Narrative: Nephi begins to describe the Messiah’s visit to the future Nephites. Prior to that appearance, however, the Messiah was resurrected. Verse 3 mentions the death and resurrection. While the resurrection is not explicitly noted in Nephi’s earlier recounting of this vision, it is clearly implied by the description of his descent from the heavens (1 Ne. 12:6).
History: Rome invaded Israel in A.D. 66, culminating with the temple’s destruction in A.D. 70. Israel was completely subjugated. Nephi reports the destruction briefly, laying blame for it on those who “fight against God and the people of his church.”
In this context, Joseph Smith is using “church” to translate Nephi’s wider symbolic meaning. Just as the “great and abominable church” (see commentary accompanying 1 Nephi 13:6) designated a category of people opposed to God’s plan, so this “church” represents believers, rather than the ecclesiastical organization. The incipient Christian church was too small and too unimportant to have prompted the Roman authorities to order the invasion. Nevertheless, the ultimate cause was still those who did not follow Yahweh. Nephi is not condemning Israel for anything more than what Isaiah does—not obeying Yahweh.
Anti-Semitism had a history long before it became a feature of the Christians who no longer saw themselves as Jews and was never solely attributable to the Christian-Jewish tensions:
Evidence of anti-Semitism has been found in the writings of those who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 4th century, B.C.E. In the first century C.E., Apion, a writer from Alexandria, wrote the “History of Egypt” which was the source for many of the false accusations about Jewish religious rituals which have plagued Jews throughout later history.
Isolated incidents of persecution against the Jews were recorded in the first century. As many as 4,000 Jews were deported to the island of Sardinia during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. The first recorded pogrom took place during the reign of the Roman Emperor Caligula in 38 C.E.
Bernard Lazare, a journalist, compiled a history of anti-Semitism which was published in 1894. He notes that the Diaspora created pockets of Jews in other cities that remained separate from the rest of the population through their unique religious laws:
The Egyptians took revenge upon them by deriding their religious customs, their abhorrence of pork. They once paraded in the city a fool, Carabas by name, adorned with a papyrus diadem, decked in a royal gown, and they saluted him as king of the Jews. Under Philadelphus, one of the first Ptolemies, Manetho, the high-priest of the Temple at Heliopolis, lent his authority to the popular hatred; he considered the Jews descendants of the Hyksos usurpers, and said that that leprous tribe had been expelled for sacrilege and impiousness. Those fables were repeated by Chaeremon and Lysimachus. It was not only popular animosity, however, that persecuted the Jews; they had also against them the Stoics and the Sophists. The Jews, by their proselytism, interfered with the Stoics; there was a rivalry for influence between them, and, notwithstanding their common belief in divine unity, there was opposition between them. The Stoics charged the Jews with irreligiousness, judging by the sayings of Posidonius and Apollonius Molo; they had a very scant knowledge of the Jewish religion. The Jews, they said, refuse to worship the gods; they do not consent to bow even before the divinity of the emperor. They have in their sanctuary the head of an ass and render homage to it; they are cannibals; every year they fatten a man and sacrifice him in a grove, after which they divide among themselves his flesh and swear on it to hate strangers. “The Jews,” says Apollonius Molo, “are enemies of all mankind; they have invented nothing useful, and they are brutal.” To this Posidonius adds: “They are the worst of all men.”
It is certain that the earliest Christianity held no animosity toward the Jews, for they were Jews themselves. However, tensions certainly built between certain Jews and these new Christian-Jews who did not follow the purity laws precisely, leading to the persecutions in which Saul (later Paul) took part. However, the real division does not come until after the Roman invasion of Jerusalem. Mark is considered the first gospel to have been written, and it is dated to about A.D. 70, right at the end of the Roman devastation of Jerusalem. By A.D. 96 even the pagan Roman texts begin to make distinctions between Jews and Christians. Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, suggests that: “We cannot fully understand the New Testament gospels until we recognize that they are… wartime literature.” Tensions ran high in the aftermath of this war among all factions of Judaism, but suspicions were even higher against the Christians who had refused to fight against Rome in the war. They refused to fight, not because they supported Rome, but because they saw that war as evidence of the signs of the times before the expected return of their Lord. As a text produced by a community who must live in the new order of an obviously dominant Rome in Jerusalem, Mark’s description of the death of the Messiah may reflect the new world order. Pagels suggests:
Mark takes a conciliatory attitude toward the Romans, although it was known that the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, had sentenced Jesus to death. Nevertheless, the two trial scenes included in this gospel effectively indict the Jewish leaders for Jesus’ death, while somewhat exonerating the Romans. Mark virtually invents a new Pilate—a well-meaning weakling solicitous of justice but, as Mark depicts him, intimidated by the chief priests within his own council chamber and by crowds shouting outside, so that he executes a man he suspects may be innocent.
Other first-century writers, Jewish and Roman, describe a very different man. Even Josephus, despite his Roman sympathies, says that the governor displayed contempt for his Jewish subjects, illegally appropriated funds from the Temple treasure, and brutally suppressed unruly crowds. Another contemporary observer, Philo, a respected and influential member of the Alexandrian Jewish community, describes Pilate as a man of “ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition,” famous for, among other things, ordering “frequent executions without trial.”
Armand L. Mauss, a professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University, discusses early Mormon understandings of the Jews: “Since the earliest Mormons were all converts from some variety of Christian background, many of them, perhaps most, were familiar with the inherited religious lore about Jews, even if they had never personally known any Jews. Nineteenth-century Mormon religious discourse occasionally reiterated such traditional ideas as the historic suffering of the Jews in consequence of their having rejected and condemned their own prophets and the true Messiah.” With the long history of blaming Jews for the death of Christ and the survival of such opinions in the early Mormon Church, it is even more interesting that the Book of Mormon does not take a similar position. Were the Book of Mormon a product of Joseph Smith’s times, some form of anti-Semitism would be natural. As Nephi’s product, however, anti-Semiticism would be out of place.