Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  At first, Matthew’s John refuses to baptize Jesus, suggesting that it is he who should be baptized by Jesus. Only after Jesus gives him permission does John presume to baptize the peasant from Nazareth.

  Luke goes one step further, repeating the same story presented in Mark and Matthew but choosing to gloss over Jesus’s actual baptism. “Now when all the people had been baptized, and Jesus too was baptized, the heavens opened …” (Luke 3:21). In other words, Luke omits any agent in Jesus’s baptism. It is not John who baptizes Jesus. Jesus is merely baptized. Luke buttresses his point by giving John his own infancy narrative alongside the one he invents for Jesus to prove that even as fetuses, Jesus was the superior figure: John’s birth to a barren woman, Elizabeth, may have been miraculous, but it was not nearly as miraculous as Jesus’s birth to a virgin. This is all part of Luke’s concerted effort, which the evangelist carries forth into his gospel’s sequel, the book of Acts, to persuade John’s disciples to abandon their prophet and follow Jesus instead.

  By the time the gospel of John recounts Jesus’s baptism, three decades after Mark, John the Baptist is no longer a baptist; the title is never used of him. In fact, Jesus is never actually baptized by John. The Baptist’s sole purpose in the fourth gospel is to bear witness to Jesus’s divinity. Jesus is not just “stronger” than John the Baptist. He is the light, the Lord, the Lamb of God, the Chosen One. He is the preexistent logos, who “existed before me,” the Baptist says.

  “I myself saw the holy spirit descend upon him from heaven like a dove,” John claims of Jesus, correcting another of Mark’s original omissions, before expressly commanding his disciples to leave him and follow Jesus instead. For John the evangelist, it was not enough simply to reduce the Baptist; the Baptist had to reduce himself, to publicly denigrate himself before the true prophet and messiah.

  “I am not the messiah,” John the Baptist admits in the fourth gospel. “I have been sent before him … He must increase, as I must decrease” (John 3:28–30).

  This frantic attempt to reduce John’s significance, to make him inferior to Jesus—to make him little more than Jesus’s herald—betrays an urgent need on the part of the early Christian community to counteract what the historical evidence clearly suggests: whoever the Baptist was, wherever he came from, and however he intended his baptismal ritual, Jesus very likely began his ministry as just another of his disciples. Before his encounter with John, Jesus was an unknown peasant and day laborer toiling away in Galilee. John’s baptism not only made him part of the new and redeemed nation of Israel, it initiated him into John’s inner circle. Not everyone who was baptized by John became his disciple; many simply returned to their homes. But Jesus did not. The gospels make it clear that rather than returning to Galilee after his baptism, he went “out into the wilderness” of Judea; that is, Jesus went directly into the place whence John had just emerged. And he stayed in the wilderness for a while, not to be “tempted by Satan,” as the evangelists imagine it, but to learn from John and to commune with his followers.

  The first words of Jesus’s public ministry echo John’s: “The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). So does Jesus’s first public action: “After this Jesus and his disciples went into Judea and there they were baptizing, and John also was baptizing …” (John 3:22–23). Of course, Jesus’s first disciples—Andrew and Philip—were not his disciples at all; they were John’s (John 1:35–37). They only followed Jesus after John was arrested. Jesus even addresses his enemies among the scribes and Pharisees with the same distinct phrase John uses for them: “You brood of vipers!” (Matthew 12:34).

  Jesus remained in Judea for some time after his baptism, moving in and out of John’s circle, preaching his master’s words and baptizing others alongside him, until Antipas, frightened by John’s power and popularity, had him seized and thrown into a dungeon. Only then did Jesus leave Judea and return home to his family.

  It would be back in Galilee, among his own people, that Jesus would fully take up John’s mantle and begin preaching about the Kingdom of God and the judgment that was to come. Yet Jesus would not simply mimic John. Jesus’s message would be far more revolutionary, his conception of the Kingdom of God far more radical, and his sense of his own identity and mission far more dangerous than anything John the Baptist could have conceived. John may have baptized by water. But Jesus would baptize by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit and fire.

  Chapter Eight

  Follow Me

  The Galilee to which Jesus returned after his stint with John the Baptist was not the Galilee into which he had been born. The Galilee of Jesus’s childhood had undergone a profound psychic trauma, having felt the full force of Rome’s retribution for the revolts that erupted throughout the land after the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E.

  The Roman response to rebellion, no matter where it arose in the realm, was scripted and predictable: burn the villages, raze the cities, enslave the population. That was likely the command given to the legions of troops dispatched by Emperor Augustus after Herod’s death to teach the rebellious Jews a lesson. The Romans easily snuffed out the uprisings in Judea and Peraea. But special attention was given to Galilee, the center of the revolt. Thousands were killed as the countryside was set ablaze. The devastation spread to every town and village; few were spared. The villages of Emmaus and Sampho were laid waste. Sepphoris, which had allowed Judas the Galilean to breach the city’s armory, was flattened. The whole of Galilee was consumed in fire and blood. Even tiny Nazareth would not have escaped the wrath of Rome.

  Rome may have been right to focus so brutally on Galilee. The region had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity for centuries. Long before the Roman invasion, the term “Galilean” had become synonymous with “rebel.” Josephus speaks of the people of Galilee as “inured to war from their infancy,” and Galilee itself, which benefited from a rugged topography and mountainous terrain, he describes as “always resistant to hostile invasion.”

  It did not matter whether the invaders were gentiles or Jews, the Galileans would not submit to foreign rule. Not even King Solomon could tame Galilee; the region and its people fiercely resisted the heavy taxes and forced labor he imposed on them to complete construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem. Nor could the Hasmonaeans—the priest-kings who ruled the land from 140 B.C.E. until the Roman invasion in 63 B.C.E.—ever quite manage to induce the Galileans to submit to the Temple-state they created in Judea. And Galilee was a constant thorn in the side of King Herod, who was not named King of the Jews until after he proved he could rid the troublesome region of the bandit menace.

  The Galileans seem to have considered themselves a wholly different people from the rest of the Jews in Palestine. Josephus explicitly refers to the people of Galilee as a separate ethnoi, or nation; the Mishnah claims the Galileans had different rules and customs than the Judeans when it came to matters such as marriage or weights and measures. These were pastoral people—country folk—easily recognizable by their provincial customs and their distinctly rustic accent (it was his Galilean accent that gave Simon Peter away as a follower of Jesus after his arrest: “Certainly you are also one of [Jesus’s disciples], for your accent betrays you”; Matthew 26:73). The urban elite in Judea referred to the Galileans derisively as “the people of the land,” a term meant to convey their dependence on subsistence farming. But the term had a more sinister connotation, meaning those who are uneducated and impious, those who do not properly abide by the law, particularly when it came to making the obligatory tithes and offerings to the Temple. The literature of the era is full of Judean complaints about the laxity of the Galileans in paying their Temple dues in a timely manner, while a bevy of apocryphal scriptures, such as The Testament of Levi and the Enoch corpus, reflect a distinctly Galilean critique of the lavish lifestyles of the Judean priesthood, their exploitation of the peasantry, and their shameful collaboration with Rome.

  No doubt the Gal
ileans felt a meaningful connection to the Temple as the dwelling place of the spirit of God, but they also evinced a deep disdain for the Temple priests who viewed themselves as the sole arbiters of God’s will. There is evidence to suggest that the Galileans were both less observant of the Temple rituals and, given the three-day distance between Galilee and Jerusalem, less likely to make frequent visits to it. Those Galilean farmers and peasants who could scrape enough money together to make it to Jerusalem for the sacred festivals would have found themselves in the humiliating position of handing over their meager sacrifices to wealthy Temple priests, some of whom may have owned the very lands these peasants and farmers labored on back home.

  The divide between Judea and Galilee grew wider after Rome placed Galilee under the direct rule of Herod the Great’s son, Antipas. For the first time in their history the Galileans had a ruler who actually resided in Galilee. Antipas’s tetrarchy transformed the province into a separate political jurisdiction no longer subject to the direct authority of the Temple and the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem. The Galileans still owed their tithes to the ravenous Temple treasury, and Rome still exercised control over every aspect of life in Galilee: Rome had installed Antipas and Rome commanded him. But Antipas’s rule allowed for a small yet meaningful measure of Galilean autonomy. There were no longer any Roman troops stationed in the province; they had been replaced by Antipas’s own soldiers. And at least Antipas was a Jew who, for the most part, tried not to offend the religious sensibilities of those under his rule—his marriage to his brother’s wife and the execution of John the Baptist notwithstanding.

  From around 10 C.E., when Antipas established his capital at Sepphoris, to 36 C.E., when he was deposed by the emperor Caligula and sent into exile, the Galileans enjoyed a period of peace and tranquillity that was surely a welcome respite from the decade of rebellion and war that had preceded it. But the peace was a ruse, the cessation of conflict a pretense for the physical transformation of Galilee. For in the span of those twenty years, Antipas built two new Greek cities—his first capital, Sepphoris, followed by his second, Tiberias, on the coast of the Sea of Galilee—that completely upended traditional Galilean society.

  These were the first real cities that Galilee had ever seen, and they were almost wholly populated with non-Galileans: Roman merchants, Greek-speaking gentiles, pursy Judean settlers. The new cities placed enormous pressure on the region’s economy, essentially dividing the province between those with wealth and power and those who served them by providing the labor necessary to maintain their lavish lifestyles. Villages in which subsistence farming or fishing were the norm were gradually overwhelmed by the needs of the cities, as agriculture and food production became singularly focused on feeding the new cosmopolitan population. Taxes were raised, land prices doubled, and debts soared, slowly disintegrating the traditional way of life in Galilee.

  When Jesus was born, Galilee was aflame. His first decade of life coincided with the plunder and destruction of the Galilean countryside, his second with its refashioning at the hands of Antipas. When Jesus departed Galilee for Judea and John the Baptist, Antipas had already left Sepphoris for his even larger and more ornate royal seat at Tiberias. By the time he returned, the Galilee he knew—of family farms and open fields, of blooming orchards and vast meadows bursting with wildflowers—looked a lot like the province of Judea he had just left behind: urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.

  Jesus’s first stop upon returning to Galilee would surely have been Nazareth, where his family still resided, though he did not stay long in his hometown. Jesus had left Nazareth a simple tekton. He returned as something else. His transformation created a deep rift in his community. They seem hardly to recognize the itinerant preacher who suddenly reappeared in their village. The gospels say Jesus’s mother, brothers, and sisters were scandalized by what people were saying about him; they tried desperately to silence and restrain him (Mark 3:21). Yet when they approached Jesus and urged him to return home and resume the family business, he refused. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Jesus asked, looking at those around him. “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–34).

  This account in the gospel of Mark is often interpreted as suggesting that Jesus’s family rejected his teachings and denied his identity as messiah. But there is nothing in Jesus’s reply to his family that hints at hostility between him and his brothers and sisters. Nor is there anything in the gospels to indicate that Jesus’s family rebuffed his messianic ambitions. On the contrary, Jesus’s brothers played fairly significant roles in the movement he founded. His brother James became the leader of the community in Jerusalem after his crucifixion. Perhaps his family was slow in accepting Jesus’s teachings and his extraordinary claims. But the historical evidence suggests that they all eventually came to believe in him and his mission.

  Jesus’s neighbors were a different story, however. The gospel paints his fellow Nazareans as distressed by the return of “Mary’s son.” Although a few spoke well of him and were amazed by his words, most were deeply disturbed by his presence and his teachings. Jesus quickly became an outcast in the small hilltop community. The gospel of Luke claims the residents of Nazareth finally drove him out to the brow of the hill on which the village was built and tried to push him off a cliff (Luke 4:14–30). The story is suspect; there is no cliff to be pushed off in Nazareth, just a gently sloping hillside. Still, the fact remains that, at least at first, Jesus was unable to find much of a following in Nazareth. “No prophet is accepted in his hometown,” he said before abandoning his childhood home for a nearby fishing village called Capernaum on the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee.

  Capernaum was the ideal place for Jesus to launch his ministry, as it perfectly reflected the calamitous changes wrought by the new Galilean economy under Antipas’s rule. The seaside village of some fifteen hundred mostly farmers and fishermen, known for its temperate climate and its fertile soil, would become Jesus’s base of operations throughout the first year of his mission in Galilee. The entire village stretched along a wide expanse of the seacoast, allowing the cool salt air to nurture all manner of plants and trees. Clumps of lush littoral vegetation thrived along the vast coastline throughout the year, while thickets of walnut and pine, fig and olive trees dotted the low-lying hills inland. The true gift of Capernaum was the magnificent sea itself, which teemed with an array of fish that had nourished and sustained the population for centuries.

  By the time Jesus set up his ministry there, however, Capernaum’s economy had become almost wholly centered on serving the needs of the new cities that had cropped up around it, especially the new capital, Tiberias, which lay just a few kilometers to the south. Food production had increased exponentially, and with it the standard of living for those farmers and fishermen who had the capacity to purchase more cultivatable land or to buy more boats and nets. But, as in the rest of Galilee, the profits from this increase in the means of production disproportionately benefited the large landowners and moneylenders who resided outside Capernaum: the wealthy priests in Judea and the new urban elite in Sepphoris and Tiberias. The majority of Capernaum’s residents had been left behind by the new Galilean economy. It would be these people whom Jesus would specifically target—those who found themselves cast to the fringes of society, whose lives had been disrupted by the rapid social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.

  This is not to say that Jesus was interested solely in the poor, or that only the poor would follow him. A number of fairly prosperous benefactors—the toll collectors Levi (Mark 2:13–15) and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10) and the wealthy patron Jairus (Mark 5:21–43), to name a few—would come to fund Jesus’s mission by providing food and lodging to him and his followers. But Jesus’s message was designed to be a direct challenge to the wealthy and the powerful, be they the occupiers in Rome, the collaborato
rs in the Temple, or the new moneyed class in the Greek cities of Galilee. The message was simple: the Lord God had seen the suffering of the poor and dispossessed; he had heard their cries of anguish. And he was finally going to do something about it. This may not have been a new message—John preached much the same thing—but it was a message being delivered to a new Galilee, by a man who, as a tried and true Galilean himself, shared the anti-Judea, anti-Temple sentiments that permeated the province.

  Jesus was not in Capernaum for long before he began gathering to himself a small group of like-minded Galileans, mostly culled from the ranks of the fishing village’s disaffected youth, who would become his first disciples (actually, Jesus had arrived with a couple of disciples already in tow, those who had left John the Baptist after his capture and followed Jesus instead). According to the gospel of Mark, Jesus found his first followers while walking along the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Spying two young fishermen, Simon and his brother Andrew, casting nets, he said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” The brothers, Mark writes, immediately dropped their nets and went with him. Sometime later Jesus came upon another pair of fishermen—James and John, the young sons of Zebedee—and made them the same offer. They, too, left their boat and their nets and followed Jesus (Mark 1:16–20).

  What set the disciples apart from the crowds that swelled and shrank whenever Jesus entered one village or another is that they actually traveled with Jesus. Unlike the enthusiastic but fickle masses, the disciples were specifically called by Jesus to leave their homes and their families behind to follow him from town to town, village to village. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—yes even his life—he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26 | Matthew 10:37).