Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

The gospels were all written after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E.; Jesus’s warning to Jerusalem that “the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you and crush you to the ground—you and your children—and they will not leave within you one stone upon another” (Luke 19:43–44) was put into his mouth by the evangelists after the fact.

God has nothing to do with it. By extension, God is entitled to be “given back” the land the Romans have seized for themselves because it is God’s land: “The Land is mine,” says the Lord (Leviticus 25:23). Caesar has nothing to do with it.

That is the zealot argument in its simplest, most concise form. And it seems to be enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately

label Jesus as lestes. A bandit. A zealot.

Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities. That singular fact should color everything we read in the gospels about the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth—from the details of his death on a cross in Golgotha to the launch of his public ministry on the banks of the Jordan River.

Alas, the gospel account is not to be believed. As deliciously scandalous as the story of John’s execution may be, it is riddled with errors and historical inaccuracies.

The Bible is replete with ablutionary practices: objects (a tent, a sword) were sprinkled with water to dedicate them to the Lord; people (lepers, menstruating women) were fully immersed in water as an act of purification.

If John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins, as Mark claims, then Jesus’s acceptance of it indicated a need to be cleansed of his sins by John.

This was precisely the claim made by John’s followers, who, long after both men had been executed, refused to be absorbed into the Jesus movement because they argued that their master, John, was greater than Jesus. After all, who baptized whom?

Hence the steady regression of John’s character from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor to Jesus—to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose at all except to acknowledge Jesus’s divinity.

And he did so for free, as a gift from God—without tithe, without sacrifice—thus seizing for himself the powers granted solely to the priesthood to deem a man worthy of entering the presence of God.

Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage in the gospel of John in which Jesus allegedly tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Not only is this the sole passage in the gospels where Jesus makes such a claim, it is an imprecise translation of the original Greek.

The phrase ouk estin ek tou kosmou is perhaps better translated as “not part of this order/system [of government].”

Jesus was not claiming that the Kingdom of God is unearthly; he was saying it is unlike any kin...

In fact, Jesus seemed to expect the Kingdom of God to be established at any moment: “I tell you, there are those here who will not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1).

“Kingdom

For those who view Jesus as the literally begotten son of God, Jesus’s Jewishness is immaterial. If Christ is divine, then he stands above any particular law or custom. But for those seeking the simple Jewish peasant and charismatic preacher who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago, there is nothing more important than this one undeniable truth: the same God whom the Bible calls “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3), the God who repeatedly commands the wholesale slaughter of every foreign man, woman, and child who occupies the land of the Jews, the “blood-spattered God” of Abraham, and Moses, and Jacob, and Joshua (Isaiah 63:3), the God who “shatters the heads of his enemies,” bids his warriors to bathe their feet in their blood and leave their corpses to be eaten by dogs (Psalms 68:21–23)—that is the only God that Jesus knew and the sole God he worshipped.

His commands to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” must be read as being directed exclusively at his fellow Jews and meant as a model of peaceful relations exclusively within the Jewish community. The commands have nothing to do with how to treat foreigners and outsiders, especially those savage “plunderers of the world” who occupied God’s land in direct violation of the Law of Moses, which Jesus viewed himself as fulfilling. They shall not live in your land.

The cross is the punishment for sedition, not a symbol of self-abnegation. Jesus was warning the Twelve that their status as the embodiment of the twelve tribes that will reconstitute the nation of Israel and throw off the yoke of occupation would rightly be understood by Rome as treason and thus inevitably lead to crucifixion.

Then again, it does not take a prophet to predict what happens to someone who challenges either the priestly control of the Temple or the Roman occupation of Palestine.

But the extreme rarity of the term outside of the gospels, and the fact that it never occurs in the letters of Paul, make it unlikely that the Son of Man was a Christological expression made up by the early church to describe Jesus.

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 pure legend.

The scene is absolutely nonsensical. 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.

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.

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.

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 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).

Because Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought, that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly get away with preaching them.