Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  On the one hand, the fact that both Matthew and Luke recount the virgin birth in their respective infancy narratives, despite the belief that they were completely unaware of each other’s work, indicates that the tradition of the virgin birth was an early one, perhaps predating the first gospel, Mark. On the other hand, outside of Matthew and Luke’s infancy narratives, the virgin birth is never even hinted at by anyone else in the New Testament: not by the evangelist John, who presents Jesus as an otherworldly spirit without earthly origins, nor by Paul, who thinks of Jesus as literally God incarnate. That absence has led to a great deal of speculation among scholars over whether the story of the virgin birth was invented to mask an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’s parentage—namely, that he was born out of wedlock.

  This is in actuality an old argument, one made by opponents of the Jesus movement from its earliest days. The second-century writer Celsus recounts a scurrilous story he claims to have heard from a Palestinian Jew that Jesus’s mother was impregnated by a soldier named Panthera. Celsus’s story is so clearly polemical that it cannot be taken seriously. However, it does indicate that, less than a hundred years after Jesus’s death, rumors about his illegitimate birth were already circulating throughout Palestine. Such rumors may have been current even in Jesus’s lifetime. When Jesus first begins preaching in his hometown of Nazareth, he is confronted with the murmuring of neighbors, one of whom bluntly asks, “Is this not Mary’s son?” (Mark 6:3). This is an astonishing statement, one that cannot be easily dismissed. Calling a first-born Jewish male in Palestine by his mother’s name—that is, Jesus bar Mary, instead of Jesus bar Joseph—is not just unusual, it is egregious. At the very least it is a deliberate slur with implications so obvious that later redactions of Mark were compelled to insert the phrase “son of the carpenter, and Mary” into the verse.

  An even more contentious mystery about Jesus involves his marital status. Although there is no evidence in the New Testament to indicate whether Jesus was married, it would have been almost unthinkable for a thirty-year-old Jewish male in Jesus’s time not to have a wife. Celibacy was an extremely rare phenomenon in first-century Palestine. A handful of sects such as the aforementioned Essenes and another called the Therapeutae practiced celibacy, but these were quasimonastic orders; they not only refused to marry, they completely divorced themselves from society. Jesus did nothing of the sort. Yet while it may be tempting to assume that Jesus was married, one cannot ignore the fact that nowhere in all the words ever written about Jesus of Nazareth—from the canonical gospels to the gnostic gospels to the letters of Paul or even the Jewish and pagan polemics written against him—is there ever any mention of a wife or children.

  In the end, it is simply impossible to say much about Jesus’s early life in Nazareth. That is because before Jesus was declared messiah, it did not matter what kind of childhood a Jewish peasant from an insignificant hamlet in Galilee may or may not have had. After Jesus was declared messiah, the only aspects of his infancy and childhood that did matter were those that could be creatively imagined to buttress whatever theological claim one was trying to make about Jesus’s identity as Christ. For better or worse, the only access one can have to the real Jesus comes not from the stories that were told about him after his death, but rather from the smattering of facts we can gather from his life as part of a large Jewish family of woodworkers/builders struggling to survive in the small Galilean village of Nazareth.

  The problem with Nazareth is that it was a city of mud and brick. Even the most elaborate buildings, such as they were, would have been constructed of stone. There were wooden beams in the roofs, and surely the doors would have been made of wood. A handful of Nazareans may have been able to afford wooden furniture—a table, some stools—and perhaps a few could have owned wooden yokes and plows with which to sow their meager plots of land. But even if one considers tekton to mean an artisan who deals in any aspect of the building trades, the hundred or so impoverished families of a modest and utterly forgettable village such as Nazareth, most of whom themselves lived barely above subsistence level, could in no way have sustained Jesus’s family. As with most artisans and day laborers, Jesus and his brothers would have had to go to bigger towns or cities to ply their trade. Fortunately, Nazareth was just a day’s walk from one of the largest and most affluent cities in Galilee—the capital city, Sepphoris.

  Sepphoris was a sophisticated urban metropolis, as rich as Nazareth was poor. Whereas Nazareth had not a single paved road, the roads in Sepphoris were wide avenues surfaced with polished slabs of stone and lined with two-story homes boasting open courtyards and private rock-cut cisterns. The Nazareans shared a single public bath. In Sepphoris, two separate aqueducts merged in the center of the city, providing ample water to the large lavish baths and public latrines that served nearly the entire population of some forty thousand inhabitants. There were Roman villas and palatial mansions in Sepphoris, some covered in colorful mosaics featuring sprightly nudes hunting fowl, garlanded women bearing baskets of fruit, young boys dancing and playing musical instruments. A Roman theater in the center of town seated forty-five hundred people, while an intricate web of roads and trade routes connected Sepphoris to Judea and the rest of the towns of Galilee, making the city a major hub of culture and commerce.

  Although Sepphoris was a predominantly Jewish city, as evidenced by the synagogues and ritual bath houses that have been unearthed there, these were a wholly different class of Jews than those found in much of Galilee. Rich, cosmopolitan, deeply influenced by Greek culture, and surrounded by a panoply of races and religions, the Jews of Sepphoris were the product of the Herodian social revolution—the nouveaux riches who rose to prominence after Herod’s massacre of the old priestly aristocracy. The city itself had been a major landmark for years; after Jerusalem, it is the most frequently mentioned city in rabbinic literature. Sepphoris served as the administrative center of Galilee throughout the Hasmonaean Dynasty. During the reign of Herod the Great, it became a vital military outpost where weapons and war provisions were stored. However, it was not until Herod’s son Antipas (“the Fox”) chose it as the royal seat of his tetrarchy, probably sometime around the turn of the first century C.E., that the stalwart city of Sepphoris became known throughout Palestine as “the Ornament of Galilee.”

  Like his father, Antipas had a passion for large-scale building projects, and in Sepphoris he found a blank slate upon which to design a city in his own image. That is because when Antipas arrived at Sepphoris with a cohort of Roman soldiers in tow, the city was no longer the central hub of Galilee it had been under his father’s rule. It was a still smoldering heap of ash and stone, a victim of Roman retribution for the rebellions that had broken out across Palestine in the wake of Herod the Great’s death in 4 B.C.E.

  When Herod died, he left behind far more than a seething populace eager to exact revenge on his friends and allies. He also left a mob of jobless poor who had flooded into Jerusalem from the rural villages to build his palaces and theaters. Herod’s monumental building spree, and especially his Temple expansion project, had employed tens of thousands of peasants and day laborers, many of whom had been driven off their land by drought or famine or, often enough, the malevolent persistence of the debt collector. But with the end of the building boom in Jerusalem and the completion of the Temple shortly before Herod’s death, these peasants and day laborers suddenly found themselves unemployed and cast out of the holy city to fend for themselves. As a result of the mass rustication, the countryside once again became a hotbed of revolutionary activity, just as it had been before Herod was declared king.

  It was around this time that a new and far more fearsome group of bandits arose in Galilee, led by a magnetic teacher and revolutionary known as Judas the Galilean. The traditions say that Judas was the son of the famed bandit chief Hezekiah, the failed messiah whom Herod had captured and beheaded forty years earlier as part of his campaign to clear the countryside of the bandit menace. After Herod’s
death, Judas the Galilean joined forces with a mysterious Pharisee named Zaddok to launch a wholly new independence movement that Josephus terms the “Fourth Philosophy,” so as to differentiate it from the other three “philosophies”: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. What set the members of the Fourth Philosophy apart from the rest was their unshakable commitment to freeing Israel from foreign rule and their fervent insistence, even unto death, that they would serve no lord save the One God. There was a well-defined term for this type of belief, one that all pious Jews, regardless of their political stance, would have recognized and proudly claimed for themselves: zeal.

  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.

  Chapter Five

  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.