A Day of Infamy
President Franklin Roosevelt’s moving and historic “Day of Infamy” speech on Monday, December 8th, 1941, the morning after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, is still remembered by those born before 1935, and to millions of us of the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946 and thereafter) was recounted firsthand by our parents as we came of age after the horrors of World War II. My father, like so many, joined the military that Monday morning. It was the most decisive geopolitical event of the 20th century and changed everything for all of us even after nearly 66 years. It is wonderfully preserved on the Web, in sound, film, and even the typed transcript from which the President read.
I have devoted my academic career to the study of Jesus and early Christianity. The 1st century AD also witnessed such a Day of Infamy. It was commemorated just last week, on Tuesday, July 24th, known by Jews as Tisha b’Av, the 9th day of the fifth month of Av on the Jewish/Hebrew calendar. It is a day of complete fasting and abject mourning, remembering the destruction of Jerusalem, including both Temples, the First and the Second, in 586 BCE and 70 CE respectively, as well as countless other sad and tragic days in Jewish history.
Over the years I have come to realize that when it comes to understanding the 1st century Jesus movement, which developed into the new religion called “Christianity,” there is no greater factor or event than the horrific destruction of Jerusalem in August of 70 CE by the 
Roman emperor Vespasian. Indeed, the Romans called this period caniculares dies, the “dog days of summer,” a name that has stuck until our time, falling between July 15 and August 15, and characterized by oppressively hot and sultry temperatures when all creatures become languid and forlorn. I would urge all my readers to carefully read through the account of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in Josephus’ Jewish War, in a translation other than that of William Whiston, which is just too outdated (1793). The Penguin edition, though abridged, by Williamson, is one easily available alternative.
I think it would be hard to overemphasize the critical and vital importance of this watershed event in 1st century Jewish Palestine. After that date everything changed, for Jews living in the Roman empire, but most decidedly for the followers of Jesus, certainly in the Homeland, but also those scattered through the Mediterranean world. To put it succinctly–nothing was ever the same again. Jesus had died in 30 CE but his influential brother James (Jacob/Yaaqov) had taken over and offered new hope and direction for the movement. When he too was brutally murdered in 62 CE by the same family of High Priests connected to the “Godfather” Annas, the Jesus movement was absolutely devastated.
Ironically, none of our New Testament documents record the horrors of August, 70 CE, and everything we have was written either a decade before or a decade after that decisive Day of Infamy. Before that date we have the authentic letters of Paul and the Q source, dating to the 50s CE. These writings anticipate an apocalyptic climax of all things directly on the horizon. After 70 CE we get our four Gospels and other materials (later Pauline letters, Peter, John, Revelation, etc.), which are basically sketching out a vision of “post-War” existence with the “End of the Age” much delayed and postponed.
The New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan has called the period from 30-50 CE, before Paul’s letters, the “dark age” of Christianity, due to the lack of historical sources. In terms of the first followers of Jesus, that is, those Jewish messianists led by James the Just, brother of Jesus, the “black out” hardly ends with Paul, who had begun to propose a wholly alternative vision of the “faith” of Jesus. The double blow of the death of James and the destruction of Jerusalem, with the death and scattering of those Jerusalem witnesses who had known Jesus, effectively ended any possibility of our direct access to a non-Pauline version of things. When the “curtain” comes up after 70 CE, a modified version of Paul was clearly the “only game in town,” and hope of the “kingdom of God on earth,” with a restoration of the nation of Israel under its Davidic Messiah, was thoroughly dashed.
Jews find many historic reasons to fast on Tisha b’Av, but I am thinking it might not be such a bad idea for Christians as well, at least for those who are interested in recovering the original faith of Jesus. In some ironic way I think one can say that the “end of the age” did indeed come during those dog days of the summer of 70 CE, and whether the new age that dawned was a loss or a gain is something with which all of us have to grapple. Christian pilgrims in the time of the emperor Constantine began to travel to Jerusalem to see the holy places that had become associated with the life of Jesus. One high point of the typical pilgrimage was to stand on the Mount of Olives, gazing over the plaza where the Temple once stood. We have accounts where they joyfully celebrate the confirmation of faith they received in thinking of how the Jews who had rejected “Christ” had been justly punished by the destruction of Jerusalem and their subsequent Exile. Luke offers us such a triumphant version of things as he rewrites Mark’s “little Apocalypse,” and Matthew as he reworks Mark’s narrative of the trial of Jesus:
“For great distress will be upon the earth and upon this people; they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:23-24)
“And all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” (Matthew 27:25)
Such post-War language echoes the brutally triumphant words of Paul, written decades earlier, when he speaks of “the Jews” who killed the Lord Jesus and “displease God and oppose all men,” but “God’s wrath has come upon them at last!” (1 Thessalonians 2:15-16).
Remembering Tisha b’Av…