A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond Read Free Book Online

could not credit that it could be an improvement on
the one they enjoyed, did not believe in the afterlife and being anxious at all costs to preserve their earthly position co-operated (like Vichy) with the occupying power. They thought they were
there for ever, but as Abram Levy, Haham of the Sephardic congregation in London, asked: ‘Where are the Sadducees now?’
    Needless to say, the Sadducees were often at odds – politically, socially and economically – with the Pharisees, who were priestly, scholarly, intellectual, bourgeois, believers in
the letter and spirit of the Law. Their attention to hygiene, for instance, amounted to the obsessive. Saul, who was a prize Pharisee before he became Paul, joked that the Pharisees would have
washed the moon had they been able to. The self-appointed monitors of society, they interpreted, practised and guarded the Law, notably from the often unintentional insults of the occupying power,
and were not always so narrow in this role as they are cast in the Gospels. Professor Hyam Maccoby, the most tolerant and readable of modern Jewish scholars, maintains that the Pharisees and the
Sanhedrin were not continuously hostile to Jesus, nor to his followers after his death, indeed that occasionally friendly references to both peep through, uncensored, in the Gospels. Professor
Maccoby claims that Jesus
was
a Pharisee. (Alas for the Jews, he is their most famous man.)
    Nothing Jesus is reported to have said conflicted with the Jewish law he had come ‘to fulfil and not to destroy’. The same Dr Abram Levy told me the only doctrinal difference between
Jesus and Judaism is the Christian emphasis on forgiveness. Jews are not obliged to be so agreeable, being a people known, as Disraeli put it, ‘never to forgive an injury, norforget a benefit’, but equally they do believe that the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath, which means that considerations of serious illness or danger take
precedence.
    None of the above, of course, would have been of any interest to the Romans, in whose literature the only reference to Jesus is in Josephus, and that a forgery. Awareness of followers of the
cult of Jesus – the term ‘Christian’ was not current till long after his death – being separate from other Jews, cannot be detected till the fire of Rome and they were not
systematically persecuted till the end of the century. Anatole France has a story which may well describe the effect of the new religion on the Roman mind at the time of Nero. Anxious to know more
about the background of the followers of Jesus, the Foreign Office (as it were) sent a young man to question Pontius Pilate, the governor who had him crucified, now in retirement in Baiae (Naples).
Pilate is delighted at the opportunity to talk shop and evades the matter in hand with a series of reminiscences in the vein of I-wonder-what-happened-to-him? Finally, exasperated, the young
diplomat asks Pilate directly to tell him about Jesus of Nazareth, founder of this new subversive cult which is giving trouble to the authorities. Pilate looks puzzled.
    ‘– whom you had crucified,’ repeats the young man, ‘thirty years ago.’
    ‘Rappelle pas,’ says Pontius Pilate.
    The followers of Jesus, the disciples of his brother James, the ‘Jerusalem Christians’, as historians called them later, may have fought the Romans in the Jewish War, but they are
– tactfully, perhaps – nowhere mentioned.
    Another sect with whom early Christians have been (mistakenly) compared were the Essenes. Though there is no monastic arm in Judaism, monasticism and monkish habits, coming from the ashrams in
India around 1,500 BC , wereadopted by colonies of Jews and of these, since the discovery in 1947 of scrolls around the north-west corner of the Dead
Sea, the colony in the caves at Qumran is the most famous. We know now that the Essene community there was destroyed by Vespasian after his capture of Jericho in AD 68.