Free James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I by Robert Eisenman

Chief Priests, the men of power [by which he means Herodians], and all those desirous for peace’ who invited the Roman army into Jerusalem ‘to put down the Uprising’. This is what Josephus meant in the Introduction to the War about how the Romans were invited into the city by ‘the Jews’ own leaders’ (1.10 & 2.418–19).
    Here one comes to an even more startling detail provided by Josephus, if what he seems to be saying can be tied to characters we know in early Christian history. The intermediary in this process of inviting the Roman army into the city was a member of the Herodian family called Saul. He is the one who delivered the message from ‘the peace coalition’ to the Roman army camped outside Jerusalem to enter, and a final report even to Nero’s headquarters , then in Corinth in Greece, a favourite haunt too of the religious activities of ‘Paul’.
    The anti-national, pro-Roman policy of the Pharisees should by now be clear. This is also the stance of the Pauline Gentile Christians, following the teaching of a person who describes himself as having been trained as a Pharisee and, according to the picture in Acts anyhow, vaunts a Roman citizenship, something not easily acquired in these turbulent times. Nor can the Pharisees in this period by any twist of the imagination be considered ‘the popular party’. If anything, the Zealot and/or Messianic were the popular parties (as nationalist parties predictably are) at least until the fall of the Temple and the re-education policy undertaken by the heirs of the Pharisees under Roman suzerainty thereafter.
    The Coming of the Romans and the Herodians
    Then what is the key to events, as described in the above analysis? It is the rise of the Herodians and the coming of the Romans. This is the reason for the widespread disaffection being expressed in this period and most of the unrest. After the fall of the Maccabeans, Roman rule was imposed, sometimes through Herodian kings or sometimes more directly through Roman procurators. It is against the backdrop of the fall of the Maccabeans and the ascent of the Herodians in the first century BCE that the rise of various sects or movements, particularly nationalistic or Messianic ones, must be gauged. Again, if one keeps this and the fact of Roman power firmly before one’s eyes, then almost all else follows comparatively easily.
    The first appearance of the Romans in the Eastern Mediterranean came just prior to this period in the late stages of the Punic War. They actually made their presence felt in the 60s BCE, when they turned Syria into a Roman province, eliminating the last vestiges of Seleucid rule. Just as Caesar was making his inroads into Transalpine Gaul, the Rhine, Britain, and Spain in the West, Pompey was undertaking the siege of Jerusalem in 63 BCE. He was abetted in this by internal dissensions within the Maccabean family itself, but also by a half-Arab, Hellenized intermediary by the name of Antipater, the father of Herod.
    Not only does Antipater successfully ingratiate himself with Pompey and his adjutants – the most well known of whom was Mark Anthony – but he ends up as the first Roman Procurator in Palestine and the ultimate arbiter of political events there. Mark Anthony, who distinguished himself in Palestinian campaigning, ultimately abets Antipater’s son Herod in obtaining the Jewish Crown. Herod finishes the job of obliterating the Maccabean family. Those he doesn’t execute he marries but, even these, he eventually butchers including his favourite wife Mariamme, the last Maccabean Princess, in the aftermath of his trip to Rome to get Octavius to reconfirm the crown Anthony had conferred on him (29 BCE). In the end, Herod even had his two sons by her – who had been brought up in Rome – put to death, presumably because he was jealous of their Maccabean blood and because the crowd preferred them to him. Here Herod really did kill all the Jewish children who sought to replace him,