Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2 page)

Although it is almost unanimously agreed that, with the possible exception of Luke-Acts,
the gospels were not written by the people for whom they are named, for ease and the
sake of clarity, I will continue to refer to the gospel writers by the names by which
we now know and recognize them.

Finally, in keeping with scholarly designations, this text employs
C.E
., or Common Era, instead of
A.D
. in its dating, and
B.C.E
. instead of
B.C
. It also more properly refers to the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible or the Hebrew
Scriptures.

It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth.
The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of
the world, a band of ragged followers trailing behind, was a common a sight in Jesus’s
time—so common, in fact, that it had become a kind of caricature among the Roman elite.
In a farcical passage about just such a figure, the Greek philosopher Celsus imagines
a Jewish holy man roaming the Galilean countryside, shouting to no one in particular:
“I am God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit. But I am coming, for the world
is already in the throes of destruction. And you will soon see me coming with the
power of heaven.”

The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine,
the Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern-day Israel/Palestine
as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Countless prophets, preachers,
and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God’s imminent judgment.
Many of these so-called false messiahs we know by name. A few are even mentioned in
the New Testament. The prophet Theudas, according to the book of Acts, had four hundred
disciples before Rome captured him and cut off
his head. A mysterious charismatic figure known only as “the Egyptian” raised an army
of followers in the desert, nearly all of whom were massacred by Roman troops. In
4
B.C.E
., the year in which most scholars believe Jesus of Nazareth was born, a poor shepherd
named Athronges put a diadem on his head and crowned himself “King of the Jews”; he
and his followers were brutally cut down by a legion of soldiers. Another messianic
aspirant, called simply “the Samaritan,” was crucified by Pontius Pilate even though
he raised no army and in no way challenged Rome—an indication that the authorities,
sensing the apocalyptic fever in the air, had become extremely sensitive to any hint
of sedition. There was Hezekiah the bandit chief, Simon of Peraea, Judas the Galilean,
his grandson Menahem, Simon son of Giora, and Simon son of Kochba—all of whom declared
messianic ambitions and all of whom were executed by Rome for doing so. Add to this
list the Essene sect, some of whose members lived in seclusion atop the dry plateau
of Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea; the first-century Jewish revolutionary
party known as the Zealots, who helped launched a bloody war against Rome; and the
fearsome bandit-assassins whom the Romans dubbed the Sicarii (the Daggermen), and
the picture that emerges of first-century Palestine is of an era awash in messianic
energy.

It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within any of the known religiopolitical
movements of his time. He was a man of profound contradictions, one day preaching
a message of racial exclusion (“I was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel”; Matthew
15:24), the next, of benevolent universalism (“Go and make disciples of all nations”;
Matthew 28:19); sometimes calling for unconditional peace (“Blessed are the peacemakers
for they shall be called the sons of God”; Matthew 5:9), sometimes promoting violence
and conflict (“If you do not have a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one”; Luke 22:36).

The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that, outside of the New Testament,
there is almost no trace of the man
who would so permanently alter the course of human history. The earliest and most
reliable nonbiblical reference to Jesus comes from the first-century Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus (d. 100
C.E
.). In a brief throwaway passage in the
Antiquities
, Josephus writes of a fiendish Jewish high priest named Ananus who, after the death
of the Roman governor Festus, unlawfully condemned a certain “James, the brother of
Jesus, the one they call messiah,” to stoning for transgression of the law. The passage
moves on to relate what happened to Ananus after the new governor, Albinus, finally
arrived in Jerusalem.

Fleeting and dismissive as this allusion may be (the phrase “the one they call messiah”
is clearly meant to express derision), it nevertheless contains enormous significance
for those searching for any sign of the historical Jesus. In a society without surnames,
a common name like James required a specific appellation—a place of birth or a father’s
name—to distinguish it from all the other men named James roaming around Palestine
(hence, Jesus
of Nazareth
). In this case, James’s appellative was provided by his fraternal connection to someone
with whom Josephus assumes his audience would be familiar. The passage proves not
only that “Jesus, the one they call messiah” probably existed, but that by the year
94
C.E
., when the
Antiquities
was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring movement.

It is that movement, not its founder, that receives the attention of second-century
historians like Tacitus (d. 118) and Pliny the Younger (d. 113), both of whom mention
Jesus of Nazareth but reveal little about him, save for his arrest and execution—an
important historical note, as we shall see, but one that sheds little light on the
details of Jesus’s life. We are therefore left with whatever information can be gleaned
from the New Testament.

The first written testimony we have about Jesus of Nazareth comes from the epistles
of Paul, an early follower of Jesus who died sometime around 66
C.E
. (Paul’s first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, can be dated between 48 and 50
C.E
., some two decades after Jesus’s death.)
The trouble with Paul, however, is that he displays an extraordinary lack of interest
in the historical Jesus. Only three scenes from Jesus’s life are ever mentioned in
his epistles: the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–26), the crucifixion (1 Corinthians
2:2), and, most crucially for Paul, the resurrection, without which, he claims, “our
preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Paul may be an
excellent source for those interested in the early formation of Christianity, but
he is a poor guide for uncovering the historical Jesus.

That leaves us with the gospels, which present their own set of problems. To begin
with, with the possible exception of the gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have
were written by the person after whom they are named. That actually is true of most
of the books in the New Testament. Such so-called
pseudepigraphical
works, or works attributed to but not written by a specific author, were extremely
common in the ancient world and should by no means be thought of as forgeries. Naming
a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person’s beliefs or representing
his or her school of thought. Regardless, the gospels are not, nor were they ever
meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness
accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds recorded by people who knew him. They are testimonies
of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events
they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the
man.

The most widely accepted theory on the formation of the gospels, the “Two-Source Theory,”
holds that Mark’s account was written first sometime after 70
C.E
., about four decades after Jesus’s death. Mark had at his disposal a collection of
oral and perhaps a handful of written traditions that had been passed around by Jesus’s
earliest followers for years. By adding a chronological narrative to this jumble of
traditions, Mark created a wholly new literary genre called
gospel
, Greek for “good news.” Yet Mark’s gospel is a short and somewhat unsatisfying one
for many Christians. There is no
infancy narrative; Jesus simply arrives one day on the banks of the Jordan River to
be baptized by John the Baptist. There are no resurrection appearances. Jesus is crucified.
His body is placed in a tomb. A few days later, the tomb is empty. Even the earliest
Christians were left wanting by Mark’s brusque account of Jesus’s life and ministry,
and so it was left to Mark’s successors, Matthew and Luke, to improve upon the original
text.

Two decades after Mark, between 90 and 100
C.E
., the authors of Matthew and Luke, working independently of each other and with Mark’s
manuscript as a template, updated the gospel story by adding their own unique traditions,
including two different and conflicting infancy narratives as well as a series of
elaborate resurrection stories to satisfy their Christian readers. Matthew and Luke
also relied on what must have been an early and fairly well distributed collection
of Jesus’s sayings that scholars have termed
Q
(German for
Quelle
, or “source”). Although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we
can infer its contents by compiling those verses that Matthew and Luke share in common
but that do not appear in Mark.

Together, these three gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—became known as the
Synoptics
(Greek for “viewed together”) because they more or less present a common narrative
and chronology about the life and ministry of Jesus, one that is greatly at odds with
the fourth gospel, John, which was likely written soon after the close of the first
century, between 100 and 120
C.E
.

These, then, are the canonized gospels. But they are not the only gospels. We now
have access to an entire library of noncanonical scriptures written mostly in the
second and third centuries that provides a vastly different perspective on the life
of Jesus of Nazareth. These include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the
Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a host of other so-called Gnostic
writings discovered in Upper Egypt, near the town of Nag Hammadi, in 1945. Though
they were left out of what would ultimately become the New Testament,
these books are significant in that they demonstrate the dramatic divergence of opinion
that existed over who Jesus was and what Jesus meant, even among those who claimed
to walk with him, who shared his bread and ate with him, who heard his words and prayed
with him.

In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon
which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular
Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century
C.E
.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so. By themselves these two facts
cannot provide a complete portrait of the life of a man who lived two thousand years
ago. But when combined with all we know about the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived—and
thanks to the Romans, we know a great deal—these two facts can help paint a picture
of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by
the gospels. Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise—a zealous
revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political
turmoil of first-century Palestine—bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle
shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.

Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively
for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed
in pain—“King of the Jews”—was called a
titulus
and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who
hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being
executed. Jesus’s crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e.,
treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time
was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus
hung men who in Greek are called
lestai
, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but which actually means “bandits”
and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.

Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing the
racked and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone
should cast doubt upon the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace
almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of his time. The notion that
the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom
of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying
revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that
had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.

Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature
of Jesus’s message and movement? To answer this question we must first recognize that
almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth
was composed
after
the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66
C.E
. In that year, a band of Jewish rebels, spurred by their zeal for God, roused their
fellow Jews in revolt. Miraculously, the rebels managed to liberate the Holy Land
from the Roman occupation. For four glorious years, the city of God was once again
under Jewish control. Then, in 70
C.E
., the Romans returned. After a brief siege of Jerusalem, the soldiers breached the
city walls and unleashed an orgy of violence upon its residents. They butchered everyone
in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount. A river of blood flowed down the
cobblestone streets. When the massacre was complete, the soldiers set fire to the
Temple of God. The fires spread beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem’s meadows,
the farms, the olive trees. Everything burned. So complete was the devastation wrought
upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem
had ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were
marched out of the city in chains.