Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (4 page)

This is as close as you will ever be to the presence of God. The stink of carnage
is impossible to ignore. It clings to the skin, the hair, becoming a noisome burden
you will not soon shake off. The priests burn incense to ward off the fetor and disease,
but the mixture
of myrrh and cinnamon, saffron and frankincense cannot mask the insufferable stench
of slaughter. Still, it is important to stay where you are and witness your sacrifice
take place in the next courtyard, the Court of Priests. Entry into this court is permitted
solely to the priests and Temple officials, for this is where the Temple’s altar stands:
a four-horned pedestal made of bronze and wood—five cubits long, five cubits wide—belching
thick black clouds of smoke into the air.

The priest takes your sacrifice to a corner and cleanses himself in a nearby basin.
Then, with a simple prayer, he slits the animal’s throat. An assistant collects the
blood in a bowl to sprinkle on the four horned corners of the altar, while the priest
carefully disembowels and dismembers the carcass. The animal’s hide is his to keep;
it will fetch a handsome price in the marketplace. The entrails and the fatty tissue
are torn out of the corpse, carried up a ramp to the altar, and placed directly atop
the eternal fire. The meat of the beast is carved away carefully and put to the side
for the priests to feast upon after the ceremony.

The entire liturgy is performed in front of the Temple’s innermost court, the Holy
of Holies—a gold-plated, columnar sanctuary at the very heart of the Temple complex.
The Holy of Holies is the highest point in all Jerusalem. Its doors are draped in
purple and scarlet tapestries embroidered with a zodiac wheel and a panorama of the
heavens. This is where the glory of God physically dwells. It is the meeting point
between the earthly and heavenly realms, the center of all creation. The Ark of the
Covenant containing the commandments of God once stood here, but that was lost long
ago. There is now nothing inside the sanctuary. It is a vast, empty space that serves
as a conduit for the presence of God, channeling his divine spirit from the heavens,
flowing it out in concentric waves across the Temple’s chambers, through the Court
of Priests and the Court of Israelites, the Court of Women and the Court of Gentiles,
over the Temple’s porticoed walls and down into the city of Jerusalem, across the
Judean countryside to Samaria
and Idumea, Peraea and Galilee, through the boundless empire of mighty Rome and on
to the rest of the world, to all peoples and nations, all of them—Jew and gentile
alike—nourished and sustained by the spirit of the Lord of Creation, a spirit that
has one sole source and no other: the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, tucked
within the Temple, in the sacred city of Jerusalem.

Entrance to the Holy of Holies is barred to all save the high priest, who at this
time, 56
C.E
., is a young man named Jonathan son of Ananus. Like most of his recent predecessors,
Jonathan purchased his office directly from Rome, and for a hefty price, no doubt.
The office of high priest is a lucrative one, limited to a handful of noble families
who pass the position between them like a legacy (the lower priests generally come
from more modest backgrounds).

The role of the Temple in Jewish life cannot be overstated. The Temple serves as calendar
and clock for the Jews; its rituals mark the cycle of the year and shape the day-to-day
activities of every inhabitant of Jerusalem. It is the center of commerce for all
Judea, its chief financial institution and largest bank. The Temple is as much the
dwelling place of Israel’s God as it is the seat of Israel’s nationalist aspirations;
it not only houses the sacred writings and scrolls of law that maintain the Jewish
cult, it is the main repository for the legal documents, historical notes, and genealogical
records of the Jewish nation.

Unlike their heathen neighbors, the Jews do not have a multiplicity of temples scattered
across the land. There is only one cultic center, one unique source for the divine
presence, one singular place and no other where a Jew can commune with the living
God. Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state. The very term “theocracy”
was coined specifically to describe Jerusalem. “Some people have entrusted the supreme
political powers to monarchies,” wrote the first-century Jewish historian Flavius
Josephus, “others to oligarchies, yet others to the masses [democracy]. Our lawgiver
[God], however, was attracted by none of these forms
of polity, but gave to his constitution the form of what—if a forced expression be
permitted—may be termed a ‘theocracy’ [
theokratia
], placing all sovereignty and authority in the hands of God.”

Think of the Temple as a kind of feudal state, employing thousands of priests, singers,
porters, servants, and ministers while maintaining vast tracts of fertile land tilled
by Temple slaves on behalf of the high priest and for his benefit. Add to this the
revenue raked in by the Temple tax and the constant stream of gifts and offerings
from visitors and pilgrims—not to mention the huge sums that pass through the hands
of the merchants and money changers, of which the Temple takes a cut—and it is easy
to see why so many Jews view the entire priestly nobility, and the high priest in
particular, as nothing but a band of avaricious “lovers of luxury,” to quote Josephus.

Picture the high priest Jonathan standing at the altar, incense smoldering in his
hand, and it is easy to see where this enmity comes from. Even his priestly garments,
passed down to him by his wealthy predecessors, attest to the high priest’s opulence.
The long, sleeveless robe dyed purple (the color of kings) and fringed with dainty
tassels and tiny golden bells sewn to the hem; the hefty breastplate, speckled with
twelve precious gems, one for each of the tribes of Israel; the immaculate turban
sitting upon his head like a tiara, fronted by a gold plate on which is engraved the
unutterable name of God; the
urim
and
thummim
, a sort of sacred dice made of wood and bone that the high priest carries in a pouch
near his breast and through which he reveals the will of God by casting lots—all of
these symbols of ostentation are meant to represent the high priest’s exclusive access
to God. They are what make the high priest different; they set him apart from every
other Jew in the world.

It is for this reason that only the high priest can enter the Holy of Holies, and
on only one day a year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when all the sins of Israel
are wiped clean. On this day, the high priest comes into the presence of God to atone
for the
whole nation. If he is worthy of God’s blessing, Israel’s sins are forgiven. If he
is not, a rope tied to his waist ensures that when God strikes him dead, he can be
dragged out of the Holy of Holies without anyone else defiling the sanctuary.

Of course, on this day, the high priest does die, though not, it would seem, by the
hand of God.

The priestly blessings complete and the
shema
sung (“Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone!”), the high priest Jonathan
steps away from the altar and walks down the ramp into the Temple’s outer courts.
The moment he arrives at the Court of Gentiles he is swallowed up by a frenzy of exaltation.
The Temple guards form a barrier of purity around him, protecting the high priest
from the contaminating hands of the masses. Yet it is easy for the assassin to track
him. He does not need to follow the blinding glare of his bejeweled vestments. He
need only listen for the jingle of the bells dangling from the hem of his robe. The
peculiar melody is the surest sign that the high priest is coming. The high priest
is near.

The assassin elbows through the crowd, pushing close enough to Jonathan to reach out
an invisible hand, to grasp the sacred vestments, to pull him away from the Temple
guards and hold him in place, just for an instant, long enough to unsheathe a short
dagger and slide it across his throat. A different sort of sacrifice.

Before the high priest’s blood spills onto the Temple floor, before the guards can
react to the broken rhythm of his stride, before anyone in the courtyard knows what
has happened, the assassin has melted back into the crowd.

You should not be surprised if he is the first to cry, “Murder!”

A Hole in the Corner

Who killed Jonathan son of Ananus as he strode across the Temple Mount in the year
56
C.E
.? No doubt there were many in Jerusalem who longed to slay the rapacious high priest,
and more than a few who would have liked to wipe out the bloated Temple priesthood
in its entirety. For what must never be forgotten when speaking of first-century Palestine
is that this land—this hallowed land from which the spirit of God flowed to the rest
of the world—was occupied territory. Legions of Roman troops were stationed throughout
Judea. Some six hundred Roman soldiers resided atop the Temple Mount itself, within
the high stone walls of the Antonia Fortress, which buttressed the northwest corner
of the Temple wall. The unclean centurion in his red cape and polished cuirass who
paraded through the Court of Gentiles, his hand hovering over the hilt of his sword,
was a not so subtle reminder, if any were needed, of who really ruled this sacred
place.

Roman dominion over Jerusalem began in 63
B.C.E
., when Rome’s master tactician, Pompey Magnus, entered the city with his conquering
legions and laid siege to the Temple. By then, Jerusalem had long since passed its
economic and cultural zenith. The Canaanite settlement that King David had recast
into the seat of his
kingdom, the city he had passed to his wayward son, Solomon, who built the first Temple
to God—sacked and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586
B.C.E
.—the city that had served as the religious, economic, and political capital of the
Jewish nation for a thousand years, was, by the time Pompey strode through its gates,
recognized less for its beauty and grandeur than for the religious fervor of its troublesome
population.

Situated on the southern plateau of the shaggy Judean mountains, between the twin
peaks of Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, and flanked by the Kidron Valley in
the east and the steep, forbidding Valley of Gehenna in the south, Jerusalem, at the
time of the Roman invasion, was home to a settled population of about a hundred thousand
people. To the Romans, it was an inconsequential speck on the imperial map, a city
the wordy statesman Cicero dismissed as “a hole in the corner.” But to the Jews this
was the navel of the world, the axis of the universe. There was no city more unique,
more holy, more venerable in all the world than Jerusalem. The purple vineyards whose
vines twisted and crawled across the level plains, the well-tilled fields and viridescent
orchards bursting with almond and fig and olive trees, the green beds of papyrus floating
lazily along the Jordan River—the Jews not only knew and deeply loved every feature
of this consecrated land, they laid claim to all of it. Everything from the farmsteads
of Galilee to the low-lying hills of Samaria and the far outskirts of Idumea, where
the Bible says the accursed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah once stood, was given by
God to the Jews, though in fact the Jews ruled none of it, not even Jerusalem, where
the true God was worshipped. The city that the Lord had clothed in splendor and glory
and placed, as the prophet Ezekiel declared, “in the center of all nations”—the eternal
seat of God’s kingdom on earth—was, at the dawn of the first century
C.E
., just a minor province, and a vexing one at that, at the far corner of the mighty
Roman Empire.

It is not that Jerusalem was unaccustomed to invasion and occupation. Despite its
exalted status in the hearts of the Jews, the
truth is that Jerusalem was little more than a trifle to be passed among a succession
of kings and emperors who took turns plundering and despoiling the sacred city on
their way to far grander ambitions. In 586
B.C.E
. the Babylonians—masters of Mesopotamia—rampaged through Judea, razing both Jerusalem
and its Temple to the ground. The Babylonians were conquered by the Persians, who
allowed the Jews to return to their beloved city and rebuild their temple, not because
they admired the Jews or took their cult seriously, but because they considered Jerusalem
an irrelevant backwater of little interest or concern to an empire that stretched
the length of Central Asia (though the prophet Isaiah would thank the Persian king
Cyrus by anointing him messiah). The Persian Empire, and Jerusalem with it, fell to
the armies of Alexander the Great, whose descendants imbued the city and its inhabitants
with Greek culture and ideas. Upon Alexander’s untimely death in 323
B.C.E
., Jerusalem was passed as spoils to the Ptolemaic dynasty and ruled from distant
Egypt, though only briefly. In 198
B.C.E
., the city was wrested from Ptolemaic control by the Seleucid king Antiochus the
Great, whose son Antiochus Epiphanes fancied himself god incarnate and strove to put
an end once and for all to the worship of the Jewish deity in Jerusalem. But the Jews
responded to this blasphemy with a relentless guerrilla war led by the stouthearted
sons of Mattathias the Hasmonaean—the Maccabees—who reclaimed the holy city from Seleucid
control in 164
B.C.E
. and, for the first time in four centuries, restored Jewish hegemony over Judea.