Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  The tangled web that bound the Temple authorities to Rome, and the notion that an attack on one would have been considered an attack on the other, is an argument made brilliantly by S.G.F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 9. Brandon also notes correctly that the Romans would not have been ignorant of the cleansing incident, since the Roman garrison in the Antonia Fortress overlooked the Temple courts. For the opposing view to Brandon’s analysis, see Cecil Roth, “The Cleansing of the Temple and Zechariah XIV.21,” Novum Testamentum 4 (1960): 174–81. Roth seems to deny any nationalist or zealot significance whatsoever either in Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem or in his cleansing of the Temple, which he reinterprets in a “spiritual and basically non-political sense,” claiming that Jesus’s main concern was stripping the Temple of any “mercantile operations.” Other scholars take this argument one step further and claim that the “cleansing” incident never even happened, at least not as it has been recorded by all four gospel writers, because it so contrasts with Jesus’s message of peace. See Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). Once again this seems like a classic case of scholars refusing to accept an obvious reality that does not fit into their preconceived Christological conceptions of who Jesus was and what Jesus meant. Mack’s thesis is expertly refuted by Craig Evans, who demonstrates not only that the Temple cleansing incident can be traced to the historical Jesus, but also that it could not have been understood in any other way than as an act of profound political significance. See Evans, Jesus and His Contemporaries (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1995), 301–18. However, elsewhere Evans disagrees with me regarding Jesus’s prediction of the Temple’s destruction. He not only believes that the prediction can be traced to Jesus, whereas I view it as being put in Jesus’s mouth by the gospel writers, he also thinks it may have been the principal factor that motivated the high priest to take action against him. See Craig Evans, “Jesus and Predictions of the Destruction of the Herodian Temple in the Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Scrolls, and Related Texts,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 10 (1992): 89–147.

  Both Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud indicate that the sacrificial animals used to be housed on the Mount of Olives, but that sometime around 30 C.E., Caiaphas transferred them into the Court of Gentiles. Bruce Chilton believes that Caiaphas’s innovation was the impetus for Jesus’s actions at the Temple as well as the principal reason for the high priest’s desire to have Jesus arrested and executed; see Bruce Chilton, “The Trial of Jesus Reconsidered,” in Jesus in Context, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 281–500.

  The question posed to Jesus about the legality of paying tribute to Caesar can be found in Mark 12:13–17, Matthew 22:15–22, and Luke 20:20–26. The episode does not appear in John’s gospel because there the cleansing event is placed among Jesus’s first acts and not at the end of his life. See Herbert Loewe, Render unto Caesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). The Jewish authorities who try to trap Jesus by asking him about the payment of tribute are variously described in the Synoptic gospels as Pharisees and Herodians (Mark 12:13; Matthew 22:15), or as “scribes and chief priests” (Luke 20:20). This lumping together of disparate authorities indicates a startling ignorance on the part of the gospel writers (who were writing their accounts some forty to sixty years after the events they describe) about Jewish religious hierarchy in firstcentury Palestine. The scribes were lower- or middle-class scholars, while the chief priests were aristocratic nobility; the Pharisees and Herodians were about as far apart economically, socially, and (if by Herodians Mark suggests a Sadducean connection) theologically as can be imagined. It almost seems as though the gospel writers are throwing out these formulae simply as bywords for “the Jews.”

  That the coin Jesus asks for, the denarius, is the same coin used to pay the tribute to Rome is definitively proven by H. St. J. Hart, “The Coin of ‘Render unto Caesar,’ ” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 241–48.

  Among the many scholars who have tried to strip Jesus’s answer regarding the tribute of its political significance are J.D.M. Derrett, Law in the New Testament (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2005) and F. F. Bruce, “Render to Caesar,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 249–63. At least Bruce recognizes the significance of the word apodidomi, and indeed it is his analysis of the verb that I reference above. Helmut Merkel is one of many scholars who see Jesus’s answer to the religious authorities as a nonanswer; “The Opposition Between Jesus and Judaism,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 129–44. Merkel quotes the German scholar Eduard Lohse in refuting Brandon and those, like myself, who believe that Jesus’s answer betrays his zealot sentiments: “Jesus neither allowed himself to be lured into conferring divine status on the existing power structure, nor concurred with the revolutionaries who wanted to change the existing order and compel the coming of the Kingdom of God by the use of force.” First of all, it should be noted that the use of force is not the issue here. Whether Jesus agreed with the followers of Judas the Galilean that only the use of arms could free the Jews from Roman rule is not what is at stake in this passage. All that is at stake here is the question of where Jesus’s views fell on the most decisive issue of the day, which also happened to be the fundamental test of zealotry: Should the Jews pay tribute to Rome? Those scholars who paint Jesus’s answer to the religious authorities as apolitical are, to my mind, totally blind to the political and religious context of Jesus’s time, and, more important, to the fact that the issue of the tribute is quite clearly meant to be connected to Jesus’s provocative entry into Jerusalem, of which there can be no apolitical interpretation.

  For some reason, the titulus above Jesus’s head has been viewed by scholars and Christians alike as some sort of joke, a sarcastic bit of humor on the part of Rome. The Romans may be known for many things, but humor isn’t one of them. As usual, this interpretation relies on a prima facie reading of Jesus as a man with no political ambitions whatsoever. That is nonsense. All criminals sentenced to execution received a titulus so that everyone would know the crime for which they were being punished and thus be deterred from taking part in similar activity. That the wording on Jesus’s titulus was likely genuine is demonstrated by Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, who notes that “If [the titulus] were invented by Christians, they would have used Christos, for early Christians would scarcely have called their Lord ‘King of the Jews.’ ” See The Gospel According to Luke I–IX (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 773. I will speak more about Jesus’s “trial” in subsequent chapters, but suffice it to say that the notion that a no-name Jewish peasant would have received a personal audience with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who had probably signed a dozen execution orders that day alone, is so outlandish that it cannot be taken seriously.

  Oddly, Luke refers to the two crucified on either side of Jesus not as lestai but as kakourgoi, or “evildoers” (Luke 23:32).

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE VOICE CRYING OUT IN THE WILDERNESS

  All four gospels give varying accounts of John the Baptist (Matthew 3:1–17; Mark 1:2–15; Luke 3:1–22; John 1:19–42). It is generally agreed that much of this gospel material, including John’s infancy narrative in Luke, was derived from independent “Baptist traditions” preserved by John’s followers. On this, see Charles Scobie, John the Baptist (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1964), 50–51, and Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 59–60. However, Wink thinks only some of this material came from John’s unique sources. He argues that the infancy narratives of John and Jesus were likely developed concurrently. See also Catherine Murphy, John the Baptist: Prophet of Purity for a New Age (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003).

  Although, according to Matthew, John warns the Jews of the coming of the “kingdom of heaven,” that is merely Matthew’s circumlocution for Kingdom of God. In fact, Matthew uses the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” throughout his
gospel, even in those passages in which he has borrowed from Mark. In other words, we can be fairly certain that “Kingdom of God” and “Kingdom of Heaven” mean the same thing and that both derived in some part from the teachings of John the Baptist.

  There are many inaccuracies in the gospel account of John’s execution (Mark 6:17–29; Matthew 14:1–12; Luke 9:7–9). For one, the evangelists refer to Herodias as the wife of Philip, when she was actually the wife of Herod. It was Salome who was Philip’s wife. Any attempt by conservative Christian commentators to make up for this blatant error—for instance, by referring to Antipas’s half brother as “Herod Philip” (a name that does not appear in any records)—falls flat. The gospels also seem to confuse the place of John’s execution (the fortress of Machaerus) with Antipas’s court, which at the time would have been in Tiberias. Finally, it should be mentioned that it is inconceivable that a royal princess would have performed for Antipas’s guests, considering the strictures of the day for Jewish women of any status. There are, of course, many apologetic attempts to rescue the gospel story of John’s beheading and to argue for its historicity (for example, Geza Vermes, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus, 49), but I agree with Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1968), 301–2, and Lester L. Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, vol. 2, 427–28, both of whom argue that the gospel story is far too fanciful and riddled with too many errors to be taken as historical.

  For parallels between Mark’s account of John’s execution and the book of Esther, see Roger Aus, Water into Wine and the Beheading of John the Baptist (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 1988). The story also echoes Elijah’s conflict with Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab (1 Kings 19–22).

  Josephus’s account of John the Baptist’s life and death can be found in Antiquities 18.116–19. King Aretas IV was the father of Antipas’s first wife, Phasaelis, whom Antipas divorced in order to marry Herodias. It is unclear whether Antipas was exiled to Spain, as Josephus states in The Jewish War 2.183, or to Gaul, as he alleges in Antiquities 18.252.

  A catalogue of ablutions and water rituals in Jewish scripture and practice can be found in R. L. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Historical Study (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 95–132. For more on the use of water in Jewish conversion rituals, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Rabbinic Conversion Ceremony,” Journal of Jewish Studies 41 (1990): 177–203. There were a few notable individuals in first-century Palestine who practiced ritual acts of immersion, most famously the ascetic known as Bannus, who lived as a hermit in the desert and who bathed himself morning and night in cold water as a means of ritual purification; see Josephus, Life 2.11–12.

  Josephus writes at length about the Essenes in both the Antiquities and The Jewish War, but the earliest evidence about the Essenes comes via Philo of Alexandria’s Hypothetica, written between 35 and 45 C.E. Pliny the Elder also speaks of the Essenes in his Natural History, written circa 77 C.E. It is Pliny who states that the Essenes lived near Engeddi, on the western shore of the Dead Sea, although most scholars believe the Essenes were located at Qumran. Pliny’s error may be due to the fact that he was writing after the war with Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem, after which the Qumran site was abandoned. Nevertheless, a huge debate has erupted among scholars over whether the community at Qumran was in fact Essene. Norman Golb is perhaps the best-known scholar who rejects the Qumran hypothesis. Golb views the Qumran site not as an Essene community but rather as a Hasmonaean fortress. He believes that the documents found in the caves near Qumran—the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls—were not written by the Essenes but brought there for safekeeping from Jerusalem. See Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret Qumran (New York: Scribner, 1995), and “The Problem of Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 1–24. Golb and his contemporaries make some valid points, and it must be admitted that some of the documents found in the caves at Qumran were not written by the Essenes and do not reflect Essene theology. The fact is that we cannot be certain whether the Essenes lived at Qumran. That said, I agree with the great Frank Moore Cross, who argued that the burden of proof rests not with those who connect the Essenes with Qumran, but with those who do not. “The scholar who would ‘exercise caution’ in identifying the sect of Qumran with the Essenes places himself in an astonishing position,” Moore writes; “he must suggest seriously that two major parties formed communistic religious communities in the same district of the desert of the Dead Sea and lived together in effect for two centuries, holding similar bizarre views, performing similar or rather identical lustrations, ritual meals, and ceremonies. He must suppose that one, carefully described by classical authors, disappeared without leaving building remains or even potsherds behind: the other, systematically ignored by classical authors, left extensive ruins, and indeed a great library. I prefer to be reckless and flatly identify the men of Qumran with their perennial houseguest, the Essenes.” Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 331–32. Everything you could ever want to know and more about Essene purity rituals can be found in Ian C. Werrett, Ritual Purity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007).

  Among those who believe that John the Baptist was a member of the Essene community are Otto Betz, “Was John the Baptist an Essene?” Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Hershel Shanks (New York: Random House, 1992), 205–14; W. H. Brownlee, “John the Baptist in the New Light of Ancient Scrolls,” The Scrolls and the New Testament, ed. Krister Stendahl (New York: Harper, 1957), 71–90; and J.A.T. Robinson, “The Baptism of John and the Qumran Community: Testing a Hypothesis,” Twelve New Testament Studies (London: SCM Press, 1962), 11–27. Among those who disagree are H. H. Rowley, “The Baptism of John and the Qumran Sect,” New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of Thomas Walter Manson, 1893–1958, ed. A.J.B. Higgins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), 218–29; Bruce D. Chilton, Judaic Approaches to the Gospels (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 17–22; and Joan E. Taylor, The Immerser: John the Baptist Within Second Temple Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997).

  It should be noted that while Isaiah 40:3 was applied to both John and the Essenes, there were important distinctions in the way the passage seems to have been interpreted by both. For more on John’s possible childhood “in the wilderness,” see Jean Steinmann, Saint John the Baptist and the Desert Tradition (New York: Harper, 1958). Regardless of whether John was a member of the Essenes, it is clear that there are a number of parallels between the two, including setting, asceticism, priestly lineage, water immersion, and the sharing of property. Individually, none of these parallels definitively proves a connection, but together they make a strong case for certain affinities between the two that should not be easily dismissed. In any case, John would not need to have been an actual member of the Essene community to be influenced by their teachings and ideas, which were pretty well integrated into the Jewish spirituality of the time.

  Although it is never explicitly stated that John’s baptism was not meant to be repeated, one can infer that to be the case for two reasons: first, because the baptism seems to require an administrator, like John, as opposed to most other water rituals, which were self-administered; and second, because John’s baptism assumes the imminent end of the world, which would make its repetition somewhat difficult, to say the least. See John Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 51.

  John Meier makes a compelling case for accepting the historicity of the phrase “baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” See Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 53–54. Josephus’s claim to the contrary can be found in Antiquities 18.116. Robert L. Webb argues that John’s baptism was a “repentance-baptism which functioned to initiate [the Jews] into the group of prepared people, the true Israel,” meaning John did in fact form his own distinct sect; see John the Baptizer a
nd Prophet, 197 and 364. Bruce Chilton completely dismantles Webb’s argument in “John the Purifier,” 203–20.