Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (26 page)

Nothing quite like what these followers of Jesus were contending existed at the time.
Ideas about the resurrection of the dead could be found among the ancient Egyptians
and Persians, of course. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, though
not of the body. Some gods—for instance, Osiris—were thought to have died and risen
again. Some men—Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—became gods after they died. But the
concept of an individual dying and rising again, in the flesh, into a life everlasting
was extremely rare in the ancient world and practically nonexistent in Judaism.

And yet what the followers of Jesus were arguing was not only that he rose from the
dead, but that his resurrection confirmed his status as messiah, an extraordinary
claim without precedent in Jewish history. Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics,
the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism.
In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or
prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let
alone his bodily resurrection. The prophet Isaiah speaks of an exalted “suffering
servant” who would be “stricken for the transgressions of [God’s] people” (Isaiah
52:13–53:12). But Isaiah never identifies this nameless servant
as the messiah, nor does he claim that the stricken servant rose from the dead. The
prophet Daniel mentions “an anointed one” (i.e., messiah) who “shall be cut off and
shall have nothing” (Daniel 7:26). But Daniel’s anointed is not killed; he is merely
deposed by a “prince who is to come.” It may be true that, centuries after Jesus’s
death, Christians would interpret these verses in such a way as to help make sense
of their messiah’s failure to accomplish any of the messianic tasks expected of him.
But the Jews of Jesus’s time had no conception whatsoever of a messiah who suffers
and dies. They were awaiting a messiah who triumphs and lives.

What Jesus’s followers were proposing was a breathtakingly bold redefinition, not
just of the messianic prophecies but of the very nature and function of the Jewish
messiah. The fisherman, Simon Peter, displaying the reckless confidence of one unschooled
and uninitiated in the scriptures, even went so far as to argue that King David himself
had prophesied Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in one of his Psalms. “Being a
prophet, and knowing God had sworn an oath to him that the fruit of his loins, of
his flesh, would be raised as the messiah to be seated on his throne,” Peter told
the pilgrims gathered at the Temple, “David, foreseeing [Jesus], spoke of the resurrection
of the messiah, saying that ‘his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see
corruption’ ” (Acts 2:30–31).

Had Stephen been knowledgeable about the sacred texts, had he been a scribe or a scholar
saturated in the scriptures, had he simply been an inhabitant of Jerusalem, for whom
the sound of the Psalms cascading from the Temple walls would have been as familiar
as the sound of his own voice, he would have known immediately that King David never
said any such thing about the messiah. The “prophecy” Peter speaks of was a Psalm
David sang about
himself:

But—and here lies the key to understanding the dramatic transformation that took place
in Jesus’s message after his death—Stephen was not a scribe or scholar. He was not
an expert in the scriptures. He did not live in Jerusalem. As such, he was the perfect
audience for this new, innovative, and thoroughly unorthodox interpretation of the
messiah being peddled by a group of illiterate ecstatics whose certainty in their
message was matched only by the passion with which they preached it.

Stephen converted to the Jesus movement shortly after Jesus’s death. As with most
converts from the distant Diaspora, he would have abandoned his hometown, sold his
possessions, pooled his resources into the community, and made a home for himself
in Jerusalem, under the shadow of the Temple walls. Although he would spend only a
brief time as a member of the new community—perhaps a year or two—his violent death
soon after his conversion would forever enshrine his name in the annals of Christian
history.

The story of that celebrated death can be found in the book of Acts, which chronicles
the first few decades of the Jesus movement after the crucifixion. The evangelist
Luke, who allegedly composed the book as a sequel to his gospel, presents Stephen’s
stoning as a watershed movement in the early history of the church. Stephen is called
a man “full of grace and power [who] did great wonders and signs among the people”
(Acts 6:8). His speech and wisdom, Luke claims, were so powerful that few could stand
against him. In fact, Stephen’s spectacular death in the book of Acts becomes,
for Luke, a coda to Jesus’s passion narrative; Luke’s gospel, alone among the Synoptics,
transfers to Stephen’s “trial” the accusation made against Jesus that he had threatened
to destroy the Temple.

“This man [Stephen] never ceases blaspheming against this holy place [the Temple]
and the law,” a gang of stone-wielding vigilantes cries out. “We have heard him say
that Jesus of Nazareth will demolish this place and will change the customs that Moses
handed down to us” (Acts 6:13–14).

Luke also provides Stephen with the self-defense that Jesus never received in his
gospel. In a long and rambling diatribe before the mob, Stephen summarizes nearly
all of Jewish history, starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus. The speech, which
is obviously Luke’s creation, is riddled with the most basic errors: it misidentifies
the burial site of the great patriarch Jacob, and it inexplicably claims that an angel
gave the law to Moses when even the most uneducated Jew in Palestine would have known
it was God himself who gave Moses the law. However, the speech’s true significance
comes near the end, when in a fit of ecstasy, Stephen looks up to the heavens and
sees “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).

The image seems to have been a favorite of the early Christian community. Mark, yet
another Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora, has Jesus say something similar to the
high priest in his gospel: “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand
of the Power” (Mark 14:62), which is then picked up by Matthew and Luke—two more Greek-speaking
Diaspora Jews—in their own accounts. But whereas Jesus in the Synoptics is directly
quoting Psalm 110 so as to draw a connection between himself and King David, Stephen’s
speech in Acts consciously replaces the phrase “the right hand of the Power” with
“the right hand of God.” There is a reason for the change. In ancient Israel, the
right hand was a symbol of power and authority; it signified a position of exaltation.
Sitting “at the right hand of God” means sharing in God’s glory,
being one with God in honor and essence. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “to sit on the right
hand of the Father is nothing else than to share in the glory of the Godhead … [Jesus]
sits at the right hand of the Father, because He has the same Nature as the Father.”

In other words, Stephen’s Son of Man is not the kingly figure of Daniel who comes
“with the clouds of heaven.” He does not establish his kingdom on earth “so that all
peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:1–14). He is not even
the messiah any longer. The Son of Man, in Stephen’s vision, is a preexistent, heavenly
being whose kingdom is not of this world; who stands at the right hand of God, equal
in glory and honor; who is, in form and substance,
God made flesh
.

That is all it takes for the stones to start flying.

Understand that there can be no greater blasphemy for a Jew than what Stephen suggests.
The claim that an individual died and rose again into eternal life may have been unprecedented
in Judaism. But the presumption of a “god-man” was simply anathema. What Stephen cries
out in the midst of his death throes is nothing less than the launch of a wholly new
religion, one radically and irreconcilably divorced from everything Stephen’s own
religion had ever posited about the nature of God and man and the relationship of
the one to the other. One can say that it was not only Stephen who died that day outside
the gates of Jerusalem. Buried with him under the rubble of stones is the last trace
of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. The story of the zealous Galilean
peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy
rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation comes
to an abrupt end, not with his death on the cross, nor with the empty tomb, but at
the first moment one of his followers dares suggest he is God.

Stephen was martyred sometime between 33 and 35
C.E
. Among those in the crowd who countenanced his stoning was a pious young Pharisee
from a wealthy Roman city on the Mediterranean
Sea called Tarsus. His name was Saul, and he was a true zealot: a fervent follower
of the Law of Moses who had burnished a reputation for violently suppressing blasphemies
such as Stephen’s. Around 49
C.E
., a mere fifteen years after he gladly watched Stephen die, this same fanatical Pharisee,
now an ardent Christian convert renamed Paul, would write a letter to his friends
in the Greek city of Philippi in which he unambiguously, and without reservation,
calls Jesus of Nazareth God. “He was in the form of God,” Paul wrote, though he was
“born in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2:6–7).

How could this have happened? How could a failed messiah who died a shameful death
as a state criminal be transformed, in the span of a few years, into the creator of
the heavens and the earth: God incarnate?

The answer to that question relies on recognizing this one rather remarkable fact:
practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel
story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and
Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible
exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named).
Those who did know Jesus—those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped
him cleanse the Temple in God’s name, who were there when he was arrested and who
watched him die a lonely death—played a surprisingly small role in defining the movement
Jesus left behind. The members of Jesus’s family, and especially his brother James,
who would lead the community in Jesus’s absence, were certainly influential in the
decades after the crucifixion. But they were hampered by their decision to remain
more or less ensconced in Jerusalem waiting for Jesus to return, until they and their
community, like nearly everyone else in the holy city, were annihilated by Titus’s
army in 70
C.E
. The apostles who were tasked by Jesus to spread his message did leave Jerusalem
and fan out across the land bearing the good news. But they were severely limited
by their inability to theologically
expound on the new faith or compose instructive narratives about the life and death
of Jesus. These were farmers and fishermen, after all; they could neither read nor
write.

The task of defining Jesus’s message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized,
Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion
of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek
philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’s message so as to
make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile
neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot
to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman
oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.

This transformation did not occur without conflict or difficulty. The original Aramaic-speaking
followers of Jesus, including the members of his family and the remnants of the Twelve,
openly clashed with the Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews when it came to the correct understanding
of Jesus’s message. The discord between the two groups resulted in the emergence of
two distinct and competing camps of Christian interpretation in the decades after
the crucifixion: one championed by Jesus’s brother, James; the other promoted by the
former Pharisee, Paul. As we shall see, it would be the contest between these two
bitter and openly hostile adversaries that, more than anything else, would shape Christianity
as the global religion we know today.

If Christ Has Not Been Risen