OUT 0F THE EARTH By Professor EM Blaiklock MA Litt D
CHAPTER FOUR
ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
The coins of Pilate and the Amazing Nazareth Decree
Character of Pilate— Ancient coinage—Pilate's provocative issue-Froehner the antiquarian and the
"slab of marble sent from Nazareth" — text of the inscription- its date and nature-the theory of Momigliano the Emperor Claudius and his religious policy Suetonius on the expulsion of the Jews—the witness of the decree to the empty tomb-the Eleu-sinian 'mysteries' and the ' corn of wheat'.
IN the drama of the Easter Story, Pilate stands with Judas in the villain's role. How temperament and circumstance forced him to that part is a tale worth telling, and one on which archaeology, or at least numismatics, can provide a comment.
It is a story difficult to piece together, for Pilate left no word of his own nor found a friend to defend him. He was a stern and selfish man with few friends, no doubt, and many enemies, intractable, with an odd streak of cowardice, and the last man who should have been Governor of Israel .
When he sat on the judgement seat that Easter morning at the place called the Pavement, Pilate was facing the fruits of folly. Pontius Pilate is mentioned by writers sacred and profane, Josephus, Philo, the four evangelists, and on all occasions he wins the right to reference by an act of obstinate folly. He had carried the legionary standards into Jerusalem with the medallions attached, and so, by setting up an idolatrous portrait in the holy place, stirred the hysterical anger of the Jews.
The Jews, moreover, had beaten him on the issue.
Their delegation had lain in his headquarters courtyard for days and nights, and merely offered their throats when he stormed and threatened with the sword. And Pilate had surrendered. He had hung votive shields in the temple, and had stirred action yet more determined among his subjects who were finding his measure. They had appealed to Caesar and had won their case. Tiberius had peremptorily ordered his Governor to remove the abuse, and it was dangerous to annoy thus the old recluse of Capri.
Add the sacrilegious massacre in Galilee mentioned in the Gospels, and the equally sacrilegious use of a sacred fund to build an aqueduct, and the sum of Pilate's mistakes assumes perilous proportions. He could clearly not afford another appeal to Caesar. Hence the triumph of the priests at the trial of Christ, and their victory over a man who was convinced of the evil of their accusations, and seeking within the limits of his cowardice and compromised career a way to follow justice and release the Prisoner. Pilate sinned that day because his past was too powerful.
But why this policy of repression and folly? Perhaps another and even more sinister figure is partly to blame.
Pilate was probably an appointee of Seianus, the powerful commander of the household troops in Rome, and for many years, until in A.D. 3I the emperor found him out and struck him down, the trusted right-hand man of dour Tiberius. Was Seianus an anti-Semitist, and did he recommend Pilate for the governorship of the turbulent province of Israel because he hated the Jews?
Pilate, at any rate, appears to have adopted his provocative policy immediately, and not after annoyance and
frustration at his subjects' hands. And that is shown by his coinage, a source of evidence too frequently over-looked. The procurators had the right to issue small coinage in the province of Israel, but it was considered a duty, in designing coins which would be in the hands of multitudes, to avoid deliberate offence. Coins were always far more significant to their ancient users than they are today. They were a means of instruction and propaganda, were observed more closely, and studied for what they had to say.
Now the story of Christ and the tribute money shows that the emperor's portrait, with the offence involved, was abroad in Israel, but the silver denarius was issued as tribute money, and accepted as such. It was quite a different matter to deluge the land with common copper coinage which ran contrary to Jewish sentiment.
Valerius Gratus, Pilate's predecessor, had issued coins harmlessly adorned with palm branches or ears of corn, familiar enough Jewish symbols. As early as A.D. 29, Pilate issued copper coins bearing the lituus or pagan priest's staff, a symbol of the imperial cult which was bound to be obnoxious to the people of Israel. It was calculated provocation, and safe, because the coin users were insulted individually and the coinage did not produce collective demonstrations of hostility. The story of the tribute money shows that the Jews had a bad conscience about coins. They had accepted the imperial coinage and were carrying its implied idolatry about. Each man swallowed the new piece of arrogance and said nothing. Seianus fell in A.D. 3I and, significantly enough, lkthe issue of such provocative coins ceased about this time.
Coins, therefore, and they are part of the stuff of archaeology, reveal something of the dour and distracted man who sent Christ to the Cross. It was clearly the Pilate of the provocative coins who stung his enemies with the inscription over the cross, and returned the savage answer :
"What I have written, I have written."
On the Resurrection, archaeology has a piece of astonishing evidence to offer, for it is quite beyond question that one of the most interesting archaeological discoveries in Israel during the century of exploration its ancient sites have seen, is a simple slab of white marble from Nazareth, the home town of Christ. The stone found its way in 1878 into the collection of a distinguished antiquarian named Froehner, who noted it down in his catalogue simply thus: "Slab of marble sent from Nazareth in 1878.
Froehner was an eccentric person, but an archaeologist of exact scholarship and distinction, most unlikely to have been deceived. If he so recorded the origin of the Nazareth stone, the statement can be quite unreservedly accepted. As a collector, on the other hand, Froehner guarded his treasures jealously, and derived a perverse and lamentable enjoyment from the possession of antiquities of which the world of scholarship knew nothing.
Publication, to Froehner's mind, diminished his personal interest in possession.
In the order of nature Monsieur Froehner passed away, and the items of his fine collection found their way to the French treasure-house of the Louvre. The piece of marble from Nazareth was housed in the Cabinet de Médailles, and at long last, in 1930 in fact, over half a century after its arrival in Europe, Michel Rostovtzeff, the great historian, cast his eye on its rather irregular lines of clear Greek script. He stared in astonishment, for here was an inscription of unique importance unknowi to scholarship.
This is what he read:
Ordinance of Caesar. It is my pleasure that graves and tombs remain undisturbed in perpetuity for those who have made them for the cult of their ancestors, or children, or members of their house. If, however, any man lay information that another has either demolished them, or has in any other way extracted the buried, or has maliciously transferred them to other places in order to wrong them, or has displaced the sealing or other stones, against such a one I order that a trial be instituted, as in respect of the gods, so in regard to the cult of mortals. For it shall be much more obligatory to honour the buried. Let it be absolutely forbidden for anyone to disturb them. In the case of contravention I desire that the offender be
sentenced to capital punishment on charge of violation of sepulture.
Need one stress the significance of a decree concerning moving the stone coverings of tombs, and extracting the bodies of the dead which comes from the town where Christ lived? The scholars were not slow to move and the Abbé Cumont, Rostovtzeff's friend, and a first-rate ancient historian, was quickly in the field with an account of the inscription, an attempt to date it, an analysis of the language, and an account of its significance.
Since the Abbé Cumont's article, the field has become a well-trodden one, and only last year (1956) an American scholar added one more acute suggestion to the commentary on the language of the inscription, and one more emperor to the list of those alleged to be the author of the decree.
In fact, on this ground or that, every Roman emperor from Augustus to Hadrian, with the exception of Caligula, has been named as the promulgator of the Nazareth decree.
But before considering the evidence for the dating which seems to be reasonable, let us look at a few other
points which twenty years of live discussion and controversy have more or less established. First of all the Greek is a rather poor translation of a Latin original.
As with schoolboy exercises, the Latin idiom peeps a little clumsily through the Greek translation. The decree therefore came to Israel in Latin, and was done into Greek for the perusal of the bilingual inhabitants of Nazareth by some secretary of the Governor.
We have called the inscription so far a decree. But should we do so in all exactitude? Perhaps not.
Edicts and decrees of the imperial government tended to find expression in rather more elegant language and less blunt terminology than the inscription quoted above.
Difficulties of this sort disappear if the inscription is assumed to be a reply, a rescript, to use the technical expression, of the emperor, addressed to the local governor, the legate of Syria or the procurator of Judaea, who had addressed to him a question on a specific case of tomb-robbery. The final volume of Pliny's correspondence contains many replies of this sort from the pen of the Emperor Trajan, outlining in conversational rather than official style the ruler's will on some matter in question. One of these rescripts is famous for the first outline which it gives of imperial policy in the matter of the rising Christian church. Indeed, included also in this volume of quite invaluable letters and replies, is one in which the governor of Bithynia makes inquiry regarding the moving of the remains of the dead, and another which contains the emperor's written judgment.
Pliny writes:
Having been petitioned by some persons to grant them the liberty of removing the relics of their deceased relations on the grounds that their tombs were destroyed
by age or broken down by the invasion of flood waters, I thought proper, Sir, knowing that it is usual at Rome to consult the College of Pontiffs on such matters, to ask you, as head of that sacred order, what course you would have me follow.
Trajan replies briefly, and one imagines a little testily, for Pliny was a most assiduous correspondent. He writes :
The obligation to petition the pontifical college is a hardship for the provincials, when they have just
reasons for removing the ashes of their ancestors. It will be better, therefore, for you to follow the example of your predecessors, and grant or deny this liberty as you see reasonable.
There, then, is a perfect example of a question and a rescript. If the Nazareth document is a rescript, it must have come to Israel in reply to an official request for instructions regarding the opening of tombs, and it does seem curious that the stone should have been set up at Nazareth and only at Nazareth, the town from which Christ came, He whose empty tomb had given the Christian Church its Gospel. And why was the emperor, whichever emperor it was, stirred to such drastic threatenings? Capital punishment for the less heinous crimes was not a common feature of Roman law until the third century, when the lengthening shadows of social and legal decadence lay heavily across the empire. What sort of question, what flagrant abuse, moved a Roman ruler, steeped in the legal tradition of his race, to depart so notably from general practice, and to lay down such provision in one part only of the empire, and that part the Israeli town of Jesus of Nazareth?
Two converging lines of evidence suggest that the inscription falls within the decade which closed with A.D. 50.
The style and execution of the lettering satisfy the practiced
epigraphist that the work belongs to the first half of that century. And then, and this rules out three emperors, Auguste Tiberus and Caligula, the central Roman government did not take over the administration o fGalilee until the death of its puppet king Agrippa in A.D. 44. No decree could have been set up in Nazareth by the governor of Syria or the procurator of Judaea before that date. The autonomy of the area may have been a legal fiction, but the Romans of all imperialists knew the value of legal fictions. Consider, too, the incident at the trial of Christ: "And they were the more fierce saying,
'He stirreth up the people teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place.' When Pilate heard of Galilee he asked whether the man were a Galilean. And as soon as he knew that He belonged to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent Him to Herod... " No Roman authority would presume to set up inscribed laws at Nazareth before A.D. 44, and if we can rely upon the epigraphical conclusion that A.D. 50 is approaching near to the latest date for work so styled and executed, it becomes possible to hazard a guess about the emperor who sent the reply to Israel.
It could have been none other than Claudius. And once one accepts that statement one or two points of confirmation immediately appear. Claudius was an odd person, a sort of Roman James the First, who would have been much happier with his books than with offices of State. Ancient historians persisted in calling him mad, but the more Claudius' actual achievements are studied, the clearer becomes the impression that he was a man of learning and of no mean ability. He was probably a spastic, whose faulty coordinations conveyed an unjust impression of subnormality, and resulted, in his early years, in ridicule and misunderstanding which damaged his person-
ality. It is clear that, anxious to carry on the religious reforms of Augustus, he was deeply informed about, and genuinely interested in, the religious situation in the Mediterranean world.
A long letter, for example, has survived in which Claudius seeks to regulate the serious Jewish problem of Alexandria. This letter, certainly a rescript, was found among the papyri in 1920, and appears to contain the first secular reference to Christian missionaries. It was written in A.D. 4I, and expressly forbids the Alexandrian Jews "to bring or invite other Jews to come by sea from Syria. If they do not abstain from this conduct," Claudius threatens,
"I shall proceed against them from fomenting a malady common to the world."
Note the language. It is the rather downright style of the Nazareth inscription, and the language of a man who had studied the Jewish religious problem, and found it irritating. It would be surprising if Claudius, with these preoccupations, was not the first Roman outside Israel to hear of the Christians.
Historians are definitely of this opinion. The Acts of the Apostles,' confirmed by two Roman historians, Orosius and Suetonius, says that Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome. This was in A.D. 49, and note how the date coincides with the likely one for the Nazareth inscription.
Suetonius adds that Claudius acted thus because of rioting in the ghetto " at the instigation of one Chrestos."
The reference is obviously to Christ, and as Arnaldo Momigliano once insisted,' those who deny that Suetonius made the simple mistake of confusing two Greek words,
"christos" and "chrestos," must undertake the difficult task of proving their contention. To suppose that the Roman biographer was referring to the Lord is undoubtedly more reasonable than any other suggestion.
thus reconstructed.
The situation may, therefore, with much probability be
In the forties of the first century the first Christian preaching was heard in Rome, and the synagogue was in bitter opposition. Trouble in the Jewish quarter, and a wave of arrests,appeal to a dual interest in the Emperor, his curiosity over religion, and his awareness of the Jewish problem, as well as his predilection for the bench. He hears the case, and it proves a strange story. The trouble, he gathers, is about one named Christ, who, his followers aver, "rose from the dead." The defence of the rabbis is obviously the Pharisaic version of the empty tomb as reported by Matthew: " His disciples came and stole away the body."' There is a quite authentic touch of Claudius' well-documented whimsicality and carefulness in the result.
Unable to decide the issue, he banished all Jews. He must then have made inquiries in Israel and heard from the authorities that the preaching of the gospel of the resurrection was rife. ' What shall I do?" asks the governor. Back comes the rescript. "Quench the trouble at its place of origin by a stern decree.
" Or, if the inscrip-
tion is not a rescript, it could be a quotation from one of Claudius' long letters on religious problems, dutifully set up by the local authorities. If this reasoning is sound three facts emerge, the first that Christian preaching began in Rome much earlier than was once supposed, and many years before the arrival of Paul. The second fact is that imperial action against the Church must have begun with Claudius, and not with Nero after the Great Fire in A.D. 64. Finally it would appear that, in Rome, as in Jerusalem, the stark fact of the empty tomb was accepted by the foes of Christ.
And so, in the words of an emperor, the 20th century reads the first secular comment on the Easter story, and legal testimony to Central fact.
The theme of resurrection appeared metaphorically in the teaching of Christ. "Truly, I tell you," He said,
"except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone; but if it die it brings forth much fruit" (John 12: 24). Curiously enough the figure was part of the Eleusinian cult of Demeter the Earth Goddess. This
"mystery religion" was domiciled at the great temple along the coast near Athens, and many thousands of Athenians were initiated into it every year. "Mystery" cults had their origin in fertility rituals and Nature-worship, and played a very large part in Greek religious experience. They owed their name to the fact that many of their rites were private, information withheld from all but the initiated. They tended to degenerate into the sexuality which surrounded such cults as those of Artemis at Ephesus, and Aphrodite at Corinth, but some of them developed the elements of true worship and through their teaching, ceremonies, and sacraments, gave birth and stimulus to genuine spiritual experience. Their theological language and practice was not without its influence on the vocabulary of the New Testament, and the organisation of Christian worship.
There seems no doubt that the Eleusinian " mysteries" were of a pure order, and played a beneficient part in Athenian life. The annual ceremonies were elaborate and aimed both at stirring deep emotions, and promoting a conviction of spiritual rebirth. Little, of course, is known of them, in the very nature of the case. Initiates kept their vows of secrecy. But it is known that part of the ceremonial was the uplifting of an ear of corn, which, in the
symbolism of the cult, was meant to simplify death and rebirth.
Eleusis is now an industrial suburb of Athens. The ruins of the sacred precincts are sadly shattered, and perhaps not tended with the care which the Greeks usually bestow upon their antiquities. But beside the path to the Great Hall lies a broken frieze, and one of its carved emblems is a sheaf of corn.
Perhaps it is fanciful to see any link between the Great Athenian mystery cult and the words of Christ about a corn of wheat. But it is odd that the remark should have been made in the context in which John reports it . . .
"And there were certain Greeks among
those that came up to worship at the festival, and they came to Philip and requested him, saying, Sir we would
see Jesus...
The visitors were probably converts to
Judaism from the Greek colonies of the Decapolis.
Was Christ speaking in words they might be supposed to understand?