Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

feeling born of desperation, nurtured by a people yearning for freedom from foreign rule. Zeal, the spirit that had fueled the revolutionary fervor of the bandits, prophets, and messiahs, was now coursing through the population like a virus working its way through the body.

The wealthy and upwardly mobile were also becoming increasingly animated by the fervent desire to cleanse the Holy Land of the Roman occupation.

Rome itself was to blame for its mismanagement and severe overtaxation of the beleaguered population.

the widespread sense of injustice and crushing poverty that had left so many Jews with no choice but to turn to violence.

the revolutionaries had an answer to Agrippa’s question. It was zeal that inspired them. The same zeal that had led the Maccabees to throw off Seleucid control two centuries before—the zeal that had helped the Israelites conquer the Promised Land in the first place—would now help this ragtag band of Jewish revolutionaries to throw off the shackles of Roman occupation.

Eleazar seized control of the Temple and put an end to the daily sacrifices on behalf of the emperor. The signal sent to Rome was clear: Jerusalem had declared its independence.

Then, in an act of profound symbolism, they set fire to the public archives. The ledgers of the debt collectors and moneylenders, the property deeds and public records—all of it went up in flames. There would be no more record of who was rich and who was poor. Everyone in this new and divinely inspired world order would begin anew.

The Roman soldiers agreed to surrender in exchange for safe passage out of the city. But when they laid down their arms and came out of their stronghold, the rebels turned on them, slaughtering every last soldier, removing utterly the scourge of Roman occupation from the city of God. After that, there was no turning back. The Jews had just declared war on the greatest empire the world had ever known.

They then pulled out their daggers—the same daggers that had given them their identity, the daggers that had, with a swipe across the high priest’s throat, launched the ill-fated war with Rome—and began to kill their wives and their children, before turning the knives upon each other. The last ten men chose one among them to kill the remaining nine. The final man set the entire palace ablaze. Then he killed himself.

In the span of a few short months, three different men—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—declared themselves emperor, each in turn violently overthrown by his successor. There was a complete breakdown of law and order in Rome as thieves and hooligans plundered the population without fear of consequence. Not since the war between Octavian and Mark Antony a hundred years earlier had the Romans experienced such civil unrest. Tacitus described it as a period “rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil struggles, horrible even in peace.”

But the Romans never came.

Henceforth, Judaism would no longer be deemed a worthy cult. The Jews were now the eternal enemy of Rome. Although mass population transfer had never been a Roman policy, Rome expelled every surviving Jew from Jerusalem and its surrounding environs,

All of Palestine became Vespasian’s personal property as the Romans strove to create the impression that there had never been any Jews in Jerusalem. By the year 135 C.E., the name Jerusalem ceased to exist in all official Roman documents.

there stands Jesus, according to the gospels, aloof, seemingly unperturbed, crying out over the din: “It is written: My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a den of thieves.”

a curious assertion about a man who not only lived in one of the most politically charged periods in Israel’s history, but who claimed to be the promised messiah sent to liberate the Jews from Roman occupation.

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.

Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities.

Perhaps his family was slow in accepting Jesus’s teachings and his extraordinary claims. But the historical evidence suggests that they all eventually came to believe in him and his mission.

Jesus’s neighbors were a different story, however. The gospel paints his fellow Nazareans as distressed by the return of “Mary’s son.” Although a few spoke well of him and were amazed by his words, most were deeply disturbed by his presence and his teachings. Jesus quickly became an outcast in the small hilltop community.

But Jesus’s message was designed to be a direct challenge to the wealthy and the powerful,

The message was simple: the Lord God had seen the suffering of the poor and dispossessed; he had heard their cries of anguish. And he was finally going to do something about it.

It was not the merchants and money changers he was addressing as he raged through the Temple courtyard, overturning tables and breaking open cages. It was those who profited most heavily from the Temple’s commerce, and who did so on the backs of poor Galileans like himself.

Well into the second and third centuries, the Jewish intellectuals and pagan philosophers who wrote treatises denouncing Christianity took Jesus’s status as an exorcist and miracle worker for granted. They may have denounced Jesus as nothing more than a traveling magician, but they did not doubt his magical abilities.

It is the finger of God that heals the blind, the deaf, the mute—the finger of God that exorcises the demons. Jesus’s task is simply to wield that finger as God’s agent on earth.

With every leper cleansed, every paralytic healed, every demon cast out, Jesus was not only challenging that priestly code, he was invalidating the very purpose of the priesthood.

He is telling him to present himself to the priest, having already been cleansed. This is a direct challenge not only to the priest’s authority, but to the Temple itself. Jesus did not only heal the leper, he purified him, making him eligible to appear at the Temple as a true Israelite. 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.

The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution, plain and simple.

The Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence.

Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews.

When it came to the heart and soul of the Jewish faith—the Law of Moses—Jesus was adamant that his mission was not to abolish the law but to fulfill it

To the Israelites, as well as to Jesus’s community in first-century Palestine, “neighbor” meant one’s fellow Jews, whether friend or foe.

In any case, neither the commandment to love one’s enemies nor the plea to turn the other cheek is equivalent to a call for nonviolence or nonresistance. Jesus was not a fool. He understood what every other claimant to the mantle of the messiah understood: God’s sovereignty could not be established except through force.

The designation of the Twelve is, if not a call to war, an admission of its inevitability, which is why Jesus expressly warned them of what was to come: “If anyone wishes to follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”

The cross is the punishment for sedition,

Over and over again, Jesus reminded his disciples of what lay ahead for him: rejection, arrest, torture, and execution

Jesus recognized that the new world order he envisioned was so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response to it would be to arrest and execute them all for sedition.

Jesus rebuffs, avoids, eludes, and sometimes downright rejects the title of messiah bestowed upon him by others.

It is called the “messianic secret.”

“The more he ordered them [not to tell anyone about him],” Mark writes, “the more excessively they proclaimed it” (Mark 7:36).

As has been repeatedly noted, the gospels are not about a man known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived two thousand years ago; they are about a messiah whom the gospel writers viewed as an eternal being sitting at the right hand of God.

the fact remains that, especially in Mark, every time someone tries to ascribe the title of messiah to him—whether a demon, or a supplicant, or one of the disciples, or even God himself—Jesus brushes it off or, at best, accepts it reluctantly and always with a caveat.

Jesus of Nazareth did not openly refer to himself as messiah. Nor, by the way, did Jesus call himself “Son of God,”

Jesus used an altogether different title, one so enigmatic and unique that for centuries scholars have been desperately trying to figure out what he could have possibly meant by it.

Jesus called himself “the Son of Man.”

this title, which is so ambiguous, and so infrequently found in the Hebrew Scriptures that to this day no one is certain what it actually means, is almost certainly one that Jesus gave himself.

Hebrew equivalent, ben adam, both of which mean “son of a human being.”

The difference between the Aramaic and Greek is significant and not likely the result of a poor translation by the evangelists. In employing the definite form of the phrase, Jesus was using it in a wholly new and unprecedented way: as a title, not as an idiom. Simply put, Jesus was not calling himself “a son of man.” He was calling himself the Son of Man.

James the Just,

far above Paul, with whom James repeatedly clashed. Why then has James been almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?

one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should 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.