Follow Me
The Galilee to which Jesus returned after his stint with John the Baptist was not the Galilee into which he had been born. The Galilee of Jesus’s childhood had undergone a profound psychic trauma, having felt the full force of Rome’s retribution for the revolts that erupted throughout the land after the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E.
The Roman response to rebellion, no matter where it arose in the realm, was scripted and predictable: burn the villages, raze the cities, enslave the population. That was likely the command given to the legions of troops dispatched by Emperor Augustus after Herod’s death to teach the rebellious Jews a lesson. The Romans easily snuffed out the uprisings in Judea and Peraea. But special attention was given to Galilee, the center of the revolt. Thousands were killed as the countryside was set ablaze. The devastation spread to every town and village; few were spared. The villages of Emmaus and Sampho were laid waste. Sepphoris, which had allowed Judas the Galilean to breach the city’s armory, was flattened. The whole of Galilee was consumed in fire and blood. Even tiny Nazareth would not have escaped the wrath of Rome.
Rome may have been right to focus so brutally on Galilee. The region had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity for centuries. Long before the Roman invasion, the term “Galilean” had become synonymous with “rebel.” Josephus speaks of the people of Galilee as “inured to war from their infancy,” and Galilee itself, which benefited from a rugged topography and mountainous terrain, he describes as “always resistant to hostile invasion.”
It did not matter whether the invaders were gentiles or Jews, the Galileans would not submit to foreign rule. Not even King Solomon could tame Galilee; the region and its people fiercely resisted the heavy taxes and forced labor he imposed on them to complete construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem. Nor could the Hasmonaeans—the priest-kings who ruled the land from 140 B.C.E. until the Roman invasion in 63 B.C.E.—ever quite manage to induce the Galileans to submit to the Temple-state they created in Judea. And Galilee was a constant thorn in the side of King Herod, who was not named King of the Jews until after he proved he could rid the troublesome region of the bandit menace.
The Galileans seem to have considered themselves a wholly different people from the rest of the Jews in Palestine. Josephus explicitly refers to the people of Galilee as a separate ethnoi, or nation; the Mishnah claims the Galileans had different rules and customs than the Judeans when it came to matters such as marriage or weights and measures. These were pastoral people—country folk—easily recognizable by their provincial customs and their distinctly rustic accent (it was his Galilean accent that gave Simon Peter away as a follower of Jesus after his arrest: “Certainly you are also one of [Jesus’s disciples], for your accent betrays you”; Matthew 26:73). The urban elite in Judea referred to the Galileans derisively as “the people of the land,” a term meant to convey their dependence on subsistence farming. But the term had a more sinister connotation, meaning those who are uneducated and impious, those who do not properly abide by the law, particularly when it came to making the obligatory tithes and offerings to the Temple. The literature of the era is full of Judean complaints about the laxity of the Galileans in paying their Temple dues in a timely manner, while a bevy of apocryphal scriptures, such as The Testament of Levi and the Enoch corpus, reflect a distinctly Galilean critique of the lavish lifestyles of the Judean priesthood, their exploitation of the peasantry, and their shameful collaboration with Rome.
No doubt the Galileans felt a meaningful connection to the Temple as the dwelling place of the spirit of God, but they also evinced a deep disdain for the Temple priests who viewed themselves as the sole arbiters of God’s will. There is evidence to suggest that the Galileans were both less observant of the Temple rituals and, given the three-day distance between Galilee and Jerusalem, less likely to make frequent visits to it. Those Galilean farmers and peasants who could scrape enough money together to make it to Jerusalem for the sacred festivals would have found themselves in the humiliating position of handing over their meager sacrifices to wealthy Temple priests, some of whom may have owned the very lands these peasants and farmers labored on back home.
The divide between Judea and Galilee grew wider after Rome placed Galilee under the direct rule of Herod the Great’s son, Antipas. For the first time in their history the Galileans had a ruler who actually resided in Galilee. Antipas’s tetrarchy transformed the province into a separate political jurisdiction no longer subject to the direct authority of the Temple and the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem. The Galileans still owed their tithes to the ravenous Temple treasury, and Rome still exercised control over every aspect of life in Galilee: Rome had installed Antipas and Rome commanded him. But Antipas’s rule allowed for a small yet meaningful measure of Galilean autonomy. There were no longer any Roman troops stationed in the province; they had been replaced by Antipas’s own soldiers. And at least Antipas was a Jew who, for the most part, tried not to offend the religious sensibilities of those under his rule—his marriage to his brother’s wife and the execution of John the Baptist notwithstanding.
From around 10 C.E., when Antipas established his capital at Sepphoris, to 36 C.E., when he was deposed by the emperor Caligula and sent into exile, the Galileans enjoyed a period of peace and tranquillity that was surely a welcome respite from the decade of rebellion and war that had preceded it. But the peace was a ruse, the cessation of conflict a pretense for the physical transformation of Galilee. For in the span of those twenty years, Antipas built two new Greek cities—his first capital, Sepphoris, followed by his second, Tiberias, on the coast of the Sea of Galilee—that completely upended traditional Galilean society.
These were the first real cities that Galilee had ever seen, and they were almost wholly populated with non-Galileans: Roman merchants, Greek-speaking gentiles, pursy Judean settlers. The new cities placed enormous pressure on the region’s economy, essentially dividing the province between those with wealth and power and those who served them by providing the labor necessary to maintain their lavish lifestyles. Villages in which subsistence farming or fishing were the norm were gradually overwhelmed by the needs of the cities, as agriculture and food production became singularly focused on feeding the new cosmopolitan population. Taxes were raised, land prices doubled, and debts soared, slowly disintegrating the traditional way of life in Galilee.
When Jesus was born, Galilee was aflame. His first decade of life coincided with the plunder and destruction of the Galilean countryside, his second with its refashioning at the hands of Antipas. When Jesus departed Galilee for Judea and John the Baptist, Antipas had already left Sepphoris for his even larger and more ornate royal seat at Tiberias. By the time he returned, the Galilee he knew—of family farms and open fields, of blooming orchards and vast meadows bursting with wildflowers—looked a lot like the province of Judea he had just left behind: urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.
Jesus’s first stop upon returning to Galilee would surely have been Nazareth, where his family still resided, though he did not stay long in his hometown. Jesus had left Nazareth a simple tekton. He returned as something else. His transformation created a deep rift in his community. They seem hardly to recognize the itinerant preacher who suddenly reappeared in their village. The gospels say Jesus’s mother, brothers, and sisters were scandalized by what people were saying about him; they tried desperately to silence and restrain him (Mark 3:21). Yet when they approached Jesus and urged him to return home and resume the family business, he refused. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Jesus asked, looking at those around him. “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–34).
This account in the gospel of Mark is often interpreted as suggesting that Jesus’s family rejected his teachings and denied his identity as messiah. But there is nothing in Jesus’s reply to his family that hints at hostility between him and his brothers and sisters. Nor is there anything in the gospels to indicate that Jesus’s family rebuffed his messianic ambitions. On the contrary, Jesus’s brothers played fairly significant roles in the movement he founded. His brother James became the leader of the community in Jerusalem after his crucifixion. 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. The gospel of Luke claims the residents of Nazareth finally drove him out to the brow of the hill on which the village was built and tried to push him off a cliff (Luke 4:14–30). The story is suspect; there is no cliff to be pushed off in Nazareth, just a gently sloping hillside. Still, the fact remains that, at least at first, Jesus was unable to find much of a following in Nazareth. “No prophet is accepted in his hometown,” he said before abandoning his childhood home for a nearby fishing village called Capernaum on the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee.
Capernaum was the ideal place for Jesus to launch his ministry, as it perfectly reflected the calamitous changes wrought by the new Galilean economy under Antipas’s rule. The seaside village of some fifteen hundred mostly farmers and fishermen, known for its temperate climate and its fertile soil, would become Jesus’s base of operations throughout the first year of his mission in Galilee. The entire village stretched along a wide expanse of the seacoast, allowing the cool salt air to nurture all manner of plants and trees. Clumps of lush littoral vegetation thrived along the vast coastline throughout the year, while thickets of walnut and pine, fig and olive trees dotted the low-lying hills inland. The true gift of Capernaum was the magnificent sea itself, which teemed with an array of fish that had nourished and sustained the population for centuries.
By the time Jesus set up his ministry there, however, Capernaum’s economy had become almost wholly centered on serving the needs of the new cities that had cropped up around it, especially the new capital, Tiberias, which lay just a few kilometers to the south. Food production had increased exponentially, and with it the standard of living for those farmers and fishermen who had the capacity to purchase more cultivatable land or to buy more boats and nets. But, as in the rest of Galilee, the profits from this increase in the means of production disproportionately benefited the large landowners and moneylenders who resided outside Capernaum: the wealthy priests in Judea and the new urban elite in Sepphoris and Tiberias. The majority of Capernaum’s residents had been left behind by the new Galilean economy. It would be these people whom Jesus would specifically target—those who found themselves cast to the fringes of society, whose lives had been disrupted by the rapid social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.
This is not to say that Jesus was interested solely in the poor, or that only the poor would follow him. A number of fairly prosperous benefactors—the toll collectors Levi (Mark 2:13–15) and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10) and the wealthy patron Jairus (Mark 5:21–43), to name a few—would come to fund Jesus’s mission by providing food and lodging to him and his followers. But Jesus’s message was designed to be a direct challenge to the wealthy and the powerful, be they the occupiers in Rome, the collaborators in the Temple, or the new moneyed class in the Greek cities of Galilee. 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. This may not have been a new message—John preached much the same thing—but it was a message being delivered to a new Galilee, by a man who, as a tried and true Galilean himself, shared the anti-Judea, anti-Temple sentiments that permeated the province.
Jesus was not in Capernaum for long before he began gathering to himself a small group of like-minded Galileans, mostly culled from the ranks of the fishing village’s disaffected youth, who would become his first disciples (actually, Jesus had arrived with a couple of disciples already in tow, those who had left John the Baptist after his capture and followed Jesus instead). According to the gospel of Mark, Jesus found his first followers while walking along the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Spying two young fishermen, Simon and his brother Andrew, casting nets, he said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” The brothers, Mark writes, immediately dropped their nets and went with him. Sometime later Jesus came upon another pair of fishermen—James and John, the young sons of Zebedee—and made them the same offer. They, too, left their boat and their nets and followed Jesus (Mark 1:16–20).
What set the disciples apart from the crowds that swelled and shrank whenever Jesus entered one village or another is that they actually traveled with Jesus. Unlike the enthusiastic but fickle masses, the disciples were specifically called by Jesus to leave their homes and their families behind to follow him from town to town, village to village. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—yes even his life—he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26 | Matthew 10:37).
The gospel of Luke claims that there were seventy-two disciples in all (Luke 10:1–12), and they undoubtedly included women, some of whom, in defiance of tradition, are actually named in the New Testament: Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Chuza; Mary, the mother of James and Joseph; Mary, the wife of Clopas; Susanna; Salome; and perhaps most famous of all, Mary from Magdala, whom Jesus had cured of “seven demons” (Luke 8:2). That these women functioned as Jesus’s disciples is demonstrated by the fact that all four gospels present them as traveling with Jesus from town to town (Mark 15:40–41; Matthew 27:55–56; Luke 8:2–3; 23:49; John 19:25). The gospels claim “many other women … followed [Jesus] and served him,” too (Mark 15:40–41), from his first days preaching in Galilee to his last breath on the hill in Golgotha.
But among the seventy-two, there was an inner core of disciples—all of them men—who would serve a special function in Jesus’s ministry. These were known simply as “the Twelve.” They included the brothers James and John—the sons of Zebedee—who would be called Boanerges, “the sons of thunder”; Philip, who was from Bethsaida and who began as one of John the Baptist’s disciples before he switched his allegiance to Jesus (John 1:35–44); Andrew, who the gospel of John claims also began as a follower of the Baptist, though the synoptic gospels contradict this assertion by locating him in Capernaum; Andrew’s brother Simon, the disciple whom Jesus nicknames Peter; Matthew, who is sometimes erroneously associated with another of Jesus’s disciples, Levi, the toll collector; Jude the son of James; James the son of Alphaeus; Thomas, who would become legendary for doubting Jesus’s resurrection; Bartholomew, about whom almost nothing is known; another Simon, known as “the Zealot,” a designation meant to signal his commitment to the biblical doctrine of zeal, not his association with the Zealot Party, which would not exist for another thirty years; and Judas Iscariot, the man the gospels claim would one day betray Jesus to the high priest Caiaphas.
The Twelve will become the principal bearers of Jesus’s message—the apostolou, or “ambassadors”—apostles sent off to neighboring towns and villages to preach independently and without supervision (Luke 9:1–6). They would not be the leaders of Jesus’s movement, but rather its chief missionaries. Yet the Twelve had another more symbolic function, one that would manifest itself later in Jesus’s ministry. For they will come to represent the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel, long since destroyed and scattered.
With his home base firmly established and his handpicked group of disciples growing, Jesus began visiting the village synagogue to preach his message to the people of Capernaum. The gospels say that those who heard him were astonished at his teaching, though not so much because of his words. Again, at this point, Jesus was merely echoing his master, John the Baptist: “From that time [when Jesus arrived in Capernaum],” Matthew writes, “Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven is near’ ” (Matthew 4:17). Rather, what astonished the crowds at that Capernaum synagogue was the charismatic authority with which Jesus spoke, “for he taught them as one with authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:28; Mark 1:22; Luke 4:31).
The comparison to the scribes, emphasized in all three synoptic gospels, is conspicuous and telling. Unlike John the Baptist, who was likely raised in a family of Judean priests, Jesus was a peasant. He spoke like a peasant. He taught in Aramaic, the common tongue. His authority was not that of the bookish scholars and the priestly aristocracy. Their authority came from their solemn lucubration and their intimate connection to the Temple. Jesus’s authority came directly from God. Indeed, from the moment he entered the synagogue in this small coastal village, Jesus went out of his way to set himself in direct opposition to the guardians of the Temple and the Jewish cult by challenging their authority as God’s representatives on earth.
Although the gospels portray Jesus as being in conflict with a whole range of Jewish authorities who are often lumped together into formulaic categories such as “the chief priests and elders,” or “the scribes and Pharisees,” these were separate and distinct groups in first-century Palestine, and Jesus had different relationships with each of them. While the gospels tend to paint the Pharisees as Jesus’s main detractors, the fact is that his relations with the Pharisees, while occasionally testy, were, for the most part, fairly civil and even friendly at times. It was a Pharisee who warned Jesus that his life was in danger (Luke 13:31), a Pharisee who helped bury him after his execution (John 19:39–40), a Pharisee who saved the lives of his disciples after he ascended into heaven (Acts 5:34). Jesus dined with Pharisees, he debated them, he lived among them; a few Pharisees were even counted among his followers.
In contrast, the handful of encounters Jesus had with the priestly nobility and the learned elite of legal scholars (the scribes) who represent them is always portrayed by the gospels in the most hostile light. To whom else was Jesus referring when he said, “You have turned my house into a den of thieves”? 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.
Like his zealous predecessors, Jesus was less concerned with the pagan empire occupying Palestine than he was with the Jewish imposter occupying God’s Temple. Both would come to view Jesus as a threat, and both would seek his death. But there can be no doubt that Jesus’s main antagonist in the gospels is neither the distant emperor in Rome nor his heathen officials in Judea. It is the high priest Caiaphas, who will become the main instigator of the plot to execute Jesus precisely because of the threat he posed to the Temple’s authority (Mark 14:1–2; Matthew 26:57–66; John 11:49–50).
As Jesus’s ministry expanded, becoming ever more urgent and confrontational, his words and actions would increasingly reflect a deep antagonism toward the high priest and the Judean religious establishment, who, in Jesus’s words, loved “to prance around in long robes and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.”
“They devour the homes of widows and make long prayers for the sake of appearance,” Jesus says of the scribes. And for that, “their condemnation will be the greater” (Mark 12:38–40). Jesus’s parables, especially, were riddled with the same anticlerical sentiments that shaped the politics and piety of Galilee, and that would become the hallmark of his ministry. Consider the famous parable of the Good Samaritan:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among thieves who stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and left him half dead. By chance, a priest came down that road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. A Levite (priest) also came by that place and seeing the man, he, too, passed on the other side. But a certain Samaritan on a journey came where the man was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds and poured oil and wine on them. He placed the man on his own animal, and led him to an inn, and took care of him. The following day he gave the innkeeper two denarii and said, “Take care of him; when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend” (Luke 10:30–37).
Christians have long interpreted this parable as reflecting the importance of helping those in distress. But for the audience gathered at Jesus’s feet, the parable would have had less to do with the goodness of the Samaritan than with the baseness of the two priests.
The Jews considered the Samaritans to be the lowliest, most impure people in Palestine for one chief reason: the Samaritans rejected the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem as the sole legitimate place of worship. Instead, they worshipped the God of Israel in their own temple on Mount Gerizim, on the western bank of the Jordan River. For those among Jesus’s listeners who recognized themselves as the beaten, half-dead man left lying on the road, the lesson of the parable would have been self-evident: the Samaritan, who denies the authority of the Temple, goes out of his way to fulfill the commandment of the Lord to “love your neighbor as yourself” (the parable itself was given in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?”). The priests, who derive their wealth and authority from their connection to the Temple, ignore the commandment altogether for fear of defiling their ritual purity and thus endangering that connection.
The people of Capernaum devoured this brazenly anticlerical message. Almost immediately, large crowds began to gather around Jesus. Some recognized him as the boy born in Nazareth to a family of woodworkers. Others heard of the power of his words and came to listen to him preach out of curiosity. Still, at this point, Jesus’s reputation was contained along the shores of Capernaum. Outside this fishing village, no one else had yet heard of the charismatic Galilean preacher—not Antipas in Tiberias, not Caiaphas in Jerusalem.
But then something happened that would change everything.
While standing at the Capernaum synagogue, speaking about the Kingdom of God, Jesus was suddenly interrupted by a man the gospels describe as having “an unclean spirit.”
“What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth?” the man cried out. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, oh holy one of God.”
Jesus cut him off at once. “Silence! Come out of him!”
All at once, the man fell to the floor, writhing in convulsions. A great cry came out of his mouth. And he was still.
Everyone in the synagogue was amazed. “What is this?” the people asked one another. “A new teaching? And with such authority that he commands the spirits and they obey him” (Mark 1:23–28).
After that, Jesus’s fame could no longer be confined to Capernaum. News of the itinerant preacher spread throughout the region, into the whole of Galilee. In every town and village the crowds grew larger as people everywhere came out, not so much to hear his message but to see the wondrous deeds they had heard about. For while the disciples would ultimately recognize Jesus as the promised messiah and the heir to the kingdom of David, while the Romans would view him as a false claimant to the office of King of the Jews, and while the scribes and the Temple priests would come to consider him a blasphemous threat to their control of the Jewish cult, for the vast majority of Jews in Palestine—those he claimed to have been sent to free from oppression—Jesus was neither messiah nor king, but just another traveling miracle worker and professional exorcist roaming through Galilee performing tricks.