Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (14 page)

So then, give back to Caesar what is his, and give back to God
what belongs to God. That is the zealot argument in its simplest, most concise form.
And it seems to be enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately label Jesus
as
lestes
. A bandit. A zealot.

A couple of days later, after sharing a secret Passover meal, Jesus and his disciples
head out in the dark of night to the Garden of Gethsemane to hide out among the gnarled
olive trees and the quickset shrubs. It is here, on the western slope of the Mount
of Olives, not far from where, some years later, the Roman general Titus would launch
his siege of Jerusalem, that the authorities find him.

“Have you come out here with swords and clubs to arrest me like a bandit [
lestes
]?” Jesus asks.

That is precisely how they’ve come for him. John’s gospel claims a “cohort” (
speira
) of soldiers marched to Gethsemane—a unit that would comprise between three hundred
and six hundred Roman guards—along with the Temple police, all of them carrying “torches
and weapons” (John 18:3). John is obviously exaggerating. But the gospels all agree
it was a large and heavily armed arresting party that came for Jesus in the night.
Such a show of force may explain why, before heading off to Gethsemane, Jesus made
sure his followers were armed as well.

“If you do not have a sword,” Jesus instructs his disciples immediately after the
Passover meal, “go sell your cloak and buy one.”

“Master,” the disciples respond, “here are two swords.”

“It is enough,” Jesus says (Luke 22:36–38).

It would not be. After a brief but bloody tussle with his disciples, the guards arrest
Jesus and bring him to the authorities in Jerusalem, where he is charged with sedition
for, among other things, “forbidding the paying of tribute to Rome,” a charge that
Jesus does not deny (Luke 23:2).

Declared guilty, Jesus is sent to Golgotha to be crucified alongside two other men
who are specifically called
lestai
, bandits (Matthew 27:38–44; Mark 15:27). As with every criminal who hangs on a cross,
Jesus is given a plaque, or
titulus
, detailing the crime for
which he is being crucified. Jesus’s
titulus
reads
KING OF THE JEWS
. His crime: striving for kingly rule;
sedition
. And so, like every bandit and revolutionary, every rabble-rousing zealot and apocalyptic
prophet who came before or after him—like Hezekiah and Judas, Theudas and Athronges,
the Egyptian and the Samaritan, Simon son of Giora and Simon son of Kochba—Jesus of
Nazareth is executed for daring to claim the mantle of king and messiah.

To be clear, Jesus was not a member of the Zealot Party that launched the war with
Rome, because no such party could be said to exist for another thirty years after
his death. Nor was Jesus a violent revolutionary bent on armed rebellion, though his
views on the use of violence were far more complex than it is often assumed.

But look closely at Jesus’s words and actions at the Temple in Jerusalem—the episode
that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution—and this one fact becomes difficult
to deny: Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened
the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities. That
singular fact should color everything we read in the gospels about the messiah known
as Jesus of Nazareth—from the details of his death on a cross in Golgotha to the launch
of his public ministry on the banks of the Jordan River.

The Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness

John the Baptist came out of the desert like an apparition—a wild man clothed in camel
hair, a leather belt tied around his waist, feeding on locusts and wild honey. He
traveled the length of the Jordan River—through Judea and Peraea, in Bethany and Aenon—preaching
a simple and dire message: The end was near. The Kingdom of God was at hand. And woe
to those Jews who assumed their descent from Abraham would save them from the coming
judgment.

“Already, the ax is laid at the root of the tree,” John warned, “and every tree that
does not bear good fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire.”

To the wealthy who came to him seeking counsel, John said, “The one with two tunics
must share with he who has none; the one with food must do the same.”

To the tribute collectors who asked him the path to salvation, he said, “Do not exact
more than that which has been prescribed to you.”

To the soldiers who begged for guidance, he said, “Do not intimidate, do not blackmail,
and be content with your wages.”

Word of the Baptist spread quickly throughout the land. People came from as far as
Galilee, some traveling for days through the stark Judean wilderness to hear him preach
at the lip of the Jordan River. Once there, they would strip off their outer garments
and cross over to the eastern shore, where John waited to take them by the hand. One
by one, he would immerse them in the living waters. When they emerged, they would
cross back to the western shore of the Jordan River—as their ancestors had done a
thousand years earlier—back to the land promised them by God. In this way, the baptized
became the
new
nation of Israel: repentant, redeemed, and ready to receive the Kingdom of God.

As the crowds who flocked to the Jordan grew larger, the Baptist’s activities caught
the attention of Herod the Great’s son, Antipas (“the Fox”), whose tetrarchy included
the region of Peraea, on the eastern bank of the river. If the gospel account is to
be believed, Antipas imprisoned John because he criticized his marriage to Herodias,
who was the wife of Antipas’s half brother (also named Herod). Not satisfied with
merely locking John up, the wily Herodias hatched a plot to put him to death. On the
occasion of Antipas’s birthday, Herodias obliged her daughter, the sultry temptress
Salome, to perform a lascivious dance for her uncle and stepfather. So aroused was
the libidinous old tetrarch by Salome’s gyrations that he at once made her a fateful
promise.

“Ask of me whatever you wish,” Antipas huffed, “and I will give it to you, even half
my kingdom.”

Salome consulted her mother. “What shall I ask for?”

“The head of John the Baptist,” Herodias replied.

Alas, the gospel account is not to be believed. As deliciously scandalous as the story
of John’s execution may be, it is riddled with errors and historical inaccuracies.
The evangelists mistakenly identify Herodias’s first husband as Philip, and they seem
to confuse
the place of John’s execution, the fortress of Machaerus, with Antipas’s court in
the city of Tiberias. The entire gospel story reads like a fanciful folktale with
deliberate echoes in the biblical account of Elijah’s conflict with Jezebel, the wife
of King Ahab.

A more prosaic yet reliable account of the death of John the Baptist can be found
in Josephus’s
Antiquities
. According to Josephus, Antipas feared that John’s growing popularity among the people
would lead to an insurrection, “for they seemed ready to do anything that he should
advise.” That may have been true. John’s warning of the coming wrath of God might
not have been new or unique in first-century Palestine, but the hope he offered those
who cleansed themselves, who made themselves anew and pursued the path of righteousness,
had enormous appeal. John promised the Jews who came to him a new world order, the
Kingdom of God. And while he never developed the concept beyond a vague notion of
equality and justice, the promise itself was enough in those dark, turbulent times
to draw to him a wave of Jews from all walks of life—the rich and the poor, the mighty
and the weak. Antipas was right to fear John; even his own soldiers were flocking
to him. He therefore seized John, charged him with sedition, and sent him to the fortress
of Machaerus, where the Baptist was quietly put to death sometime between 28 and 30
C.E
.

Yet John’s fame far outlived him. Indeed, John’s fame outlived Antipas, for it was
widely believed that the tetrarch’s defeat at the hands of the Nabataean king Aretas
IV in 36
C.E
., his subsequent exile, and the loss of his title and property were all God’s divine
punishment for executing John. Long after his death, the Jews were still mulling over
the meaning of John’s words and deeds; John’s disciples were still wandering Judea
and Galilee, baptizing people in his name. John’s life and legend were preserved in
independent “Baptist traditions” composed in Hebrew and Aramaic and passed around
from town to town. Many assumed he was the messiah. Some thought he would rise from
the dead.

Despite his fame, however, no one seems to have known then—just
as no one knows now—who, exactly, John the Baptist was or where he had come from.
The gospel of Luke provides a fantastical account of John’s lineage and miraculous
birth, which most scholars dismiss out of hand. If there is any historical information
to be gleaned from Luke’s gospel, however, it is that John may have come from a priestly
family; his father, Luke says, belonged to the priestly order of Abijah (Luke 1:5).
If that is true, John would have been expected to join the priestly line of his father,
though the apocalyptic preacher who walked out of the desert “eating no bread and
drinking no wine” had quite clearly rejected his family obligations and his duties
to the Temple for a life of asceticism in the wilderness. Perhaps this was the source
of John’s immense popularity among the masses: he had stripped himself of his priestly
privileges so as to offer the Jews a new source of salvation, one that had nothing
to do with the Temple and the detestable priesthood:
baptism
.

To be sure, baptisms and water rituals were fairly common throughout the ancient Near
East. Bands of “baptizing groups” roamed Syria and Palestine initiating congregants
into their orders by immersing them in water. Gentile converts to Judaism would often
take a ceremonial bath to rid themselves of their former identity and enter into the
chosen tribe. The Jews revered water for its liminal qualities, believing it had the
power to transport a person or object from one state to another: from unclean to clean,
from profane to holy. The Bible is replete with ablutionary practices: objects (a
tent, a sword) were sprinkled with water to dedicate them to the Lord; people (lepers,
menstruating women) were fully immersed in water as an act of purification. The priests
in the Temple of Jerusalem poured water on their hands before approaching the altar
to make sacrifices. The high priest underwent one ritual immersion before entering
the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, and another immediately after taking upon
himself the sins of the nation.

The most famous ablutionary sect of the time was the aforementioned Essene community.
The Essenes were not strictly a
monastic movement. Some lived in cities and villages throughout Judea, others separated
themselves entirely from the rest of the Jews in communes like that at Qumran, where
they practiced celibacy and held all property in common (the only items of personal
property an Essene at Qumran would be allowed were a cloak, a linen cloth, and a hatchet
for digging a latrine in the wilderness when the need arose). Because the Essenes
viewed the physical body as base and corrupt, they developed a rigid system of full
immersion baths that had to be completed over and over again to maintain a constant
state of ritual purity. Yet the Essenes also practiced a one-time, initiatory water
ritual—a baptism of sorts—that was used to welcome new recruits into their community.

This could have been the source of John’s unusual baptismal rite. John himself may
have been an Essene. There are some tantalizing connections between the two. Both
John and the Essene community were based in the wilderness region of Judea at approximately
the same time: John is presented as going off into the Judean wilderness at a young
age, which would be in keeping with the Essene practice of adopting and training the
sons of priests. Both John and the Essenes rejected the Temple authorities: the Essenes
maintained their own distinct calendar and their own dietary restrictions and refused
the concept of animal sacrifice, which was the primary activity of the Temple. Both
saw themselves and their followers as the true tribe of Israel, and both were actively
preparing for the end times: the Essenes eagerly awaited an apocalyptic war when “the
Sons of Light” (the Essenes) would battle “the Sons of Darkness” (the Temple priests)
for control over the Temple of Jerusalem, which the Essenes would purify and make
holy again under their leadership. And both John and the Essenes seem to have identified
themselves as “the voice crying out in the wilderness” spoken of by the Prophet Isaiah:
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God” (Isaiah 40:3). All
four gospels attribute this verse to John, while for the Essenes, the verse
served as the most significant passage of scripture in defining their conception of
themselves and their community.