Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (9 page)

Zeal implied a strict adherence to the Torah and the Law, a refusal to serve any foreign
master—to serve any human master at all—and an uncompromising devotion to the sovereignty
of God. To be zealous for the Lord was to walk in the blazing footsteps of the prophets
and heroes of old, men and women who tolerated no partner to God, who would bow to
no king save the King of the World, and who dealt ruthlessly with idolatry and with
those who transgressed God’s law. The very land of Israel was claimed through zeal,
for it was the zealous warriors of God who cleansed it of all foreigners and idolaters,
just as God demanded. “Whoever sacrifices
to any god but the Lord alone shall be utterly annihilated” (Exodus 22:20).

Many Jews in first-century Palestine strove to live a life of zeal, each in his or
her own way. But there were some who, in order to preserve their zealous ideals, were
willing to resort to extreme acts of violence if necessary, not just against the Romans
and the uncircumcised masses, but against their fellow Jews, those who dared submit
to Rome. They were called
zealots
.

These zealots should not be confused with the Zealot Party that would arise sixty
years later, after the Jewish Revolt in 66
C.E
. During Jesus’s lifetime, zealotry did not signify a firm sectarian designation or
political party. It was an idea, an aspiration, a model of piety inextricably linked
to the widespread sense of apocalyptic expectation that had seized the Jews in the
wake of the Roman occupation. There was a feeling, particularly among the peasants
and the pious poor, that the present order was coming to an end, that a new and divinely
inspired order was about to reveal itself. The Kingdom of God was at hand. Everyone
was talking about it. But God’s reign could only be ushered in by those with the
zeal
to fight for it.

Such ideas had existed long before Judas the Galilean came along. But Judas was perhaps
the first revolutionary leader to fuse banditry and zealotry into a single revolutionary
force, making resistance to Rome a religious duty incumbent on all Jews. It was Judas’s
fierce determination to do whatever it took to free the Jews from foreign rule and
cleanse the land in the name of Israel’s God that made the Fourth Philosophy a model
of zealous resistance for the numerous apocalyptic revolutionaries who would, a few
decades later, join forces to expel the Romans from the Holy Land.

In 4
B.C.E
., with Herod the Great dead and buried, Judas and his small army of zealots made
a daring assault on the city of Sepphoris. They broke open the city’s royal armory
and seized for themselves the weapons and provisions that were stored inside. Now
fully armed and joined by a number of sympathetic Sepphoreans,
the members of the Fourth Philosophy launched a guerrilla war throughout Galilee,
plundering the homes of the wealthy and powerful, setting villages ablaze, and meting
out the justice of God upon the Jewish aristocracy and those who continued to pledge
their loyalty to Rome.

The movement grew in size and ferocity throughout the following decade of violence
and instability. Then, in the year 6
C.E.
, when Judea officially became a Roman province and the Syrian governor, Quirinius,
called for a census to tally, register, and properly tax the people and property in
the newly acquired region, the members of the Fourth Philosophy seized their opportunity.
They used the census to make a final appeal to the Jews to stand with them against
Rome and fight for their freedom. The census, they argued, was an abomination. It
was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was,
in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It was an admission that
the Jews were not the chosen tribe of God but the personal property of the emperor.

It was not the census itself that so enraged Judas and his followers; it was the very
notion of paying any tax or tribute to Rome. What more obvious sign was needed of
the subservience of the Jews? The tribute was particularly offensive as it implied
that the land belonged to Rome, not God. Indeed, the payment of tribute became, for
the zealots, a test of piety and allegiance to God. Simply put, if you thought it
lawful to pay tribute to Caesar, then you were a traitor and apostate. You deserved
to die.

Inadvertently helping Judas’s cause was the bumbling high priest at the time, a Roman
lackey named Joazar, who happily went along with Quirinius’s census and encouraged
his fellow Jews to do the same. The collusion of the high priest was all the proof
Judas and his followers needed that the Temple itself had been defiled and must be
forcibly rescued from the sinful hands of the priestly aristocracy. As far as Judas’s
zealots were concerned, Joazar’s acceptance of the census was his death warrant. The
fate of the
Jewish nation depended on killing the high priest. Zeal demanded it. Just as the sons
of Mattathias “showed zeal for the law” by killing those Jews who sacrificed to any
but God (Maccabees 2:19–28), just as Josiah, King of Judah, butchered every uncircumcised
man in his land because of his “zeal for the Mighty One” (2 Baruch 66:5), so now must
these zealots turn back the wrath of God upon Israel by ridding the land of treasonous
Jews like the high priest.

It is clear from the fact that the Romans removed the high priest Joazar from his
post not long after he had encouraged the Jews to obey the census that Judas won the
argument. Josephus, who has very little positive to say about Judas the Galilean (he
calls him a “sophist,” a pejorative that to Josephus signifies a troublemaker, a disturber
of the peace, a deceiver of the young), notes somewhat cryptically that Joazar was
“overpowered” by the argument of the zealots.

Josephus’s problem with Judas seems not to have been his “sophistry” or his use of
violence, but rather what he derisively calls Judas’s “royal aspirations.” What Josephus
means is that in fighting against the subjugation of the Jews and preparing the way
for the establishment of God’s reign on earth, Judas, like his father Hezekiah before
him, was claiming for himself the mantle of the messiah, the throne of King David.
And, like his father before him, Judas would pay the price for his ambition.

Not long after he led the charge against the census, Judas the Galilean was captured
by Rome and killed. As retribution for the city’s having given up its arms to Judas’s
followers, the Romans marched to Sepphoris and burned it to the ground. The men were
slaughtered, the women and children auctioned off as slaves. More than two thousand
rebels and sympathizers were crucified en masse. A short time later, Herod Antipas
arrived and immediately set to work transforming the flattened ruins of Sepphoris
into an extravagant royal city fit for a king.

Jesus of Nazareth was likely born the same year that Judas the Galilean—Judas the
failed messiah, son of Hezekiah the failed
messiah—rampaged through the countryside, burning with zeal. He would have been about
ten years old when the Romans captured Judas, crucified his followers, and destroyed
Sepphoris. When Antipas began to rebuild Sepphoris in earnest, Jesus was a young man
ready to work in his father’s trade. By then practically every artisan and day laborer
in the province would have poured into Sepphoris to take part in what was the largest
restoration project of the time, and one can be fairly certain that Jesus and his
brothers, who lived a short distance away in Nazareth, would have been among them.
In fact, from the time he began his apprenticeship as a
tekton
to the day he launched his ministry as an itinerant preacher, Jesus would have spent
most of his life not in the tiny hamlet of Nazareth, but in the cosmopolitan capital
of Sepphoris: a peasant boy in a big city.

Six days a week, from sunup to sundown, Jesus would have toiled in the royal city,
building palatial houses for the Jewish aristocracy during the day, returning to his
crumbling mud-brick home at night. He would have witnessed for himself the rapidly
expanding divide between the absurdly rich and the indebted poor. He would have mingled
with the city’s Hellenized and Romanized population: those wealthy, wayward Jews who
spent as much time praising the emperor of Rome as they did the Lord of the Universe.
He certainly would have been familiar with the exploits of Judas the Galilean. For
while the population of Sepphoris seems to have been tamed and transformed after Judas’s
rebellion into the model of Roman cooperation—so much so that in 66
C.E.
, as most of Galilee was joining the revolt against Rome, Sepphoris immediately declared
its loyalty to the emperor and became a Roman garrison during the battle to reclaim
Jerusalem—the memory of Judas the Galilean and what he accomplished did not fade in
Sepphoris: not for the drudge and the dispossessed; not for those, like Jesus, who
spent their days slogging bricks to build yet another mansion for yet another Jewish
nobleman. And no doubt Jesus would have been aware of the escapades of Herod Antipas—“that
Fox,” as Jesus calls him (Luke 13:31)—who lived in Sepphoris until around 20
C.E
., when he moved to Tiberias, on the coast of the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, Jesus may
have regularly set eyes upon the man who would one day cut off the head of his friend
and mentor, John the Baptist, and seek to do the same to him.

Where Is Your Fleet to Sweep the Roman Seas?

Prefect Pontius Pilate arrived in Jerusalem in the year 26
C.E
. He was the fifth prefect, or governor, Rome had sent to oversee the occupation of
Judea. After the death of Herod the Great and the dismissal of his son Archelaus as
ethnarch in Jerusalem, Rome decided it would be best to govern the province directly,
rather than through yet another Jewish client-king.

The Pontii were Samnites, descended from the mountainous domain of Samnium in southern
Rome, a hard country of stone and blood and brutal men that had been broken and forcibly
absorbed into the Roman Empire in the third century
B.C.E
. The surname Pilatus meant “skilled with a javelin,” a tribute perhaps to Pilate’s
father, whose glory as a Roman soldier under Julius Caesar had allowed the Pontii
to advance from their humble origins into the Roman knightly class. Pilate, like all
Roman knights, performed his expected military service to the empire. But he was not
a soldier like his father; he was an administrator, more comfortable with accounts
and tallies than with swords and spears. Yet Pilate was no less hard a man. The sources
describe him as cruel, coldhearted,
and rigid: a proudly imperious Roman with little regard for the sensitivities of subject
peoples.

Pilate’s disdain for the Jews was obvious from the very first day he arrived in Jerusalem,
bedecked in a white tunic and golden breastplate, a red cape draped over his shoulders.
The new governor announced his presence in the holy city by marching through Jerusalem’s
gates trailed by a legion of Roman soldiers carrying standards bearing the emperor’s
image—an ostentatious display of contempt for Jewish sensibilities. Later, he introduced
a set of gilded Roman shields dedicated to Tiberius, “son of the divine Augustus,”
into the Temple of Jerusalem. The shields were an offering on behalf of the Roman
gods, their presence in the Jewish Temple a deliberate act of blasphemy. Informed
by his engineers that Jerusalem needed to rebuild its aging aqueducts, Pilate simply
took the money to pay for the project from the Temple’s treasury. When the Jews protested,
Pilate sent his troops to slaughter them in the streets.

The gospels present Pilate as a righteous yet weak-willed man so overcome with doubt
about putting Jesus of Nazareth to death that he does everything in his power to save
his life, finally washing his hands of the entire episode when the Jews demand his
blood. That is pure fiction. What Pilate was best known for was his extreme depravity,
his total disregard for Jewish law and tradition, and his barely concealed aversion
to the Jewish nation as a whole. During his tenure in Jerusalem he so eagerly, and
without trial, sent thousands upon thousands of Jews to the cross that the people
of Jerusalem felt obliged to lodge a formal complaint with the Roman emperor.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his cold, hard cruelty to the Jews, Pontius Pilate
became one of the longest-serving Roman governors in Judea. It was a perilous and
volatile job. The governor’s most important task was to ensure the uninterrupted flow
of tax revenues back to Rome. But to do so he had to maintain a functional, if fragile,
relationship with the high priest; the governor
would administer the civil and economic affairs of Judea, while the high priest maintained
the Jewish cult. The tenuous bond between the two offices meant that no Roman governor
or Jewish high priest lasted very long, especially in those first few decades after
Herod’s death. The five governors before Pilate served only a couple of years each,
the lone exception being Pilate’s immediate predecessor, Valerius Gratus. But whereas
Gratus appointed and dismissed five different high priests in his time as governor,
throughout Pilate’s decade-long tenure in Jerusalem, he had only one high priest to
contend with: Joseph Caiaphas.