Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  Yet what truly set Simon apart from the rest of the rebel leaders in Jerusalem is that, from the very beginning, he unabashedly presented himself as messiah and king. Like Menahem before him, Simon dressed himself in kingly robes and paraded about the city as its savior. He declared himself “Master of Jerusalem” and used his divinely anointed position to begin rounding up and executing the upper-class Jews whom he suspected of treason. As a result, Simon son of Giora ultimately came to be recognized as the supreme commander of the fractured rebellion—and just in time. For no sooner had Simon consolidated his authority over the rest of the rebel groups than Titus appeared at the city gates, with four Roman legions in tow, demanding Jerusalem’s immediate surrender.

  All at once, the factionalism and feuding amongst the Jews gave way to frantic preparations for the impending Roman assault. But Titus was in no hurry to attack. Instead, he ordered his men to build a stone wall around Jerusalem, trapping everyone inside and cutting off all access to food and water. He then set up camp on the Mount of Olives, from which he had an unobstructed view of the city’s population as they slowly starved to death.

  The famine that ensued was horrible. Entire families perished in their homes. The alleys were filled with the bodies of the dead; there was no room, and no strength, to bury them properly. The inhabitants of Jerusalem crawled through the sewers searching for food. People ate cow dung and tufts of dry grass. They stripped off and chewed the leather from their belts and shoes. There were scattered reports of Jews who succumbed to eating the dead. Those who attempted to escape the city were easily captured and crucified on the Mount of Olives for all to see.

  It would have been sufficient for Titus to simply wait for the population to perish on their own. He would not have needed to unsheathe his sword to defeat Jerusalem and end the rebellion. But that is not what his father had sent him there to do. His task was not to starve the Jews into submission; it was to eradicate them from the land they claimed as their own. Thus, in late April of 70 C.E., as death stalked the city and the population perished by the hundreds from hunger and thirst, Titus rallied his legions and stormed Jerusalem.

  The Romans threw up ramparts along the walls of the upper city and began bombarding the rebels with heavy artillery. They constructed a massive battering ram that easily breached the first wall surrounding Jerusalem. When the rebels retreated to a second interior wall, that, too, was breached and the gates set on fire. As the flames slowly died down, the city was laid bare for Titus’s troops.

  The soldiers set upon everyone—man, woman, child, the rich, the poor, those who had joined in the rebellion, those who had remained faithful to Rome, the aristocrats, the priests. It made no difference. They burned everything. The whole city was ablaze. The roar of the flames mixed with screams of agony as the Roman swarm swept through the upper and lower city, littering the ground with corpses, sloshing through streams of blood, literally clambering over heaps of dead bodies in pursuit of the rebels, until finally the Temple was in their sights. With the last of the rebel fighters trapped inside the inner courtyard, the Romans set the entire foundation aflame, making it seem as though the Temple Mount was boiling over at its base with blood and fire. The flames enveloped the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the God of Israel, and brought it crashing to the ground in a pile of ash and dust. When the fires finally subsided, Titus gave orders to raze what was left of the city so that no future generation would even remember the name Jerusalem.

  Thousands perished, though Simon son of Giora—Simon the failed messiah—was taken alive so that he could be dragged back to Rome in chains for the Triumph that Vespasian had promised his people. Along with Simon came the sacred treasures of the Temple: the golden table and the shewbread offered to the Lord; the lampstand and the seven-branched Menorah; the incense burners and cups; the trumpets and holy vessels. All of these were carried in triumphal procession through the streets of Rome as Vespasian and Titus, crowned with laurels and clad in purple robes, watched in silent resolution. Finally, at the end of the procession, the last of the spoils was carried out for all to see: a copy of the Torah, the supreme symbol of the Jewish religion.

  Vespasian’s point was hard to miss: This was a victory not over a people, but over their god. It was not Judea but Judaism that had been defeated. Titus publicly presented the destruction of Jerusalem as an act of piety and an offering to the Roman gods. It was not he who had accomplished the task, Titus claimed. He had merely given his arms to his god, who had shown his anger against the god of the Jews.

  Remarkably, Vespasian chose to waive the customary practice of evocatio, whereby a vanquished enemy had the option of worshipping its god in Rome. Not only would the Jews be forbidden to rebuild their temple, a right offered to nearly every other subject people in the empire; they would now be forced to pay a tax of two drachmas a year—the exact amount Jewish men once paid in shekels to the Temple in Jerusalem—in order to help rebuild the Temple of Jupiter, which was accidentally burned down during the Roman civil war. All Jews, no matter where in the empire they lived, no matter how loyal they had remained to Rome, no matter if they had taken part in the rebellion or not—every Jew, including women and children, was now forced to pay for the upkeep of the central pagan cult of Rome.

  Henceforth, Judaism would no longer be deemed a worthy cult. The Jews were now the eternal enemy of Rome. Although mass population transfer had never been a Roman policy, Rome expelled every surviving Jew from Jerusalem and its surrounding environs, ultimately renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, and placed the entire region under direct imperial control. All of Palestine became Vespasian’s personal property as the Romans strove to create the impression that there had never been any Jews in Jerusalem. By the year 135 C.E., the name Jerusalem ceased to exist in all official Roman documents.

  For those Jews who survived the bloodbath—those huddled naked and starved beyond the collapsed city walls, watching in horror as the Roman soldiers urinated on the smoldering ashes of the House of God—it was perfectly clear who was to blame for the death and devastation. Surely it was not the Lord of Hosts who had brought such destruction upon the sacred city. No. It was the lestai, the bandits and the rebels, the Zealots and the Sicarii, the nationalist revolutionaries who had preached independence from Rome, the so-called prophets and false messiahs who had promised salvation from God in return for their fealty and zeal. They were the ones responsible for the Roman onslaught. They were the ones whom God had abandoned.

  In the years to come, the Jews would begin to distance themselves as much as possible from the revolutionary idealism that had led to the war with Rome. They would not altogether abandon their apocalyptic expectations. On the contrary, a flourish of apocalyptic writings would emerge over the next century reflecting the continued longing for divine deliverance from Roman rule. The lingering effects of this messianic fervor would even lead to the outbreak of a brief second Jewish war against Rome in 132 C.E., this one led by the messiah known as Simon son of Kochba. For the most part, however, the rabbis of the second century would be compelled by circumstance and by fear of Roman reprisal to develop an interpretation of Judaism that eschewed nationalism. They would come to view the Holy Land in more transcendental terms, fostering a messianic theology that rejected overt political ambitions, as acts of piety and the study of the law took the place of Temple sacrifices in the life of the observant Jew.

  But that was all many years away. On this day—the day in which the beaten and bloodied remnants of the ancient Jewish nation were wrenched from their homes, their Temple, their God, and forcibly marched out of the Promised Land to the land of the heathens and idolaters—all that seemed certain was that the world as they knew it had come to an end.

  Meanwhile, in triumphant Rome, a short while after the Temple of the Lord had been desecrated, the Jewish nation scattered to the winds, and the religion made a pariah, tradition says a Jew named John Mark took up his quill and composed the first words to the first gospel w
ritten about the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth—not in Hebrew, the language of God, nor in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, but in Greek, the language of the heathens. The language of the impure. The language of the victors.

  This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus the Christ.

  PART II

  The spirit of the Lord God is upon me

  because the Lord has anointed me

  to bring good news to the meek;

  he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted

  ,

  to proclaim liberty to the captives

  ,

  and release to the prisoners who are bound;

  to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor

  ,

  and the day of vengeance for our God

  .

  I

  SAIAH 61:1–2

  Prologue

  Zeal for Your House

  Of all the stories told about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, there is one—depicted in countless plays, films, paintings, and Sunday sermons—that, more than any other word or deed, helps reveal who Jesus was and what Jesus meant. It is one of only a handful of events in Jesus’s ministry attested to by all four canonized gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—adding some measure of weight to its historicity. Yet all four evangelists present this monumental moment in a casual, almost fleeting manner, as though they were either oblivious to its meaning or, more likely, deliberately downplaying an episode whose radical implications would have been immediately recognized by all who witnessed it. So revelatory is this single moment in Jesus’s brief life that it alone can be used to clarify his mission, his theology, his politics, his relationship to the Jewish authorities, his relationship to Judaism in general, and his attitude toward the Roman occupation. Above all, this singular event explains why a simple peasant from the low hills of Galilee was seen as such a threat to the established system that he was hunted down, arrested, tortured, and executed.

  The year is approximately 30 C.E. Jesus has just entered Jerusalem, riding a donkey and flanked by a frenzied multitude shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed be the coming kingdom of our father David!” The ecstatic crowd sings hymns of praise to God. Some spread cloaks on the road for Jesus to ride over, just as the Israelites did for Jehu when he was declared king (2 Kings 9:12–13). Others saw off palm branches and wave them in the air, in remembrance of the heroic Maccabees who liberated Israel from foreign rule two centuries earlier (1 Maccabees 13:49–53). The entire pageant has been meticulously orchestrated by Jesus and his followers in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy: “Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Cry out, daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and victorious is he, humble and riding upon an ass, upon a colt, the son of a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9).

  The message conveyed to the city’s inhabitants is unmistakable: the long-awaited messiah—the true King of the Jews—has come to free Israel from its bondage.

  As provocative as his entrance into Jerusalem may be, it pales in comparison to what Jesus does the following day. With his disciples and, one assumes, the praiseful multitude in tow, Jesus enters the Temple’s public courtyard—the Court of Gentiles—and sets about “cleansing” it. In a rage, he overturns the tables of the money changers and drives out the vendors hawking cheap food and souvenirs. He releases the sheep and cattle ready to be sold for sacrifice and breaks open the cages of the doves and pigeons, setting the birds to flight. “Take these things out of here!” he shouts.

  With the help of his disciples he blocks the entrance to the courtyard, forbidding anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple. Then, as the crowd of vendors, worshippers, priests, and curious onlookers scramble over the scattered detritus, as a stampede of frightened animals, chased by their panicked owners, rushes headlong out of the Temple gates and into the choked streets of Jerusalem, as a corps of Roman guards and heavily armed Temple police blitz through the courtyard looking to arrest whoever is responsible for the mayhem, there stands Jesus, according to the gospels, aloof, seemingly unperturbed, crying out over the din: “It is written: My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a den of thieves.”

  The authorities are irate, and with good reason. There is no law that forbids the presence of vendors in the Court of Gentiles. Other parts of the Temple may have been sacrosanct and off-limits to the lame, the sick, the impure, and, most especially, to the gentile masses. But the outer court was a free-for-all arena that served both as a bustling bazaar and as the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council. The merchants and money changers, those selling beasts for sacrifice, the impure, the heathen, and the heretic, all had a right to enter the Court of Gentiles as they pleased and do business there. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Temple priests demand to know just who this rabble-rouser thinks he is. By what authority does he presume to cleanse the Temple? What sign can he provide to justify such a blatantly criminal act?

  Jesus, as is his wont, ignores these questions altogether and instead answers with his own enigmatic prophecy. “Destroy this Temple,” he says, “and in three days I will raise it up.”

  The crowd is dumbstruck, so much so that they apparently do not notice Jesus and his disciples calmly exiting the Temple and walking out of the city, having just taken part in what the Roman authorities would have deemed a capital offense: sedition, punishable by crucifixion. After all, an attack on the business of the Temple is akin to an attack on the priestly nobility, which, considering the Temple’s tangled relationship with Rome, is tantamount to an attack on Rome itself.

  Put aside for a moment the centuries of exegetical acrobatics that have been thrust upon this bewildering episode in Jesus’s ministry; examine the event from a purely historical perspective, and the scene simply boggles the mind. It is not the accuracy of Jesus’s prediction about the Temple that concerns us. The gospels were all written after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E.; Jesus’s warning to Jerusalem that “the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you and crush you to the ground—you and your children—and they will not leave within you one stone upon another” (Luke 19:43–44) was put into his mouth by the evangelists after the fact. Rather, what is significant about this episode—what is impossible to ignore—is how blatant and inescapably zealous Jesus’s actions at the Temple appear.

  The disciples certainly recognize this. Watching Jesus break open the cages and kick over tables on a rampage, the gospel of John says the disciples were reminded of the words of King David, who cried, “Zeal for your house has consumed me” (John 2:17; Psalms 69:9).

  The Temple authorities also recognize Jesus’s zeal and hatch a clever plot to trap him into implicating himself as a zealot revolutionary. Striding up to Jesus in full view of everyone present, they ask, “Teacher, we know that you are true, that you teach the way of God in truth, and that you show deference for no man. Tell us: Is it lawful to pay the tribute to Caesar or not?”

  This is no simple question, of course. It is the essential test of zealotry. Ever since the uprising of Judas the Galilean, the question of whether the Law of Moses permitted paying tribute to Rome had become the distinguishing characteristic of those who adhered to zealot principles. The argument was simple and understood by all: Rome’s demand for tribute signaled nothing less than a claim of ownership over the land and its inhabitants. But the land did not belong to Rome. The land belonged to God. Caesar had no right to receive tribute, because he had no right to the land. In asking Jesus about the legality of paying tribute to Rome, the religious authorities were asking him an altogether different question: Are you or are you not a zealot?

  “Show me a denarius,” Jesus says, referring to the Roman coin used to pay the tribute. “Whose image is this and whose inscription?”

  “It is Caesar’s,” the authorities reply.

  “Well, t
hen, give back to Caesar the property that belongs to Caesar, and give back to God the property that belongs to God.”

  It is astonishing that centuries of biblical scholarship have miscast these words as an appeal by Jesus to put aside “the things of this world”—taxes and tributes—and focus one’s heart instead on the only things that matter: worship and obedience to God. Such an interpretation perfectly accommodates the perception of Jesus as a detached, celestial spirit wholly unconcerned with material matters, a curious assertion about a man who not only lived in one of the most politically charged periods in Israel’s history, but who claimed to be the promised messiah sent to liberate the Jews from Roman occupation. At best, Jesus’s response has been viewed as a milquetoast compromise between the priestly and zealot positions—between those who thought it lawful to pay the tribute to Rome and those who did not.

  The truth is that Jesus’s answer is as clear a statement as one can find in the gospels on where exactly he fell in the debate between the priests and the zealots—not over the issue of the tribute, but over the far more significant question of God’s sovereignty over the land. Jesus’s words speak for themselves: “Give back (apodidomi) to Caesar the property that belongs to Caesar …” The verb apodidomi, often translated as “render unto,” is actually a compound word: apo is a preposition that in this case means “back again”; didomi is a verb meaning “to give.” Apodidomi is used specifically when paying someone back property to which he is entitled; the word implies that the person receiving payment is the rightful owner of the thing being paid. In other words, according to Jesus, Caesar is entitled to be “given back” the denarius coin, not because he deserves tribute, but because it is his coin: his name and picture are stamped on it. God has nothing to do with it. By extension, God is entitled to be “given back” the land the Romans have seized for themselves because it is God’s land: “The Land is mine,” says the Lord (Leviticus 25:23). Caesar has nothing to do with it.