Sheba

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44 WRITING THE OLD TESTAMENT northern side of the Tigris River, converted to Judaism and supported the Jews in their rebellion in Judaea against Roman rule A.D. 66-73. In A.D. 116, Jews in Mesopotamia briefly ousted the Romans before being reconquered. However, the main Jewish uprising in the early 500s in this area was not against the Romans but the Persians. From around the end of the second century A.D. the Jews of Persian-controlled Babylon were represented by members of the House of David, the Exilarchs. These traced their ancestry to Jehoiakim, King of Judah (634-598 B.C.E.), his exiled son Jehoiachin, released by the Persians, being the first Exilarch. In A.D. 513, one of the Exilarchs, Mar Zutra II (reportedly the twenty-fourth direct descendant of Jehoiachin), established an independent Jewish state at Mahoza on the Tigris River. The Persians retaliated, defeating and crucifying him in A.D. 520. Militant Judaism had already experienced a serious setback when the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 312–337) made Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion. Constantine had become a covert to Christianity in A.D. 312, following a Christian vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, where he had defeated the emperor Maxentius and seized the throne himself. He had ordered his soldiers to paint the Christian Chi-Rho symbol on their shields. Constantine’s victory determined his choice of Christianity as the official religion of the empire. Being of a practical administrative bent, he wanted to ensure there was unanimity in dogma and therefore convened the Council of Nicaea, one of the most important events in the history of Christianity. The Council of Nicaea met in A.D. 325 under Constantine’s direction, to standardize the faith throughout the Roman Empire. In this he was almost completely successful. All major Christian denominations today (the Jehovah’s Witnesses, of Arian origin, being an exception) adhere to the Nicaean Creed hammered out at the council as the basis of Christian belief: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth ....”. Some dissension followed and other councils convened, but Constantine’s success in blending Christ’s teachings with Paul’s interpretations and popular pagan festivals and rituals transformed the faith into a world religion. The New Testament was then canonized as Holy Writ, including Matthew 27:25, a fabricated account stating that the Jews fervently accepted responsibility for Christ’s martyrdom, thus ensuring eternal damnation. Whatever hopes Judaism had when the Roman Empire of the West fell in A.D. 478 were dashed when the victorious Germanic tribes adopted
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 45 Christianity, partly because the church’s structure, education system, and legal expertise assisted central government. Nevertheless, militant Messianic elements still continued to agitate for an independent Jewish state. In the 520s, the Jews in Mahoza and in Himyar (southern Arabia) respectively challenged the imperial authority of Persia and of Aksum (Ethiopia) and, although both were crushed, their defeats were viewed as temporary setbacks. The situation dramatically changed with the astonishing success of Islam after A.D. 632. Jewish intellectual centers in Babylon, the Holy Land, North Africa, and Spain came under Islamic rule, whose relative tolerance posed a greater threat than Christianity to the survival of Judaism. Muslims permitted freedom of religion to Christians and Jews so long as they paid a special tax. If they chose to embrace Islam the tax was lifted. The Muslims supra-tribal outlook offered opportunities to all sectors of society - irrespective of race, class or background - once they became Muslims, and this produced a brilliant flowering of culture as the Muslims absorbed Greek, Persian, Jewish, and other traditions. The Jewish reaction to this political and religious setback followed past precedents. Jews had no wish to become assimilated and thus to disappear as separate entities like the ten “lost” tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel. Bernhard Berenson (1865-1959), a convert to Catholicism, criticized this attitude, implying the Rabbinical Judaism that dominated the exilic communities was self seeking, for without a following the scholar-priests, rabbis, would have no support or purpose: From Ezra down, this Jewish exclusiveness was due less and less to a feeling of superiority, certainly not in the ways of this world, but rather to a fear of contamination. Rabbinical Judaism is first and foremost an organization for keeping a small minority, scattered among the nations, from dissolving and disappearing. It was thus based on fear. 1 The priesthood demanded stricter control of their communities and to this end worked to produce uniformity of doctrine and scripture to combat fragmentation of their faith. At the end of the eighth century A.D. the authority of Rabbinical Judaism was challenged in Babylon by the Karaites. Rabbinical Judaism should be seen as the ideological successor of the Zadokites, although tradition tells us that it was developed by the scribe class of Pharisees. The Karaites rejected the Talmud, the Zadokite commentaries on the Torah, upholding the principle that the Torah was
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MAP 8 Arabic Dialects of Western Ar
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Sheba

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