Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (37 page)

Tacitus’s quote about Felix comes from Geza Vermes,
Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus
(London: Penguin, 2005), 89. Josephus’s quote about every man hourly expecting death
is from
The Jewish War
7.253.

Rome actually assigned one more procurator to succeed Gessius Florus: Marcus Antonius
Julianus. But that was during the years of the Jewish Revolt, and he never seems to
have set foot in Jerusalem.

Agrippa’s speech is from
The Jewish War
2.355–78. As moving as the speech may be, it is obviously Josephus’s own creation.

For more on the history of Masada and its changes under Herod, see Solomon Zeitlin,
“Masada and the Sicarii,”
Jewish Quarterly Review
55.4 (1965): 299–317.

Josephus seems to deliberately avoid using the word “messiah” to refer to Menahem,
but in describing Menahem’s posturing as a popularly recognized “anointed king,” he
is no doubt describing phenomena that, according to Richard Horsley, “can be understood
as concrete examples of popular ‘messiahs’ and their movements.” Horsley, “Menahem
in Jerusalem,” 340.

For some great examples of the coins struck by the victorious Jewish rebels, see Ya’akov
Meshorer,
Treasury of Jewish Coins from the Persian Period to Bar Kokhba
(Jerusalem and Nyack, N.Y.: Amphora Books, 2001).

The speech of the Sicarii leader was made by Eleazar ben Yair and can be found in
Josephus,
The Jewish War
7.335. Tacitus’s description of the era in Rome being “rich in disasters” comes from
Goodman,
Rome and Jerusalem
, 430.

The Zealot Party was led by a revolutionary priest named Eleazar son of Simon. Some
scholars argue that this Eleazar was the same Eleazar the Temple Captain who seized
control of the Temple at the start of the revolt and ceased all sacrifices on behalf
of the emperor. For this view, see Rhoads,
Israel in Revolution;
also Geza Vermes,
Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus
, 83. Vermes claims this was the same Eleazar who attacked and killed Menahem. That
is unlikely. The Temple Captain was named Eleazar son of Ananias, and, as both Richard
Horsley and Morton Smith have shown, he had no connection to the Eleazar son of Simon
who took over the leadership of the Zealot Party in 68
C.E
. See Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii,”
Harvard Theological Review
64 (1971): 1–19, and Horsley, “The Zealots: Their Origin, Relationship and Importance
in the Jewish Revolt,”
Novum Testamentum
28 (1986): 159–92.

Most of the information we have about John of Gischala comes from Josephus, with whom
John was on extremely unfriendly terms. Thus the portrait of John that comes out of
Josephus’s writings is of a mad tyrant who put all of Jerusalem in danger with his
thirst for power and blood. No contemporary scholar takes this description of John
seriously. For a better portrait of the man, see Uriel
Rappaport, “John of Gischala: From Galilee to Jerusalem,”
Journal of Jewish Studies
33 (1982): 479–93. With regard to John’s zealousness and his eschatological ideals,
Rappaport is correct to note that while it is difficult to know his exact religiopolitical
outlook, his alliance with the Zealot Party suggests, at the very least, that he was
sympathetic to zealot ideology. In any case, John eventually managed to overpower
the Zealots and take control over the inner Temple, though, by all accounts, he allowed
Eleazar son of Simon to remain at least nominally in charge of the Zealot Party, right
up to the moment in which Titus invaded Jerusalem.

For a description of the famine that ensued in Jerusalem during Titus’s siege, see
Josephus,
The Jewish War
5.427–571, 6.271–76. Josephus, who was writing his history of the war for the very
man who won it, presents Titus as trying desperately to restrain his men from killing
wantonly and in particular from destroying the Temple. This is obviously nonsense.
It is merely Josephus pandering to his Roman audience. Josephus also sets the number
of Jews who died in Jerusalem at one million. This is clearly an exaggeration.

For complete coverage of the exchange rate among ancient currencies in first-century
Palestine, see Fredric William Madden’s colossal work,
History of Jewish Coinage and of Money in the Old and New Testament
(London: Bernard Quaritch, 1864). Madden notes that Josephus refers to the shekel
as equal to four Attic drachms (drachmas), meaning two drachmas equals one-half shekel
(238). See also J. Liver, “The Half-Shekel Offering in Biblical and Post-Biblical
Literature,”
Harvard Theological Review
56.3 (1963): 173–98.

Some scholars argue, unconvincingly, that no perceptible shift occurred in the Roman
attitude toward Jews; see, for example, Eric S. Gruen, “Roman Perspectives on the
Jews in the Age of the Great Revolt,”
First Jewish Revolt
, 27–42. With regard to the symbol of parading the Torah during the Triumph, I think
Martin Goodman said it best in
Rome and Jerusalem
: “There could not be a clearer demonstration that the conquest was being celebrated
not just over Judea but over Judaism” (453). For more on Judaism after the destruction
of the Temple, see Michael S. Berger, “Rabbinic Pacification of Second-Century Jewish
Nationalism,”
Belief and Bloodshed
, ed. James K. Wellman, Jr. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 48.

It is vital to note that the earliest manuscripts we have of the gospel of Mark end
the first verse at “Jesus the Christ.” It was only later that a redactor added the
phrase “the Son of God.” The significance of the gospels’ being written in Greek should
not be overlooked. Consider that the Dead Sea Scrolls, the most contemporary set of
Jewish writings to survive the destruction of Jerusalem, whose themes and topics are
very close to those of the New Testament, were written almost exclusively in Hebrew
and Aramaic.

The story of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple
can be found in Matthew 21:1–22, Mark 11:1–19, Luke 19:29–48, and John 2:13–25. Note
that John’s gospel places the event at the start of Jesus’s ministry, whereas the
Synoptics place it at the end. That Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem reveals his kingly
aspirations is abundantly clear. Recall that Solomon also mounts a donkey in order
to be proclaimed king (1 Kings 1:32–40), as does Absalom when he tries to wrest the
throne from his father, David (2 Samuel 19:26). According to David Catchpole, Jesus’s
entry into Jerusalem fits perfectly into a family of stories detailing “the celebratory
entry to a city by a hero figure who has previously achieved his triumph.” Catchpole
notes that this “fixed pattern of triumphal entry” has precedence not only among the
Israelite kings (see for example Kings 1:32–40) but also in Alexander’s entry into
Jerusalem, Apollonius’s entry into Jerusalem, Simon Maccabaeus’s entry into Jerusalem,
Marcus Agrippa’s entry into Jerusalem, and so on. See David R. Catchpole, “The ‘Triumphal’
Entry,”
Jesus and the Politics of His Day
, ed. Ernst Bammel and C.F.D. Moule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984),
319–34.

Jesus explicitly uses the term
lestai
to signify “den of thieves,” instead of the more common word for thieves,
kleptai
(see Mark 11:17). While it may seem obvious that in this case Jesus is not using
the term in its politicized sense as “bandit”—meaning someone with zealot tendencies—some
scholars believe that Jesus is in fact referring specifically to bandits in this passage.
Indeed, some link Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple to an insurrection led by bar Abbas
that took place there around the same time (see Mark 15:7). The argument goes like
this: Since bar Abbas is
always
characterized with the epithet
lestai
, Jesus’s use of the term must be referring to the slaughter that took place around
the Temple during the bandit insurrection he led. Therefore, the best translation
of Jesus’s admonition here is not “den of thieves,” but rather “cave of bandits,”
meaning “zealot stronghold,” and thus referring specifically to bar Abbas’s insurrection.
See George Wesley Buchanan, “Mark 11:15–19: Brigands in the Temple,”
Hebrew Union College Annual
30 (1959): 169–77. This is an intriguing argument, but there is a simpler explanation
for Jesus’s use of the word
lestai
instead of
kleptai
in this passage. The evangelist is likely quoting the prophet Jeremiah (7:11) in
its Septuagint (Greek) translation: “Has this house, which is called by my name, become
a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, utters the LORD!” That
translation uses the phrase
spaylayon laystoun
to mean “den of thieves,” which makes sense in that the Septuagint was written long
before
lestai
became a byword for “bandits”—indeed, long before there was any such thing as a bandit
in Judea or Galilee. Here,
lestai
is the preferred Greek translation of the Hebrew word
paritsim
, which is poorly attested in the Hebrew Bible and is
used, at most, twice in the entire text. The word
paritsim
can mean something like “violent ones,” though in Ezekiel 7:22, which also uses the
Hebrew word
paritsim
, the Septuagint translates the word into the Greek by using
afulaktos
, which means something like “unguarded.” The point is that the Hebrew word
paritsim
was obviously problematic for the Septuagint translators, and any attempt to limit
the meaning of the Hebrew or Greek words to a specific meaning or an overly circumscribed
semantic range is difficult, to say the least. Thus, it is likely that when Jesus
uses the word
lestai
in this passage, he means nothing more complicated than “thieves,” which, after all,
is how he viewed the merchants and money changers at the Temple.

The tangled web that bound the Temple authorities to Rome, and the notion that an
attack on one would have been considered an attack on the other, is an argument made
brilliantly by S.G.F. Brandon,
Jesus and the Zealots
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 9. Brandon also notes correctly
that the Romans would not have been ignorant of the cleansing incident, since the
Roman garrison in the Antonia Fortress overlooked the Temple courts. For the opposing
view to Brandon’s analysis, see Cecil Roth, “The Cleansing of the Temple and Zechariah
XIV.21,”
Novum Testamentum
4 (1960): 174–81. Roth seems to deny any nationalist or zealot significance whatsoever
either in Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem or in his cleansing of the Temple, which he
reinterprets in a “spiritual and basically non-political sense,” claiming that Jesus’s
main concern was stripping the Temple of any “mercantile operations.” Other scholars
take this argument one step further and claim that the “cleansing” incident never
even happened, at least not as it has been recorded by all four gospel writers, because
it so contrasts with Jesus’s message of peace. See Burton Mack,
A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). Once again this seems like a classic case of
scholars refusing to accept an obvious reality that does not fit into their preconceived
Christological conceptions of who Jesus was and what Jesus meant. Mack’s thesis is
expertly refuted by Craig Evans, who demonstrates not only that the Temple cleansing
incident can be traced to the historical Jesus, but also that it could not have been
understood in any other way than as an act of profound political significance. See
Evans,
Jesus and His Contemporaries
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1995), 301–18. However, elsewhere Evans disagrees with
me regarding Jesus’s prediction of the Temple’s destruction. He not only believes
that the prediction can be traced to Jesus, whereas I view it as being put in Jesus’s
mouth by the gospel writers, he also thinks it may have been the principal factor
that motivated the high priest to take action against him. See Craig Evans, “Jesus
and Predictions of the Destruction of the Herodian Temple in the Pseudepigrapha, Qumran
Scrolls, and Related Texts,”
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha
10 (1992): 89–147.

Both Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud indicate that the sacrificial animals
used to be housed on the Mount of Olives, but that sometime around 30
C.E.
, Caiaphas transferred them into the Court of Gentiles. Bruce Chilton believes that
Caiaphas’s innovation was the impetus for Jesus’s actions at the Temple as well as
the principal reason for the high priest’s desire to have Jesus arrested and executed;
see Bruce Chilton, “The Trial of Jesus Reconsidered,” in
Jesus in Context
, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 281–500.

The question posed to Jesus about the legality of paying tribute to Caesar can be
found in Mark 12:13–17, Matthew 22:15–22, and Luke 20:20–26. The episode does not
appear in John’s gospel because there the cleansing event is placed among Jesus’s
first acts and not at the end of his life. See Herbert Loewe,
Render unto Caesar
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). The Jewish authorities who try to
trap Jesus by asking him about the payment of tribute are variously described in the
Synoptic gospels as Pharisees and Herodians (Mark 12:13; Matthew 22:15), or as “scribes
and chief priests” (Luke 20:20). This lumping together of disparate authorities indicates
a startling ignorance on the part of the gospel writers (who were writing their accounts
some forty to sixty years after the events they describe) about Jewish religious hierarchy
in firstcentury Palestine. The scribes were lower- or middle-class scholars, while
the chief priests were aristocratic nobility; the Pharisees and Herodians were about
as far apart economically, socially, and (if by Herodians Mark suggests a Sadducean
connection) theologically as can be imagined. It almost seems as though the gospel
writers are throwing out these formulae simply as bywords for “the Jews.”