Several recent studies have called into question the traditional accounts of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. On the one hand, a revulsion against anti-Semitism has led Jewish scholars in particular to re-examine and reject the gospel accounts that they believe to be the source of anti-Semitism. A poignant expression of the depth of such feeling is the dedication of Paul Winter’s book, On the Trial of Jesus (1961):
To the Dead in Auschwitz, Izbica, Majdanek, Treblinka. Among whom are those who were Dearest to me.
Medieval Christians did misuse Scriptures to justify anti-Semitism. Let us hope we have all come to the point where we can agree with Paul Maier that “to be anti-Semitic because of Good Friday would be as ridiculous as to hate Italians because a few of their forebears once threw Christians to the lions!” Some Christians still misuse the Scriptures to reinforce discrimination against Negroes. But this proves nothing against the Scriptures themselves; it only reflects an ill-informed and prejudiced interpretation.
On the other hand, an interest in a more positive image of the Zealots, aroused by, for example, the Israeli excavation of Masada (the last Zealot stronghold against the Romans in A.D. 73), and a sympathy for zealous religious revolutionaries like the Berrigan brothers have meant that for some the image of Christ as a Zealot is more credible and attractive than the traditional portrait of a pacific Christ.
The Zealots were those Jews who in their zeal for God’s theocratic kingdom refused to acknowledge the rule of Rome, considering it unlawful to pay taxes to Caesar. The radical “Weathermen” faction among them were called sicarii, from their habit of concealing daggers and using them to assassinate Romans and their Jewish collaborators. When Paul was arrested in the temple at Jerusalem in A.D. 58, the officer asked him (Acts 21:38): “Are you not the Egyptian who caused an insurrection of four thousand sicarii?” (cf. M. Hengel, Die Zeloten, 1961).
I. Was Jesus a Zealot Sympathizer?
A. Early Attempts To Portray Jesus as a Zealot
The earliest impetus for a critical examination, of the life of Jesus resulted from attempts to refute the thesis of Samuel Reimarus, whose work Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Junger was posthumously published for the author by Gotthold Lessing in 1778, just after the American Revolution (cf. Albert Schweitzer’s famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus [1910], originally entitled in German Von Reimarus zu Wrede [1901]). Reimarus contended that both John the Baptist and Jesus were revolutionaries.
The theme was reasserted by Robert Eisler in his work Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas (1929–30), relying in part on the portrait of Jesus in the Slavonic version of Josephus. An abridged English translation by A. J. Krappe appeared as The Messiah Jesus and John theBaptist (1931). J. Carmichael’s popular work The Death of Jesus (1962) is based upon Eisler.
B. The Arguments of S. G. F. Brandon
The most recent attempts to portray Jesus as a Zealot sympathizer are the writings of S. G. F. Brandon, who acknowledges his indebtedness to Eisler. Brandon, who is professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, has written The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church (1951), Jesus and the Zealots (1967), and The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (1968). He argues that Jesus was sympathetic to the aims of the Zealot movement, and that faith in Jesus simply made the Jewish Christians into more zealous Jews. Jesus’ statement about swords (Luke 22:38) is taken to reflect the practice of the sicarii.
A major argument rests on the fact that at least one of Jesus’ disciples was without doubt a Zealot—Simon Zelotes (Luke 6:15). In Mark 3:18 and Matthew 10:4 he is misleadingly dubbed Simon the “Canaanite” by the King James Version. The Greek word Kananaion is actually a transcription of the Aramaic word for Zealot. The suggestion is also entertained that the name Judas Iscariot means, not the man from Kerioth, but the Sicariot.
The two “thieves” who were crucified with Jesus and Barabbas, who was released, were in all probability Zealots. The traditional translation of “thief” is indeed much too mild a rendering for the Greek word lestes, which connotes a violent brigand. Josephus uses the term as an opprobrious synonym for the Zealots. If Barabbas, a notable prisoner (Matt. 27:16), had been a brigand (John 18:40) and had murdered in the insurrection (Mark 15:7) for the cause of freedom, we can understand why the crowd preferred his release to that of Jesus.
Brandon argues that the Gospel of Mark was written as an apology to the Romans, obscuring Jesus’ Zealotic sympathies in order to avoid Roman persecution against the Christians. The other three Gospels, relying upon Mark, developed even further the apologetic theme of a pacifist Christ.
Brandon rejects the tradition preserved in Eusebius that the Christians were warned just before the outbreak of the Jewish-Roman War in A.D. 66 to flee from Jerusalem to Pella in Transjordan, just south of the Sea of Galilee. He hypothesizes that the Jewish Christians, who believed that Jesus would return after his death as a political deliverer, remained in Jerusalem to fight along with the Zealots and perished in the conflict. It was Paul who transformed faith in Jesus as a political messiah into faith in a divine Christ.
C. Criticism of Brandon’s Arguments
Brandon’s views resemble the discredited Tubingen hypothesis of a conflict between Petrine and Pauline Christianity (cf. his article, “Tubingen Vindicated?,” Hibbert Journal, XLIX [1951], 41–7). The main difference is that Brandon thinks the synthesis between Petrine thesis and Pauline antithesis was achieved in the late first century instead of in the second century, as F. C. Baur thought. His interpretation of the Gospels is based on a critical tendency similar to Bauer’s, in which he rejects everything that does not fit into his framework.
Like Eisler, though with more reserve, Brandon believes that the Slavonic version of Josephus, which presents Christ as a political deliverer, may contain material from an original Aramaic draft of Josephus. The most recent critical studies of the text, however, conclude that the version is a late translation from Greek into Russian (cf. Louis H. Feldman, Studies in Judaica: Scholarship on Philo and Josephus [1937–1962], pp. 28, 29).
To maintain his thesis Brandon has to argue that the famous pericope on the payment of tribute (Mark 12:13–17) must have originally had Jesus denouncing the payment of tribute to Caesar! Jesus’ enigmatic statement in Luke concerning swords may have been intended to relate to the needs of the disciples’ defense. He himself foreswore the need for armed resistance (Matt. 26:52), warning that “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” This is a far cry from the Zealotic attitude toward a Holy War expressed in the saying, “Anyone who sheds the blood of the godless is like one who offers a sacrifice.”
Brandon’s attempt to explain the sayings and activities of Jesus and his early disciples in terms of the Zealots and the Sicarii involves a certain degree of anachronistic retrojection. After the uprising of Judas of Galilee in A.D. 6, Josephus does not mention any Zealotic uprising until the activity of Theudas in 44. According to Josephus, the Sicarii first became active under Felix, 52–60.
Brandon repeatedly emphasizes the presence of Simon the Zealot but makes curiously little use of the fact that another disciple of Jesus was a hated tax-collector for the Romans—Matthew. That Jesus converted wealthy publicans like Zacchaeus is but briefly mentioned by Brandon (Jesus and the Zealots, p. 201), and he does not discuss what this implies for his thesis. The truth is that Jesus gathered into his band disciples from the entire spectrum of “political” convictions, from the radical left to the far right. Oscar Cullmann, in The State in the New Testament (1963), describes Jesus’ own position:
On the one hand, the State is nothing final. On the other, it has the right to demand what is necessary to its existence—but no more. Every totalitarian claim of the State is thereby disallowed. And the double imperative logically follows: on the one hand, do not let the Zealots draw you into a purely political martial action against the existence of the Roman State; on the other, do not give to the State what belongs to God! In the background we hear the challenge: if ever the State demands what belongs to God, if ever it hinders you in the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, then resist it [p. 33].
If Jesus had been fomenting a Zealotic type of revolution, it is curious that, unlike the cases of other messianic leaders such as Judas, Theudas, and the Egyptian,. Jesus alone—and none of his followers—was arrested and executed.
Fatal to Brandon’s thesis that Jesus was leading a para-Zealotic movement and that Mark and the other Gospels were apologetic works addressed to the Romans to disguise this is the fact that before A.D. 64 it was not the Romans who persecuted the early Christians but the Jews.
Brandon’s rejection of the Pella tradition is ingenious but quite unconvincing. Excavations at Pella by Robert H. Smith of Wooster College were unfortunately halted by the hostilities in the Jordan Valley. The literary tradition in Eusebius is quite strong, going back to Hegesippus (second century). Eusebius also quotes Justin (second century) as referring to hostility between Bar Kochba and the Christians in “the recent war” of A.D. 132–35, presumably because, as in the case of the First War of A.D. 66–73, they would not bear arms against the Romans (cf. Sidney Sowers, “The Circumstances and Recollection of the Pella Flight,” Theologische Zeitschrift, XXVI.5 [1970], 305–20).
Finally, Brandon’s theory—though much more learned than that of H. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot—does little to explain the genesis of Christianity. As Walter Wink in a review of Brandon’s Jesus and the Zealots in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review (XXV.1 [1969], 55) points out:
In his theory we have the curious paradox of a religion whose founder uttered little besides political rhetoric and revolutionary commonplaces … and who was succeeded by a group of dissident disciples. These disciples, recoiling in horror from the grievous consequences of his mindless opposition to Roman might, created … a truly unique and utterly remarkable religion of suffering love, possessing such universalistic ramifications that it ultimately became the dominant religion of the Empire and later of the Western world.
II. Roman And/Or Jewish Culpability?
A. Juster and Lietzmann
In 1914 J. Juster published a learned work called Les Juifs dans l’empire romain, in which he sought to prove that during the first century A.D. the Romans had allowed the Jewish Sanhedrin the right of capital punishment. In 1931 the famous church historian Hans Lietzmann, successor to Adolf Harnack’s chair in Berlin, wrote an article, entitled “Der Prozess Jesu” that touched off a controversy.
Following Juster, Lietzmann argued that since the Jews had the right of capital punishment, it would have been unnecessary for them to get Roman ratification.
He reasoned that the Gospels were written as they were in order to transfer the blame from the Roman governor to the Jews. Since Christ was crucified in the Roman fashion and not stoned in the Jewish fashion. Lietzmann concluded that the narratives of a Jewish trial in the Gospels were unhistorical.
B. Winter and Cohn
The erudite work of Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus (1961), adds to the arguments of Juster and Lietzmann a radical form criticism that prunes away even materials accepted as dominical by Bultmann. Winter rejects as secondary adaptations such accounts as (1) the investigation by Annas, (2) the night session of the Sanhedrin, (3) the mockery of Jesus, (4) the examination by Herod Antipas, (5) the Barabbas episode, and (6) the efforts of Pilate to spare Jesus.
Most recently Haim H. Cohn, a justice of the supreme court of Israel, in Reflections on the Trial and Death of Jesus (1967), has gone so far as to suggest that the Sanhedrin was seeking to find men to testify in favor of Jesus and was attempting to persuade Jesus to plead not guilty before the Romans.
C. Arguments Against the Historicity of the Trials
1. The figure of Pilate. Philo, the famous Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, described Pilate as “naturally inflexible, a blend of self-will and relentlessness.” In contrast with this harsh portrait are the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, which portray a Pilate sympathetic to Jesus and antagonistic to the Jews in an exaggerated degree. Although many scholars have dated these Acts to the fourth century, F. Scheidweiler (in E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha. 1963), believes they date back to the second century.
Around A.D. 200. Tertullian spoke of Pilate as a “Christian in his conscience.” The Greek Orthodox Church canonized Pilate’s wife, who is given the name Procla, and the Ethiopian church recognizes June 25 as “St. Pilate and St. Procla’s Day.”
Such scholars as Loisy, Goguel, Brandon, and Winter believe that this tendency to present Pilate in a favorable light began with the writing of the Gospels themselves. Their account, which tends to exonerate Pilate and blame the Jews, was an apologetic fabrication, these scholars say.
2. Jewish capital jurisdiction.John 18:31 reports the Jews as saying to Pilate, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.” Winter’s main argument against the historicity of the Gospels’ account of the trials of Jesus is the conviction, following Juster and Lietzmann, that the Jews did have the right of capital punishment until A.D. 70. After that time the Jews introduced strangulation as a method of secret execution.
Juster adduced the following examples to demonstrate the Jews’ authority: (a) The warning inscription on the balustrade in the temple, reading: “Let no foreigner enter within the screen and enclosure surrounding the sanctuary. Whosoever is taken so doing will be the cause that death overtaketh him” (cf. Acts 21). (b) The stoning of Stephen (cf. Acts 7). (c) The stoning of James, the brother of Jesus, in A.D. 62, recorded in Josephus and in Eusebius. The execution of James the son of Zebedee in A.D. 44 (Acts 12:1, 2) is not relevant here because at that time a Jewish client king, Herod Agrippa, rather than a Roman governor was in charge.
3. Illegalities of the Jewish trial. As objections to the gospel accounts, Cohn and other scholars have pointed to the numerous discrepancies between facets of the examination of Jesus before the high priests and the directions for trials set forth in the Mishnah in the tractate Sanhedrin:
a. Capital cases could not be tried at night (Sanh. IV:1).
b. Capital judgments were to be delayed to the next day (Sanh. IV:1).
c. Therefore capital cases could not be tried on the eve of a Sabbath or of a festival day (Sanh. IV:1).
d. It was illegal to pass the death sentence anywhere except in the Hewn Chamber in the inner forecourt of the temple.
e. An attempt was to be made to find witnesses for the defense (Sanh. V:4).
f. False witnesses were to suffer condign penalties (Sanh. XI:6).
g. Capital cases had to open with arguments for acquittal (Sanh. IV:1).
h. The younger members were to speak first so as not to be influenced by the older members (Sanh. IV:2).
i. In capital cases all could not speak in favor of condemnation (Sanh. IV:1).
Convinced that no court could have so flagrantly disregarded its own rules, many writers have therefore concluded that the accounts in the Gospels are anti-Jewish inventions.
4. The issue of blasphemy. According to Sanhedrin VII:5, “ ‘the blasphemer’ is not culpable unless he pronounces the Name itself.…” Therefore the rending of the high priest’s garments in Mark 14:63 could not have been a protest against a legally indictable instance of blasphemy. Indeed, according to Winter, Jesus was theologically unexceptionable: he said and did nothing meriting prosecution by the Sanhedrin, he was not in any way different from the Pharisees, and he did not claim to be the Messiah.
D. Criticism of the Preceding Arguments
1. Pilate. In examining the sources on Pilate, Paul L. Maier points out that of the descriptions of Pilate in the New Testament, Josephus, and Philo, only Philo’s is frankly hostile. Philo does describe Pilate’s vacillation between the twin pressures of the outraged Jews and the Emperor Tiberius in the instance of aniconic shields dedicated at Herod’s palace.
After Caligula’s death in A.D. 41, Philo wrote to Claudius, and it was in his interest to portray the previous Roman administration in the worst possible light. “Therefore with Josephus recording Pilate’s humanity as well as his blunders, and the New Testament casting him virtually as Jesus’ lawyer for the defense before capitulation to popular pressure, a more balanced portrait of Pontius Pilate is possible …,” says Maier (“The Episode of the Golden Roman Shields at Jerusalem,” Harvard Theological Review. LXII [1969], 109–21). In other words, the portrayal of Pilate in the Gospels is not so discordant with other contemporary evidence as some would have us believe.
2. Jewish capital jurisdiction. A. N. Sherwin-White, a Roman historian, has examined the arguments of Juster, upon which Lietzmann and Winter have relied, and found them unconvincing.
But the truth is, to speak generally, that all that the learned Juster did was to make out a case which would have some probability if it were the common practice of the Roman government to allow capital jurisdiction to local municipal or ethnic tribunals. When we find that the capital power was the most jealously guarded of all the attributes of government, not even entrusted to the principal assistants of the governors, … it becomes very questionable indeed for the Sanhedrin [Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, 1963].
The positive examples adduced by Juster are shown to be but exceptions that prove the rule that the Jews did not have capital jurisdiction. The temple warning is a special exception and applies to Gentiles. “But if the Sanhedrin had the general right to execute offenders against the religious law, this special concession would not have been necessary,” says Sherwin-White.
The stoning of Stephen, which followed no formal sentencing, was an illegal lynching. Stephen, it should be noted, was not the only one to be killed. Not often noted in the discussion is Paul’s terrible role as a persecutor. He confesses: “And I persecuted this way unto the death” (Acts 22:4), and “when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them” (Acts 26:10). These events may very well have taken place in the interim between Pilate’s removal in 36 and the arrival of the next governor Marullus in 37, during the interregnum of Marcellus (who was but a subordinate of the legate). As Bo Reicke, in The New Testament Era (1968), comments:
This campaign on behalf of Jewish national ideals … took on astonishing proportions; but in the Marcellus interregnum of 36 it was possible because no imperial procurator was in Judea and Vitellius (the legate at Damascus) gave the leading Jews considerable freedom of action [p. 192].
“The story of the execution of James in Josephus, as the text stands, explicitly disproves the thesis of Juster,” says Sherwin-White. Josephus tells how Ananus the high priest seized the opportunity provided by the interim between the death of Festus in A.D. 62 and the arrival of Albinus to condemn James to death (Antiquities XX: 199 ff.). Later other Jews told the new governor that the high priest had no authority to act in such a manner.
As D. R. Catchpole concludes, “In sum, the evidence of legal proceedings during the procuratorial period suggests that the system stated by John and assumed by the Synoptics is accurate. The Jews could try, but they could not execute” (in The Trial of Jesus, edited by E. Bammel, 1970, p. 63).
3. Alleged illegalities. The Mishnah as we now have it is the compilation of oral traditions edited by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi at the end of the second century. According to H. Danby, who translated the Mishnah into English, the legal rules of the Mishnah represent a Pharisaic idealization that does not correspond to actual conditions of the early first century A.D. According to the Mishnah, the Sanhedrin is all powerful; there is not the slightest hint of the ruling Roman power. The Mishnah tells us nothing of the leading role of the rival Sadducees, who were the dominant group in the Sanhedrin before A.D. 70 (cf. H. Danby, “The Bearing of the Rabbinical Criminal Code on the Jewish Trial Narratives of the Gospels,” Journal of Theological Studies, XXI [1919–20], 51–76).
Moreover, Josef Blinzler has shown that before A.D. 70 the Sanhedrin followed a Sadducean code, and not the Pharisaic code as recorded in the Mishnah (The Trial of Jesus. 1959; see also J. Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, 1969, p. 178). Josephus reveals that the essential differences between the two groups were: (1) the Sadducees were literalists, hewing closely to the biblical text; (2) they were more severe in punishments (Antiquities XIII:294 ff.).
The very fact that not a single one of the purely Pharisaic and notably humane regulations of the Mishnah was observed in the trial of Jesus, proves only that Sadducean rules were observed, says Blinzler (“Das Synedrium von Jerusalem und die Strafprozessordnung der Mischna,” Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, LII [1961], 60). His conclusion is: “Thus the thesis that the Tractate Sanhedrin did not yet apply in Jewish penal law in the period before A.D. 70, which is so important for a correct assessment of the trial of Jesus, can be regarded as unshaken” (in Bammel, op. cit., p. 152).
4. The issue of blasphemy. Winter has argued that “Jesus was a normal person—he was the norm of normality—and he neither identified nor equated himself with anyone except Jesus of Nazareth.” This hardly explains the attachment to and the hostility against Jesus. A more accurate assessment is the reflection of A. Ginzberg:
Israel cannot accept with religious enthusiasm, as the Word of God, the utterances of a man who speaks in his own name—not “thus saith the Lord” but “I say unto you.” This “I” is in itself sufficient to drive Judaism away from the Gospels for ever [Ten Essays on Zionism and Judaism, 1922, p. 232].
Jesus’ statements equating himself with God the Father sounded so blasphemous to the Jews that on at least three occasions they picked up stones against him (John 5:18 ff.; 8:57 ff.; 10:30 ff.) This was, to be sure, not technically blasphemy according to the Mishnaic ordinance. It was instead such obvious blasphemy as to arouse the Jews to inflamed hostility. In C. H. Dodd’s judgment:
The evangelists, I conclude, John and the Synoptics alike, take the view that Jesus was charged with blasphemy because he spoke and acted in ways which implied that he stood in a special relation with God, so that his words carried divine authority and his actions were instinct with divine power. Unless this could be believed, the implied claim was an affront to the deepest religious sentiments of his people, a profanation of sanctities; and this, I suggest, is what the charge of “blasphemy” really stands for, rather than any definable statutory offence [More New Testament Studies, 1968, p. 99].
5. The question of culpability. From a historical analysis we may conclude that Pilate was legally responsible for the execution of Christ, and that the Jewish leaders were morally culpable. The cross cannot be used, however, as an instrument for hateful anti-Semitism. From a theological perspective, we are all guilty. The cross must stand as a symbol that calls us to contrition and to love.
III. Reflections on the Crucifixion
A. The Cruelty of Crucifixion
Crucifixion was a horrible means of execution that the Romans learned from the Carthaginians. Part of the punishment was the burden of carrying the cross or the patibulum, the cross beam, through the city. The ordeal so exhausted Jesus that he had to be “carried” (Mark 15:22) to Golgotha.
The arms were nailed to the crossbeam, not through the palms but through the wrist bones. Often a block of wood to support the body and another to support the feet were attached. Israeli archaeologists recently found in an ossuary dating from the first century A.D. a heel bone pierced with a seven-inch nail—the first such physical evidence of crucifixion to be found. Since the soldiers were able to proffer to Jesus a sponge soaked in posca, their cheap vinegar wine, the cross must not have been very high.
Paul Winter vividly describes the terrible cruelty of the cross:
It represented the acme of the torturer’s art: atrocious physical sufferings, length of torment, ignominy, the effect of the crowd gathered to witness the long agony of the crucified.… We cannot even say that the crucified person writhed in agony, for it was impossible for him to move. Stripped of his clothing, unable even to brush away the flies which fell upon his wounded flesh, already lacerated by the preliminary scourging, exposed to the insults and curses of people who can always find some sickening pleasure in the sight of the tortures of others … the cross represented miserable humanity reduced to the last degree of impotence, suffering and degradation [On the Trial of Jesus, 1961, p. 65].
B. The Meaning of the Cross
Paul wrote in First Corinthians 1:23, “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”
The Jews did not perceive the death of Christ as an expiatory atonement in terms of Isaiah 53. According to Billerbeck, “the ancient synagogue knows a suffering Messiah (ben David), to whom death was not appointed, and it knows a dying Messiah, of whom no sufferings are predicted, the Messiah ben Joseph” (cf. H. J. Schoeps, Paul, 1961, pp. 137–39). The hostile references in the Talmud and the late Toledoth Jeshu describe the death of Jesus as an execution deserved by one who led Israel astray by sorcery.
To the Romans, crucifixion was a frightful death reserved for slaves and rebels. Roman citizens were exempt; they were more mercifully executed with the sword. Cicero said, “Even the mere word, cross, must remain far not only from the lips of the citizens of Rome, but also from their thoughts, their eyes, their ears.”
How scandalous it was then to hear of a “mischievous superstition,” as Tacitus calls it, that involved worship of a criminal executed on a cross! There is a crude graffito on the wall of a palace on the Palatine hill in Rome, dating from the end of the second century, that depicts a young man adoring a crucified man with the head of an ass. The apologist Marcus Minucius Felix (third century) reports the sentiments of a pagan concerning the cross:
Again, to say that a man who had suffered capital punishment for a crime and the death-dealing wood of the cross are objects of their veneration, is to assign fitting altars to abandoned wretches, and to assert that they worship what they deserve to worship.
How then did the cross become the symbol of a movement that infiltrated and eventually captured the Roman Empire? How could the Christians have elevated a symbol that was as notorious as the gibbet or gallows into an emblem of triumph? Would the death of a political messiah have converted a fanatical enemy like Saul of Tarsus? Would the demise of an innocuously “normal” Pharisee have inspired the conversion of skeptical pagans to the degree that they willingly, yea joyously, risked martyrdom for their faith?
Surely the only thing that can explain the rise and the spread of Christianity is the assured conviction of the early disciples that their Master had risen from the tomb, demonstrating his Oneness with the Father—a conviction that was confirmed by the transformation of their lives through the power of his resurrection!
Edwin M. Yamauchi is associate professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He teaches various areas of ancient history, including Roman. He has the Ph.D. in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University.