Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

For every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it.

the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds recorded by people who knew him. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man.

these three gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—became known as the Synoptics (Greek for “viewed together”) because they more or less present a common narrative and chronology about the life and ministry of Jesus,

These, then, are the canonized gospels.

In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so.

Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing the racked and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone should cast doubt upon the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of his time.

Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity emerged.

This book is an attempt to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary who, two thousand years ago, walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition.

It is also about how, in the aftermath of Jesus’s failure to establish God’s reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted not only Jesus’s mission and identity, but also the v...

For what must never be forgotten when speaking of first-century Palestine is that this land—this hallowed land from which the spirit of God flowed to the rest of the world—was occupied territory.

Jerusalem was little more than a trifle to be passed among a succession of kings and emperors who took turns plundering and despoiling the sacred city on their way to far grander ambitions.

the Romans wanted to control the Jews, they had to control the Temple. And if they wanted to control the Temple, they had to control the high priest,

Rome took upon itself the responsibility of appointing and deposing (either directly or indirectly) the high priest, essentially transforming him into a Roman employee.

what the Romans considered to be their unfathomable sense of superiority.

when the Jews first came to this land a thousand years earlier, God had decreed that they massacre every man, woman, and child they encountered, that they slaughter every ox, goat, and sheep they came across, that they burn every farm, every field, every crop, every living thing without exception so as to ensure that the land would belong solely to those who worshipped this one God and no other.

only after every single previous inhabitant of this land was eradicated, “as the Lord God of Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10: 28–42)—that the Jews were allowed to settle here.

now found itself laboring under the boot of an imperial pagan power,

The agriculture that had once sustained the meager village populations was now almost wholly focused on feeding the engorged urban centers, leaving the rural peasants hungry and destitute.

now forced to pay a heavy tribute to Rome.

Those who managed to remain on their wasted fields often had no choice but to borrow heavily from the landed aristocracy, at exorbitant interest rates.

symbols of righteous zeal against Roman aggression, dispensers of divine justice to the traitorous Jews.

The Romans had a different word for them. They called them lestai. Bandits.

The bandits represented the first stirrings of what would become a nationalist resistance movement against the Roman occupation.

to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome.

There would be no more semi-independence. No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.

This is no simple declaration. It is, in fact, an act of treason. In first-century Palestine, simply saying the words “This is the messiah,” aloud and in public, can be a criminal offense, punishable by crucifixion.

there seems to have been a fair consensus about who the messiah is supposed to be and what the messiah is supposed to do: he is the descendant of King David; he comes to restore Israel, to free the Jews from the yoke of occupation, and to establish God’s rule in Jerusalem.

The early Christian community appears not to have been particularly concerned about any aspect of Jesus’s life before the launch of his ministry.

but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact.

The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age;

The readers of Luke’s gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened than in what it meant.

to tell tales of gods and heroes whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false but whose underlying message would be seen as true.

(There is, however, one thing about which all the prophecies seem to agree: the messiah is a human being, not divine.

Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God. The descendant of King David. The promised messiah. That Jesus—the eternal logos from whom creation sprang, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God—you will find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem, surrounded by simple shepherds and wise men bearing gifts from the east.

Jesus would have belonged to the lowest class of peasants in first-century Palestine, just above the indigent, the beggar, and the slave.

There were no schools in Nazareth for peasant children to attend.

less than a hundred years after Jesus’s death, rumors about his illegitimate birth were already circulating throughout Palestine.

“Is this not Mary’s son?” (Mark 6:3). This is an astonishing statement, one that cannot be easily dismissed. Calling a first-born Jewish male in Palestine by his mother’s name—that is, Jesus bar Mary, instead of Jesus bar Joseph—is not just unusual, it is egregious. At the very least it is a deliberate slur with implications so obvious that later redactions of Mark were compelled to insert the phrase “son of the carpenter, and Mary” into the verse.

Celibacy was an extremely rare phenomenon in first-century Palestine.

Zeal implied a strict adherence to the Torah and the Law, a refusal to serve any foreign master—to serve any human master at all—and an uncompromising devotion to the sovereignty of God.

Many Jews in first-century Palestine strove to live a life of zeal, each in his or her own way. But there were some who, in order to preserve their zealous ideals, were willing to resort to extreme acts of violence if necessary, not just against the Romans and the uncircumcised masses, but against their fellow Jews, those who dared submit to Rome. They were called zealots.

God’s reign could only be ushered in by those with the zeal to fight for it.

making resistance to Rome a religious duty incumbent on all Jews. It was Judas’s fierce determination to do whatever it took to free the Jews from foreign rule and cleanse the land in the name of Israel’s God

The census, they argued, was an abomination. It was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews.

To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome.

It was not the census itself that so enraged Judas and his followers; it was the very notion of paying any tax or tribute to Rome.

Six days a week, from sunup to sundown, Jesus would have toiled in the royal city, building palatial houses for the Jewish aristocracy during the day, returning to his crumbling mud-brick home at night. He would have witnessed for himself the rapidly expanding divide between the absurdly rich and the indebted poor.

the memory of Judas the Galilean and what he accomplished did not fade in Sepphoris: not for the drudge and the dispossessed; not for those, like Jesus, who spent their days slogging bricks to build yet another mansion for yet another Jewish nobleman.

Pilate simply took the money to pay for the project from the Temple’s treasury. When the Jews protested, Pilate sent his troops to slaughter them in the streets.

He used the power of the purse to play the different Jewish factions in Jerusalem against one another, always to his benefit.