The First Seventy Years

THE GOSPELS AND THE GREAT WAR:  AD 60-80
September 17, 2014

In the fourth and fifth decades of the Christian faith the church lost its first generation of leadership and its home in Jerusalem. The two focal points for these decades became the war with Rome and the appearance of a Gospel by Mark.  The great task for the church over these years was to preserve the words of Jesus and his story, and they accomplished this task in what surely for Jerusalem Christians was the "worst of all times." For all of the fourth decade Christianity's homeland was plunged into war with Rome, and once again believers were forced to flee from Jerusalem.  Doubtless churches were still being planted in these decades, but Luke's wonderful narrative ends about the year 62 A.D., and there is no record of the new churches established in the secondary towns and villages of Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece.  Because the living voices of the original leaders were being snuffed out Christians, like Jews before them, needed to put their story into writing, and there were those whom God had called who could put their pens to work so God could speak through them.  The letters of Paul, Peter, James and Jude were treasured in these decades by those who had them, but there was not yet a "New Testament."  The scriptures used by the believers were the Old Testament books ("the word of truth" that Timothy was urged to "rightly divide")  interpreted in the light of Jesus' resurrection.   In the Roman world one building built in the church's fifth decade stands to this day as a testimony both to Rome's greatness and its cruelty;  the Coliseum was begun by Vespasian in 70  A.D. and finished by Titus in 80 A. D.

The Key Dates
62 James the Just, "the Lord's Brother," martyred
62 Simeon becomes leader of Jerusalem Church
64 Peter and Paul martyred during Nero's reign
66 The War With Rome begins
66-68 Christians Leave Jerusalem for Pella
70 Temple is destroyed, Jerusalem burned
70 Mark's Gospel written

From James to Simeon in Jerusalem
One of the surprises most people encounter in tracing the changes in the church in the early decades is the emergence of James, the brother of Jesus, as the leader after Peter is forced to leave Jerusalem by Herod Agrippa I.  Nothing in the four Gospels prepares us for the emergence of one of the brothers as a believer much less as the dominant leader  of the Jerusalem church.  We saw earlier what a powerful figure James was as both Peter and, later, Paul came to James to get agreements on how they could evangelize.  Fully Jewish, widely respected in the Jewish community and legendary in his prayer life, James lived and served Jewish Christianity until his death in 62 A.D.  The story of James' execution by the same Temple authorities that crucified Jesus is told by Hegessipus, a second century Christian writer.  James was called upon by the authorities to testify against the Christian understanding of who Jesus was, but he used the occasion to witness to the gathered crowd about Jesus.  He was thrown off the wall of the temple and then beaten to death by a man in the crowd as he prayed for his persecutors.  There are doubtless some legendary elements in the story Hegessipus told, but the Roman historian, Josephus, confirmed that James was executed on trumped up charges while there was no Roman Prefect in Judea.  Here is what Josephus said:

"...the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James" met his death after the death of the procurator Porcius Festus but before Lucceius Albinus had assumed office (Antiquities 20,9) — which has been dated to 62. The High Priest Hanan ben Hanan (Anani Ananus in Latin) took advantage of this lack of imperial oversight to assemble a Sanhedrin ...who condemned James "on the charge of breaking the law", then had him executed by stoning. Josephus reports that Hanan's act was widely viewed as little more than judicial murder and offended a number of "those who were considered the most fair-minded people in the City, and strict in their observance of the Law", who went so far as to arrange a meeting with Albinus as he entered the province in order to petition him successfully about the matter. In response, King Agrippa replaced Ananus with Jesus son of Damneus.^[1]

We are fortunate to have a list of all the early leaders of the Jerusalem church which Eusebius preserved for us.^[2]  The second leader of the Jerusalem church was a cousin of Jesus named Simeon.  He was the son of Clopas, the brother of Joseph.  This is a person most of us have never heard of, but he served as the pastor of the Jerusalem church  for over forty years in very difficult times.  He is surely one of the great figures of the Christian faith.  It is sad that we know so little about him.^[3]   Simeon took over the leadership of the church either just before the nation was plunged into war or just after--a war that forced citizens to choose sides between the Zealots and the pacifists.  As often happens, the passionate Zealots carried the day and brought disaster upon all the people of Israel, Jews and Christians alike.  While we do not know much about Simeon,  the fact that another relative of Jesus assumed leadership of the Christians in Jerusalem thirty years after the crucifixion  tells us that the family of Jesus was deeply involved in the church in Judea and Galilee.

From Jerusalem to Pella
The revolt against Rome began in Galilee and ended at Masada.  From A.D. 66-70 the rebels managed to carry on the fight against the Romans but that ended with the burning of the Temple by the army of Titus in A.D. 70.  After that the war centered on the Zealot hold outs who had withdrawn to the mountain fortress of Masada.  For three long years the Romans surrounded the mountain fortress while they built a road to allow them to storm the walls.  Perhaps  it was in these years that the Essenes who had withdrawn to the desert at Qumran hid their precious scrolls in the caves to prevent the Romans from taking them.  It took almost two millennia to find them. When at last the Romans breached the walls of Masada the Zealots inside committed suicide rather than being captured and the great war was finally over.  Titus took his looted treasures back to Rome along with captives to be executed, and today tourists can still see the scene of his triumphant return to the city depicted on the Arch of Titus.  It only takes a paragraph to summarize the events of the fourth decade of the church,  but even the massive volumes of Josephus fail to capture the sufferings of the people at the hands of the Romans.
One telling event recorded in the Gospels hints at the terrible tensions that ran through Jewish society in the days prior to the revolt.  A group of conservative Pharisees brought Jesus a Roman coin and asked him if Jews should pay taxes to Caesar.  To say "No" would have invited punishment by the Romans; to say "Yes" would have indicated "softness" on the Roman issue and would have inflamed the Zealots who were already using terrorist type attacks on the Romans even in Jesus' day.  The zealous patriots who were plotting an overthrow of Roman occupiers were already convinced that Jesus was "soft" on the Romans because he had taught his disciples to "turn the other cheek" rather than fight the Romans.  When we read these stories in the light of the rage of today's terrorists and their atrocities, we are reminded of how hard it was to be a follower of Jesus in the days leading up to the great war.  Neutrality was not an option.  People had to declare their allegiance and to refuse to join the revolt could lead to suffering and death.  It was in this atmosphere that the church of the fourth decade in Jerusalem made a gut-wrenching decision--they had to leave their homeland and flee.  The fourth century Christian writer, Eusebius,^[4]  tells us about their decision:
But the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded by a revelation, vouchsafed to approved men there before the war, to leave the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella.  And when those that believed in Christ had come thither from Jerusalem, then, as if the royal city of the Jews and the whole land of Judea were entirely destitute of holy men, the judgment of God at length overtook those who had committed such outrages against Christ and his apostles, and totally destroyed that generation of impious men.
The Christians of Jerusalem all moved to Pella in what is today Jordan.  They may have lived in caves just outside the city.  The excavation of the city has not produced any evidence of Christians inside the city.  Why did they go to Pella?
Cautious speculation suggests that there may have been some local connection between the Galilean leaders of the early Christian community and prominent citizens of Pella. Pella is only 20 miles south of the Sea of Galilee. The Gospels and Acts make it clear that the northern Jordan Valley region was familiar territory for the predominantly Galilean early church leaders. Some scholars have suggested that at least some of John the Baptist’s earlier missionary work may have taken place in the northern Jordan Valley, and not just in the southern Jordan Valley traditionally associated with his activities. More practically, three of the best crossing points in the northern Jordan Valley fall within the territory of Pella. With Galilee itself already devastated and occupied by the Romans after the start of the revolt in 66 A.D., Pella might have seemed the safest short-term bet in a very difficult neighborhood.^[5]
We don't know how long these Christians remained in Pella and we can't be sure that they ever returned to Jerusalem but most historians believe they did return.  According to Eusebius, those who returned joined with the remaining family of Jesus in Galilee to elect Simeon, the son of Clopas, uncle of Jesus, as head of the Jerusalem church.^[6]   Simeon led the church until some time in the reign of the emperor Hadrian, some forty years.

From The Living Word To Books
The fourth decade of the church not only saw the death of James, the great leader of the Jerusalem church, but also witnessed the deaths of both Peter and Paul. We do not have first hand evidence about the deaths of these two Christian leaders.  According to tradition, both were executed during Nero's reign (A.D. 54-68).  It is well documented that Nero used Christians as scapegoats to escape responsibility for the great fire that destroyed much of Rome in 64.  It may well be that Peter and Paul were executed during this period.  Tradition says that the Apostle Paul was beheaded since Roman citizens could not be crucified.  Simon Peter is said to have asked to be crucified upside down because he was not worthy to be crucified as Jesus was.  It may well be that Peter's tomb lies deep beneath the Vatican as recent excavators have claimed.  The letters Paul and Peter wrote ultimately became viewed as inspired scripture and now make up half of the entire New Testament.  Their contributions to the growth of the church were secure by the time of their deaths, but their loss marks a tipping point in the history of the church.  The apostolic age came to an end with the death of these two leaders and the ability to hear the gospel directly from those who had seen the risen Lord died with them.  And with the death of the living witnesses there was the great danger that the words of the Lord would be lost.  Just as the Jews who left Jerusalem to go to Babylon in 586 B.C. needed to preserve for future generations what they knew, so too Christians needed to keep the story of Jesus alive when the apostles and first disciples began to pass away.
Scholars tell us that we can thank John Mark for doing something that had never been done before--write a Gospel.  There had been Greek biographies and stories of people who did remarkable deeds and there had been historians who wrote about the events of empires, but there had never been anything quite like a Gospel.  Mark's Gospel is not a biography.  After all it doesn't even begin with Jesus' early life.  It isn't just a dry listing of what happened, either.  Mark pieced Jesus' story together to lead up to the last week when Jesus was crucified. Almost half of Mark's Gospel is taken up by that last week! Along the way Mark told the remarkable story of Jesus' announcement of the Kingdom of God and Jesus' own understanding of his role in it, a role the disciples struggled to grasp and Rome never understood.   The teachings of Jesus were apparently already widely known among the churches by the  fourth decade.  Mark does not write about them except as they are part of Jesus' ministry to people.  There is no "sermon on the mount" in Mark.  It is very difficult to answer even the most basic questions we like to ask about an author's work.  When did he write?  Where did he write?  To Whom did he write? Where did he get his information? Why did he write?  As I've said already, we may be able to answer the last question;  it seems clear that Mark wanted to show who Jesus was and show that his crucifixion was not for crimes he committed but because of his obedience to the Father.  But the other questions continue to elude scholars.  It is now generally agreed that both Matthew and Luke knew and used Mark; so Mark wrote before those two.  It is not crystal clear that Mark knew about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. but he may have.  Most assume that he wrote while the great war between Rome and Israel was being fought.  Perhaps he was in Rome far removed from the fighting.  He writes as a Jew but he translates words that non-Jews would not recognize so he thinks there are Gentiles who will be reading his work.  According to a very early tradition, Mark was an associate of Simon Peter whose testimony about Jesus he recorded.  Luke, of course, describes Mark as working with the Apostle Paul.  We do not have an original copy of Mark but some of Mark is preserved in a manuscript dating 200-250 A.D.  Sometime in the fifth decade, A.D. 70-80 copies of Mark began to make their way to the churches.  One interesting fact is that every early manuscript of our New Testament is part of a codex, a book, rather than a scroll.  Christians needed to be able to find passages more easily than the old scrolls of Judaism allowed and thus the new literary form of a "gospel" found its place in a brand new way of preserving texts, in a book.

Conclusion
The fourth and fifth decades of the Christian church, A.D. 60-80, witnessed profound pressures on Christians.  The madman Nero slaughtered innocent Christians in the most barbaric fashion in Rome while Rome's armies destroyed the Temple and ravaged the entire land of Israel, forcing Christians to flee and robbing them of their physical home in the heart of Judaism. The church would never be the same.  But these decades preserved the old, old story for all succeeding generations and made it possible for Matthew and Luke to do their work.

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 BACK TO TEXT1. Quoted in Wickipedia article at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus
The story is found in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, (xx.9).

  BACK TO TEXT2. "I have not found any written statement of the dates of the bishops in Jerusalem, for
tradition says that they were extremely short-lived, but I have gathered from documents this much—that up to the siege of the Jews by Hadrian the successions of bishops were fifteen in number. It is said that they were all Hebrews by origin who had nobly accepted the knowledge of Christ, so that they were counted worthy even of the episcopal ministry by those who had the power to judge such questions. For their whole church at that time consisted of Hebrews who had continued Christian faith from the Apostles down to the siege at the time when the Jews again rebelled from the Romans and were beaten in a great war. Since the Jewish bishops then ceased, it is now necessary to give their names from the beginning  
The first then was James who was called the Lord's brother, and after him 
Simeon was the second. 
The third was Justus, 
Zacchaeus was the fourth, 
Tobias the fifth, 
the sixth Benjamin, 
the seventh John,
the eighth Matthias, 
the ninth Philip, 
the tenth Seneca, 
the eleventh Justus, 
the twelfth Levi, 
the thirteenth Efres, 
the fourteenth Joseph, and last of all
the fifteenth Judas. 
Such were the bishops in the city of Jerusalem, from the Apostles down to the time mentioned, and they were all Jews."   Eusebius,  Church History, 4.5. 1-4

 BACK TO TEXT3. "Simeon the son of Clopas was leader of the Jerusalem church - and doubtless the most important figure in Jewish Christianity - for at least 40 years, until his martyrdom in the reign of Trajan (either between 99.and 103 CE or between 108 and 117 CE). When Luke's first readers read of Cleopas (Lk. 24:18) and John's first readers of Mary of Clopas (Jn. 19:25), many of them would no doubt easily have recognized the parents of their famous contemporary. That we know so little about so significant a figure is another salutary reminder of the great gaps in our evidence for early Christianity. But the great reverence with which he was remembered in Jewish Christian tradition can be seen in Hegesippus's hagiographical account of his death.[16] The historically reliable information in the account is that Simeon was arrested on a charge of political subversion, because he was of a Davidic family and supported the alleged Davidic king Jesus, and was put to death by crucifixion. This fits well into the period between the two great Jewish revolts…".  Richard Bauckham, "The Relatives of Jesus," Themelios 21 (January, 1996) 21.

  BACK TO TEXT4. Eusebius, Church History,  5.3.

  BACK TO TEXT5. Stephen Bourke, "The Christian Flight To Pella," Biblical Archaeological Review (39:03, May/Jun 2013), 30-39, 70-71. 

  BACK TO TEXT6. After the martyrdom of James and the capture of Jerusalem which immediately followed,
the story goes that those of the Apostles and of the disciples of the Lord who
were still alive came together from every place with those who were, humanly speaking,
of the family of the Lord, for many of them were then still alive, and they all took
counsel together as to whom they ought to adjudge worthy to succeed James, and all
unanimously decided that Simeon the son of Clopas, whom the scripture of the Gospel
also mentions, was worthy of the throne of the diocese there. He was, so it is said, a
cousin of the Saviour, for Hegesippus relates that Clopas was the brother of Joseph.

Eusebius, Church History, 3:11