Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (21 page)

After two years, word of Jesus and his band of followers has finally reached Antipas’s
court. Certainly, Jesus has not been shy in condemning “that Fox” who claims the tetrarchy
of Galilee and Peraea, nor has he ceased pouring contempt upon the hypocrite priests
and scribes—the “brood of vipers”—who he claims will be displaced in the coming Kingdom
of God by harlots and toll collectors. Not only has he healed those whom the Temple
cast out as sinners beyond salvation, he has cleansed them of their sins, thus rendering
irrelevant the entire priestly establishment and their costly, exclusivist rituals.
His healings and exorcisms have drawn crowds too large for the tetrarch in Tiberias
to ignore, though, at least for now, the fickle masses seem less interested in Jesus’s
teachings than in his “tricks,” so much so that when they keep asking for a sign so
that they may believe his message, Jesus seems finally to have had enough. “It is
an evil and adulterous generation that seeks a sign; no sign shall be given to it”
(Matthew 12:38).

All of this activity has the sycophants at Antipas’s court chattering about who this
Galilean preacher may be. Some think he is Elijah reborn, or perhaps one of the other
“prophets of old.” That is not a wholly unreasonable conclusion. Elijah, who lived
in the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century
B.C.E
., was the paradigm of the wonder-working prophet. A fearsome and uncompromising warrior
for Yahweh, Elijah strove to root out the
worship of the Canaanite god Baal among the Israelites. “How long will you continue
limping along with two opinions?” Elijah asked the people. “If Yahweh is god, then
follow him; if Baal is god, then follow him” (1 Kings 18:21).

To prove Yahweh’s superiority, Elijah challenged four hundred and fifty priests of
Baal to a contest. They would prepare two altars, each with a bull placed on a pillar
of wood. The priests would pray to Baal for fire to consume the offering, while Elijah
prayed to Yahweh.

Day and night the priests of Baal prayed. They shouted aloud and cut themselves with
swords and lances until they were awash in blood. They cried and begged and pleaded
with Baal to bring down fire, but nothing happened.

Elijah then poured twelve jars of water on his pyre, took a step back, and called
upon the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel to show his might. At once a great ball
of fire fell down from heaven and consumed the bull, the wood, the stones, the dust
on the ground, and the pools of water surrounding the sacrifice. When the Israelites
saw the work of Yahweh, they fell down on their knees and worshipped him as God. But
Elijah was not finished. He seized the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal, forced
them down into the valley of Wadi Kishon, and, according to the scriptures, slaughtered
every last one of them with his own hands, for he was “zealous for the Lord God Almighty”
(1 Kings 18:20–40, 19:10).

So great was Elijah’s faithfulness that he was not allowed to die but was taken up
to heaven in a whirlwind to sit beside God’s throne (2 Kings 2:11). His return at
the end of time, when he would gather together the twelve tribes of Israel and sweep
in the messianic age, was predicted by the prophet Malachi: “Behold, I am sending
the prophet Elijah to you before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He
will turn the hearts of fathers to their sons, and the hearts of sons to their fathers,
lest I come and smite the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:5–6).

Malachi’s prophecy explains why the courtiers at Tiberias see in
Jesus the reincarnation of Israel’s quintessential end-times prophet. Jesus has done
little to discourage such comparisons, consciously taking upon himself the symbols
of the prophet Elijah—the itinerant ministry, the peremptory calling of disciples,
the mission to reconstitute the twelve tribes, the strict focus on the northern regions
of Israel, and the signs and wonders he performs everywhere he goes.

Antipas, however, is unconvinced by the mutterings of his courtiers. He believes that
the preacher from Nazareth is not Elijah but John the Baptist, whom he killed, risen
from the dead. Blinded by guilt over John’s execution, he is incapable of conceiving
Jesus’s true identity (Matthew 14:1–2; Mark 6:14–16; Luke 9:7–9).

Meanwhile, Jesus and his disciples continue their slow journey toward Judea and Jerusalem.
Leaving behind the village of Bethsaida, where, according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus
fed five thousand people with only five loaves of bread and two fish (Mark 6:30–44),
the disciples begin traveling along the outskirts of Caesarea Philippi, a Roman city
north of the Sea of Galilee that serves as the seat of the tetrarchy of Herod the
Great’s other son, Philip. As they walk, Jesus casually asks his followers, “Who do
the people say I am?”

The disciples’ response reflects the speculations at Tiberias: “Some say you are John
the Baptist. Others say Elijah. Still others say you are Jeremiah or one of the other
prophets risen from the dead.”

Jesus stops and turns to his disciples. “But who do
you
say I am?”

It falls upon Simon Peter, the nominal leader of the Twelve, to answer for the rest:
“You are messiah,” Peter says, inferring at this fateful juncture in the gospel story
the mystery that the tetrarch in Tiberias could not possibly comprehend (Matthew 16:13–16;
Mark 8:27–29; Luke 9:18–20).

Six days later, Jesus takes Peter and the brothers James and John—the sons of Zebedee—to
a high mountain, where he is miraculously transformed before their eyes. “His clothes
became dazzling
white, like snow,” Mark writes, “whiter than any fuller on earth could whiten them.”
Suddenly Elijah, the prophet and precursor to the messiah, appears on the mountain.
With him is Moses, the great liberator and lawgiver of Israel, the man who broke the
bonds of the Israelites and shepherded the people of God back to the Promised Land.

Elijah’s presence on the mountain has already been primed by the speculations in Tiberias
and by the ruminations of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi. But Moses’s appearance
is something else entirely. The parallels between the so-called transfiguration story
and the Exodus account of Moses receiving the law on Mount Sinai are hard to miss.
Moses also took three companions with him up the mountain—Aaron, Nadab and Abihu—and
he, too, was physically transformed by the experience. Yet whereas Moses’s transformation
was the result of his coming into contact with God’s glory, Jesus is transformed by
his own glory. Indeed, the scene is written in such a way so that Moses and Elijah—the
Law and the Prophets—are clearly made subordinate to Jesus.

The disciples are terrified by the vision, and rightly so. Peter tries to ease the
disquiet by offering to build three tabernacles at the site: one for Jesus, one for
Elijah, and one for Moses. As he speaks, a cloud consumes the mountain—just as it
did centuries ago on Mount Sinai—and a voice from within echoes the words that were
uttered from on high the day that Jesus began his ministry at the Jordan River: “This
is my son. The Beloved. Listen to him,” God says, bestowing upon Jesus the same sobriquet
(
ho Agapitos
, “the Beloved”) that God had given to King David. Thus, what Antipas’s court could
not conceive, and Simon Peter could only surmise, is now divinely confirmed in a voice
from a cloud atop a mountain: Jesus of Nazareth is the anointed messiah, the King
of the Jews (Matthew 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36).

What makes these three clearly interconnected scenes so significant is that up to
this point in Jesus’s ministry, particularly as it has been presented in the earliest
gospel, Mark, Jesus has made no
statement whatsoever about his messianic identity. In fact, he has repeatedly tried
to conceal whatever messianic aspirations he may or may not have had. He silences
the demons that recognize him (Mark 1:23–25, 34, 3:11–12). He swears those he heals
to secrecy (Mark 1:43–45, 5:40–43, 7:32–36, 8:22–26). He veils himself in incomprehensible
parables and goes out of his way to obscure his identity and mission from the crowds
that gather around him (Mark 7:24). Over and over again Jesus rebuffs, avoids, eludes,
and sometimes downright rejects the title of messiah bestowed upon him by others.

There is a term for this strange phenomenon, which has its origins in the gospel of
Mark but which can be traced throughout the gospels. It is called the “messianic secret.”

Some believe that the messianic secret is the evangelist’s own invention, that it
is either a literary device to slowly reveal Jesus’s true identity or a clever ploy
to emphasize just how wondrous and compelling Jesus’s messianic presence was; despite
his many attempts to hide his identity from the crowds, it simply could not be concealed.
“The more he ordered them [not to tell anyone about him],” Mark writes, “the more
excessively they proclaimed it” (Mark 7:36).

Yet that assumes a level of literary skill in the gospel of Mark for which no evidence
exists (Mark’s gospel is written in a coarse, elementary Greek that betrays the author’s
limited education). The notion that the messianic secret may have been Mark’s way
of slowly revealing Jesus’s identity belies the fundamental theological assertion
that launches the gospel in the first place: “This is the beginning of the good news
of Jesus
the Christ
” (Mark 1:1). Regardless, even at the moment in which Jesus’s messianic identity is
first surmised by Simon Peter in his dramatic confession outside Caesarea Philippi—indeed,
even when his identity is spectacularly revealed by God upon the mountaintop—Jesus
still commands his disciples to secrecy, sternly ordering them not to tell anyone
what
Peter confessed (Mark 8:30), and forbidding the three witnesses to his transfiguration
to utter a word about what they saw (Mark 9:9).

It is more likely that the messianic secret can be traced to the historical Jesus,
though it may have been embellished and reconstructed in Mark’s gospel before being
adopted haphazardly and with obvious reservations by Matthew and Luke. That the messianic
secret may be historical helps explain why Mark’s redactors went to such lengths to
compensate for their predecessor’s portrayal of a messiah who seems to want nothing
to do with the title. For example, while Mark’s account of Simon Peter’s confession
ends with Jesus neither accepting nor rejecting the title but simply ordering the
disciples “not to tell anyone about him,” Matthew’s account of the same story, which
took shape twenty years later, has Jesus responding to Peter with a resounding confirmation
of his messianic identity: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!” Jesus exclaims.
“Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you; it was my father in heaven who did so”
(Matthew 16:17).

In Mark, the miraculous moment on the mountaintop ends without comment from Jesus,
only a firm reminder not to tell anyone what had happened. But in Matthew, the transfiguration
ends with a lengthy discourse by Jesus in which he identifies John the Baptist as
Elijah reborn, thereby explicitly claiming for himself, as the successor to John/Elijah,
the mantle of the messiah (Matthew 17:9–13). And yet, despite these apologetic elaborations,
even Matthew and Luke conclude both Peter’s confession and the transfiguration with
strict commands by Jesus to, in Matthew’s words, “not tell anyone that
he was the messiah
” (Matthew 16:20).

If it is true that the messianic secret can be traced to the historical Jesus, then
it could very well be the key to unlocking, not who the early church thought Jesus
was, but who Jesus himself thought he was. Admittedly, this is no easy task. It is
extremely difficult, if not impossible, to rely on the gospels to access Jesus’s self-consciousness.
As has been repeatedly noted, the gospels are not
about a man known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived two thousand years ago; they are
about a messiah whom the gospel writers viewed as an eternal being sitting at the
right hand of God. The firstcentury Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up
their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about
the nature and function of Jesus
as Christ
, not composing a historical biography about a human being.

Still, there is no mistaking the tension that exists in the gospels between how the
early church viewed Jesus and how Jesus seems to view himself. Obviously, the disciples
who followed Jesus recognized him as messiah, either during his lifetime or immediately
after his death. But one should not forget that messianic expectations were by no
means uniformly defined in first-century Palestine. Even those Jews who agreed that
Jesus was the messiah did not agree about what being the messiah actually meant. When
they scoured the smattering of prophecies in the scriptures, they discovered a confusing,
often contradictory, array of views and opinions about the messiah’s mission and identity.
He would be an eschatological prophet who will usher in the End of Days (Daniel 7:13–14;
Jeremiah 31:31–34). He would be a liberator who will release the Jews from bondage
(Deuteronomy 18:15–19; Isaiah 49:1–7). He would be a royal claimant who will recreate
the Kingdom of David (Micah 5:1–5; Zechariah 9:1–10).

In first-century Palestine, nearly every claimant to the mantle of the messiah neatly
fit one of these messianic paradigms. Hezekiah the bandit chief, Judas the Galilean,
Simon of Peraea, and Athronges the shepherd all modeled themselves after the Davidic
ideal, as did Menahem and Simon son of Giora during the Jewish War. These were king-messiahs
whose royal aspirations were clearly defined in their revolutionary actions against
Rome and its clients in Jerusalem. Others, such as Theudas the wonder worker, the
Egyptian, and the Samaritan cast themselves as liberator-messiahs in the mold of Moses,
each would-be messiah promising to free his followers from the yoke of Roman occupation
through some miraculous
deed. Oracular prophets such as John the Baptist and the holy man Jesus ben Ananias
may not have overtly assumed any messianic ambitions, but their prophecies about the
End Times and the coming judgment of God clearly conformed to the prophet-messiah
archetype one finds both in the Hebrew Scripture and in the rabbinic traditions and
commentaries known as the Targum.