by Reza Aslan
So then, give back to Caesar what is his, and give back to God what belongs to God. That is the zealot argument in its simplest, most concise form. And it seems to be enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately label Jesus as lestes. A bandit. A zealot.
A couple of days later, after sharing a secret Passover meal, Jesus and his disciples head out in the dark of night to the Garden of Gethsemane to hide out among the gnarled olive trees and the quickset shrubs. It is here, on the western slope of the Mount of Olives, not far from where, some years later, the Roman general Titus would launch his siege of Jerusalem, that the authorities find him.
“Have you come out here with swords and clubs to arrest me like a bandit [lestes]?” Jesus asks.
That is precisely how they’ve come for him. John’s gospel claims a “cohort” (speira) of soldiers marched to Gethsemane—a unit that would comprise between three hundred and six hundred Roman guards—along with the Temple police, all of them carrying “torches and weapons” (John 18:3). John is obviously exaggerating. But the gospels all agree it was a large and heavily armed arresting party that came for Jesus in the night. Such a show of force may explain why, before heading off to Gethsemane, Jesus made sure his followers were armed as well.
“If you do not have a sword,” Jesus instructs his disciples immediately after the Passover meal, “go sell your cloak and buy one.”
“Master,” the disciples respond, “here are two swords.”
“It is enough,” Jesus says (Luke 22:36–38).
It would not be. After a brief but bloody tussle with his disciples, the guards arrest Jesus and bring him to the authorities in Jerusalem, where he is charged with sedition for, among other things, “forbidding the paying of tribute to Rome,” a charge that Jesus does not deny (Luke 23:2).
Declared guilty, Jesus is sent to Golgotha to be crucified alongside two other men who are specifically called lestai, bandits (Matthew 27:38–44; Mark 15:27). As with every criminal who hangs on a cross, Jesus is given a plaque, or titulus, detailing the crime for which he is being crucified. Jesus’s titulus reads KING OF THE JEWS. His crime: striving for kingly rule; sedition. And so, like every bandit and revolutionary, every rabble-rousing zealot and apocalyptic prophet who came before or after him—like Hezekiah and Judas, Theudas and Athronges, the Egyptian and the Samaritan, Simon son of Giora and Simon son of Kochba—Jesus of Nazareth is executed for daring to claim the mantle of king and messiah.
To be clear, Jesus was not a member of the Zealot Party that launched the war with Rome, because no such party could be said to exist for another thirty years after his death. Nor was Jesus a violent revolutionary bent on armed rebellion, though his views on the use of violence were far more complex than it is often assumed.
But look closely at Jesus’s words and actions at the Temple in Jerusalem—the episode that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution—and this one fact becomes difficult to deny: Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities. That singular fact should color everything we read in the gospels about the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth—from the details of his death on a cross in Golgotha to the launch of his public ministry on the banks of the Jordan River.
Chapter Seven
The Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness
John the Baptist came out of the desert like an apparition—a wild man clothed in camel hair, a leather belt tied around his waist, feeding on locusts and wild honey. He traveled the length of the Jordan River—through Judea and Peraea, in Bethany and Aenon—preaching a simple and dire message: The end was near. The Kingdom of God was at hand. And woe to those Jews who assumed their descent from Abraham would save them from the coming judgment.
“Already, the ax is laid at the root of the tree,” John warned, “and every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire.”
To the wealthy who came to him seeking counsel, John said, “The one with two tunics must share with he who has none; the one with food must do the same.”
To the tribute collectors who asked him the path to salvation, he said, “Do not exact more than that which has been prescribed to you.”
To the soldiers who begged for guidance, he said, “Do not intimidate, do not blackmail, and be content with your wages.”
Word of the Baptist spread quickly throughout the land. People came from as far as Galilee, some traveling for days through the stark Judean wilderness to hear him preach at the lip of the Jordan River. Once there, they would strip off their outer garments and cross over to the eastern shore, where John waited to take them by the hand. One by one, he would immerse them in the living waters. When they emerged, they would cross back to the western shore of the Jordan River—as their ancestors had done a thousand years earlier—back to the land promised them by God. In this way, the baptized became the new nation of Israel: repentant, redeemed, and ready to receive the Kingdom of God.
As the crowds who flocked to the Jordan grew larger, the Baptist’s activities caught the attention of Herod the Great’s son, Antipas (“the Fox”), whose tetrarchy included the region of Peraea, on the eastern bank of the river. If the gospel account is to be believed, Antipas imprisoned John because he criticized his marriage to Herodias, who was the wife of Antipas’s half brother (also named Herod). Not satisfied with merely locking John up, the wily Herodias hatched a plot to put him to death. On the occasion of Antipas’s birthday, Herodias obliged her daughter, the sultry temptress Salome, to perform a lascivious dance for her uncle and stepfather. So aroused was the libidinous old tetrarch by Salome’s gyrations that he at once made her a fateful promise.
“Ask of me whatever you wish,” Antipas huffed, “and I will give it to you, even half my kingdom.”
Salome consulted her mother. “What shall I ask for?”
“The head of John the Baptist,” Herodias replied.
Alas, the gospel account is not to be believed. As deliciously scandalous as the story of John’s execution may be, it is riddled with errors and historical inaccuracies. The evangelists mistakenly identify Herodias’s first husband as Philip, and they seem to confuse the place of John’s execution, the fortress of Machaerus, with Antipas’s court in the city of Tiberias. The entire gospel story reads like a fanciful folktale with deliberate echoes in the biblical account of Elijah’s conflict with Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab.
A more prosaic yet reliable account of the death of John the Baptist can be found in Josephus’s Antiquities. According to Josephus, Antipas feared that John’s growing popularity among the people would lead to an insurrection, “for they seemed ready to do anything that he should advise.” That may have been true. John’s warning of the coming wrath of God might not have been new or unique in first-century Palestine, but the hope he offered those who cleansed themselves, who made themselves anew and pursued the path of righteousness, had enormous appeal. John promised the Jews who came to him a new world order, the Kingdom of God. And while he never developed the concept beyond a vague notion of equality and justice, the promise itself was enough in those dark, turbulent times to draw to him a wave of Jews from all walks of life—the rich and the poor, the mighty and the weak. Antipas was right to fear John; even his own soldiers were flocking to him. He therefore seized John, charged him with sedition, and sent him to the fortress of Machaerus, where the Baptist was quietly put to death sometime between 28 and 30 C.E.
Yet John’s fame far outlived him. Indeed, John’s fame outlived Antipas, for it was widely believed that the tetrarch’s defeat at the hands of the Nabataean king Aretas IV in 36 C.E., his subsequent exile, and the loss of his title and property were all God’s divine punishment for executing John. Long after his death, the Jews were still mulling over the meaning of John’s words and deeds; John’s disciples were still wandering Judea and Galilee, baptizing people in his name. John’s life and legend were preserved in indepe
ndent “Baptist traditions” composed in Hebrew and Aramaic and passed around from town to town. Many assumed he was the messiah. Some thought he would rise from the dead.
Despite his fame, however, no one seems to have known then—just as no one knows now—who, exactly, John the Baptist was or where he had come from. The gospel of Luke provides a fantastical account of John’s lineage and miraculous birth, which most scholars dismiss out of hand. If there is any historical information to be gleaned from Luke’s gospel, however, it is that John may have come from a priestly family; his father, Luke says, belonged to the priestly order of Abijah (Luke 1:5). If that is true, John would have been expected to join the priestly line of his father, though the apocalyptic preacher who walked out of the desert “eating no bread and drinking no wine” had quite clearly rejected his family obligations and his duties to the Temple for a life of asceticism in the wilderness. Perhaps this was the source of John’s immense popularity among the masses: he had stripped himself of his priestly privileges so as to offer the Jews a new source of salvation, one that had nothing to do with the Temple and the detestable priesthood: baptism.
To be sure, baptisms and water rituals were fairly common throughout the ancient Near East. Bands of “baptizing groups” roamed Syria and Palestine initiating congregants into their orders by immersing them in water. Gentile converts to Judaism would often take a ceremonial bath to rid themselves of their former identity and enter into the chosen tribe. The Jews revered water for its liminal qualities, believing it had the power to transport a person or object from one state to another: from unclean to clean, from profane to holy. The Bible is replete with ablutionary practices: objects (a tent, a sword) were sprinkled with water to dedicate them to the Lord; people (lepers, menstruating women) were fully immersed in water as an act of purification. The priests in the Temple of Jerusalem poured water on their hands before approaching the altar to make sacrifices. The high priest underwent one ritual immersion before entering the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, and another immediately after taking upon himself the sins of the nation.
The most famous ablutionary sect of the time was the aforementioned Essene community. The Essenes were not strictly a monastic movement. Some lived in cities and villages throughout Judea, others separated themselves entirely from the rest of the Jews in communes like that at Qumran, where they practiced celibacy and held all property in common (the only items of personal property an Essene at Qumran would be allowed were a cloak, a linen cloth, and a hatchet for digging a latrine in the wilderness when the need arose). Because the Essenes viewed the physical body as base and corrupt, they developed a rigid system of full immersion baths that had to be completed over and over again to maintain a constant state of ritual purity. Yet the Essenes also practiced a one-time, initiatory water ritual—a baptism of sorts—that was used to welcome new recruits into their community.
This could have been the source of John’s unusual baptismal rite. John himself may have been an Essene. There are some tantalizing connections between the two. Both John and the Essene community were based in the wilderness region of Judea at approximately the same time: John is presented as going off into the Judean wilderness at a young age, which would be in keeping with the Essene practice of adopting and training the sons of priests. Both John and the Essenes rejected the Temple authorities: the Essenes maintained their own distinct calendar and their own dietary restrictions and refused the concept of animal sacrifice, which was the primary activity of the Temple. Both saw themselves and their followers as the true tribe of Israel, and both were actively preparing for the end times: the Essenes eagerly awaited an apocalyptic war when “the Sons of Light” (the Essenes) would battle “the Sons of Darkness” (the Temple priests) for control over the Temple of Jerusalem, which the Essenes would purify and make holy again under their leadership. And both John and the Essenes seem to have identified themselves as “the voice crying out in the wilderness” spoken of by the Prophet Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God” (Isaiah 40:3). All four gospels attribute this verse to John, while for the Essenes, the verse served as the most significant passage of scripture in defining their conception of themselves and their community.
Yet there are enough differences between John and the Essenes to make one cautious about drawing too firm a connection. John is presented not as a member of a community but as a loner, a solitary voice calling out in the wilderness. His is by no means an exclusivist message but one open to all Jews willing to abandon their wicked ways and live a life of righteousness. Most crucially, John does not appear to be obsessed with ritual purity; his baptism seems to have been specifically designed as a one-time affair, not something to be repeated again and again. John may have been influenced by the water rituals of other Jewish sects of his time, including the Essenes, but it appears that the baptism he offered in the Jordan River was uniquely his inspiration.
What, then, did John’s baptism mean? The gospel of Mark makes the astonishing claim that what John was offering at the Jordan was “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). The unmistakably Christian nature of this phrase casts serious doubt on its historicity. It sounds more like a Christian projection upon the Baptist’s actions, not something the Baptist would have claimed for himself—though if that is true, it would be an odd statement for the early church to make about John: that he had the power to forgive sins, even before he knew Jesus.
Josephus explicitly states that John’s baptism was “not for the remission of sins, but for the purification of the body.” That would make John’s ritual more like an initiation rite, a means of entering into his order or sect, a thesis borne out in the book of Acts, in which a group of Corinthians proudly claim to have been baptized into John’s baptism (Acts 19:1–3). But that, too, would have been problematic for the early Christian community. Because if there is one thing about which all four gospels agree when it comes to John the Baptist, it is that sometime around his thirtieth year, and for reasons unknown, Jesus of Nazareth left his tiny hillside village of Nazareth in Galilee, abandoned his home, his family, and his obligations, and trekked down to Judea to be baptized by John in the Jordan River. Indeed, the life of the historical Jesus begins not with his miraculous birth or his obscured youth but at the moment he first meets John the Baptist.
The problem for the early Christians was that any acceptance of the basic facts of John’s interaction with Jesus would have been a tacit admission that John was, at least at first, a superior figure. If John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins, as Mark claims, then Jesus’s acceptance of it indicated a need to be cleansed of his sins by John. If John’s baptism was an initiation rite, as Josephus suggests, then clearly Jesus was being admitted into John’s movement as just another one of his disciples. This was precisely the claim made by John’s followers, who, long after both men had been executed, refused to be absorbed into the Jesus movement because they argued that their master, John, was greater than Jesus. After all, who baptized whom?
John the Baptist’s historical importance and his role in launching Jesus’s ministry created a difficult dilemma for the gospel writers. John was a popular, well-respected, and almost universally acknowledged priest and prophet. His fame was too great to ignore, his baptism of Jesus too well known to conceal. The story had to be told. But it also had to be massaged and made safe. The two men’s roles had to be reversed: Jesus had to be made superior, John inferior. Hence the steady regression of John’s character from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor to Jesus—to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose at all except to acknowledge Jesus’s divinity.
Mark casts John the Baptist as a wholly independent figure who baptizes Jesus as one among many who come to him seeking repentance. “There went out to him people from all over Judea, and from Jerusalem, to be baptized by him in the River Jordan, and to confess their sins … and it ha
ppened that, in those days, Jesus came from Galilee, from Nazareth, and he too was baptized by John in the Jordan” (Mark 1:5, 9). Mark’s Baptist admits that he himself is not the promised messiah—“There is one coming after me who is stronger than I am,” John says, “one whose sandals I am not worthy to untie” (Mark 1:7–8)—but strangely, John never actually acknowledges Jesus to be the one he is referring to. Even after Jesus’s perfunctory baptism, when the sky opens and the spirit of God descends upon him in the form of a dove as a heavenly voice says, “You are my son: the Beloved. In you I am well pleased,” John neither notices nor comments on this moment of divine interjection. To John, Jesus is merely another supplicant, another son of Abraham who journeys to the Jordan to be initiated into the renewed tribe of Israel. He simply moves on to the next person waiting to be baptized.
Writing some two decades later, Matthew recounts the narrative of Jesus’s baptism almost word for word from Mark, but he makes certain to address at least one of his predecessor’s glaring omissions: the moment Jesus arrives on the banks of the Jordan, John immediately recognizes him as the “one coming after me.”
“I baptize you with water,” the Baptist says. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”