they drew a great many followers, and at once filled our government with tumult, also laying the foundation of our future miseries...."

In Antiquities 18.23-25 Josephus gives a few important specifics about this enigmatic yet apparently momentous fourth philosophy:

These men agree in all things with the Pharisees, except for their inviolable attachment to liberty; they say that God is to be their only ruler and lord. They do not regard dying as a form of death, nor do they heed of the deaths of their relations and friends, nor can any fear of death make them call any man their master. Since this immovable resolution of theirs has been witnessed by many, I shall speak no further of it; nor am I afraid that these accounts should be disbelieved, but rather fear, that what I have said cannot equal the resolution they show when they undergo pain. It was in the time of the procurator Gessius Florus that the nation began to grow mad with this distemper; it was he who occasioned the Jews to go wild with it by the abuse of his authority, and made them revolt against the Romans...."

Gessius Florius was the extravagantly corrupt procurator appointed by Nero in 64 A.D.; in referring to Florius here, Josephus draws a direct line between the tax protest of 6 A.D. and the revolt of 66 A.D. Yet as Josephus himself admits, there was nothing to distinguish the fourth philosophy from conventional Pharisaic piety, which was observed by the majority of Jews (including Josephus), except for the resolute conviction that only God can rightfully rule the Jews -- and, even this was a belief so widely held that, in Josephus' own words, "the nation began to go mad" with it. In reducing, with a characteristic hellenism, this pervasive nationalistic fervor to an arcane "fourth philosophy," Josephus tells us more about his own prejudices than about the beliefs of his countrymen. The fourth philosophy in fact represented a broad, mainstream belief, held by far more Jews than adhered to the other three sects (Essenes, Pharisees, and Sadducees) combined. The ideological foundation of the fourth philosophy was laid long before 6 A.D.; the defining precept, that only God should rule in Israel, is as ancient as the exodus from Egypt.

Interestingly, the sudden revelation -- at least that is how Josephus would have us see it -- of the fourth philosophy resulted in no revolutionary violence. What follows, in both the Antiquities and War, is a dramatic, twenty-year silence. Josephus does not explain this period of relative quiet, but we can assume that the after Quinctilius Varus' demonstration of Roman power, there was little popular support for armed resistance. Most Jews accepted the admonition of Daniel 4.17: "the most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever he will, and sets up over it the basest of men." It was part and parcel of God's cosmic promise, stated in so much intertestamental literature and popular myth, that in the last age before the establishment of God's kingdom, the basest of men would inherit the kingdom of the world. And no sensible Jews could dispute, in 6 A.D., that the Romans were the rulers of the world.

Yet there may also have been a temporary lessening of social tensions due to an economic "quick fix" instituted around the time of the tax registration of 6 A.D. The Mosaic statute that required lenders to forgive loans every seventh, or sabbatical, year had resulted in severe credit shortage, as lenders avoided making loans that could not be repaid before the sabbatical year. The famed conservative Pharisaic scribe Hillel the Elder addressed this problem by instituting a legal device called the prozbul, a court-sworn disclaimer of the right of release from debt in the Sabbatical year (Mishnah Sheviith 10.3-6). The prozbul probably brought temporary relief to peasants newly burdened by Roman taxes. But within a generation this easy credit must have contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of foreclosures on peasant landowners who had given up their protection under Mosaic law in return for easy credit.

By the time of Jesus' ministry, the foreclosures had significantly increased the ranks of the indigent day laborers, a phenomenon we can glimpse in Jesus' parable of the laborers in the vineyard, found in Matthew 20.1-16. The landowner went out early in the morning (most likely to the village marketplace) to hire laborers for the grape harvest, found the usual contingent waiting, negotiated their day wage, and sent them to work. Returning throughout the day, he continued to find workers waiting for hire. As late as an hour before sunset, the landowner "found others standing idle, and said to them, Why are you standing here all the day idle? They say to him, Because no man has hired us." Though the parable is intended to illustrate that "the last shall be first" in the kingdom of heaven (those hired an hour before sunset were paid the same wage as those who began to work in the morning), the imagery presupposes a familiarity with day laborers waiting all day in the marketplace for work, and finding none.

So, for an instant, we glimpse the lives of the poorest Jews after two decades of ruthlessly efficient Roman rule. Then, shortly after Pontius Pilate assumed the Prefecture of Judea in 26 A.D., the era of silent misery ends, and we begin to hear about new deliverers.

Next: THE EVIDENCE

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