Zealot E-Book

Reza Aslan

• Herausgeber: The Westbourne Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

From the internationally bestselling author of No god but God comes a fascinating, provocative and meticulously researched biography that challenges long-held assumptions about the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth. Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher from Galilee launched a revolutionary movement proclaiming the 'Kingdom of God', and threatened the established order of first-century Palestine. Defying both Imperial Rome and its collaborators in the Jewish religious hierarchy, he was captured, tortured and executed as a state criminal. Within decades, his followers would call him the Son of God. Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most influential and enigmatic figures by examining Jesus within the context of the times in which he lived: the age of zealotry, an era awash in apocalyptic fervour, when scores of Jewish prophets and would-be messiahs wandered the Holy Land bearing messages from God. They also espoused a fervent nationalism that made resistance to Roman occupation a sacred duty. Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against historical sources, Aslan describes a complex figure: a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves; an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity secret; and the seditious 'King of the Jews', whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his lifetime. Aslan explores why the early Church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary, and grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself. Zealot provides a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel, and a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time and the birth of a religion.

Leseprobe

BY REZA ASLAN

BOOKS

Zealot

Beyond Fundamentalism (originally published as How to Win a Cosmic War)

No god but God

EDITED COLLECTIONS

Tablet & Pen

Muslims and Jews in America (with Aaron J. Hahn Tapper)

ZEALOT

ZEALOT

The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Reza Aslan

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.

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword.

MATTHEW 10:34

CONTENTS

Map: First-Century Palestine

The Temple in Jerusalem

Author’s Note

Introduction

Chronology

PART I

Prologue: A Different Sort of Sacrifice

Chapter One: A Hole in the Corner

Chapter Two: King of the Jews

Chapter Three: You Know Where I Am From

Chapter Four: The Fourth Philosophy

Chapter Five: Where Is Your Fleet to Sweep the Roman Seas?

Chapter Six: Year One

PART II

Prologue: Zeal for Your House

Chapter Seven: The Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness

Chapter Eight: Follow Me

Chapter Nine: By the Finger of God

Chapter Ten: May Your Kingdom Come

Chapter Eleven: Who Do You Say I Am?

Chapter Twelve: No King but Caesar

PART III

Prologue: God Made Flesh

Chapter Thirteen: If Christ Has Not Been Risen

Chapter Fourteen: Am I Not an Apostle?

Chapter Fifteen: The Just One

Epilogue: True God from True God

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When I was fifteen years old, I found Jesus.

I spent the summer of my sophomore year at an evangelical youth camp in Northern California, a place of timbered fields and boundless blue skies, where, given enough time and stillness and soft-spoken encouragement, one could not help but hear the voice of God. Amidst the man-made lakes and majestic pines my friends and I sang songs, played games, and swapped secrets, rollicking in our freedom from the pressures of home and school. In the evenings, we gathered in a firelit assembly hall at the center of the camp. It was there that I heard a remarkable story that would change my life forever.

Two thousand years ago, I was told, in an ancient land called Galilee, the God of heaven and earth was born in the form of a helpless child. The child grew into a blameless man. The man became the Christ, the savior of humanity. Through his words and miraculous deeds, he challenged the Jews, who thought they were the chosen of God, and in return the Jews had him nailed to a cross. Though he could have saved himself from that gruesome death, he freely chose to die. His death was the point of it all, for his sacrifice freed us all from the burden of our sins. But the story did not end there, because three days later, he rose again, exalted and divine, so that now, all who believe in him and accept him into their hearts will also never die, but have eternal life.

For a kid raised in a motley family of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists, this was truly the greatest story ever told. Never before had I felt so intimately the pull of God. In Iran, the place of my birth, I was Muslim in much the way I was Persian. My religion and my ethnicity were mutual and linked. Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable. After the Iranian revolution forced my family to flee our home, religion in general, and Islam in particular, became taboo in our household. Islam was shorthand for everything we had lost to the mullahs who now ruled Iran. My mother still prayed when no one was looking, and you could still find a stray Quran or two hidden in a closet or a drawer somewhere. But, for the most part, our lives were scrubbed of all trace of God.

That was just fine with me. After all, in the America of the 1980s, being Muslim was like being from Mars. My faith was a bruise, the most obvious symbol of my otherness; it needed to be concealed.

Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America’s national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American. I do not mean to say that mine was a conversion of convenience. On the contrary, I burned with absolute devotion to my newfound faith. I was presented with a Jesus who was less “Lord and Savior” than he was a best friend, someone with whom I could have a deep and personal relationship. As a teenager trying to make sense of an indeterminate world I had only just become aware of, this was an invitation I could not refuse.

The moment I returned home from camp, I began eagerly to share the good news of Jesus Christ with my friends and family, my neighbors and classmates, with people I’d just met and with strangers on the street: those who heard it gladly, and those who threw it back in my face. Yet something unexpected happened in my quest to save the souls of the world. The more I probed the Bible to arm myself against the doubts of unbelievers, the more distance I discovered between the Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus of history—between Jesus the Christ and Jesus of Nazareth. In college, where I began my formal study of the history of religions, that initial discomfort soon ballooned into full-blown doubts of my own.

The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions—just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years—left me confused and spiritually unmoored. And so, like many people in my situation, I angrily discarded my faith as if it were a costly forgery I had been duped into buying. I began to rethink the faith and culture of my forefathers, finding in them as an adult a deeper, more intimate familiarity than I ever had as a child, the kind that comes from reconnecting with an old friend after many years apart.

Meanwhile, I continued my academic work in religious studies, delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar. No longer chained to the assumption that the stories I read were literally true, I became aware of a more meaningful truth in the text, a truth intentionally detached from the exigencies of history. Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus, the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that he defied, the more I was drawn to him. Indeed, the Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost became so much more real to me than the detached, unearthly being I had been introduced to in church.

Today, I can confidently say that two decades of rigorous academic research into the origins of Christianity has made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ. My hope with this book is to spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied to spreading the story of the Christ.

There are a few things to keep in mind before we begin our examination. 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. Rather than burden the reader with the centuries-long debate about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth, I have constructed my narrative upon what I believe to be the most accurate and reasonable argument, based on my two decades of scholarly research into the New Testament and early Christian history. For those interested in the debate, I have exhaustively detailed my research and, whenever possible, provided the arguments of those who disagree with my interpretation in the lengthy notes section at the end of this book.

All Greek translations of the New Testament are my own (with a little help from my friends Liddell and Scott). In those few cases in which I do not directly translate a passage of the New Testament, I rely on the translation provided by the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. All Hebrew and Aramaic translations are provided by Dr. Ian C. Werrett, associate professor of religious studies at St. Martin’s University.

Throughout the text, all references to the Q source material (the material unique to the gospels of Matthew and Luke) will be marked thus: (Matthew | Luke), with the order of the books indicating which gospel I am most directly quoting. The reader will notice that I rely primarily on the gospel of Mark and the Q material in forming my outline of the story of Jesus. That is because these are the earliest and thus most reliable sources available to us about the life of the Nazarean. In general I have chosen not to delve too deeply into the so-called Gnostic Gospels. While these texts are incredibly important in outlining the wide array of opinions among the early Christian community about who Jesus was and what his teachings meant, they do not shed much light on the historical Jesus himself.

Although it is almost unanimously agreed that, with the possible exception of Luke-Acts, the gospels were not written by the people for whom they are named, for ease and the sake of clarity, I will continue to refer to the gospel writers by the names by which we now know and recognize them.

Finally, in keeping with scholarly designations, this text employs C.E., or Common Era, instead of A.D. in its dating, and B.C.E. instead of B.C. It also more properly refers to the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible or the Hebrew Scriptures.

INTRODUCTION

It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth. The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of the world, a band of ragged followers trailing behind, was a common sight in Jesus’s time—so common, in fact, that it had become a kind of caricature among the Roman elite. In a farcical passage about just such a figure, the Greek philosopher Celsus imagines a Jewish holy man roaming the Galilean countryside, shouting to no one in particular: “I am God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit. But I am coming, for the world is already in the throes of destruction. And you will soon see me coming with the power of heaven.”

The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern-day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God’s imminent judgment. Many of these so-called false messiahs we know by name. A few are even mentioned in the New Testament. The prophet Theudas, according to the book of Acts, had four hundred disciples before Rome captured him and cut off his head. A mysterious charismatic figure known only as “the Egyptian” raised an army of followers in the desert, nearly all of whom were massacred by Roman troops. In 4 B.C.E., the year in which most scholars believe Jesus of Nazareth was born, a poor shepherd named Athronges put a diadem on his head and crowned himself “King of the Jews”; he and his followers were brutally cut down by a legion of soldiers. Another messianic aspirant, called simply “the Samaritan,” was crucified by Pontius Pilate even though he raised no army and in no way challenged Rome—an indication that the authorities, sensing the apocalyptic fever in the air, had become extremely sensitive to any hint of sedition. There was Hezekiah the bandit chief, Simon of Peraea, Judas the Galilean, his grandson Menahem, Simon son of Giora, and Simon son of Kochba—all of whom declared messianic ambitions and all of whom were executed by Rome for doing so. Add to this list the Essene sect, some of whose members lived in seclusion atop the dry plateau of Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea; the first-century Jewish revolutionary party known as the Zealots, who helped launched a bloody war against Rome; and the fearsome bandit-assassins whom the Romans dubbed the Sicarii (the Daggermen), and the picture that emerges of first-century Palestine is of an era awash in messianic energy.

It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within any of the known religiopolitical movements of his time. He was a man of profound contradictions, one day preaching a message of racial exclusion (“I was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel”; Matthew 15:24), the next, of benevolent universalism (“Go and make disciples of all nations”; Matthew 28:19); sometimes calling for unconditional peace (“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God”; Matthew 5:9), sometimes promoting violence and conflict (“If you do not have a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one”; Luke 22:36).

The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that, outside of the New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would so permanently alter the course of human history. The earliest and most reliable nonbiblical reference to Jesus comes from the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (d. 100 C.E.). In a brief throwaway passage in the Antiquities, Josephus writes of a fiendish Jewish high priest named Ananus who, after the death of the Roman governor Festus, unlawfully condemned a certain “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah,” to stoning for transgression of the law. The passage moves on to relate what happened to Ananus after the new governor, Albinus, finally arrived in Jerusalem.

Fleeting and dismissive as this allusion may be (the phrase “the one they call messiah” is clearly meant to express derision), it nevertheless contains enormous significance for those searching for any sign of the historical Jesus. In a society without surnames, a common name like James required a specific appellation—a place of birth or a father’s name—to distinguish it from all the other men named James roaming around Palestine (hence, Jesus of Nazareth). In this case, James’s appellative was provided by his fraternal connection to someone with whom Josephus assumes his audience would be familiar. The passage proves not only that “Jesus, the one they call messiah” probably existed, but that by the year 94 C.E., when the Antiquities was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring movement.

It is that movement, not its founder, that receives the attention of second-century historians like Tacitus (d. 118) and Pliny the Younger (d. 113), both of whom mention Jesus of Nazareth but reveal little about him, save for his arrest and execution—an important historical note, as we shall see, but one that sheds little light on the details of Jesus’s life. We are therefore left with whatever information can be gleaned from the New Testament.

The first written testimony we have about Jesus of Nazareth comes from the epistles of Paul, an early follower of Jesus who died sometime around 66 C.E. (Paul’s first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, can be dated between 48 and 50 C.E., some two decades after Jesus’s death.) The trouble with Paul, however, is that he displays an extraordinary lack of interest in the historical Jesus. Only three scenes from Jesus’s life are ever mentioned in his epistles: the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–26), the crucifixion (1 Corinthians 2:2), and, most crucially for Paul, the resurrection, without which, he claims, “our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Paul may be an excellent source for those interested in the early formation of Christianity, but he is a poor guide for uncovering the historical Jesus.

That leaves us with the gospels, which present their own set of problems. To begin with, with the possible exception of the gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have were written by the person after whom they are named. That actually is true of most of the books in the New Testament. Such so-called pseudepigraphical works, or works attributed to but not written by a specific author, were extremely common in the ancient world and should by no means be thought of as forgeries. Naming a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person’s beliefs or representing his or her school of thought. Regardless, 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.

The most widely accepted theory on the formation of the gospels, the “Two-Source Theory,” holds that Mark’s account was written first sometime after 70 C.E., about four decades after Jesus’s death. Mark had at his disposal a collection of oral and perhaps a handful of written traditions that had been passed around by Jesus’s earliest followers for years. By adding a chronological narrative to this jumble of traditions, Mark created a wholly new literary genre called gospel, Greek for “good news.” Yet Mark’s gospel is a short and somewhat unsatisfying one for many Christians. There is no infancy narrative; Jesus simply arrives one day on the banks of the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptist. There are no resurrection appearances. Jesus is crucified. His body is placed in a tomb. A few days later, the tomb is empty. Even the earliest Christians were left wanting by Mark’s brusque account of Jesus’s life and ministry, and so it was left to Mark’s successors, Matthew and Luke, to improve upon the original text.

Two decades after Mark, between 90 and 100 C.E., the authors of Matthew and Luke, working independently of each other and with Mark’s manuscript as a template, updated the gospel story by adding their own unique traditions, including two different and conflicting infancy narratives as well as a series of elaborate resurrection stories to satisfy their Christian readers. Matthew and Luke also relied on what must have been an early and fairly well distributed collection of Jesus’s sayings that scholars have termed Q (German for Quelle, or “source”). Although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we can infer its contents by compiling those verses that Matthew and Luke share in common but that do not appear in Mark.

Together, 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, one that is greatly at odds with the fourth gospel, John, which was likely written soon after the close of the first century, between 100 and 120 C.E.

These, then, are the canonized gospels. But they are not the only gospels. We now have access to an entire library of noncanonical scriptures written mostly in the second and third centuries that provides a vastly different perspective on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. These include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a host of other so-called Gnostic writings discovered in Upper Egypt, near the town of Nag Hammadi, in 1945. Though they were left out of what would ultimately become the New Testament, these books are significant in that they demonstrate the dramatic divergence of opinion that existed over who Jesus was and what Jesus meant, even among those who claimed to walk with him, who shared his bread and ate with him, who heard his words and prayed with him.

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. By themselves these two facts cannot provide a complete portrait of the life of a man who lived two thousand years ago. But when combined with all we know about the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived—and thanks to the Romans, we know a great deal—these two facts can help paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by the gospels. Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise—a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine—bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.

Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed in pain—“King of the Jews”—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus’s crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e., treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but which actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.

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. The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.

Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s message and movement? To answer this question we must first recognize that almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth was composed after the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. In that year, a band of Jewish rebels, spurred by their zeal for God, roused their fellow Jews in revolt. Miraculously, the rebels managed to liberate the Holy Land from the Roman occupation. For four glorious years, the city of God was once again under Jewish control. Then, in 70 C.E., the Romans returned. After a brief siege of Jerusalem, the soldiers breached the city walls and unleashed an orgy of violence upon its residents. They butchered everyone in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount. A river of blood flowed down the cobblestone streets. When the massacre was complete, the soldiers set fire to the Temple of God. The fires spread beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem’s meadows, the farms, the olive trees. Everything burned. So complete was the devastation wrought upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were marched out of the city in chains.

The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic event is hard to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to live as outcasts among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged.

The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because it allowed the early church to ward off the wrath of a deeply vengeful Rome, but also because, with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s evangelism. Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful 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 was born.

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 very nature and definition of the Jewish messiah.

There are those who consider such an endeavor to be a waste of time, believing the Jesus of history to be irrevocably lost and incapable of recovery. Long gone are the heady days of “the quest for the historical Jesus,” when scholars confidently proclaimed that modern scientific tools and historical research would allow us to uncover Jesus’s true identity. The real Jesus no longer matters, these scholars argue. We should focus instead on the only Jesus that is accessible to us: Jesus the Christ.

Granted, writing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth is not like writing a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. The task is somewhat akin to putting together a massive puzzle with only a few of the pieces in hand; one has no choice but to fill in the rest of the puzzle based on the best, most educated guess of what the completed image should look like. The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves—their own reflection—in the image of Jesus they have constructed.

And yet that best, most educated guess may be enough to, at the very least, question our most basic assumptions about Jesus of Nazareth. If we expose the claims of the gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures of their literary and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate picture of the Jesus of history. Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived—an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism—then, in some ways, his biography writes itself.

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means.

Everything else is a matter of faith.

CHRONOLOGY

164 B.C.E.

The Maccabean Revolt

140

Founding of the Hasmonaean Dynasty

63

Pompey Magnus conquers Jerusalem

37

Herod the Great named King of the Jews

4

Herod the Great dies

4

Revolt of Judas the Galilean

4 B.C.E.–6 C.E.:

Jesus of Nazareth born

6 C.E.:

Judea officially becomes Roman province

10

Sepphoris becomes first royal seat of Herod Antipas

18

Joseph Caiaphas appointed High Priest

20

Tiberias becomes second royal seat of Herod Antipas

26

Pontius Pilate becomes governor (prefect) in Jerusalem

26–28

Launch of John the Baptist’s ministry

28–30

Launch of Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry

30–33

Death of Jesus of Nazareth

36

Revolt of the Samaritan

37

Conversion of Saul of Tarsus (Paul)

44

Revolt of Theudas

46

Revolt of Jacob and Simon, the sons of Judas the Galilean

48

Paul writes first epistle: 1 Thessalonians

56

Murder of the High Priest Jonathan

56

Paul writes final epistle: Romans

57

Revolt of the Egyptian

62

Death of James, the brother of Jesus

66

Death of Paul and the Apostle Peter in Rome

66

The Jewish Revolt

70

The Destruction of Jerusalem

70–71

The gospel of Mark written

73

Romans capture Masada

80–90

The epistle of James written

90–100

The gospels of Matthew and Luke written

94

Josephus writes the Antiquities

100–120

The gospel of John written

132

Revolt of Simon son of Kochba

300

The Pseudo-Clementines compiled

313

Emperor Constantine issues Edict of Milan

325

The Council of Nicaea

398

The Council of Hippo Regius

PART I

Arise! Arise!

Put on your strength, O Zion!

Put on your beautiful garments, Jerusalem, the holy city;

for the uncircumcised and the unclean

shall never again enter you.

Shake off the dust from yourself, stand up,

O captive Jerusalem;

release the bonds from your neck,

O captive daughter of Zion.

ISAIAH 52:1–2

Prologue

A DIFFERENT SORT OF SACRIFICE

The war with Rome begins not with a clang of swords but with the lick of a dagger drawn from an assassin’s cloak.

Festival season in Jerusalem: a time when Jews from across the Mediterranean converge upon the holy city bearing fragrant offerings to God. There are in the ancient Jewish cult a host of annual observances and celebrations that can only be performed here, inside the Temple of Jerusalem, in the presence of the high priest, who hoards the most sacred feast days—Passover, Pentecost, the harvest festival of Sukkot—for himself, all the while pocketing a healthy fee, or tithe, as he would call it, for his trouble. And what trouble it is! On such days the city’s population can swell to more than a million people. It takes the full force of the porters and lower priests to squeeze the crush of pilgrims through the Hulda Gates at the Temple’s southern wall, to herd them along the dark and cavernous galleries beneath the Temple plaza and guide them up the double flight of stairs that lead to the public square and marketplace known as the Court of Gentiles.

The Temple of Jerusalem is a roughly rectangular structure, some five hundred meters long and three hundred meters wide, balanced atop Mount Moriah, on the eastern edge of the holy city. Its outer walls are rimmed with covered porticos whose slab-topped roofs, held up by row after row of glittering white stone columns, protect the masses from the merciless sun. On the Temple’s southern flank sits the largest and most ornate of the porticoes, the Royal Portico—a tall, two-story, basilica-like assembly hall built in the customary Roman style. This is the administrative quarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme religious body and highest judicial court of the Jewish nation. It is also where a clatter of merchants and grubby money changers lie in wait as you make your way up the underground stairs and onto the spacious sunlit plaza.

The money changers play a vital role in the Temple. For a fee, they will exchange your foul foreign coins for the Hebrew shekel, the only currency permitted by the Temple authorities. The money changers will also collect the half-shekel Temple tax that all adult males must pay to preserve the pomp and spectacle of all you see around you: the mountains of burning incense and the ceaseless sacrifices, the wine libations and the first-fruits offering, the Levite choir belting out psalms of praise and the accompanying orchestra thrumming lyres and banging cymbals. Someone must pay for these necessities. Someone must bear the cost of the burnt offerings that so please the Lord.

With the new currency in hand, you are now free to peruse the pens lining the periphery walls to purchase your sacrifice: a pigeon, a sheep—it depends on the depth of your purse, or the depth of your sins. If the latter transcends the former, do not despair. The money changers are happy to offer the credit you need to enhance your sacrifice. There is a strict legal code regulating the animals that can be purchased for the blessed occasion. They must be free of blemish. Domesticated, not wild. They cannot be beasts of burden. Whether ox or bull or ram or sheep, they must have been reared for this purpose alone. They are not cheap. Why should they be? The sacrifice is the Temple’s primary purpose. It is the very reason for the Temple’s being. The songs, the prayers, the readings—every ritual that takes place here arose in service of this singular and most vital ritual. The blood libation not only wipes away your sins, it cleanses the earth. It feeds the earth, renewing and sustaining it, protecting us all from drought or famine or worse. The cycle of life and death that the Lord in his omnificence has decreed is wholly dependent upon your sacrifice. This is not the time for thrift.

So purchase your offering, and make it a good one. Pass it on to any of the white-robed priests roaming the Temple plaza. They are the descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses, responsible for maintaining the Temple’s daily rites: the burning of incense, the lighting of lamps, the sounding of trumpets, and, of course, the sacrificial offerings. The priesthood is a hereditary position, but there is no shortage of them, certainly not during festival season, when they arrive in droves from distant lands to assist in the festivities. They cram the Temple in twenty-four-hour shifts to ensure that the fires of sacrifice are kept aflame day and night.

The Temple is constructed as a series of tiered courtyards, each smaller, more elevated, and more restrictive than the last. The outermost courtyard, the Court of Gentiles, where you purchased your sacrifice, is a broad piazza open to everyone, regardless of race or religion. If you are a Jew—one free of any physical affliction (no lepers, no paralytics) and properly purified by a ritual bath—you may follow the priest with your offering through a stone-lattice fence and proceed into the next courtyard, the Court of Women (a plaque on the fence warns all others to proceed no farther than the outer court on pain of death). Here is where the wood and oil for the sacrifices are stored. It is also the farthest into the Temple that any Jewish woman may proceed; Jewish men may continue up a small semicircular flight of stairs through the Nicanor Gate and into the Court of Israelites.