Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (25 page)

If one knew nothing else about Jesus of Nazareth save that he was crucified by Rome,
one would know practically all that was needed to uncover who he was, what he was,
and why he ended
up nailed to a cross. His offense, in the eyes of Rome, is self-evident. It was etched
upon a plaque and placed above his head for all to see:
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
. His crime was daring to assume kingly ambitions.

The gospels testify that Jesus was crucified alongside other
lestai
, or bandits: revolutionaries, just like him. Luke, obviously uncomfortable with the
implications of the term, changes
lestai
to
kakourgoi
, or “evildoers.” But try as he might, Luke cannot avoid the most basic fact about
his messiah: Jesus was executed by the Roman state for the crime of sedition. Everything
else about the last days of Jesus of Nazareth must be interpreted through this singular,
stubborn fact.

So, then, one can dismiss the theatrical trial before Pilate as pure fantasy for all
the reasons stated above. If Jesus did in fact appear before Pilate, it would have
been brief and, for Pilate, utterly forgettable. The governor may not have bothered
to look up from his logbook long enough to register Jesus’s face, let alone engage
in a lengthy conversation with him about the meaning of truth.

He would have asked his one question: “Are you the King of the Jews?” He would have
registered Jesus’s answer. He would have logged the crime. And he would have sent
Jesus on his way to join the countless others dying or already dead up on Golgotha.

Even the earlier trial before the Sanhedrin must be reexamined in the light of the
cross. The story of that trial, as it is presented in the gospels, is full of contradictions
and inconsistencies, but the general outline is as follows: Jesus is arrested at night,
on the eve of the Sabbath, during the festival of Passover. He is brought under cover
of darkness to the courtyard of the high priest, where the members of the Sanhedrin
await him. At once, a group of witnesses appear and testify that Jesus has made threats
against the Temple of Jerusalem. When Jesus refuses to answer these accusations, the
high priest asks him directly whether he is the messiah. Jesus’s answer varies in
all four gospels, but it always includes a declaration of himself as the Son of Man.
The declaration infuriates
the high priest, who immediately charges Jesus with blasphemy, the punishment for
which is death. The next morning, the Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate to be crucified.

The problems with this scene are too numerous to count. The trial before the Sanhedrin
violates nearly every requirement laid down by Jewish law for a legal proceeding.
The Mishnah is adamant on this subject. The Sanhedrin is not permitted to meet at
night. It is not permitted to meet during Passover. It is not permitted to meet on
the eve of the Sabbath. It is certainly not permitted to meet so casually in the courtyard
(
aule
) of the high priest, as Matthew and Mark claim. And it must begin with a detailed
list of why the accused is innocent before any witnesses are allowed to come forth.
The argument that the trial rules laid down by the rabbis in the Mishnah did not apply
in the the thirties, when Jesus was tried, falls flat when one remembers that the
gospels were also not written in the thirties. The social, religious, and political
context for the narrative of Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin was post–70
C.E
. rabbinic Judaism: the era of the Mishnah. At the very least, what these flagrant
inaccuracies demonstrate is the evangelists’ extremely poor grasp of Jewish law and
Sanhedrin practice. That alone should cast doubt on the historicity of the trial before
Caiaphas.

Even if one excuses all of the above violations, the most troublesome aspect of the
Sanhedrin trial is its verdict. If the high priest did in fact question Jesus about
his messianic ambitions, and if Jesus’s answer did signify blasphemy, then the Torah
could not be clearer about the punishment: “The one who blasphemes the name of the
Lord shall surely be put to death:
the congregation shall stone him to death
” (Leviticus 24:16). That is the punishment inflicted upon Stephen for his blasphemy
when he calls Jesus the Son of Man (Acts 7:1–60). Stephen is not transferred to Roman
authorities to answer for his crime; he is stoned to death on the spot. It may be
true that under the Roman imperium, the Jews did not have the authority to execute
criminals (though that did not stop
them from killing Stephen). But one cannot lose sight of the fundamental fact with
which we began: Jesus is not stoned to death by the Jews for blasphemy; he is crucified
by Rome for sedition.

Just as there may be a kernel of truth in the story of Jesus’s trial before Pilate,
there may also be a kernel of truth in the story of the Sanhedrin trial. The Jewish
authorities arrested Jesus because they viewed him both as a threat to their control
of the Temple and as a menace to the social order of Jerusalem, which under their
agreement with Rome they were responsible for maintaining. Because the Jewish authorities
technically had no jurisdiction in capital cases, they handed Jesus over to the Romans
to answer for his seditious teachings. The personal relationship between Pilate and
Caiaphas may have facilitated the transfer, but the Roman authorities surely needed
little convincing to put yet another Jewish insurrectionist to death. Pilate dealt
with Jesus the way he dealt with all threats to the social order: he sent him to the
cross. No trial was held. No trial was necessary. It was Passover, after all, always
a time of heightened tensions in Jerusalem. The city was bursting at its seams with
pilgrims. Any hint of trouble had to be immediately addressed. And whatever else Jesus
may have been, he was certainly trouble.

With his crime recorded in Pilate’s logbook, Jesus would have been led out of the
Antonia Fortress and taken to the courtyard, where he would be stripped naked, tied
to a stake, and savagely scourged, as was the custom for all those sentenced to the
cross. The Romans would then have placed a crossbeam behind the nape of his neck and
hooked his arms back over it—again, as was the custom—so that the messiah who had
promised to remove the yoke of occupation from the necks of the Jews would himself
be yoked like an animal led to slaughter.

As with all those condemned to crucifixion, Jesus would have been forced to carry
the crossbeam himself to a hill situated outside the walls of Jerusalem, directly
on the road leading into the city gates—perhaps the same road he had used a few days
earlier to
enter the city as its rightful king. This way, every pilgrim entering Jerusalem for
the holy festivities would have no choice but to bear witness to his suffering, to
be reminded of what happens to those who defy the rule of Rome. The crossbeam would
be attached to a scaffold or post, and Jesus’s wrists and ankles would be nailed to
the structure with three iron spikes. A heave, and the cross would be lifted to the
vertical. Death would not have taken long. In a few short hours, Jesus’s lungs would
have tired, and breathing become impossible to sustain.

That is how, on a bald hill covered in crosses, beset by the cries and moans of agony
from hundreds of dying criminals, as a murder of crows circled eagerly over his head
waiting for him to breathe his last, the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth would
have met the same ignominious end as every other messiah who came before or after
him.

Except that unlike those other messiahs, this one would not be forgotten.

PART III

Blow a trumpet in Zion;

raise a shout on my holy mountain!

Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble
,

for the day of the Lord is coming
,

it is near;

a day of darkness and gloom
,

a day of clouds and thick darkness
.

J
OEL 2:1–2

God Made Flesh

Stephen—he who was stoned to death by an angry mob of Jews for blasphemy—was the first
of Jesus’s followers to be killed after the crucifixion, though he would not be the
last. It is curious that the first man martyred for calling Jesus “Christ” did not
himself know Jesus of Nazareth. Stephen was not a disciple, after all. He never met
the Galilean peasant and day laborer who claimed the throne of the Kingdom of God.
He did not walk with Jesus or talk to him. He was not part of the ecstatic crowd that
welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as its rightful ruler. He took no part in the disturbance
at the Temple. He was not there when Jesus was arrested and charged with sedition.
He did not watch Jesus die.

Stephen did not hear about Jesus of Nazareth until after his crucifixion. A Greek-speaking
Jew who lived in one of the many Hellenistic provinces outside the Holy Land, Stephen
had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, along with thousands of other Diaspora Jews just
like him. He was probably presenting his sacrifice to the Temple priests when he spied
a band of mostly Galilean farmers and fishermen wandering about the Court of Gentiles,
preaching about a simple Nazarean whom they called messiah.

By itself, such a spectacle would not have been unusual in Jerusalem,
certainly not during the festivals and feast days, when Jews from all over the Roman
Empire flocked to the sacred city to make their Temple offerings. Jerusalem was the
center of spiritual activity for the Jews, the cultic heart of the Jewish nation.
Every sectarian, every fanatic, every zealot, messiah, and self-proclaimed prophet,
eventually made his way to Jerusalem to missionize or admonish, to offer God’s mercy
or warn of God’s wrath. The festivals in particular were an ideal time for these schismatics
to reach as wide and international an audience as possible.

So when Stephen saw the gaggle of hirsute men and ragged women huddled beneath a portico
in the Temple’s outer court—simple provincials who had sold their possessions and
given the proceeds to the poor; who held all things in common and owned nothing themselves
save their tunics and sandals—he probably did not pay much attention at first. He
may have pricked up his ears at the suggestion that these particular schismatics followed
a messiah who had already been killed (crucified, no less!). He may have been astonished
to learn that, despite the unalterable fact that Jesus’s death
by definition
disqualified him as liberator of Israel, his followers still called him messiah.
But even that would not have been completely unheard of in Jerusalem. Were not John
the Baptist’s followers still preaching about their late master, still baptizing Jews
in his name?

What truly would have caught Stephen’s attention was the staggering claim by these
Jews that, unlike every other criminal crucified by Rome, their messiah was not left
on the cross for his bones to be picked clean by the greedy birds Stephen had seen
circling above Golgotha when he entered the gates of Jerusalem. No, the corpse of
this particular peasant—this Jesus of Nazareth—had been brought down from the cross
and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest of men in Judea.
More remarkable still, his followers claimed that three days after their messiah had
been placed in the rich man’s tomb, he came back to life. God raised him up again,
freed him from death’s grip. The spokesman
of the group, a fisherman from Capernaum called Simon Peter, swore that he witnessed
this resurrection with his own eyes, as did many others among them.

To be clear, this was not the resurrection of the dead that the Pharisees expected
at the end of days and the Sadducees denied. This was not the gravestones cracking
open and the earth coughing up the buried masses, as the prophet Isaiah had envisioned
(Isaiah 26:19). This had nothing to do with the rebirth of the “House of Israel” foretold
by the prophet Ezekiel, wherein God breathes new life into the dry bones of the nation
(Ezekiel 37). This was a lone individual, dead and buried in rock for days, suddenly
rising up and walking out of his tomb of his own accord, not as a spirit or ghost,
but as a man of flesh and blood.