Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  In other words, Stephen’s Son of Man is not the kingly figure of Daniel who comes “with the clouds of heaven.” He does not establish his kingdom on earth “so that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:1–14). He is not even the messiah any longer. The Son of Man, in Stephen’s vision, is a preexistent, heavenly being whose kingdom is not of this world; who stands at the right hand of God, equal in glory and honor; who is, in form and substance, God made flesh.

  That is all it takes for the stones to start flying.

  Understand that there can be no greater blasphemy for a Jew than what Stephen suggests. The claim that an individual died and rose again into eternal life may have been unprecedented in Judaism. But the presumption of a “god-man” was simply anathema. What Stephen cries out in the midst of his death throes is nothing less than the launch of a wholly new religion, one radically and irreconcilably divorced from everything Stephen’s own religion had ever posited about the nature of God and man and the relationship of the one to the other. One can say that it was not only Stephen who died that day outside the gates of Jerusalem. Buried with him under the rubble of stones is the last trace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. The story of the zealous Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation comes to an abrupt end, not with his death on the cross, nor with the empty tomb, but at the first moment one of his followers dares suggest he is God.

  Stephen was martyred sometime between 33 and 35 C.E. Among those in the crowd who countenanced his stoning was a pious young Pharisee from a wealthy Roman city on the Mediterranean Sea called Tarsus. His name was Saul, and he was a true zealot: a fervent follower of the Law of Moses who had burnished a reputation for violently suppressing blasphemies such as Stephen’s. Around 49 C.E., a mere fifteen years after he gladly watched Stephen die, this same fanatical Pharisee, now an ardent Christian convert renamed Paul, would write a letter to his friends in the Greek city of Philippi in which he unambiguously, and without reservation, calls Jesus of Nazareth God. “He was in the form of God,” Paul wrote, though he was “born in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2:6–7).

  How could this have happened? How could a failed messiah who died a shameful death as a state criminal be transformed, in the span of a few years, into the creator of the heavens and the earth: God incarnate?

  The answer to that question relies on recognizing this one rather remarkable fact: practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named). Those who did know Jesus—those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God’s name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him die a lonely death—played a surprisingly small role in defining the movement Jesus left behind. The members of Jesus’s family, and especially his brother James, who would lead the community in Jesus’s absence, were certainly influential in the decades after the crucifixion. But they were hampered by their decision to remain more or less ensconced in Jerusalem waiting for Jesus to return, until they and their community, like nearly everyone else in the holy city, were annihilated by Titus’s army in 70 C.E. The apostles who were tasked by Jesus to spread his message did leave Jerusalem and fan out across the land bearing the good news. But they were severely limited by their inability to theologically expound on the new faith or compose instructive narratives about the life and death of Jesus. These were farmers and fishermen, after all; they could neither read nor write.

  The task of defining Jesus’s message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’s message so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.

  This transformation did not occur without conflict or difficulty. The original Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus, including the members of his family and the remnants of the Twelve, openly clashed with the Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews when it came to the correct understanding of Jesus’s message. The discord between the two groups resulted in the emergence of two distinct and competing camps of Christian interpretation in the decades after the crucifixion: one championed by Jesus’s brother, James; the other promoted by the former Pharisee, Paul. As we shall see, it would be the contest between these two bitter and openly hostile adversaries that, more than anything else, would shape Christianity as the global religion we know today.

  Chapter Thirteen

  If Christ Has Not Been Risen

  It was, the gospels say, the sixth hour of the day—three o’clock in the afternoon—on the day before the Sabbath when Jesus of Nazareth breathed his last. According to the gospel of Mark, a crowning darkness came over the whole of the earth, as though all creation had paused to bear witness to the death of this simple Nazarean, scourged and executed for calling himself King of the Jews. At the ninth hour, Jesus suddenly cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Someone soaked a sponge in sour wine and raised it to his lips to ease his suffering. Finally, no longer able to bear the heaving pressure on his lungs, Jesus lifted his head to the sky and, with a loud, agonized cry, gave up his spirit.

  Jesus’s end would have been swift and unnoticed by all, save, perhaps, for the handful of female disciples who stood weeping at the bottom of the hill, gazing up at their maimed and mutilated master: most of the men had scattered into the night at the first sign of trouble in Gethsemane. The death of a state criminal hanging on a cross atop Golgotha was a tragically banal event. Dozens died with Jesus that day, their broken bodies hanging limp for days afterward to serve the ravenous birds that circled above and the dogs that came out under cover of night to finish what the birds left behind.

  Yet Jesus was no common criminal, not for the evangelists who composed the narrative of his final moments. He was God’s agent on earth. His death could not have conceivably gone unnoticed, either by the Roman governor who sent him to the cross or by the high priest who handed him over to die. And so, when Jesus yielded his soul to heaven, at the precise moment of his final breath, the gospels say that the veil in the Temple, which separated the altar from the Holy of Holies—the blood-spattered veil sprinkled with the sacrifice of a thousand thousand offerings, the veil that the high priest, and only the high priest, would draw back as he entered the private presence of God—was violently rent in two, from top to bottom.

  “Surely this was a son of God,” a bewildered centurion at the foot of the cross declares, before running off to Pilate to report what had happened.

  The tearing of the Temple’s veil is a fitting end to the passion narratives, the perfect symbol of what the death of Jesus meant for the men and women who reflected upon it many decades later. Jesus’s sacrifice, they argued, removed the barrier between humanity and God. The veil that separated the divine presence from the rest of the world had been torn away. Through Jesus’s death, everyone could now access God’s spirit, without ritual or priestly mediation. The high priest’s high-priced prerogative, the very Temple itself, was suddenly made irrelevant. The body of Christ had replaced the Temple rituals, just as the words of Jesus had supplanted the Torah.

  Of course, these are theological reflections rendered years after the Temple had already been destroyed; it is not difficult to consider Jesus’s death to have displaced a Temple
that no longer existed. For the disciples who remained in Jerusalem after the crucifixion, however, the Temple and the priesthood were still very much a reality. The veil that hung before the Holy of Holies was still apparent to all. The high priest and his cohort still controlled the Temple Mount. Pilate’s soldiers still roamed the stone streets of Jerusalem. Not much had changed at all. The world remained essentially as it was before their messiah had been taken from them.

  The disciples faced a profound test of their faith after Jesus’s death. The crucifixion marked the end of their dream of overturning the existing system, of reconstituting the twelve tribes of Israel and ruling over them in God’s name. The Kingdom of God would not be established on earth, as Jesus had promised. The meek and the poor would not exchange places with the rich and the powerful. The Roman occupation would not be overthrown. As with the followers of every other messiah the empire had killed, there was nothing left for Jesus’s disciples to do but abandon their cause, renounce their revolutionary activities, and return to their farms and villages.

  Then something extraordinary happened. What exactly that something was is impossible to know. Jesus’s resurrection is an exceedingly difficult topic for the historian to discuss, not least because it falls beyond the scope of any examination of the historical Jesus. Obviously, the notion of a man dying a gruesome death and returning to life three days later defies all logic, reason, and sense. One could simply stop the argument there, dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen Jesus to be the product of a deludable mind.

  However, there is this nagging fact to consider: one after another of those who claimed to have witnessed the risen Jesus went to their own gruesome deaths refusing to recant their testimony. That is not, in itself, unusual. Many zealous Jews died horribly for refusing to deny their beliefs. But these first followers of Jesus were not being asked to reject matters of faith based on events that took place centuries, if not millennia, before. They were being asked to deny something they themselves personally, directly encountered.

  The disciples were themselves fugitives in Jerusalem, complicit in the sedition that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. They were repeatedly arrested and abused for their preaching; more than once their leaders had been brought before the Sanhedrin to answer charges of blasphemy. They were beaten, whipped, stoned, and crucified, yet they would not cease proclaiming the risen Jesus. And it worked! Perhaps the most obvious reason not to dismiss the disciples’ resurrection experiences out of hand is that, among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus alone is still called messiah. It was precisely the fervor with which the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection that transformed this tiny Jewish sect into the largest religion in the world.

  Although the first resurrection stories were not written until the mid- to late nineties (there is no resurrection appearance in either the Q source materials, compiled in around 50 C.E., or in the gospel of Mark, written after 70 C.E.), belief in the resurrection seems to have been part of the earliest liturgical formula of the nascent Christian community. Paul—the former Pharisee who would become the most influential interpreter of Jesus’s message—writes about the resurrection in a letter addressed to the Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth, sometime around 50 C.E. “For I give over to you the first things which I myself accepted,” Paul writes, “that Christ died for the sake of our sins, according to the scriptures; that he was buried and that he rose again on the third day, according to the scriptures; that he was seen by Cephas [Simon Peter], then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by over five hundred brothers at once, many of whom are still alive, though some have died. After that, he was seen by [his brother] James; then by all the apostles. And, last of all, he was seen by me as well …” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).

  Paul may have written those words in 50 C.E., but he is repeating what is likely a much older formula, one that may be traced to the early forties. That means belief in the resurrection of Jesus was among the community’s first attestations of faith—earlier than the passion narratives, earlier even than the story of the virgin birth.

  Nevertheless, the fact remains that the resurrection is not a historical event. It may have had historical ripples, but the event itself falls outside the scope of history and into the realm of faith. It is, in fact, the ultimate test of faith for Christians, as Paul wrote in that same letter to the Corinthians: “If Christ has not been risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

  Paul makes a key point. Without the resurrection, the whole edifice of Jesus’s claim to the mantle of the messiah comes crashing down. The resurrection solves an insurmountable problem, one that would have been impossible for the disciples to ignore: Jesus’s crucifixion invalidates his claim to be the messiah and successor to David. According to the Law of Moses, Jesus’s crucifixion actually marks him as the accursed of God: “Anyone hung on a tree [that is, crucified] is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23). But if Jesus did not actually die—if his death were merely the prelude to his spiritual evolution—then the cross would no longer be a curse or a symbol of failure. It would be transformed into a symbol of victory.

  Precisely because the resurrection claim was so preposterous and unique, an entirely new edifice needed to be constructed to replace the one that had crumbled in the shadow of the cross. The resurrection stories in the gospels were created to do just that: to put flesh and bones upon an already accepted creed; to create narrative out of established belief; and, most of all, to counter the charges of critics who denied the claim, who argued that Jesus’s followers saw nothing more than a ghost or a spirit, who thought it was the disciples themselves who stole Jesus’s body to make it appear as though he rose again. By the time these stories were written, six decades had passed since the crucifixion. In that time, the evangelists had heard just about every conceivable objection to the resurrection, and they were able to create narratives to counter each and every one of them.

  The disciples saw a ghost? Could a ghost eat fish and bread, as the risen Jesus does in Luke 24:42–43?

  Jesus was merely an incorporeal spirit? “Does a spirit have flesh and bones?” the risen Jesus asks his incredulous disciples as he offers his hands and feet to touch as proof (Luke 24:36–39).

  Jesus’s body was stolen? How so, when Matthew has conveniently placed armed guards at his tomb—guards who saw for themselves the risen Jesus, but who were bribed by the priests to say the disciples had stolen the body from under their noses? “And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day” (Matthew 28:1–15).

  Again, these stories are not meant to be accounts of historical events; they are carefully crafted rebuttals to an argument that is taking place offscreen. Still, it is one thing to argue that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. That is, in the end, purely a matter of faith. It is something else entirely to say that he did so according to the scriptures. Luke portrays the risen Jesus as addressing this issue himself by patiently explaining to his disciples, who “had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), how his death and resurrection were in reality the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies, how everything written about the messiah “in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms” led to the cross and the empty tomb. “Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day,” Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke 24:44–46).

  Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of Moses, not in the prophets, not in the Psalms. In the entire history of Jewish thought there is not a single line of scripture that says the messiah is to suffer, die, and rise again on the third day, which may explain why Jesus does not bother to cite any scripture to back up his incredible claim.

  No wonder Jesus’s followers had such a difficult time convincing their fellow Jews in Jerusalem to accept their message. When Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that the crucifixion is “a stumbling block to the Jews,�
� he is grossly understating the disciples’ dilemma (1 Corinthians 1:23). To the Jews, a crucified messiah was nothing less than a contradiction in terms. The very fact of Jesus’s crucifixion annulled his messianic claims. Even the disciples recognized this problem. That is why they so desperately tried to deflect their dashed hopes by arguing that the Kingdom of God they had hoped to establish was in actuality a celestial kingdom, not an earthly one; that the messianic prophecies had been misconstrued; that the scriptures, properly interpreted, said the opposite of what everyone thought they did; that embedded deep in the texts was a secret truth about the dying and rising messiah that only they could uncover. The problem was that in a city as steeped in the scriptures as Jerusalem, such an argument would have fallen on deaf ears, especially when it came from a group of illiterate peasants from the backwoods of Galilee whose only experience with the scriptures was what little they heard of them in their synagogues back home. Try as they might, the disciples simply could not persuade a significant number of Jerusalemites to accept Jesus as the long-awaited liberator of Israel.

  The disciples could have left Jerusalem, fanned out across Galilee with their message, returned to their villages to preach among their friends and neighbors. But Jerusalem was the place of Jesus’s death and resurrection, the place to which they believed he would soon return. It was the center of Judaism, and despite their peculiar interpretation of the scriptures, the disciples were, above all else, Jews. Theirs was an altogether Jewish movement intended, in those first few years after Jesus’s crucifixion, for an exclusively Jewish audience. They had no intention of abandoning the sacred city or divorcing themselves from the Jewish cult, regardless of the persecution they faced from the priestly authorities. The movement’s principal leaders—the apostles Peter and John, and Jesus’s brother, James—maintained their fealty to Jewish customs and Mosaic Law to the end. Under their leadership, the Jerusalem church became known as the “mother assembly.” No matter how far and wide the movement spread, no matter how many other “assemblies” were established in cities such as Philippi, Corinth, or even Rome, no matter how many new converts—Jew or gentile—the movement attracted, every assembly, every convert, and every missionary would fall under the authority of the “mother assembly” in Jerusalem, until the day it was burned to the ground.