Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  The gospel of Luke claims that there were seventy-two disciples in all (Luke 10:1–12), and they undoubtedly included women, some of whom, in defiance of tradition, are actually named in the New Testament: Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Chuza; Mary, the mother of James and Joseph; Mary, the wife of Clopas; Susanna; Salome; and perhaps most famous of all, Mary from Magdala, whom Jesus had cured of “seven demons” (Luke 8:2). That these women functioned as Jesus’s disciples is demonstrated by the fact that all four gospels present them as traveling with Jesus from town to town (Mark 15:40–41; Matthew 27:55–56; Luke 8:2–3; 23:49; John 19:25). The gospels claim “many other women … followed [Jesus] and served him,” too (Mark 15:40–41), from his first days preaching in Galilee to his last breath on the hill in Golgotha.

  But among the seventy-two, there was an inner core of disciples—all of them men—who would serve a special function in Jesus’s ministry. These were known simply as “the Twelve.” They included the brothers James and John—the sons of Zebedee—who would be called Boanerges, “the sons of thunder”; Philip, who was from Bethsaida and who began as one of John the Baptist’s disciples before he switched his allegiance to Jesus (John 1:35–44); Andrew, who the gospel of John claims also began as a follower of the Baptist, though the synoptic gospels contradict this assertion by locating him in Capernaum; Andrew’s brother Simon, the disciple whom Jesus nicknames Peter; Matthew, who is sometimes erroneously associated with another of Jesus’s disciples, Levi, the toll collector; Jude the son of James; James the son of Alphaeus; Thomas, who would become legendary for doubting Jesus’s resurrection; Bartholomew, about whom almost nothing is known; another Simon, known as “the Zealot,” a designation meant to signal his commitment to the biblical doctrine of zeal, not his association with the Zealot Party, which would not exist for another thirty years; and Judas Iscariot, the man the gospels claim would one day betray Jesus to the high priest Caiaphas.

  The Twelve will become the principal bearers of Jesus’s message—the apostolou, or “ambassadors”—apostles sent off to neighboring towns and villages to preach independently and without supervision (Luke 9:1–6). They would not be the leaders of Jesus’s movement, but rather its chief missionaries. Yet the Twelve had another more symbolic function, one that would manifest itself later in Jesus’s ministry. For they will come to represent the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel, long since destroyed and scattered.

  With his home base firmly established and his handpicked group of disciples growing, Jesus began visiting the village synagogue to preach his message to the people of Capernaum. The gospels say that those who heard him were astonished at his teaching, though not so much because of his words. Again, at this point, Jesus was merely echoing his master, John the Baptist: “From that time [when Jesus arrived in Capernaum],” Matthew writes, “Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven is near’ ” (Matthew 4:17). Rather, what astonished the crowds at that Capernaum synagogue was the charismatic authority with which Jesus spoke, “for he taught them as one with authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:28; Mark 1:22; Luke 4:31).

  The comparison to the scribes, emphasized in all three synoptic gospels, is conspicuous and telling. Unlike John the Baptist, who was likely raised in a family of Judean priests, Jesus was a peasant. He spoke like a peasant. He taught in Aramaic, the common tongue. His authority was not that of the bookish scholars and the priestly aristocracy. Their authority came from their solemn lucubration and their intimate connection to the Temple. Jesus’s authority came directly from God. Indeed, from the moment he entered the synagogue in this small coastal village, Jesus went out of his way to set himself in direct opposition to the guardians of the Temple and the Jewish cult by challenging their authority as God’s representatives on earth.

  Although the gospels portray Jesus as being in conflict with a whole range of Jewish authorities who are often lumped together into formulaic categories such as “the chief priests and elders,” or “the scribes and Pharisees,” these were separate and distinct groups in first-century Palestine, and Jesus had different relationships with each of them. While the gospels tend to paint the Pharisees as Jesus’s main detractors, the fact is that his relations with the Pharisees, while occasionally testy, were, for the most part, fairly civil and even friendly at times. It was a Pharisee who warned Jesus that his life was in danger (Luke 13:31), a Pharisee who helped bury him after his execution (John 19:39–40), a Pharisee who saved the lives of his disciples after he ascended into heaven (Acts 5:34). Jesus dined with Pharisees, he debated them, he lived among them; a few Pharisees were even counted among his followers.

  In contrast, the handful of encounters Jesus had with the priestly nobility and the learned elite of legal scholars (the scribes) who represent them is always portrayed by the gospels in the most hostile light. To whom else was Jesus referring when he said, “You have turned my house into a den of thieves”? It was not the merchants and money changers he was addressing as he raged through the Temple courtyard, overturning tables and breaking open cages. It was those who profited most heavily from the Temple’s commerce, and who did so on the backs of poor Galileans like himself.

  Like his zealous predecessors, Jesus was less concerned with the pagan empire occupying Palestine than he was with the Jewish imposter occupying God’s Temple. Both would come to view Jesus as a threat, and both would seek his death. But there can be no doubt that Jesus’s main antagonist in the gospels is neither the distant emperor in Rome nor his heathen officials in Judea. It is the high priest Caiaphas, who will become the main instigator of the plot to execute Jesus precisely because of the threat he posed to the Temple’s authority (Mark 14:1–2; Matthew 26:57–66; John 11:49–50).

  As Jesus’s ministry expanded, becoming ever more urgent and confrontational, his words and actions would increasingly reflect a deep antagonism toward the high priest and the Judean religious establishment, who, in Jesus’s words, loved “to prance around in long robes and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.”

  “They devour the homes of widows and make long prayers for the sake of appearance,” Jesus says of the scribes. And for that, “their condemnation will be the greater” (Mark 12:38–40). Jesus’s parables, especially, were riddled with the same anticlerical sentiments that shaped the politics and piety of Galilee, and that would become the hallmark of his ministry. Consider the famous parable of the Good Samaritan:

  A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among thieves who stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and left him half dead. By chance, a priest came down that road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. A Levite (priest) also came by that place and seeing the man, he, too, passed on the other side. But a certain Samaritan on a journey came where the man was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds and poured oil and wine on them. He placed the man on his own animal, and led him to an inn, and took care of him. The following day he gave the innkeeper two denarii and said, “Take care of him; when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend” (Luke 10:30–37).

  Christians have long interpreted this parable as reflecting the importance of helping those in distress. But for the audience gathered at Jesus’s feet, the parable would have had less to do with the goodness of the Samaritan than with the baseness of the two priests.

  The Jews considered the Samaritans to be the lowliest, most impure people in Palestine for one chief reason: the Samaritans rejected the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem as the sole legitimate place of worship. Instead, they worshipped the God of Israel in their own temple on Mount Gerizim, on the western bank of the Jordan River. For those among Jesus’s listeners who recognized themselves as the beaten, half-dead man left lying on the road, the lesson of the parable would have been self-evident: the Samaritan, who denies the authority of the Temple, goes out of his way to f
ulfill the commandment of the Lord to “love your neighbor as yourself” (the parable itself was given in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?”). The priests, who derive their wealth and authority from their connection to the Temple, ignore the commandment altogether for fear of defiling their ritual purity and thus endangering that connection.

  The people of Capernaum devoured this brazenly anticlerical message. Almost immediately, large crowds began to gather around Jesus. Some recognized him as the boy born in Nazareth to a family of woodworkers. Others heard of the power of his words and came to listen to him preach out of curiosity. Still, at this point, Jesus’s reputation was contained along the shores of Capernaum. Outside this fishing village, no one else had yet heard of the charismatic Galilean preacher—not Antipas in Tiberias, not Caiaphas in Jerusalem.

  But then something happened that would change everything.

  While standing at the Capernaum synagogue, speaking about the Kingdom of God, Jesus was suddenly interrupted by a man the gospels describe as having “an unclean spirit.”

  “What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth?” the man cried out. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, oh holy one of God.”

  Jesus cut him off at once. “Silence! Come out of him!”

  All at once, the man fell to the floor, writhing in convulsions. A great cry came out of his mouth. And he was still.

  Everyone in the synagogue was amazed. “What is this?” the people asked one another. “A new teaching? And with such authority that he commands the spirits and they obey him” (Mark 1:23–28).

  After that, Jesus’s fame could no longer be confined to Capernaum. News of the itinerant preacher spread throughout the region, into the whole of Galilee. In every town and village the crowds grew larger as people everywhere came out, not so much to hear his message but to see the wondrous deeds they had heard about. For while the disciples would ultimately recognize Jesus as the promised messiah and the heir to the kingdom of David, while the Romans would view him as a false claimant to the office of King of the Jews, and while the scribes and the Temple priests would come to consider him a blasphemous threat to their control of the Jewish cult, for the vast majority of Jews in Palestine—those he claimed to have been sent to free from oppression—Jesus was neither messiah nor king, but just another traveling miracle worker and professional exorcist roaming through Galilee performing tricks.

  Chapter Nine

  By the Finger of God

  It did not take long for the people of Capernaum to realize what they had in their midst. Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mason, and far better paid. Galilee especially abounded with charismatic fantasts claiming to channel the divine for a nominal fee. Yet from the perspective of the Galileans, what set Jesus apart from his fellow exorcists and healers is that he seemed to be providing his services free of charge. That first exorcism in the Capernaum synagogue may have shocked the rabbis and elders who saw in it a “new kind of teaching”—the gospels say a slew of scribes began descending upon the city immediately afterward to see for themselves the challenge posed to their authority by this simple peasant. But for the people of Capernaum, what mattered was not so much the source of Jesus’s healings. What mattered was their cost.

  By evening, word had reached all of Capernaum about the free healer in their city. Jesus and his companions had taken shelter in the house of the brothers Simon and Andrew, where Simon’s mother-in-law lay in bed with a fever. When the brothers told Jesus of her illness, he went to her and took her hand, and at once she was healed. Soon after, a great horde gathered at Simon’s house, carrying with them the lame, the lepers, and those possessed by demons. The next morning, the crush of sick and infirm had grown even larger.

  To escape the crowds Jesus suggested leaving Capernaum for a few days. “Let us go into the next towns so I may proclaim my message there as well” (Mark 1:38). But news of the itinerant miracle worker had already reached the neighboring cities. Everywhere Jesus went—Bethsaida, Gerasa, Jericho—the blind, the deaf, the mute, and the paralytic swarmed to him. And Jesus healed them all. When he finally returned to Capernaum a few days later, so many had huddled at Simon’s door that a group of men had to tear a hole in the roof just so they could lower their paralyzed friend down for Jesus to heal.

  To the modern mind, the stories of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms seem implausible, to say the least. Acceptance of his miracles forms the principal divide between the historian and the worshipper, the scholar and the seeker. It may seem somewhat incongruous, then, to say that there is more accumulated historical material confirming Jesus’s miracles than there is regarding either his birth in Nazareth or his death at Golgotha. To be clear, there is no evidence to support any particular miraculous action by Jesus. Attempts by scholars to judge the authenticity of one or another of Jesus’s healings or exorcisms have proven a useless exercise. It is senseless to argue that it is more likely that Jesus healed a paralytic but less likely that he raised Lazarus from the dead. All of Jesus’s miracle stories were embellished with the passage of time and convoluted with Christological significance, and thus none of them can be historically validated. It is equally senseless to try to demythologize Jesus’s miracles by searching for some rational basis to explain them away: Jesus only appeared to walk on water because of the changing tides; Jesus only seemed to exorcise a demon from a person who was in reality epileptic. How one in the modern world views Jesus’s miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates raged within the early church over who Jesus was—a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?—there was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role as an exorcist and miracle worker.

  All of the gospels, including the noncanonized scriptures, confirm Jesus’s miraculous deeds, as does the earliest source material, Q. Nearly a third of the gospel of Mark consists solely of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms. The early church not only maintained a vivid memory of Jesus’s miracles, it built its very foundation upon them. Jesus’s apostles were marked by their ability to mimic his miraculous powers, to heal and exorcise people in his name. Even those who did not accept him as messiah still viewed Jesus as “a doer of startling deeds.” At no point in the gospels do Jesus’s enemies ever deny his miracles, though they do question their motive and source. Well into the second and third centuries, the Jewish intellectuals and pagan philosophers who wrote treatises denouncing Christianity took Jesus’s status as an exorcist and miracle worker for granted. They may have denounced Jesus as nothing more than a traveling magician, but they did not doubt his magical abilities.

  Again, Jesus was not the only miracle worker trolling though Palestine healing the sick and casting out demons. This was a world steeped in magic and Jesus was just one of an untold number of diviners and dream interpreters, magicians and medicine men who wandered Judea and Galilee. There was Honi the Circle-Drawer, so named because during a time of drought he drew a circle in the dirt and stood inside it. “I swear by your great name that I will not move from here until you have mercy on your sons,” Honi shouted up to God. And the rains came at once. Honi’s grandsons Abba Hilqiah and Hanan the Hidden were also widely credited with miraculous deeds; both lived in Galilee around the same time as Jesus. Another Jewish miracle worker, Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, who resided in the village of Arab just a few kilometers from Jesus’s home in Nazareth, had the power to pray over the sick and even intercede on their behalf to discern who would live and who would die. Perhaps the most famous miracle worker of the time was Apollonius of Tyana. Described as a “holy man” who taught the concept of a “Supreme God,” Apollonius performed miraculous deeds everywhere he went. He healed the lame, the blind, the paralytic. He even raised a girl from the dead.

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nbsp; Nor was Jesus the sole exorcist in Palestine. The itinerant Jewish exorcist was a familiar sight, and exorcisms themselves could be a lucrative enterprise. Many exorcists are mentioned in the gospels (Matthew 12:27; Luke 11:19; Mark 9:38–40; see also Acts 19:11–17). Some, like the famed exorcist Eleazar, who may have been an Essene, used amulets and incantations to draw demons out of the afflicted through their noses. Others, such as Rabbi Simon ben Yohai, could cast out demons simply by uttering the demon’s name; like Jesus, Yohai would first command the demon to identify itself, which then gave him authority over it. The book of Acts portrays Paul as an exorcist who used Jesus’s name as a talisman of power against demonic forces (Acts 16:16–18, 19:12). Exorcism instructions have even been found within the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  The reason exorcisms were so commonplace in Jesus’s time is that the Jews viewed illness as a manifestation either of divine judgment or of demonic activity. However one wishes to define demon possession—as a medical problem or a mental illness, epilepsy or schizophrenia—the fact remains that the people of Palestine understood these problems to be signs of possession, and they saw Jesus as one of a number of professional exorcists with the power to bring healing to those afflicted.

  It may be true that, unlike many of his fellow exorcists and miracle workers, Jesus also maintained messianic ambitions. But so did the failed messiahs Theudas and the Egyptian, both of whom used their miraculous deeds to gain followers and make messianic claims. These men and their fellow wonder workers were known by Jews and gentiles alike as “men of deeds,” the same term that was applied to Jesus. What is more, the literary form of the miracle stories found in the Jewish and pagan writings of the first and second centuries is almost identical to that of the gospels; the same basic vocabulary is used to describe both the miracle and the miracle worker. Simply put, Jesus’s status as an exorcist and miracle worker may seem unusual, even absurd, to modern skeptics, but it did not deviate greatly from the standard expectation of exorcists and miracle workers in first-century Palestine. Whether Greek, Roman, Jewish, or Christian, all peoples in the ancient Near East viewed magic and miracle as a standard facet of their world.