The effect of such conditions in so critical a place as Judea, was to call Roman attention to the country to a much greater extent than was advantageous to the Jews. The region very naturally appeared to them as a turbulent and seditious section, much as Gaul did to Julius Caesar and largely for the same reason, the instinctive love of liberty and the presence of “innovators,” νεωτερισταί, cupidi rerum novarum, restless and ambitious instigators of rebellion.[[301]] The Jerusalem Jews are, to be sure, very eager to escape the reproach of disloyalty. The rebellion was the work of outsiders (ἐπήλυδες), to wit, the Galileans and Gileadites above-mentioned.[[302]]
Varus crucified two thousand men, and then disbanded his auxiliary army. The latter, composed obviously of natives of the country, proceeded to plunder on their own account. Varus’ prompt action brought them to terms. The officers were seized and sent to Rome, where, however, only the relatives of Herod, who had added impiety to treason, were punished.
But the reproach of being a seditious people was resented by other Jews than those of Jerusalem. The Jews in Rome were largely descended from those who had left the country before even Antipater, Herod’s father, had become powerful there. On them, of course, the house of Herod could make no claim, and for obvious reasons closer relations with Rome seemed to them eminently desirable. The Jewish embassy which Varus had permitted the Judeans to send—how selected and led we have no information—was joined by an immense deputation from the Roman synagogues. The substance of their plea was the petition that they be made an integral part of the province of Syria. “For it will thus become evident whether they really are a seditious people, generally impatient of all forms of authority for any length of time” (Jos. Ant. XVII. ii. 2; Wars, II. vi. 2).
This plea, to be joined to Syria, is particularly significant if we remember that the motive of the Jews in sending the embassy was, in the words of the Wars (II. vi. 1), to plead for the autonomy of their nation (cf. Ant. XVII. xi. 1). We see strikingly confirmed the theory of the Roman provincial system, in which the proconsul or propraetor was only an official added to, but not superseding, the local authorities.
The representative of Archelaus, Nicolaus of Damascus,[[303]] charged the former’s accusers with “rebellion and lust for sedition,” with lack of that culture which consists in observance of right and law. Nicolaus had in view primarily the Jewish accusers of his employer, but no doubt made his remarks general. In the earlier version of the embassy, as it appears in the Wars (II. vi. 2), it is the whole nation that Nicolaus charges directly with “a natural lack of submission and loyalty to royal power.”
Augustus declined to continue the heterogeneous kingdom of Herod. A brief trial of Archelaus as ethnarch of Judea proper convinced him of the latter’s worthlessness. The request of the Jewish envoys was now granted. Judea became a part of Syria—and the agent or procurator of the Syrian proconsul took up official residence at Caesarea. We find, however, that this step, which the Jews themselves had suggested, almost immediately provoked a serious rebellion in Galilee, led by one Judah of Gamala in Galilee and by a Pharisee named Zadok, who, if we may believe Josephus, were appreciably different from the various “robbers,” ληστής, whom he had formerly enumerated, and, in his eyes, even more detestable than they were. They placed their opposition on the basis of a principle. This principle was that of the sinfulness of all mortal government and the consequent rejection of Roman authority as well. Accordingly they refused to pay tribute. These advocates of a pure theocracy had of course obvious Scriptural warrant for their position, but the relatively rapid spread of such a doctrine in the form of an actual programme of resistance can be accounted for only by the extremely unsettled state of the country and the still more unsettled state of men’s minds.
That this Judah formed a fourth sect of the Jews in addition to the three, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, already in existence, as Josephus tells us, may not be quite true.[[304]] Men of his type are scarcely founders of sects. But there can be no doubt that the doctrines which these zealots espoused were those which Josephus has described. The later history of Europe has abundant examples of such groups of fanatic warriors maintaining one of many current religious dogmas, especially in times of economic and political disorder. Of such incidents the Hussite bands of Ziska and the Anabaptist insurrection are examples. In this case the distress and uncertainty were largely spiritual. The economic conditions, while bad, had not become particularly worse. Indeed, if anything, more direct administration had somewhat lightened the burdens, by making them less arbitrary and by removing the heavy expense of a court and the need of footing the bill for Herod’s building enterprises.
Josephus regards the great rebellion of 68 C.E. as the direct consequence of this insurrection of Judah. He is therefore very bitter against this “fourth philosophic system,” which spread among the younger men and brought the country to ruin. It is at least curious that in his earlier work, the Wars, in which the recollection of Jewish disaster would be, one would suppose, vastly more vivid, he does not ascribe to this rebellion any such far-reaching effects (Wars, II. viii. 1); nor is it in any degree likely that this insurrection was after all more than what it appears to be there, a sporadic outburst in that hotbed of unrest, the Galilean hills, noteworthy only for the special zeal with which the theocratic principles were announced.
No riots or disturbances are mentioned in Judea till the famous image-riots of the time of Pontius Pilate. However we may wish to discount the highly colored narrative preserved in Josephus, there can be no doubt that these riots did take place. It may even be that the representation of influential Jews induced the much desired concession on Pilate’s part of removing the “images.” But what these images were does not appear with any clearness from Josephus’ account, and of course we are under no obligation to take literally the “five days and five nights” during which the ambassadors lay prostrate, with bare necks, at Pilate’s feet.
Josephus speaks of the “images of Caesar which are called standards” (Wars, II. ix. 2; Ant. XVIII. iii. 1). The Roman standards, signa, σημαίαι, often contained representations of the emperor. But these were in the form of medallions in flat relief, hung upon the standard. They would have been noticed only upon relatively close inspection. There were also statues in the camp. But it is quite unlikely that if the Roman provincial administrators were instructed to issue no coins with the imperial effigy, they would be allowed to carry into the city actual statues of the emperor. They may well have forgotten that the military standards would be themselves offensive, if they bore, as they always did, the representation of animal forms. All legions at this time carried the eagle, and most of them had other heraldic animals as well.[[305]]