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Alternative History: Julian Messiah:
by John W. Braue, III

Constantius II, third¹ son of Constantine I “the Great”, acceded to the purple in 337 on his father’s death, and was probably the moving force behind the massacre of the “Neo-Flavians”, descendants of his grandfather Constantius I, in the same year. Only Constantius I, his two brothers Constans and Constantine I², and two cousins, Gallus and his half-brother Julian, survived.

Constantine II was killed in a civil war with Constans in 340; Constans was in turn overthrown and killed by the usurper Magnentius in 350. After overcoming Magnentius, Constantine II named Gallus Caesar (at the time, junior emperor); however, he executed him in 354. By Hobson’s choice, Constantius appointed Julian, the last remaining male Neo-Flavian other than himself, Caesar in 355. Constantius had the wit to see that the Roman Empire could no longer be administered by a single emperor, something that had forced Diocletian to institute the Tetrarchy.

Julian is notorious in history as “the Apostate”; raised as a Christian, he renounced Christianity in favor of Neo-Platonism, perhaps about 350. Neo-Platonism used traditional paganism as a framework for a religious doctrine with certain superficial resemblances to Platonic philosophy; under the name of “astral piety”, it had been influential in Imperial society since the reign of Gallienus (260-269 CE).

Julian was proclaimed Augustus (senior emperor) by the Gallic legions in 360; again, a valid assessment of the ambition of Julian and the abuses of Constantius cannot be made. Certainly Constantius was on the march against his cousin when he suddenly (and apparently naturally) died in 361. This left Julian sole emperor by default.

Julian was hostile to Christianity. Although no friend to Judaism (he described it as an “impious religion”), he was willing to use it and even give it some support as an opposing force. One of his edicts was for the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem! In 363, the reconstruction began under Alypius, but was suspended, allegedly because mysterious balls of flame erupted from the site and killed the workers. Whatever the cause, the work was halted when Julian prepared for his Persian campaign, a somewhat mismanaged affair that resulted in his death, and the death of all his plans, besides. Julian was the last significant non-Christian emperor; the largely pagan senatorial aristocracy could not resist the rise of the largely Christian (and barbarian) military.

So, where do we go from here? As I say, Julian’s Persian campaign was somewhat mismanaged; his progress through Mesopotamia was generally successful, but his generals ultimately realized that taking the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, necessary to their decisive defeat, would require a prolonged siege, which the Roman army was not capable of undertaking.Julian accepted this, but ordered the burning of his fleet, apparently in a fit of pique at being denied (as he saw it) the opportunity at conquering the Persians. In his retreat through Assyria, the scorched-earth policy of the Persians forced the Romans to skirmish with their guerillas whilst foraging; in one of these skirmishes, Julian was mortally wounded.

I will feign, therefore, that Julian’s fleet is not burned, either because he masters his anger and does not give the order, or because the order is not carried out. Supplies are adequate in the retreat; the army is not forced into the skirmishing that resulted in Julian’s death. Although the campaign results in no territorial acquisitions, enough victories (and loot) are gained that Julian’s prestige is not impaired.

Returning from Persia, Julian winters at Antioch; finding that work on the Temple has (for whatever reason) been halted, he orders its resumption, with more attention to be paid to it and greater resources committed to it. Again, this is not of love of Judaism, but rather out of opposition to Christianity, the more so as (in the retrospective of history, at least) the disasters halting work in 363 had been seen as evidence of divine displeasure with the Jews and Julian. Work continues apace, and the third³ Temple is dedicated in 370.

This results in a very different line of thought evolving in Judaism. Jewish religious doctrine now generally views the ages since the destruction of the Second Temple (or perhaps the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, about two generations later) as the galut Edom⁴, the “exile of Edom” (Edom is generally identified with Rome); this exile will only be ended with the coming of Messiah, who will also build the Third (and final) Temple. Now, instead, a somewhat cyclical view of history (with, of course, religious implications) is devised; the building of a Temple is held to mark the beginning of a period of Jewish prosperity, leading to their complacency and lack of attention to Torah. This leads to destruction of the Temple as a direct consequence of Jewish apostasy and assimilation; the subsequent repentance and re-dedication to Torah of the surviving Jews then causes God to appoint a messiah⁵ from among the goyim who causes a new Temple to be built, and the cycle begins anew.

This doctrine (which begins, although of course it does not emerge full-blown, in the 360’s) enables Julian to be hailed as moshiah ha-maor, the “messiah of the age”. In turn Julian, although he never becomes a Jew, is naturally gratified at being recognized as the anointed of God<sup>6, and is willing to be more philo-Judaic as a result. He had had cordial relations with the nasi (political and religious leader) Hillel the Younger (a OTL letter is preserved in which “he has advised his brother, the venerable patriarch Julos [sic], to abolish what was called the ‘send-tax’”). Hillel died in 365 CE; however, it is reasonable that, in this OTL, these good relations continue with Hillel’s son and successor, Gamliel V (OTL 365-c. 380). Indeed, the third Temple is placed under the control and supervision of the nesi’im and their courts (identified by the Talmud with the Sanhedrin).

This leads to a change in Julian’s religious administrative policy (but not in his actual and expressed religious beliefs). In his short OTL reign, he had endeavored to construct a “pagan church”, largely based on the then-existing Christian example, which in turn drew some of its inspiration from late-Roman administrative practices. This endeavor led to criticism and mockery by Christians, who claimed, with some justification, that Julian was attempting an uninspired copy of Christian institutions that had demonstrated their superiority to pagan ones. With the revival of the Temple cult, and the warmer relations between the Empire and Judaism, Julian has another model to follow. Amoraic7 practice had tended to the autocratic, to prop up the diminishing prestige of the Hillelic nesi’im in the Exile. Hillel the Younger had indeed effectively renounced his authority by publishing a computational method for establishing the calendar in 359 (previously, the calendar had been established by a combination of testimony to observation and discussion by the “high court of seven”, a committee of the Great Sanhedrin8). Whether or not he or his successor can recall this issue, however, it is obviously one that Julian is most unlikely to emulate; indeed, he rather slavishly imitates the recently-abandoned Jewish practice by declaring that he (as pontifex maximus) and the collegium pontificum shall proclaim the dies nefasti (on which no public business could be conducted).

The nature of the rebuilt Temple is different from its predecessor, also. We must remember that, according to OTL Jewish thought, the Bet ha-Midrash -- the Temple at Jerusalem – was the one place where sacrifice could legitimately be brought. And, when I speak of sacrifice, I speak of animal sacrifice; the Temple just prior to the revolt of 66-73 CE must have been one of the most terrifying abbatoirs imaginable, not only to our Western imaginations, but also to late Classical and early Magian9 peoples; they had temples and sacrifices, but due to the plurality of temples, nothing on the scale of the Bet ha-Midrash.

As far back as First Temple times, however, a strain of thought in Judaism held that the Temple ritual was of but little spiritual value compared with proper, ethical behavior; the prophet Hosea insisted that God desired mercy, not sacrifice. Ironically, the concentration of the Mishnah on the sacrificial ritual is undoubtedly due to the abrupt termination of it by the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE; with nothing but memories to record, the Tannaim10 recorded them in great detail. The nesi’im would undoubtedly have revived them in the rebuilt Temple, but their practice would inevitably be immediately and continuously altered by the evolution of thought in the lapse of nearly three centuries.

Looking far ahead from Julian’s time, we can certainly posit a “para-Islam”; Spengler viewed Muhammed as a religious reformer of the stature and nature of Luther or the Buddha (Spenglerian jargon is that he was “contemporaneous” with them, not implying that he lived at the same time, but that he held a similar role in his culture as they did theirs). A reforming “para-Islam” would likely have arisen about the same time and to the same ends that the actual Islam did. Its history in TTL would have been very different from actual Islamic history, of course; and in some ways it might have been more successful. OTL Islam coincidentally arose at the same time as the final, devastating conflict between Rome and Persia. It faced a Persia which had ceased to exist in all but name, and a seriously crippled Rome (which equally, under Heraclius I, was ceasing to be “Roman” save in name). If that war had not happened, the armies of the Caliphate would have found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to establish their political dominion in the Middle East. Equally, though, I opine that there would have been much less resistance to spreading para-Islam by the word, rather than the sword; Constantinople might have seen the turban established in the eighth century rather than the fifteeneth.

1 Crispus, Constantine’s eldest son and Constantius’ half-brother, was executed by Constantine in 326. The exact offense of Crispus, and the proper apportionment of blame between him, Constantine, his step-mother Fausta, and his grandmother Helena, is obscure.
2 Constantine I didn’t demonstrate a lot of imagination in naming his children. He also had a daughter named Constantia or Constantina; another daughter was named Helena, after his mother.
3 Or fourth, depending if you view Herod’s renovation of the second Temple as resulting in a different complex.
4 There is not, to my knowledge, any “official” method of, or even consensus on, Romanization of Hebrew, the more so as there are small but significant differences between Ashkenazi, Sephardi/Israeli, and Mizrahi pronunciations. Therefore, I’ll Romanize it however I damned well please.
5 ”Messiah” (moshiah in Hebrew) means “anointed” (“Christ”, Greek khristos, is a calque). Various figures, including Cyrus the Great, are identified as messiahs in the Tanakh and Talmud. The term has taken on eschatological meaning as “the redeemer at the end of history”; of course, in this ATL, it is given a different meaning.
6 It doesn’t hurt, either, that another personage identified as moshiah ha-maor is Alexander the Great.
7 The period between the redaction of the Mishnah by the nasi Yehudah I ben Shimon ha-Nasi, invariably referred to simply as “Rabbi”, and the death of Ravina bar Huna, successor of Rav Ashi in the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud; roughly, 200-500 CE.
8 The Karaite sect, established by the anti-exilarch Anan ben David in the ninth century CE and still existing today, denies that Hillel had the authority to decree the establishment of the calendar by calculation, and still uses observation.
9 I adopt – and to a large degree agree with – Oswald Spengler’s identification of a “Magian” culture in the Middle East, distinct from the Classical culture of Greece and Rome, with the distinction partially masked by the facts that Classical culture partially overlapped Magian in time and space.
10 The sages who composed the Mishnah.</sup>

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