Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  No inscriptions have been found in Nazareth to indicate that the population was particularly literate. Scholars estimate that between 95 and 97 percent of the Jewish peasantry at the time of Jesus could neither read nor write. On that point see Crossan, Historical Jesus, 24–26.

  On Nazareth as the place of Jesus’s birth, see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 277–78; E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993); and John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: HarperOne, 1995), 18–23.

  For more on messianic views at the time of Jesus, see Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 1–36. Scholem outlines two distinct messianic trends within early Judaism: the restorative and the utopian. Restorative messianism seeks a return to an ideal condition in the glorified past; in other words, it considers the improvement of the present era to be directly linked to the glories of the past. But while the restorative pole finds its hope in the past, it is nevertheless directly concerned with the desire of an even better future that will bring about “a state of things which has never yet existed.” Related to the restorative pole is utopian messianism. More apocalyptic in character, utopian messianism seeks catastrophic change with the coming of the messiah: that is, the annihilation of the present world and the initiation of a messianic age. Restorative messianism can be seen in the kingly traditions that look to the Davidic ideal—it seeks to establish a kingdom in the present time—while the utopian messianism is associated with the priestly figure found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. Of course, neither of these messianic trends existed independently of the other. On the contrary, both poles existed in some form in nearly every messianic group. Indeed, it was the tension between these two messianic trends that created the varying character of the messiah in Judaism. For more on Jewish messianism, see studies by Richard Horsley, including “Messianic Figures and Movements in First-Century Palestine,” The Messiah, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 295; “Popular Messianic Movements Around the Time of Jesus,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984): 447–95; and “ ‘Like One of the Prophets of Old’: Two Types of Popular Prophets at the Time of Jesus,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 47 (1985): 435–63. All three of Horsley’s studies have been vital in my examination of messianic ideas around the time of Jesus. I also recommend the relevant entry in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1992); and The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, ed. J. Werblowsky et al. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).

  It would seem that the Qumran community did indeed await two different messiahs. The Community Rule suggests this in 9:12 when it speaks of the coming of “the Prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel.” Clearly a differentiation is being made between the kingly and priestly messianic figures. This notion is further developed in the Rule of the Congregation. In this scroll a banquet is described in the “last days” in which the messiah of Israel sits in a subordinate position to the priest of the congregation. While the text does not use the word “messiah” to refer to the priest, his superior position at the table indicates his eschatological power. These texts have led scholars to deduce that the Qumran community believed in the coming of a kingly messiah and a priestly messiah, with the latter dominating over the former. See James Charlesworth, “From Jewish Messianology to Christian Christology; Some Caveats and Perspectives,” Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, ed. Jacob Neusner et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 225–64.

  It should be noted that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is the messiah explicitly termed the physical descendant of David, i.e., “Son of David.” But the imagery associated with the messiah and the fact that it is thought that his chief task is to reestablish David’s kingdom permanently linked messianic aspirations to Davidic lineage. This is in large part due to the so-called Davidic covenant, based on the prophet Nathan’s prophecy: “Your [David’s] house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16).

  Jesus’s lineage from King David is stated over and over again, not just throughout the gospels but also in the letters of Paul, in which Jesus is repeatedly described as “of the seed of David” (Romans 1:3–4; 2 Timothy 2:8). Whether it was true is impossible to say. Many people claimed lineage to the greatest Israelite king (who lived a thousand years before Jesus of Nazareth), and frankly none of them could either prove such lineage or disprove it. But obviously the link between Jesus and David was vital for the early Christian community because it helped prove that this lowly peasant was in fact the messiah.

  It is widely accepted that the original text of Mark ended with 16:8 and that Mark 16:9–20 was a later addition to the text. Per Norman Perrin: “It is the virtually unanimous opinion of modern scholarship that what appears in most translations of the gospel of Mark 16:9–20 is a pastiche of material taken from other gospels and added to the original text of the gospel as it was copied and transmitted by the scribes of the ancient Christian communities.” Perrin, The Resurrection According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Philadelphia: Fortress Press: 1977), 16. However, there are still some who question this assumption, arguing that a book cannot end with the Greek word γαρ, as Mark 16:8 does. That view has been debunked by P. W. van der Horst, “Can a Book End with TAP Note on Mark XVI.8,” Journal of Theological Studies 23 (1972): 121–24. Horst notes numerous texts in antiquity that do in fact end in this manner (e.g., Plotinus’s 32nd treatise). In any case, anyone who reads Mark in the original Greek can tell that a different hand wrote the final eight verses.

  For prophecies claiming that “when the messiah comes, no one will know where he is from,” see 1 Enoch 48:6 and 4 Ezra 13:51–52. For a complete breakdown of the so-called messianic “proof texts,” see J.J.M. Roberts, “The Old Testament’s Contribution to Messianic Expectations,” The Messiah, 39–51. According to Roberts, these texts fall into five categories. First, there are those passages that appear to be prophecies ex eventu. Roberts cites Balaam’s oracle in Numbers 24:17 (“a star will come forth out of Jacob”) as an instance in which a prophecy that seems to find its fulfillment in the early monarchical period (in this case, the celebration of David’s victories as king of Israel over Moab and Edom, as is indicated in verses 17b and 18) has been forced to function as a prophecy regarding future divine kingship. Such a futuristic interpretation, argues Roberts, ignores the original setting of the prophecy. The second category deals with prophetic passages that seem to have settings in the enthronement ceremonies of the anointed kings. For instance, Psalm 2 (“You are my son … / this day I become your father”) and Isaiah 9:6 (“For a child has been born to us … and his title will be Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace”) were most likely composed for specific occasions to serve both religious and political functions. The political usage of these texts is apparent in their claims of the authoritative power of the king and his direct link to God. They also establish a link between the responsibilities of the king toward his people and the commands of God. The king who serves in God’s stead must display God’s justice. Even so, such statements as are found in these verses would no doubt create a powerful tool for kingly propaganda. The third category of the messianic proof texts do indeed speak of a future ruler and are perhaps the verses most frequently quoted by those who want to give a salvific interpretation to the messiah of the Hebrew scriptures (Micah 5:1–5; Zechariah 9:1–10). These texts speak of the embodiment of the Davidic ideal, metaphorically (not physically) referred to as a king of the Davidic line, who will restore the monarchy of Israel to its former glory. But for Roberts, the promises of a future king (e.g., Micah’s promise of a king rising from the humility of Bethlehem) “imply a serious criticism of the current occupant of the Davidic throne as less than an adequate heir to David.” Such criticism is apparent throughout the prophetic texts (see Isaiah 1:21–26, 11:1–9, 32
:1–8). Roberts uses the same approach in the fourth group of messianic proof texts envisioning a future king. These texts, primarily Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Roberts places at the end of the Judean kingdom, when a restoration of the Davidic dynasty was a response to growing existential concerns over the future of Israel as a theocracy. The final category deals with the postexilic texts. According to Roberts, upon return from exile, the Jews were faced with a destroyed Temple, a disgraced priesthood, and no Davidic king. The prophetic texts of Zechariah and Haggai dealt with these problems in oracles that placed Zerubbabel in the position of restoring Israel’s monarchy and Temple (Haggai 2:20–23; Zechariah 4:6–10). Roberts believes that the prophecies regarding the restoration of the crown and the Temple (e.g., Zechariah 6:9–15) refer solely to the actions of Zerubbabel and are an optimistic response to the terrible circumstances that existed in the postexilic period. He also traces the later priestly expectations of the messiah to the texts of this period that include a restoration of the priesthood under Joshua (Zechariah 3:1–10). Roberts is convinced by his study of the messianic proof texts that the idea of a salvific messiah is not explicitly stated in the Hebrew scriptures but is rather a later development of Jewish eschatology that was adopted by the Pharisees, perhaps in the second or first century B.C.E., and later incorporated into “normative Judaism.”

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE FOURTH PHILOSOPHY

  Some scholars believe that tekton means not “woodworker” but any artisan who deals in the building trades. While Mark 6:3 is the only verse that calls Jesus a tekton, Matthew 13:55 states that Jesus’s father was a tekton. Considering the strictures of the day, the verse is likely meant to indicate that Jesus was a tekton, too (though this passage in Matthew does not actually name Jesus’s father). Some scholars believe that artisans and day laborers in the time of Jesus should be considered akin to a lower middle class in the social hierarchy of Galilee, but that view has been disproven by Ramsay MacMullen in Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 384 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

  Many studies have been done about the language of Jesus and of first-century Palestine in general, but none are better than those of Joseph Fitzmyer. See “Did Jesus Speak Greek?” Biblical Archaeology Review 18.5 (September/October 1992): 58–63; and “The Languages of Palestine in the First Century A.D.,” in The Language of the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 126–62. Other fine studies on the language of Jesus include James Barr, “Which Language Did Jesus Speak? Some Remarks of a Semitist,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 53.1 (Autumn 1970): 14–15; and Michael O. Wise, “Languages of Palestine,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 434–44.

  John Meier makes an interesting comment about the passage in Luke in which Jesus stands at the synagogue reading the Isaiah scroll: “Anyone who would wish to defend Luke’s depiction of the Isaiah reading as historically reliable even in its details would have to explain (1) how Jesus managed to read from an Isaiah scroll a passage made up of Isaiah 61:1a, b, d; 58:6d; 61:2a, with the omission of 61:1c, 2d; (2) why it is that Jesus read a text of Isaiah that is basically that of the Greek Septuagint, even when at times the Septuagint diverges from the Masoretic text.” See Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 303. Nevertheless, Meier actually believes that Jesus was not illiterate and that he even may have had some kind of formal education, though he provides an enlightening account of the debate on both sides of the argument (271–78).

  Regarding Jesus’s brothers, arguments have been made by some Catholic (and a few Protestant) theologians that the Greek word adelphos (brother) could possibly mean “cousin” or “step-brother.” While that may be true, nowhere in the entire New Testament is the word adelphos ever used to mean either (and it is used some 340 times). Mark 6:17 uses the word adelphos to mean “half brother” when he refers to Philip’s relationship to Herod Antipas, but even this usage implies “physical brother.”

  One interesting sidenote about Jesus’s family is that they were all named after great heroes and patriarchs of the Bible. Jesus’s name was Yeshu, short for Yeshua or Joshua, the great Israelite warrior whose wholesale slaughter of the tribes inhabiting Canaan cleansed the land for the Israelites. His mother was Miriam, named after the sister of Moses. His father, Joseph, was named after the son of Jacob, who would become known as Israel. His brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, were all named after biblical heroes. Apparently the naming of children after the great patriarchs became customary after the Maccabean revolt and may indicate a sense of awakened national identity that seemed to have been particularly marked in Galilee.

  The argument in Matthew that Jesus’s virgin birth was prophesied in Isaiah holds no water at all, since scholars are nearly unanimous in translating the passage in Isaiah 7:14 not as “behold a virgin shall conceive” but “behold, a young maiden (alma) will conceive.” There is no debate here: alma is Hebrew for a young woman. Period.

  For one particularly controversial argument about Jesus’s illegitimate birth, see Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). Schaberg claims Mary was very likely raped, though it is not clear how she comes to that conclusion.

  Celsus’s story about the soldier Panthera is from his second-century tract True Discourse, which has been lost to history. Our only access to it comes from Origen’s polemical response to the work titled Against Celsus, written sometime in the middle of the third century C.E.

  It should be noted that both Matthew and Luke recount the “son of Mary” passage in Mark 6:3, but both fix Mark’s statement by pointedly referring to Jesus as “the carpenter’s son” (Matthew 13:55) and “the son of Joseph” (Luke 4:22) respectively. There are variant readings of Mark that insert “the son of the carpenter” in this verse, but it is generally agreed that these are later additions. The original of Mark 6:3 undoubtedly calls Jesus “son of Mary.” It is possible, though highly unlikely, that Jesus was called “son of Mary” because Joseph had died so long ago that he was forgotten. But John Meier notes that there is only a single case in the entire Hebrew Scriptures in which a man is referred to as his mother’s son. That would be the sons of Zeruiah—Joab, Abishai, and Asahel—who were soldiers in King David’s army (1 Samuel 26:6; 2 Samuel 2:13). All three are repeatedly referred to as “sons of Zeruiah.” See Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 226.

  For more on the question of whether Jesus was married, see William E. Phipps, Was Jesus Married? (New York: Harper and Row, 1970) and The Sexuality of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Karen King, a professor at Harvard University, has recently unearthed a tiny scrap of papyrus, which she dates to the fourth century, that contains a Coptic phrase that translates to “Jesus said to them, my wife …” At the time of this writing, the fragment had yet to be authenticated, though even if it is not a forgery, it would only tell us what those in the fourth century believed about Jesus’s marital status.

  There are some great stories about the boy Jesus in the gnostic gospels, especially The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which a petulant Jesus flaunts his magical powers by bringing clay birds to life or striking dead neighborhood kids who fail to show him deference. The best and most complete collection of the gnostic gospels in English is The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. Marvin W. Meyer (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

  For more on Sepphoris, see the relevant entry by Z. Weiss in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. Ephraim Stern (New York: Simon and Schuster; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 1324–28. For Sepphoris as a major commercial center in Galilee, see Arlene Fradkin, “Long-Distance Trade in the Lower Galilee: New Evidence from Sepphoris,” in Archaeology and the Galilee, Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough, eds. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 107–16. There is some debate as to whether the miqva’ot (ritual baths) discovered in Sepphoris were actually ritual baths; Hanan Eshel at Bar Ilan is among t
hose who do not think they were. See “A Note on ‘Miqvaot’ at Sepphoris,” Archaeology and the Galilee, 131–33. See also Eric Meyers, “Sepphoris: City of Peace,” in The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology, ed. Andrea M. Berlin and Andrew J. Overman (London: Routledge, 2002), 110–20. I actually find Eshel’s argument quite convincing, though the majority of scholars and archaeologists do not.

  There is no way to be certain of the exact date of Antipas’s declaration and rebuilding of Sepphoris as his royal seat. Eric Meyer says that Antipas moved to Sepphoris almost immediately after the Romans razed the city in 6 B.C.E.; see Eric M. Meyers, Ehud Netzer, and Carol L. Meyers, “Ornament of All Galilee,” The Biblical Archeologist, 49.1 (1986): 4–19. However, Shirley Jackson Case places the date much later, at around 10 C.E., in “Jesus and Sepphoris,” Journal of Biblical Literature 45 (1926): 14–22. For better or worse, the closest we can place Antipas’s entry into Sepphoris is around the turn of the first century. It should be noted that Antipas renamed the city Autocratoris, or “Imperial City,” after he made it the seat of his tetrarchy.

  For more on Jesus’s life in Sepphoris, see Richard A. Batey, Jesus and the Forgotten City: New Light on Sepphoris and the Urban World of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1991). Archaeological work by Eric Meyers has cast some doubt on the widely held notion that the city was razed by Varus, as Josephus claims in War 2:68. See “Roman Sepphoris in the Light of New Archeological Evidence and Research,” The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 323.

  Although it seems that Judas was actually from the town of Gamala in the Golan, he was nevertheless known to all as “Judas the Galilean.” There is a great deal of debate about the relationship between Hezekiah and Judas the Galilean, and while it cannot be definitively proven that Judas the Galilean was the same person as Judas the bandit who was Hezekiah’s son, that is certainly the assumption that Josephus makes (twice!), and I do not see a reason to doubt him. See War 2.56 and Antiquities 17.271–72. For more on Judas’s genealogical connection to Hezekiah, see the relevant entry in Geza Vermes, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 2006), 165–67; also J. Kennard, “Judas the Galilean and His Clan,” Jewish Quarterly Review 36 (1946): 281–86. For the opposing view, see Richard A. Horsley, “Menahem in Jerusalem: A Brief Messianic Episode Among the Sicarii—Not ‘Zealot Messianism,’ ” Novum Testamentum 27.4 (1985): 334–48. On Judas the Galilean’s innovation and his effect on the revolutionary groups that would follow, see Morton Smith, “The Zealots and the Sicarii,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 1–19.