Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  What makes this example so telling is that it is the same one Paul often uses in his letters when making the exact opposite argument. “What then are we to say about Abraham, our father according to the flesh?” Paul writes. “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, though not before God. Rather, what does the scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’ ” (Romans 4:1–3; see also Galatians 3:6–9).

  James may not have been able to read any of Paul’s letters but he was obviously familiar with Paul’s teachings about Jesus. The last years of his life were spent dispatching his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in order to correct what he viewed as Paul’s mistakes. The sermon that became his epistle was just another attempt by James to curb Paul’s influence. Judging by Paul’s own epistles, James’s efforts were successful, as many among Paul’s congregations seem to have turned their backs on him in favor of the teachers from Jerusalem.

  The anger and bitterness that Paul feels toward these “false apostles [and] deceitful workers,” these “servants of Satan” sent to infiltrate his congregations by a man he angrily dismisses as one of the “supposedly acknowledged leaders” of the church—a man he claims “contributed nothing” to him—seeps like poison through the pages of his later epistles (2 Corinthians 11:13; Galatians 2:6). Yet Paul’s attempts to convince his congregations not to abandon him would ultimately prove futile. There was never any doubt about where the loyalty of the community would lie in a dispute between a former Pharisee and the flesh and blood of the living Christ. No matter how Hellenistic the Diaspora Jews may have become, their allegiance to the leaders of the mother assembly did not waver. James, Peter, John—these were the pillars of the church. They were the principal characters in all the stories people told about Jesus. They were the men who walked and talked with Jesus. They were among the first to see him rise from the dead; they would be the first to witness him return with the clouds of heaven. The authority James and the apostles maintained over the community during their lifetimes was unbreakable. Not even Paul could escape it, as he discovered in 57 C.E., when he was forced by James to publicly repent of his beliefs by taking part in that strict purification ritual in the Temple of Jerusalem.

  As with his account of the Apostolic Council some years earlier, Luke’s rendering of this final meeting between James and Paul in the book of Acts tries to brush aside any hint of conflict or animosity by presenting Paul as silently acquiescing to the Temple rite demanded of him. But not even Luke can hide the tension that so obviously exists in this scene. In Luke’s account, before James sends Paul to the Temple to prove to the Jerusalem assembly that he “observes and guards the law,” he first draws a sharp distinction between “the things that God had done among the gentiles in [Paul’s] ministry,” and the “many thousands of believers … among the Jews [who] are all zealous for the law” (Acts 21:20). James then gives Paul “four men who are under a vow” and instructs him to “go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of their heads” (Acts 21:24).

  What Luke is describing in this passage is called a “Nazirite vow” (Numbers 6:2). Nazirites were strict devotees of the Law of Moses who pledged to abstain from wine and refused to shave their hair or come near a corpse for a set period of time, either as an act of piety or in return for the fulfillment of a wish, such as a healthy child or a safe journey (James himself may have been a Nazirite, as the description of those who take the vow perfectly matches the descriptions of him in the ancient chronicles). Considering Paul’s views on the Law of Moses and the Temple of Jerusalem, his forced participation in such a ritual would have been hugely embarrassing for him. The entire purpose of the rite was to demonstrate to the Jerusalem assembly that he no longer believed what he had been preaching for nearly a decade. There is no other way to read Paul’s participation in the Nazirite vow except as a solemn renunciation of his ministry and a public declaration of James’s authority over him—all the more reason to doubt Luke’s depiction of Paul as simply going along with the ritual without comment or complaint.

  Interestingly, Luke’s may not be the only account of this pivotal moment. An eerily similar story is recounted in the compilation of writings known collectively as the Pseudo-Clementines. Although compiled sometime around 300 C.E. (nearly a century before the New Testament was officially canonized), the Pseudo-Clementines contain within them two separate sets of traditions that can be dated much earlier. The first is known as the Homilies, and comprises two epistles: one by the apostle Peter, the other by Peter’s successor in Rome, Clement. The second set of traditions is called the Recognitions, which is itself founded upon an older document titled Ascent of James that most scholars date to the middle of the second century C.E., perhaps two or three decades after the gospel of John was written.

  The Recognitions contains an incredible story about a violent altercation that James the brother of Jesus has with someone simply called “the enemy.” In the text, James and the enemy are engaged in a shouting match inside the Temple when, all of a sudden, the enemy attacks James in a fit of rage and throws him down the Temple stairs. James is badly hurt by the fall but his supporters quickly come to his rescue and carry him to safety. Remarkably, the enemy who attacked James is later identified as none other than Saul of Tarsus (Recognitions 1:70–71).

  As with the Lukan version, the story of the altercation between James and Paul in the Recognitions has its flaws. The fact that Paul is referred to as Saul in the text suggests that the author believes the event took place before Paul’s conversion (though the Recognitions never actually refers to that conversion). Yet regardless of the historicity of the story itself, Paul’s identity as “the enemy” of the church is repeatedly affirmed, not only in the Recognitions, but also in the other texts of the Pseudo-Clementines. In the Epistle of Peter, for example, the chief apostle complains that “some from among the gentiles have rejected my lawful preaching, attaching themselves to certain lawless and trifling preaching of the man who is my enemy” (Epistle of Peter 2:3). Elsewhere, Peter flatly identifies this “false prophet” who teaches “the dissolution of the law” as Paul, cautioning his followers to “believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother, or whosoever may come after him” (Recognitions 4:34–35).

  What the Pseudo-Clementine documents indicate, and the New Testament clearly confirms, is that James, Peter, John, and the rest of the apostles viewed Paul with wariness and suspicion, if not open derision, which is why they went to such lengths to counteract Paul’s teachings, censuring him for his words, warning others not to follow him, even sending their own missionaries to his congregations. No wonder Paul was so keen to flee to Rome after the incident at the Temple in 57 C.E. He was surely not eager to be judged by the emperor for his alleged crimes, as Luke seems to suggest. Paul went to Rome because he hoped he could escape James’s authority. But as he discovered when he arrived in the Imperial City and saw Peter already established there, one could not so easily escape the reach of James and Jerusalem.

  While Paul spent the last years of his life in Rome, frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm he received for his message (perhaps because the Jews were heeding Peter’s call to “believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother”), the Jerusalem assembly under James’s leadership thrived. The Hebrews in Jerusalem were certainly not immune to persecution by the religious authorities. They were often arrested and sometimes killed for their preaching. James the son of Zebedee, one of the original Twelve, was even beheaded (Acts 12:3). But these periodic bouts of persecution were rare and seem not to have been the result of a rejection of the law on the part of the Hebrews, as was the case with the Hellenists who were expelled from the city. Obviously, the Hebrews had figured out a way to accommodate themselves to the Jewish priestly authorities, or else they could not have remained in Jerusalem. These were by all accounts
law-abiding Jews who kept the customs and traditions of their forefathers but who happened also to believe that the simple Jewish peasant from Galilee named Jesus of Nazareth was the promised messiah.

  That is not to say that James and the apostles were uninterested in reaching out to gentiles, or that they believed gentiles could not join their movement. As indicated by his decision at the Apostolic Council, James was willing to forgo the practice of circumcision and other “burdens of the law” for gentile converts. James did not want to force gentiles to first become Jews before they were allowed to become Christians. He merely insisted that they not divorce themselves entirely from Judaism, that they maintain a measure of fidelity to the beliefs and practices of the very man they claimed to be following (Acts 15:12–21). Otherwise, the movement risked becoming a wholly new religion, and that is something neither James nor his brother Jesus would have imagined.

  James’s steady leadership over the Jerusalem assembly came to an end in 62 C.E., when he was executed by the high priest Ananus, not just because he was a follower of Jesus and certainly not because he transgressed the law (or else “the most fair-minded and … strict in the observance of the law” would not have been up in arms about his unjust execution). James was likely killed because he was doing what he did best: defending the poor and weak against the wealthy and powerful. Ananus’s schemes to impoverish the lower-class priests by stealing their tithes would not have sat well with James the Just. And so, Ananus took advantage of the brief absence of Roman authority in Jerusalem to get rid of a man who had become a thorn in his side.

  One cannot know how Paul felt in Rome when he heard about James’s death. But if he assumed the passing of Jesus’s brother would relax the grip of Jerusalem over the community, he was mistaken. The leadership of the Jerusalem assembly passed swiftly to another of Jesus’s family members, his cousin Simeon son of Clopas, and the community continued unabated until four years after James’s death, when the Jews suddenly rose up in revolt against Rome.

  Some among the Hebrews seem to have fled Jerusalem for Pella when the uprising began. But there is no evidence to suggest that the core leadership of the mother assembly abandoned Jerusalem. Rather, they maintained their presence in the city of Jesus’s death and resurrection, eagerly awaiting his return, right up to the moment that Titus’s army arrived and wiped the holy city and its inhabitants—both Christians and Jews—off the face of the earth. With the destruction of Jerusalem, the connection between the assemblies scattered across the Diaspora and the mother assembly rooted in the city of God was permanently severed, and with it the last physical link between the Christian community and Jesus the Jew. Jesus the zealot.

  Jesus of Nazareth.

  Epilogue

  True God from True God

  The balding, gray-bearded old men who fixed the faith and practice of Christianity met for the first time in the Byzantine city of Nicaea, on the eastern shore of Lake Izmit in present-day Turkey. It was the summer of 325 C.E. The men had been brought together by the emperor Constantine and commanded to come to a consensus on the doctrine of the religion he had recently adopted as his own. Bedecked in robes of purple and gold, an aureate laurel resting on his head, Rome’s first Christian emperor called the council to order as though it were a Roman Senate, which is understandable, considering that every one of the nearly two thousand bishops he had gathered in Nicaea to permanently define Christianity was a Roman.

  The bishops were not to disband until they had resolved the theological differences among them, particularly when it came to the nature of Jesus and his relationship to God. Over the centuries since Jesus’s crucifixion, there had been a great deal of discord and debate among the leaders of the church over whether Jesus was human or divine. Was he, as those like Athanasius of Alexandria claimed, God incarnate, or was he, as the followers of Arius seemed to suggest, just a man—a perfect man, perhaps, but a man nonetheless?

  After months of heated negotiations, the council handed to Constantine what became known as the Nicene Creed, outlining for the first time the officially sanctioned, orthodox beliefs of the Christian church. Jesus is the literal son of God, the creed declared. He is Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of the same substance as the father. As for those who disagreed with the creed, those like the Arians who believed that “there was a time when [Jesus] was not,” they were immediately banished from the empire and their teachings violently suppressed.

  It may be tempting to view the Nicene Creed as an overtly politicized attempt to stifle the legitimate voices of dissent in the early church. It is certainly the case that the council’s decision resulted in a thousand years or more of unspeakable bloodshed in the name of Christian orthodoxy. But the truth is that the council members were merely codifying a creed that was already the majority opinion, not just of the bishops gathered at Nicaea, but of the entire Christian community. Indeed, belief in Jesus as God had been enshrined in the church centuries before the Council of Nicaea, thanks to the overwhelming popularity of the letters of Paul.

  After the Temple was destroyed, the holy city burned to the ground, and the remnants of the Jerusalem assembly dispersed, Paul underwent a stunning rehabilitation in the Christian community. With the possible exception of the Q document (which is, after all, a hypothetical text), the only writings about Jesus that existed in 70 C.E. were the letters of Paul. These letters had been in circulation since the fifties. They were written to the Diaspora communities, which, after the destruction of Jerusalem, were the only Christian communities left in the realm. Without the mother assembly to guide the followers of Jesus, the movement’s connection to Judaism was broken, and Paul became the primary vehicle through which a new generation of Christians was introduced to Jesus the Christ. Even the gospels were deeply influenced by Paul’s letters. One can trace the shadow of Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew. But it is in the gospel of Luke, written by one of Paul’s devoted disciples, that one can see the dominance of Paul’s views, while the gospel of John is little more than Pauline theology in narrative form.

  Paul’s conception of Christianity may have been anathema before 70 C.E. But afterward, his notion of a wholly new religion free from the authority of a Temple that no longer existed, unburdened by a law that no longer mattered, and divorced from a Judaism that had become a pariah was enthusiastically embraced by converts throughout the Roman Empire. Hence, in 398 C.E., when, according to legend, another group of bishops gathered at a council in the city of Hippo Regius in modern-day Algeria to canonize what would become known as the New Testament, they chose to include in the Christian scriptures one letter from James, the brother and successor of Jesus, two letters from Peter, the chief apostle and first among the Twelve, three letters from John, the beloved disciple and pillar of the church, and fourteen letters from Paul, the deviant and outcast who was rejected and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem. In fact, more than half of the twenty-seven books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul.

  This should not be surprising. Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem was almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology. And that is precisely what Paul provided. The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make.

  Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because t
he one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus the man—is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.

  For my wife, Jessica Jackley, and the entire Jackley clan,

  whose love and acceptance have taught me more about Jesus

  than all my years of research and study

  .

  Acknowledgments

  This book is the result of two decades of research into the New Testament and the origins of the Christian movement conducted at Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Although I am obviously indebted to all my professors, I would like to single out my extremely patient Greek professor Helen Moritz, and my brilliant adviser, the late Catherine Bell, at Santa Clara, Harvey Cox and Jon Levinson at Harvard, and Mark Juergensmeyer at UCSB. I am also grateful for the unconditional support I received from my editor Will Murphy and the entire team at Random House. Special thanks to Elyse Cheney, the best literary agent in the world, and to Ian Werrett, who not only translated all the Hebrew and Aramaic passages in the book, but also read multiple drafts and provided vital feedback on the manuscript. But the biggest thanks of all goes, as always, to my beloved wife and best friend Jessica Jackley, whose love and devotion have made me the man I always hoped I could be.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  I am greatly indebted to John P. Meier’s epic work, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vols. I–IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991–2009). I first met Father Meier while I was studying the New Testament at Santa Clara University, and it was his definitive look at the historical Jesus, which at the time existed only in its first volume, that planted the seeds of the present book in my mind. Father Meier’s book answers the question of why we have so little historical information about a man who so thoroughly changed the course of human history. His thesis—that we know so little about Jesus because in his lifetime he would have been viewed as little more than a marginal Jewish peasant from the backwoods of Galilee—forms the theoretical groundwork for the book you are reading.