The Fourth Way

The destruction of Judas and his army was as swift as it was certain. When the scout's intelligence reached Coponius, he arrayed his soldiers on both sides of a steep wadi leading up toward Jericho. They kept out of sight until the vanguard of Judas's force was fully committed to the defile. Then the Romans poured into the ravine, swords flashing, armor bright in the sun. The boar, the eagle, the bull, and the bolt drove forward behind the fleeing men. The holy warriors fell to Roman blades and were trampled beneath studded sandals.

Those who escaped the ravine were trapped by the swollen Jordan river. Few were able to cross successfully, as many were cut down on the banks, speared in the shallows, or carried away by the deep and swirling waters.

Bodies were found along the river for weeks afterward. Most picked clean by desert animals and birds. The head of Judas was stuck on a pike and marched through Jericho and up to Jerusalem, where it was hoisted above the Temple, at the top of the Antonia Fortress, as a warning to future rebels. Seddok was tied to a stake, and the Romans piled crumpled sheets of his beloved scrolls around him. The wooden handles were splintered, and all was set on fire as the old man cried aloud to God for salvation.

But many men escaped back into Galilee, throwing away their swords, yet ever harboring hatred and revenge in their hearts. They could not openly speak of their survival or of the great events begun by Judas and Seddok; but in quiet corners of their farms and orchards, and in closed sessions in their synagogues led by a new, younger rabbi, rebellion did not die. The thirst for freedom intensified, and their children were taught to hate the foreigners and their Jewish collaborators as never before.

The two sons of Judas the Galilean grew up beneath the shadow of their famous father, hidden in Gamla, their father's hometown, for fear the Romans would find them. Occasionally Judas's cousin, on the pretense of business, would travel to Gamla for some task or other to check on the sons of Judas and help them however he could. It was dangerous, for the spies of both Rome and the Sanhedrin kept an ever more vigilant watch in Galilee, lest any flame of rebellion arise again.

But that flame did burn again. In thirty years' time, while Claudius reigned as Caesar and the renegade Jew Tiberius Alexander was procurator of Judea, the sons of Judas the Galilean rose up to protest the foreign presence in the Holy Land. Encouraged by their rabbi and followed by a mixed multitude of zealots and troublemakers, they too marched on Jerusalem, only to be captured somewhere in Samaria, betrayed by their own, and sent for judgment to Caesarea Maritima.

There was a sensation when it was discovered that they were the two surviving sons of Judas the Galilean. A thorough search was ordered by Tiberius to hunt down all other descendants of Judas and have them executed—child or man—immediately. Most were found and murdered. But one exceptional child did survive: Menahem. His tale comes later. Menahem's father, Simon, and Simon's brother, James, were ordered crucified, and they hung publicly for many days, not allowed to die. Finally the crows would not even alight on the bodies anymore, and the two brothers sucked in their last breath, then expired without a word.

All who saw them went home to warn their children against too much zeal for God. Many other families gathered to remember the words of another crucified man who taught them to reject violence and love their enemies. This man, they believed, had resurrected from the dead and so was the true Messiah Israel hoped for. But they were hated by all, and the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sought them out to destroy them as equally dangerous as the Zealots.

The Zealot cause began with Judas the Galilean and Seddok. It was the Fourth Way. The Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes each had something in life to anchor them to the world as it was: the Sadducees their wealth and power, the Pharisees the Law and the hope of resurrection, the Essenes their strange brotherhood in the desert. But the Zealots held fast to the total elimination of every foreign power—and if not elimination, then its subjugation to the throne in Jerusalem. And who, then, would sit upon that throne? That question would, in time, undo them all.

From the beginning, Jewish violence could never rival Roman violence. That violence had subdued Britain, Germania, Gaul, Spain, Greece, Carthage, and Egypt, and had held the eastern powers beyond ancient Babylonia in check. Jewish violence had only cast off one lesser overlord for a season, only to see another take his place.

What Judas and Seddok—and a thousand men with them—found to their horror, and too late, was the nature of Rome: rage and fury made disciplined, organized, systematic, brutal, inexhaustible, unstoppable.

In death they could not warn their children. Those who survived did so by turning their backs on the slaughter and running for home. Their stories, told and retold, swelled beyond the event itself. Children began to ask for tales of Judas the Galilean at bedtime instead of David the shepherd boy, or Samson, or Moses. With each generation, exaggerated memories and twisted prophecies prodded other would-be Messiahs to provoke the Roman beast.

But the day of reckoning was inevitable. The spirit of Judas the Galilean would never be quiet until the temple lay in a heap of rubble, and the Jewish nation ceased to exist.