Revelation: - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

for their Jewishness. The Jews who remained faithful to their law and religion
tended to become isolated from the mainstream of the life of other men and to
lead their own life in a spiritual ghetto.
In 168 B.C. the Greco-Syrian Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes 4th, then
ruling over Syria and Palestine, brought the issue to its final head by
converting the temple of Israel’s God into a place of pagan sacrifice and
erecting there the image of the Olympian Zeus. Already since the beginning
of his reign in 175, he had inexorably turned the moral pressure against Jewish
fidelity into physical force. Under pain of death, circumcision and the
observance of the Sabbath had been forbidden. Aided by faithless Jews,
Antiochus brought to bear against Jewish re ligion all the power inherent in a
mighty secular state.
As it happened, Antiochus had overreached himself. Inflamed by the
desecration of the temple and the murder of the holy high priest Onias III,
realizing with the des peration of men hard pressed that they could no longer
have anything to lose by taking the ultimate step of revolt, the Maccabean
rebellion spread throughout Palestine. Under the leadership of the Maccabees,
the venerable Mathathias and his vigor ous sons Judas, Jonathan, and Simon,
Judaism showed once more its power to survive and conquer. Within a few
years the temple was rededicated to God, Judea was freed, and for a while the
Jews were to be independent, having successfully braved a power before which
greater peoples had trembled.
But the seeds of corruption had been too well sown. The very de -
scendants of the Maccabees were soon conducting themselves more shamefully
and with greater de pravity than the pagan Antiochus. The last native Israelite
dynasty became in fact pagan. Greater injustices than had been endured from
foreigners were now the daily infliction of Jewish kings. The opposed parties
of Pharisees and Sadducees, respectively despising and admiring all that was
not Jewish, divided the people with incessant strife, massacre, civil and
religious corruption. In 63 B.C. the Romans annexed Judea without
opposition, and the Jews were to remain the uneasy subjects of Rome
throughout the time the New Testament was lived and written. The final
result was to be the Jewish revolt of A.D. 67-70 ending in the destruction once
and for all of the temple, and the second revolt of 135 which put an end to the
Jewish state and left Jerusalem for the first time an all-pagan city.
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