Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  “As for the towns of these people that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance,” God told the Israelites, “you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them all—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deuteronomy 20:17–18).

  It was, the Bible claims, only after the Jewish armies had “utterly destroyed all that breathed” in the cities of Libnah and Lachish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir, in the hill country and in the Negeb, in the lowlands and in the slopes—only after every single previous inhabitant of this land was eradicated, “as the Lord God of Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10: 28–42)—that the Jews were allowed to settle here.

  And yet, a thousand years later, this same tribe that had shed so much blood to cleanse the Promised Land of every foreign element so as to rule it in the name of its God now found itself laboring under the boot of an imperial pagan power, forced to share the holy city with Gauls, Spaniards, Romans, Greeks, and Syrians—all of them foreigners, all of them heathens—obligated by law to make sacrifices in God’s own Temple on behalf of a Roman idolater who lived more than a thousand kilometers away.

  How would the heroes of old respond to such humiliation and degradation? What would Joshua or Aaron or Phineas or Samuel do to the unbelievers who had defiled the land set aside by God for his chosen people?

  They would drown the land in blood. They would smash the heads of the heathens and the gentiles, burn their idols to the ground, slaughter their wives and their children. They would slay the idolaters and bathe their feet in the blood of their enemies, just as the Lord commanded. They would call upon the God of Israel to burst forth from the heavens in his war chariot, to trample upon the sinful nations and make the mountains writhe at his fury.

  As for the high priest—the wretch who betrayed God’s chosen people to Rome for some coin and the right to prance about in his spangled garments? His very existence was an insult to God. It was a blight upon the entire land.

  It had to be wiped away.

  Chapter Two

  King of the Jews

  In the years of tumult that followed the Roman occupation of Judea, as Rome became enmeshed in a debilitating civil war between Pompey Magnus and his erstwhile ally Julius Caesar, even while remnants of the Hasmonaean Dynasty continued vying for the favors of both men, the situation for the Jewish farmers and peasants who harrowed and sowed God’s land steadily worsened. The small family farms that for centuries had served as the primary basis of the rural economy were gradually swallowed up by large estates administered by landed aristocracies flush with freshly minted Roman coins. Rapid urbanization under Roman rule fueled mass internal migration from the countryside to the cities. The agriculture that had once sustained the meager village populations was now almost wholly focused on feeding the engorged urban centers, leaving the rural peasants hungry and destitute. The peasantry were not only obligated to continue paying their taxes and their tithes to the Temple priesthood, they were now forced to pay a heavy tribute to Rome. For farmers, the total could amount to nearly half their annual yield.

  At the same time, successive droughts had left large swaths of the countryside fallow and in ruin as much of the Jewish peasantry was reduced to slavery. Those who managed to remain on their wasted fields often had no choice but to borrow heavily from the landed aristocracy, at exorbitant interest rates. Never mind that Jewish law forbade the charging of interest on loans; the massive fines that were levied on the poor for late payments had basically the same effect. In any case, the landed aristocracy expected the peasants to default on their loans; they were banking on it. For if the loan was not promptly and fully repaid, the peasant’s land could be confiscated and the peasant kept on the farm as a tenant toiling on behalf of its new owner.

  Within a few years after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, an entire crop of landless peasants found themselves stripped of their property with no way to feed themselves or their families. Many of these peasants immigrated to the cities to find work. But in Galilee, a handful of displaced farmers and landowners exchanged their plows for swords and began fighting back against those they deemed responsible for their woes. From their hiding places in the caves and grottoes of the Galilean countryside, these peasant-warriors launched a wave of attacks against the Jewish aristocracy and the agents of the Roman Republic. They roamed through the provinces, gathering to themselves those in distress, those who were dispossessed and mired in debt. Like Jewish Robin Hoods, they robbed the rich and, on occasion, gave to the poor. To the faithful, these peasant gangs were nothing less than the physical embodiment of the anger and suffering of the poor. They were heroes: symbols of righteous zeal against Roman aggression, dispensers of divine justice to the traitorous Jews. The Romans had a different word for them. They called them lestai. Bandits.

  “Bandit” was the generic term for any rebel or insurrectionist who employed armed violence against Rome or the Jewish collaborators. To the Romans, the word “bandit” was synonymous with “thief” or “rabble-rouser.” But these were no common criminals. The bandits represented the first stirrings of what would become a nationalist resistance movement against the Roman occupation. This may have been a peasant revolt; the bandit gangs hailed from impoverished villages like Emmaus, Beth-horon, and Bethlehem. But it was something else, too. The bandits claimed to be agents of God’s retribution. They cloaked their leaders in the emblems of biblical kings and heroes and presented their actions as a prelude for the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth. The bandits tapped into the widespread apocalyptic expectation that had gripped the Jews of Palestine in the wake of the Roman invasion. One of the most fearsome of all the bandits, the charismatic bandit chief Hezekiah, openly declared himself to be the messiah, the promised one who would restore the Jews to glory.

  Messiah means “anointed one.” The title alludes to the practice of pouring or smearing oil on someone charged with divine office: a king, like Saul, or David, or Solomon; a priest, like Aaron and his sons, who were consecrated to do God’s work; a prophet, like Isaiah or Elisha, who bore a special relationship with God, an intimacy that comes with being designated God’s representative on earth. The principal task of the messiah, who was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, was to rebuild David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome. Indeed, the day would come when these angry bands of peasant gangs would form the backbone of an apocalyptic army of zealous revolutionaries that would force the Romans to flee Jerusalem in humiliation. In those early years of the occupation, however, the bandits were little more than a nuisance. Still, they needed to be stopped; someone had to restore order in the countryside.

  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.

  C
hapter Three

  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.