Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (33 page)

The bishops were not to disband until they had resolved the theological differences
among them, particularly when it came to the nature of Jesus and his relationship
to God. Over the centuries since Jesus’s crucifixion, there had been a great deal
of discord and debate among the leaders of the church over whether Jesus was human
or divine. Was he, as those like Athanasius of Alexandria claimed, God incarnate,
or was he, as the followers of Arius seemed
to suggest, just a man—a perfect man, perhaps, but a man nonetheless?

After months of heated negotiations, the council handed to Constantine what became
known as the Nicene Creed, outlining for the first time the officially sanctioned,
orthodox beliefs of the Christian church. Jesus is the literal son of God, the creed
declared. He is Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of the
same substance as the father. As for those who disagreed with the creed, those like
the Arians who believed that “there was a time when [Jesus] was not,” they were immediately
banished from the empire and their teachings violently suppressed.

It may be tempting to view the Nicene Creed as an overtly politicized attempt to stifle
the legitimate voices of dissent in the early church. It is certainly the case that
the council’s decision resulted in a thousand years or more of unspeakable bloodshed
in the name of Christian orthodoxy. But the truth is that the council members were
merely codifying a creed that was already the majority opinion, not just of the bishops
gathered at Nicaea, but of the entire Christian community. Indeed, belief in Jesus
as God had been enshrined in the church centuries before the Council of Nicaea, thanks
to the overwhelming popularity of the letters of Paul.

After the Temple was destroyed, the holy city burned to the ground, and the remnants
of the Jerusalem assembly dispersed, Paul underwent a stunning rehabilitation in the
Christian community. With the possible exception of the
Q
document (which is, after all, a hypothetical text), the only writings about Jesus
that existed in 70
C.E
. were the letters of Paul. These letters had been in circulation since the fifties.
They were written to the Diaspora communities, which, after the destruction of Jerusalem,
were the only Christian communities left in the realm. Without the mother assembly
to guide the followers of Jesus, the movement’s connection to Judaism was broken,
and Paul became the primary vehicle through which a new generation of Christians was
introduced to
Jesus the Christ. Even the gospels were deeply influenced by Paul’s letters. One can
trace the shadow of Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew. But it is in the gospel
of Luke, written by one of Paul’s devoted disciples, that one can see the dominance
of Paul’s views, while the gospel of John is little more than Pauline theology in
narrative form.

Paul’s conception of Christianity may have been anathema before 70
C.E
. But afterward, his notion of a wholly new religion free from the authority of a
Temple that no longer existed, unburdened by a law that no longer mattered, and divorced
from a Judaism that had become a pariah was enthusiastically embraced by converts
throughout the Roman Empire. Hence, in 398
C.E
., when, according to legend, another group of bishops gathered at a council in the
city of Hippo Regius in modern-day Algeria to canonize what would become known as
the New Testament, they chose to include in the Christian scriptures one letter from
James, the brother and successor of Jesus, two letters from Peter, the chief apostle
and first among the Twelve, three letters from John, the beloved disciple and pillar
of the church, and fourteen letters from Paul, the deviant and outcast who was rejected
and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem. In fact, more than half of the twenty-seven
books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul.

This should not be surprising. Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem was
almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology. And that is precisely
what Paul provided. The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored
in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome,
and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism
and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one
for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make.

Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus
of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering
an army of
disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic
preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical
Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely
lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of
the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus the
man
—is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He
is, in short, someone worth believing in.

This book is the result of two decades of research into the New Testament and the
origins of the Christian movement conducted at Santa Clara University, Harvard University,
and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Although I am obviously indebted
to all my professors, I would like to single out my extremely patient Greek professor
Helen Moritz, and my brilliant adviser, the late Catherine Bell, at Santa Clara, Harvey
Cox and Jon Levinson at Harvard, and Mark Juergensmeyer at UCSB. I am also grateful
for the unconditional support I received from my editor Will Murphy and the entire
team at Random House. Special thanks to Elyse Cheney, the best literary agent in the
world, and to Ian Werrett, who not only translated all the Hebrew and Aramaic passages
in the book, but also read multiple drafts and provided vital feedback on the manuscript.
But the biggest thanks of all goes, as always, to my beloved wife and best friend
Jessica Jackley, whose love and devotion have made me the man I always hoped I could
be.

I am greatly indebted to John P. Meier’s epic work,
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus
, vols. I–IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991–2009). I first met Father Meier
while I was studying the New Testament at Santa Clara University, and it was his definitive
look at the historical Jesus, which at the time existed only in its first volume,
that planted the seeds of the present book in my mind. Father Meier’s book answers
the question of why we have so little historical information about a man who so thoroughly
changed the course of human history. His thesis—that we know so little about Jesus
because in his lifetime he would have been viewed as little more than a marginal Jewish
peasant from the backwoods of Galilee—forms the theoretical groundwork for the book
you are reading.

Of course, I argue further that part of the reason we know so little about the historical
Jesus is that his messianic mission—historic as it may have turned out to be—was not
uncommon in first-century Palestine. Hence my reference to Celsus’s quote—“I am God,
or the servant of God, or a divine spirit …”—which can be found in Rudolf Otto’s classic
study,
The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man
(Boston: Starr King Press, 1957), 13.

A brief word about my use of the term “first-century Palestine” throughout this book.
While Palestine was the unofficial Roman designation for the land encompassing modern-day
Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon during Jesus’s lifetime, it was not
until the Romans quashed the Bar Kochba revolt in the middle of the second century
C.E
that the region was officially named
Syria Palaestina
. Nevertheless, the term “first-century Palestine” has become so commonplace in academic
discussions about the era of Jesus that I see no reason not to use it in this book.

For more on Jesus’s messianic contemporaries—the so-called false messiahs—see the
works of Richard A. Horsley, specifically “Popular Messianic Movements Around the
Time of Jesus,”
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
46 (1984): 409–32; “Popular Prophetic Movements at the Time of Jesus: Their Principal
Features and Social Origins,”
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
26 (1986): 3–27; and, with John S. Hanson,
Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs
(Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), 135–189. The reader will note that I rely a great
deal on Professor Horsley’s work. That is because he is by far the most prominent
thinker on the subject of first-century apocalypticism.

Although the so-called Two-Source Theory is almost universally accepted by scholars,
there are a handful of biblical theorists who reject it as a viable explanation for
the creation of the four canonized gospels as we know them. For example, J. Magne,
From Christianity to Gnosis and from Gnosis to Christianity
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993) views the Two-Source Theory as overly simplistic
and incapable of adequately addressing what he sees as the complex variants among
the Synoptic gospels.

In addition to the story of the fiendish Jewish priest Ananus, there is one other
passage in Josephus’s
Antiquities
that mentions Jesus of Nazareth. This is the so-called Testimonium Flavianum in book
18, chapter 3, in which Josephus appears to repeat the entire gospel formula. But
that passage has been so corrupted by later Christian interpolation that its authenticity
is dubious at best, and scholarly attempts to cull through the passage for some sliver
of historicity have proven futile. Still, the second passage is significant in that
it mentions Jesus’s crucifixion.

Among Romans, crucifixion originated as a deterrence against the revolt of slaves,
probably as early as 200
B.C.E
. By Jesus’s time, it was the primary form of punishment for “inciting rebellion”
(i.e., treason or sedition), the exact crime with which Jesus was charged. See Hubert
Cancick et al., eds.,
Brill’s New Pauly Encyclopedia of the Ancient World: Antiquity
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2005), 60 and 966. The punishment applied solely to
non-Roman citizens. Roman citizens could be crucified, however, if the crime was so
grave that it essentially forfeited their citizenship.

There are no resurrection appearances in the gospel of Mark, as it is the unanimous
consensus of scholars that the original version of the gospel ended with Mark 16:8.
For more on this, see
note
to chapter 3 below.

In 313
C.E.
, the emperor Constantine passed the Edict of Milan, which initiated a period of Christian
tolerance in the Roman Empire, wherein property that was confiscated from Christians
by the state was returned and Christians were free to worship without fear of reprisals
from the state. While the Edict of Milan created space for Christianity to become
the official religion of the empire, Constantine never made it so. Julian the Apostate
(d. 363
C.E
), the last non-Christian
emperor, actually tried to push the empire back toward paganism by emphasizing that
system over and against Christianity and purging the government of Christian leaders,
though he never repealed the Edict of Milan. It was not until the year 380
C.E.
, during the rule of Emperor Flavius Theodosius, that Christianity became the official
religion of the Roman Empire.

The very brief outline of Jesus’s life and ministry presented at the end of the introduction
to this book represents the view of the vast majority of scholars about what can be
said with confidence about the historical Jesus. For more, see Charles H. Talbert,
ed.,
Reimarus: Fragments
(Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985) and James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, ed.,
The Historical Jesus: Five Views
(Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

Help with the description of the Temple of Jerusalem and the sacrifices therein comes
from a variety of sources as well as from my frequent trips to the Temple site. But
a few books were particularly helpful in reconstructing the ancient Jewish Temple,
including Martin Jaffee,
Early Judaism
(Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2006), especially page 172–88; Joan Comay,
The Temple of Jerusalem
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975); and John Day, ed.,
Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel
(New York: T&T Clark, 2005).

Instructions for the Temple’s four-horned altar were given to Moses while he and the
Israelites rambled across the desert searching for a home: “And you shall make the
altar of acacia wood. And you shall affix horns upon its four corners so that it shall
be horned; and you shall overlay it with bronze. And you shall make pots for receiving
its ashes, and shovels and basins and forks and fire pans; all of its vessels you
shall cast in bronze. And you shall make for it a grating, a net made of bronze; and
on the net you shall affix four bronze rings to its four corners. And you shall place
it under the edge of the altar, so that the net extends halfway down the altar. And
you shall make poles for the altar, poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with bronze.
And the poles shall be inserted into the rings, so that the poles shall be on the
two sides of the altar when it is carried. You shall make it hollow with boards, as
it was shown to you on the mountain. Thus it shall be done” (Exodus 27:18).

What does it mean for the Temple to be the sole source of God’s divine presence? Consider
this: The Samaritans denied the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem as the sole place
of worship. They instead worshipped God on Mount Gerizim. Though this was essentially
the only religious difference between the two peoples, it was enough for the Samaritans
not to be considered Jews. There were other places of sacrifice for Jews (for instance,
in Heliopolis), but these were considered substitutes, not replacements.