Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  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.

  Like most high priests, Caiaphas was an extremely wealthy man, though his wealth may have come through his wife, who was the daughter of a previous high priest named Ananus. Caiaphas likely was appointed to the office of high priest not because of his own merit but through the influence of his father-in-law, a larger-than-life character who managed to pass the position to five of his own sons while remaining a significant force throughout Caiaphas’s tenure. According to the gospel of John, after Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was first brought to Ananus for questioning before being dragged to Caiaphas for judgment (John 18:13).

  Gratus had appointed Caiaphas as high priest in the year 18 C.E., meaning he had already served eight years in the office by the time Pilate arrived in Jerusalem. Part of the reason Caiaphas was able to hold the position of high priest for an unprecedented eighteen years was because of the close relationship he ended up forging with Pontius Pilate. The two men worked well together. The period of their combined rule, from 18 C.E. to 36 C.E., coincided with the most stable period in the entire first century. Together they managed to keep a lid on the revolutionary impulse of the Jews by dealing ruthlessly with any hint of political disturbance, no matter how small.

  Yet despite their best efforts, Pilate and Caiaphas were unable to extinguish the zeal that had been kindled in the hearts of the Jews by the messianic uprisings that took place at the turn of the century—those of Hezekiah the bandit chief, Simon of Peraea, Athronges the shepherd boy, and Judas the Galilean. Not long after Pilate arrived in Jerusalem, a new crop of preachers, prophets, bandits, and messiahs began traipsing through the Holy Land, gathering disciples, preaching liberation from Rome, and promising the coming of the Kingdom of God. In 28 C.E., an ascetic preacher named John began baptizing people in the waters of the Jordan River, initiating them into what he believed was the true nation of Israel. When John the Baptist’s popularity became too great to control, Pilate’s tetrarch in Peraea, Herod Antipas, had him imprisoned and executed sometime around 30 C.E. A couple of years later, a woodworker from Nazareth named Jesus led a band of disciples on a triumphant procession into Jerusalem, where he assaulted the Temple, overturned the tables of the money changers, and broke free the sacrificial animals from their cages. He, too, was captured and sentenced to death by Pilate. Three years after that, in 36 C.E., a messiah known only as “the Samaritan” gathered a group of followers atop Mount Gerizim, where he claimed he would reveal “sacred vessels” hidden there by Moses. Pilate responded with a detachment of Roman soldiers who climbed Gerizim and cut the Samaritan’s faithful multitude to pieces.

  It was that final act of unrestrained violence on Mount Gerizim that ended Pilate’s governorship in Jerusalem. Summoned to Rome to explain his actions to the emperor Tiberius, Pilate never returned to Judea. He was exiled to Gaul in 36 C.E. Considering their close working relationship, it may be no coincidence that Joseph Caiaphas was dismissed from his position as high priest in the same year.

  With Pilate and Caiaphas gone, there was no longer any hope of stifling the revolutionary passions of the Jews. By midcentury the whole of Palestine was buzzing with messianic energy. In 44 C.E., a wonder-working prophet named Theudas crowned himself messiah and brought hundreds of followers to the Jordan, promising to part the river just as Moses had done at the Sea of Reeds a thousand years earlier. This, he claimed, would be the first step in reclaiming the Promised Land from Rome. The Romans, in response, dispatched an army to lop off Theudas’s head and scatter his followers into the desert. In 46 C.E., two sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, launched their own revolutionary movement in the footsteps of their father and grandfather; both were crucified for their actions.

  What Rome required to keep these messianic stirrings in check was a steady, sensible hand, someone who would respond to the grumblings of the Jews while still maintaining peace and order in the Judean and Galilean countryside. What Rome sent to Jerusalem instead was a series of bumbling governors—each more vicious and greedy than the last—whose corruption and ineptitude would transform the anger, resentment, and apocalyptic mania that had been steadily building throughout Palestine into a full-scale revolution.

  It started with Ventidius Cumanus, who was stationed in Jerusalem in 48 C.E., two years after the uprising by Judas’s sons had been quelled. As governor, Cumanus was little more than a thief and a fool. Among his first acts was the posting of Roman soldiers on the roofs of the Temple’s porticoes, ostensibly to guard against chaos and disorder during the feast of Passover. In the midst of the holy celebrations, one of these soldiers thought it would be amusing to pull back his garment and display his bare ass to the congregation below, all the while shouting what Josephus, in his decorum, describes as “such words as you might expect upon such a posture.”

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sp; The crowd was incensed. A riot broke out in the Temple plaza. Rather than calming the situation, Cumanus sent a cohort of Roman soldiers up to the Temple Mount to butcher the panicked crowd. The pilgrims who escaped the slaughter were trapped by the narrow exits leading out of the Temple courtyard. Hundreds were trampled underfoot. Tensions escalated further after one of Cumanus’s legionaries grabbed hold of a Torah scroll and tore it to pieces in front of a Jewish assembly. Cumanus had the soldier hastily executed, but it was not enough to quell the growing anger and disaffection among the Jews.

  Things came to a head when a group of Jewish travelers from Galilee were attacked while passing through Samaria on their way to Jerusalem. When Cumanus dismissed the Jews’ appeal for justice, allegedly because the Samaritans had bribed him, a group of bandits, led by a man named Eleazar son of Dinaeus, took justice into their own hands and went on a rampage throughout Samaria, killing every Samaritan they came across. This was more than an act of bloody vengeance; it was an assertion of freedom by a people fed up with allowing law and order to rest in the hands of a crooked and fickle administrator from Rome. The outbreak of violence between the Jews and Samaritans was the last straw for the emperor. In 52 c.e., Ventidius Cumanus was sent into exile and Antonius Felix was shipped off to Jerusalem in his stead.

  As governor, Felix fared no better than his predecessor. Like Cumanus, he treated the Jews under his control with utter contempt. He used the power of the purse to play the different Jewish factions in Jerusalem against one another, always to his benefit. He seemed at first to have enjoyed a close relationship with the high priest Jonathan, one of the five sons of Ananus who served in the position. Felix and Jonathan worked together to suppress the bandit gangs in the Judean countryside; Jonathan may have even played a role in Felix’s capture of the bandit chief Eleazar son of Dinaeus, who was sent to Rome and crucified. But once the high priest had served Felix’s purpose, he was cast aside. Some say Felix had a hand in what happened next, for it was under his governorship that a new kind of bandit arose in Jerusalem: a shadowy group of Jewish rebels that the Romans dubbed Sicarii, or “Daggermen,” due to their penchant for small, easy-to-conceal daggers, called sicae, with which they assassinated the enemies of God.

  The Sicarii were zealots fueled by an apocalyptic worldview and a fervent devotion to establishing God’s rule on earth. They were fanatical in their opposition to the Roman occupation, though they reserved their vengeance for those Jews, particularly among the wealthy priestly aristocracy, who submitted to Roman rule. Fearless and unstoppable, the Sicarii murdered their opponents with impunity: in the middle of the city, in broad daylight, in the midst of great hordes, during feast days and festivals. They blended into assemblies and crowds, their daggers tucked inside their cloaks, until they were close enough to strike. Then, as the dead man collapsed to the ground, covered in blood, the Sicarii would sheath their daggers stealthily and join their voices in the cries of indignation from the panicked crowd.

  The leader of the Sicarii at the time was a young Jewish revolutionary named Menahem, the grandson of none other than the failed messiah Judas the Galilean. Menahem shared his grandfather’s hatred for the wealthy priestly aristocracy in general, and the unctuous high priests in particular. To the Sicarii, Jonathan son of Ananus was an imposter: a thief and a swindler who had grown rich by exploiting the suffering of the people. He was as responsible for the bondage of the Jews as the heathen emperor in Rome. His presence on the Temple Mount defiled the entire nation. His very existence was an abomination to the Lord. He had to die.

  In the year 56 C.E., the Sicarii under Menahem’s leadership were finally able to achieve what Judas the Galilean could only dream of accomplishing. During the feast of Passover, a Sicarii assassin pushed his way through the mass of pilgrims packed into the Temple Mount until he was close enough to the high priest Jonathan to pull out a dagger and swipe it across his throat. He then melted back into the crowd.

  The murder of the high priest threw all of Jerusalem into a panic. How could the leader of the Jewish nation, God’s representative on earth, be killed in broad daylight, in the middle of the Temple courtyard, and seemingly with impunity? Many refused to believe that the culprit could have been a Jew. There were whispers that the Roman governor, Felix, had ordered the assassination himself. Who else could have been so profane as to spill the high priest’s blood on the Temple grounds?

  Yet the Sicarii had only just begun their reign of terror. Shouting their slogan “No lord but God!” they began attacking the members of the Jewish ruling class, plundering their possessions, kidnapping their relatives, and burning down their homes. By these tactics they sowed terror into the hearts of the Jews so that, as Josephus writes, “More terrible than their crimes was the fear they aroused, every man hourly expecting death, as in war.”

  With Jonathan’s death, the messianic ardor in Jerusalem reached fever pitch. There was a widespread sense among the Jews that something profound was happening, a feeling born of desperation, nurtured by a people yearning for freedom from foreign rule. Zeal, the spirit that had fueled the revolutionary fervor of the bandits, prophets, and messiahs, was now coursing through the population like a virus working its way through the body. No longer could it be contained in the countryside; its influence was being felt in the towns and cities, even in Jerusalem. It was not just the peasants and outcasts who were whispering about the great kings and prophets who had freed Israel from her enemies in the past. The wealthy and upwardly mobile were also becoming increasingly animated by the fervent desire to cleanse the Holy Land of the Roman occupation. The signs were everywhere. The scriptures were about to be fulfilled. The end of days was at hand.

  In Jerusalem, a holy man named Jesus son of Ananias suddenly appeared, prophesying the destruction of the city and the imminent return of the messiah. Another man, a mysterious Jewish sorcerer called “the Egyptian,” declared himself King of the Jews and gathered thousands of followers on the Mount of Olives, where he vowed that, like Joshua at Jericho, he would bring the walls of Jerusalem tumbling down at his command. The crowd was massacred by Roman troops, though, as far as anyone knows, the Egyptian escaped.

  Felix’s bumbling reaction to these events ultimately led to his sacking and replacement with another man, Porcius Festus. But Festus proved no better in dealing with the restive Jewish population, either in the countryside, where the number of prophets and messiahs gathering followers and preaching liberation from Rome was growing out of control, or in Jerusalem, where the Sicarii, buoyed by their success in killing the high priest Jonathan, were now murdering and pillaging at will. So overwhelmed was Festus by the stress of the position that he died soon after taking the office. He was followed by Lucceius Albinus, a notorious degenerate, swindler, and incompetent who spent his two years in Jerusalem enriching himself by plundering the wealth of the populace. After Albinus came Gessius Florus, whose brief, turbulent tenure was remembered because first, it made the years under Albinus seem positively peaceful in comparison, and second, he would be the last Roman governor Jerusalem would know.

  It was now 64 C.E. In two years’ time the anger, resentment, and messianic zeal that had been steadily building throughout the land would erupt into a full-scale revolt against Rome. Cumanus, Felix, Festus, Albinus, Florus—each of these governors contributed through his malfeasance to the Jewish uprising. Rome itself was to blame for its mismanagement and severe overtaxation of the beleaguered population. Certainly the Jewish aristocracy, with their incessant conflicts and their sycophantic efforts to gain power and influence by bribing Roman officials, shared responsibility for the deteriorating social order. And no doubt the Temple leadership played a role in fostering the widespread sense of injustice and crushing poverty that had left so many Jews with no choice but to turn to violence. Add to all this the seizure of private lands, the high levels of unemployment, the displacement and forced urbanization of the peasantry, and the drought and famine that devastated the Judean and G
alilean countryside, and it was only a matter of time before the fires of rebellion would engulf the whole of Palestine. It seemed that the entire Jewish nation was ready to erupt into open revolt at the slightest provocation—which Florus was foolish enough to provide.

  In May of 66 C.E., Florus suddenly announced that the Jews owed Rome a hundred thousand dinarii in unpaid taxes. Trailed by an army of bodyguards, the Roman governor marched into the Temple and broke into the treasury, plundering the money that the Jews had offered as a sacrifice to God. Riots ensued, to which Florus responded by sending a thousand Roman soldiers into the upper city to murder at will. The soldiers killed women and children. They broke into homes and slaughtered people in their beds. The city was thrown into chaos. War was on the horizon.

  To calm the situation, the Romans sent the Jews one of their own: Agrippa II, whose father, Agrippa I, was a beloved Jewish leader who had managed to maintain a close bond with Rome. Although the son did not share his late father’s popularity, he was the best hope the Romans had for defusing the tension in Jerusalem.

  The young Agrippa rushed to the holy city in a last-ditch effort to stave off war. Standing on the roof of the royal palace with his sister Bernice at his side, he pleaded with the Jews to face the reality of the situation. “Will you defy the whole Roman Empire?” he asked. “What is the army, where is the weapon on which you rely? Where is your fleet to sweep the Roman seas? Where is your treasury to meet the cost of your campaigns? Do you really suppose that you are going to war with Egyptians or Arabs? Will you shut your eyes to the might of the Roman Empire? Will you not measure your own weakness? Are you wealthier than the Gauls, stronger than the Germans, more intelligent than the Greeks, more numerous than all the peoples of the world? What is it which inspires you with confidence to defy the Romans?”