Richard A. Horsley, with John S. Hanson. Trinity Press International, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; 1999. Originally published in 1985.
by James A. Bacon
When first published in 1985, Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs acted as a much-needed antidote to a debilitating trend in New Testament scholarship. Simple-minded interpretations of Jesus and his social milieu had come into vogue with the liberation theology of the 1960s and 1970s, and an equally simplistic academic counterrevolution had set in. Leftist scholars were interpreting the Great Revolt of 66 A.D. as a classic war of liberation against the Romans and their Jewish collaborators. They construed any sign of resistance to imperial rule as part of a broad-based “Zealot” movement. Carrying this line of thinking to extremes, some even argued that Jesus himself was a Zealot executed by the Romans for armed insurrection. In reaction, conservative scholars cited abundant evidence to portray Jesus as an other-worldly pacifist. In the polarized intellectual climate of the time, there seemed to be only two ways of understanding Jesus: He was either a militant revolutionary or a conscientious objector.
In Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs, Richard Horsley endeavors to show that opposition to Roman rule in Judea was more widespread than acknowledged by the conservatives but less organized and politically conscious than depicted by the radicals. Because the dynamics of Judean society were more complex than either side had been willing to admit, latitude existed to draw a more nuanced portrait of Jesus. Though not without its problems, Horsley’s work has withstood the test of time fairly well. The volume reviewed here, a 1999 paperback reprint, still stands as one of the best surveys of socio-political conditions in 1st century Palestine.
Although Horsley chastises liberation theologians for their simplistic portrayal of the Zealot movement, he shares many of their assumptions. The defining reality of 1st century Galilee and Judea, he says, was the rule of Rome and its allies: the Herodian princes and Temple priests. Peasants, burdened by taxes, rents, interest payments and temple tithes, chafed under the oppression. But clinging to traditions of the Israelites as a free people owing their loyalty only to God, they did not suffer silently. Horsley examines four patterns of resistance: social banditry, popular kingship, prophetic movements and the “fourth philosophy.” (In a subsequent work, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, Horsley expands his typology to encompass mob violence in Jerusalem and forms of passive resistance such as peasant strikes.)
Brigandage was endemic in 1st century Palestine. While some commentators have depicted every band of highwaymen as participants in a broader liberation struggle, Horsley views the brigandage as “social banditry” — a widespread non-political phenomenon in peasant societies. Conveying as much as 40 percent of their production to the urban elites, Judean peasants borrowed money during hard times to meet their obligations. Interest payments added to their burdens; farmers who failed to make their payments lost their land. Fleeing debts and taxes, these economic refugees hid in the hills, preyed upon travelers and raided the estates of the rich. Though they rarely exhibited any political consciousness, their resistance to authority occasionally made them champions of the people. When the Jews rose against the Romans, bandits from all across Palestine flocked to Jerusalem in defense of Jewish liberty.
On occasion, most notably the 4 B.C. revolt following the death of Herod the Great and the 66 A.D. revolt against Rome, brigand leaders assembled military forces of sufficient size to defy the Romans openly. A number of these men, from Athronges the shepherd to Simon bar Gioras, made claims to kingship. Alongside the written traditions anticipating a King David-like messiah, Horsley contends, there existed a peasant tradition of a popular kingship, stemming from ancient Israel when pre-Davidic kings were anointed by lot or popular election. Arising from the peasant class, Athronges, Simon and others saw themselves as fulfilling this oral tradition, not the written scriptures of the scribal elites. The principal goal of these peasant pretenders, asserts Horsley, was to displace Herodian and Roman rule and to “restore the traditional ideals of a free and egalitarian society.”
While the men who would be king sought liberation by the sword, prophets predicted deliverance by the hand of God. Within a few years of Jesus’ death, a series of prophets inspired crowds of peasants to follow them into the wilderness with the hope of catalyzing divine intervention by re-enacting miraculous events from the nation’s past. One unnamed Samaritan prophet led a throng up the holy Mount Gerizim to retrieve artifacts left by Moses. A certain Theudas convinced his followers to join him as he parted the waters of the Jordan River and made way for a triumphal entry into the promised land. The so-called Egyptian prophet gathered a mob on the Mount of Olives, predicting that, Joshua-like, he would command the walls of Jerusalem to come tumbling down. They all failed: The Romans suppressed each movement. But Palestine seethed with discontent and other prophets took their place, issuing an endless stream of apocalyptic warnings and promises.
Horsley identifies one other manifestation of unrest: that which the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus referred to as the “fourth philosophy.” Reacting to the Roman census in 6 A.D. Judas the Galilean and Saddok, a Pharisee, preached resistance, arguing that God was their only master. While liberation scholars saw in Judas and Saddok the progenitors of the militant Zealot movement, Horsley cautions that resistance to Roman rule did not necessarily require the taking up of arms. The fourth philosophy also inspired acts of civil disobedience, passive resistance and a willingness to suffer martyrdom, of which there were many examples under the rule of the Roman governors.
To some Jews, however, the fourth philosophy did justify violent resistance. The sicarii, a secretive group based in Jerusalem, assassinated high-ranking Jews and kidnapped their servants in exchange for ransom money. Liberation scholars have subsumed the sicarii within the larger Zealot movement, but Horsley regards them as entirely distinct. The sicarii drew their members from the scribal elite, not from the peasantry as the Zealots did. By terrorizing the ruling class, the sicarii did aggravate the cycle of violence that led to the Great Revolt, but their role in the rebellion itself was peripheral. Holing up in the fortress of Masada, notes Horsley, the sicarii refused to aid the rebels in Jerusalem, then committed mass suicide when besieged by the Romans. They never amounted to a serious fighting force.
As for the famous Zealots, they emerged as a recognizable movement only during the revolt itself. Far from being a long-standing army of national resistance, the Zealots came into being when the Romans began their reconquest of Judea. As the Romans advanced, the people fled. Fugitive peasants formed gangs of brigands. Wave after wave converged upon Jerusalem for safety until they became a force to be reckoned with. They assaulted the Jewish nobles and seized control of the Temple, installing one of their own members as High Priest. In contrast to the Jewish factions led by Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala, Horsley observes, the Zealots were more preoccupied with pursuing their vendetta against the Jewish nobility than presenting a unified front to the Romans.
All in all, Horsley’s schema is vastly preferable to the nonsense that prevailed before Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs appeared in 1985. As a preliminary work, it paves the way for a more comprehensive analysis in the author’s subsequent books. Unfortunately, while correcting the offenses of an earlier era, Horsley creates troublesome misconceptions of his own — misconceptions that have taken on the immutability of dogma in many American universities.
The two most egregious flaws are these: First, he assumes with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the economic situation of the Palestinian peasantry was deteriorating in the decades before the Great Revolt; second, by limiting his scrutiny to different forms of resistance to Roman-Herodian rule, he ignores other ways of coping with the travails and hazards of life in 1st century Palestine. Like the liberation theologians who preceded him, Horsely imagines a bipolar Judean society divided between collaborators and resisters. While attuned to subtle variations of resistance, he perpetuates a one-dimensional view of those who found Roman rule tolerable.
There is no denying the reality that Judea was a hierarchical society or that the ruling institutions expropriated a significant amount of wealth from the peasantry. But Horsley draws a picture of unrelieved oppression that grew ever worse with time. Where an independent peasantry had once prevailed, he says, large landed estates administered by stewards and farmed by tenants were becoming the norm. Taxes, tithes and debt to money lenders were becoming more oppressive. Dispossessed of their land, especially after periods of famine, peasants fled to the hills and joined the ever-growing ranks of the bandits. Incredibly, Horsley offers no serious evidence whatsoever to support this quasi-Marxist analysis. Yes, taxes were high. Yes, the number of bandits did increase after the famine of 46-48 A.D. And, yes, a mob did burn the archives of debtor’s records during the Great Revolt. But taxes, tithes and other obligations had been onerous for centuries, and there is absolutely no reason to believe the burden of these obligations was increasing or that ownership of land was being concentrated in the hands of fewer and richer landlords. Horsley cites no such evidence because it does not exist.
Indeed, an argument can be made that the pax romana brought unprecedented prosperity to the Jews of Jesus’ era. An end to the internecine warfare of the previous century allowed landowners to make investments that boosted agricultural productivity. Trade increased. And the flow of tithes from diaspora Jews to the great Temple turned Jerusalem into a cultic boom town. Through the prevailing patron-client system of social organization, it can be argued, much of this new-found wealth trickled down to the common man. The woolly leftist paradigm — economic conditions drive peasants to revolt against their oppressors — just doesn’t fit the facts.
The second blemish in Horsley’s analysis is his decision to limit his typology to different manifestations of resistance. In his view, the Jewish aristocracy — priestly families, Herodian princes and large landowners — supported the Romans. Everyone else opposed them with varying degrees of intensity. By imposing a 20th century class-warfare paradigm on Jewish society, this typology ignores the mental constructs the Jews employed to make sense of their world. Their pre-scientific view of causality led them to conclusions about the causes of their misfortunes that would never occur to modern Americans or Western Europeans. It was far from inevitable that they would blame the Romans for their ills.
The Jews divined supernatural causes for their maladies and misfortunes. Often they interpreted an individual’s woes — from physical ailments and adulterous wives to poor crops and financial reversals — as God’s punishment for their sins. Defining “sins” as violations of divine law, many Jews redoubled their efforts to live in accordance with God’s ordinances. The Pharisees and Essenes, among others, prided themselves upon their scrupulous observance of the law. Many believed that the path of national salvation lay not in taking up arms, but in urging the people to abide by God’s codes and codicils. If the people collectively lived lawfully, according to the logic of God’s covenant with Israel, he would bless the nation.
We must also consider that in the Jews’ cosmological scheme, angels, demons and other invisible agents interfered in the affairs of men. By controlling these supernatural entities, practitioners of ritual magic believed they could manipulate the earthly world around them. Although Horsley makes a big point of examining popular beliefs, not just the formal literary tradition, he gives no attention whatsoever to the extraordinary energy — reflected in amulets, phylacteries, the recitation of magical incantations and the expulsion of demons — devoted to mastering these supernatural forces. As long as individual Jews retained faith in their ability to remedy their personal circumstances by either regulating their personal behavior or controlling magical forces, they were less inclined to run the risk of taking up arms against their rulers.
Finally, Horsley ignores the primal force of ethnicity. The Jews focused many of their resentments on the Greeks and Samaritans with whom they uneasily coexisted in Palestine. A burgeoning Jewish population was migrating into districts formerly dominated by their ethnic neighbors. Inevitably, tensions arose as the Jews challenged the primacy of the Greeks, accustomed to a privileged status, in cities throughout Palestine, Egypt and the rest of the Hellenistic world. The Roman practice of recruiting auxiliary troops exclusively from the Greek and Samaritan populations of Palestine did nothing to ease the brewing conflict. To the Jews, the language of their persecutors was Greek, not Latin. Indeed, Josephus attributes the outbreak of the Great Revolt in large measure to increasing hostilities between the Greeks and the Jews.
In sum, Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs does advance our understanding of the socio-political forces at work in Jesus’ lifetime. Its analysis is considerably more sophisticated than the works that preceded it and opens up the field to further inquiry. For that contribution alone, Horsley deserves a place in the pantheon of eminent Jesus scholars. But he oversimplifies Judaic society to a distressing degree. Perhaps most disappointing, given his emphasis on popular culture, Horsley neglects the role of sin, magic and ethnic strife in shaping the Jewish response to Roman rule.
August 2, 2000