Life in Year One by Scott Korb

Author:Scott Korb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

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DEATH IN YEAR ONE

Follow me, and leave the dead behind to bury their dead.

—MATTHEW 8:22

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: To understand what it was like to live in Jesus’ world it does us little good to look directly at him.178 It’s clear that by all accounts Jesus felt the weight of Rome and the pull of money differently than other first-century Galileans. He doesn’t appear to have believed in family, work, or study the way other people did. He had what might safely be called an unusual perspective on healing, eating, and drinking. The man didn’t feel at home in his hometown and had no political attachments.179 He hardly recognized the law and baffled even his closest friends with his ideas about war and peace. And perhaps strangest and most dangerous of all, Jesus didn’t practice religion like his fellow Jews.

But, while for our purposes any real-life itinerant like Jesus would mainly be a “ragged figure who moves from tree to tree” across these pages, when the moving did eventually stop and he called out in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me”—well, at his most ragged this man stopped moving from tree to tree and was nailed to one, giving us reason finally to pause and take a look at him.

“Christus,” says Tacitus, “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” While the penalty this second-rate Roman governor issued to a poor artisan from Nazareth may have been extreme, crucifi xion was hardly uncommon. In The Jewish War alone, Josephus records the deadly crosses of unnamed thousands (though not the cross of Jesus180). As always, Josephus exaggerates in terms of the real numbers, but just consider this description of Jerusalem and the handiwork of Florus, procurator of Judea, in the lead-up to the war that began in 66: The total number that perished that day, including women and children—for not even infants were spared—came to about 3,600. The disaster was made even more crushing by the unheard-of character of the Roman brutality. No one had ever before dared to do what Florus did then—to scourge men of equestrian rank before the new judgment-seat and nail them to the cross, men who were indeed Jews, but all the same enjoyed Roman status.

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