Next Quest for the Historical Jesus: “Armies and Soldiers” by Christopher B. Zeichmann (pp. 284-297), March 28, 2025.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Despite a prevalent focus on military forces and members in the primary texts of the New Testament, scholars almost never discuss the subject in detail. They are certain it was a negative force in the lives of the people, and yet there are positive interactions again and again throughout the texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn this chapter, I would like to suggest briefly two ways the study of the historical Jesus might benefit from recent advances in the study of the militaries of the eastern Mediterranean. First is the counterintuitive insight that there is no monolithic \u2018Roman army.\u2019 Rather, there were a variety of military forces in early Roman Palestine \u2013 forces that had little in common by way of purpose and demographics. Civilians, including New Testament evangelists and likely the historical Jesus, were cognizant of these distinctions and held differing opinions about such forces, unlike the modern tendency to homogenize them under the aegis of a singular \u2018Roman army.\u2019 Second, there has been extensive archaeological work on fortlets, forts, road stations, and other sites where Palestinian solders were located. Discussion of these sites is often monadic, such that their broader significance in relation to each other is unclear. How might we understand the military networks of Palestine in a comparative perspective? What might this indicate about their role in Jesus\u2019s life and death?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were three main groups of soldiers in Palestine during the time period. The first and best known were the legionaries<\/span>. They were \u201cemployed by Rome itself. Their allegiances were to the emperor and whichever general they served,\u201d and they were Roman citizens before they were recruited. They almost always spoke Latin and \u201cgarrisoned in major imperial cities such as Syria, Belgica, Pannonia, and post-war Judea.\u201d However, the historical Jesus may never have encountered a legionary since they had no reason to be in Galilee or Judea before the first Jewish revolt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, auxiliaries were the Roman forces Jesus and his followers would have met in Judea or the Decapolis<\/span>. They roughly equaled the number of legionaries throughout the Empire, but were noncitizens who joined in expectation of becoming a Roman citizen after retirement. They were also recruited from the provinces in which they served, particularly (in the case of Judea) from cities like Caesarea Maritima and Sebaste. In other words, \u201cthey were locals.\u201d Only after the first Jewish revolt would these auxiliaries be sent elsewhere in the empire and foreign auxiliaries imported in. They were \u201csignificantly less Romanized than legionaries: auxiliary soldiers spoke the lingua franca of Greek along with local languages (e.g., Aramaic).\u201d This means \u201cthe soldiers that crucified [Jesus]\u201d were locals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, there were \u201croyal forces that did not directly serve Rome but were under the authority of a client king.\u201d<\/span> Many client kingdoms maintained their own armies like \u201cNabatea, Antipas\u2019s Galilee, and Agrippa I\u2019s Judea.\u201d These soldiers had no expectation of becoming Roman citizens and in Galilee would have been recruited in \u201cSepphoris and Tiberias …or mustered from rural areas,\u201d and would have spent their entire military careers right in the area (unless lent to Rome for the occasional need close by). The \u201ccenturion in Capernaum (Luke 7:1-10)\u201d would have been a royal soldier, as would any soldier he \u201cencountered in Batanea, Perea, and Galilee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short, \u201ca unified military structure …did not exist at the time.\u201d Simon James has demonstrated \u201cthere was not even a word that communicated the notion of a single, monolithic military in the early Common Era\u201d in Latin, and the same is true of Greek. \u201cSoldiers understood themselves to be clients of their specific general, and individual generals likewise understood themselves to be patrons of their soldiers.\u201d On becoming citizens, soldier commonly chose a name to \u201calign themselves with their generals.\u201d No emperor could even envision being patron of the entire military. Seeing a unified military is a modern anachronism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, once scholars are aware of the distinctions being made in the New Testament texts, they will need to \u201cattend to the politics of military representation\u201d to guard against the texts\u2019 biases on display concerning different groups of soldiers. Luke especially presents Antipas\u2019s royal soldiers as \u201ccapricious and cruel (Luke 23:11)\u201d compared to Pilate\u2019s auxiliaries. The centurion in Capernaum (Matt 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10) is often cited as Jesus interacting with an avatar of Rome. Matthew and\/or Luke may have viewed him thus through an anachronistic lens, but the real centurion could have only been \u201cthe principality of a Herodian tetrarch\u201d historically.<\/span> The same is true of the demons who called themselves Legion in Mark 5:1-10, set in the Decapolis when it was a client kingdom ruled through the power of royal soldiers. <\/span>\u201c…such subtexts, if they are indeed present in Mark\u2019s Gospel, do not represent Jesus\u2019s politics but must result from a postwar tradition.\u201d The rout of Antipas\u2019s royal soldiers by Aretas in 37 CE also suggests a force more accustomed to policing rather than fighting wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both Josephus and the Christian Gospels give the impression that the military was an urban phenomenon in Galilee and Judea, confined to the largest cities like Caesarea Maritima and Jerusalem. This is flatly contradicted by the archaeological evidence. Rather, the vast majority of soldiers were located in small rural garrisons and seemed to have served as more of a patrolling force than the sort of occupying power they are commonly imagined to be.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n