Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (3 page)

The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic event is hard
to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to live as outcasts
among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the second century gradually and
deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched
the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish
life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged.

The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal
that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because it allowed the early church
to ward off the wrath of a deeply vengeful Rome, but also because, with the Jewish
religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s
evangelism. Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary
Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly
matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries
later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish
preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize
as orthodox Christianity was born.

This book is an attempt to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the
Jesus
before
Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary who, two thousand years
ago, walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement
with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after
a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested
and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. It is also about how, in the aftermath
of Jesus’s failure to establish God’s reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted
not only Jesus’s mission and identity, but also the very nature and definition of
the Jewish messiah.

There are those who consider such an endeavor to be a waste of time, believing the
Jesus of history to be irrevocably lost and incapable of recovery. Long gone are the
heady days of “the quest for the historical Jesus,” when scholars confidently proclaimed
that modern scientific tools and historical research would allow us to uncover Jesus’s
true identity. The
real
Jesus no longer matters, these
scholars argue. We should focus instead on the only Jesus that is accessible to us:
Jesus
the Christ
.

Granted, writing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth is not like writing a biography
of Napoleon Bonaparte. The task is somewhat akin to putting together a massive puzzle
with only a few of the pieces in hand; one has no choice but to fill in the rest of
the puzzle based on the best, most educated guess of what the completed image should
look like. The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest
for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the
Jesus they want to see. Too often they see
themselves
—their own reflection—in the image of Jesus they have constructed.

And yet that best, most educated guess may be enough to, at the very least, question
our most basic assumptions about Jesus of Nazareth. If we expose the claims of the
gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures of their literary
and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate picture of the Jesus of history.
Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political
context of the era in which he lived—an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against
Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism—then, in some
ways, his biography writes itself.

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly
will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end,
he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means.

Everything else is a matter of faith.

PART I

Arise! Arise!

Put on your strength, O Zion!

Put on your beautiful garments, Jerusalem, the holy city;

for the uncircumcised and the unclean

shall never again enter you
.

Shake off the dust from yourself, stand up
,

O captive Jerusalem;

release the bonds from your neck
,

O captive daughter of Zion
.

I
SAIAH 52:1–2

A Different Sort of Sacrifice

The war with Rome begins not with a clang of swords but with the lick of a dagger
drawn from an assassin’s cloak.

Festival season in Jerusalem: a time when Jews from across the Mediterranean converge
upon the holy city bearing fragrant offerings to God. There are in the ancient Jewish
cult a host of annual observances and celebrations that can only be performed here,
inside the Temple of Jerusalem, in the presence of the high priest, who hoards the
most sacred feast days—Passover, Pentecost, the harvest festival of Sukkot—for himself,
all the while pocketing a healthy fee, or
tithe
, as he would call it, for his trouble. And what trouble it is! On such days the city’s
population can swell to more than a million people. It takes the full force of the
porters and lower priests to squeeze the crush of pilgrims through the Hulda Gates
at the Temple’s southern wall, to herd them along the dark and cavernous galleries
beneath the Temple plaza and guide them up the double flight of stairs that lead to
the public square and marketplace known as the Court of Gentiles.

The Temple of Jerusalem is a roughly rectangular structure, some five hundred meters
long and three hundred meters wide, balanced atop Mount Moriah, on the eastern edge
of the holy city.
Its outer walls are rimmed with covered porticos whose slab-topped roofs, held up
by row after row of glittering white stone columns, protect the masses from the merciless
sun. On the Temple’s southern flank sits the largest and most ornate of the porticoes,
the Royal Portico—a tall, two-story, basilica-like assembly hall built in the customary
Roman style. This is the administrative quarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme religious
body and highest judicial court of the Jewish nation. It is also where a clatter of
merchants and grubby money changers lie in wait as you make your way up the underground
stairs and onto the spacious sunlit plaza.

The money changers play a vital role in the Temple. For a fee, they will exchange
your foul foreign coins for the Hebrew shekel, the only currency permitted by the
Temple authorities. The money changers will also collect the half-shekel Temple tax
that all adult males must pay to preserve the pomp and spectacle of all you see around
you: the mountains of burning incense and the ceaseless sacrifices, the wine libations
and the first-fruits offering, the Levite choir belting out psalms of praise and the
accompanying orchestra thrumming lyres and banging cymbals. Someone must pay for these
necessities. Someone must bear the cost of the burnt offerings that so please the
Lord.

With the new currency in hand, you are now free to peruse the pens lining the periphery
walls to purchase your sacrifice: a pigeon, a sheep—it depends on the depth of your
purse, or the depth of your sins. If the latter transcends the former, do not despair.
The money changers are happy to offer the credit you need to enhance your sacrifice.
There is a strict legal code regulating the animals that can be purchased for the
blessed occasion. They must be free of blemish. Domesticated, not wild. They cannot
be beasts of burden. Whether ox or bull or ram or sheep, they must have been reared
for this purpose alone. They are not cheap. Why should they be? The sacrifice is the
Temple’s primary purpose. It is the very reason for the Temple’s being. The songs,
the prayers, the readings—every ritual that takes place here arose in service of this
singular and most vital ritual. The blood libation not only wipes away your sins,
it cleanses the earth. It feeds the earth, renewing and sustaining it, protecting
us all from drought or famine or worse. The cycle of life and death that the Lord
in his omnificence has decreed is wholly dependent upon your sacrifice. This is not
the time for thrift.

So purchase your offering, and make it a good one. Pass it on to any of the white-robed
priests roaming the Temple plaza. They are the descendants of Aaron, the brother of
Moses, responsible for maintaining the Temple’s daily rites: the burning of incense,
the lighting of lamps, the sounding of trumpets, and, of course, the sacrificial offerings.
The priesthood is a hereditary position, but there is no shortage of them, certainly
not during festival season, when they arrive in droves from distant lands to assist
in the festivities. They cram the Temple in twenty-four-hour shifts to ensure that
the fires of sacrifice are kept aflame day and night.

The Temple is constructed as a series of tiered courtyards, each smaller, more elevated,
and more restrictive than the last. The outermost courtyard, the Court of Gentiles,
where you purchased your sacrifice, is a broad piazza open to everyone, regardless
of race or religion. If you are a Jew—one free of any physical affliction (no lepers,
no paralytics) and properly purified by a ritual bath—you may follow the priest with
your offering through a stone-lattice fence and proceed into the next courtyard, the
Court of Women (a plaque on the fence warns all others to proceed no farther than
the outer court on pain of death). Here is where the wood and oil for the sacrifices
are stored. It is also the farthest into the Temple that any Jewish woman may proceed;
Jewish men may continue up a small semicircular flight of stairs through the Nicanor
Gate and into the Court of Israelites.