NPR
Excerpt: Zealot: The Life And Times Of Jesus Of Nazareth
July 02, 2013
Introduction
It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of
Nazareth. The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village
clamoring about the end of the world, a band of ragged followers trailing
behind,
was a common a sight in Jesus' time — so common, in fact, that it had become
a kind of caricature among the Roman elite. In a farcical passage about
just such a figure, the Greek philosopher Celsus imagines a Jewish holy man
roaming the Galilean countryside, shouting to no one in particular: "I am
God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit. But I am coming, for the
world is already in the throes of destruction. And you will soon see me coming
with the power of heaven."
The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of
Palestine, the Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing
modern day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and
Lebanon. Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy
Land delivering messages of God's imminent judgment. Many of these so-called
"false messiahs" we know by name. A few are even mentioned in the New
Testament. The prophet Theudas, according to the book of Acts, had four
hundred
disciples before Rome captured him and cut off his head. A mysterious
charismatic figure known only as "The Egyptian" raised an army of followers in
the desert, nearly all of whom were massacred by Roman troops. In 4 b.c.e.,
the year in which most scholars believe Jesus of Nazareth was born, a poor
shepherd named Athronges put a diadem on his head and crowned himself "King
of the Jews"; he and his followers were brutally cut down by a legion of
soldiers. Another messianic aspirant, called simply "The Samaritan," was
crucified by Pontius Pilate even though he raised no army and in no way
challenged Rome — an indication that the authorities, sensing the apocalyptic
fever in the air, had become extremely sensitive to any hint of sedition.
There was Hezekiah the bandit chief, Simon of Peraea, Judas the Galilean, his
grandson Menahem, Simon son of Giora, and Simon son of Kochba — all of whom
declared messianic ambitions and all of whom were executed by Rome for
doing so. Add to this list the Essene sect, some of whose members lived in
seclusion atop the dry plateau of Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead
Sea; the first-century Jewish revolutionary party known as the Zealots, who
helped launched a bloody war against Rome; and the fearsome
bandit-assassins whom the Romans dubbed the Sicarii (the Daggermen), and the
picture that
emerges of first-century Palestine is of an era awash in messianic energy.
It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within any of the known
religiopolitical movements of his time. He was a man of profound
contradictions, one day preaching a message of racial exclusion ("I was sent
solely
to the lost sheep of Israel"; Matthew 15:24), the next, of benevolent
universalism ("Go and make disciples of all nations"; Matthew 28:19);
sometimes
calling for unconditional peace ("Blessed are the peacemakers for they
shall be called the sons of God"; Matthew 5:9), sometimes promoting violence
and conflict ("If you do not have a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one";
Luke 22:36).
The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that, outside of the
New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would so permanently
alter the course of human history. The earliest and most reliable
nonbiblical reference to Jesus comes from the first-century Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus (d. 100 c.e.). In a brief throwaway passage in the
Antiquities,
Josephus writes of a fiendish Jewish high priest named Ananus who, after
the death of the Roman governor Festus, unlawfully condemned a certain
"James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah," to stoning for
transgression of the law. The passage moves on to relate what happened to
Ananus
after the new governor, Albinus, finally arrived in Jerusalem.
Fleeting and dismissive as this allusion may be (the phrase "the one they
call messiah" is clearly meant to express derision), it nevertheless
contains enormous significance for those searching for any sign of the
historical
Jesus. In a society without surnames, a common name like James required a
specific appellation — a place of birth or a father's name — to distinguish
it from all the other men named James roaming around Palestine (hence,
Jesus of Nazareth). In this case, James' appellative was provided by his
fraternal connection to someone with whom Josephus assumes his audience would
be
familiar. The passage proves not only that "Jesus, the one they call
messiah" probably existed, but that by the year 94 c.e., when the Antiquities
was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring
movement.
It is that movement, not its founder, that receives the attention of
second-century historians like Tacitus (d. 118) and Pliny the Younger (d. 113),
both of whom mention Jesus of Nazareth but reveal little about him, save for
his arrest and execution — an important historical note, as we shall see,
but one that sheds little light on the details of Jesus' life. We are
therefore left with whatever information can be gleaned from the New
Testament.
The first written testimony we have about Jesus of Nazareth comes from the
epistles of Paul, an early follower of Jesus who died sometime around 66
c.e. (Paul's first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, can be dated between 48 and 50
c.e., some two decades after Jesus' death). The trouble with Paul, however,
is that he displays an extraordinary lack of interest in the historical
Jesus. Only three scenes from Jesus' life are ever mentioned in his epistles:
the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–26), the crucifixion (1 Corinthians
2:2), and, most crucially for Paul, the resurrection, without which, he
claims, "our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians
15:14). Paul may be an excellent source for those interested in the early
formation of Christianity, but he is a poor guide for uncovering the
historical
Jesus.
That leaves us with the gospels, which present their own set of problems.
First of all, one must recognize that, with the possible exception of the
gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have were written by the person after
whom they are named. That is true of most of the books in the New
Testament. Such so-called pseudepigraphical works, or works attributed to but
not
written by a specific author, were extremely common in the ancient world and
should by no means be thought of as forgeries. Naming a book after a person
was a standard way of reflecting that person's beliefs or representing his
or her school of thought. Regardless, the gospels are not, nor were they
ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus' life. These are not
eyewitness accounts of Jesus' words and deeds. They are testimonies of faith
composed by communities of faith written many years after the events they
describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus
the man.
The most widely accepted theory on the formation of the gospels, "the
Two-Source Theory," holds that Mark's account was written first sometime after
70 c.e., some four decades after Jesus' death. Mark had at his disposal a
collection of oral and perhaps a handful of written traditions that had been
passed around by Jesus' earliest followers for years. By adding a
chronological narrative to this jumble of traditions, Mark created a wholly
new
literary genre called gospel, Greek for "good news." Yet Mark's gospel is a
short and somewhat unsatisfying one for many Christians. There is no infancy
narrative; Jesus simply arrives one day on the banks of the Jordan River to
be baptized by John the Baptist. There are no resurrection appearances.
Jesus is crucified. His body is placed in a tomb. A few days later, the tomb
is empty. Even the earliest Christians were left wanting by Mark's brusque
account of Jesus' life and ministry, and so it was left to Mark's
successors, Matthew and Luke, to improve upon the original text.
Two decades after Mark, between 90 and 100 c.e., the authors of Matthew and
Luke, working independently of each other and with Mark's manuscript as a
template, updated the gospel story by adding their own unique traditions,
including two different and conflicting infancy narratives as well as a
series of elaborate resurrection stories to satisfy their Christian readers.
Matthew and Luke also relied on what must have been an early and fairly well
distributed collection of Jesus' sayings that scholars have termed Q
(German for Quelle, or "source"). Although we no longer have any physical
copies
of this document, we can infer its contents by compiling those verses that
Matthew and Luke share in common but that do not appear in Mark.
Together, these three gospels — Mark, Matthew, and Luke — became known as
the Synoptics (Greek for "viewed together") because they more or less
present a common narrative and chronology about the life and ministry of
Jesus,
one that is greatly at odds with the fourth gospel, John, which was likely
written soon after the close of the first century, between 100 and 120 c.e.
These, then, are the canonized gospels. But they are not the only gospels.
We now have access to an entire library of noncanonical scriptures written
mostly in the second and third centuries that provides a vastly different
perspective on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. These include the Gospel of
Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Mary
Magdalene, and a host of other so-called "Gnostic writings" discovered in
Upper Egypt, near the town of Nag Hammadi, in 1945. Though they were left out
of what would ultimately become the New Testament, these books are
significant in that they demonstrate the dramatic divergence of opinion that
existed
over who Jesus was and what Jesus meant, even among those who walked with
him, who shared his bread and ate with him, who heard his words and prayed
with him.
In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of
Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew
who
led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first
century c.e.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so. By
themselves these two facts cannot provide a complete portrait of the life of a
man
who lived two thousand years ago. But when combined with all we know about
the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived — and thanks to the Romans, we
know a great deal — these two facts can help paint a picture of Jesus of
Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by the
gospels. Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise — a
zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious
and political turmoil of first-century Palestine — bears little resemblance
to the image of the gentle shepherd cultivated by the early Christian
community.
Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost
exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above
Jesus'
head as he writhed in pain — "King of the Jews" — was called a titulus
and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal
who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for
which he was being executed. Jesus' crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving
for kingly rule (i.e. treason), the same crime for which nearly every other
messianic aspirant of the time was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The
gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called
lestai, a word often rendered into English as "thieves" but that actually
means "bandits" and was the most common Roman designation for an
insurrectionist or rebel.
Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing the racked
and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone
should cast doubt upon the gospels' portrayal of Jesus as a man of
unconditional peace almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of
his
time. The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for
the imposition of the "Kingdom of God" — a term that would have been
understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome — could
have
remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly
every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.
Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary
nature of Jesus' message and movement? To answer this question we must
first recognize that almost every gospel story written about the life and
mission of Jesus of Nazareth was composed after the Jewish rebellion against
Rome in 66 c.e. In that year, a band of Jewish rebels, spurred by their zeal
for God, roused their fellow Jews in revolt. Miraculously, the rebels
managed to liberate the Holy Land from the Roman occupation. For four glorious
years, the city of God was once again under Jewish control. Then, in 70
c.e., the Romans returned. After a brief siege of Jerusalem, the soldiers
breached the city walls and unleashed an orgy of violence upon its residents.
They butchered everyone in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount. A
river of blood flowed down the cobblestone streets. When the massacre was
complete, the soldiers set fire to the Temple of God. The fires spread
beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem's meadows, the farms, the olive
trees. Everything burned. So complete was the devastation wrought upon the
holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had
ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest
were marched out of the city in chains.
The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic
event is hard to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to
live as outcasts among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the
second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical
messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome. The
Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism
emerged.
The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the
revolutionary zeal that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because
it
allowed the early church to ward off the wrath of a deeply vengeful Rome, but
also because, with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans
had become the primary target of the church's evangelism. Thus began the long
process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into
a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That
was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries
later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant
Jewish preacher's movement the official religion of the state, and what we
now recognize as orthodox Christianity was born.
This book is an attempt to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of
history, the Jesus before Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish
revolutionary who, two thousand years ago, walked across the Galilean
countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement with the goal of
establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after a
provocative
entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested and
executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. It is also about how, in the
aftermath of Jesus' failure to establish God's reign on earth, his followers
reinterpreted not only Jesus' mission and identity, but also the very nature
and definition of the Jewish messiah.
There are those who consider such an endeavor to be a waste of time,
believing the Jesus of history to be irrevocably lost and incapable of
recovery.
Long gone are the heady days of "the quest for the historical Jesus," when
scholars confidently proclaimed that modern scientific tools and historical
research would allow us to uncover Jesus' true identity. The real Jesus no
longer matters, these scholars argue. We should focus instead on the only
Jesus that is accessible to us: Jesus the Christ.
Granted, writing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth is not like writing a
biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. The task is somewhat akin to putting together
a massive puzzle with only a few of the pieces in hand; one has no choice
but to fill in the rest of the puzzle based on the best, most educated
guess of what the completed image should look like. The great Christian
theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical
Jesus is
ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to
see. Too often they see themselves — their own reflection — in the image
of Jesus they have constructed.
And yet that best, most educated guess may be enough to, at the very least,
question our most basic assumptions about Jesus of Nazareth. If we expose
the claims of the gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge
the scriptures of their literary and theological flourishes and forge a far
more accurate picture of the Jesus of history. Indeed, if we commit to
placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of
the era in which he lived — an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt
against Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism —
then, in some ways, his biography writes itself.
The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect;
he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would
recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by
historical
means.
Everything else is a matter of faith.
>From Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
Copyright 2013 by Reza Aslan. Excerpted by permission of Random House.
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