The dark reputation of Late Antiquity as a period of cruelty and terror is based to a great extent on the operation, or abuse, of its criminal law. The severed heads of some usurpers and rebels went the rounds of the Empire as a warning to others and an ever more ghastly proof that the challenge was no more. Traitors, murderers, magicians and other criminals were routinely burned alive, the public floggings of slave and free inflicted both pain and social humiliation, judicial torture was extended up the social scale, innocents on remand rotted in prison, their cases unheard. All this provokes horror in the modern student of the time and general condemnation of the ‘judicial savagery’ of the age.

The harshness of the judicial climate in general, reinforced as it was by the menacing rhetoric of imperial laws, which routinely threatened the wicked with harsh penalties cannot be denied. In the language of the laws, emperors stand self-convicted of imposing terror on the citizens of the Empire, while their content reiterates the desirability of harsh punishments, and reveals the slow but sure erosion of the immunities of the better-off. From the pagans Libanius and Ammianus, as well as from the Christians Lactantius and Eusebius come harrowing accounts of oppression by ruthless judges, the ‘rack’, the ‘claws’ and the sadism of torturers.

This book should be sub-titled ‘travelling hopefully’. Its route has been planned in the light of long-standing preoccupations of my own, with some help from friends. The Theodosian Code has long been used as evidence for late Roman history, without much attention being granted, at least by historians writing in English, to the status of that evidence. The conference on the Theodosian Code held at the University of St Andrews in 1990 and the resulting publication, edited by myself and Ian Wood, were a start in that direction. This book takes some points further, in particular in relation to how imperial law was made, and how and whether it worked as intended. This enquiry will entail a re-examination of what we are to make of the rhetoric of the laws: if a certain scepticism over government pronouncements is in order now, there can surely be a case made for subjecting imperial legal propaganda and its motives to similar scrutiny. But we should not focus only on the centre, where imperial law originated; its reception and use by the citizens of the wider Empire is of equal importance. Two perspectives must, therefore, be used, that of the legislator, and that of those who used the law for their own purposes.

In order to arrive at the end of this journey at all, many attractive by-ways have been, regretfully, ignored. I have nothing to say about ‘vulgar law’ – except that the concept requires a re-examination I shall not attempt.

Emperors, and others, went to great lengths to advertise and strengthen the authority of law. Simultaneously, however, complaints flowed thick and fast from citizens and emperors about the failure of laws to be observed. As a result of such complaints, late Roman law is generally assumed to have been widely disobeyed, ignored or circumvented. Historians of Late Antiquity, following the rhetoric of some imperial legislation, have deplored the subversion of the ‘rule of law’ by corrupt activities on the part of officials and venal judges and habitual oppression of the poor by the rich, a picture which blends seamlessly with the notions of ‘decline’ accompanying the political disintegration of the western empire in the fifth century AD.

Probing further, it may be argued that Roman law became the victim of a deep-seated conflict within Roman society between rules, which were universal, and power, which was arbitrary. ‘Rules’ are not only laws or ‘legal rules’, written or customary, but also rules of behaviour and accepted normative precepts; the exercise of power, the ability to do things or compel others to act in certain ways, encompasses the pursuit of self-interest, clashes of strength or will, the exertion of patronage, or political factors, such as wealth or influence. The emperor himself was implicated in this conflict, because he was supreme patron as well as legislator. The activity of the patron was, of its nature, arbitrary, in that he sought to benefit those who happened to be his clients, rather than operating universal rules.

The purpose of this chapter is to propose a methodology for reconstructing Aramaic sources which lie behind the synoptic Gospels. We must begin by surveying the languages which were in general use in Israel during Jesus' lifetime: Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.

Latin was the language of the Roman imperial power. It is consequently found in inscriptions. One of the most famous was set up by Pontius Pilatus, Praefectus Iudaeae during at least the latter part of Jesus' ministry. It comes from a building in Caesarea, the Roman capital of Judaea and the normal residence of the Praefectus Iudaeae:

]S TIBERIEUM

PON]TIUS PILATUS

PRAEF]ECTUS IUDA[EA]E

This is the language of power, and we may not infer from it any widespread use of Latin.

Other people in Israel who will have known some Latin include Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee during Jesus' ministry. He was educated in Rome for several years (see Jos. AJ XVII.20), and he maintained Herod the Great's description of his supporters as Herodiani. How much he used this language, however, we do not know.

It follows that Jesus is not likely to have had the opportunity to have learnt Latin, and that it would have been of little use to him if he had.

Greek was much more widely used, throughout Israel. It had begun to spread through Israel after the conquests of Alexander the Great. A number of Greek cities were founded, and some older cities were hellenised.

We saw in ch. 1 that the quest of the historical Jesus has made little use of Aramaic as an investigative tool. This is a remarkable fact. Most people have noticed that language is a significant part of culture, but the study of Jesus has proceeded as if this were not the case. It has been largely a Christian enterprise, and the sacred text is in Greek. Too much reconstruction of a Jewish man is liable to create problems for the doctrine of the Trinity. Hence a few specialised people have done all the existing work. Only two outstanding books have been written, those of Meyer and Black, in 1896 and 1946, before the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. As we consider the history of scholarship so long afterwards, no praise can be too high for these two brilliant and independent men.

The discovery of the scrolls puts us in a position to alter the nature of this work. Throughout the first century of critical scholarship, the use of Aramaic was beset with such severe problems that most scholars might well feel that it was a specialised area of dubious value. We saw this especially in considering the work of scholars such as Torrey and Burney, most of whose suggestions could not be accepted.

The Gospel of Mark is written in Greek, though Jesus spoke Aramaic. Moreover, Jesus' ministry was exercised among Jews, whereas, by the time Mark's Gospel was written, many of Jesus' followers were Gentiles, and this Gospel shows traces of Gentile self-identification. It follows that the change in language from Aramaic to Greek was part of a cultural shift from a Jewish to a Gentile environment. If therefore we wish to recover the Jesus of history, we must see whether we can reconstruct his sayings, and the earliest accounts of his doings, in their original Aramaic. This should help us to understand him within his own cultural background.

For this purpose, we must establish a clear methodology, not least because some people are still repeating every mistake with which the history of scholarship is littered. I therefore begin with a critical Forschungsberichte. This is not a comprehensive catalogue of previous work, but a selective discussion of what advances have been made, what significant mistakes have been made, and the reasons for both of these.

The early fathers give us very little reliable information about the transmission of Jesus' words in Aramaic before the writing of the Gospels. Eusebius has the apostles speak ἡ Σύρων φωνή (Dem. Ev. III.4.44; 7.10), his name for the Aramaic dialects contemporary with him, but he gives us no significant help in getting behind the Gospel traditions.

This book was written in 1994–6, when I held a British Academy Research Readership awarded for the purpose. I am extremely grateful to the Academy for this award, which enabled me to complete a major piece of research.

I am also grateful to all those who have discussed with me the problems of method and of detail which this work has entailed. I effectively began this research while reading for a doctorate at Durham University under Professor C. K. Barrett, whose extraordinary combination of learning and helpfulness with lack of bureaucracy or interference remains a model to which one can only aspire. I should particularly like to thank also the late Professor M. Black, Dr G. J. Brooke, Professor B. D. Chilton, Professor J. A. Fitzmyer, Professor R. Kearns, the late Professor B. Lindars, Professor M. Müller, and Professor M. Wilcox. I should also like to thank members of the Aramaic Background and Historical Jesus seminars at the Society for New Testament Studies, the Jesus seminar at meetings of British New Testament scholars, and an annual seminar on the use of the Old Testament in the New now generally held at Hawarden, for what I have learnt from them. I alone am responsible for what I have said.

Imperialisms, modern and ancient

Power is a slippery concept. A generation before Julius Caesar's conquest of the North, Vercingetorix' father was ejected by the Arverni for aiming at supreme power, and at about the same time the Aedui and the Sequani contested for supreme power in Gaul. We know little about how these conflicts were conducted or even what form supreme power or hegemony would have taken in this period. Roman rule, however, changed both in the methods of competition and in the prizes that could be won by it. This too was an aspect of Roman cultural style in Gaul. Gauls were not passive objects of Roman rule, but had been implicated by Rome in new configurations of power, new complexes of domination. In so far as a power structure existed it was constituted by the regular forms these contests took.

The career of Titus Sennius Solemnis illustrates the nature of this power structure. The inscription through which we know this third-century Gallo-Roman aristocrat originally formed part of a typical honorific monument, a statue set up in ad 238 in a public area of his home city, by decree of the senate of the free community of the Viducasses, who lived around Caen in modern Normandy, after Solemnis had been voted the honour by the Council of the Three Gallic Provinces.