Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (30 page)

This time, James confronts Paul directly, telling him that it has come to their attention
that Paul has been teaching believers “to forsake Moses” and “not circumcise their
children or observe the customs [of the law]” (Acts 21:21). Paul does not respond
to the accusation, though this is exactly what he has been teaching. He has even gone
so far as to say that those who let themselves be circumcised will have “cut themselves
off from Christ” (Galatians 5:2–4).

To clear up matters once and for all, James forces Paul to take part with four other
men in a strict purification ritual in the Temple—the same Temple that Paul believes
has been replaced by the blood of Jesus—so that “all will know there is nothing to
the rumors said about you, and that you observe and guard the law” (Acts 21:24). Paul
obeys; he seems to have no choice in the matter. But as he is completing the ritual,
a group of devout Jews recognize him.

“Men of Israel!” they shout. “Help! This is the man who has been teaching everyone
everywhere against our people, our law, and this place” (Acts 21:27–28). All at once,
a mob descends upon Paul. They seize him and drag him out of the Temple. Just as they
are about to beat him to death, a group of Roman soldiers suddenly appears. The soldiers
break up the mob and take Paul into
custody, not because of the disturbance at the Temple, but because they mistake him
for someone else.

“Are you not the Egyptian who some days ago led a revolt in the wilderness of four
thousand Sicarii?” a military tribune asks Paul (Acts 21:38).

It seems Paul’s arrival in Jerusalem in 57
C.E
. could not have come at a more chaotic time. One year earlier, the Sicarii had begun
their reign of terror by slaying the high priest Jonathan. They were now wantonly
murdering members of the priestly aristocracy, burning down their homes, kidnapping
their families, and sowing fear in the hearts of the Jews. The messianic fervor in
Jerusalem was at a boil. One by one, claimants to the mantle of the messiah had arisen
to liberate the Jews from the yoke of Roman occupation. Theudas the wonder worker
had already been cut down by Rome for his messianic aspirations. The rebellious sons
of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, had been crucified. The bandit chief Eleazar
son of Dinaeus, who had been ravaging the countryside, slaughtering Samaritans in
the name of the God of Israel, had been captured and beheaded by the Roman prefect
Felix. And then the Egyptian had suddenly appeared on the Mount of Olives, vowing
to bring the walls of Jerusalem tumbling down at his command.

For James and the apostles in Jerusalem, the turmoil could mean only one thing: the
end was near; Jesus was about to return. The Kingdom of God they had assumed Jesus
would build while he was alive would now finally be established—all the more reason
to ensure that those espousing deviant teachings in Jesus’s name were brought back
into the fold.

In that light, Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem may have been unexpected, but considering
the apocalyptic expectations in Jerusalem, it was neither ill timed nor unwelcomed.
If Jesus were about to return, it would be no bad thing to have Paul waiting for him
in a prison cell, where, at the very least, he and his perverse views could be contained
until Jesus could judge them himself. But because the
arresting soldiers assumed Paul was the Egyptian, they sent him at once to be judged
by the Roman governor, Felix, who happened at the time to be in the coastal town of
Caesarea dealing with a conflict that had erupted between the city’s Jews and its
Syrian and Greek inhabitants. Although Felix ultimately cleared Paul of the Egyptian’s
crimes, he nevertheless threw him in a Caesarean prison, where he languished until
Festus replaced Felix as governor and promptly transferred Paul to Rome at his behest.

Festus allowed Paul to go to Rome because Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen. Paul
was born in Tarsus, a city whose inhabitants had been granted Roman citizenship by
Mark Antony a century earlier. As a citizen, Paul had the right to demand a Roman
trial, and Festus, who would serve as governor for an extremely brief and tumultuous
period in Jerusalem, seemed happy to grant him one, if for no other reason than to
simply be rid of him.

There may have been a more urgent reason for Paul to want to go to Rome. After the
embarrassing spectacle at the Temple, in which he was forced to renounce everything
he had been preaching for years, Paul wanted to get as far as he could from Jerusalem
and the ever-tightening noose of control placed around his neck by James and the apostles.
Besides, Rome seemed the perfect place for Paul. This was the Imperial City, the seat
of the Roman Empire. Surely the Hellenistic Jews who had chosen to make Caesar’s home
their own would be receptive to Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus Christ. Rome
already had a small but growing contingent of Christians who lived alongside a fairly
sizable Jewish population. A decade before Paul’s arrival, conflicts between the two
communities had led the emperor Claudius to expel both groups from the city. By the
time Paul arrived some time in the early sixties, however, both populations were once
again flourishing. The city seemed ripe for Paul’s message.

Although Paul was officially under house arrest in Rome, it appears he was able to
continue his preaching without much interference from the authorities. Yet by all
accounts, Paul had little
success in converting Rome’s Jews to his side. The Jewish population was not just
unreceptive to his unique interpretation of the messiah, they were openly hostile
to it. Even the gentile converts did not appear overly welcoming toward Paul. That
may be because Paul was not the only “apostle” preaching Jesus in the imperial city.
Peter, the first of the Twelve, was also in Rome.

Peter had come to Rome a few years before Paul and likely at James’s command to help
establish an enduring community of Greek-speaking Jewish believers in the heart of
the Roman Empire, a community that would be under the influence of the Jerusalem assembly
and taught in accordance with the Jerusalem doctrine: in short, an anti-Pauline community.
It is difficult to know just how successful Peter had become in his task before Paul
arrived. But according to Acts, the Hellenists in Rome reacted so negatively to Paul’s
preaching that he decided to cut himself off once and for all from his fellow Jews
“who listen but never understand … who look but never perceive.” Paul vowed from that
moment on to preach to none but the gentiles, “for they will listen” (Acts 28:26–29).

No record exists of these final years in the lives of Peter and Paul, the two men
who would become the most important figures of Christianity. Strangely, Luke ends
his account of Paul’s life with his arrival in Rome and he does not mention that Peter
was in the city, too. Stranger still, Luke does not bother to record the most significant
aspect of the two men’s years together in the Imperial City. For in the year 66
C.E
., the same year that Jerusalem erupted in revolt, the emperor Nero, reacting to a
sudden surge of Christian persecution in Rome, seized Peter and Paul and executed
them both for espousing what he assumed was the same faith.

He was wrong.

The Just One

They called James, the brother of Jesus, “James the Just.” In Jerusalem, the city
he had made his home after his brother’s death, James was recognized by all for his
unsurpassed piety and his tireless defense of the poor. He himself owned nothing,
not even the clothes he wore—simple garments made of linen, not wool. He drank no
wine and ate no meat. He took no baths. No razor ever touched his head, nor did he
smear himself with scented oils. It was said he spent so much time bent in worship,
beseeching God’s forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew hard as a camel’s.

To the followers of Jesus, James was the living link to the messiah, the blood of
the Lord. To everyone else in Jerusalem, he was simply “the just one.” Even the Jewish
authorities praised James for his rectitude and his unshakable commitment to the law.
Was it not James who excoriated the heretic Paul for abandoning the Torah? Did he
not force the former Pharisee to repent of his views and cleanse himself at the Temple?
The authorities may not have accepted James’s message about Jesus any more than they
accepted Paul’s, but they respected James and viewed him as a righteous and honorable
man. According to the early Christian historian Hegesippus (110–180
C.E
.), the Jewish authorities repeatedly asked James
to use his influence among the people to dissuade them from calling Jesus messiah.
“We entreat you, restrain the people, for they have gone astray in regard to Jesus,
as if he were the Christ,” they begged. “For we bear you witness, as do all the people,
that you are just and that you do not respect persons. Persuade, therefore, the multitude
not to be led astray concerning Jesus.”

Their entreaties went unheeded, of course. For although James was, as everyone attests,
a zealous devotee of the law, he was also a faithful follower of Jesus; he would never
betray the legacy of his elder brother, not even when he was martyred for it.

The story of James’s death can be found in Josephus’s
Antiquities
. The year was 62
C.E
. All of Palestine was sinking into anarchy. Famine and drought had devastated the
countryside, leaving fields fallow and farmers starving. Panic reigned in Jerusalem,
as the Sicarii murdered and pillaged at will. The revolutionary fervor of the Jews
was growing out of control, even as the priestly class upon which Rome relied to maintain
order was tearing itself apart, with the wealthy priests in Jerusalem having concocted
a scheme to seize for themselves the tithes that were meant to sustain the lower-class
village priests. Meanwhile, a succession of inept Roman governors—from the hotheaded
Cumanus to the scoundrel Felix and the hapless Festus—had only made matters worse.

When Festus died suddenly and without an immediate successor, Jerusalem descended
into chaos. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the emperor Nero hurriedly dispatched
Festus’s replacement, Albinus, to restore order in the city. But it would take weeks
for Albinus to arrive. The delay gave the newly appointed high priest, a rash and
irascible young man named Ananus, the time and opportunity to try to fill the vacuum
of power in Jerusalem himself.

Ananus was the son of the extremely influential former high priest, also named Ananus,
whose four other sons (and one son-in-law, Joseph Caiaphas) had all taken turns serving
in the post. It was, in fact, the elder Ananus, whom Josephus calls “the great hoarder
of money,” who instigated the shameless effort to strip the lower priests of their
tithes, their sole source of income. With no Roman governor to check his ambitions,
the young Ananus began a reckless campaign to rid himself of his perceived enemies.
Among his first actions, Josephus writes, was to assemble the Sanhedrin and bring
before it “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah.” Ananus charged
James with blasphemy and transgressing the law, sentencing him to be stoned to death.

The reaction to James’s execution was immediate. A group of the city’s Jews, whom
Josephus describes as “the most fair-minded and … strict in the observance of the
law,” were outraged by Ananus’s actions. They sent word to Albinus, who was en route
to Jerusalem from Alexandria, informing him of what had transpired in his absence.
In response, Albinus wrote a seething letter to Ananus, threatening to take murderous
vengeance upon him the moment he arrived. By the time Albinus entered Jerusalem, however,
Ananus had already been removed from his post as high priest and replaced with a man
named Jesus son of Damneus, who was himself deposed a year later, just before the
start of the Jewish Revolt.

The passage concerning the death of James in Josephus is famous for being the earliest
nonbiblical reference to Jesus. As previously noted, Josephus’s use of the appellation
“James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah,” proves that by the year
94
C.E.
, when the
Antiquities
was written, Jesus of Nazareth was already recognized as the founder of an important
and enduring movement. Yet a closer look at the passage reveals that the true focus
of Josephus is not Jesus, whom he dismisses as “the one they call messiah,” but rather
James, whose unjust death at the hands of the high priest forms the core of the story.
That Josephus mentions Jesus is no doubt significant. But the fact that a Jewish historian
writing to a Roman audience would recount in detail the circumstances of James’s death,
and the overwhelmingly negative reaction to his execution—not from the Christians
in Jerusalem, but from the city’s most devout and observant Jews—is a clear indication
of just
how prominent a figure James was in first-century Palestine. Indeed, James was more
than just Jesus’s brother. He was, as the historical evidence attests, the undisputed
leader of the movement Jesus had left behind.