Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (42 page)

On the argument about whether the Jews had the right under Roman occupation to put
criminals to death, see Raymond Brown,
Death of the Messiah
, vol. 1, 331–48. Catchpole’s conclusion on this issue is, in my opinion, the correct
one: “The Jews could try [a death penalty case], but they could not execute.” See
“The Historicity of the Sanhedrin trial,”
The Trial of Jesus
, 63. G.W.H. Lampe suggests that an official record of Jesus’s “trial” before Pilate
could have been preserved, considering the preservation of similar
acta
of Christian martyrs. Apparently several Christian writers mention an
Acta Pilati
existing in the second and third centuries. But even if that were true (and it very
likely is not), there is no reason to believe that such a document would represent
anything other than a Christological polemic. See G.W.H. Lampe, “The Trial of Jesus
in the
Acta Pilati,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day
, 173–82.

Plutarch writes that “every wrongdoer who goes to execution carries his own cross.”

The evidence that Stephen was a Diaspora Jew comes from the fact that he is designated
as the leader of the Seven, the “Hellenists” who fell into conflict with the “Hebrews,”
as recounted in Acts 6 (see below for more on the Hellenists). Stephen’s stoners were
freedmen, themselves Hellenists, but recent émigrés to Jerusalem theologically aligned
with the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. See Marie-Éloise Rosenblatt,
Paul the Accused
(Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 24.

The earliest sources we have for belief in the resurrection of the dead can be found
in the Ugaritic and Iranian traditions. Zoroastrian scriptures, primarily the Gathas,
present the earliest and perhaps most well-developed concept of the
resurrection of the individual when it speaks of the dead “rising in their bodies”
at the end of time (Yasna 54). Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh would be resurrected,
but they did not accept the resurrection of the masses.

Stanley Porter finds examples of bodily resurrection in Greek and Roman religions
but claims there is little evidence of the notion of physical resurrection of the
dead in Jewish thought. See Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs,
Resurrection
(Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). Jon Douglas Levenson disagrees
with Porter, arguing that belief in the resurrection of the body is rooted in the
Hebrew Bible and is not, as some have argued, merely part of the Second Temple period
or the apocalyptic literature written after 70
C.E
.;
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Levenson argues that after the destruction
of Jerusalem there was a growing belief among the rabbinate that the redemption of
Israel required the flesh-and-blood resurrection of the dead. But even he admits that
the vast majority of the resurrection traditions found in Judaism are not about individual
exaltation but about national restoration. In other words, this is about a metaphorical
resurrection of the Jewish people as a whole, not the literal resurrection of mortals
who had died and come back again as flesh and blood. Indeed, Charlesworth notes that
if by “resurrection” we mean “the concept of God’s raising the body and soul after
death (meant literally) to a new and eternal life (not a return to mortal existence),”
then there is only one passage in the entire Hebrew Bible that fits such a criterion—Daniel
12:2–3: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting
life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” The many other passages that have
been interpreted as referencing the resurrection of the dead simply do not pass scrutiny.
For instance, Ezekiel 37—“Thus said the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath
to enter you and you shall live again …”—explicitly refers to these bones as “the
House of Israel.” Psalm 30, in which David writes, “I cried out to you and you healed
me. O Lord, you brought me up from Sheol, preserved me from going down into the pit”
(30:2–4), is very obviously about healing from illness, not literally being raised
from death. The same holds true for the story of Elijah resurrecting the dead (1 Kings
17:17–24), or, for that matter, Jesus raising Lazarus (John 11:1–46), both of which
fall into the category of healing stories, not resurrection stories, as the person
“resurrected” will presumably die again. Charlesworth, however, does find evidence
of belief in the resurrection of the dead into immortality in the Dead Sea Scrolls,
especially in a scroll called
On Resurrection
(4Q521), which claims that God, through the messiah, will bring the dead to life.
Interestingly, this seems to fit with Paul’s belief that believers in the risen Christ
will also be resurrected: “and the dead in Christ shall rise” (1Thessalonians 4:15–17).
See James H. Charlesworth et al.,
Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine
(London: T&T Clark, 2006). Those scrolls that seem to imply
that the Righteous Teacher of Qumran will rise from the dead are speaking not about
a literal resurrection of the body but about a metaphorical rising from disenfranchisement
for a people who had been divorced from the Temple. There is something like a resurrection
idea in the
pseudepigrapha
—for instance, in 1 Enoch 22–27, or in 2 Maccabees 14, in which Razis tears out his
entrails and God puts them back again. Also,
The Testament of Judah
implies that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will rise to live again (25:1). With regard
to ideas of the resurrection in the Mishnah, Charlesworth correctly notes that such
passages are too late (post–second century
C.E.)
to be quoted as examples of Jewish beliefs prior to 70
C.E.
, though he admits it is conceivable that “the tradition in Mishnah Sanhedrin defined
the beliefs of some pre-70 Pharisees.”

Rudolf Bultmann finds evidence for the concept of the dying and rising son-deity in
the so-called mystery religions of Rome. He states that “gnosticism above all is aware
of the notion of the Son of God become man—and the heavenly redeemer man.” See
Essays: Philosophical and Theological
(New York: Macmillan, 1995), 279. But I think Martin Hengel is right to note that
the great wave of interest in “mystery religions” that arose in the Roman Empire,
and the synthesis with Judaism and proto-Christianity that resulted, did not take
place until the second century. In other words, it may have been Christianity that
influenced the dying and rising deity concept in gnosticism and the mystery religions,
not the other way around. See Martin Hengel,
The Son of God
(Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 1976), 25–41.

Other important texts for the historical and cultural study of resurrection in the
ancient world include Geza Vermes,
The Resurrection: History and Myth
(New York: Doubleday, 2008) and N. T. Wright,
The Resurrection of the Son of God
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

There can be no question whatsoever that Psalm 16 is self-referential, as the first
person singular form is used from the beginning: “Preserve me, O God, for in thee
I take refuge.” The Hebrew word translated here as “godly one” is
chasid
. It seems obvious to me that David’s reference to himself as “godly one” has more
to do with his piety and devotion to God than it does with the deification of either
David himself (which would have been unimaginable) or any future Davidic figure. Of
course, Luke would have been using the Septuagint of Psalm 16:8–11, which translates
the Hebrew
chasid
into the Greek
hosion
, meaning “holy one,” which, given the context and meaning of the psalm, should be
seen as synonymous with “godly one.” It may be a huge stretch of the imagination to
consider this psalm to be about the messiah, but it is ridiculous to interpret it
as predicting Jesus’s death and resurrection.

Stephen’s lengthy defense in the book of Acts is obviously Luke’s composition; it
was written six decades after Stephen’s death. But it bears scrutiny, nonetheless,
as Luke was himself a Diaspora Jew—a Greek-speaking Syrian convert
from the city of Antioch—and his perception of who Jesus was would have aligned with
Stephen’s.

Among the more egregious errors in Stephen’s slipshod account of the biblical story:
Stephen speaks of Abraham buying the tomb at Schechem for his grandson Jacob to be
buried in, whereas the Bible says it was Jacob who bought the tomb at Schechem (Genesis
33:19), though he himself was buried with Abraham in Hebron (Genesis 50:13). Stephen
contends that Moses saw the burning bush on Mount Sinai, when in fact it appeared
to him on Mount Horeb, which, despite some arguments to the contrary, was not the
same place as Sinai (Exodus 3:1). He then goes on to state that an angel gave the
law to Moses, when it was God himself who gave Moses the law. It is possible, of course,
that Luke has been influenced by the Jubilean tradition, which claims that Moses was
given the law by the “Angel of the Presence.” Jubilees 45.15–16 states, “and Israel
blessed his sons before he died and told them everything that would befall them in
the land of Egypt; and he made known to them what would come upon them in the last
days, and blessed them and gave to Joseph two portions in the land. And he slept with
his fathers, and he was buried in the double cave in the land of Canaan, near Abraham
his father in the grave which he dug for himself in the double cave in the land of
Hebron. And he gave all his books and the books of his fathers to Levi his son that
he might preserve them and renew them for his children until this day.” Interestingly,
Jubilees also suggests that the Torah was written down by Moses, which is the oldest
witness to the tradition of Mosaic authorship for the Torah.

For more on the significance of the phrase “the right hand of God,” see entry in David
Noel Freedman et al.,
Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible
(Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000). Per Freedman, the signet ring was worn on the royal
right hand (Jeremiah 22:24); the elder son received the greater blessing via the right
hand (Genesis 48:14, 17); the position of honor was at one’s right hand (Psalm 110:1);
and the right hand of God performs acts of deliverance (Exodus 15:6), victory (Psalms
20:6), and might (Isaiah 62:8). Thomas Aquinas’s remarks are from
Summa Theologica
, question 58.

There were, in actuality, two (though some say three) veils that divided the Holy
of Holies from the rest of the Temple: an outer veil that hung at the entrance to
the inner sanctuary, and an inner veil within the sanctuary itself that separated
the
hekal
, or portal, from the smaller chamber within which the spirit of God dwelt. Which
veil is meant by the gospels is irrelevant, since the story is legend, though it should
be noted that only the outer veil would have been visible to
anyone but the high priest. See Daniel Gurtner,
Torn Veil: Matthew’s Exposition of the Death of Jesus
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Although the historical evidence and the New Testament both clearly demonstrate that
the followers of Jesus remained in Jerusalem after his crucifixion, it is interesting
to note that the gospel of Matthew has the risen Jesus telling the disciples to meet
him back in Galilee (Matthew 28:7).

Oscar Cullman,
The State in the New Testament
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956);
The Christology of the New Testament
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959); John Gager,
Kingdom and Community: The Social World of the Early Christians
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975); and Martin Dibelius,
Studies in the Acts of the Apostles
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956), have all demonstrated that the early followers
of Jesus were unsuccessful in persuading other Jerusalemites to their movement. Gager
notes correctly that, in general, “early converts did not represent the established
sectors of Jewish society” (26). Dibelius suggests that the Jerusalem community wasn’t
even interested in missionizing outside Jerusalem but led a quiet life of piety and
contemplation as they awaited Jesus’s second coming.

Gager explains the success of the early Jesus movement, despite its many doctrinal
contradictions, by relying on a fascinating sociological study by L. Festinger, H.
W. Riecken, and S. Schachter titled
When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted
the Destruction of the World
(New York: Harper and Row, 1956), which, in Gager’s words, demonstrates that “under
certain conditions a religious community whose fundamental beliefs are disconfirmed
by events in the world will not necessarily collapse and disband. Instead it may undertake
zealous missionary activity as a response to its sense of cognitive dissonance, i.e.,
a condition of distress and doubt stemming from the disconfirmation of an important
belief” (39). As Festinger himself puts it in his follow-up study,
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957): “the presence of dissonance gives rise
to pressures to reduce or eliminate the dissonance. The strength of the pressure to
reduce the dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance” (18).

There is a great deal of debate about what exactly “Hellenist” meant. It could have
meant that these were gentile converts to Christianity, as Walter Bauer argues in
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity
(Mifflintown, Pa.: Sigler Press, 1971). H. J. Cadbury agrees with Bauer. He thinks
the Hellenists were gentile Christians who may have come from Galilee or other gentile
regions and who were not favorably disposed toward the Law. See “The Hellenists,”
The Beginnings of Christianity
, vol. 1, ed. K. Lake and H. J. Cadbury (London: Macmillan, 1933), 59–74. However,
the term “Hellenist” most likely refers to Greek-speaking Jews from the Diaspora,
as Martin Hengel convincingly
demonstrates in
Between Jesus and Paul
(Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 1983). Marcel Simon agrees with Hengel, though he
also believes (contra Hengel) that the term had derogatory connotations among the
Jews of Judea for its Greek (that is, pagan) accommodations. Simon notes that Hellenism
is numbered among Justin Martyr’s list of heresies in
Trypho
(80.4). See
St. Stephen and the Hellenists in the Primitive Church
(New York: Longmans, 1958).