Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (16 page)

No doubt the Galileans felt a meaningful connection to the Temple as the dwelling
place of the spirit of God, but they also evinced a deep disdain for the Temple priests
who viewed themselves as the sole arbiters of God’s will. There is evidence to suggest
that the Galileans were both less observant of the Temple rituals and, given the three-day
distance between Galilee and Jerusalem, less likely to make frequent visits to it.
Those Galilean farmers and peasants who could scrape enough money together to make
it to Jerusalem for the sacred festivals would have found themselves in the humiliating
position of handing over their meager sacrifices to wealthy Temple priests, some of
whom may have owned the very lands these peasants and farmers labored on back home.

The divide between Judea and Galilee grew wider after Rome placed Galilee under the
direct rule of Herod the Great’s son, Antipas. For the first time in their history
the Galileans had a ruler who actually resided in Galilee. Antipas’s tetrarchy transformed
the province into a separate political jurisdiction no longer subject to the direct
authority of the Temple and the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem. The Galileans still
owed their tithes to the ravenous Temple treasury, and Rome still exercised control
over every aspect of life in Galilee: Rome had installed Antipas and Rome commanded
him. But Antipas’s rule allowed for a small yet meaningful measure of Galilean autonomy.
There were no longer any Roman troops stationed in the province; they had been replaced
by Antipas’s own soldiers. And at least Antipas was a Jew who, for the most part,
tried not to offend the religious sensibilities of those under his rule—his marriage
to his brother’s wife and the execution of John the Baptist notwithstanding.

From around 10
C.E.
, when Antipas established his capital at
Sepphoris, to 36
C.E
., when he was deposed by the emperor Caligula and sent into exile, the Galileans
enjoyed a period of peace and tranquillity that was surely a welcome respite from
the decade of rebellion and war that had preceded it. But the peace was a ruse, the
cessation of conflict a pretense for the physical transformation of Galilee. For in
the span of those twenty years, Antipas built two new Greek cities—his first capital,
Sepphoris, followed by his second, Tiberias, on the coast of the Sea of Galilee—that
completely upended traditional Galilean society.

These were the first real cities that Galilee had ever seen, and they were almost
wholly populated with non-Galileans: Roman merchants, Greek-speaking gentiles, pursy
Judean settlers. The new cities placed enormous pressure on the region’s economy,
essentially dividing the province between those with wealth and power and those who
served them by providing the labor necessary to maintain their lavish lifestyles.
Villages in which subsistence farming or fishing were the norm were gradually overwhelmed
by the needs of the cities, as agriculture and food production became singularly focused
on feeding the new cosmopolitan population. Taxes were raised, land prices doubled,
and debts soared, slowly disintegrating the traditional way of life in Galilee.

When Jesus was born, Galilee was aflame. His first decade of life coincided with the
plunder and destruction of the Galilean countryside, his second with its refashioning
at the hands of Antipas. When Jesus departed Galilee for Judea and John the Baptist,
Antipas had already left Sepphoris for his even larger and more ornate royal seat
at Tiberias. By the time he returned, the Galilee he knew—of family farms and open
fields, of blooming orchards and vast meadows bursting with wildflowers—looked a lot
like the province of Judea he had just left behind: urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous,
and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.

Jesus’s first stop upon returning to Galilee would surely have been Nazareth, where
his family still resided, though he did not
stay long in his hometown. Jesus had left Nazareth a simple
tekton
. He returned as something else. His transformation created a deep rift in his community.
They seem hardly to recognize the itinerant preacher who suddenly reappeared in their
village. The gospels say Jesus’s mother, brothers, and sisters were scandalized by
what people were saying about him; they tried desperately to silence and restrain
him (Mark 3:21). Yet when they approached Jesus and urged him to return home and resume
the family business, he refused. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Jesus asked,
looking at those around him. “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the
will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–34).

This account in the gospel of Mark is often interpreted as suggesting that Jesus’s
family rejected his teachings and denied his identity as messiah. But there is nothing
in Jesus’s reply to his family that hints at hostility between him and his brothers
and sisters. Nor is there anything in the gospels to indicate that Jesus’s family
rebuffed his messianic ambitions. On the contrary, Jesus’s brothers played fairly
significant roles in the movement he founded. His brother James became the leader
of the community in Jerusalem after his crucifixion. Perhaps his family was slow in
accepting Jesus’s teachings and his extraordinary claims. But the historical evidence
suggests that they all eventually came to believe in him and his mission.

Jesus’s neighbors were a different story, however. The gospel paints his fellow Nazareans
as distressed by the return of “Mary’s son.” Although a few spoke well of him and
were amazed by his words, most were deeply disturbed by his presence and his teachings.
Jesus quickly became an outcast in the small hilltop community. The gospel of Luke
claims the residents of Nazareth finally drove him out to the brow of the hill on
which the village was built and tried to push him off a cliff (Luke 4:14–30). The
story is suspect; there is no cliff to be pushed off in Nazareth, just a gently
sloping hillside. Still, the fact remains that, at least at first, Jesus was unable
to find much of a following in Nazareth. “No prophet is accepted in his hometown,”
he said before abandoning his childhood home for a nearby fishing village called Capernaum
on the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee.

Capernaum was the ideal place for Jesus to launch his ministry, as it perfectly reflected
the calamitous changes wrought by the new Galilean economy under Antipas’s rule. The
seaside village of some fifteen hundred mostly farmers and fishermen, known for its
temperate climate and its fertile soil, would become Jesus’s base of operations throughout
the first year of his mission in Galilee. The entire village stretched along a wide
expanse of the seacoast, allowing the cool salt air to nurture all manner of plants
and trees. Clumps of lush littoral vegetation thrived along the vast coastline throughout
the year, while thickets of walnut and pine, fig and olive trees dotted the low-lying
hills inland. The true gift of Capernaum was the magnificent sea itself, which teemed
with an array of fish that had nourished and sustained the population for centuries.

By the time Jesus set up his ministry there, however, Capernaum’s economy had become
almost wholly centered on serving the needs of the new cities that had cropped up
around it, especially the new capital, Tiberias, which lay just a few kilometers to
the south. Food production had increased exponentially, and with it the standard of
living for those farmers and fishermen who had the capacity to purchase more cultivatable
land or to buy more boats and nets. But, as in the rest of Galilee, the profits from
this increase in the means of production disproportionately benefited the large landowners
and moneylenders who resided outside Capernaum: the wealthy priests in Judea and the
new urban elite in Sepphoris and Tiberias. The majority of Capernaum’s residents had
been left behind by the new Galilean economy. It would be these people whom Jesus
would specifically target—those who
found themselves cast to the fringes of society, whose lives had been disrupted by
the rapid social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.

This is not to say that Jesus was interested solely in the poor, or that only the
poor would follow him. A number of fairly prosperous benefactors—the toll collectors
Levi (Mark 2:13–15) and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10) and the wealthy patron Jairus (Mark
5:21–43), to name a few—would come to fund Jesus’s mission by providing food and lodging
to him and his followers. But Jesus’s message was designed to be a direct challenge
to the wealthy and the powerful, be they the occupiers in Rome, the collaborators
in the Temple, or the new moneyed class in the Greek cities of Galilee. The message
was simple: the Lord God had seen the suffering of the poor and dispossessed; he had
heard their cries of anguish. And he was finally going to do something about it. This
may not have been a new message—John preached much the same thing—but it was a message
being delivered to a new Galilee, by a man who, as a tried and true Galilean himself,
shared the anti-Judea, anti-Temple sentiments that permeated the province.

Jesus was not in Capernaum for long before he began gathering to himself a small group
of like-minded Galileans, mostly culled from the ranks of the fishing village’s disaffected
youth, who would become his first disciples (actually, Jesus had arrived with a couple
of disciples already in tow, those who had left John the Baptist after his capture
and followed Jesus instead). According to the gospel of Mark, Jesus found his first
followers while walking along the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Spying two young fishermen,
Simon and his brother Andrew, casting nets, he said, “Follow me, and I will make you
fishers of men.” The brothers, Mark writes, immediately dropped their nets and went
with him. Sometime later Jesus came upon another pair of fishermen—James and John,
the young sons of Zebedee—and made them the same offer. They, too, left their boat
and their nets and followed Jesus (Mark 1:16–20).

What set the disciples apart from the crowds that swelled and
shrank whenever Jesus entered one village or another is that they actually traveled
with Jesus. Unlike the enthusiastic but fickle masses, the disciples were specifically
called by Jesus to leave their homes and their families behind to follow him from
town to town, village to village. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father
and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—yes even his life—he cannot
be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26 | Matthew 10:37).

The gospel of Luke claims that there were seventy-two disciples in all (Luke 10:1–12),
and they undoubtedly included women, some of whom, in defiance of tradition, are actually
named in the New Testament: Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Chuza; Mary, the
mother of James and Joseph; Mary, the wife of Clopas; Susanna; Salome; and perhaps
most famous of all, Mary from Magdala, whom Jesus had cured of “seven demons” (Luke
8:2). That these women functioned as Jesus’s disciples is demonstrated by the fact
that all four gospels present them as traveling with Jesus from town to town (Mark
15:40–41; Matthew 27:55–56; Luke 8:2–3; 23:49; John 19:25). The gospels claim “many
other women … followed [Jesus] and served him,” too (Mark 15:40–41), from his first
days preaching in Galilee to his last breath on the hill in Golgotha.

But among the seventy-two, there was an inner core of disciples—all of them men—who
would serve a special function in Jesus’s ministry. These were known simply as “the
Twelve.” They included the brothers James and John—the sons of Zebedee—who would be
called
Boanerges
, “the sons of thunder”; Philip, who was from Bethsaida and who began as one of John
the Baptist’s disciples before he switched his allegiance to Jesus (John 1:35–44);
Andrew, who the gospel of John claims also began as a follower of the Baptist, though
the synoptic gospels contradict this assertion by locating him in Capernaum; Andrew’s
brother Simon, the disciple whom Jesus nicknames Peter; Matthew, who is sometimes
erroneously associated with another of Jesus’s disciples, Levi, the toll collector;
Jude the son of James; James the son of Alphaeus; Thomas,
who would become legendary for doubting Jesus’s resurrection; Bartholomew, about whom
almost nothing is known; another Simon, known as “the Zealot,” a designation meant
to signal his commitment to the biblical doctrine of zeal, not his association with
the Zealot Party, which would not exist for another thirty years; and Judas Iscariot,
the man the gospels claim would one day betray Jesus to the high priest Caiaphas.

The Twelve will become the principal bearers of Jesus’s message—the
apostolou
, or “ambassadors”—apostles sent off to neighboring towns and villages to preach independently
and without supervision (Luke 9:1–6). They would not be the leaders of Jesus’s movement,
but rather its chief missionaries. Yet the Twelve had another more symbolic function,
one that would manifest itself later in Jesus’s ministry. For they will come to represent
the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel, long since destroyed and scattered.

With his home base firmly established and his handpicked group of disciples growing,
Jesus began visiting the village synagogue to preach his message to the people of
Capernaum. The gospels say that those who heard him were astonished at his teaching,
though not so much because of his words. Again, at this point, Jesus was merely echoing
his master, John the Baptist: “From that time [when Jesus arrived in Capernaum],”
Matthew writes, “Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven is near’ ”
(Matthew 4:17). Rather, what astonished the crowds at that Capernaum synagogue was
the charismatic authority with which Jesus spoke, “for he taught them as one with
authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:28; Mark 1:22; Luke 4:31).

The comparison to the scribes, emphasized in all three synoptic gospels, is conspicuous
and telling. Unlike John the Baptist, who was likely raised in a family of Judean
priests, Jesus was a peasant. He spoke like a peasant. He taught in Aramaic, the common
tongue. His authority was not that of the bookish scholars and the priestly aristocracy.
Their authority came from their solemn lucubration
and their intimate connection to the Temple. Jesus’s authority came directly from
God. Indeed, from the moment he entered the synagogue in this small coastal village,
Jesus went out of his way to set himself in direct opposition to the guardians of
the Temple and the Jewish cult by challenging their authority as God’s representatives
on earth.