Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (6 page)

That someone turned out to be a clever young Jewish nobleman from Idumea named Herod.
Herod’s father, Antipater, had the good fortune of being on the right side in the
civil war between Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar. Caesar rewarded Antipater for his
loyalty by granting him Roman citizenship in 48
B.C.E
. and giving him administrative powers on behalf of Rome over all of
Judea. Before his death a few years later, Antipater cemented his position among the
Jews by appointing his sons Phasael and Herod as governors over Jerusalem and Galilee,
respectively. Herod was probably only fifteen years old at the time, but he immediately
distinguished himself as an effective leader and energetic supporter of Rome by launching
a bloody crusade against the bandit gangs. He even captured the bandit chief Hezekiah
and cut off his head, putting an end (temporarily) to the bandit menace.

While Herod was clearing Galilee of the bandit gangs, Antigonus, the son of Aristobulus,
who had lost the throne and the high priesthood to his brother Hyrcanus after the
Roman invasion, was stirring up trouble in Jerusalem. With the help of Rome’s avowed
enemies, the Parthians, Antigonus besieged the holy city in 40
B.C.E
., taking both the high priest Hyrcanus and Herod’s brother Phasael prisoner. Hyrcanus
was mutilated, rendering him ineligible, according to Jewish law, to serve any longer
as high priest; Herod’s brother Phasael committed suicide while in captivity.

The Roman Senate determined that the most effective way to retake Jerusalem from Parthian
control was to make Herod its client-king and let him accomplish the task on Rome’s
behalf. The naming of client-kings was standard practice during the early years of
the Roman Empire, allowing Rome to expand its borders without expending valuable resources
administering conquered provinces directly.

In 37
B.C.E
., Herod marched to Jerusalem with a massive Roman army under his command. He expelled
the Parthian forces from the city and wiped out the remnants of the Hasmonaean dynasty.
In recognition of his services, Rome named Herod “King of the Jews,” granting him
a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon.

Herod’s was a profligate and tyrannical rule marked by farcical excess and bestial
acts of cruelty. He was ruthless to his enemies and tolerated no hint of revolt from
the Jews under his reign. Upon
ascending the throne, he massacred nearly every member of the Sanhedrin and replaced
the Temple priests with a claque of fawning admirers who purchased their positions
directly from him. This act effectively neutered the political influence of the Temple
and redistributed power to a new class of Jews whose reliance on the favors of the
king transformed them into a sort of nouveau riche aristocracy. Herod’s penchant for
violence and his highly publicized domestic disputes, which bordered on the burlesque,
led him to execute so many members of his own family that Caesar Augustus once famously
quipped, “I would rather be Herod’s pig than his son.”

In truth, being King of the Jews in Herod’s time was no enviable task. There were,
according to Josephus, twenty-four fractious Jewish sects in and around Jerusalem.
Although none enjoyed unfettered dominance over the others, three sects, or rather
schools
, were particularly influential in shaping Jewish thought at the time: the Pharisees,
who were primarily lower- and middle-class rabbis and scholars who interpreted the
laws for the masses; the Sadducees, more conservative and, with regard to Rome, more
accommodating priests from wealthier landowning families; and the Essenes, a predominantly
priestly movement that separated itself from the authority of the Temple and made
its base on a barren hilltop in the Dead Sea valley called Qumran.

Charged with pacifying and administrating an unruly and heterogeneous population of
Jews, Greeks, Samaritans, Syrians, and Arabs—all of whom hated him more than they
hated each other—Herod did a masterful job of maintaining order on behalf of Rome.
His reign ushered in an era of political stability among the Jews that had not been
seen for centuries. He initiated a monumental building and public works project that
employed tens of thousands of peasants and day laborers, permanently changing the
physical landscape of Jerusalem. He built markets and theaters, palaces and ports,
all modeled on the classical Hellenic style.

To pay for his colossal construction projects and to satisfy his
own extravagance, Herod imposed a crushing tax rate upon his subjects, from which
he continued to dispatch a hefty tribute to Rome, and with pleasure, as an expression
of his esteem for his Roman masters. Herod was not just the emperor’s client-king.
He was a close and personal friend, a loyal citizen of the Republic who wanted more
than to emulate Rome; he wanted to remake it in the sands of Judea. He instituted
a forced Hellenization program upon the Jews, bringing gymnasia, Greek amphitheaters,
and Roman baths to Jerusalem. He made Greek the language of his court and minted coins
bearing Greek letters and pagan insignia.

Yet Herod was also a Jew, and as such he understood the importance of appealing to
the religious sensibilities of his subjects. That is why he embarked on his most ambitious
project: the rebuilding and expansion of the Temple of Jerusalem. It was Herod who
had the Temple raised on a platform atop Mount Moriah—the highest point in the city—and
embellished with wide Roman colonnades and towering marble columns that gleamed in
the sun. Herod’s Temple was meant to impress his patrons in Rome, but he also wanted
to please his fellow Jews, many of whom did not consider the King of the Jews to be
himself a Jew. Herod was a convert, after all. His mother was an Arab. His people,
the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier. The rebuilding
of the Temple was, for Herod, not only a means of solidifying his political dominance;
it was a desperate plea for acceptance by his Jewish subjects.

It did not work.

Despite the rebuilding of the Temple, Herod’s unabashed Hellenism and his aggressive
attempts to “Romanize” Jerusalem enraged pious Jews who seem never to have ceased
viewing their king as a slave to foreign masters and a devotee of foreign gods. Not
even the Temple, the supreme symbol of Jewish identity, could mask Herod’s infatuation
with Rome. Shortly before its completion, Herod placed a golden eagle—the sign of
Roman dominion—over its main portal and forced his handpicked high priest to offer
two sacrifices a day on behalf of Caesar Augustus as “the Son of God.” Nevertheless,
it is a sign of how firmly Herod held his kingdom in his grip that the general odium
of the Jews toward his reign never rose to the level of insurrection, at least not
in his lifetime.

When Herod the Great died in 4
B.C.E.
, Augustus split his realm among his three sons: Archelaus was given Judea, Samaria,
and Idumea; Herod Antipas—known as “the Fox”—reigned over Galilee and Peraea (a region
in the Transjordan northeast of the Dead Sea); and Philip was handed control over
Gaulanitis (modern day Golan) and the lands northeast of the Sea of Galilee. None
of Herod’s three sons were given the title of king: Antipas and Philip were each named
tetrarch
, meaning “ruler of a quarter,” and Archelaus was named
ethnarch
, or “ruler of a people”; both titles were deliberately meant to signal the end of
unified kingship over the Jews.

The division of Herod’s kingdom proved a disaster for Rome, as the dam of anger and
resentment that had been built during his long and oppressive reign burst into a flood
of riots and violent protests that his nebbish sons, dulled by a life of idleness
and languor, could hardly contain. The rioters burned down one of Herod’s palaces
on the Jordan River. Twice, the Temple itself was overrun: first during Passover,
then again at Shavuot or the Festival of Weeks. In the countryside, the bandit gangs
that Herod had beaten into submission once again began tearing through Galilee, slaughtering
the former king’s associates. In Idumea, Herod’s home region, two thousand of his
soldiers mutinied. Even Herod’s allies, including his own cousin Achiab, joined the
rebellion.

These uprisings were no doubt fueled by the messianic expectations of the Jews. In
Peraea, a former slave of Herod’s—an imposing giant of a man named Simon—crowned himself
messiah and rallied together a group of bandits to plunder the royal palaces at Jericho.
The rebellion ended when Simon was captured and beheaded. A short while later, another
messianic aspirant, a poor shepherd boy named Athronges, placed a crown upon his head
and
launched a foolhardy attack against Roman forces. He, too, was caught and executed.

The chaos and bloodshed continued unabated until Caesar Augustus finally ordered his
own troops into Judea to put an end to the uprising. Although the emperor allowed
Philip and Antipas to remain in their posts, he sent Archelaus into exile, placed
Jerusalem under a Roman governor, and, in the year 6
C.E.
, transformed all of Judea into a province ruled directly by Rome. There would be
no more semi-independence. No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem
now belonged wholly to Rome.

According to tradition, Herod the Great died on the eve of Passover in 4
B.C.E.
, at the ripe age of seventy, having reigned over the Jews for thirty-seven years.
Josephus writes that on the day of Herod’s death, there was an eclipse of the moon,
an inauspicious sign, perhaps presaging the tumult that would follow. There is, of
course, another tradition told about the demise of Herod the Great: that sometime
between his death in 4
B.C.E
. and the Roman takeover of Jerusalem in 6
C.E.
, in an obscure hillside village in Galilee, a child was born who would one day claim
for himself Herod’s mantle as King of the Jews.

You Know Where I Am From

Ancient Nazareth rests on the jagged brow of a windy hilltop in lower Galilee. No
more than a hundred Jewish families live in this tiny village. There are no roads,
no public buildings. There is no synagogue. The villagers share a single well from
which to draw fresh water. A single bath, fed by a trickle of rainfall captured and
stored in underground cisterns, serves the entire population. It is a village of mostly
illiterate peasants, farmers, and day laborers; a place that does not exist on any
map.

The homes in Nazareth are simple affairs: a single windowless room, divided in two—one
room for the family, the other for the livestock—made of whitewashed mud and stone
and crowned with a flat-topped roof where the householders gather to pray, where they
lay out their wash to dry, where they take their meals on temperate evenings, and
where, in the hot summer months, they roll out their dusty mats and sleep. The lucky
inhabitants have a courtyard and a tiny patch of soil to grow vegetables, for no matter
their occupation or skill, every Nazarean is a farmer. The peasants who call this
secluded village home are, without exception, cultivators of the land. It is agriculture
that feeds and sustains the meager population. Everyone raises their own livestock,
everyone
plants their own crops: a bit of barley, some wheat, a few stalks of millet and oats.
The manure collected from the animals feeds the earth, which in turn feeds the villagers,
who then feed the livestock. Self-sufficiency is the rule.

The hillside hamlet of Nazareth is so small, so obscure, that its name does not appear
in any ancient Jewish source before the third century
C.E
.—not in the Hebrew Bible, not in the Talmud, not in the Midrash, not in Josephus.
It is, in short, an inconsequential and utterly forgettable place. It is also the
city in which Jesus was likely born and raised. That he came from this tightly enclosed
village of a few hundred impoverished Jews may very well be the only fact concerning
Jesus’s childhood about which we can be fairly confident. So identified was Jesus
with Nazareth that he was known throughout his life simply as “the Nazarean.” Considering
how common a first name Jesus was, the city of his birth became his principal sobriquet.
It was the one thing about which everyone who knew him—his friends and his enemies
alike—seemed to agree.

Why, then, do Matthew and Luke—and
only
Matthew (2:1–9) and Luke (2:1–21)—claim that Jesus was born not in Nazareth but in
Bethlehem, even though the name Bethlehem does not appear anywhere else in the entire
New Testament (not even anywhere else in Matthew or Luke, both of which repeatedly
refer to Jesus as “the Nazarean”), save for a single verse in the gospel of John (7:42)?

The answer may be found in that verse from John.

It was, the evangelist writes, early in Jesus’s ministry. Up to this point, Jesus
had, for the most part, restricted himself to preaching his message to the poor farmers
and fishermen of Galilee—his friends and neighbors. But now that the Feast of Tabernacles
has arrived, Jesus’s family urge him to travel with them to Judea to celebrate the
joyous harvest festival together, and to reveal himself to the masses.