The Fall of Jerusalem: Understanding the Jewish Revolt That Changed History Forever w/ Dr. Guy McLean Rogers

Johnny Ova: Welcome back everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and I can't even tell you how excited I am for our guest today. He'll tell you I've been chasing him down by email for quite some time, but I have the privilege of speaking to Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers. Thank you so much, Dr. Rogers, for joining us today to talk about 70 AD.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Thank you for inviting me. I'm glad we finally were able to find a time to do this.

Johnny Ova: I know our listeners are going to really enjoy our conversation, since this is a hot talking point that I reference quite a bit. When we talk about this Roman-Jewish war of 70 and what led up to it, I want to talk about sourcing first. What sources do we have that tell us about this event that are reliable, that we can trust?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: The war that broke out actually in 66 and resulted in the destruction of the temple in 70 is one of the best documented wars in all of the ancient world because of the literary works of this guy who we know as Flavius Josephus. Originally he was a Jewish priest and general who fought in the war, first on the Jewish side and then on the Roman side, and after the war was over he wrote several works, at least four of which give us information about the war. The most important is the one usually called The Jewish War. The manuscripts don't have a title, but it's a work devoted solely to the war. It's written in Greek, which wasn't his first language. In fact, he originally published a version in Aramaic, which was the sister or brother language of Hebrew in the first century CE. We don't have that, so we rely on the Greek version.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: After The Jewish War, he went back and decided to write a much longer work about Jewish history, usually titled in English Jewish Antiquities. Again it didn't have its own title, but it's a massive work, a lot of reading for anyone who gets really ambitious, and it describes the events of the war. At the end of that he also wrote an autobiography, or Life, which also discusses events. So we have a mass of literary information. Some of it is unfortunately contradictory, and people like me spend a lot of time trying to square the circle and make coherent sense of it.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Then there's a lot of archaeological data as well. Israel is probably, by square footage, the most excavated place in the world, so there's a lot of material evidence. And there are Roman polytheist sources, people like Tacitus and Cassius Dio, and some Christian sources too, which provide further background on the run-up to the revolt and the rest. Putting it all together, we have a huge amount of information about this war in particular, which distinguishes it from a couple of the other wars the Jews and the Romans fought against each other. In terms of sources, it's rich and complex.

Johnny Ova: I didn't realize it was one of the most documented. That's pretty cool. My next question is about what led up to this. As far as I understand, the Jews and the Romans, and even some of the Christians, were kind of playing nice for quite a while, and then something started this conflict. What was the religious and political climate in Judea in the years leading to 66 and eventually to AD 70?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: I think the place to start is after the son of Herod the Great was sent packing by the Romans. After Herod died in 4 BCE, one of his sons was put in charge of the central area with Judea in the middle of it. After about ten years, the emperor Augustus decided he just wasn't up to the job, sent him into exile, and decided to send out a Roman governor. We know those governors were called prefects at the time, and he sent out a man named Coponius. The prefects had legal jurisdiction and some military control over Jerusalem and Judea, but they operated under the guidance of the Roman governor of Syria, who was the big dog on the block.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: For the issues you're interested in, what's interesting is that when this first prefect was sent out in 6 CE, there was a revolt right away. Not many people know about it. A Galilean named Judas and a Pharisee named Zadok led a revolt. They went around telling people that the census the Romans planned to take, which meant enrolling people and their property on a list so they could be taxed, amounted to slavery, and that anyone who acknowledged the emperor as master or king was in violation of Jewish law. There can only be one king. So from the moment the Romans took over, there was opposition. From 6 to the outbreak of the revolt in 66, you're right, it wasn't one long period of unrest, but there was periodic unrest the whole time.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Going back to your question about sources, what's really interesting is that Josephus says these two men, Judas and Zadok, inspired the later rebels, some of whom were called Sicarii. That's a tricky name for the group that helped spark the revolt in 66, because Josephus uses Sicarii in two different ways. In the early period they're assassins for hire, but by the 50s or 60s it's clear they're coalescing into a political group opposed to Roman rule.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: So there were periodic outbreaks. The one of most interest to your audience would be during the prefecture of our notorious friend Pontius Pilate, who is famous or infamous for reasons your audience will all know. Josephus tells us he almost inspired two separate revolts against Rome by trying to bring into Jerusalem shields, or actually Roman military standards, which violated the commandment against graven images. Then under the emperor we usually call Caligula, whose real name was Gaius, from 37 to 41, Gaius had the brilliant idea of putting up a statue of himself on the Temple Mount, presumably in the temple itself, which also almost caused a revolt. So there was an ongoing series of incidents.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: On top of that, there was endemic ethnic strife among Jews, Greeks, Syrians and others in Judea, which actually predated the Roman entry into the area. Something a lot of people don't realize is that Alexander the Great's entry into this neighborhood in 332 BCE, and after his death in 323 the battles among his successors, the Seleucids in Syria and the Ptolemies in Egypt, brought in a lot of people whose views on all kinds of things were fundamentally different from those of Jews, Samaritans and others. So the groundwork was being laid. You used the word rumbling earlier, the rumbling of revolt, and that's actually a really good term. If you think of this as the pre-stage of an earthquake, the plates were shifting under the surface all the time.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: So the question is why it happened when it did. The simple answer is that there was an especially nasty outbreak of the ethnic rivalry between Greeks and Jews in the coastal city of Caesarea, which had been built up by Herod the Great. Some Greeks tried to block access to a prayer house, a synagogue, and the two sides went back and forth. The governor at the time, Gessius Florus, essentially washed his hands of it and went to Jerusalem. When he got there in 66, because the emperor Nero needed money to rebuild Rome after four of its districts had burned to the ground, he took a large amount of silver out of the temple treasury. When Jews protested, he let his auxiliary troops loose on them, and they massacred thousands of Jews.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Those two things, the ethnic strife in Caesarea and what the Roman governor did in Jerusalem, were the match that lit it. Shortly afterward, some of the priests in the temple decided they shouldn't allow sacrifices to be made on behalf of Romans and other foreigners. The Romans had been paying for sacrifices for the welfare of the emperor and the Roman people since the time of Augustus. Stopping that was a declaration of independence, a separation from Rome. That was the declaration of independence in 66, and it started it all.

Johnny Ova: So this wasn't one event out of the blue. It was building animosity and conflict over years and decades that exploded at this moment.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: That's correct. But it's important to point out that the animosity wasn't characteristic of the entire society. There were groups who agreed with Judas the Galilean that you couldn't have two kings, and there were people for whom it was no problem to have a Roman emperor and local Roman rulers. As you know, Jesus famously said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. So it wasn't everybody. That's a really important point, because once the revolt started, it devolved fairly quickly into a civil war within Jewish society at the same time. So almost immediately we have three wars going on: Jews against Romans, Jews against other Jews, and Jews against people in the neighborhood who were not friendly to them and had not been for a long time. That's why, even with these rich sources, people have been arguing about the causes of the war, its course, and why the Jews lost for literally two thousand years. It's a very complex phenomenon, not a cut-and-dried case.

Johnny Ova: I like the Sicarii, am I pronouncing that right? The Jewish ninjas of the first century, for the most part. Were the Jewish people aware of this growing danger? Was it part of everyday life? Were there signs that something big was about to happen?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Yes, that's the short answer. If you read the first book or so of Josephus's War, he charts all of these incidents from 6 to 66, and you get a sense that something big was going to happen. No society on earth is ever without its tensions anyway. But this was a situation where things came together in the late 50s and early 60s to a threshold point. There had been other massacres of Jews by Roman-led auxiliary troops in the middle of the first century, and there had been ethnic riots and conflicts. The question is how you get to the point where it's no longer, something happens and then, like in a dysfunctional family, everybody goes to their rooms and says, wow, that was awful, we're not going to talk about it, because it could be much worse.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: They got to that point after Florus unleashed these auxiliary troops, who were recruited mostly from non-Jews, though there were Jews among them, and they massacred, if Josephus is right, thousands of Jewish civilians. That was the point of no return. I say to people interested in ancient warfare, and warfare and human history more generally: once you get to a red line where it's not five or ten people but two or three thousand, in a society of the scale of first-century Jewish society, things change. In Jerusalem maybe we're talking about a couple hundred thousand people. That may be high; we don't have good statistics. But if you kill three to five thousand civilians, it means that when they go back to their rooms that night, everybody either is related to or knows somebody who was killed. Then you reach the threshold, and people say, you know what? Basta. Enough of this. I've had it.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: There were people like the Sicarii, and other sectarian groups like the so-called Zealots. But something really important to keep in mind is that it's not true that only these so-called radical groups were part of the revolt. We know some of the leaders of the revolt came from among the Pharisees, and there were Essenes as well. They too reached the threshold point, and that's when people decided this was no longer tolerable. It's not clear they wanted to fight a long war ending in a showdown around Jerusalem. But at that point there were enough people that this was no longer a series of riots. It was a major revolt against Roman rule, the biggest revolt in the early Roman Empire.

Johnny Ova: That leads right into where my brain is going: the messianic expectations and prophecies that were probably circulating then. You read a lot in the Scriptures about the end of the age. You see Jesus talking about the temple falling in Matthew 24. You see him carrying the cross and telling the women, don't weep for me, weep for yourselves because of what's about to happen in Jerusalem. What was the prophetic or messianic expectation of the Jewish people, in your opinion? Were they under the impression that the end of the age was taking place, that they were watching the destruction of something coming imminently?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: It's interesting for your audience, if they get interested in this. It's not a terribly dense read, but if you look at Josephus on the period from 6 to 66, you'll find a lot of information about both messianic and apocalyptic expectations. Of course, and rightly so, those famous passages in Matthew and Mark about Jesus and the temple have become the focus of one vector, which is really about the temple. But beside that, and at the same time, there were all kinds of other people going around Jerusalem, Jews and non-Jews, or in some cases Jews from other places, encouraging these kinds of expectations. Josephus, for instance, talks about an Egyptian who came into Jerusalem, started preaching, and told people to assemble on the Mount of Olives, saying he would lead them up there and at his command the walls of Jerusalem would fall down. So there were a lot of these men.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: It culminates in something I think a lot of people are unaware of. Josephus tells a story, afterward obviously, about a Jewish man in 61 who was also named Jesus, Yeshua son of Ananias, who went around shouting at people, woe to Jerusalem, woe to the Jerusalemites. People thought he was crazy. The local people had him beaten, and finally they brought him to the Roman authorities, who decided he was just crazy. But Josephus says that after the destruction of the temple, they decided maybe he wasn't crazy. He was one of these prophetic figures. I don't mean to be facetious, but sometimes I get the feeling that if you could time-capsule your way back into first-century Jerusalem, there would be more prophets wandering around than nonprophets. Everybody had a view about where all of this was going.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: The serious answer to your question is yes, this was an age when people did think something dramatic was about to happen. As a little sidebar, from 115 to 117 there was another revolt against the Romans, the Diaspora Revolt, where people in Mesopotamia, probably in Judea though not to the same extent, and definitely in Egypt and in Cyrenaica, or Libya, rose up again. Then there was a third big revolt, the Bar Kokhba revolt, from 132 to 135 or 136, where exactly the same thing happened. People went around saying this is the age when there will be freedom from these horrible Romans. And when they talk about messianic expectations, they specifically talk about Bar Kokhba, and about redemption beginning with the ingathering of people from the diaspora back to Israel. That's what those first-century people were about as well. They were part of that tradition, which continues.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. I know a lot of teachers and even historians who relate many of the end-time events, which some Christians project into the future, to the understanding that many if not all of them were fulfilled around 70 AD with the temple. So I was curious about your thoughts on their expectation, at least from their understanding.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: There definitely were people focused on the temple itself, and it's a very long and complex issue, because the temple was, I argue in my book, probably the most amazing monument in the whole Greco-Roman and wider world. The Temple Mount's footprint was larger than the footprint of the Great Pyramid of Giza. So people were focused on it, but there were also critics of it, because of course our friend Herod was the one responsible for expanding it to that extent. Herod had his fans, but he also had his critics among Jews.

Johnny Ova: He had his haters. For people who have never studied this event, talk about some of what happened during the fall of the temple and the Roman siege, starting in 66 and culminating in 70. We could go five hours on the details, but give us a high-level overview of who led the charge and what was taking place.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: When the revolt broke out in 66, the Jews in Jerusalem appointed people to organize the defense, because they knew what was coming. At first the Romans sent the governor of Syria down to snuff out the revolt, and he was ambushed and lost significant casualties, which really gave the rebels momentum. After that, the Jews appointed generals to go out to the different areas they controlled, and our friend Josephus was appointed general in charge of the Galilee and the Golan. The basic strategy was to fortify the most significant towns and villages and fight the Romans from them.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: In 67 the emperor Nero appointed Vespasian and his son to deal with the revolt, and in one year the Romans essentially conquered the Galilee and the Golan. That meant they needed to go down to Jerusalem, and they probably would have done it in 68 or 69, but there was a revolt in one of the northern provinces of the empire, and Nero ended up committing suicide. So there was a breathing space for the Jews in Jerusalem to get organized and think about the best way to defend themselves against the inevitable Roman counterattack. Instead, Josephus argues, they fought among themselves, and during this period they also managed to burn up their own food supply.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: When the Romans finally showed up in 70, Vespasian had thrown his hat into the ring and essentially become emperor, and he delegated the task of taking Jerusalem to his son Titus. Titus led a very large Roman and allied army there around Passover of 70. This time they brought all their siege equipment and organized a resupply campaign, which they needed because they knew it would be difficult. Jerusalem essentially had three sets of defensive walls, and then walls around the Temple Mount itself, so four sets of walls really, and the Romans had to break through them. Josephus spends a whole book on the fighting. It wasn't a walkover by any means. The Romans suffered very significant casualties. The Jews excelled at hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. They had some artillery captured from the Romans earlier, but not much, and they didn't specialize in it.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Over a four-month period the Romans broke through the three sets of walls, which brought them to the fortress attached to the Temple Mount by a kind of walkway or portico. At that point, in August of 70, both sides probably knew the end was near. Very famously, in the days before the Romans broke through onto the Temple Mount, Josephus tells us Titus held a council of his generals and advisors where they debated what to do about the temple when they got up there. Josephus, who wrote this Greek account of the war and the destruction of the temple, says Titus was against destroying the temple, and that was the view and the command that prevailed.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: But when the Roman soldiers got onto the Temple Mount, where the priests and the hardcore rebels were holed up, the legionaries, after suffering a lot over four months, went crazy. Some of you have probably been to Israel in the summertime. It's hotter than blue blazes in Jerusalem in the summer. Imagine fighting there. It was really, really difficult. They massacred people, and a soldier threw a torch into one of the doors of the temple, and it lit a fire that started a conflagration. It burned the temple down, and eventually most of the buildings up there were destroyed too: not just the inner temple, but the porticoes around it, the supply buildings and the rest. Almost everyone on the Temple Mount, priests, men, women, children, civilians, was slaughtered by the Romans. Some people escaped into the tunnels under the city, and they too were eventually rooted out and killed. So the city was sacked.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: There's a huge amount of discussion and controversy among scholars about whether Titus intended the temple to be destroyed. As I said, Josephus was writing all this in Rome, and we know he circulated a copy that Titus read and supposedly stamped with his approval, saying, yes, that's the way it happened. That account exculpates Titus. The problem is that other monuments in Rome make clear Titus and his father took credit for destroying Jerusalem and sacking the temple. Famously there's the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, and there was a big inscription, once part of the Circus Maximus, which said Titus was the first person to sack Jerusalem. That was a blatant lie. Everyone in your audience will know Jerusalem had been sacked several times before, but what the heck.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Even more important, a classical scholar was able to restore an inscription over one of the entry doors of the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheater, which said the amphitheater had been built from the spoils of the war. So they were not trying to hide the fact that they had destroyed Jerusalem and sacked the temple. They wanted it both ways. They wanted the credit. And frankly, you can't say the Romans lacked a sense of irony: Vespasian had a Temple of Peace built in which some of the artifacts looted from the temple were stored. So this was a major event.

Johnny Ova: You can't let facts get in the way of a good story, right?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Exactly.

Johnny Ova: In the eyes of Rome, how significant was the destruction of the temple? In the grand scheme was it a side issue, like, these guys are annoying me, let me wipe out this nuisance? Or was it a big deal?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: No, it was a big deal, and the reason is that from their point of view Judea was within the Roman Empire. Conceptualizing the Roman Empire is complex, because it's not like the maps with a rigid line saying this is Roman and this isn't. The borders were more fungible than that. But when they sent out a prefect like Pontius Pilate, or later a procurator like Gessius Florus, it means they think Roman jurisdiction applies there. People outside that jurisdiction not playing nice with the Romans is one thing. The Romans always had difficult relations with the Iranian-based dynasties like the Parthians and the Sasanians. But people living within the empire revolting? To the Romans that's a no-no. They see you not only as rebels but as ingrates.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: It's also important to keep in mind that Vespasian and Titus were not old aristocratic blue bloods. They were new men, so they had to justify holding the chief executive position, and this was their meal ticket. They crushed this revolt, and they wanted to promote it. After they destroyed the temple, they made Judea its own province with a new legate in charge and a legion stationed there, the Tenth Legion. In the years after that they dawdled a bit, but three or four years later they crushed all the other pockets of resistance, including shutting down the semi-official temple of the Jews at Leontopolis in Egypt. Vespasian and Titus were in the business of crushing and eradicating the sacrificial cult of the Jews, both because they were believing polytheists and because they didn't want any place where Jewish revolutionaries might congregate in the future. So yes, it was a really big deal, and they didn't want it to repeat itself. But it did, in the Diaspora Revolt and then the Bar Kokhba revolt, which caused the Romans to blow an even bigger fuse. In Judea they basically went around and exterminated as much of the population as they possibly could.

Johnny Ova: I've got just a few more questions, because I know you have to run shortly. When this temple fell, how did its destruction change Jewish religious life?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: I think that's maybe the most important question to come out of all of this. The short answer is that Jews had to adjust to a situation where there was no longer this central meeting place and place of sacrifice. It's really important to dig down into that and ask what the purpose of those sacrifices was. A much, much better scholar of all things Judaic than any of us will ever be, Maimonides, looked at all the commandments in the Hebrew Bible, all 613 of them, and counted how many had to do with sacrifices. The number exceeds 100. So of the 613 commandments, not the Ten, more than 100 focus on sacrifices: sacrificing for good things, sacrificing to avoid bad things, sacrificing in honor. All of that was happening in the temple, and now it's gone. So where do you do those things? How do you approach your divinity, as it were? The answer, after the end of the first century, is by turning to the book itself, to the Torah. That's where I end my book as well. Most of my research and books have been about religion and warfare, and this book on the Jewish revolt is where those two vectors really come together.

Johnny Ova: Which is right here, by the way.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Thank you. It's where they come together. The Romans thought that by destroying the temple, what they had done is essentially destroyed Judaism. But they got it wrong. The reason is that the survivors, led by a man known as Rabbi Judah the Nasi, or leader, turned the people toward the book itself. That was the real source of their ongoing connection with their God. That's the direction it took.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Thank you for promoting my book, and now I'll give a shout-out to another book your audience might be interested in. Barry Strauss, a great scholar of Greco-Roman antiquity and Judaism whom I know, has a book called Jews vs Rome that just came out. He talks about the effects of all this and what he calls the turn toward the spiritual side of Judaism as the source of its strength: never conceding that the covenant had been broken, or that this was in some sense a punishment, but seeing it as part of a plan, and that they don't need the temple to continue. That becomes the direction. It also helped that Judaism wasn't based only in Judea and around the temple. There was a huge diaspora where people were able to carry on as well. That's why it survived, despite this terrible thing. I'm not Jewish, I'm a historian, but when you read about this, or the destruction of churches or polytheist shrines, these are poignant moments because you're talking about people's most deeply held beliefs. I try to keep that in mind.

Johnny Ova: And in this case, it was ripped completely away. It must have been a very hard transition, but it changed them, and not just the Jewish community but the Christian communities too. That leads to my last question. From a historian's perspective, how did this event shape not only Jewish history but also the early Christian movement?

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Among Jews, going back to your earlier question about messianism and expectations, one thing my colleague Barry Strauss points out is that if you put yourself in the position of Jews after 70 CE, as horrible and traumatic as it was, it had precedent in Jewish history. There had been a first temple, destroyed by the Babylonians and then rebuilt, or built anew, within about 70 years. So we know there were many Jews after 70 who expected the temple to be rebuilt as well.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: As far as the Christians are concerned, it's unfortunate from a source point of view, because we don't have an exact analog to Josephus, a participant in the events who was also a narrator of them. What we do have, of course, are the Synoptic Gospels and John, which talk about the temple, as we discussed. There's controversy among scholars about whether they show knowledge of what happened. Most people don't think they do. But later, writers like Eusebius try to put this into the context of what, by the time Eusebius is writing, is a parting of the ways between the different groups.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: I was thinking about this before today. If you could go back and talk to the people in the circle around Jesus in the first century, most of them probably would have identified themselves as Jews, but there may have been people already transitioning to calling themselves something different. Unfortunately we don't have their testimonies. We just have what other people say about them. For instance, we have an early second-century Roman governor, Pliny, who writes about Christians and reports what they say about themselves, but that's not them speaking for themselves. So we're in a difficult position. But to go back to your question: yes, by the second century this was seen by both Jews and Christians as an inflection point in their histories, which went back to a common source.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Rogers, I cannot thank you enough for carving out time with me today. This was fun, and I learned so much from you. Hopefully in the future, when you have some free time, we can jump back on and get into some more specifics. I truly appreciate you and your work. I'm going to link all your books in the description on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and our website. If you're listening or watching and want to learn more and dig deeper, I definitely recommend Dr. Rogers' books. Thank you so very much for your time today.

Dr. Guy MacLean Rogers: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Nice to talk to you, and good luck with everything.