Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (36 page)

For more on Sepphoris, see the relevant entry by Z. Weiss in
The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land
, ed. Ephraim Stern (New York: Simon and Schuster; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society,
1993), 1324–28. For Sepphoris as a major commercial center in Galilee, see Arlene
Fradkin, “Long-Distance Trade in the Lower Galilee: New Evidence from Sepphoris,”
in
Archaeology and the Galilee
, Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough, eds. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997),
107–16. There is some debate as to whether the
miqva’ot
(ritual baths) discovered in Sepphoris were actually ritual baths; Hanan Eshel at
Bar Ilan is among those who do not think they were. See “A Note on ‘Miqvaot’ at Sepphoris,”
Archaeology and the Galilee
, 131–33. See also Eric Meyers, “Sepphoris: City of Peace,” in
The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology
, ed. Andrea M. Berlin and Andrew J. Overman (London: Routledge, 2002), 110–20. I
actually find Eshel’s argument quite convincing, though the majority of scholars and
archaeologists do not.

There is no way to be certain of the exact date of Antipas’s declaration and rebuilding
of Sepphoris as his royal seat. Eric Meyer says that Antipas moved to Sepphoris almost
immediately after the Romans razed the city in 6
B.C.E.;
see Eric M. Meyers, Ehud Netzer, and Carol L. Meyers, “Ornament of All Galilee,”
The Biblical Archeologist
, 49.1 (1986): 4–19. However, Shirley Jackson Case places the date much later, at
around 10
C.E.
, in “Jesus and Sepphoris,”
Journal of Biblical Literature
45 (1926): 14–22. For better or worse, the closest we can place Antipas’s
entry into Sepphoris is around the turn of the first century. It should be noted that
Antipas renamed the city
Autocratoris
, or “Imperial City,” after he made it the seat of his tetrarchy.

For more on Jesus’s life in Sepphoris, see Richard A. Batey,
Jesus and the Forgotten City: New Light on Sepphoris and the Urban World of Jesus
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1991). Archaeological work by Eric Meyers
has cast some doubt on the widely held notion that the city was razed by Varus, as
Josephus claims in
War
2:68. See “Roman Sepphoris in the Light of New Archeological Evidence and Research,”
The Galilee in Late Antiquity
, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 323.

Although it seems that Judas was actually from the town of Gamala in the Golan, he
was nevertheless known to all as “Judas the Galilean.” There is a great deal of debate
about the relationship between Hezekiah and Judas the Galilean, and while it cannot
be definitively proven that Judas the Galilean was the same person as Judas the bandit
who was Hezekiah’s son, that is certainly the assumption that Josephus makes (twice!),
and I do not see a reason to doubt him. See
War
2.56 and
Antiquities
17.271–72. For more on Judas’s genealogical connection to Hezekiah, see the relevant
entry in Geza Vermes,
Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 165–67; also J. Kennard, “Judas the Galilean and His Clan,”
Jewish Quarterly Review
36 (1946): 281–86. For the opposing view, see Richard A. Horsley, “Menahem in Jerusalem:
A Brief Messianic Episode Among the Sicarii—Not ‘Zealot Messianism,’ ”
Novum Testamentum
27.4 (1985): 334–48. On Judas the Galilean’s innovation and his effect on the revolutionary
groups that would follow, see Morton Smith, “The Zealots and the Sicarii,”
Harvard Theological Review
64 (1971): 1–19.

The biblical concept of zeal is best defined as “jealous anger,” and it is derived
from the divine character of God, whom the Bible calls “a devouring fire, a jealous
God” (Deuteronomy 4:24). The most celebrated model of biblical zeal is Phinehas, the
grandson of Aaron (Moses’s brother), whose example of spontaneous individual action
as an expression of God’s jealous anger and as atonement for the sins of the Jewish
nation became the model of personal righteousness in the Bible (Numbers 25). See my
How to Win a Cosmic War
, 70–72. Also see relevant entry in
The Anchor Bible Dictionary
, 1043–54.

Once again, Richard Horsley rejects the proposition that Judas the Galilean had messianic
aspirations. But his rejection is based on two assumptions: first, that Judas the
Galilean is not descended from Hezekiah the bandit chief, which we have already questioned
above; and second, that Josephus does not directly call Judas “king” or “messiah”
but instead calls him “sophist,” a term with no messianic connotations. See
Menahem in Jerusalem
, 342–43. However, Josephus clearly derides Judas for what he calls his “royal aspirations.”
What else could this mean but that Judas had messianic (i.e., kingly) ambitions? What’s
more, Josephus
uses the same term, “sophist,” to describe both Mattathias (
Antiquities
17.6), who was overtly connected to messianic aspirations during the Maccabean revolt,
and Menahem (
Jewish War
2.433–48), whose messianic pretensions are not in dispute. On this point I agree
with Martin Hengel when he writes that “a dynasty of leaders proceeded from Judas
[of Galilee], among whom messianic pretension became evident at least in one, Menahem,
allows one to surmise that the ‘Fourth Sect’ had a messianic foundation already in
its founder.” See
The Zealots
(London: T&T Clark, 2000), 299. However, I disagree with Hengel that the members
of the Fourth Philosophy can be adequately labeled Zealots. Rather, I contend that
they preached zealotry as a biblical doctrine demanding the removal of foreign elements
from the Holy Land, which is why I use the term “zealot,” with a lowercase z, to describe
them. For more on Josephus’s use of the term “sophist,” see note 71 in Whiston’s translation
of
The Jewish War
, book 2, chapter 1, section 3.

There is very little historical evidence about the life of Pontius Pilate before his
tenure as prefect in Jerusalem, but Ann Wroe has written an interesting account titled
Pontius Pilate
(New York: Random House, 1999), which, while not a scholarly book, is definitely
a fun read. With regard to the difference between a Roman prefect and a procurator,
the short answer is that there was none, at least not in a small and fairly insignificant
province like Judea. Josephus calls Pilate a procurator in the
Antiquities
18.5.6, whereas Philo refers to him as prefect. The terms were probably interchangeable
at the time. I have chosen to simply use the term “governor” to mean both prefect
and procurator.

For more on Pilate’s introduction of the shields into the Temple of Jerusalem, I recommend
G. Fuks, “Again on the Episode of the Gilded Roman Shields at Jerusalem,”
Harvard Theological Review
75 (1982): 503–7, and P. S. Davies, “The Meaning of Philo’s Text About the Gilded
Shields,”
Journal of Theological Studies
37 (1986): 109–14.

A great deal has been written about the reasons why the Jews rebelled against Rome.
No doubt there was a combination of social, economic, political, and religious grievances
that ultimately led to the Jewish War, but David Rhoads outlines six principal causes
in his book
Israel in Revolution: 6–74
C.E
. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976): (1) the Jews were defending the Law of God;
(2) the Jews believed God would lead them to victory; (3) the Jews wanted to rid the
holy land of foreigners and gentiles; (4) the Jews were trying to defend God’s city,
Jerusalem, from desecration; (5) the Jews wanted to cleanse the Temple; and (6) the
Jews hoped it would usher in the end time and the coming of the messiah. However,
some scholars (and I include myself in this category) emphasize
the eschatological motivations of the Jews over these other reasons. See for example
A. J. Tomasino, “Oracles of Insurrection: The Prophetic Catalyst of the Great Revolt,”
Journal of Jewish Studies
59 (2008): 86–111. Others caution about putting too much weight on the role that
apocalyptic fervor played in stirring the Jews to revolt. See for instance Tessa Rajak,
“Jewish Millenarian Expectations,”
The First Jewish Revolt
, ed. Andrea M. Berlin and J. Andrew Overman (New York: Routledge, 2002), 164–88.
Rajak writes: “Expectation of an imminent End … was not the normal mindset of first-century
Judaism.” However, I think the evidence to the contrary far outweighs this view, as
the link between messianism and the Jewish Revolt could not be clearer in Josephus’s
account of the Jewish War.

Concerning the list of messianic aspirants that arose in the buildup to the Jewish
War, P. W. Barnett suggests that the fact that Josephus fails to call these messianic
figures
baselius
, or “king” (with the exception of “the Egyptian”), proves that they thought of themselves
not as messiahs but rather as “sign prophets.” But Barnett notes that even these sign
prophets “anticipated some great act of eschatological redemption,” which, after all,
is the inherent right of the messiah. See P. W. Barnett, “The Jewish Sign Prophets,”
New Testament Studies
27 (1980): 679–97. James S. McLaren tries (and, in my opinion, fails) to avoid relying
too much on the idea that the Jews expected “divine assistance” to defeat the Romans
or that they were fueled by messianic fervor, by claiming that the Jews “were simply
optimistic that they would succeed,” in the same way that, say, the Germans were optimistic
that they would defeat Britain. Yet what else did “optimism” mean in first-century
Palestine but confidence in God? See “Going to War Against Rome: The Motivation of
the Jewish Rebels,” in
The Jewish Revolt Against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
, ed. M. Popovic,
Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism
154 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 129–53.

It should be noted that while “the Samaritan” called himself “messiah,” he did not
mean it exactly in the Jewish sense of the word. The Samaritan equivalent of “messiah”
is
Taheb
. However, the Taheb was directly related to the messiah. In fact, the words were
synonymous, as evidenced by the Samaritan woman in the gospel of John who tells Jesus,
“I know that the messiah is coming. When he will come, he will show us all things”
(John 4:25).

Josephus is the first to use the Latin word “Sicarii” (Josephus,
Jewish War
2.254–55), though it is obvious he borrows the term from the Romans. The word “Sicarii”
appears in Acts 21:38 in reference to the “false prophet” known as “the Egyptian,”
for whom Paul is mistaken. Acts claims the Egyptian had four thousand followers, which
is a more likely figure than the thirty thousand that Josephus claims in
Jewish War
2.247–70 (though in
Antiquities
20.171, Josephus provides a much smaller number).

Although Josephus describes the Sicarii as “a different type of bandit,” he
uses the words “Sicarii” and “bandits” interchangeably throughout
The Jewish War
. In fact, at times he uses the term “Sicarii” to describe groups of bandits who do
not use daggers as weapons. It is likely that his reason for differentiating the Sicarii
from “the other bandits” was to keep all the various bandit gangs distinct for narrative’s
sake, though a case can be made that after the rise of Menahem in the first year of
the war, the Sicarii became a recognizably separate group—the same group that seized
control of Masada. See Shimon Applebaum, “The Zealots: The Case for Revaluation,”
Journal of Roman Studies
61 (1971): 155–70. In my opinion, the best and most up-to-date study of the Sicarii
is Mark Andrew Brighton,
The Sicarii in Josephus’s Judean War: Rhetorical Analysis and Historical Observations
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Scholarship, 2009).

Other views on the Sicarii include Emil Schurer,
A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ
, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890), for whom the Sicarii are a fanatical offshoot
of the Zealot Party; Martin Hengel,
The Zealots
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), who disagrees with Schurer, arguing that the Sicarii
were just an ultra-violent subgroup of the bandits; Solomon Zeitlin, “Zealots and
Sicarii,”
Journal of Biblical Literature
81 (1962): 395–98, who believes the Sicarii and the Zealots were two distinct and
“mutually hostile” groups; Richard A. Horsley, “Josephus and the Bandits,”
Journal for the Study of Judaism
10 (1979): 37–63, for whom the Sicarii are just a localized phenomenon, part of the
larger movement of “social banditry” that was rife in the Judean countryside; and
Morton Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii: Their Origins and Relation,”
Harvard Theological Review
64 (1971): 7–31, whose view that labels such as Sicarii and Zealot were not static
designations but rather indicated a generalized and widespread yearning for the biblical
doctrine of zeal is wholeheartedly adopted in this book.

In the
Antiquities
, written some time after
The Jewish War
, Josephus suggests that it was the Roman proconsul Felix who spurred the Sicarii
to murder the high priest Jonathan for his own political purposes. Some scholars,
most notably Martin Goodman,
The Ruling Class of Judea
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), continue to argue this point, viewing
the Sicarii as little more than hired assassins or mercenaries. This is unlikely.
First of all, the explanation given in the
Antiquities
contradicts Josephus’s earlier, and likely more reliable, account in
The Jewish War
, which makes no mention of Felix’s hand in the assassination of Jonathan. In fact,
the description of Jonathan’s murder in the
Antiquities
fails to mention the role of the Sicarii at all. Instead, the text refers to assassins
generally as “bandits” (
lestai
). In any case, the account of Jonathan’s murder in
The Jewish War
is written deliberately to emphasize the ideological/religious motivations of the
Sicarii (hence their slogan “No lord but God!”), and as a prelude to the much more
significant murders of the high priest Ananus ben Ananus (62
C.E.
) and Jesus ben Gamaliel (63–64
C.E.
), which ultimately launch the war with Rome.