This triumph must have made the Jewish Revolt very real to the people of Rome; it was designed to render them vividly aware of the gravity of the danger from which the new emperor and his son had delivered them. Among the spectators that day were doubtless many Christians, who thus beheld the spectacle of Israel’s ruin. But the sight would have given them other thoughts than those that moved their pagan neighbors. The evidence of Jewish sedition must have been a disturbing reminder of the fact that Jesus, the founder of their faith, had been executed for sedition against Rome.
—A touch. A fingertip feeling pulsing muscles and skin – the same fingertip that had felt the temperature of a glass of milk, that had flowed through curtains and childrens’ hair – is the fingertip Caravaggio uses for the climax of the Christian epic: Thomas finally settles his doubts and touches Jesus’ crucifixion marks. When the women and the other ten apostles told Thomas Jesus had appeared to them after his death, he could not believe it. But this touch…
The apostles did not believe it either when they first heard from the women – but then they saw him, and the unexpected became true. Still, Thomas could not believe it. And who can judge him? Even if his closest companions attested that they had seen Jesus alive after his death, Thomas could still hear the nails being driven into his hands, smell the blood flowing from his wounds, see the dust floating across the light beams as they placed Jesus’ body in a tomb.—Read More:http://wonderingfair.com/tag/jesus/
They would have seen that many of their fellow citizens were likely to view Christianity as Tacitus did when he wrote: “Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself…”
The Gospel of Mark reflects the position of the Roman Christians at this time with an amazing fidelity. There is one passage that, alone, unmistakably indicates the time and purpose of the Gospel’s composition. In chapter 12:13-17 Jesus is questioned about the duty of Jews to pay tribute to Rome. Since the matter could have had no spiritual significance for the Christians of Rome, we may reasonably ask why the author of the Gospel devoted space to it. The answer can only be that the subject was politically important to the Roman Christians. This conclusion in turn raises the obvious question, when could the Christians in Rome have been thus interested in the attitude of Jesus to the Jewish obligation to pay tribute to Rome? The answer is equally obvious: when the issue had been so disturbingly intruded upon the attention of the Roman Christians by the Flavian triumph in A.D. 71.
—The Vatican itself vehemently denies having any knowledge of the menorah’s whereabouts.
And yet “my heart tells me this is not the truth,” responds Rabbi Amar. Nor is he the only religious Jew whose heart dwells in longing memory both on the menorah and on the Temple from which its light once radiated to the world. Today, the site where the menorah proudly stood is an area physically empty of Jews, a fact commemorated every year on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av: the day on which, according to tradition, the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.e. and, half a millennium later, the even more magnificent Second Temple was sacked and burned by the Romans in 70 c.e.
… Titus along the road to the Roman Forum. The original pagan inscription on this edifice, whose pediment depicts the victory parade of the Roman forces and their train of spoils, proclaims its dedication “to the divine Titus Vespasianus Augustus, son of the divine Vespasian.”
Nor was it only Rome’s emperor-worshipping pagans who saw a cosmic significance in the conquest of Jerusalem. To the Christian Church, the destruction of the Temple served as an ultimate sign that the Jews were no longer God’s chosen people, divine favor having now been transferred to a newer and better Israel.—Read More:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/mysteries-of-the-menorah/ image:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/mysteries-of-the-menorah/
In this passage about the tribute money the Jewish leaders are depicted as trying to make Jesus compromise himself on a matter that was a burning issue for the Jewish nationalists- the nonpayment of tribute was one of the causes of the revolt in 66. The author of the Markan Gospel represents Jesus as endorsing the Jewish obligation to pay tribute to Caesar, but there are grounds for grave doubt that this was really the view of Jesus. The Markan presentation, however,was needed in Rome at this time, for it assured the Christians there, and any other who might read the Gospel, that Jesus was loyal to Rome and opposed to Jewish nationalism.
—But perhaps the most interesting theory has been put forward by the Israeli scholar Daniel Sperber, who has proposed that the menorah had already been altered from its authentically original design by the time of the Temple’s destruction. Noting the basic similarity of the dragons on the arch to those on the temple at Didyma, Sperber points to a significant difference: unlike the sea-dragons on the menorah, those at Didyma are ridden by naked nymphs. Perhaps, he suggests, the new pedestal was the brainchild of someone eager to introduce a pagan motif into the Temple while at the same time remaining nominally sensitive to Jewish concerns.
Who might that have been? The perfect culprit is the man who has served as a villain in both the Jewish and Christian traditions: King Herod, the Idumean dictator and client of Rome who ruled Jerusalem around the time of the birth of Jesus.
Herod’s relationship with the Temple was a complex one. On the one hand, all contemporary sources, including the rabbis of the Mishnah, agree that he oversaw a stupendous refurbishing of the Temple Mount, elevating its architectural status into an eighth wonder of the ancient world. On the other hand, the contemporaneous historian Josephus recorded the king’s efforts to Romanize the Temple,…Read More:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/mysteries-of-the-menorah/ image:http://johngushue.typepad.com/blog/leonard-cohen/
The Gospel of Mark is often, and can plausibly be interpreted as an account of Jesus composed by a member of the Christian community in Rome to meet the needs of his fellow Christians, in danger and perplexity owing to the Jewish War and the publicity given to it by the Flavian triumph in Rome. The apologetic purpose is evident in many ways, but the essential point of concern for the author of the Gospel was the Roman execution of Jesus. Even though he represented Jesus as loyal to Rome over the tribute question, there remained the undeniable fact that Pontius Pilate had crucified Jesus as a rebel. How was this awkward and disturbing fact to be explained? …. ( to be continued)
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