Body and Soul
3
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
— Galatians 5:1
The Seven Synagogues
What today’s Bible scholars wouldn’t give for a look at what Aquila saw when he visited the seven synagogues of Jerusalem, circa A.D. 120!
Synagogues store scrolls — today, just as they did in second century. The great gilded Ark Torah, for instance, stands at the head of every Jewish sanctuary in just the spot (no coincidence) where the tabernacle usually stands in a traditional Catholic church. It holds liturgical copies of what we Christians, speaking our customary Greek, refer to as the Pentateuch: the five chief books of the Old Covenant, the books of the Law. Most synagogues have shelves in a back room as well, containing (in wealthier communities)40 copies of all the other books, too; “the prophets and the psalms” as Jesus called them (Luke 24:44), “psalms” meaning not just the book of Psalms but also the larger collection of wisdom literature of which they are the best known part. The public reading of these scrolls during communal prayer services was, in the centuries before printing and prior to widespread public literacy, the layman’s only access to the written word of God. It is similar today: most of the scrolls in any synagogue are very old — family heirlooms, so to speak, passed down by the parents and grandparents of current worshippers. So why should modern experts find the scrolls of the second century so special? The answer, believe it or not, is that the earliest surviving copy of the entire Tanakh in the original Hebrew dates from the year 1008. Yes, you read that correctly: our oldest copy of the Old Testament — preserved at the National Library of Russia and known as the Leningrad Codex — dates from the age of knights in armor and ladies fair, just about nine hundred years after the setting of our present story. Nearly as much time passed, in other words, between Aquila and the Leningrad Codex as has passed since the Leningrad Codex down to our day. So a peek into the shelves that Aquila saw would be a boon undreamed of for today’s textual critics.41
There had probably been a synagogue in Sinope; that may even be the place where Aquila learned his earliest lessons in written Hebrew. Even much later, after all, when the break between the two traditions had solidified and grown much wider, St. Jerome, the great Bible translator, profited by the generosity of Palestinian rabbis willing, under similar circumstances, to help him improve his own comprehension of biblical Hebrew. But remote Pontus could have shown nothing, surely, to match the panoply of Scripture readily at hand in the Holy City itself, however diminished by the recent unpleasantness. Practically any book on earth in any language is a click or two away via today’s Internet, and even many backwoods Christian preachers have kept printed Hebrew Bibles in the parsonage since the eighteenth century. It may be difficult to realize, consequently, just how limited Christian access to the original Old Testament text was in those early years. The Greek Septuagint simply was the Bible for second-century believers — along with the apostolic books, of course, for which Greek is native — and this to such a degree that many Christians seem to have lost track of the fact that this version is, after all, a translation. Aquila would have known better, of course, but even his outlook would almost certainly have been colored by the overwhelming dominance of the Septuagint tradition in Christian circles. His first look, then, into the jars of Jerusalem — if the rabbis were hospitable, of course — could only have come as a shock.
The first and most obvious bombshell would have been his discovery that Holy Land Bibles were dramatically shorter than the Christian version — not just minus the New Testament books or even the seven most recent Hebrew books, often called the Apocrypha,42 but minus large chunks of the undisputed writings as well. Nearly a third of Esther, for instance, was missing from almost all of the Jerusalem scrolls, as well as the final fifth or so of the prophet Daniel. One of the psalms had apparently been dropped, too — who knows why — along with the book of Jeremiah. Even more puzzling, hundreds of smaller omissions kept cropping up, even from the majestic Torah, more and more of them the longer you looked. Encountering these Jerusalem scrolls must have been, for Aquila, like watching a familiar movie classic in a censored or abridged form: every few moments there was another chance to cry out “Hey, wait a minute!” To make things even odder, however, to make formulating a theory about these changes even more difficult, there were occasional discrepancies of just the opposite type: passages where Aquila’s familiar Bible from back home suddenly turned into “the Deluxe Extended Version with Deleted Scenes.” Jeremiah, for example, and the book of Job were both inexplicably longer than their Septuagint counterparts and full of fascinating stuff Aquila had probably never heard of. Other differences were everywhere: changes in wording, in spelling, and in grammar. All of the proverbs were present, in the book bearing that name, but the order was jumbled for some reason — almost as if each one had been written on the back of a playing card, the deck been shuffled, and then the proverbs transcribed again in the new order. Yet very few of these differences appeared to be of any great theological importance; that, in some strange way, seemed only to make them more mysterious.
Aquila, as we have previously guessed, likely knew before he arrived that many Jesus rejecters looked at the Septuagint askance. There had, nevertheless, been no wholesale dismissal of the “Bible of the Dispersed” as of yet. “During the first century,” writes Marcel Simon, “the diaspora Jews still venerated it as an inspired text, on the same level with the original Hebrew . . . [and] had up till now unanimously recognized the Septuagint’s authority.”43 Palestinian rabbis, too, continued to afford it at least a grudging place on the nation’s shelves; the Greek version, after all, had circulated with hardly any protest on their part for over three hundred years now, and any sudden retraction of the welcome they had given it in the third century B.C. would necessarily involve an unseemly break with the past. The rabbis, in any case, probably still had access to the underlying Hebrew text on which Ptolemy’s scholars had based their work — the sources of the Septuagint, that is, of which only fragments exist in our day.44 Aquila may very well have seen these scrolls while examining the manuscripts held by the seven synagogues — to which the famous Greek version must surely have corresponded pretty closely, given such widespread acceptance of the tale about its miraculously perfect translation.45
There too, Aquila would have quickly run across the second big shocker of the week: namely, the news that Jerusalem Jews kept not two Bibles in their synagogues but several. It was not simply a matter of one Bible for the Christians, another for everyone else — no, the rabbis appear to have had other variant editions on hand as well!46 Along with the Septuagint-like fragments mentioned above and the text that became the basis for the Leningrad Codex (as well as for most modern Bibles in English), the Dead Sea Scrolls also contain evidence for at least two other independent Old Testaments circulating in Israel in these early centuries: scrolls that align closely with the ancient Peschitto (the Bible in Syriac) and others that reflect the textual form found in the Samaritan Pentateuch, which Justin may well have seen in Shechem.47 More-stable young scholars might have stood chomping at the bit in front of such a spectacle — a Christmas tree laden with exciting, unopened presents. But for Aquila, as for many to whom these complexities had been hitherto unknown, the sudden eye-opener may well have sent him reeling at the crush of unanswered questions.
What caused all these multiple recensions? Which Bible is “the original”? And how, other than by personal preference, was one to choose? As an orthodox Christian, Aquila had always been told that the Old Testament books were as fully inspired by God as the words of Christ. So, which of these competing, sometimes contradictory, Hebrew Bibles had received the “special sauce”? Which version was the “director’s cut”? And which collection contained the correct list of books — with all their intended contents?48
Law-maximizers, certainly, had made their preference for versions other than the Septuagint very well known. But Aquila couldn’t simply accuse his fellow Jesus followers of making a Bible to suit themselves (as he might, alas, have been in the mood to do lately) because it was a certainty that the Greek Old Testament became what it is long before Jesus was born. Nor did Christian-owned copies of the Septuagint differ at all from copies held by Diaspora Jews. Was it possible that the Diaspora Bible itself was skewed toward lawless principles — and that the Christians (perhaps Peter or Paul and the other “minimizers”) had, in choosing it, simply picked the “minority report” that best justified their own decision? Or perhaps the Christians themselves were merely heirs to a set of ideas that had been percolating in Greek-speaking Jewry for years, ideas that were, in themselves, a rebellion against the Law!
If Aquila had been more patient — and more trusting of his fathers in the faith — he would gradually have got his answers from the Church, just as we will gradually see them emerge in the pages ahead. He could have addressed them to his own proper bishop at Jerusalem, the successor of St. James, who seems at that time (according to Eusebius) to have been a Jew named Joseph. Aquila could, with his ready command of languages, have written to the church at Rome; that congregation for which St. Paul had thanked his God, “because your faith is proclaimed in all the world” (Rom. 1:8). St. Telesphorus had recently been named bishop there, only the seventh successor to the chair first occupied by St. Peter. Aquila could even have addressed his questions to St. Polycarp, then bishop of Smyrna in Ionia: a personal disciple, in his youth, of the aged St. John the Apostle — who, in turn, learned his doctrine directly from the Lord Jesus Christ! And yet Aquila seems, instead, to have already begun losing himself in the half-lit thicket of conspiracy theory and the Great Apostasy.
He did not turn, as far as we know, to any of these great saints so readily available but asked the rabbis for answers instead. And the rabbis sent him to Jamnia.
The Last Men Standing
In the dark night that followed the ninth of Av, while the orange embers of the Jerusalem temple were still aglow, a teacher was spirited away from the city by his students inside a dead man’s coffin. That man was the Pharisaic sage Johanan ben Zakkai; and his disciples, in an effort to save Israel’s great heritage of Hebrew law and scholarship, took him thirty miles west to the seaside town of Jamnia where a small rabbinical seminary with a modest library was still in operation. At Jamnia the learned rabbi helped to establish a kind of government in exile for the beleaguered Jewish nation, much as the free Polish government fled to France and then Britain after their ill-starred homeland fell to the Nazis in 1939. Johanan called together a new Sanhedrin, the traditional governing body of Palestinian Jewry, and was himself named nasi, or patriarch. There, together with the Jamnia scribes, he and his fellow Pharisees began picking up the pieces of their nation’s lost sovereignty and thus saved Jesus-free Hebrew religion in the Holy Land.49
Gamaliel succeeded Johanan around the year 90 — about the same time St. John was writing the book of Revelation from his cell on Patmos.50 This Gamaliel had, as a young man, seen the city fall in 70; he watched, in other words, while the intractable divisions within Jewry caused the cataclysm. Jewish unity, as a result, became the obsession of his life. When challenged, for instance, by some of his fellow rabbis and charged with personal ambition in his drive to consolidate all authority in his own hands, Gamaliel silenced his critics by making the following solemn oath: “Lord of the world, it is manifest and known to Thee that I have not done it for my own honor nor for that of my house, but for Thy honor, that factions may not increase in Israel.”51 Ironically, the disastrous revolt itself had brought this elusive goal within closer reach than it had been for centuries. The Zealots, most rabid and uncompromising of all the Jewish sects, were also the group that had most closely hitched their wagon to the success of the rebellion — and thus largely perished with it in the flames of 70. The sect of the Sadducees, custodians of the Temple and responsible for performing most of its ceremonies, was so closely tied to that shrine that it seems simply to have gone down with the ship; Sadduceeism became, as far as we can tell, entirely extinct before the turn of the second century. The Essenes, inversely, show signs of having abandoned the temple while it was still standing. The luxury and corruption of the Sadducees appears to have put the Essenes off the temple service altogether and set them looking for a more “inward” and ecstatic form of faith. The shift in focus made this apocalyptic group of monk-like visionaries (St. John the Baptist may have been among their number) more mobile than most Palestinian Jews, more willing to wander away from the Holy City and its hitherto mandatory rites. Their wanderings, however, grew too wide eventually, and the Essenes, too, vanished into the desert to meet extinction, like dying pachyderms looking for the legendary graveyard of elephants. Every other substantial Jewish sect vanished from the scene during the same period.
Of all Holy Land Jews, only the Pharisees remained by 128 — the last men standing. In fact, as Marcel Simon puts it: “Pharisaism and Judaism were practically synonymous [by this time]. . . . The catastrophe ensured the victory of Pharisaism by putting all of its rivals out of the running with a single, brutal blow.” The Sadducees had allowed Temple observance to become their whole raison d’être. The Pharisees kept the rites, to be sure, and contributed to the Temple’s upkeep, but “the fall of the temple did not interfere in the least with the practice of religion as they understood it, and their grief over its destruction seems to have been comforted without the loss of too much time.” Far less closely attached to places and things,
they had, if one may so express it, a place of spiritual retreat, prepared long ago. They had the Torah. The religion to which they subscribed was already a religion of the book, and only secondarily a religion of the Temple. It was a religion of the Temple only to the extent that the temple rites represented one aspect of the Law.52
So long as Scripture study was kept central and scrupulous law-keeping made an end in itself, Judaism as interpreted by the Pharisees could go on forever. And it is largely due to the tenacity of the patriarch Gamaliel at Jamnia that this version of the Hebrew faith survives today.
Gamaliel was still alive when Aquila reached Jamnia — but just barely. He appears to have been on his deathbed, an object of pilgrimages and veneration for his grateful countrymen. Akiba ben Joseph had succeeded to the patriarchate; he was an old friend of Gamaliel’s, less formidable as a scholar but fully his sponsor’s equal in tenacity and the passion to pass down Israel’s age-old faith unchanged. Aquila must have been deeply impressed by the hushed atmosphere at Jamnia, not only by the reverence of the deathwatch but by the prayerful scribes who labored quietly to preserve Israel’s written heritage across the gulf of catastrophe. These dedicated ascetics burned the midnight oil copying out the handmade scrolls by which the Tanakh was to be transmitted into the future, much as medieval monks were to pass them down in the Christian monasteries to come. Indeed, we know for a fact that Aquila was deeply impressed somehow, for when Gamaliel died not long after his arrival, Aquila rushed impulsively home to his Jerusalem dwellings and sold practically everything of value he owned in order to make a large commemorative offering at the patriarch’s funeral. This may have been the newcomer’s attempt to demonstrate the sincerity of his inquiries in the eyes of the patriarch Akiba. Nevertheless, one can’t help but see the act as a personal burning of bridges on Aquila’s part as well, the turning of his face decisively toward the land of the Jews — and away from Hadrian’s Rome.
We may wonder how the emperor’s chief overseer for the Jerusalem project had time to pursue such unworldly things so vigorously. Yes, Aquila was sent as a translator, but probably his duties in that regard were not too taxing; his main job, in fact, may simply have been to continue looking imperial, since, by the standards of the time, his mere kinship to Hadrian lent a touch of royalty and superstitious awe to his presence. He likely did, however, have actual responsibilities to the emperor — as a diplomat or ambassador. The Pharisees, recall, had been the mortal enemies of the Zealots, whom the Romans chiefly blamed for the revolt. And though they certainly seem to have been in a restive mood during the events surrounding our Lord’s Passion, the Pharisees as a party did not seethe continuously against Roman oversight in Judea. In fact, they often appear to have welcomed it tacitly as a pleasurable respite from the everlasting Jew-on-Jew violence that characterized the era. So it may well be that Aquila was meant to do more than translate official documents; the emperor may have charged him with translating his own pacific intentions toward the Jews as well, with helping them to see the benefits of his plan as the Samaritans had, and thus strengthening the collaborationist tendencies already shown by the Pharisees during the last war. Some historians, in fact, believe that an undeclared guerilla war — often referred to as the Kitos War and quite bloody in and of itself 53 — had been conducted by Jews in the East since 70, with no letup. There was a time limit to Aquila’s mission then, of which he would have been all too aware. The Jewish pot, in Roman eyes, seemed once again to be coming to a boil; and this made Jerusalem pacification a priority. If Aquila could manage it with the carrot — with “Zeus Hypsistos” and the Roman equivalent of “dollar diplomacy” — fine and good. If not . . . well, in that case, the legions might, regrettably, have to march back in with the stick.
Akiba probably detected Aquila’s shakiness as a Christian right from the start. Almost certainly, he had seen Judaizers before and recognized “the look.” He probably realized, too, that Aquila must be working for Hadrian — and not just as an interpreter. But Aquila’s kind of zeal for the Law would have been difficult to fake, rigorous as those observances are, and the excellence of his Hebrew could have been acquired only by many hundreds of hours of committed study. Perhaps an opportunity was presenting itself. Perhaps this young man could, with careful management, be turned from strict allegiance to the Roman emperor as thoroughly as from the Nazarene. There was, after all, a remote possibility — not to be discounted — that Aquila himself might ascend to the throne of the Caesars someday, as the kinfolk of deceased emperors had shown a tendency to do already.
Even short of that glittering potentiality, however, Akiba could see great value in winning the adherence of a man so proficient in both the Hebrew idiom and in Greek, “the language of Japhet,” as he would later call it.54 If Akiba truly wished to unify all the Jews, he had to reach the great mass of the Dispersed as well — and that meant finding a way to communicate effectively in Greek. Aquila came to Jamnia looking for “Hebrew verity” — for the biblical truth as it is in the original tongue, as he would have seen it, and not in some possibly unreliable translation. It may be, as the rabbi surely reflected, that Yahweh Himself led this young waverer to the rabbinical colony in order to help turn the whole world onto that same beneficent path.
There were barriers in the way, of course. Some of Akiba’s colleagues might object to sharing their insights with a man uncircumcised; not only a goy but a Nazarene to boot (at least for the time being) and a paid official in the service of the pagan Caesar. Jamnia had secrets to hide as well; doctrines both religious and political — only half formed as yet — which might bring trouble to the community should they happen to reach the emperor’s ears. So there was risk, to be sure. But if the patriarch read his man correctly, Aquila might be brought on as a metuente to begin with — and then, under Akiba’s own tutelage, led gradually on to greater things.
And this, if the report of the later scholar St. Jerome can be trusted, is exactly what happened sometime in the early 130s: Aquila of Sinope, hitherto the disciple of Christ, became “the disciple of Rabbi Akiba.”
The Counsel of Jamnia
If Aquila expected a ready answer to his questions about the discrepancies in the synagogue jars he was likely disappointed. Almost certainly the rabbis themselves could not account for the multiple recensions represented there, any more than today’s Bible scholars can explain them. There’s no surviving record from antiquity that even attempts to solve the mystery, and it may be that the facts of the matter had already been lost by Aquila’s time. Many have faulted the translation into Greek, to be sure; but no one, in all the centuries of controversy between the two faiths, ever suggested that the Hebrew sources of the Septuagint were simply fabricated or deliberately falsified. Whatever those documents were and however they came into existence, they not only predated Diaspora Judaism; they also helped to create it, rather than having been created by it. All the same, Rabbi Akiba did have what he considered to be a strong circumstantial case to make against the longer text, and he appears to have begun schooling Aquila in it as soon as he came on board.
In one sense, it had been the brute facts of geography that created the heresies of the Dispersed. Indisputably, the Mosaic Law mandated certain rites and ceremonies that could be validly carried only out in Jerusalem. Sizable swaths of the Torah are, in fact, concerned with little more than the proper way to offer the sacrifices performed at the one and only Hebrew temple. And yet large Jewish communities had arisen hundreds and even thousands of miles from the Holy City in an age when travel was slow, difficult, and dangerous, when most people never ventured more than twenty miles from their birthplaces. Consequently, non-Palestinians attracted to the Hebrew faith had been faced with a choice: either to get over their interest in the religion of Yahweh or to work out some version of it more adapted to their own circumstances. In practice, this had meant developing an exegetical method that would allow biblical commandments originally concerned almost entirely with ritual to be interpreted as moral or spiritual lessons instead. And this, in Akiba’s eyes, had been the fatal bite of the apple.
The taste for allegorical interpretations of Scripture gradually spread in the Diaspora and was more or less given its head. These led finally to all the enormities of Philo and his school. Philo, for instance, began offering “logical” explanations for God’s purity laws: “God forbids eating the flesh of birds of prey and carnivorous animals,” he wrote, “in order to elevate the virtue of peace.” As a result of such allegorizing, “the self-evident religious and historical meaning of much of the Torah was lost among the spiritual and moral sentiments whereby Philo sought to demonstrate the harmony and rationality of the universe.”55 This line of reasoning proved irresistible to a people raised in classical Greek culture; people for whom circumcision seemed a barbaric act of self-mutilation and in whom traditional Bible stories such as those of Jonah and the whale and Balaam’s ass likely produced a reaction not dissimilar to that experienced by Clarence Darrow. Eventually, Hellenistic exegetes went so far as to declare that the literal content of the Tanakh had always been of secondary importance, rationalizing a course that had been taken for mostly practical reasons. Allegory became, in Akiba’s eyes, an addiction in the Diaspora and was gradually employed to produce a sweeping abridgement of the Law that seemed to prefigure Christianity. The Hellenized Jews had (perhaps understandably at first) been given an inch and ended up taking a mile.
Yet the authorities in Jerusalem were, in a sense, offered the same hard choice: either refuse to accept the growing body of Dispersed and begin issuing edicts of excommunication against the movement — or take a bite of the apple themselves. Out-and-out proselytes became relatively rare in the Diaspora; more and more, the Hellenized synagogues became surrounded by a great cloud of quasi-Jewish God-fearers, keeping whichever portion of the Law they themselves felt comfortable with. Yet, prior to circumcision (and for a lot of these, “prior” had become a lifestyle) such persons were still goyim — still Gentiles for whom the Law had never been intended anyway. This is how the rite of Tvilah — the immersion in a ritual bath that usually accompanied circumcision during a Jewish conversion — was allowed to become a substitute for circumcision in the Diaspora.56 Thus, “for want of the will, or sometimes the power, to make its converts accept the observance of the whole law, Judaism did allow the rise of a class of semi-proselytes whose charter was represented by the so-called Noahic commandments.”57 After all, is not the condition of the heart more important than that of the body? Had not even the Lord himself said, through the prophet Hosea: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings”? (6:6). Did not the prophet Micah summarize the whole duty of an Israelite when he asked: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (6:8). Questions like these led many rabbis — even within Judea — to look on these portentous changes at first with tolerance and finally with favor. “According to one rabbinical master, the rejection of idolatry is such that whoever undertakes it, it is as if he had acknowledged every detail of the Torah.”58
The next step in this long descent (as Rabbi Akiba would have described it) was when these outlaw second cousins to the Jews began to think of themselves as better or “more truly authentic” Jews than those attached to the movement that spawned them! If, as everyone seemed ready to admit, an interior or mystical devotion counts for more than mere rote observance, then the more interior, the better, eh? Perhaps Judaism had been meant all along to “outgrow” gradually its attachment to stiff formality and primitive blood sacrifice! Hadn’t it truly flowered for the first time only when it finally got free from the stifling hothouse atmosphere surrounding the temple cult? Hadn’t it experienced, outside the Holy Land, an explosive growth never seen before (an indication of God’s blessing?) as a direct result of these modifications? This train of thought led finally to the most offensive notion of all in the eyes of Jamnia: the idea that the destruction of the temple might have been God’s will — not merely in the permissive sense or as a corrective chastisement but as a positive creative act on His part! “For Jewish universalism, the Temple had been an obstacle and a hindrance. . . . For the diaspora, the destruction of the sanctuary . . . was the natural climax of a long development, of a process of refinement begun by the prophets. It marked the inauguration of spiritual worship.”59
Aquila, one imagines, could take the final few steps on his own; the patriarch’s account had confirmed everything he suspected all along simply by connecting the historical dots. The ritual and ceremonial Law had been fully explained away by Hellenized Jewry before the Christians ever came along! And the tendency of Jewish authorities to honor these so-called God-fearers had played into the hands of the emerging Church, simply by making mere faith fully equal to law-keeping. It hadn’t really been a matter, as Aquila first guessed, of the Christian Apostles coveting the Dispersed and taking steps to gather them in; it had actually been the Dispersed discovering in Jesus a prophet after their own hearts and co-opting Him! It may even be that the Diaspora had, during the rise of Christian-ism, consciously coveted the ease of initiation that made the job of Christian evangelists so much simpler than that of Jewish missionaries and had taken steps to modify their own requirements in order to remain competitive. The Apostles, for their part, shrewdly embraced this co-opting — and quickly began tripling, quadrupling, their membership on a monthly or weekly basis.
As for the Nazarene — well, who knew what His actual teaching on these matters may have been? The four orthodox Gospels were written after the Law-nullifying council — and under the supervision of the nullifiers themselves.60 Then finally,
in regions where Hellenistic Judaism was formerly a force, many of its adherents, both Jews and proselytes, may well have become Christian. In so doing, they were displaying a certain self-consistency. The allegorical methods of pseudo-Aristeas61 led naturally to those of the fathers. The logos of Philo prepared them to accept the Logos-Christ. . . . The infant Church borrowed from the thinkers of diaspora Judaism, along with some of their apologetic themes, their allegorical method of interpreting scripture, the translation on which it was based, and the speculations about divine hypostases that were to prove so fruitful for its theology.62
Lawless Judaism, as Akiba would have explained it, had given rise to the lawlessness of the Church; and the appeal of lawlessness, so perennial in the wayward hearts of men, fully accounted for the current crisis of Jewish defections to Christianity. But Jamnia, Aquila soon learned, was rising to the occasion. A great reformation was already underway, first to stanch the bleeding and then to recover what had been lost. First, the rabbis had begun insisting on immediate circumcision for all potential converts and full observance of the whole Mosaic Law — no more “intermediate categories by which previously a pagan had been able to come into Judaism.”63 Proselytes in general came to be distrusted as too likely to pass over into Christianity. Anarchistic rabbis of the type who had encouraged this growth of “fake Jews” through the decades were weeded out and given the boot — and a new crop of sterner men trained to take their places. But it had been Gamaliel (of blessed memory) who zeroed in on the most pressing problem — the lack of any agreed-upon place for the buck to stop. Gamaliel had felt keenly, during his own administration, the want of any general authority among Jews competent to reject Christianity once and for all. A recognized head acknowledged by all or most Israelites (something even not possible before A.D. 70) could consider himself authorized to make an official canon of sacred books for the first time — as well as an index of banned or suspect works. And this is exactly what the new, empowered patriarch of Jamnia set himself to do.
First, in a recently published treatise on ritual handwashing called Tosefta Yadayim, Akiba had taken the opportunity to include the following ruling: “The Gospels and heretical books do not defile the hands.” “The phrase ‘do not defile the hands,’ ” as expert Gary Michuta explains, “refers to a non-sacred text. Sacred texts require ritual hand washing after they are touched. Non-sacred texts do not. Therefore, Akiba is stating that the texts listed are not sacred (i.e., they are not Scripture).”64 This ruling was decisive and authoritative, to be sure — but not too surprising, since these books were, after all, the explicitly Christian texts of the so-called New Testament. It was in his next ruling that the patriarch truly broke new ground, with a decision destined to impact Aquila’s life profoundly: “The book of Ben Sira [known in modern Bibles as Ecclesiasticus or Sirach] and all books of later date are no longer canonical.”65 Since Sirach is the oldest of the Deuterocanonical books (composed around 180 B.C.), this was an attack on the inspiration of all the rest as well of them as well — and also happens to constitute the synagogue’s first-ever official ruling against the Greek Septuagint. “He who reads aloud in the synagogue from books not belonging to the canon as if they were canonical,” as Akiba judged elsewhere, would henceforth be subject to punishment. And yet Akiba was certainly begging the question here; it was, after all, he himself who was making this new canon, here in the year 130. The old Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 attributes this action, much more frankly, to Akiba’s desire to “disarm the Christians . . . who drew their ‘proofs’ from the Apocrypha . . . [and] to emancipate the Jews of the Dispersion from the domination of the Septuagint, the errors and inaccuracies of which frequently distorted the true meaning of Scripture, and were even used as arguments against the Jews by the Christians.”66
This, then, was Jamnia’s counsel to Aquila — Rabbi Akiba’s circumstantial case. From the very beginning of its existence until now, the Septuagint had always been associated with Law minimizers (whether Jewish or Christian or some combination of the two), and this fact alone was surely enough to set it aside. Had not the Christians used it almost exclusively since the day their “New Testament” books began to be written? In Akiba’s view, there was no need to lose oneself in the weeds over the textual questions involved. Wherever these longer and shorter rescensions might have come from, it was simply undeniable that the one connected with lawbreakers was the longer of the two — the one that had been made into the Septuagint. Call it guilt by association if you like, but, all other things being equal, the Pharisees would, thank you very much, opt for one of the shorter versions. Where the texts were concerned, Akiba seemed to say, the Jews needed only to decide on their story and stick to it.
So where did Aquila come in? Just at this point. It wasn’t the very idea of a Greek Bible the rabbis objected to. If, indeed, the Diaspora was to be reclaimed for Pharisaic orthodoxy, it was vitally important that the Tanakh should be translated into Greek. But it must be a Greek Bible subject to orthodox control — the control of the patriarch at Jamnia. Already the scholars there, under the supervision of the elder rabbis Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Joshua ben Hananiah, had begun the process of creating their own “perfect” Hebrew text on which to double down, by comparing and contrasting all of the material at their disposal (all “not the Septuagint” material, that is). What was badly needed going forward was some native Greek speaker — sympathetic, of course, to the Jamnia project and thus not the easiest man to find — able to translate that text, as it was completed, into the lingua franca. And now this fine young man from Sinope appears at the doorstep, eager to learn and to be of service. And Aquila, for his part, shows every sign of having been flattered by the suggestion and — despite the fact that he had a job already — ready, willing, and able to dig in right away.
There was, however, a hitch. Another of the Jamnia reforms had placed a certain formality in the way, a bump in the road, one might say. As a way to identify infiltrators — indeed, as a way to drive Jewish Christians out of the synagogues altogether — Rabbi Gamaliel had caused a new set of prayers to be added to the approved Jewish liturgy. Known as the Eighteen Benedictions, the recital of which had been fixed as a duty to be performed three times a day by every Israelite, these prayers now included the following additional petition: “Let there be no hope for the apostates, and the kingdom of pride mayest thou destroy quickly, in our days. And let the Nazarenes and the minim [heretics] suddenly perish. Let them be extinguished from the book of life and not be written with the righteous. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the proud.”67 Anyone who would not say this prayer aloud was to be removed from the synagogue. If Aquila was to be admitted as a Jamnia scholar, with daily access to the holy scrolls whose very touch “defiled the hands” with glory, he would, of course, have to conform to all of the required duties of Jamnia — one of which would, for a Christian, constitute a solemn act of self-cursing.
There was only one way to remove this barrier, as Akiba surely explained: full conversion to Judaism, including circumcision, renunciation of all previous errors, and solemn ritual promises to abide daily by every single command written in the book of the Law.
The Son of a Star
Quite unexpectedly, the emperor himself showed up in Jerusalem late in the year 131, accompanied, no doubt by a cohort of his most trusted bodyguards.68 One can’t help but wonder if rumors had reached his ears along the way, alarming reports that his trusted overseer might have lost track of his mission and “gone native.” If, at any rate, the accounts preserved in the Talmud are to be trusted, Hadrian, though tired out from his journey, met with Aquila almost immediately after his arrival — with more than a few questions on his mind.
The emperor may well have been shocked by his kinsman’s haggard appearance. Rabbis Eliezer and Joshua, under whose supervision he had worked for over a year now, were becoming concerned that Aquila was spending all his strength on his newly chosen task. Epiphanius describes him as “painfully ambitious” during this period, “moved not by the right motive, but (by the desire) to distort certain of the words occurring in the translation of the seventy-two69 so that he might proclaim the things testified to about Christ in the divine Scriptures to have been fulfilled in some other way . . . [and to justify, perhaps] a certain shame that he felt.” Aquila had, in any event, joined those burning the midnight oil at Jamnia and showed the unmistakable marks of that profession: the furrowed brow, the dark circles and squinting eyes now sensitive to light.
Perhaps Hadrian’s ambassador had been shrewdly “building bridges” by making so friendly with the indigenous? If so, he’d be pleased to hear that the emperor had come with good news. Rome was ready to make additional reparations for the unfortunate events of 70, beginning with the reconstruction of the temple at Roman expense, to commence forthwith. Hadrian also hoped that Aquila would help spread the happy tidings that he himself had, unilaterally, called an end to Trajan’s long war in the East during which so many Jews had been persecuted. The emperor also wished to convey his personal distress at seeing so much of the city still in ruins and to announce a readiness to make serious new investments in the region, with an eye toward economic and political stabilization. And he hoped that Aquila would relate this message to his friends in the now-officially recognized Sanhedrin at Jamnia. Hadrian also brought, however, Aquila’s replacement — the newly minted Roman governor of Judea, Tineius Rufus. It was he who would take over from here, supervising the construction phase. Aquila was to be rewarded for his service — and sent home to Pontus.
This must have been the point at which Aquila (quite fearlessly) made the big revelation recorded by the Talmudists. It was far worse than the emperor thought. His ambassador did not want to go home. He had joined the scribes at Jamnia and become part of their community. He had, in fact, converted to Judaism. Responding to Hadrian’s no doubt sputtering demand for some rational reason why, Aquila brazenly insisted that he had taken the step upon the emperor’s advice! Reminding him of his own suggestions about “buying low and selling high,” Aquila claimed to have acted on that piece of sharp, pecuniary wisdom: “For I have found nothing,” he said, “so deeply neglected and held in such depreciation as the Law and Israel; but both, no doubt, will rise again, as Isaiah has predicted.”70 Later — and a bit less cleverly — Aquila explained that he had become possessed by the desire to understand Israel’s Scriptures and found that he could not properly study them without entering into Abraham’s Covenant: “Just as no soldier could draw his pay without bearing arms, no one could study the Torah thoroughly without obeying the Jewish laws.”71 Hadrian would not have realized, probably, that this last assertion was a subtle dig at Christianity; Aquila’s former status as a Jesus follower had likely been hidden from the emperor, owing to the fact that that faith, unlike Judaism, was still officially outlawed. In another old legend often associated with Aquila, his final decision to make the step had been confirmed in a dream in which the wicked false prophet Balaam warned him away from Judaism because of its hundreds of burdensome laws, while Jesus, a faithful and true Jewish prophet, advised him to go ahead.
Aquila did remain at Jamnia — and thus had a front-row seat as Hadrian’s well-meaning policies led directly to another Jewish apocalypse. While Aquila labored at his Christian-unfriendly Bible translation, Tineius Rufus translated the emperor’s policies into action — or the emperor’s policies, at any rate, as he understood them. Great wagonloads of imperial shekels did, indeed, come pouring into the Holy City. Rufus spoiled the effect by simultaneously minting new Judean coins on which the proposed name for the city formerly known as Jerusalem was shamelessly emblazoned: Aelia Capitolina — “Aelia” being Hadrian’s family name. This signaled, as nothing else could, that the Holy City was simply being refounded — resettled as a majority-pagan colony, though paternally tolerant, one hoped, toward its aboriginal Jewish remnant. Rumors spread immediately to the effect that the “rebuilt” temple in the works would actually be another shrine to Jupiter, just as the canny Jews, cutting through all the obfuscating philosophical hogwash, had always considered the temple at Shechem to be. Furious unrest began immediately. When Governor Rufus turned up at the ruins to perform the foundation ceremony, the Jews watched in horror as heathen workmen ploughed over great patches of holy ground — an act of sacrilege and further desecration. Violence erupted right away. This marked the beginning of what historians call the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Second Jewish War — a conflict far more final and devastating in its result than the first.
The “spontaneous” rioting at the temple site was followed up so instantaneously by carefully organized military action that one can’t help guessing that the whole thing had been in the planning stages for months, if not years. Previously unrevealed Jewish militias went into action all across Judea with a well-thought-out plan, resulting in a series of quick, embarrassing defeats for the standing Roman garrison. In fact, when the emperor, now returned to Rome, replaced Governor Rufus and sent massive reinforcements to quell the uprising, the defenders retreated into a kind of Jewish Maginot Line — a fortified system of interconnected hideout caves so widespread and extensive they are still being uncovered today.72 These kinds of works cannot have sprouted overnight. The new revolt, in short, showed all the earmarks of having been cunningly nurtured in advance.
Bar Kokhba, or Simon bar Kosevah (a name that probably indicates his place of origin) was, from everything we can gather, a brash, ruthless soldier, headstrong and inspiring, rather like a Jewish George Patton, but hardly a mastermind.73 In fact, we learn something very significant, it seems, when we uncover the meaning behind his name change — and who it was that changed it. “The Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva [Akiba],” according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “ . . . gave him the surname ‘Bar Kokhba’ meaning ‘Son of a Star’ in the Aramaic language, from the Star Prophecy verse from Numbers 24:17: ‘There shall come a star out of Jacob.’ ” Akiba backed up this identification with another very dramatic act; he transferred his own title and authority — that of Nasi, which can mean prince of Israel as well as patriarch — to Simon Bar Kokhba. How can we help but interpret these proclamations as anything but active and official sponsorship on the part of Akiba? Where the rabbi happened to find Bar Kosivah and how he ever came to believe he could invest such a coarse and artless individual with so exalted a title (not to mention mastery over the Sanhedrin and the scholars of Jamnia) has been lost to history. The historian Eusebius, at any rate, gives us the practical upshot in a few frank words:
The leader of the Jews at this time was a man by the name of Barcocheba (which signifies a star), who possessed the character of a robber and a murderer, but nevertheless, relying upon his name, boasted to them, as if they were slaves, that he possessed wonderful powers; and he pretended that he was a star that had come down to them out of heaven to bring them light in the midst of their misfortunes.74
Bar Kokhba was a strange sort of savior, to be sure. His prayer, for instance, as he led his forces into battle, is recorded in the Talmud: “O Master of the universe, there is no need for you to assist us, but do not embarrass us either!” He does not, in other words, appear to have been a pious man on any level. Yet his results seemed to speak for themselves. The war went exceptionally — almost miraculously — well for the Jews for the first two and a half years. Practically every engagement was a victory, and Bar Kokhba wasted no time in consolidating these gains and declaring a new, independent state of Israel over most of Judea. The era of redemption was announced, the time for all of Yahweh’s long-delayed promises to be at last fulfilled. Tons of the recently minted “Aelia Capitolina” coins were gathered up, softened in the furnaces of the nation, and restamped with Bar Kokhba’s name instead, along with the image of a newly built, all-Hebrew temple in the midst of a fully restored Holy City. These coins (examples of which reside in modern museums) also bore references to “Year One of the redemption of Israel,” “Year Two of the freedom of Israel,” and “For the freedom of Jerusalem.” Modern Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin believes the new Nasi even tried to wean his people off the Greek and Aramaic tongues at this time as part of a sweeping reorganization of the entire culture: “It seems that this change came as a result of the order that was given by Bar Kokhba, who wanted to revive . . . the Hebrew language and make it the official language of the state.”75
What were these goals but those of Rabbi Akiba himself — and Gamaliel before him? The divisions that had doomed the first revolt were gone; the deck had been providentially cleared for a new and cohesive war for independence. Thanks to the transformations wrought during the previous uprising — along with the unifying efforts of the Jamnia patriarchs over the past six decades — factional infighting could now be kept to a minimum. The time to move was now! — before the rising tide of defections to Christianity had time to restart the old cycle of disunity. In fact, a credible effort to restore King David’s realm at this time might do wonders to nip the entire Jesus movement in the bud; it might give the existentially homeless Greek Jews a galvanizing rallying point and a new ability to believe in a national Israel on earth again, instead of the defeatist “New Jerusalem” conception preached by the Christians: “pie in the sky by and by when you die.”
“It must not be forgotten, [too],” as Marcel Simon writes, “that the period between the wars was marked by a new, and final, explosion of intense Messianic and apocalyptic expectation.” Some of these messianic groups cited the prophecy of Jeremiah given just prior to the Babylonian invasion: “This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity, says the Lord” (Jer. 25:11–12). These things had come to pass, just as the prophet foretold, when the first temple, Solomon’s temple, had been destroyed in 586 B.C. and then rebuilt, beginning in 516. If this pattern were to be repeated, the second temple was also due for restoration about the year 140, less than a decade ahead. Bar Kokhba, then, was finally giving the people what they really wanted: the kind of messiah in preference for whom the mob had rejected Jesus. Now, they would get some action; Roman heads were getting busted as they wished them to be busted, by a man who hated the Romans as much as they did, without all the pointless navel-gazing about “turning the other cheek” or “physician, heal thyself.”
And whether our guesses are true or not — guesses to the effect that Rabbi Akiba was the true power behind the throne, pulling the strings for years in advance — one thing we can say with confidence, for the fact is recorded in the Talmud. Akiba the patriarch did finally identify — with all the prestige of his office — Simon Bar Kokhba as Israel’s long-expected redeemer, Melekh HaMashiach, God’s chosen messiah.76 Whether he believed this theory, or just thought he did, or else cynically promoted it as a grab for power, the rabbi backed and encouraged this fantasy to the hilt. “Akiba’s endorsement of Bar Kokhba as messiah,” writes Gary Michuta, “changed the complexion of the Second Jewish Revolt (AD 132–135), turning it from a popular uprising into a messianic movement.”77
This identification cannot have been an easy thing for Aquila to hear. His position before now, as implied by his dream about Jesus and Balaam, had been a mere change in theology, to a point of view not too unlike that held by still-Christian Judaizers. It allowed him to fancy, at any rate, that he still honored the “real” Jesus and even accepted Him on some level. But now he was pressured to admit just the opposite: that the Nazarene had been a fraud and a deceiver pure and simple. And if, as seems probable, Aquila did meet the new master of Jamnia in person, his troubles no doubt grew worse. One can only imagine Bar Kokhba making a tour of inspection at the venerable school, meeting his new disciples in person — Bar Kokhba, who, in all likelihood, couldn’t read at all, not even Aramaic, much less Hebrew or Greek. Aquila would also, if Eusebius’s judgment is correct, have been disgusted by the man’s crudity; by the violence and vindictiveness of his personality, especially as compared with the character of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels. The mind must have reeled and rebelled. And yet — had not Samson, too, been God’s chosen judge of Israel? Samson was a wild, sensuous man as well, equally violent and explosive. And Samson freed the people from the heathen Philistines, brought down their own house of idols upon their own foolish heads. Clearly, then, God sometimes moves in mysterious ways, picking strange and even unpleasant instruments to work His will. Who was Aquila — a mere scribe — to question the inscrutable will of God?
And yet the words of Jesus came back, almost certainly, echoing in Aquila’s ears — the words He spoke at the Mount of Olives as He prophesied Israel’s fated fall: “Take heed that no one leads you astray. . . . If anyone says to you, ‘Lo, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. Lo, I have told you beforehand” (Matt. 24:4, 23–25). Every syllable of this passage must have tormented Aquila like the rack, as it has other apostates down through the centuries. And yet he had heard other prophetic words as well. He had been inclined at first to read Rome’s assault on the Holy City as a pure calamity imposed on the apple of God’s eye by sheer pagan injustice and sin. But one of the rabbis, surprisingly, seemed to agree with his former Christian masters on this subject — up to a point. The loss of the temple had, indeed, been a divine punishment — for allowing lawless Judaism to arise and flourish! “Israel was only scattered after having renounced the One, the rite of circumcision, the Ten Commandments, and the five books of Torah.”78 Eventually, Pharisaic rabbis of the Jamnia school began to express their judgment that the translation of Bible into Greek had been a sin comparable to worshipping the golden calf!
The torments involved in this internal argument must have reached a pinnacle of agony in 134, the third year of the war, when Bar Kokhba instituted universal conscription in response to Roman gains. Hadrian ordered a gigantic force into Israel, far larger than the army commanded by Titus in 70. Six full legions crossed the Jordan this time, under the command of General Sextus Julius Severus, with additional auxiliaries from other units — nearly one-third of the entire Roman army. Now was the time for every man of Hebrew ancestry to come to the aid of his country. Since almost all the Christians in the Holy Land happened to fit this description, Bar Kokhba ordered them to enlist as well — or be considered traitors to the national government. Yet enlisting in his army meant swearing an oath to Bar Kokhba personally, an oath that involved recognition of his messiahship as well. Such an oath would, for a Christian, involve an act of apostasy no different from offering sacrifice in the name of the “divine” Caesar. As a result, practically all of them refused and went into hiding — even though most desired the liberation of their homeland from foreign occupation as much as any other Jew. According to the Chronicon of Eusebius, Bar Kokhba had them ruthlessly run to ground and put to torture; a thorough purge of a disloyal internal element, a potential “fifth column” in his eyes.79 Aquila, meanwhile, was likely kept at his work in Jamnia, his new anti-Christian Bible having been judged by Akiba to be as valuable a weapon of war as any battering ram or catapult.80
We have reason to believe that not every Jamnia rabbi shared Akiba’s exalted opinion of Simon Bar Kosevah — even at the time. After the war, another of Akiba’s disciples, Yose ben Halafta, dubbed him “Simon Bar Kozevah,” meaning “Son of the Lie” (though he kept such thoughts to himself while the conflict raged).81 Certainly there must have been individual men and women who acted in good faith in Bar Kokhba’s service, following their conscience as they understood it. The Church, likewise, has no desire to defame anyone willing to put his life on the line for the freedom of his country or to remain loyal to the religious traditions of his forebears until God gives him light to see differently. But there’s really no way around it for orthodox Christian commentators, however charitable we might wish to be — any more than we can avoid saying potentially hurtful things when comparing the fundamentally incompatible claims of Muhammad or Joseph Smith with those of our Lord Jesus Christ. Bar Kokhba came “in the spirit of antichrist,” one of “many antichrists that have come” (1 John 2:18) — and Akiba, head of the Pharisaic party that proclaimed him, was the false prophet who offered him to the people. And the oath most Judeans took at the time, affirming Bar Kokhba as messiah instead of Jesus, became a solemn doubling down on the apostasy of their grandfathers: “Give us Barabbas!”
Akiba, before the end of the war, was captured by the encircling Romans, along with several other important scholars and Sanhedrin members. According to a rabbinic midrash, these men became the famous “Ten Martyrs” of the Bar Kokhba era, brutally executed by the troops of General Severus. Stories went out of the agonizing tortures they endured. Several were flayed alive; Rabbi Ishmael had the skin of his head pulled off slowly, and Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradion was burned at the stake while wrapped in a wet sheepskin held in place by an encircling Torah scroll — this to prevent him dying too quickly, of course. Rabbis Huspith, Jeshbab, Hakinai, and Yehuda ben Baba all met similar ends.
We aren’t certain how Akiba himself was killed. All we know for sure is that when Aquila heard about it, he pledged himself to Simon Bar Kokhba, to Akiba’s war, and to the movement that created them, body and soul.
40 Bible scrolls were costly, made by hand, and took years to produce, in many cases. Even the material was costly. Only the oldest or richest communities had anything like a complete Tanakh, whatever “complete” may have meant in their eyes. Opportunities for a Christian like Aquila to have examined Hebrew copies rather than the Greek ones used by the Church would likely have been limited.
41 By way of contrast, the earliest surviving copy of a practically complete Septuagint is the Codex Vaticanus, dating from about 325.
42 Contrary to a widespread belief, only one of these so-called Deuterocanonical books was composed in Greek, the book of Wisdom. The others had to be translated into Greek by the Seventy just like the rest of the Old Testament.
43 Marcel Simon, Verus Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 64.
44 Before 1947, it was very common for skeptics and other hostile critics to dismiss the Septuagint as merely a very bad translation (or at least a very corrupt one) of the same Hebrew originals from which the King James Bible was made. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, has proved that the Greek Bible was based on a distinct and independent Hebrew text in its own right. Several of the famous “corruptions” of the Septuagint have been validated by scrolls discovered at Qumran, scrolls that are at least as old as those used to construct the more familiar Masoretic Text — and taken from the same set of jars.
45 “The issues surrounding this use of the version are quite complex, but the fact remains that the Septuagint was translated from some Hebrew text that was not identical to the Hebrew text we use today. That original Greek translation, which was produced much earlier than any surviving copy of the Hebrew Bible, is an indirect witness to its Vorlage, that is, the Hebrew parent text from which it was translated.” Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 38.
46 The Talmud includes a story to the effect that three differing Torah scrolls had been kept in the Temple and that the variances between them were often resolved by majority decision among the three.
47 This is not meant to suggest that the Palestinian rabbis looked on all versions with equal favor; even in the Dead Sea caves associated with the rival Essene party, roughly 50 percent of the texts correspond closely to the version contained in the Leningrad Codex. But no one had, as yet, officially “excommunicated” any version — not least because there were simply no officials in place recognized to speak for all of Jewry.
48 The Peschitto, like the Septuagint, includes all seven of the Deuterocanonical books — the so-called Apocrypha. The Samaritan Pentateuch, on the other hand, consists of the five books of Moses only; with, incidentally, over six thousand distinct variations from the Masoretic Text employed by modern Jews.
49 “Jabneh [Jamnia] took the place of Jerusalem; it became the religious and national center of the Jews; and the most important functions of the Sanhedrin, such as determining the time of the new moon and of the festivals, were observed there. It even enjoyed some of the privileges of the Holy City, among others the right to blow the shofar when New Year’s Day fell on a Sabbath.” Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Jabneh or Jamnia,” by Richard Gottheil and M. Seligsohn, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8375-jabneh.
50 Not to be confused with Gamaliel I, who counseled leniency toward the Apostles in Acts 5.
51 Talmud (B. M. 59b), quoted in Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Gamaliel II,” by Solomon Schechter and Wilhelm Bacher, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/6495-gamaliel-ii.
52 Simon, Verus Israel, 14, 70.
53 The numerous Roman wars of the late first and early second centuries left many occupied portions of the empire lightly garrisoned. Ethnic Judeans took advantage of the situation and instigated several major uprisings in countries with large Jewish minorities, including Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica. The slaughter was so appalling in Cyprus particularly (240,000 Greek civilians killed, according to Dio Cassius) that Jews were permanently banned from living on the island for centuries afterward. “Kitos” is a corruption of the name Quietus, the Roman general who finally put down the Cypriot revolt.
54 Japhet, or Japheth, one of Noah’s three sons named in the book of Genesis, was thought to be the progenitor of the European races, while Jews were descended from his brother Shem.
55 Simon, Verus Israel, 151.
56 Modern Jews, in fact, describe the baptism which takes place in our churches as “Christian Tvilah” — a pretty good description, to tell the truth, of the rite offered by John the Baptist at the Jordan. That, of course, was before Jesus raised it by his own divine power to a new and more glorious role as the sacrament of regeneration.
57 Simon, Verus Israel, 392. These “Noahic” commandments of Genesis 9 — not to commit murder and not to consume blood — are echoed to some degree in St. James’s ruling at the Jerusalem Council.
58 Simon, Verus Israel, 278.
59 Ibid., 39.
60 The Apostolic Council of Jerusalem is thought to have taken place in the year 49, while the earliest Gospel — that of Mark or perhaps an early Hebrew version of Matthew — appeared in the 50s or 60s.
61 Pseudo-Aristeas refers to the Jewish author of the so-called Letter of Aristeas, the document that established the legend about the miraculous translation of the Septuagint.
62 Simon, Verus Israel, 176.
63 Ibid., 277.
64 Gary Michuta, Hostile Witnesses (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers, 2016), 103.
65 Quoted in Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Yadayim,” by Joseph Jacobs and Jacob Zallel Lauterbach, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/15048-yadayim.
66 Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Akiba ben Joseph,” by Louis Ginzberg, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1033-akiba-ben-joseph.
67 Quoted in Simon, Verus Israel, 198.
68 Skepticism about whether a sitting emperor would have visited such a noted hotspot in person was allayed in 2014 by the discovery in Jerusalem, near the Damascus Gate, of a Latin inscription commemorating Hadrian’s visit.
69 Philo, among others, sets the number of Septuagint translators at seventy-two rather than the usual seventy, a change that appears to have been made for numerological reasons; he holds that the number of scholars was chosen by selecting six scholars from each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
70 Quoted in Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Aquila.” “Thus says the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the servant of rulers: ‘Kings shall see and arise; princes, and they shall prostrate themselves; because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you’ ” (Isa. 49:7).
71 Quoted in Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Aquila.”
72 “Hideout systems were employed in the Judean hills, the Judean desert, northern Negev, and to some degree also in Galilee, Samaria and Jordan Valley. As of July 2015 some 350 hideout systems have been mapped within the ruins of 140 Jewish villages.” Wikipedia, s.v. “Bar Kokhba revolt,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt#cite_note-nrg-47.
73 The Jamnia authorities, for instance, had to intervene to prevent him maiming his entire army. Bar Kokhba had begun requiring his men prove their courage and loyalty by chopping off one of their own fingers!
74 Eusebius, Church History 4, 6.
75 Quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “Simon bar Kokhba,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_bar_Kokhba.
76 “The part which Akiba is said to have taken in the Bar Kokhba war cannot be historically determined. The only established fact concerning his connection with Bar Kokhba is that the venerable teacher really regarded the patriot as the promised Messiah (Yer. Ta’anit, iv. 68d); and this is absolutely all there is in evidence of an active participation by Akiba in the revolution.” Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Akiba ben Joseph.”
77 Gary Michuta, “Did the Jews Ever Accept the Deuterocanon?” Detroit Catholic, November 9, 2016, https://detroitcatholic.com/news/gary-michuta/did-the-jews-ever-accept-the-deuterocanon.
78 Midrash, quoted in Simon, Verus Israel, 198.
79 “Eusebius of Caesarea wrote that Jewish Christians were killed and suffered ‘all kinds of persecutions’ at the hands of rebel Jews when they refused to help Bar Kokhba against the Roman troops.” Justin himself writes: “For in the Jewish war which lately raged, Barchochebas, the leader of the revolt of the Jews, gave orders that Christians alone should be led to cruel punishments, unless they would deny Jesus Christ and utter blasphemy.”
80 Aquila’s translation is notable for its pedantry. “The main feature of Aquila’s version is its excessive literalness. His chief aim was to render the Hebrew into Greek word for word, without any regard for Greek idiom. The same Greek word is regularly used for the same Hebrew, however incongruous the effect.” Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Aquila.”
81 Quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “Simon bar Kokhba.”