Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  Of course, the revolutionaries had an answer to Agrippa’s question. It was zeal that inspired them. The same zeal that had led the Maccabees to throw off Seleucid control two centuries before—the zeal that had helped the Israelites conquer the Promised Land in the first place—would now help this ragtag band of Jewish revolutionaries to throw off the shackles of Roman occupation.

  Derided and ignored by the crowd, Agrippa and Bernice had no choice but to flee the city. Still, up to this point, war with Rome could have been avoided if it had not been for the actions of a young man named Eleazar, who, as the Temple captain, was the priestly official with powers to police disturbances in the Temple vicinity. Backed by a group of lower-class priests, Eleazar seized control of the Temple and put an end to the daily sacrifices on behalf of the emperor. The signal sent to Rome was clear: Jerusalem had declared its independence. In a short time, the rest of Judea and Galilee, Idumea and Peraea, Samaria and all the villages scattered across the Dead Sea valley would follow.

  Menahem and the Sicarii rallied to the Temple captain’s side. Together, they expelled all the non-Jews from Jerusalem, just as the scriptures demanded. They tracked down and killed the high priest, who had gone into hiding as soon as the fighting began. Then, in an act of profound symbolism, they set fire to the public archives. The ledgers of the debt collectors and moneylenders, the property deeds and public records—all of it went up in flames. There would be no more record of who was rich and who was poor. Everyone in this new and divinely inspired world order would begin anew.

  With the lower city under their control, the rebels began fortifying themselves for the inevitable Roman assault. Yet rather than sending a massive army to retake Jerusalem, Rome inexplicably dispatched a small force to the city, which the rebels easily repelled before turning their attention to the upper city, where the few remaining soldiers left in Jerusalem were holed up in a Roman garrison. The Roman soldiers agreed to surrender in exchange for safe passage out of the city. But when they laid down their arms and came out of their stronghold, the rebels turned on them, slaughtering every last soldier, removing utterly the scourge of Roman occupation from the city of God.

  After that, there was no turning back. The Jews had just declared war on the greatest empire the world had ever known.

  Chapter Six

  Year One

  In the end, it came down to just a thousand men, women, and children—the last of the rebels to survive the Roman onslaught. The year was 73 C.E. Fitting that what had begun with the Sicarii should end with the Sicarii. The city of Jerusalem had already been burned to the ground, its walls toppled, its population slaughtered. The whole of Palestine was once more under Roman control. All that remained of the rebellion were these last few Sicarii who had fled Jerusalem with their wives and children to hole themselves up inside the fortress of Masada, on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Now here they were, stuck on top of an isolated rock cliff in the middle of a barren desert, watching helplessly as a phalanx of Roman soldiers gradually made its way up the face of the cliff—shields up, swords drawn—ready to put a definitive end to the rebellion that had begun seven years earlier.

  The Sicarii originally came to Masada in the first few days after the launch of the war with Rome. As a naturally fortified and virtually impregnable fortress situated more than a thousand feet above the Dead Sea, Masada had long served as a refuge for the Jews. David came here to hide from King Saul when he sent his men to hunt down the shepherd boy who would one day take the crown from him. The Maccabees used Masada as a military base during their revolt against the Seleucid Dynasty. A century later, Herod the Great transformed Masada into a veritable fortress city, flattening the boat-shaped summit and enclosing it with a massive wall made of white Jerusalem stone. Herod added storerooms and grain houses, rainwater cisterns, even a swimming pool. He also placed in Masada a huge cache of weapons sufficient, it was said, to arm a thousand men. For himself and his family, Herod constructed a monumental three-tiered palace that hung from the northern prow of the cliff face, just below the lip of the summit, complete with baths, glittering colonnades, multihued mosaics, and a dazzling 180-degree view of the briny-white Dead Sea valley.

  After Herod’s death, the fortress and palaces at Masada, and the cache of weapons stored therein, fell into Roman hands. When the Jewish rebellion began in 66 C.E., the Sicarii, under the leadership of Menahem, seized Masada from Roman control and took its weapons back to Jerusalem to join forces with Eleazar the Temple captain. Having seized control over the city and destroyed the Temple archives, the rebels began minting coins to celebrate their hard-won independence. These were etched with symbols of victory—chalices and palm branches—and inscribed with slogans like “Freedom of Zion” and “Jerusalem Is Holy,” written not in Greek, the language of the heathens and idolaters, but in Hebrew. Each coin was self-consciously dated “Year One,” as though a wholly new era had begun. The prophets had been right. Surely, this was the Kingdom of God.

  Yet in the midst of the celebrations, as Jerusalem was being secured and a fragile calm was slowly descending upon the city, Menahem did something unexpected. Draping himself in purple robes, he made a triumphal entry into the Temple courtyard, where, flanked by his armed devotees among the Sicarii, he openly declared himself messiah, King of the Jews.

  In some ways, Menahem’s actions made perfect sense. After all, if the Kingdom of God had indeed been established, then it was time for the messiah to appear so as to rule over it in God’s name. And who else should don the kingly robes and sit upon the throne but Menahem, grandson of Judas the Galilean, great-grandson of Hezekiah the bandit chief? Menahem’s messianic assumption was, for his followers, merely the realization of the prophecies: the final step in ushering in the last days.

  That is not how Eleazar the Temple captain saw it. He and his associates among the lower priests were incensed at what they viewed as a blatant power grab by the Sicarii. They put together a plan to kill the self-proclaimed messiah and rid the city of his meddlesome followers. While Menahem was prancing about the Temple in his royal garb, Eleazar’s men suddenly rushed the Temple Mount and overpowered his guards. They dragged Menahem out into the open and tortured him to death. The surviving Sicarii barely fled Jerusalem with their lives. They reassembled at their base atop the fortress of Masada, where they waited out the rest of the war.

  Seven years the Sicarii waited. As the Romans regrouped and returned to wrest Palestine from rebel control, as one after another the towns and villages of Judea and Galilee were razed and their populations tamed by the sword, as Jerusalem itself was surrounded and its inhabitants slowly starved to death, the Sicarii waited in their mountain fortress. Only after every rebellious city had been destroyed and the land once again placed under their control did the Romans turn their sights toward Masada.

  The Roman regiment arrived at the foot of Masada in 73 C.E., three years after Jerusalem fell. Because the soldiers could not attack the fortress outright, they first built a massive wall around the entire base of the mountain, ensuring that no rebel could escape undetected. With the area secured, the Romans constructed a steep ramp up the yawning chasm on the western side of the cliff face, slowly scraping away tens of thousands of pounds of earth and stone for weeks on end, even as the rebels hurled rocks at them from above. The soldiers then pushed a huge siege tower up the ramp, from which they spent days bombarding the rebels with arrows and ballista balls. Once Herod’s perimeter wall finally gave, all that separated the Romans from the last of the Jewish rebels was a hurriedly built interior wall. The Romans set fire to the wall, then returned to their encampments and patiently waited for it to collapse on its own.

  Huddled together inside Herod’s palace, the Sicarii knew the end had come. The Romans would surely do to them and their families what they had done to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Amid the steely silence, one of the Sicarii leaders stood and addressed the rest.

  “My friends, since we resolved long ago neve
r to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God himself, who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time has now come to make that resolution true in practice.” Drawing his dagger, he made a final plea. “God has granted us the power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom, which was not the case for those [in Jerusalem] who were conquered unexpectedly.”

  The speech had its desired effect. As the Romans prepared for their final assault on Masada, the rebels drew lots among them to decide the order with which they would proceed with their gruesome plan. They then pulled out their daggers—the same daggers that had given them their identity, the daggers that had, with a swipe across the high priest’s throat, launched the ill-fated war with Rome—and began to kill their wives and their children, before turning the knives upon each other. The last ten men chose one among them to kill the remaining nine. The final man set the entire palace ablaze. Then he killed himself.

  The following morning, as the Romans stood triumphantly atop the hitherto impregnable fortress of Masada, all they encountered was a ghostly calm: nine hundred and sixty dead men, women, and children. The war was finally over.

  The question is why it took so long.

  News of the Jewish Revolt had traveled swiftly to Emperor Nero, who immediately tapped one of his most trusted men, Titus Flavius Vespasianus—Vespasian, as he was known—to retake Jerusalem. Taking command of a massive army of more than sixty thousand fighting men, Vespasian set off at once for Syria, while his son Titus went to Egypt to collect the Roman legions stationed in Alexandria. Titus would lead his troops north through Idumea as Vespasian pushed south into Galilee. The plan was for father and son to squeeze the Jews between their two armies and choke the life out of the rebellion.

  One by one the rebellious cities gave way to the might of Rome as Titus and Vespasian carved a trail of destruction across the Holy Land. By 68 C.E., all of Galilee, as well as Samaria, Idumea, Peraea, and the entire Dead Sea region, save for Masada, were firmly back under Roman control. All that remained was for Vespasian to send his armies into Judea to lay waste to the seat of the rebellion: Jerusalem.

  As he was preparing for the final assault, however, Vespasian received word that Nero had committed suicide. Rome was in turmoil. Civil war was tearing through the capital. In the span of a few short months, three different men—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—declared themselves emperor, each in turn violently overthrown by his successor. There was a complete breakdown of law and order in Rome as thieves and hooligans plundered the population without fear of consequence. Not since the war between Octavian and Mark Antony a hundred years earlier had the Romans experienced such civil unrest. Tacitus described it as a period “rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil struggles, horrible even in peace.”

  Spurred by the legions under his command, Vespasian halted his campaign in Judea and hastened to Rome to stake his own claim to the throne. The haste, it seems, was unnecessary. Long before he reached the capital in the summer of 70 C.E., his supporters had taken control of the city, murdered his rivals, and declared Vespasian sole emperor.

  Yet the Rome that Vespasian now found himself ruling had undergone a profound transformation. The mass civil unrest had given rise to a great deal of consternation about the decline of Roman power and influence. The situation in distant Judea was particularly galling. It was bad enough that the lowly Jews had rebelled in the first place; it was inconceivable that after three long years, the rebellion still had not been crushed. Other subject peoples revolted, of course. But these were not Gauls or Britons; they were superstitious peasants hurling rocks. The very scale of the Jewish Revolt, and the fact that it had come at a time of profound social and political distress in Rome, had created something akin to an identity crisis among the Roman citizenry.

  Vespasian knew that to consolidate his authority and address the malaise that had descended upon Rome, he needed to focus the people’s attention away from their domestic troubles and toward a spectacular foreign conquest. A small victory would not do. What the emperor required was an absolute pummeling of an enemy force. He needed a Triumph: a fabulous display of Roman might replete with captives, slaves, and spoils to win over his disgruntled citizens and strike terror into the hearts of his subjects. And so, immediately upon taking the throne, Vespasian set out to complete the task he had left unfinished in Judea. He would not simply quash the Jewish rebellion; that would be insufficient to make his point. He would utterly annihilate the Jews. He would wipe them from the earth. Devastate their lands. Burn their temple. Destroy their cult. Kill their god.

  From his perch in Rome, Vespasian sent word to his son Titus to march at once to Jerusalem and spare no expense in bringing the rebellion of the Jews to a swift and decisive end. What the emperor could not have known was that the rebellion was on the verge of collapsing on its own.

  Not long after Menahem was murdered and the Sicarii banished from Jerusalem, the rebels began preparing for the Roman invasion they were certain was on the horizon. The walls surrounding the city were fortified, and preparations were made to gather as much military equipment as was available. Swords and arrows were collected, suits of armor forged, catapults and ballista balls stacked along the city’s perimeter. Young boys were hurriedly trained in hand-to-hand combat. The whole city was in a panic as the rebels manned their positions and waited for the Romans to return and reclaim Jerusalem.

  But the Romans never came. The rebels were certainly aware of the devastation taking place around them. Every day a horde of bruised and bloodied refugees poured into Jerusalem; the city was bursting at its borders. But the Roman reprisals were thus far focused solely on the countryside and major rebel strongholds such as Tiberias, Gamala, and Gischala. The longer the rebels waited for the Romans to arrive in Jerusalem, the more fractured and unstable the city’s leadership became.

  Early on, a transitional government of sorts had been formed, made up mostly of those among Jerusalem’s priestly aristocracy who had joined the rebellion, many of them reluctantly. This so-called “moderate” faction was in favor of coming to terms with Rome, if that was still possible. They wanted to surrender unconditionally, beg for mercy, and submit once more to Roman rule. The moderates enjoyed a good deal of support in Jerusalem, particularly among the wealthier Jews who were looking for a way to preserve their status and property, not to mention their lives.

  But an even larger and more vocal faction in Jerusalem was convinced that God had led the Jews into war against Rome and that God would lead them to victory. Things may have seemed bleak at the moment, and the enemy invincible. But that was part of God’s divine plan. Did not the prophets warn that in the final days “the sown places shall appear unsown and the storehouses shall be found empty” (2 Esdras 6:22)? Yet if the Jews would only remain loyal to the Lord, then very soon they would see Jerusalem clothed in glory. The trumpets would sound and all who heard them would be struck with fear. The mountains would flatten and the earth would open up to swallow God’s enemies. All that was required was faithfulness. Faithfulness and zeal.

  At the head of this camp was a coalition of peasants, lower-class priests, bandit gangs, and recently arrived refugees who came together to form a distinct revolutionary faction called the Zealot Party. Poor, pious, and antiaristocratic, the members of the Zealot Party wanted to remain true to the original intention of the revolt: to purify the Holy Land and establish God’s rule on earth. They were violently opposed to the transitional government and its plans to surrender the city to Rome. This was blasphemy. It was treason. And the Zealot Party knew well the punishment for both.

  The Zealot Party took over the Temple’s inner courtyard, where only the priests were permitted, and from there unleashed a wave of terror against those they deemed insufficiently loyal to the rebellion: the wealthy aristocracy and upper-class Jews; the old Herodian nobles and the Temple’s former leadership; the chief priests and all those who followed the moderate camp. The leaders of the Zealot Party set u
p their own shadow government and drew lots to determine which of them would be the next high priest. The lot fell to an illiterate country peasant named Phanni son of Samuel, who was dressed up in the high priest’s gaudy vestments, placed before the entrance of the Holy of Holies, and taught how to perform the sacrifices while the remnants of the priestly nobility watched from a distance, weeping at what they perceived to be the desecration of their holy lineage.

  As the bloodshed and internecine battles between rival groups continued, even more refugees began to flood into the city, adding fuel to the fires of factionalism and discord that threatened to engulf all of Jerusalem. With the moderates silenced, there were now three principal camps vying with one another for control over the city. While the Zealot Party, which consisted of about twenty-five hundred men, held the inner court of the Temple, the outer courts fell into the hands of the former leader of the rebellion in Gischala, a well-to-do urbanite named John, who had barely escaped the Roman destruction of his city.

  At first, John of Gischala threw in his lot with the Zealot Party, with whom he shared a devotion to the religious principles of the revolution. Whether John himself could be called a zealot is difficult to say. He was undoubtedly a fierce nationalist with a deep hatred of Rome at a time in which national sentiment and messianic expectation were inextricably linked. He even melted down the sacred vessels of the Temple and turned them into implements of war with which to fight the armies of Rome. But a fight over control of the Temple ultimately forced John to break with the Zealot Party and form his own coalition, which consisted of some six thousand fighting men.

  The third and largest rebel camp in Jerusalem was led by Simon son of Giora, one of the bandit leaders who fought off the initial assault on Jerusalem by Cestius Gallus. Simon had spent the first year of the Jewish Revolt scouring the Judean countryside, plundering the lands of the wealthy, setting slaves free, and earning a reputation as the champion of the poor. After a brief stay with the Sicarii in Masada, Simon came to Jerusalem with a massive personal army of ten thousand men. At first, the city welcomed him, hoping he could rein in the excesses of the Zealot Party and clip the wings of John of Gischala, who was becoming increasingly authoritarian in his conduct. Although Simon was unable to wrest the Temple from either of his rivals, he did manage to seize control over most of the upper and lower city.