Rome inflicted its own kind of “eye for an eye” justice of revenge when Jews dared to defend themselves and their God. Jesus himself was a product of the collectivist Roman way of “eye for an eye” justice. But if eye for an eye collective justice rules, then was it only right that some Jews punish those Jews who tried to help Jesus, just as Romans punished the Jewess Mary for the deeds of Jewish freedom fighters? In the larger Roman world, Jews are despised. But in the Jewish world, would a mongrel half-Roman/half-Jew be despised? Jesus was the greatest scapegoat individual of the greatest scapegoat race.
The world hated the Jews and some Jews hated Jesus. By being less Jewish than the Jews, he became more Jewish than the Jews; the most persecuted of the persecuted; the most despised and damned of the most despised and damned. Jesus suffered persecution by some Jews at a time when Jews themselves were being persecuted by the Romans. Was this why Jesus rebelled against Jewish law? By the standards of Jewish law, anyone born of a Jewish mother is fully Jewish. This means that Jesus was fully and totally Jewish by Jewish law.
But was the law adequate to contain the Jesus predicament? The law was utterly inadequate for dealing with the de- facto discrimination that was inseparable from the fight against Rome and this is a root of his conflict with the law. From God’s higher view, he was truly a Jew; truly a child or son of the God of Moses. However, from view of the decimated, enslaved, traumatized, and all-too-human Jewish community, Jesus represented a seemingly irresolvable dilemma. The chasm between Jewish law and Jewish behavior under these abnormal circumstances was abnormally wide. Jesus must have heard, ad nauseam, Jewish moral incrimination of Rome for persecuting Jews. Yet Jesus, if peaceful himself, found himself persecuted by some, at least in part, for his violent connection to the Roman enemy. Hypocrites! Once again, in the world at large, the Romans stood at the top and the Jews were pushed to the bottom. Jesus, insofar as he was discriminated for his Roman connection, represented Rome at the bottom; Rome beneath the contempt of Judaism. And this was the hypocrisy or contradiction that exploded the boundaries of Judaism. The Jesus-exception broke the back of morals that justified hatred of Rome and revolutionary patriotism. The Jesus-exception exploded the clear moral dichotomy between oppressors and oppressed. If Rome is evil for persecuting Jews, then what are Jews when they persecute a half-Roman? What was the Jewish leadership to do with this exception of Jesus; this exception that breaks all the rules?
The obvious answer, especially for the Jewish leadership, was to repress the problem that Jesus represents or repress Jesus himself. But how could the Jewish leadership criticize Jesus for his Roman connection when Jewish leadership itself was collaborating with Roman rule in Jerusalem? John Dominic Crossan explained that he had always thought of Jesus and Paul “within Judaism within the Roman Empire” and this “has always been the absolutely necessary matrix rather than the annoyingly unnecessary background for any discussion of earliest Christianity.” Crossan is on the right track. But the question, then, is where does Jesus fit into this historical matrix?
If Jesus was of half-Jewish descent and half-Roman descent, this means that his status would have been a great question mark in his world. But if Jesus was of half-Jewish descent and half-Roman descent, this also means that we can know something of the biological architecture of Jesus’s soul. Jesus was not only born into a social world utterly polarized between the binarily opposite contrast of pagan Roman and monotheistic Jew; Jesus was born of a forced consequence of the polarization between Roman oppressor and Jewish revolt. He could not have been born into a more polarized world, and he could not have been born into a more precarious position within that polarized world.
