Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  That the Seven were leaders of an independent community in the early church is proven by the fact that they are presented as actively preaching, healing, and performing signs and wonders. They are not waiters whose main responsibility is food distribution, as Luke suggests in Acts 6:1–6.

  Hengel writes that “the Aramaic-speaking part of the community was hardly affected” by the persecution of the Hellenists, and he notes that, considering the fact that the Hebrews stayed in Jerusalem until at least the outbreak of war in 66 C.E., they must have come to some sort of accommodation with the priestly authorities. “In Jewish Palestine, only a community which remained strictly faithful to the law could survive in the long run”; Between Jesus and Paul, 55–56.

  Another reason to consider the Jesus movement in the first few years after the crucifixion to be an exclusively Jewish mission is that among the first acts of the apostles after Jesus’s death was to replace Judas Iscariot with Matthias (Acts 1:21–26). This may indicate that the notion of the reconstitution of Israel’s tribes was still alive immediately after the crucifixion. Indeed, among the first questions the disciples ask the risen Jesus is whether, now that he was back, he intended to “restore the kingdom to Israel.” That is, will you perform now the messianic function you failed to perform during your lifetime? Jesus brushes off the question: “it is not for you to know the times or the season that the Father has put down in his power [to accomplish such things]” (Acts 1:7).

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: AM I NOT AN APOSTLE?

  Of the letters in the New Testament that are attributed to Paul, only seven can be confidently traced to him: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. Letters attributed to Paul but probably not written by him include Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.

  There is some debate over the date of Paul’s conversion. The confusion rests with Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:1 that he went to the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem “after fourteen years.” Assuming that the council was held around the year 50 C.E., that would place Paul’s conversion around 36 or 37 C.E. This is the date favored by James Tabor, Paul and Jesus (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012). However, some scholars believe that by “after fourteen years,” Paul means fourteen years after his initial appearance before the Apostles, which he claims took place three years after his conversion. That would place his conversion closer to 33 C.E., a date favored by Martin Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, 31. Adolf Harnack, in The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), calculates that Paul was converted eighteen months after Jesus’s death, but I think that is far too early a date for Paul’s conversion. I agree with Tabor and others that Paul’s conversion was more likely sometime around 36 or 37 C.E., fourteen years before the Apostolic Council.

  That these lines of Paul in the letter to the Galatians regarding the “so-called pillars of the church” were directed specifically toward the Jerusalem-based Apostles and not some unnamed Jewish Christians with whom he disagreed is definitely proven by Gerd Ludemann in his indispensable works Paul: The Founder of Christianity (New York: Prometheus Books, 2002), especially page 69 and 120; and, with M. Eugene Boring, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). See also Tabor, Paul and Jesus, 19; and J.D.G. Dunn, “Echoes of the Intra-Jewish Polemic in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” Journal of Biblical Literature 112/3 (1993): 459–77.

  There has been a fierce debate recently about the role of Paul in creating what we now consider Christianity, with a number of contemporary scholars coming to Paul’s defense and painting him as a devout Jew who remained loyal to his Jewish heritage and faithful to the laws and customs of Moses but who just happened to view his mission as adapting messianic Judaism to a gentile audience. The traditional view of Paul among scholars of Christianity could perhaps best be summed up by Rudolf Bultmann, Faith and Understanding (London: SCM Press, 1969), who famously described Paul’s doctrine of Christ as “basically a wholly new religion, in contrast to the original Palestinian Christianity.” Scholars who more or less agree with Bultmann include Adolf Harnak, What Is Christianity? (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902); H. J. Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish History (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961); and Gerd Ludemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity. Among the recent scholars who see Paul as a loyal Jew who merely tried to translate Judaism for a gentile audience are L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity, and my former professor Marie-Éloise Rosenblatt, Paul the Accused (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995).

  Ultimately, there is some truth in both views. Those who believe that Paul was the creator of Christianity as we know it, or that it was he who utterly divorced the new faith from Judaism, often do not adequately take into consideration the eclecticism of Diaspora Judaism or the influence of the Greek-speaking Hellenists, from whom Paul, himself a Greek-speaking Hellenist, likely first heard about Jesus of Nazareth. But to be clear, the Hellenists may have deemphasized the Law of Moses in their preaching, but they did not demonize it; they may have abandoned circumcision as a requirement for conversion, but they did not relegate it to dogs and evildoers and suggest those who disagree should be castrated, as Paul does (Galatians 5:12). Regardless of whether Paul adopted his unusual doctrine from the Hellenists or invented it himself, however, what even his staunchest defenders cannot deny is just how deviant his views are from even the most experimental Jewish movements of his time.

  That Paul is speaking about himself when he cites Isaiah 49:1–6 regarding “the root of Jesse” serving as “a light to the Gentiles” is obvious, since even Paul admits that Jesus did not missionize to the gentiles (Romans 15:12).

  Research done by N. A. Dahl demonstrates just how unusual Paul’s use of the term Xristos (Christ) was. Dahl notes that for Paul, Xristos is never a predicate, never governed by a genitive, never a title but always a designation, and never used in the appositional form, as in Yesus ha Xristos, or Jesus the Christ. See N. A. Dahl, Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).

  It was not unusual to be called Son of God in ancient Judaism. God calls David his son: “today I have begotten you” (Psalms 2:7). He even calls Israel his “first-born son” (Exodus 4:22). But in every case, Son of God is meant as a title, not a description. Paul’s view of Jesus as the literal son of God is without precedence in second Temple Judaism.

  Luke claims that Paul and Barnabas separated because of a “sharp contention,” which Luke claims was over whether to take Mark with them on their next missionary trip but which is obviously tied to what happened in Antioch shortly after the Apostolic Council. While Peter and Paul were in Antioch, they engaged in a fierce public feud because, according to Paul, Peter stopped sharing a table with gentiles as soon as a delegation sent by James arrived in the city, “for fear of the circumcision faction” in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:12). Of course, Paul is our only source for this event, and there are plenty of reasons for doubting his version of the story, not the least of which is the fact that sharing a table with gentiles is in no way forbidden under Jewish law. It is more likely that the argument was about the keeping of Jewish dietary laws—that is, not eating gentile food—an argument in which Barnabas sided with Peter.

  Luke says Paul was sent to Rome to escape a Jewish plot to have him killed. He also claims that the Roman tribune ordered nearly five hundred of his soldiers to personally accompany Paul to Caesarea. This is absurd and can be flatly ignored.

  Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, according to the historian Suetonius, “because the Jews of Rome were indulging in constant riots at the instigation of Chrestus.” It is widely believed that by Chrestus, Suetonius meant Christ, and that this spat among the Jews was between the city’s Christian and non-Christian Jews. As F. F. Bruce notes, “we should remind ourselves that, while we with our hindsight can distinguish betw
een Jews and Christians as early as the reign of Claudius, no such distinction could have been made at that time by the Roman authorities.” F. F. Bruce, “Christianity Under Claudius,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 44 (March 1962): 309–26.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE JUST ONE

  The description of James and the entreaties of the Jews are both taken from the account of the Palestinian Jewish Christian Hegesippus (100–180 C.E.). We have access to Hegesippus’s five books of early Church history only through passages cited in the third-century text of Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–c. 339 C.E.), an archbishop of the Church under the Emperor Constantine.

  How reliable a source Hegesippus may be is a matter of great debate. On the one hand, there are a number of statements by Hegesippus whose historicity the majority of scholars accept without dispute, including his assertion that “control of the Church passed together with the Apostles, to the brother of the Lord James, whom everyone from the Lord’s time till our own has named the Just, for there were many Jameses, but this one was holy from his birth” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23). This claim is backed up with multiple attestations (see below) and can even be traced in the letters of Paul and in the book of Acts. However, there are some traditions in Hegesippus that are confused and downright incorrect, including his claim that James was allowed to “enter the Sanctuary alone.” If by “Sanctuary” Hegesippus means the Holy of Holies (and there is some question as to whether that is indeed what he means), then the statement is patently false; only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies. There is also a variant tradition of James’s death in Hegesippus that contradicts what scholars accept as the more reliable account in Josephus’s Antiquities. As recorded in the Ecclesiastical History, it was James’s response to the request of the Jews to help dissuade the people from following Jesus as messiah that ultimately leads to his death: “And [James] answered with a loud voice: Why do you ask me concerning Jesus, the Son of Man? He himself sits in heaven at the right hand of the great power, and is about to come upon the clouds of heaven! So they went up and threw down the just man, and said to each other: Let us stone James the Just. And they began to stone him, for he was not killed by the fall; but he turned and knelt down and said: I entreat you, Lord God our father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

  What is fascinating about this story is that it seems to be a variant of the story of Stephen’s martyrdom in the book of Acts, which was itself swiped from Jesus’s response to the high priest Caiaphas in the gospel of Mark. Note also the parallel between James’s death speech and that of Jesus’s on the cross in Luke 23:24.

  Hegesippus ends the story of James’s martyrdom thus: “And one of them, one of the fullers, took the club with which he beat out clothes and struck the just man on the head. And thus he suffered martyrdom. And they buried him on the spot, by the temple, and his monument still remains by the temple. He became a true witness, both to Jews and Greeks, that Jesus is the Christ. And immediately Vespasian besieged them” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.1–18). Again, while scholars are almost unanimous in preferring Josephus’s account of James’s death to Hegesippus, it bears mentioning that the latter tradition is echoed in the work of Clement of Alexandria, who writes: “there were two Jameses, one the Just, who was thrown down from the parapet [of the Temple] and beaten to death with the fuller’s club, the other the James [son of Zebedee] who was beheaded” (Clement, Hypotyposes, Book 7).

  Josephus writes of the wealthy priestly aristocracy seizing the tithes of the lower priests in Antiquities 20.180–81: “But as for the high priest, Ananias, he increased in glory every day, and this to a great degree, and had obtained the favor and esteem of the citizens in a signal manner; for he was a great hoarder up of money: he therefore cultivated the friendship of Albinus, and of the high priest [Jesus, son of Danneus], by making them presents; he also had servants who were very wicked, who joined themselves to the boldest sort of the people, and went to the thrashing-floors, and took away the tithes that belonged to the priests by violence, and did not refrain from beating such as would not give these tithes to them. So the other high priests acted in the like manner, as did those his servants, without any one being able to prohibit them; so that [some of the] priests, that of old were wont to be supported with those tithes, died for want of food.” This Ananias was probably Ananus the Elder, father to the Ananus who killed James.

  Josephus’s account of James’s martyrdom can be found in Antiquities 20.9.1. Not everyone is convinced that James was executed for being a Christian. Maurice Goguel, for instance, argues that if the men executed along with James were also Christians then their names would have been preserved in Christian tradition; Goguel, Birth of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1954). Some scholars, myself included, believe that he was executed for condemning Ananus’s seizure of the tithes meant for the lower-class priests; see S.G.F. Brandon, “The Death of James the Just: A New Interpretation,” Studies in Mysticism and Religion (Jerusalem: Magnus Press, 1967): 57–69.

  Whether the Jews were outraged by the unlawful procedure of the trial or by the unjust verdict is difficult to decipher from Josephus’s account. The fact that they complain to Albinus about the illegality of Ananus’s calling the Sanhedrin without a procurator in Jerusalem seems to suggest that it was the procedure of the trial they objected to, not the verdict. However, I agree with John Painter who notes that “the suggestion that what the group objected to was Ananus taking the law into his own hands when Roman authority was required for the imposition of the death penalty (see John 18:31) does not fit an objection raised by ‘the most fair-minded … and strict in the observance of the law’.… Rather it suggests that those who were fair-minded and strict in their observance of the law regarded as unjust the verdict that James and the others had transgressed the law.” See John Painter, “Who Was James?” in The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission, Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner, eds. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 10–65; 49.

  Pierre-Antoine Bernheim agrees: “Josephus, by indicating the disagreement of the ‘most precise observers of the law,’ probably wanted to emphasize not the irregularity of the convening of the Sanhedrin in terms of the rules imposed by the Romans but the injustice of the verdict in relation to the law of Moses as this was interpreted by the most widely recognized experts …” James, the Brother of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1997), 249.

  While some scholars—for instance, Craig C. Hill, Hellenists and Hebrews (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992)—disagree with Painter and Bernheim, arguing that the complaint of the Jews had nothing to do with James himself, most (myself included) are convinced that the Jews’ complaint was about the injustice of the verdict, not the process of the trial; see also F. F. Bruce, New Testament History (New York: Doubleday, 1980), especially pages 372–73.

  Hegesippus’s quote regarding the authority of James can be found in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.4–18. It is unclear whether Hegesippus means that control of the church passed to the apostles and to James, or that control over the apostles also passed to James. Either way, James’s leadership is affirmed. Gerd Ludemann actually thinks the phrase “with the apostles” is not original but was added by Eusebius to conform with the mainstream view of apostolic authority. See Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989).

  The material from Clement of Rome is taken from the so-called Pseudo-Clementines, which, while compiled sometime around 300 C.E., reflects far earlier Jewish-Christian traditions that can be traced through the text’s two primary documents: the Homilies and the Recognitions. The Homilies contain two epistles: The Epistle of Peter, from which the reference to James as “Lord and Bishop of the Holy Church” is cited, and the Epistle of Clement, which is addressed to James “the Bishop of Bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the Holy Assembly of the Hebrews, and all the Assemblies everywhere.” The Recognitions is itself probably founded upon
an older document titled Ascent of James, which most scholars trace to the mid-100s. Georg Strecker thinks the Ascent was written in Pella, where the Jerusalem-based Christians allegedly congregated after the destruction of Jerusalem. See his entry “The Pseudo-Clementines,” in New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, Wilhelm Schneemelker, ed. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 483–541.

  The passage from the Gospel of Thomas can be found in Chapter 12. Incidentally the surname “James the Just” also appears in the Gospel of the Hebrews; see The Nag Hammadi Library for the complete text of both. Clement of Alexandria is quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.1.2–5. Obviously the title of bishop in describing James is anachronistic, but the implication of the term is clear. Jerome’s Lives of Illustrious Men can be found in an English translation by Ernest Cushing Richardson in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1892). The no longer extant passage in Josephus blaming the destruction of Jerusalem on James’s unjust death is cited by Origen in Contra Celsus 1.47, by Jerome in Lives and in his Commentary on Galatians, and by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 2.23.

  That James is in the position of presiding authority in the Apostolic Council is proven by the fact that he is the last to speak and begins his judgment with the word krino, or “I decree.” See Bernheim, James, Brother of Jesus, 193. As Bernheim correctly notes, the fact that Paul, when referencing the three pillars of the church, always mentions James first is due to his preeminence. This is affirmed by later redactions of the text in which copyists have reversed the order to put Peter before James in order to place him as head of the church. Any question of James’s preeminence over Peter is put to rest in the passage of Galatians 2:11–14 in which emissaries sent by James to Antioch compel Peter to stop eating with Gentiles, while the ensuing fight between Peter and Paul leads Barnabas to leave Paul and return to James.