Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  The gospels testify that Jesus was crucified alongside other lestai, or bandits: revolutionaries, just like him. Luke, obviously uncomfortable with the implications of the term, changes lestai to kakourgoi, or “evildoers.” But try as he might, Luke cannot avoid the most basic fact about his messiah: Jesus was executed by the Roman state for the crime of sedition. Everything else about the last days of Jesus of Nazareth must be interpreted through this singular, stubborn fact.

  So, then, one can dismiss the theatrical trial before Pilate as pure fantasy for all the reasons stated above. If Jesus did in fact appear before Pilate, it would have been brief and, for Pilate, utterly forgettable. The governor may not have bothered to look up from his logbook long enough to register Jesus’s face, let alone engage in a lengthy conversation with him about the meaning of truth.

  He would have asked his one question: “Are you the King of the Jews?” He would have registered Jesus’s answer. He would have logged the crime. And he would have sent Jesus on his way to join the countless others dying or already dead up on Golgotha.

  Even the earlier trial before the Sanhedrin must be reexamined in the light of the cross. The story of that trial, as it is presented in the gospels, is full of contradictions and inconsistencies, but the general outline is as follows: Jesus is arrested at night, on the eve of the Sabbath, during the festival of Passover. He is brought under cover of darkness to the courtyard of the high priest, where the members of the Sanhedrin await him. At once, a group of witnesses appear and testify that Jesus has made threats against the Temple of Jerusalem. When Jesus refuses to answer these accusations, the high priest asks him directly whether he is the messiah. Jesus’s answer varies in all four gospels, but it always includes a declaration of himself as the Son of Man. The declaration infuriates the high priest, who immediately charges Jesus with blasphemy, the punishment for which is death. The next morning, the Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate to be crucified.

  The problems with this scene are too numerous to count. The trial before the Sanhedrin violates nearly every requirement laid down by Jewish law for a legal proceeding. The Mishnah is adamant on this subject. The Sanhedrin is not permitted to meet at night. It is not permitted to meet during Passover. It is not permitted to meet on the eve of the Sabbath. It is certainly not permitted to meet so casually in the courtyard (aule) of the high priest, as Matthew and Mark claim. And it must begin with a detailed list of why the accused is innocent before any witnesses are allowed to come forth. The argument that the trial rules laid down by the rabbis in the Mishnah did not apply in the the thirties, when Jesus was tried, falls flat when one remembers that the gospels were also not written in the thirties. The social, religious, and political context for the narrative of Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin was post–70 C.E. rabbinic Judaism: the era of the Mishnah. At the very least, what these flagrant inaccuracies demonstrate is the evangelists’ extremely poor grasp of Jewish law and Sanhedrin practice. That alone should cast doubt on the historicity of the trial before Caiaphas.

  Even if one excuses all of the above violations, the most troublesome aspect of the Sanhedrin trial is its verdict. If the high priest did in fact question Jesus about his messianic ambitions, and if Jesus’s answer did signify blasphemy, then the Torah could not be clearer about the punishment: “The one who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death: the congregation shall stone him to death” (Leviticus 24:16). That is the punishment inflicted upon Stephen for his blasphemy when he calls Jesus the Son of Man (Acts 7:1–60). Stephen is not transferred to Roman authorities to answer for his crime; he is stoned to death on the spot. It may be true that under the Roman imperium, the Jews did not have the authority to execute criminals (though that did not stop them from killing Stephen). But one cannot lose sight of the fundamental fact with which we began: Jesus is not stoned to death by the Jews for blasphemy; he is crucified by Rome for sedition.

  Just as there may be a kernel of truth in the story of Jesus’s trial before Pilate, there may also be a kernel of truth in the story of the Sanhedrin trial. The Jewish authorities arrested Jesus because they viewed him both as a threat to their control of the Temple and as a menace to the social order of Jerusalem, which under their agreement with Rome they were responsible for maintaining. Because the Jewish authorities technically had no jurisdiction in capital cases, they handed Jesus over to the Romans to answer for his seditious teachings. The personal relationship between Pilate and Caiaphas may have facilitated the transfer, but the Roman authorities surely needed little convincing to put yet another Jewish insurrectionist to death. Pilate dealt with Jesus the way he dealt with all threats to the social order: he sent him to the cross. No trial was held. No trial was necessary. It was Passover, after all, always a time of heightened tensions in Jerusalem. The city was bursting at its seams with pilgrims. Any hint of trouble had to be immediately addressed. And whatever else Jesus may have been, he was certainly trouble.

  With his crime recorded in Pilate’s logbook, Jesus would have been led out of the Antonia Fortress and taken to the courtyard, where he would be stripped naked, tied to a stake, and savagely scourged, as was the custom for all those sentenced to the cross. The Romans would then have placed a crossbeam behind the nape of his neck and hooked his arms back over it—again, as was the custom—so that the messiah who had promised to remove the yoke of occupation from the necks of the Jews would himself be yoked like an animal led to slaughter.

  As with all those condemned to crucifixion, Jesus would have been forced to carry the crossbeam himself to a hill situated outside the walls of Jerusalem, directly on the road leading into the city gates—perhaps the same road he had used a few days earlier to enter the city as its rightful king. This way, every pilgrim entering Jerusalem for the holy festivities would have no choice but to bear witness to his suffering, to be reminded of what happens to those who defy the rule of Rome. The crossbeam would be attached to a scaffold or post, and Jesus’s wrists and ankles would be nailed to the structure with three iron spikes. A heave, and the cross would be lifted to the vertical. Death would not have taken long. In a few short hours, Jesus’s lungs would have tired, and breathing become impossible to sustain.

  That is how, on a bald hill covered in crosses, beset by the cries and moans of agony from hundreds of dying criminals, as a murder of crows circled eagerly over his head waiting for him to breathe his last, the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth would have met the same ignominious end as every other messiah who came before or after him.

  Except that unlike those other messiahs, this one would not be forgotten.

  PART III

  Blow a trumpet in Zion;

  raise a shout on my holy mountain!

  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble

  ,

  for the day of the Lord is coming

  ,

  it is near;

  a day of darkness and gloom

  ,

  a day of clouds and thick darkness

  .

  J

  OEL 2:1–2

  Prologue

  God Made Flesh

  Stephen—he who was stoned to death by an angry mob of Jews for blasphemy—was the first of Jesus’s followers to be killed after the crucifixion, though he would not be the last. It is curious that the first man martyred for calling Jesus “Christ” did not himself know Jesus of Nazareth. Stephen was not a disciple, after all. He never met the Galilean peasant and day laborer who claimed the throne of the Kingdom of God. He did not walk with Jesus or talk to him. He was not part of the ecstatic crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as its rightful ruler. He took no part in the disturbance at the Temple. He was not there when Jesus was arrested and charged with sedition. He did not watch Jesus die.

  Stephen did not hear about Jesus of Nazareth until after his crucifixion. A Greek-speaking Jew who lived in one of the many Hellenistic provinces outside the Holy Land, Stephen had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, along with th
ousands of other Diaspora Jews just like him. He was probably presenting his sacrifice to the Temple priests when he spied a band of mostly Galilean farmers and fishermen wandering about the Court of Gentiles, preaching about a simple Nazarean whom they called messiah.

  By itself, such a spectacle would not have been unusual in Jerusalem, certainly not during the festivals and feast days, when Jews from all over the Roman Empire flocked to the sacred city to make their Temple offerings. Jerusalem was the center of spiritual activity for the Jews, the cultic heart of the Jewish nation. Every sectarian, every fanatic, every zealot, messiah, and self-proclaimed prophet, eventually made his way to Jerusalem to missionize or admonish, to offer God’s mercy or warn of God’s wrath. The festivals in particular were an ideal time for these schismatics to reach as wide and international an audience as possible.

  So when Stephen saw the gaggle of hirsute men and ragged women huddled beneath a portico in the Temple’s outer court—simple provincials who had sold their possessions and given the proceeds to the poor; who held all things in common and owned nothing themselves save their tunics and sandals—he probably did not pay much attention at first. He may have pricked up his ears at the suggestion that these particular schismatics followed a messiah who had already been killed (crucified, no less!). He may have been astonished to learn that, despite the unalterable fact that Jesus’s death by definition disqualified him as liberator of Israel, his followers still called him messiah. But even that would not have been completely unheard of in Jerusalem. Were not John the Baptist’s followers still preaching about their late master, still baptizing Jews in his name?

  What truly would have caught Stephen’s attention was the staggering claim by these Jews that, unlike every other criminal crucified by Rome, their messiah was not left on the cross for his bones to be picked clean by the greedy birds Stephen had seen circling above Golgotha when he entered the gates of Jerusalem. No, the corpse of this particular peasant—this Jesus of Nazareth—had been brought down from the cross and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest of men in Judea. More remarkable still, his followers claimed that three days after their messiah had been placed in the rich man’s tomb, he came back to life. God raised him up again, freed him from death’s grip. The spokesman of the group, a fisherman from Capernaum called Simon Peter, swore that he witnessed this resurrection with his own eyes, as did many others among them.

  To be clear, this was not the resurrection of the dead that the Pharisees expected at the end of days and the Sadducees denied. This was not the gravestones cracking open and the earth coughing up the buried masses, as the prophet Isaiah had envisioned (Isaiah 26:19). This had nothing to do with the rebirth of the “House of Israel” foretold by the prophet Ezekiel, wherein God breathes new life into the dry bones of the nation (Ezekiel 37). This was a lone individual, dead and buried in rock for days, suddenly rising up and walking out of his tomb of his own accord, not as a spirit or ghost, but as a man of flesh and blood.

  Nothing quite like what these followers of Jesus were contending existed at the time. Ideas about the resurrection of the dead could be found among the ancient Egyptians and Persians, of course. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, though not of the body. Some gods—for instance, Osiris—were thought to have died and risen again. Some men—Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—became gods after they died. But the concept of an individual dying and rising again, in the flesh, into a life everlasting was extremely rare in the ancient world and practically nonexistent in Judaism.

  And yet what the followers of Jesus were arguing was not only that he rose from the dead, but that his resurrection confirmed his status as messiah, an extraordinary claim without precedent in Jewish history. Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection. The prophet Isaiah speaks of an exalted “suffering servant” who would be “stricken for the transgressions of [God’s] people” (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). But Isaiah never identifies this nameless servant as the messiah, nor does he claim that the stricken servant rose from the dead. The prophet Daniel mentions “an anointed one” (i.e., messiah) who “shall be cut off and shall have nothing” (Daniel 7:26). But Daniel’s anointed is not killed; he is merely deposed by a “prince who is to come.” It may be true that, centuries after Jesus’s death, Christians would interpret these verses in such a way as to help make sense of their messiah’s failure to accomplish any of the messianic tasks expected of him. But the Jews of Jesus’s time had no conception whatsoever of a messiah who suffers and dies. They were awaiting a messiah who triumphs and lives.

  What Jesus’s followers were proposing was a breathtakingly bold redefinition, not just of the messianic prophecies but of the very nature and function of the Jewish messiah. The fisherman, Simon Peter, displaying the reckless confidence of one unschooled and uninitiated in the scriptures, even went so far as to argue that King David himself had prophesied Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in one of his Psalms. “Being a prophet, and knowing God had sworn an oath to him that the fruit of his loins, of his flesh, would be raised as the messiah to be seated on his throne,” Peter told the pilgrims gathered at the Temple, “David, foreseeing [Jesus], spoke of the resurrection of the messiah, saying that ‘his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption’ ” (Acts 2:30–31).

  Had Stephen been knowledgeable about the sacred texts, had he been a scribe or a scholar saturated in the scriptures, had he simply been an inhabitant of Jerusalem, for whom the sound of the Psalms cascading from the Temple walls would have been as familiar as the sound of his own voice, he would have known immediately that King David never said any such thing about the messiah. The “prophecy” Peter speaks of was a Psalm David sang about himself:

  Therefore my heart is glad, and my honor rejoices;

  my body also dwells secure.

  For you did not forsake my soul to Sheol [the underworld or “Hades”],

  or allow your godly one to see the Pit.

  [Rather] you taught me the way of life;

  in your presence there is an abundance of joy,

  in your right hand there is eternal pleasure.

  P

  SALMS

  16:9–11

  But—and here lies the key to understanding the dramatic transformation that took place in Jesus’s message after his death—Stephen was not a scribe or scholar. He was not an expert in the scriptures. He did not live in Jerusalem. As such, he was the perfect audience for this new, innovative, and thoroughly unorthodox interpretation of the messiah being peddled by a group of illiterate ecstatics whose certainty in their message was matched only by the passion with which they preached it.

  Stephen converted to the Jesus movement shortly after Jesus’s death. As with most converts from the distant Diaspora, he would have abandoned his hometown, sold his possessions, pooled his resources into the community, and made a home for himself in Jerusalem, under the shadow of the Temple walls. Although he would spend only a brief time as a member of the new community—perhaps a year or two—his violent death soon after his conversion would forever enshrine his name in the annals of Christian history.

  The story of that celebrated death can be found in the book of Acts, which chronicles the first few decades of the Jesus movement after the crucifixion. The evangelist Luke, who allegedly composed the book as a sequel to his gospel, presents Stephen’s stoning as a watershed movement in the early history of the church. Stephen is called a man “full of grace and power [who] did great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). His speech and wisdom, Luke claims, were so powerful that few could stand against him. In fact, Stephen’s spectacular death in the book of Acts becomes, for Luke, a coda to Jesus’s passion narrative; Luke’s gospel, alo
ne among the Synoptics, transfers to Stephen’s “trial” the accusation made against Jesus that he had threatened to destroy the Temple.

  “This man [Stephen] never ceases blaspheming against this holy place [the Temple] and the law,” a gang of stone-wielding vigilantes cries out. “We have heard him say that Jesus of Nazareth will demolish this place and will change the customs that Moses handed down to us” (Acts 6:13–14).

  Luke also provides Stephen with the self-defense that Jesus never received in his gospel. In a long and rambling diatribe before the mob, Stephen summarizes nearly all of Jewish history, starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus. The speech, which is obviously Luke’s creation, is riddled with the most basic errors: it misidentifies the burial site of the great patriarch Jacob, and it inexplicably claims that an angel gave the law to Moses when even the most uneducated Jew in Palestine would have known it was God himself who gave Moses the law. However, the speech’s true significance comes near the end, when in a fit of ecstasy, Stephen looks up to the heavens and sees “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).

  The image seems to have been a favorite of the early Christian community. Mark, yet another Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora, has Jesus say something similar to the high priest in his gospel: “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power” (Mark 14:62), which is then picked up by Matthew and Luke—two more Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews—in their own accounts. But whereas Jesus in the Synoptics is directly quoting Psalm 110 so as to draw a connection between himself and King David, Stephen’s speech in Acts consciously replaces the phrase “the right hand of the Power” with “the right hand of God.” There is a reason for the change. In ancient Israel, the right hand was a symbol of power and authority; it signified a position of exaltation. Sitting “at the right hand of God” means sharing in God’s glory, being one with God in honor and essence. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “to sit on the right hand of the Father is nothing else than to share in the glory of the Godhead … [Jesus] sits at the right hand of the Father, because He has the same Nature as the Father.”