PRINCE OF PEACE.
GALILEE AND VIOLENT UPRISING.
The Galilee was a territory apart from the rest of Palestine in the first century common era. Sharp confrontation between Jesus and Pharisees, not to mention the Roman provincial government had a good deal to do with Jesus being from the Galilee.
Geza Vermes wrote that “Geographically this northernmost district of Palestine was a little island in the midst of unfriendly seas.”
Jesus the Jew, 44.
Vermes was right. To the west it was bordered by Gentiles in the country of Ptolemais, called Acre. North was Tyre, Sidon, and the smaller villages that depended on these Syro-Phoenician powers. To the East was Gaulanitis, Hippo, and Gadara. The Galileans were even cut off from their Jewish brothers by a very Hellenized territory called Beth-Shean, but ever more, the Samaritans who they could not stand.
The Galilee was not only on an island, it was like North Korea without nukes. Constant rebellion and threats came out of zealous movements from the Galilee which came to bear upon Jesus whether he wanted the attention or not. There was a long history of rebellion in Galilee:
Pagan pressure under Antiochus Epiphanes IV led to the Maccabean revolt.
Simon Maccabaeus brought the Jews of Galilee to be refugees in the highland and central Judea when war broke out and they did not return until the tail end of the 2nd century BCE (104-103 BCE).
The Maccabees gave an ultimatum to the Gentiles in the area that they could stay if they underwent circumcision and adhered to Jewish Law.
From the middle of the first century CE it was the most troublesome district to Rome. It is likely that the zealots who we encounter in the gospels came from Ezekias son of Judas, or Judas of Gamala, or more commonly, “Judas the Galilean” (zealot= zealous for God, and so they wanted to violently upend Rome and relive the glory of the Maccabees…).
Judas the Galilean was executed by a very young but already paranoid Herod in 47 BCE and Judas’ son carried his work forward, breaking into the king’s arms in Sepphoris in 4BCE and raising hell.
The year Jesus was born the Romans had to crucify some 2000 Galileans for fomenting rebellion against the empire.
It was Galilee which played a large role in advent of the Jewish War with Rome and Judas the Galilean’s descendant Eleazar son of Jairus was the leader at Masada where a few hundred zealots staved off a thirsty Roman legion who all just wanted to go home :D.
All this is to say, the Galilee had a reputation for revolutionaries, Jesus is crucified between two of them and a third is released in the storyline of the gospels in place of Jesus.
Josephus described the Galileans, who he had tried and failed to persuade out of war with Rome, as men who “always resisted any hostile invasion,” and were “from infancy inured to war” (Bellum Judaicum 3.41). In Rabbinic lore, Galileans are known for being quarrelsome and starting fires all over the place.
THE PRINCE OF PEACE.
Galileans like Jesus were the kids of war and peace. Contemporaneous to the time of Jesus, three political uprisings by Jewish peasants against Roman tribute resulted blood baths. Josephus writes that the Roman troops “reduced inhabitants to slavery” … and that “the whole district became a scene of bloodshed and fire.” Josephus tells how in the town of Japhia, 6,000 rebel fighters were finally putdown by the Romans, and “the population was massacred in the open air or in their houses, old and long alike.” The Romans, in the name of establishing peace, killed all males save for infants, and sold all women and girls into the Roman slave trade. In describing Rome’s final siege of Judea, Josephus writes that “the Jordan River was choked off with the dead.”
JOSEPHUS, WAR 3.304-5, 4.419-48.
And so we might expect what everyone expected. God to send a Messiah to fight for Israel and restore its Hasmonean glory. But Jesus’ birth is announced as “peace from God,” Jesus taught the the peacemakers will be blessed, and he said that the ones who live by the sword, like the Maccabees or Galilean rebels, would eventually die by the sword. In the story of the gospel of Matthew, on the very night Jesus chose radical nonviolence over revolution, he told Peter:
"Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” MATTHEW 26.52
Here is a place where Jesus’ Galilean home deeply shaped his conviction that violence would not overcome violence, but would only compound injury. And so Jesus loved to quarrel about Torah but his interpretation always led him to piety for God and love for humankind. In the tradition of Hillel, who was asked to summarize the entire Law on one foot and said, “Love your neighbor as yourself— the rest is commentary!” Jesus stood against zealot ideals and for love of brother and enemy alike. Jesus believed the strongest force in the world was not force at all… it was love.
The human choice for violence is ever present and always easy. It will become the quickest and most uncreative solution as oil, water, and land become scarcer this century. But creative solutions are possible and so is a post-war people. Or at least we might say, that if the world always lines up to exchange blows, followers of Jesus should take seriously the Prince of Peace:
“We ourselves were well-conversant with war, murder, and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plough shares, our spears for farm tools. Now we cultivate the fear of God, justice, kindness to men, faith, and the expectation of the future given to us by the Father himself through the Crucified One.” (Dialogue with Trypho 110.3.4)
—Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 160 C.E.