Apocalypse in Asia

One of the difficulties involved in dating Revelation to the 60s and linking it with the fall of Jerusalem is the fact that both John and the churches he writes to are in Asia Minor. Revelation 1:4 is arguably an opening to the entire book, as a letter from john to the seven churches of Asia. If the focus of the book is on Jerusalem and surroundings, why the focus of this book on Asia Minor.

On this question, we find a great deal of help from John Marshall’s Parables of War.

Marshall takes Revelation as a book addressed to Jews and a Jewish situation. Here is his opening gambit: “The ‘long year’ looked like the last year, the last of all years, even to the Roman historian Tacitus. Consider the way the world looked then to a Jew in the Diaspora. From the island of Patmos in 69 CE, a Jew named John looked to the east and saw the holy city of Jerusalem besieged by the armies of Rome but standing valiantly, awaiting its deliverance. Beyond Jerusalem, the ghost of Nero – or a Nero who had never really died – threatened to lead the armies of Parthia against his former dominions. Looking to the west, John saw the convulsions of the great beast that was Rome: war raged on Italian soil, each emperor slew his predecessor, each so-called ruler of the world was unable to rule even his own city. It appeared that the Empire was drunk on its own corruption, lurching toward its dissolution. . . . Closer to home, John saw his own Jewish community living dangerously among the nations, derided and scapegoated by their neighbors over the war in Judea, tempted to abandon the commandments of God for the ways of the nations” (1).

Revelation, Marshall argues, was John’s attempt “to make sense of the situation for himself and his community.” He wanted them to understand the dangers of their situation, and urged them in his visions to stand fast against the adversity and adversary, as God, through the Lamb, “would save of even extend his people and punish their adversaries” (2).

I don’t agree with Marshall’s overall view of Revelation here, but in filling out a portrait of first-century Judaism, he gives us a good bit of help in figuring out what is going on among Jews of the Diaspora. He admits that Josephus is basically our only source, and that Josephus gives us little about the Jewish Diaspora during the Jewish war. But he reads Josephus “against the grain” of his intentions, and with the limits of those intentions in view, and also looks at what happened to other communities during conflicts with the empire.

Josephus mentions, for instance, that the Jews of Jerusalem “hoped that all their fellow-countrymen beyond the Euphrates would join them in revolt” (quoted from Josephus, Jewish War, 1.6, on Marshall 101). This hope went unfulfilled, but it wasn’t an implausible hope: “By straddling the eastern boundary of the Roman Empire, the Jewish Diaspora formed at least a straw thread to the Greco-Roman sense of security” (101). Josephus’s emphasis on the hope for help from beyond the Euphrates elides the possibility that Jews within the Roman empire might also take the opportunity to revolt against Rome.

Later in Jewish War (2.398-9), Josephus quotes a speech from Agrippa warning that the Jews might bring Roman wrath on their brothers throughout the empire if they revolt: “The peril . . . threatens not only us Jews here, but also all who inhabit foreign cities; for there is not a people in the world which does not contain a portion of our race. All these, if you go to war, will be butchered by your adversaries, and through the folly of a handful of men every city will be drenched with Jewish blood” (quoted in Marshall, 102).

This wasn’t a hypothetical danger. In Caesarea, Jews fought in three-sided battle with Greek citizens and Roman rulers According to Josephus, “the inhabitants of Caesarea massacred the Jews who resided in their city: within one hour more than twenty thousand were slaughtered, and Caesarea was completely emptied of Jews.” This massacre was followed by “rampages by Jews in all the towns of Syria, with the result that there is conflict in every city of Syria.” Marshall suggests that once the war broke out in Judea, “active conflict in support of compatriots in Judea” is a possible response throughout the Diaspora (105).

At the end of Book 2 of the Jewish War, Josephus “describes conflicts in the Diaspora that resulted from the tensions brought on by war in Judea.” Though he doesn’t mention Asia minor, “the problems he details in Damascus and Alexandria are of a sort that could have occurred almost anywhere in the Empire. Following the rampage by Jews in Syria, Josephus describes another cycle of retaliation in the cities of Syria.” By his telling, “only Antioch, Sidon, and Apamea spared the residents and refused either to kill or imprison a single Jew” (106).

Antioch, though, was a focus of tensions between Jews and others: “Josephus . . . narrates conflicts between Jews and Gentiles, and also among Jewish factions, that began at the same time as Vespasian landed in Syria with a mandate from Nero to quell the nascent Jewish rebellion. Josephus describes this as the time when ‘hatred of the Jews was everywhere at its height.’ . . . The conflict starts in that atmosphere of hostility with a denunciation by an Antiochan Jew, named Antiochus, of other Jews as arsonists plotting to incinerate the whole city. Accordingly, Antiochus ‘delivered up some foreign Jews as accomplices to the plot.’” Antiochus forces residents to sacrifice in the manner of Greeks, and Jews who refuse are punished. Titus’s arrival saves the Jews, and confirms their legal status in Antioch. Yet Marshall thinks it “unlikely that it transformed the atmosphere in the city” (108).

Marshall also points to the treatment of zealous Jews who fled to Egypt after Jerusalem fell. Local Jews “out of fear of being branded by the Greek population as supporters of the rebellion in Judea, turned the refugees over to the authorities. . . . In addition to torturing and executing the remnants of the Sicarii in Egypt, the governor, acting under imperial orders, closed down and later destroyed the Jewish temple at Leontopolis. . . . Given the way in which the temple in Jerusalem served as a point of convergence for rebellion in Judea, the temple in Leontopolis also had the potential to focus unrest among Jews in Egypt” (109).

Marshall is also vivid, if admittedly speculative, about the connections between the upheavals in Rome and the war in Judea. The years 67-70 were confusing and chaotic in Rome. Marshall provides an integrated timeline (111, fn 28):

News of turmoil in Rome would have traveled to Asia Minor. Among Jews, it would be known that Jerusalem was under siege, and that it was holding firm. In the summer and fall of 69, Marshall suggests, two pieces of news would have roused Asia’s Jews.

In the early summer, according to Tacitus, “a Neronic pretender arose in Achaia and gathered armies in Asia Minor. He reports: ‘About this time Achaia and Asia were terrified by a false rumor of Nero’s arrival. The reports with regard to his death had been varied and therefore many people imagined and believed he was alive” (113).

Around the same time, the governor of Syria “marched from Syria toward Rome through Asia Minor,” leading 15,000 troops. Jews would have asked, “Was the Empire consuming itself? Was this the end of the ruler of the world? Was the blood on the streets of the great city a sing of the end of the age, of the new Jerusalem soon to be released from its bondage and lifted to a resplendent glory?” (114).

None of this amounts to conclusive evidence that Asia Minor was rocked in the excitement and turmoil of 68-70 that encompassed both Jerusalem and Rome. But Marshall makes a plausible circumstantial case that fills out the details in Christopher Rowland’s speculation (Open Heaven, 410-1):

Even if Jews in Asia Minor showed no sympathy for the revolt itself, it is difficult to see how they could have avoided the suspicion of the inhabitants of the city in which they dwelt, for the simple reason that they were linked by ties of religion with the rebels of Palestine.” Rowland wonders if Roman authorities in Asia Minor might have forced a test of allegiance on Jews by requiring a sacrifice to the emperor. He thinks it likely that “Jewish privileges, however long standing, may have come under threat at this time” (411).

Under the circumstances, “there was a likelihood that Jews and Jewish sympathizers would have been under great pressure in the Diaspora to dissociate themselves from the position of their co-religionists in Palestine. In this situation it would not be surprising to find many Jews apostatizing, and, on occasion, the imperial cult may have been used as a device whereby Jewish loyalty to Rome could be tested.” In fact, “the latter possibility is more likely to have been true of Asia Minor than any other part of the empire, for it was in that province particularly that the imperial cult was so firmly rooted and linked with the indigenous religious practices through the commune Asiae” (412).

If we reckon with the likelihood that some, perhaps many, of the “Jews” of Asia Minor are Jewish followers of Jesus, converted during the ministry of Paul, then the historical situation of the seven churches clicks into place. They would perhaps be the objects of attack from Jews who considered them apostate; they would also be objects of suspicion from Romans, as well as local authorities and mobs, for their divided loyalties. They were a community adrift – having unmoored themselves to some degree from Judaism, which was already in some tension with Greco-Roman mores and religion. Martyrdom is a real threat for the Christ-following Jews of Asia Minor, and through John Jesus urges them to stand firm.