Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  They bring him to the courtyard of the high priest Caiaphas, where the chief priests, the scribes, and elders—the whole of the Sanhedrin—have gathered. There, they question him about the threats he’s made to the Temple, using his own words against him: “We heard him say ‘I will bring down this Temple made with human hands, and in three days I will build another made not with hands.’ ”

  This is a grave accusation. The Temple is the chief civic and religious institution of the Jews. It is the sole source of the Jewish cult and the principal symbol of Rome’s hegemony over Judea. Even the slightest threat to the Temple would instantly arouse the attention of the priestly and Roman authorities. A few years earlier, when two zealous rabbis, Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, shared with their students their plans to remove the golden eagle that Herod the Great had placed above the Temple’s main gate, both rabbis and forty of their students were rounded up and burned alive.

  Yet Jesus refuses to answer the charges leveled against him, probably because there is no answer to be made. After all, he has publicly and repeatedly threatened the Temple of Jerusalem, vowing that “not one stone would be left upon another; all will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). He has been in Jerusalem only a few days but already he has caused a riot at the Court of Gentiles, violently disrupting the Temple’s financial transactions. He has replaced the costly blood and flesh sacrifice mandated by the Temple with his free healings and exorcisms. For three years he has raged against the Temple priesthood, threatening their primacy and power. He has condemned the scribes and the elders as “a brood of vipers” and promised that the Kingdom of God would sweep away the entire priestly class. His very ministry is founded upon the destruction of the present order and the removal from power of every single person who now stands in judgment of him. What else is there to say?

  When morning comes, Jesus is bound again and escorted through the rough stone ramparts of the Antonia Fortress to appear before Pontius Pilate. As governor, Pilate’s chief responsibility in Jerusalem is to maintain order on behalf of the emperor. The only reason a poor Jewish peasant and day laborer would be brought before him is if he had jeopardized that order. Otherwise there would be no hearing, no questions asked, no need for a defense. Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on a slip of papyrus. The notion that he would even be in the same room as Jesus, let alone deign to grant him a “trial,” beggars the imagination. Either the threat posed by Jesus to the stability of Jerusalem is so great that he is one of only a handful of Jews to have the opportunity to stand before Pilate and answer for his alleged crimes, or else the so-called trial before Pilate is a fabrication.

  There is reason to suspect the latter. The scene does have an unmistakable air of theater to it. This is the final moment in Jesus’s ministry, the end of a journey that began three years earlier on the banks of the Jordan River. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks only one other time after his interview with Pilate—when he is writhing on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

  Yet in Mark’s telling of the story, something happens between Jesus’s trial before Pilate and his death on a cross that is so incredible, so obviously contrived, that it casts suspicion over the entire episode leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion. Pilate, having interviewed Jesus and found him innocent of all charges, presents him to the Jews along with a bandit (lestes) named bar Abbas who has been accused of murdering Roman guards during an insurrection at the Temple. According to Mark, it was a custom of the Roman governor during the feast of Passover to release one prisoner to the Jews, anyone for whom they asked. When Pilate asks the crowd which prisoner they would like to have released—Jesus, the preacher and traitor to Rome, or bar Abbas, the insurrectionist and murderer—the crowd demands the release of the insurrectionist and the crucifixion of the preacher.

  “Why?” Pilate asks, pained at the thought of having to put an innocent Jewish peasant to death. “What evil has he done?”

  But the crowd shouts all the louder for Jesus’s death. “Crucify him! Crucify him!” (Mark 15:1–20).

  The scene makes no sense at all. Never mind that outside the gospels there exists not a shred of historical evidence for any such Passover custom on the part of any Roman governor. What is truly beyond belief is the portrayal of Pontius Pilate—a man renowned for his loathing of the Jews, his total disregard for Jewish rituals and customs, and his penchant for absentmindedly signing so many execution orders that a formal complaint was lodged against him in Rome—spending even a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser.

  Why would Mark have concocted such a patently fictitious scene, one that his Jewish audience would immediately have recognized as false? The answer is simple: Mark was not writing for a Jewish audience. Mark’s audience was in Rome, where he himself resided. His account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth was written mere months after the Jewish Revolt had been crushed and Jerusalem destroyed.

  Like the Jews, the early Christians struggled to make sense of the trauma of the Jewish Revolt and its aftermath. More to the point, they had to reinterpret Jesus’s revolutionary message and his self-identity as the kingly Son of Man in light of the fact that the Kingdom of God they were awaiting never materialized. Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus’s words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves. That task was made somewhat easier by the fact that many among Jerusalem’s Christian community seem to have sat out the war with Rome, viewing it as a welcomed sign of the end times promised by their messiah. According to the third-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea, a large number of Christians in Jerusalem fled to the other side of the Jordan River. “The people of the church at Jerusalem,” Eusebius wrote, “in accordance with a certain oracle that was vouchsafed by way of revelation to approved men there, had been commanded to depart from the city before the war, and to inhabit a certain city of Peraea they called Pella.” By most accounts, the church they left behind was demolished in 70 C.E. and all signs of the first Christian community in Jerusalem were buried in a mound of rubble and ash.

  With the Temple in ruins and the Jewish religion made pariah, the Jews who followed Jesus as messiah had an easy decision to make: they could either maintain their cultic connections to their parent religion and thus share in Rome’s enmity (Rome’s enmity toward Christians would peak much later), or they could divorce themselves from Judaism and transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher of good works whose kingdom was not of this world.

  It was not only fear of Roman reprisal that drove these early Christians. With Jerusalem despoiled, Christianity was no longer a tiny Jewish sect centered in a predominantly Jewish land surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Jews. After 70 C.E., the center of the Christian movement shifted from Jewish Jerusalem to the Graeco-Roman cities of the Mediterranean: Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, Damascus, Antioch, Rome. A generation after Jesus’s crucifixion, his non-Jewish followers outnumbered and overshadowed the Jewish ones. By the end of the first century, when the bulk of the gospels were being written, Rome—in particular the Roman intellectual elite—had become the primary target of Christian evangelism.

  Reaching out to this particular audience required a bit of creativity on the part of the evangelists. Not only did all traces of revolutionary zeal have to be removed from the life of Jesus, the Romans had to be completely absolved of any responsibility for Jesus’s death. It was the Jews who killed the messiah. The Romans were unwitting pawns of the high priest Caiaphas, who desperately wanted to murder Jesus but who did not have the legal means to do so. The high
priest duped the Roman governor Pontius Pilate into carrying out a tragic miscarriage of justice. Poor Pilate tried everything he could to save Jesus. But the Jews cried out for blood, leaving Pilate no choice but to give in to them, to hand Jesus over to be crucified. Indeed, the farther each gospel gets from 70 C.E. and the destruction of Jerusalem, the more detached and outlandish Pilate’s role in Jesus’s death becomes.

  The gospel of Matthew, written in Damascus some twenty years after the Jewish Revolt, paints a picture of Pontius Pilate at great pains to set Jesus free. Having been warned by his wife not to have anything to do with “that innocent man,” and recognizing that the religious authorities are handing Jesus over to him solely “out of jealousy,” Matthew’s Pilate literally washes his hands of any blame for Jesus’s death. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he tells the Jews. “See to it yourselves.”

  In Matthew’s retelling of Mark, the Jews respond to Pilate “as a whole”—that is, as an entire nation (pas ho laos)—that they themselves will accept the blame for Jesus’s death from this day until the end of time: “May his blood be on our heads, and on our children!” (Matthew 27:1–26).

  Luke, writing in the Greek city of Antioch at around the same time as Matthew, not only confirms Pilate’s guiltlessness for Jesus’s death; he unexpectedly extends that amnesty to Herod Antipas as well. Luke’s copy of Mark presents Pilate excoriating the chief priests, the religious leaders, and the people for the accusations they have dared to level against Jesus. “You brought this person to me as one who was turning the people away [from the Law]. I have examined him in your presence and found him guilty of none of the charges you have brought against him. Neither has Herod, when I sent [Jesus] to him. He has done nothing worthy of death” (Luke 23:13–15). After trying three separate times to dissuade the Jews from their bloodlust, Pilate reluctantly consents to their demands and hands Jesus over to be crucified.

  Not surprisingly, it is the last of the canonized gospels that pushes the conceit of Pilate’s innocence—and the Jews’ guilt—to the extreme. In the gospel of John, written in Ephesus sometime after 100 C.E., Pilate does everything he can to save the life of this poor Jewish peasant, not because he thinks Jesus is guiltless, but because he seems to believe that Jesus may in fact be the “Son of God.” Nevertheless, after struggling in vain against the Jewish authorities to set Jesus free, the ruthless prefect who commands legions of troops and who regularly sends them into the streets to slaughter the Jews whenever they protest any of his decisions (as he did when the Jews objected to his pilfering of the Temple treasury to pay for Jerusalem’s aqueducts) is forced by the demands of the unruly crowd to give Jesus up.

  As Pilate hands him over to be crucified, Jesus himself removes all doubt as to who is truly responsible for his death: “The one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin,” Jesus tells Pilate, personally absolving him of all guilt by laying the blame squarely on the Jewish religious authorities. John then adds one final, unforgivable insult to a Jewish nation that, at the time, was on the verge of a full-scale insurrection, by attributing to them the most foul, the most blasphemous piece of pure heresy that any Jew in first-century Palestine could conceivably utter. When asked by Pilate what he should do with “their king,” the Jews reply, “We have no king but Caesar!” (John 19:1–16).

  Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame for Jesus’s death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point of absurdity, becoming in the process the basis for two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism.

  It is, of course, not inconceivable that Jesus would have received a brief audience with the Roman governor, but, again, only if the magnitude of his crime warranted special attention. Jesus was no simple troublemaker, after all. His provocative entry into Jerusalem trailed by a multitude of devotees declaring him king, his act of public disturbance at the Temple, the size of the force that marched into Gethsemane to arrest him—all of these indicate that the authorities viewed Jesus of Nazareth as a serious threat to the stability and order of Judea. Such a “criminal” would very likely have been deemed worthy of Pilate’s attention. But any trial Jesus received would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges for which he was being executed. Hence, the one question that Pilate asks Jesus in all four gospel accounts: “Are you the King of the Jews?”

  If the gospel story were a drama (and it is), Jesus’s answer to Pilate’s question would serve as the climax that unfurls the story’s denouement: the crucifixion. This is the moment when the price must be paid for all that Jesus has said and done over the previous three years: the attacks against the priestly authorities, the condemnation of the Roman occupation, the claims of kingly authority. It has all led to this inevitable moment of judgment, just as Jesus said it would. From here it will be the cross and the tomb.

  And yet perhaps no other moment in Jesus’s brief life is more opaque and inaccessible to scholars than this one. That has partly to do with the multiple traditions upon which the story of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion rely. Recall that while Mark was the first written gospel, it was preceded by blocks of oral and written traditions about Jesus that were transmitted by his earliest followers. One of these “blocks” has already been introduced: the material unique to the gospels of Matthew and Luke that scholars term Q. But there is reason to believe that other blocks of traditions existed before the gospel of Mark that dealt exclusively with Jesus’s death and resurrection. These so-called passion narratives set up a basic sequence of events that the earliest Christians believed occurred at the end of Jesus’s life: the Last Supper. The betrayal by Judas Iscariot. The arrest at Gethsemane. The appearance before the high priest and Pilate. The crucifixion and the burial. The resurrection three days later.

  This sequence of events did not actually contain a narrative, but was designed strictly for liturgical purposes. It was a means for the early Christians to relive the last days of their messiah through ritual by, for instance, sharing the same meal he shared with his disciples, praying the same prayers he offered in Gethsemane, and so on. Mark’s contribution to the passion narratives was his transformation of this ritualized sequence of events into a cohesive story about the death of Jesus, which his redactors, Matthew and Luke, integrated into their gospels along with their own unique flourishes (John may have relied on a separate set of passion narratives for his gospel, since almost none of the details he provides about the last days of Jesus match what is found in the Synoptics).

  As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant. What mattered was Christology, not history. The gospel writers obviously recognized how integral Jesus’s death was to the nascent community, but the story of that death needed elaborating. It needed to be slowed down and refocused. It required certain details and embellishments on the part of the evangelists. As a result, this final, most significant episode in the story of Jesus of Nazareth is also the one most clouded by theological enhancements and flat-out fabrications. The only means the modern reader has at his or her disposal to try to retrieve some semblance of historical accuracy in the passion narratives is to slowly strip away the theological overlay imposed by the evangelists on Jesus’s final days and return to the most primitive version of the story that can be excavated from the gospels. And the only way to do that is to start at the end of the story, with Jesus nailed to a cross.

  Crucifixion was a widespread and exceedingly common form of execution in antiquity, one used by Persians, Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Romans, and Greeks. Even the Jews practiced crucifixion; the punishment is mentioned numerous times in rabbinic sources. The reason crucifixion was so common is because it was so cheap. It could be carried out almost anywhere; all one needed was a tree. The torture could last for days without the need for an actual tor
turer. The procedure of the crucifixion—how the victim was hanged—was left completely to the executioner. Some were nailed with their heads downward. Some had their private parts impaled. Some were hooded. Most were stripped naked.

  It was Rome that conventionalized crucifixion as a form of state punishment, creating a sense of uniformity in the process, particularly when it came to the nailing of the hands and feet to a crossbeam. So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire that Cicero referred to it as “that plague.” Among the citizenry, the word “cross” (crux) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to “go hang yourself.”

  Yet it would be inaccurate to refer to crucifixion as a death penalty, for it was often the case that the victim was first executed, then nailed to a cross. The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal as it was to serve as a deterrent to others who might defy the state. For that reason, crucifixions were always carried out in public—at crossroads, in theaters, on hills, or on high ground—anywhere where the population had no choice but to bear witness to the gruesome scene. The criminal was always left hanging long after he had died; the crucified were almost never buried. Because the entire point of the crucifixion was to humiliate the victim and frighten the witnesses, the corpse would be left where it hung to be eaten by dogs and picked clean by the birds of prey. The bones would then be thrown onto a heap of trash, which is how Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, earned its name: the place of skulls. Simply put, crucifixion was more than a capital punishment for Rome; it was a public reminder of what happens when one challenges the empire. That is why it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, banditry.

  If one knew nothing else about Jesus of Nazareth save that he was crucified by Rome, one would know practically all that was needed to uncover who he was, what he was, and why he ended up nailed to a cross. His offense, in the eyes of Rome, is self-evident. It was etched upon a plaque and placed above his head for all to see: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. His crime was daring to assume kingly ambitions.