Robert(o) Carlos Alfaro

Three Figures, Many Verdicts

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Robert(o) C. Alfaro

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How Jews saw Yochanan the Immerser, Yeshua, and Yaakov the Just — in the first century and today

First-century Jews held no single verdict on Yochanan the Immerser (John the Baptist), Yeshua (Jesus), or Yaakov HaTzaddik (James the Just). Yet the surviving sources show one steady pattern. Many ordinary Jews admired these men, the people holding power feared them, and all three were put to death by those powers.

How We Know Anything at All

There were no newspapers in first-century Judea. What we know comes from a small set of texts written years or centuries later, and every one of them has an angle. Reading them side by side, and noticing where they disagree, is how historians build a picture. Dates use CE (Common Era) and BCE, the same years as AD and BC; other terms are explained at the end.

SourceWhen writtenWho wrote itWhat to watch for
Josephus, Jewish Antiquitiesc. 93–94 CE, in RomeA Jerusalem priest who fought Rome in the revolt of 66–70 CE, then went over to the Roman sideWrites for Roman readers; wary of anything that looks like rebellion; his manuscripts survived only through Christian copyists
Gospels and Acts (New Testament)c. 70–110 CEFollowers of Yeshua, most of them JewishWritten to persuade; arguments with other Jews after the Temple fell in 70 CE color the portraits
Tacitus, Annalsc. 116 CEA Roman senator and historianHostile to Christians; useful because he has no reason to invent the execution
Hegesippus, quoted by EusebiusHegesippus c. 170s CE; Eusebius c. 300–325 CEChristian writersSurvives only secondhand; mixes memory with legend
Rabbinic literature (Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmuds)c. 200–600 CERabbinic sages in the Land of Israel and BabyloniaWritten long after; where it touches Yeshua it argues against Christianity rather than reporting

None of these sources is neutral, and none was written by an eyewitness to all of the events. That is the honest starting point. (Josephus background: Livius)

Part One: The First Century

Yochanan the Immerser: Widely Respected, Killed as a Political Risk

Yochanan was the most broadly admired of the three, and he is the only one Josephus praises without reservation. In Antiquities 18.116–119, Josephus calls him a good man who urged Jews to practice virtue, justice toward one another, and piety toward God, and to come together for immersion. (Josephus, Ant. 18.116–119, via Livius)

Why Yochanan was killed. Josephus says crowds were deeply moved by Yochanan’s preaching. Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee and Perea, feared that this influence could spark a revolt, so he imprisoned Yochanan at the fortress of Machaerus, and executed him there. The Gospels give a more personal reason: Yochanan had publicly condemned Antipas for marrying Herodias, his brother’s wife (Mark 6:17–18). The two accounts can both be true, since a prophet attacking a ruler’s marriage in front of large crowds was itself a political threat.

What ordinary Jews thought. Years later Antipas lost an army to the Nabatean king Aretas IV. Josephus reports that some Jews saw the defeat as God’s just punishment for killing Yochanan. That is a striking piece of evidence: a popular verdict, recorded by a writer with no Christian loyalties.

What the immersion meant. Here the sources differ in an important way.

  • Josephus: immersion did not earn pardon for sins. It purified the body, on the assumption that the soul had already been made clean by righteous living.
  • The Gospels: Yochanan preached “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4).

The gap may be smaller than it looks. Historian Joan Taylor argues that Yochanan expected repentance and good deeds to come first, with immersion as the outward purification that followed. (Review of Taylor, The Immerser, Denver Journal)

Where he fits in Judaism. Ritual immersion was ordinary Jewish practice in this period, and archaeologists have found many stepped immersion pools (mikva’ot) from the era. The Dead Sea Scrolls community at Qumran also tied immersion to inner repentance.

Yeshua: Devotion from Some, Alarm from the Powerful

Responses to Yeshua split, and every source reflects the split. He was executed by Rome around 30 CE, during Pontius Pilate’s term as governor of Judea (26–36 CE).

Among the crowds. In the Galilee he drew large followings as a teacher and healer, and some followers came to see him as the Messiah, the anointed king Israel’s prophets had promised.

Among the Pharisees. The Gospels show Pharisees as both critics and occasional allies. Some warn him that Herod Antipas wants him dead (Luke 13:31). Later, the respected Pharisee Gamaliel urges the council to leave his followers alone: if their movement is merely human it will fail, and if it is from God no one can stop it (Acts 5:34–39).

Among the priestly elite. The high-priestly leadership in Jerusalem, mostly Sadducees, saw him as a threat, especially after his disruption in the Temple courts (Mark 11:15–18).

Yaakov HaTzaddik: A Torah-Keeping Leader Whose Killing Outraged Observant Jews

Yaakov may be the most revealing of the three. He led the community of Yeshua’s followers in Jerusalem, a community that kept the Torah, and his death in 62 CE drew protest from law-observant Jews outside his movement.

His place in the movement. Paul calls him “the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19) and names him one of the three “pillars” of the Jerusalem community, with Peter and John (Galatians 2:9). In Acts he presides at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15). Later he tells Paul that thousands of Jewish believers are “all zealous for the law,” and asks Paul to join a vow ceremony in the Temple to prove that he still keeps it (Acts 21:18–26).

Josephus’s account (Antiquities 20.197–203). This is the clearest picture we have, and most scholars accept it as authentic. (Josephus, Ant. 20.200, Whiston translation) The sequence:

  1. The Roman governor Festus died, and his successor Albinus had not yet arrived.
  2. The new high priest, Ananus son of Ananus, a Sadducee whom Josephus calls bold and harsh in judgment, used the gap to convene a court of judges.
  3. He brought Yaakov, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ,” and some others before it, charged them as lawbreakers, and had them stoned.
  4. The citizens who seemed most fair-minded and most careful about the law were offended. They secretly appealed to King Agrippa II, and some rode out to meet Albinus on his way from Alexandria.
  5. Albinus wrote Ananus an angry letter, and Agrippa removed him after only three months as high priest.

The wording itself supports authenticity. A Christian forger would not call Yeshua the “so-called” Christ. (Eusebius quoting Josephus, with editor’s notes)

Who protested? Josephus does not name the group. Many historians suspect Pharisees, since he elsewhere contrasts lenient Pharisees with harsh Sadducee judges, but that identification is an inference. What is certain is the point that matters: respected, law-observant Jews treated Yaakov’s execution as a miscarriage of justice.

The later legend. The Christian writer Hegesippus (c. 170s CE), quoted by Eusebius, gives a far more elaborate story. He says everyone called Yaakov “the Just.” He drank no wine, ate no meat, never cut his hair, and prayed in the Temple so often for the people’s forgiveness that his knees grew hard like a camel’s. In this version, opponents threw him from the Temple’s pinnacle, stoned him, and finished him with a laundryman’s club, shortly before Rome’s invasion. Even Eusebius’s 19th-century editors call this account overdrawn and colored by legend. Its method of death contradicts Josephus, who is the more reliable source.

One more echo. The Christian writers Origen and Eusebius both claim Josephus wrote that Jerusalem’s destruction came to avenge Yaakov the Just. No surviving manuscript of Josephus contains that line, so it was probably added to the copies they used. Even so, it mirrors the popular verdict on Yochanan’s death: a righteous man’s killing was remembered as bringing judgment on those responsible.

The Pattern: Popular Respect, Elite Fear

Yochanan the ImmerserYeshuaYaakov HaTzaddik
Admired byLarge crowds; many saw him as a prophetGalilean crowds and disciples; some Pharisees were cautious or friendlyThe Torah-keeping Jerusalem community; respected observant Jews outside it
Killed byHerod Antipas, ruler of GalileeRome, under Pilate, after the high-priestly leadership handed him overThe high priest Ananus, acting without Roman approval
DateBefore c. 30 CEc. 30 CE62 CE
MethodExecuted at Machaerus (beheaded, per the Gospels)CrucifiedStoned
Stated reasonFear of an uprising (Josephus); attacking Antipas’s marriage (Gospels)Sedition: “King of the Jews”Charged as a lawbreaker
Public reactionSome Jews saw Antipas’s military defeat as God’s punishmentHis followers carried on in his nameProtest by observant citizens got Ananus removed

A Slow Parting of the Ways

It is tempting to imagine Judaism and Christianity splitting cleanly in the first century. Recent scholarship, much of it by Jewish scholars, says the break was slow, uneven, and different from place to place.

  • The first generation was Jewish. Paula Fredriksen’s When Christians Were Jews (2018) reconstructs the Jerusalem community led by Yaakov and Peter as a Temple-centered Jewish messianic movement, not a new religion. (Library Journal review)
  • The “clean break” is questioned. The essay collection The Ways That Never Parted (2003), edited by Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, argues that Jews and Christians kept influencing each other through late antiquity. (Fortress Press)
  • Even the famous “curse” is disputed. The Birkat HaMinim, a line in the daily Jewish prayer against heretics, was long dated to around 85–95 CE and read as a move to push Jesus-followers out of synagogues. Ruth Langer’s study Cursing the Christians? (2012) finds unambiguous evidence for it only from the late 300s CE. (Oxford Academic) Joel Marcus defends a modified early date. (New Testament Studies abstract)

Commonly cited turning points include the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE, when Jesus-followers could not back a rival messiah. Yaakov’s own career, as a Torah-observant leader honored by observant Jews, is one of the strongest signs that the earliest movement lived inside Judaism.

Part Two: Jewish Views Today

Yeshua: Not the Messiah, but Increasingly Reclaimed as a Jew

Every Jewish denomination rejects Yeshua as Messiah, as divine, and as savior. Yet over the last two centuries, many Jewish thinkers have reclaimed him as a Jew whose story belongs to Jewish history.

Why the answer is no. The objections are theological more than personal.

  • The Messiah’s work is undone. In Jewish expectation the Messiah is a human king of David’s line who restores Israel, rebuilds the Temple, and brings an age of peace. That world has not arrived.
  • God does not become a man. Judaism holds that God is not incarnated in a human being, so belief in Yeshua as divine falls outside Judaism.

Where the line is drawn in law. Israel’s Supreme Court applied that line in two landmark cases. In 1962 it ruled that Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish-born Jew who saved Jews during the Holocaust and later became a Catholic monk known as Brother Daniel, did not qualify as a Jew under the Law of Return. In 1989, in the Beresford case, it ruled that Messianic Jews count as having joined another religion for the same purpose. (Summary of the rulings)

Where ordinary Jews draw it. The picture among laypeople is looser than the official one. In Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey, 34% of American Jews said a person can be Jewish while believing Jesus was the Messiah, including 35% of ultra-Orthodox Jews. (Christianity Today on the Pew findings) That likely reflects a point of traditional law rather than approval. Under rabbinic law a person born Jewish stays Jewish even after adopting another faith, though they are seen as having left the faith. (The Forward on the survey)

The weight of history. For many centuries Jews lived under Christian rule and suffered persecution carried out in Jesus’ name, including the charge that Jews as a people killed him. Medieval polemics like Toledot Yeshu answered by mocking him. Until modern times most Jewish thinkers simply avoided the subject. (University of Edinburgh source guide on Klausner)

Medieval and Early Modern Voices

Maimonides (12th century). In a passage of his law code (Laws of Kings 11:4) that Christian censors cut from printed editions, he calls Jesus a stumbling block. Yet he also says Christianity and Islam spread the ideas of the Messiah, the Torah, and the commandments to distant nations, preparing the world for the true Messiah. (Ohr Somayach, quoting the passage)

Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776). This leading 18th-century authority argued that Jesus and Paul meant to bring non-Jews to the moral laws given to Noah’s descendants, and never meant to release Jews from the Torah. (Emden’s letter in translation) In 1985 Orthodox rabbi Harvey Falk built on Emden in Jesus the Pharisee. (BAS Library)

The Modern Jewish “Reclamation” of Jesus

ThinkerKey workWhat he or she argued
Abraham Geiger (1810–1874)Das Judentum und seine Geschichte (1864)A founder of Reform Judaism; cast Jesus as a liberal Pharisee in the line of Hillel. (Jewish Virtual Library)
Joseph Klausner (1874–1958)Jesus of Nazareth (Hebrew, 1922)The first critical life of Jesus written in Hebrew for Jewish readers; treated him as a significant figure in Jewish national history. (Harvard Theological Review)
Martin Buber (1878–1965)Two Types of Faith (1950)Wrote that from his youth he had found in Jesus his “great brother.” (Scottish Journal of Theology)
David Flusser (1917–2000)Jesus (1968; later revised)Hebrew University professor; read Jesus as a Jewish sage and argued his teaching was in Hebrew. (Logos)
Geza Vermes (1924–2013)Jesus the Jew (1973)Compared Jesus to Galilean holy men such as Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa.
Pinchas Lapide (1922–1997)The Resurrection of Jesus (1977)An Orthodox Jewish theologian who accepted the resurrection as a historical event while denying that it made Jesus the Messiah. (Themelios review)
Amy-Jill LevineThe Misunderstood Jew (2006)Argues Jesus must be read inside first-century Judaism and challenges anti-Jewish readings of the Gospels.
Daniel BoyarinThe Jewish Gospels (2012)Argues that ideas of a divine-human Messiah already existed within Jewish thought before Jesus.

A correction to the common quote. Buber’s line is often repeated as “great elder brother.” The published English translation says “great brother.”

Across the denominations. Orthodox Jews generally view Yeshua as a Jew whose followers’ claims were mistaken, though figures like Emden, Falk, Flusser, and Lapide show a warmer Orthodox strand. Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Jews are more likely to claim him as a Jewish teacher whose followers took his message in another direction. All of them reject the Christian doctrines about him.

Yochanan Today: A Jewish Prophet Remembered Mostly by Others

Yochanan has no place in Jewish prayer, and rabbinic literature never mentions him. He is remembered mainly by other traditions: Christianity calls him the forerunner of Jesus, Islam honors him as the prophet Yahya, and the small Mandaean faith of Iraq and Iran treats him as its central prophet.

For historians, though, he is a believable Second Temple figure: a prophetic preacher of righteousness who called Jews to repent and immerse. The practice he is named for never left Judaism. Jews still immerse in a mikveh for conversion, for family purity, and, in many communities, before Yom Kippur.

Yaakov Today: Invisible in Practice, Important to Historians

Yaakov is even less visible in Jewish life, but scholars increasingly see him as a key witness. A Jerusalem leader who stayed Torah-observant, and whose death was protested by observant Jews, is hard evidence that the earliest Jesus movement lived inside Judaism.

Renewed scholarly attention. At a 1997 Bard College conference, scholars noticed that Yaakov had been nearly ignored in biblical research despite the respect he once commanded. That led to The Brother of Jesus (2001), co-edited by Bruce Chilton and the prominent Jewish scholar of rabbinic Judaism Jacob Neusner. (Bard College announcement) In an earlier volume Neusner examined whether Yaakov’s advice to Paul about Temple vows (Acts 21) matched Jewish law. (Table of contents, James the Just and Christian Origins)

Other Jesus-following Jews named Yaakov. Early rabbinic texts preserve stories about a different Yaakov, a Galilean follower of Yeshua, which show such Jews still living among the rabbis in the early second century.

  • A Yaakov of Kefar Sama offered to heal Rabbi Eleazar ben Dama of a snakebite in Yeshua’s name. Eleazar’s uncle, Rabbi Ishmael, forbade it, and Eleazar died before he could argue the point (Tosefta Hullin 2:22–23).
  • The great sage Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, arrested by Rome on suspicion of heresy, later recalled that a Yaakov of Kefar Sekhania had once shared a teaching of Yeshua with him in Sepphoris, and that it had pleased him (Tosefta Hullin 2:24; Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zarah 16b–17a). (Jewish Encyclopedia)

These are not stories about Yaakov HaTzaddik. But they show the same thing his life shows: contact between rabbis and Jewish followers of Yeshua continued long after 70 CE, with a mix of suspicion and curiosity.

Bottom Line

In the first century, Jews did not agree about any of these three men. Yochanan and Yaakov drew wide respect, even from Jews outside their circles. Yeshua drew both devotion and alarm. The powerful, Herod Antipas, Rome, and a high priest, killed all three.

Today no branch of Judaism accepts Yeshua as Messiah or as divine, and that line is firm. But a long line of Jewish thinkers, from Emden to Buber to Levine, treats Yeshua, Yochanan, and Yaakov as part of the Jewish story rather than outsiders to it. The best evidence, especially Josephus on Yaakov, supports them: the earliest Jesus movement began as a Jewish movement, and its break with the rest of Judaism came slowly.

Sources and Further Reading

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