I am greatly indebted to John P. Meier’s epic work, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vols. I–IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991–2009). I first met Father Meier while I was studying the New Testament at Santa Clara University, and it was his definitive look at the historical Jesus, which at the time existed only in its first volume, that planted the seeds of the present book in my mind. Father Meier’s book answers the question of why we have so little historical information about a man who so thoroughly changed the course of human history. His thesis—that we know so little about Jesus because in his lifetime he would have been viewed as little more than a marginal Jewish peasant from the backwoods of Galilee—forms the theoretical groundwork for the book you are reading.
Of course, I argue further that part of the reason we know so little about the historical Jesus is that his messianic mission—historic as it may have turned out to be—was not uncommon in first-century Palestine. Hence my reference to Celsus’s quote—“I am God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit …”—which can be found in Rudolf Otto’s classic study, The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man (Boston: Starr King Press, 1957), 13.
A brief word about my use of the term “first-century Palestine” throughout this book. While Palestine was the unofficial Roman designation for the land encompassing modern-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon during Jesus’s lifetime, it was not until the Romans quashed the Bar Kochba revolt in the middle of the second century C.E that the region was officially named Syria Palaestina. Nevertheless, the term “first-century Palestine” has become so commonplace in academic discussions about the era of Jesus that I see no reason not to use it in this book.
For more on Jesus’s messianic contemporaries—the so-called false messiahs—see the works of Richard A. Horsley, specifically “Popular Messianic Movements Around the Time of Jesus,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984): 409–32; “Popular Prophetic Movements at the Time of Jesus: Their Principal Features and Social Origins,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26 (1986): 3–27; and, with John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), 135–189. The reader will note that I rely a great deal on Professor Horsley’s work. That is because he is by far the most prominent thinker on the subject of first-century apocalypticism.
Although the so-called Two-Source Theory is almost universally accepted by scholars, there are a handful of biblical theorists who reject it as a viable explanation for the creation of the four canonized gospels as we know them. For example, J. Magne, From Christianity to Gnosis and from Gnosis to Christianity (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993) views the Two-Source Theory as overly simplistic and incapable of adequately addressing what he sees as the complex variants among the Synoptic gospels.
In addition to the story of the fiendish Jewish priest Ananus, there is one other passage in Josephus’s Antiquities that mentions Jesus of Nazareth. This is the so-called Testimonium Flavianum in book 18, chapter 3, in which Josephus appears to repeat the entire gospel formula. But that passage has been so corrupted by later Christian interpolation that its authenticity is dubious at best, and scholarly attempts to cull through the passage for some sliver of historicity have proven futile. Still, the second passage is significant in that it mentions Jesus’s crucifixion.
Among Romans, crucifixion originated as a deterrence against the revolt of slaves, probably as early as 200 B.C.E. By Jesus’s time, it was the primary form of punishment for “inciting rebellion” (i.e., treason or sedition), the exact crime with which Jesus was charged. See Hubert Cancick et al., eds., Brill’s New Pauly Encyclopedia of the Ancient World: Antiquity (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2005), 60 and 966. The punishment applied solely to non-Roman citizens. Roman citizens could be crucified, however, if the crime was so grave that it essentially forfeited their citizenship.
There are no resurrection appearances in the gospel of Mark, as it is the unanimous consensus of scholars that the original version of the gospel ended with Mark 16:8. For more on this, see note to chapter 3 below.
In 313 C.E., the emperor Constantine passed the Edict of Milan, which initiated a period of Christian tolerance in the Roman Empire, wherein property that was confiscated from Christians by the state was returned and Christians were free to worship without fear of reprisals from the state. While the Edict of Milan created space for Christianity to become the official religion of the empire, Constantine never made it so. Julian the Apostate (d. 363 C.E), the last non-Christian emperor, actually tried to push the empire back toward paganism by emphasizing that system over and against Christianity and purging the government of Christian leaders, though he never repealed the Edict of Milan. It was not until the year 380 C.E., during the rule of Emperor Flavius Theodosius, that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
The very brief outline of Jesus’s life and ministry presented at the end of the introduction to this book represents the view of the vast majority of scholars about what can be said with confidence about the historical Jesus. For more, see Charles H. Talbert, ed., Reimarus: Fragments (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985) and James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, ed., The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2009).
Help with the description of the Temple of Jerusalem and the sacrifices therein comes from a variety of sources as well as from my frequent trips to the Temple site. But a few books were particularly helpful in reconstructing the ancient Jewish Temple, including Martin Jaffee, Early Judaism (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2006), especially page 172–88; Joan Comay, The Temple of Jerusalem (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975); and John Day, ed., Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel (New York: T&T Clark, 2005).
Instructions for the Temple’s four-horned altar were given to Moses while he and the Israelites rambled across the desert searching for a home: “And you shall make the altar of acacia wood. And you shall affix horns upon its four corners so that it shall be horned; and you shall overlay it with bronze. And you shall make pots for receiving its ashes, and shovels and basins and forks and fire pans; all of its vessels you shall cast in bronze. And you shall make for it a grating, a net made of bronze; and on the net you shall affix four bronze rings to its four corners. And you shall place it under the edge of the altar, so that the net extends halfway down the altar. And you shall make poles for the altar, poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with bronze. And the poles shall be inserted into the rings, so that the poles shall be on the two sides of the altar when it is carried. You shall make it hollow with boards, as it was shown to you on the mountain. Thus it shall be done” (Exodus 27:18).
What does it mean for the Temple to be the sole source of God’s divine presence? Consider this: The Samaritans denied the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem as the sole place of worship. They instead worshipped God on Mount Gerizim. Though this was essentially the only religious difference between the two peoples, it was enough for the Samaritans not to be considered Jews. There were other places of sacrifice for Jews (for instance, in Heliopolis), but these were considered substitutes, not replacements.
For more on Judea as a “Temple-State,” see H. D. Mantel in “The High Priesthood and the Sanhedrin in the Time of the Second Temple,” The Herodian Period, ed. M. Avi-Yonah and Z. Baras, The World History of the Jewish People 1.7 (Jerusalem: New Brunswick, 1975), 264–81. Josephus’s quote regarding Jerusalem as a theocracy is from Against Apion, 2.164–66. For more on the Temple of Jerusalem as a bank, see Neill Q. Hamilton, “Temple Cleansing and Temple Bank,” Journal of Biblical Literature 83.4 (1964): 365–72. A very concise breakdown of the Temple’s revenues can be found in Magen Broshi, “The Role of the Temple in the Herodian Economy,” Jewish Studies 38 (1987): 31–37.
The Qumran community rejected the Temple of Jerusalem for having fallen into the hands of the corrupt priesthood. Instead, it saw itself as a temporary replacement for the Temple, referring to the community as the “temple of man/men,” or miqdash adam. Some scholars have argued that this is why the Qumranites were so interested in ritual purity; they believed that their prayers and lustrations were more potent than the rituals and sacrifices in Jerusalem, which had been tainted by the Temple priests. For a detailed discussion of the phrase “temple of man/men” at Qumran, see G. Brooke, Exegesis at Qumran: 4QFlorilegium in its Jewish Context (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1985), 184–93; D. Dimant, “4QFlorilegium and the Idea of the Community as Temple,” in Hellenica et Judaica: Hommage à Valentin Nikiprowetzky, ed. A. Caquot (Leuben-Paris: Éditions Peeters, 1986), 165–89.
It is Josephus who famously refers to the entire priestly nobility as “lovers of luxury” in The Jewish War, though he was not alone in his criticism. There is a similar criticism of the priests in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where they are called the “seekers of smooth things” and those who are “flattery-seekers.”
There is a wonderful description of the high priest in the famed Letter of Aristeas, written sometime around the second century B.C.E., a translation of which appears in the second volume of James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 7–34. Here is the excerpt: “We were greatly astonished, when we saw Eleazar engaged in the ministration, at the mode of his dress, and the majesty of his appearance, which was revealed in the robe which he wore and the precious stones upon his person. There were golden bells upon the garment which reached down to his feet, giving forth a peculiar kind of melody, and on both sides of them there were pomegranates with variegated flowers of a wonderful hue. He was girded with a girdle of conspicuous beauty, woven in the most beautiful colours. On his breast he wore the oracle of God, as it is called, on which twelve stones, of different kinds, were inset, fastened together with gold, containing the names of the leaders of the tribes, according to their original order, each one flashing forth in an indescribable way its own particular colour. On his head he wore a tiara, as it is called, and upon this in the middle of his forehead an inimitable turban, the royal diadem full of glory with the name of God inscribed in sacred letters on a plate of gold … having been judged worthy to wear these emblems in the ministrations. Their appearance created such awe and confusion of mind as to make one feel that one had come into the presence of a man who belonged to a different world. I am convinced that any one who takes part in the spectacle which I have described will be filled with astonishment and indescribable wonder and be profoundly affected in his mind at the thought of the sanctity which is attached to each detail of the service.”
For a primer on Rome’s policy in dealing with subject populations, and especially its relationship with the high priest and priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem, see Martin Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judea (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); also Richard A. Horsley, “High Priests and the Politics of Roman Palestine,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 17.1 (1986): 23–55. Goodman’s Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007) provides an indispensable discussion of the remarkably tolerant attitude of Rome toward the Jews while also providing a range of Roman views about Jewish exceptionalism. It is from Goodman’s book that the quotations from Cicero, Tacitus, and Seneca are pulled (pages 390–91). Further discussion of Roman attitudes toward Jewish practices can be found in Eric S. Gruen, “Roman Perspectives on the Jews in the Age of the Great Revolt,” in The First Jewish Revolt, ed. Andrea M. Berlin and J. Andrew Overman (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27–42. For more on the religious practices and cults of Rome, see Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
The act of “utter annihilation” (herem in Hebrew), in which God commands the wholesale slaughter of “all that breathes,” is a recurring theme in the Bible, as I explain in my book How to Win a Cosmic War (New York: Random House, 2009), 66–69. It is “ethnic cleansing as a means of ensuring cultic purity,” to quote the great biblical scholar John Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122.1 (2003): 7.
For precise taxes and measures taken by Rome upon the Jewish peasantry, see Lester L. Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 334–37; also Horsley and Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, Messiahs, 48–87. Grabbe notes that some scholars have cast doubt on whether the Jewish population was forced to pay tribute to Rome, though no one questions whether the Jews were forced to finance the Roman civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar. On the subject of mass urbanization and the transfer of populations from rural to urban centers, see Jonathan Reed, “Instability in Jesus’ Galilee: A Demographic Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature (2010) 129.2: 343–65.
The term “messiah” in the Hebrew Bible is used in reference to King Saul (1 Samuel 12:5), King David (2 Samuel 23:1), King Solomon (1 Kings 1:39), and the priest Aaron and his sons (Exodus 29:1–9), as well as the prophets Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1) and Elisha (1 Kings 19:15–16). The exception to this list can be found in Isaiah 45:1, where the Persian king Cyrus, though he does not know the God of the Jews (45:4), is called messiah. In all, there are thirty-nine occurrences of the word “messiah” in the Hebrew Bible that refer specifically to the anointing of someone or something, such as Saul’s shield (2 Samuel 1:21) or the Tabernacle (Numbers 7:1). And yet not one of these occurrences refers to the messiah as a future salvific character who would be appointed by God to rebuild the Kingdom of David and restore Israel to a position of glory and power. That view of the messiah, which seems to have been fairly well established by the time of Jesus, was actually shaped during the tumultuous period of the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C.E.
Although there is little doubt that the bandit gangs of Galilee represented an apocalyptic, eschatological, and millenarian movement, Richard Horsley and John Hanson view these as three distinct categories, and as a result they refuse to label the bandits a “messianic” movement. In other words, the authors contend that “messianic” and “eschatological” must not be viewed as equivalents. Yet, as I discuss in this section, there is no reason to believe that such a distinction existed in the minds of the Jewish peasant, who, far from having a sophisticated understanding of messianism, would have most likely lumped all of these “distinct categories” into a vague expectation of the “End Times.” In any case, Horsley and Hanson themselves admit that “many of the essential conditions for banditry and messianic movements are the same. In fact, there might well have been no difference between them had there not been among the Jews a tradition of popular kingship and historical prototypes of a popular ‘anointed one.’ ” Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs, 88–93.
For Caesar as Son of God, see Adela Yarbro Collins, “Mark and His Readers: The Son of God Among Greeks and Romans,” Harvard Theological Review 93.2 (2000): 85–100. Two zealous rabbis, Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, led an uprising that attacked the Temple and tried to destroy the eagle that Herod placed atop the Temple gates. They and their students were captured and tortured to death by Herod’s men.
The complexities of Jewish sectarianism in first-century Judaism are tackled nicely by Jeff S. Anderson in his cogent analysis The Internal Diversification of Second Temple Judaism (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 2002).
Josephus says Simon of Peraea called himself “king,” by which Horsley and Hanson infer that he was part of the “popular messianic movements” that erupted after Herod’s death. See Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs, 93. Again, for me there seems to be no reason to assume any distinction whatsoever in the minds of the Jewish peasantry between “messiah” and “king,” insofar as both titles relied not on the scriptures, which the vast majority of Jews could neither access nor read, but rather on popular traditions and stories of messianic movements from Jewish history, as well as on oracles, popular images, fables, and oral traditions. Of course, some scholars go so far as to refuse to consider “king” to mean messiah. In other words, they make a distinction between, as Craig Evans puts it, “political royal claimants and messianic royal claimants.” Among this camp is M. De Jong, Christology in Context: The Earliest Christian Response to Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988). But Evans is right to argue that when dealing with any royal aspirant in first-century Palestine, “the presumption should be that any Jewish claim to Israel’s throne is in all probability a messianic claimant in some sense.” I couldn’t agree more. See Craig Evans, Jesus and His Contemporaries (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1995), 55.
On the population of ancient Nazareth, see the relevant entry in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992). See also E. Meyers and J. Strange, Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981) and John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 18. Scholars disagree about just how many people lived in Nazareth at the time of Jesus, with some claiming fewer than a couple hundred, and others saying as many as a couple thousand. My instinct is to hedge toward the middle of the scale; hence my estimate of a population consisting of about one hundred families. For more about provincial life in the Galilee of Jesus see Scott Korb, Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine (New York: Riverhead, 2011).
Despite the stories in the gospels about Jesus preaching in his hometown’s synagogue, no archaeological evidence has been unearthed to indicate the presence of a synagogue in ancient Nazareth, though there very well could have been a small structure that served as such (remember that “synagogue” in Jesus’s time could mean something as simple as a room with a Torah scroll). It should also be remembered that by the time the gospels were written, the Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed and the sole gathering place for Jews was the synagogue. So it makes sense that Jesus is constantly presented as teaching in the synagogue in every town he visits.
No inscriptions have been found in Nazareth to indicate that the population was particularly literate. Scholars estimate that between 95 and 97 percent of the Jewish peasantry at the time of Jesus could neither read nor write. On that point see Crossan, Historical Jesus, 24–26.
On Nazareth as the place of Jesus’s birth, see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 277–78; E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993); and John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: HarperOne, 1995), 18–23.
For more on messianic views at the time of Jesus, see Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 1–36. Scholem outlines two distinct messianic trends within early Judaism: the restorative and the utopian. Restorative messianism seeks a return to an ideal condition in the glorified past; in other words, it considers the improvement of the present era to be directly linked to the glories of the past. But while the restorative pole finds its hope in the past, it is nevertheless directly concerned with the desire of an even better future that will bring about “a state of things which has never yet existed.” Related to the restorative pole is utopian messianism. More apocalyptic in character, utopian messianism seeks catastrophic change with the coming of the messiah: that is, the annihilation of the present world and the initiation of a messianic age. Restorative messianism can be seen in the kingly traditions that look to the Davidic ideal—it seeks to establish a kingdom in the present time—while the utopian messianism is associated with the priestly figure found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. Of course, neither of these messianic trends existed independently of the other. On the contrary, both poles existed in some form in nearly every messianic group. Indeed, it was the tension between these two messianic trends that created the varying character of the messiah in Judaism. For more on Jewish messianism, see studies by Richard Horsley, including “Messianic Figures and Movements in First-Century Palestine,” The Messiah, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 295; “Popular Messianic Movements Around the Time of Jesus,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984): 447–95; and “ ‘Like One of the Prophets of Old’: Two Types of Popular Prophets at the Time of Jesus,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 47 (1985): 435–63. All three of Horsley’s studies have been vital in my examination of messianic ideas around the time of Jesus. I also recommend the relevant entry in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1992); and The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, ed. J. Werblowsky et al. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).
It would seem that the Qumran community did indeed await two different messiahs. The Community Rule suggests this in 9:12 when it speaks of the coming of “the Prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel.” Clearly a differentiation is being made between the kingly and priestly messianic figures. This notion is further developed in the Rule of the Congregation. In this scroll a banquet is described in the “last days” in which the messiah of Israel sits in a subordinate position to the priest of the congregation. While the text does not use the word “messiah” to refer to the priest, his superior position at the table indicates his eschatological power. These texts have led scholars to deduce that the Qumran community believed in the coming of a kingly messiah and a priestly messiah, with the latter dominating over the former. See James Charlesworth, “From Jewish Messianology to Christian Christology; Some Caveats and Perspectives,” Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, ed. Jacob Neusner et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 225–64.
It should be noted that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is the messiah explicitly termed the physical descendant of David, i.e., “Son of David.” But the imagery associated with the messiah and the fact that it is thought that his chief task is to reestablish David’s kingdom permanently linked messianic aspirations to Davidic lineage. This is in large part due to the so-called Davidic covenant, based on the prophet Nathan’s prophecy: “Your [David’s] house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16).
Jesus’s lineage from King David is stated over and over again, not just throughout the gospels but also in the letters of Paul, in which Jesus is repeatedly described as “of the seed of David” (Romans 1:3–4; 2 Timothy 2:8). Whether it was true is impossible to say. Many people claimed lineage to the greatest Israelite king (who lived a thousand years before Jesus of Nazareth), and frankly none of them could either prove such lineage or disprove it. But obviously the link between Jesus and David was vital for the early Christian community because it helped prove that this lowly peasant was in fact the messiah.
It is widely accepted that the original text of Mark ended with 16:8 and that Mark 16:9–20 was a later addition to the text. Per Norman Perrin: “It is the virtually unanimous opinion of modern scholarship that what appears in most translations of the gospel of Mark 16:9–20 is a pastiche of material taken from other gospels and added to the original text of the gospel as it was copied and transmitted by the scribes of the ancient Christian communities.” Perrin, The Resurrection According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Philadelphia: Fortress Press: 1977), 16. However, there are still some who question this assumption, arguing that a book cannot end with the Greek word γαρ, as Mark 16:8 does. That view has been debunked by P. W. van der Horst, “Can a Book End with TAP Note on Mark XVI.8,” Journal of Theological Studies 23 (1972): 121–24. Horst notes numerous texts in antiquity that do in fact end in this manner (e.g., Plotinus’s 32nd treatise). In any case, anyone who reads Mark in the original Greek can tell that a different hand wrote the final eight verses.
For prophecies claiming that “when the messiah comes, no one will know where he is from,” see 1 Enoch 48:6 and 4 Ezra 13:51–52. For a complete breakdown of the so-called messianic “proof texts,” see J.J.M. Roberts, “The Old Testament’s Contribution to Messianic Expectations,” The Messiah, 39–51. According to Roberts, these texts fall into five categories. First, there are those passages that appear to be prophecies ex eventu. Roberts cites Balaam’s oracle in Numbers 24:17 (“a star will come forth out of Jacob”) as an instance in which a prophecy that seems to find its fulfillment in the early monarchical period (in this case, the celebration of David’s victories as king of Israel over Moab and Edom, as is indicated in verses 17b and 18) has been forced to function as a prophecy regarding future divine kingship. Such a futuristic interpretation, argues Roberts, ignores the original setting of the prophecy. The second category deals with prophetic passages that seem to have settings in the enthronement ceremonies of the anointed kings. For instance, Psalm 2 (“You are my son … / this day I become your father”) and Isaiah 9:6 (“For a child has been born to us … and his title will be Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace”) were most likely composed for specific occasions to serve both religious and political functions. The political usage of these texts is apparent in their claims of the authoritative power of the king and his direct link to God. They also establish a link between the responsibilities of the king toward his people and the commands of God. The king who serves in God’s stead must display God’s justice. Even so, such statements as are found in these verses would no doubt create a powerful tool for kingly propaganda. The third category of the messianic proof texts do indeed speak of a future ruler and are perhaps the verses most frequently quoted by those who want to give a salvific interpretation to the messiah of the Hebrew scriptures (Micah 5:1–5; Zechariah 9:1–10). These texts speak of the embodiment of the Davidic ideal, metaphorically (not physically) referred to as a king of the Davidic line, who will restore the monarchy of Israel to its former glory. But for Roberts, the promises of a future king (e.g., Micah’s promise of a king rising from the humility of Bethlehem) “imply a serious criticism of the current occupant of the Davidic throne as less than an adequate heir to David.” Such criticism is apparent throughout the prophetic texts (see Isaiah 1:21–26, 11:1–9, 32:1–8). Roberts uses the same approach in the fourth group of messianic proof texts envisioning a future king. These texts, primarily Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Roberts places at the end of the Judean kingdom, when a restoration of the Davidic dynasty was a response to growing existential concerns over the future of Israel as a theocracy. The final category deals with the postexilic texts. According to Roberts, upon return from exile, the Jews were faced with a destroyed Temple, a disgraced priesthood, and no Davidic king. The prophetic texts of Zechariah and Haggai dealt with these problems in oracles that placed Zerubbabel in the position of restoring Israel’s monarchy and Temple (Haggai 2:20–23; Zechariah 4:6–10). Roberts believes that the prophecies regarding the restoration of the crown and the Temple (e.g., Zechariah 6:9–15) refer solely to the actions of Zerubbabel and are an optimistic response to the terrible circumstances that existed in the postexilic period. He also traces the later priestly expectations of the messiah to the texts of this period that include a restoration of the priesthood under Joshua (Zechariah 3:1–10). Roberts is convinced by his study of the messianic proof texts that the idea of a salvific messiah is not explicitly stated in the Hebrew scriptures but is rather a later development of Jewish eschatology that was adopted by the Pharisees, perhaps in the second or first century B.C.E., and later incorporated into “normative Judaism.”
Some scholars believe that tekton means not “woodworker” but any artisan who deals in the building trades. While Mark 6:3 is the only verse that calls Jesus a tekton, Matthew 13:55 states that Jesus’s father was a tekton. Considering the strictures of the day, the verse is likely meant to indicate that Jesus was a tekton, too (though this passage in Matthew does not actually name Jesus’s father). Some scholars believe that artisans and day laborers in the time of Jesus should be considered akin to a lower middle class in the social hierarchy of Galilee, but that view has been disproven by Ramsay MacMullen in Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 384 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
Many studies have been done about the language of Jesus and of first-century Palestine in general, but none are better than those of Joseph Fitzmyer. See “Did Jesus Speak Greek?” Biblical Archaeology Review 18.5 (September/October 1992): 58–63; and “The Languages of Palestine in the First Century A.D.,” in The Language of the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 126–62. Other fine studies on the language of Jesus include James Barr, “Which Language Did Jesus Speak? Some Remarks of a Semitist,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 53.1 (Autumn 1970): 14–15; and Michael O. Wise, “Languages of Palestine,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 434–44.
John Meier makes an interesting comment about the passage in Luke in which Jesus stands at the synagogue reading the Isaiah scroll: “Anyone who would wish to defend Luke’s depiction of the Isaiah reading as historically reliable even in its details would have to explain (1) how Jesus managed to read from an Isaiah scroll a passage made up of Isaiah 61:1a, b, d; 58:6d; 61:2a, with the omission of 61:1c, 2d; (2) why it is that Jesus read a text of Isaiah that is basically that of the Greek Septuagint, even when at times the Septuagint diverges from the Masoretic text.” See Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 303. Nevertheless, Meier actually believes that Jesus was not illiterate and that he even may have had some kind of formal education, though he provides an enlightening account of the debate on both sides of the argument (271–78).
Regarding Jesus’s brothers, arguments have been made by some Catholic (and a few Protestant) theologians that the Greek word adelphos (brother) could possibly mean “cousin” or “step-brother.” While that may be true, nowhere in the entire New Testament is the word adelphos ever used to mean either (and it is used some 340 times). Mark 6:17 uses the word adelphos to mean “half brother” when he refers to Philip’s relationship to Herod Antipas, but even this usage implies “physical brother.”
One interesting sidenote about Jesus’s family is that they were all named after great heroes and patriarchs of the Bible. Jesus’s name was Yeshu, short for Yeshua or Joshua, the great Israelite warrior whose wholesale slaughter of the tribes inhabiting Canaan cleansed the land for the Israelites. His mother was Miriam, named after the sister of Moses. His father, Joseph, was named after the son of Jacob, who would become known as Israel. His brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, were all named after biblical heroes. Apparently the naming of children after the great patriarchs became customary after the Maccabean revolt and may indicate a sense of awakened national identity that seemed to have been particularly marked in Galilee.
The argument in Matthew that Jesus’s virgin birth was prophesied in Isaiah holds no water at all, since scholars are nearly unanimous in translating the passage in Isaiah 7:14 not as “behold a virgin shall conceive” but “behold, a young maiden (alma) will conceive.” There is no debate here: alma is Hebrew for a young woman. Period.
For one particularly controversial argument about Jesus’s illegitimate birth, see Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). Schaberg claims Mary was very likely raped, though it is not clear how she comes to that conclusion.
Celsus’s story about the soldier Panthera is from his second-century tract True Discourse, which has been lost to history. Our only access to it comes from Origen’s polemical response to the work titled Against Celsus, written sometime in the middle of the third century C.E.
It should be noted that both Matthew and Luke recount the “son of Mary” passage in Mark 6:3, but both fix Mark’s statement by pointedly referring to Jesus as “the carpenter’s son” (Matthew 13:55) and “the son of Joseph” (Luke 4:22) respectively. There are variant readings of Mark that insert “the son of the carpenter” in this verse, but it is generally agreed that these are later additions. The original of Mark 6:3 undoubtedly calls Jesus “son of Mary.” It is possible, though highly unlikely, that Jesus was called “son of Mary” because Joseph had died so long ago that he was forgotten. But John Meier notes that there is only a single case in the entire Hebrew Scriptures in which a man is referred to as his mother’s son. That would be the sons of Zeruiah—Joab, Abishai, and Asahel—who were soldiers in King David’s army (1 Samuel 26:6; 2 Samuel 2:13). All three are repeatedly referred to as “sons of Zeruiah.” See Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 226.
For more on the question of whether Jesus was married, see William E. Phipps, Was Jesus Married? (New York: Harper and Row, 1970) and The Sexuality of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Karen King, a professor at Harvard University, has recently unearthed a tiny scrap of papyrus, which she dates to the fourth century, that contains a Coptic phrase that translates to “Jesus said to them, my wife …” At the time of this writing, the fragment had yet to be authenticated, though even if it is not a forgery, it would only tell us what those in the fourth century believed about Jesus’s marital status.
There are some great stories about the boy Jesus in the gnostic gospels, especially The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which a petulant Jesus flaunts his magical powers by bringing clay birds to life or striking dead neighborhood kids who fail to show him deference. The best and most complete collection of the gnostic gospels in English is The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. Marvin W. Meyer (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
For more on Sepphoris, see the relevant entry by Z. Weiss in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. Ephraim Stern (New York: Simon and Schuster; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 1324–28. For Sepphoris as a major commercial center in Galilee, see Arlene Fradkin, “Long-Distance Trade in the Lower Galilee: New Evidence from Sepphoris,” in Archaeology and the Galilee, Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough, eds. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 107–16. There is some debate as to whether the miqva’ot (ritual baths) discovered in Sepphoris were actually ritual baths; Hanan Eshel at Bar Ilan is among those who do not think they were. See “A Note on ‘Miqvaot’ at Sepphoris,” Archaeology and the Galilee, 131–33. See also Eric Meyers, “Sepphoris: City of Peace,” in The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology, ed. Andrea M. Berlin and Andrew J. Overman (London: Routledge, 2002), 110–20. I actually find Eshel’s argument quite convincing, though the majority of scholars and archaeologists do not.
There is no way to be certain of the exact date of Antipas’s declaration and rebuilding of Sepphoris as his royal seat. Eric Meyer says that Antipas moved to Sepphoris almost immediately after the Romans razed the city in 6 B.C.E.; see Eric M. Meyers, Ehud Netzer, and Carol L. Meyers, “Ornament of All Galilee,” The Biblical Archeologist, 49.1 (1986): 4–19. However, Shirley Jackson Case places the date much later, at around 10 C.E., in “Jesus and Sepphoris,” Journal of Biblical Literature 45 (1926): 14–22. For better or worse, the closest we can place Antipas’s entry into Sepphoris is around the turn of the first century. It should be noted that Antipas renamed the city Autocratoris, or “Imperial City,” after he made it the seat of his tetrarchy.
For more on Jesus’s life in Sepphoris, see Richard A. Batey, Jesus and the Forgotten City: New Light on Sepphoris and the Urban World of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1991). Archaeological work by Eric Meyers has cast some doubt on the widely held notion that the city was razed by Varus, as Josephus claims in War 2:68. See “Roman Sepphoris in the Light of New Archeological Evidence and Research,” The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 323.
Although it seems that Judas was actually from the town of Gamala in the Golan, he was nevertheless known to all as “Judas the Galilean.” There is a great deal of debate about the relationship between Hezekiah and Judas the Galilean, and while it cannot be definitively proven that Judas the Galilean was the same person as Judas the bandit who was Hezekiah’s son, that is certainly the assumption that Josephus makes (twice!), and I do not see a reason to doubt him. See War 2.56 and Antiquities 17.271–72. For more on Judas’s genealogical connection to Hezekiah, see the relevant entry in Geza Vermes, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 2006), 165–67; also J. Kennard, “Judas the Galilean and His Clan,” Jewish Quarterly Review 36 (1946): 281–86. For the opposing view, see Richard A. Horsley, “Menahem in Jerusalem: A Brief Messianic Episode Among the Sicarii—Not ‘Zealot Messianism,’ ” Novum Testamentum 27.4 (1985): 334–48. On Judas the Galilean’s innovation and his effect on the revolutionary groups that would follow, see Morton Smith, “The Zealots and the Sicarii,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 1–19.
The biblical concept of zeal is best defined as “jealous anger,” and it is derived from the divine character of God, whom the Bible calls “a devouring fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24). The most celebrated model of biblical zeal is Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron (Moses’s brother), whose example of spontaneous individual action as an expression of God’s jealous anger and as atonement for the sins of the Jewish nation became the model of personal righteousness in the Bible (Numbers 25). See my How to Win a Cosmic War, 70–72. Also see relevant entry in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1043–54.
Once again, Richard Horsley rejects the proposition that Judas the Galilean had messianic aspirations. But his rejection is based on two assumptions: first, that Judas the Galilean is not descended from Hezekiah the bandit chief, which we have already questioned above; and second, that Josephus does not directly call Judas “king” or “messiah” but instead calls him “sophist,” a term with no messianic connotations. See Menahem in Jerusalem, 342–43. However, Josephus clearly derides Judas for what he calls his “royal aspirations.” What else could this mean but that Judas had messianic (i.e., kingly) ambitions? What’s more, Josephus uses the same term, “sophist,” to describe both Mattathias (Antiquities 17.6), who was overtly connected to messianic aspirations during the Maccabean revolt, and Menahem (Jewish War 2.433–48), whose messianic pretensions are not in dispute. On this point I agree with Martin Hengel when he writes that “a dynasty of leaders proceeded from Judas [of Galilee], among whom messianic pretension became evident at least in one, Menahem, allows one to surmise that the ‘Fourth Sect’ had a messianic foundation already in its founder.” See The Zealots (London: T&T Clark, 2000), 299. However, I disagree with Hengel that the members of the Fourth Philosophy can be adequately labeled Zealots. Rather, I contend that they preached zealotry as a biblical doctrine demanding the removal of foreign elements from the Holy Land, which is why I use the term “zealot,” with a lowercase z, to describe them. For more on Josephus’s use of the term “sophist,” see note 71 in Whiston’s translation of The Jewish War, book 2, chapter 1, section 3.
There is very little historical evidence about the life of Pontius Pilate before his tenure as prefect in Jerusalem, but Ann Wroe has written an interesting account titled Pontius Pilate (New York: Random House, 1999), which, while not a scholarly book, is definitely a fun read. With regard to the difference between a Roman prefect and a procurator, the short answer is that there was none, at least not in a small and fairly insignificant province like Judea. Josephus calls Pilate a procurator in the Antiquities 18.5.6, whereas Philo refers to him as prefect. The terms were probably interchangeable at the time. I have chosen to simply use the term “governor” to mean both prefect and procurator.
For more on Pilate’s introduction of the shields into the Temple of Jerusalem, I recommend G. Fuks, “Again on the Episode of the Gilded Roman Shields at Jerusalem,” Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982): 503–7, and P. S. Davies, “The Meaning of Philo’s Text About the Gilded Shields,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 109–14.
A great deal has been written about the reasons why the Jews rebelled against Rome. No doubt there was a combination of social, economic, political, and religious grievances that ultimately led to the Jewish War, but David Rhoads outlines six principal causes in his book Israel in Revolution: 6–74 C.E. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976): (1) the Jews were defending the Law of God; (2) the Jews believed God would lead them to victory; (3) the Jews wanted to rid the holy land of foreigners and gentiles; (4) the Jews were trying to defend God’s city, Jerusalem, from desecration; (5) the Jews wanted to cleanse the Temple; and (6) the Jews hoped it would usher in the end time and the coming of the messiah. However, some scholars (and I include myself in this category) emphasize the eschatological motivations of the Jews over these other reasons. See for example A. J. Tomasino, “Oracles of Insurrection: The Prophetic Catalyst of the Great Revolt,” Journal of Jewish Studies 59 (2008): 86–111. Others caution about putting too much weight on the role that apocalyptic fervor played in stirring the Jews to revolt. See for instance Tessa Rajak, “Jewish Millenarian Expectations,” The First Jewish Revolt, ed. Andrea M. Berlin and J. Andrew Overman (New York: Routledge, 2002), 164–88. Rajak writes: “Expectation of an imminent End … was not the normal mindset of first-century Judaism.” However, I think the evidence to the contrary far outweighs this view, as the link between messianism and the Jewish Revolt could not be clearer in Josephus’s account of the Jewish War.
Concerning the list of messianic aspirants that arose in the buildup to the Jewish War, P. W. Barnett suggests that the fact that Josephus fails to call these messianic figures baselius, or “king” (with the exception of “the Egyptian”), proves that they thought of themselves not as messiahs but rather as “sign prophets.” But Barnett notes that even these sign prophets “anticipated some great act of eschatological redemption,” which, after all, is the inherent right of the messiah. See P. W. Barnett, “The Jewish Sign Prophets,” New Testament Studies 27 (1980): 679–97. James S. McLaren tries (and, in my opinion, fails) to avoid relying too much on the idea that the Jews expected “divine assistance” to defeat the Romans or that they were fueled by messianic fervor, by claiming that the Jews “were simply optimistic that they would succeed,” in the same way that, say, the Germans were optimistic that they would defeat Britain. Yet what else did “optimism” mean in first-century Palestine but confidence in God? See “Going to War Against Rome: The Motivation of the Jewish Rebels,” in The Jewish Revolt Against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. M. Popovic, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 154 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 129–53.
It should be noted that while “the Samaritan” called himself “messiah,” he did not mean it exactly in the Jewish sense of the word. The Samaritan equivalent of “messiah” is Taheb. However, the Taheb was directly related to the messiah. In fact, the words were synonymous, as evidenced by the Samaritan woman in the gospel of John who tells Jesus, “I know that the messiah is coming. When he will come, he will show us all things” (John 4:25).
Josephus is the first to use the Latin word “Sicarii” (Josephus, Jewish War 2.254–55), though it is obvious he borrows the term from the Romans. The word “Sicarii” appears in Acts 21:38 in reference to the “false prophet” known as “the Egyptian,” for whom Paul is mistaken. Acts claims the Egyptian had four thousand followers, which is a more likely figure than the thirty thousand that Josephus claims in Jewish War 2.247–70 (though in Antiquities 20.171, Josephus provides a much smaller number).
Although Josephus describes the Sicarii as “a different type of bandit,” he uses the words “Sicarii” and “bandits” interchangeably throughout The Jewish War. In fact, at times he uses the term “Sicarii” to describe groups of bandits who do not use daggers as weapons. It is likely that his reason for differentiating the Sicarii from “the other bandits” was to keep all the various bandit gangs distinct for narrative’s sake, though a case can be made that after the rise of Menahem in the first year of the war, the Sicarii became a recognizably separate group—the same group that seized control of Masada. See Shimon Applebaum, “The Zealots: The Case for Revaluation,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 155–70. In my opinion, the best and most up-to-date study of the Sicarii is Mark Andrew Brighton, The Sicarii in Josephus’s Judean War: Rhetorical Analysis and Historical Observations (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Scholarship, 2009).
Other views on the Sicarii include Emil Schurer, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890), for whom the Sicarii are a fanatical offshoot of the Zealot Party; Martin Hengel, The Zealots (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), who disagrees with Schurer, arguing that the Sicarii were just an ultra-violent subgroup of the bandits; Solomon Zeitlin, “Zealots and Sicarii,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 395–98, who believes the Sicarii and the Zealots were two distinct and “mutually hostile” groups; Richard A. Horsley, “Josephus and the Bandits,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 10 (1979): 37–63, for whom the Sicarii are just a localized phenomenon, part of the larger movement of “social banditry” that was rife in the Judean countryside; and Morton Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii: Their Origins and Relation,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 7–31, whose view that labels such as Sicarii and Zealot were not static designations but rather indicated a generalized and widespread yearning for the biblical doctrine of zeal is wholeheartedly adopted in this book.
In the Antiquities, written some time after The Jewish War, Josephus suggests that it was the Roman proconsul Felix who spurred the Sicarii to murder the high priest Jonathan for his own political purposes. Some scholars, most notably Martin Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), continue to argue this point, viewing the Sicarii as little more than hired assassins or mercenaries. This is unlikely. First of all, the explanation given in the Antiquities contradicts Josephus’s earlier, and likely more reliable, account in The Jewish War, which makes no mention of Felix’s hand in the assassination of Jonathan. In fact, the description of Jonathan’s murder in the Antiquities fails to mention the role of the Sicarii at all. Instead, the text refers to assassins generally as “bandits” (lestai). In any case, the account of Jonathan’s murder in The Jewish War is written deliberately to emphasize the ideological/religious motivations of the Sicarii (hence their slogan “No lord but God!”), and as a prelude to the much more significant murders of the high priest Ananus ben Ananus (62 C.E.) and Jesus ben Gamaliel (63–64 C.E.), which ultimately launch the war with Rome.
Tacitus’s quote about Felix comes from Geza Vermes, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus (London: Penguin, 2005), 89. Josephus’s quote about every man hourly expecting death is from The Jewish War 7.253.
Rome actually assigned one more procurator to succeed Gessius Florus: Marcus Antonius Julianus. But that was during the years of the Jewish Revolt, and he never seems to have set foot in Jerusalem.
Agrippa’s speech is from The Jewish War 2.355–78. As moving as the speech may be, it is obviously Josephus’s own creation.
For more on the history of Masada and its changes under Herod, see Solomon Zeitlin, “Masada and the Sicarii,” Jewish Quarterly Review 55.4 (1965): 299–317.
Josephus seems to deliberately avoid using the word “messiah” to refer to Menahem, but in describing Menahem’s posturing as a popularly recognized “anointed king,” he is no doubt describing phenomena that, according to Richard Horsley, “can be understood as concrete examples of popular ‘messiahs’ and their movements.” Horsley, “Menahem in Jerusalem,” 340.
For some great examples of the coins struck by the victorious Jewish rebels, see Ya’akov Meshorer, Treasury of Jewish Coins from the Persian Period to Bar Kokhba (Jerusalem and Nyack, N.Y.: Amphora Books, 2001).
The speech of the Sicarii leader was made by Eleazar ben Yair and can be found in Josephus, The Jewish War 7.335. Tacitus’s description of the era in Rome being “rich in disasters” comes from Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 430.
The Zealot Party was led by a revolutionary priest named Eleazar son of Simon. Some scholars argue that this Eleazar was the same Eleazar the Temple Captain who seized control of the Temple at the start of the revolt and ceased all sacrifices on behalf of the emperor. For this view, see Rhoads, Israel in Revolution; also Geza Vermes, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus, 83. Vermes claims this was the same Eleazar who attacked and killed Menahem. That is unlikely. The Temple Captain was named Eleazar son of Ananias, and, as both Richard Horsley and Morton Smith have shown, he had no connection to the Eleazar son of Simon who took over the leadership of the Zealot Party in 68 C.E. See Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 1–19, and Horsley, “The Zealots: Their Origin, Relationship and Importance in the Jewish Revolt,” Novum Testamentum 28 (1986): 159–92.
Most of the information we have about John of Gischala comes from Josephus, with whom John was on extremely unfriendly terms. Thus the portrait of John that comes out of Josephus’s writings is of a mad tyrant who put all of Jerusalem in danger with his thirst for power and blood. No contemporary scholar takes this description of John seriously. For a better portrait of the man, see Uriel Rappaport, “John of Gischala: From Galilee to Jerusalem,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 479–93. With regard to John’s zealousness and his eschatological ideals, Rappaport is correct to note that while it is difficult to know his exact religiopolitical outlook, his alliance with the Zealot Party suggests, at the very least, that he was sympathetic to zealot ideology. In any case, John eventually managed to overpower the Zealots and take control over the inner Temple, though, by all accounts, he allowed Eleazar son of Simon to remain at least nominally in charge of the Zealot Party, right up to the moment in which Titus invaded Jerusalem.
For a description of the famine that ensued in Jerusalem during Titus’s siege, see Josephus, The Jewish War 5.427–571, 6.271–76. Josephus, who was writing his history of the war for the very man who won it, presents Titus as trying desperately to restrain his men from killing wantonly and in particular from destroying the Temple. This is obviously nonsense. It is merely Josephus pandering to his Roman audience. Josephus also sets the number of Jews who died in Jerusalem at one million. This is clearly an exaggeration.
For complete coverage of the exchange rate among ancient currencies in first-century Palestine, see Fredric William Madden’s colossal work, History of Jewish Coinage and of Money in the Old and New Testament (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1864). Madden notes that Josephus refers to the shekel as equal to four Attic drachms (drachmas), meaning two drachmas equals one-half shekel (238). See also J. Liver, “The Half-Shekel Offering in Biblical and Post-Biblical Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 56.3 (1963): 173–98.
Some scholars argue, unconvincingly, that no perceptible shift occurred in the Roman attitude toward Jews; see, for example, Eric S. Gruen, “Roman Perspectives on the Jews in the Age of the Great Revolt,” First Jewish Revolt, 27–42. With regard to the symbol of parading the Torah during the Triumph, I think Martin Goodman said it best in Rome and Jerusalem: “There could not be a clearer demonstration that the conquest was being celebrated not just over Judea but over Judaism” (453). For more on Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, see Michael S. Berger, “Rabbinic Pacification of Second-Century Jewish Nationalism,” Belief and Bloodshed, ed. James K. Wellman, Jr. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 48.
It is vital to note that the earliest manuscripts we have of the gospel of Mark end the first verse at “Jesus the Christ.” It was only later that a redactor added the phrase “the Son of God.” The significance of the gospels’ being written in Greek should not be overlooked. Consider that the Dead Sea Scrolls, the most contemporary set of Jewish writings to survive the destruction of Jerusalem, whose themes and topics are very close to those of the New Testament, were written almost exclusively in Hebrew and Aramaic.
The story of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple can be found in Matthew 21:1–22, Mark 11:1–19, Luke 19:29–48, and John 2:13–25. Note that John’s gospel places the event at the start of Jesus’s ministry, whereas the Synoptics place it at the end. That Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem reveals his kingly aspirations is abundantly clear. Recall that Solomon also mounts a donkey in order to be proclaimed king (1 Kings 1:32–40), as does Absalom when he tries to wrest the throne from his father, David (2 Samuel 19:26). According to David Catchpole, Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem fits perfectly into a family of stories detailing “the celebratory entry to a city by a hero figure who has previously achieved his triumph.” Catchpole notes that this “fixed pattern of triumphal entry” has precedence not only among the Israelite kings (see for example Kings 1:32–40) but also in Alexander’s entry into Jerusalem, Apollonius’s entry into Jerusalem, Simon Maccabaeus’s entry into Jerusalem, Marcus Agrippa’s entry into Jerusalem, and so on. See David R. Catchpole, “The ‘Triumphal’ Entry,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, ed. Ernst Bammel and C.F.D. Moule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 319–34.
Jesus explicitly uses the term lestai to signify “den of thieves,” instead of the more common word for thieves, kleptai (see Mark 11:17). While it may seem obvious that in this case Jesus is not using the term in its politicized sense as “bandit”—meaning someone with zealot tendencies—some scholars believe that Jesus is in fact referring specifically to bandits in this passage. Indeed, some link Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple to an insurrection led by bar Abbas that took place there around the same time (see Mark 15:7). The argument goes like this: Since bar Abbas is always characterized with the epithet lestai, Jesus’s use of the term must be referring to the slaughter that took place around the Temple during the bandit insurrection he led. Therefore, the best translation of Jesus’s admonition here is not “den of thieves,” but rather “cave of bandits,” meaning “zealot stronghold,” and thus referring specifically to bar Abbas’s insurrection. See George Wesley Buchanan, “Mark 11:15–19: Brigands in the Temple,” Hebrew Union College Annual 30 (1959): 169–77. This is an intriguing argument, but there is a simpler explanation for Jesus’s use of the word lestai instead of kleptai in this passage. The evangelist is likely quoting the prophet Jeremiah (7:11) in its Septuagint (Greek) translation: “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, utters the LORD!” That translation uses the phrase spaylayon laystoun to mean “den of thieves,” which makes sense in that the Septuagint was written long before lestai became a byword for “bandits”—indeed, long before there was any such thing as a bandit in Judea or Galilee. Here, lestai is the preferred Greek translation of the Hebrew word paritsim, which is poorly attested in the Hebrew Bible and is used, at most, twice in the entire text. The word paritsim can mean something like “violent ones,” though in Ezekiel 7:22, which also uses the Hebrew word paritsim, the Septuagint translates the word into the Greek by using afulaktos, which means something like “unguarded.” The point is that the Hebrew word paritsim was obviously problematic for the Septuagint translators, and any attempt to limit the meaning of the Hebrew or Greek words to a specific meaning or an overly circumscribed semantic range is difficult, to say the least. Thus, it is likely that when Jesus uses the word lestai in this passage, he means nothing more complicated than “thieves,” which, after all, is how he viewed the merchants and money changers at the Temple.
The tangled web that bound the Temple authorities to Rome, and the notion that an attack on one would have been considered an attack on the other, is an argument made brilliantly by S.G.F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 9. Brandon also notes correctly that the Romans would not have been ignorant of the cleansing incident, since the Roman garrison in the Antonia Fortress overlooked the Temple courts. For the opposing view to Brandon’s analysis, see Cecil Roth, “The Cleansing of the Temple and Zechariah XIV.21,” Novum Testamentum 4 (1960): 174–81. Roth seems to deny any nationalist or zealot significance whatsoever either in Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem or in his cleansing of the Temple, which he reinterprets in a “spiritual and basically non-political sense,” claiming that Jesus’s main concern was stripping the Temple of any “mercantile operations.” Other scholars take this argument one step further and claim that the “cleansing” incident never even happened, at least not as it has been recorded by all four gospel writers, because it so contrasts with Jesus’s message of peace. See Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). Once again this seems like a classic case of scholars refusing to accept an obvious reality that does not fit into their preconceived Christological conceptions of who Jesus was and what Jesus meant. Mack’s thesis is expertly refuted by Craig Evans, who demonstrates not only that the Temple cleansing incident can be traced to the historical Jesus, but also that it could not have been understood in any other way than as an act of profound political significance. See Evans, Jesus and His Contemporaries (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1995), 301–18. However, elsewhere Evans disagrees with me regarding Jesus’s prediction of the Temple’s destruction. He not only believes that the prediction can be traced to Jesus, whereas I view it as being put in Jesus’s mouth by the gospel writers, he also thinks it may have been the principal factor that motivated the high priest to take action against him. See Craig Evans, “Jesus and Predictions of the Destruction of the Herodian Temple in the Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Scrolls, and Related Texts,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 10 (1992): 89–147.
Both Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud indicate that the sacrificial animals used to be housed on the Mount of Olives, but that sometime around 30 C.E., Caiaphas transferred them into the Court of Gentiles. Bruce Chilton believes that Caiaphas’s innovation was the impetus for Jesus’s actions at the Temple as well as the principal reason for the high priest’s desire to have Jesus arrested and executed; see Bruce Chilton, “The Trial of Jesus Reconsidered,” in Jesus in Context, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 281–500.
The question posed to Jesus about the legality of paying tribute to Caesar can be found in Mark 12:13–17, Matthew 22:15–22, and Luke 20:20–26. The episode does not appear in John’s gospel because there the cleansing event is placed among Jesus’s first acts and not at the end of his life. See Herbert Loewe, Render unto Caesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). The Jewish authorities who try to trap Jesus by asking him about the payment of tribute are variously described in the Synoptic gospels as Pharisees and Herodians (Mark 12:13; Matthew 22:15), or as “scribes and chief priests” (Luke 20:20). This lumping together of disparate authorities indicates a startling ignorance on the part of the gospel writers (who were writing their accounts some forty to sixty years after the events they describe) about Jewish religious hierarchy in first-century Palestine. The scribes were lower- or middle-class scholars, while the chief priests were aristocratic nobility; the Pharisees and Herodians were about as far apart economically, socially, and (if by Herodians Mark suggests a Sadducean connection) theologically as can be imagined. It almost seems as though the gospel writers are throwing out these formulae simply as bywords for “the Jews.”
That the coin Jesus asks for, the denarius, is the same coin used to pay the tribute to Rome is definitively proven by H. St. J. Hart, “The Coin of ‘Render unto Caesar,’ ” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 241–48.
Among the many scholars who have tried to strip Jesus’s answer regarding the tribute of its political significance are J.D.M. Derrett, Law in the New Testament (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2005) and F. F. Bruce, “Render to Caesar,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 249–63. At least Bruce recognizes the significance of the word apodidomi, and indeed it is his analysis of the verb that I reference above. Helmut Merkel is one of many scholars who see Jesus’s answer to the religious authorities as a nonanswer; “The Opposition Between Jesus and Judaism,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 129–44. Merkel quotes the German scholar Eduard Lohse in refuting Brandon and those, like myself, who believe that Jesus’s answer betrays his zealot sentiments: “Jesus neither allowed himself to be lured into conferring divine status on the existing power structure, nor concurred with the revolutionaries who wanted to change the existing order and compel the coming of the Kingdom of God by the use of force.” First of all, it should be noted that the use of force is not the issue here. Whether Jesus agreed with the followers of Judas the Galilean that only the use of arms could free the Jews from Roman rule is not what is at stake in this passage. All that is at stake here is the question of where Jesus’s views fell on the most decisive issue of the day, which also happened to be the fundamental test of zealotry: Should the Jews pay tribute to Rome? Those scholars who paint Jesus’s answer to the religious authorities as apolitical are, to my mind, totally blind to the political and religious context of Jesus’s time, and, more important, to the fact that the issue of the tribute is quite clearly meant to be connected to Jesus’s provocative entry into Jerusalem, of which there can be no apolitical interpretation.
For some reason, the titulus above Jesus’s head has been viewed by scholars and Christians alike as some sort of joke, a sarcastic bit of humor on the part of Rome. The Romans may be known for many things, but humor isn’t one of them. As usual, this interpretation relies on a prima facie reading of Jesus as a man with no political ambitions whatsoever. That is nonsense. All criminals sentenced to execution received a titulus so that everyone would know the crime for which they were being punished and thus be deterred from taking part in similar activity. That the wording on Jesus’s titulus was likely genuine is demonstrated by Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, who notes that “If [the titulus] were invented by Christians, they would have used Christos, for early Christians would scarcely have called their Lord ‘King of the Jews.’ ” See The Gospel According to Luke I–IX (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 773. I will speak more about Jesus’s “trial” in subsequent chapters, but suffice it to say that the notion that a no-name Jewish peasant would have received a personal audience with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who had probably signed a dozen execution orders that day alone, is so outlandish that it cannot be taken seriously.
Oddly, Luke refers to the two crucified on either side of Jesus not as lestai but as kakourgoi, or “evildoers” (Luke 23:32).
All four gospels give varying accounts of John the Baptist (Matthew 3:1–17; Mark 1:2–15; Luke 3:1–22; John 1:19–42). It is generally agreed that much of this gospel material, including John’s infancy narrative in Luke, was derived from independent “Baptist traditions” preserved by John’s followers. On this, see Charles Scobie, John the Baptist (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1964), 50–51, and Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 59–60. However, Wink thinks only some of this material came from John’s unique sources. He argues that the infancy narratives of John and Jesus were likely developed concurrently. See also Catherine Murphy, John the Baptist: Prophet of Purity for a New Age (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003).
Although, according to Matthew, John warns the Jews of the coming of the “kingdom of heaven,” that is merely Matthew’s circumlocution for Kingdom of God. In fact, Matthew uses the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” throughout his gospel, even in those passages in which he has borrowed from Mark. In other words, we can be fairly certain that “Kingdom of God” and “Kingdom of Heaven” mean the same thing and that both derived in some part from the teachings of John the Baptist.
There are many inaccuracies in the gospel account of John’s execution (Mark 6:17–29; Matthew 14:1–12; Luke 9:7–9). For one, the evangelists refer to Herodias as the wife of Philip, when she was actually the wife of Herod. It was Salome who was Philip’s wife. Any attempt by conservative Christian commentators to make up for this blatant error—for instance, by referring to Antipas’s half brother as “Herod Philip” (a name that does not appear in any records)—falls flat. The gospels also seem to confuse the place of John’s execution (the fortress of Machaerus) with Antipas’s court, which at the time would have been in Tiberias. Finally, it should be mentioned that it is inconceivable that a royal princess would have performed for Antipas’s guests, considering the strictures of the day for Jewish women of any status. There are, of course, many apologetic attempts to rescue the gospel story of John’s beheading and to argue for its historicity (for example, Geza Vermes, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus, 49), but I agree with Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1968), 301–2, and Lester L. Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, vol. 2, 427–28, both of whom argue that the gospel story is far too fanciful and riddled with too many errors to be taken as historical.
For parallels between Mark’s account of John’s execution and the book of Esther, see Roger Aus, Water into Wine and the Beheading of John the Baptist (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 1988). The story also echoes Elijah’s conflict with Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab (1 Kings 19–22).
Josephus’s account of John the Baptist’s life and death can be found in Antiquities 18.116–19. King Aretas IV was the father of Antipas’s first wife, Phasaelis, whom Antipas divorced in order to marry Herodias. It is unclear whether Antipas was exiled to Spain, as Josephus states in The Jewish War 2.183, or to Gaul, as he alleges in Antiquities 18.252.
A catalogue of ablutions and water rituals in Jewish scripture and practice can be found in R. L. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Historical Study (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 95–132. For more on the use of water in Jewish conversion rituals, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Rabbinic Conversion Ceremony,” Journal of Jewish Studies 41 (1990): 177–203. There were a few notable individuals in first-century Palestine who practiced ritual acts of immersion, most famously the ascetic known as Bannus, who lived as a hermit in the desert and who bathed himself morning and night in cold water as a means of ritual purification; see Josephus, Life 2.11–12.
Josephus writes at length about the Essenes in both the Antiquities and The Jewish War, but the earliest evidence about the Essenes comes via Philo of Alexandria’s Hypothetica, written between 35 and 45 C.E. Pliny the Elder also speaks of the Essenes in his Natural History, written circa 77 C.E. It is Pliny who states that the Essenes lived near Engeddi, on the western shore of the Dead Sea, although most scholars believe the Essenes were located at Qumran. Pliny’s error may be due to the fact that he was writing after the war with Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem, after which the Qumran site was abandoned. Nevertheless, a huge debate has erupted among scholars over whether the community at Qumran was in fact Essene. Norman Golb is perhaps the best-known scholar who rejects the Qumran hypothesis. Golb views the Qumran site not as an Essene community but rather as a Hasmonaean fortress. He believes that the documents found in the caves near Qumran—the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls—were not written by the Essenes but brought there for safekeeping from Jerusalem. See Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret Qumran (New York: Scribner, 1995), and “The Problem of Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 1–24. Golb and his contemporaries make some valid points, and it must be admitted that some of the documents found in the caves at Qumran were not written by the Essenes and do not reflect Essene theology. The fact is that we cannot be certain whether the Essenes lived at Qumran. That said, I agree with the great Frank Moore Cross, who argued that the burden of proof rests not with those who connect the Essenes with Qumran, but with those who do not. “The scholar who would ‘exercise caution’ in identifying the sect of Qumran with the Essenes places himself in an astonishing position,” Moore writes; “he must suggest seriously that two major parties formed communistic religious communities in the same district of the desert of the Dead Sea and lived together in effect for two centuries, holding similar bizarre views, performing similar or rather identical lustrations, ritual meals, and ceremonies. He must suppose that one, carefully described by classical authors, disappeared without leaving building remains or even potsherds behind: the other, systematically ignored by classical authors, left extensive ruins, and indeed a great library. I prefer to be reckless and flatly identify the men of Qumran with their perennial houseguest, the Essenes.” Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 331–32. Everything you could ever want to know and more about Essene purity rituals can be found in Ian C. Werrett, Ritual Purity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007).
Among those who believe that John the Baptist was a member of the Essene community are Otto Betz, “Was John the Baptist an Essene?” Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Hershel Shanks (New York: Random House, 1992), 205–14; W. H. Brownlee, “John the Baptist in the New Light of Ancient Scrolls,” The Scrolls and the New Testament, ed. Krister Stendahl (New York: Harper, 1957), 71–90; and J.A.T. Robinson, “The Baptism of John and the Qumran Community: Testing a Hypothesis,” Twelve New Testament Studies (London: SCM Press, 1962), 11–27. Among those who disagree are H. H. Rowley, “The Baptism of John and the Qumran Sect,” New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of Thomas Walter Manson, 1893–1958, ed. A.J.B. Higgins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), 218–29; Bruce D. Chilton, Judaic Approaches to the Gospels (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 17–22; and Joan E. Taylor, The Immerser: John the Baptist Within Second Temple Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997).
It should be noted that while Isaiah 40:3 was applied to both John and the Essenes, there were important distinctions in the way the passage seems to have been interpreted by both. For more on John’s possible childhood “in the wilderness,” see Jean Steinmann, Saint John the Baptist and the Desert Tradition (New York: Harper, 1958). Regardless of whether John was a member of the Essenes, it is clear that there are a number of parallels between the two, including setting, asceticism, priestly lineage, water immersion, and the sharing of property. Individually, none of these parallels definitively proves a connection, but together they make a strong case for certain affinities between the two that should not be easily dismissed. In any case, John would not need to have been an actual member of the Essene community to be influenced by their teachings and ideas, which were pretty well integrated into the Jewish spirituality of the time.
Although it is never explicitly stated that John’s baptism was not meant to be repeated, one can infer that to be the case for two reasons: first, because the baptism seems to require an administrator, like John, as opposed to most other water rituals, which were self-administered; and second, because John’s baptism assumes the imminent end of the world, which would make its repetition somewhat difficult, to say the least. See John Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 51.
John Meier makes a compelling case for accepting the historicity of the phrase “baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” See Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 53–54. Josephus’s claim to the contrary can be found in Antiquities 18.116. Robert L. Webb argues that John’s baptism was a “repentance-baptism which functioned to initiate [the Jews] into the group of prepared people, the true Israel,” meaning John did in fact form his own distinct sect; see John the Baptizer and Prophet, 197 and 364. Bruce Chilton completely dismantles Webb’s argument in “John the Purifier,” 203–20.
The heavenly affirmation “This is my son, the Beloved” is from Psalms 2:7, in which God addresses David on the occasion of his enthronement as king in Jerusalem (Beloved was David’s nickname). As John Meier rightly notes, this moment “does not mirror some inner experience that Jesus had at the time; it mirrors the desire of the first-generation Christian church to define Jesus as soon as the primitive Gospel story begins—all the more so because this definition was needed to counter the impression of Jesus’s subordination to John, implicit in the tradition of the former being baptized by the latter.” Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 107.
Among those scholars who make a convincing case that Jesus began his ministry as a disciple of John are P. W. Hollenbach, “Social Aspects of John the Baptizer’s Preaching Mission in the Context of Palestinian Judaism,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (ANRW) 2.19.1 (1979): 852–53, and “The Conversion of Jesus: From Jesus the Baptizer to Jesus the Healer,” ANRW 2.25.1 (1982): 198–200, as well as Robert L. Webb, “Jesus’ Baptism: Its Historicity and Implications,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 10.2 (2000): 261–309. Webb summarizes the relationship between John and Jesus thus: “Jesus was baptized by John and probably remained with him for some time in the role of disciple. Later, in alignment and participation with John and his movement, Jesus also engaged in a baptizing ministry near John. Although he was still a disciple of John, Jesus perhaps should be viewed at this point as John’s right-hand man or protégé. While tensions may have arisen between John’s disciples and those around Jesus, the two men viewed themselves as working together. Only later, after the arrest of John, did a shift take place in which Jesus moved beyond the conceptual framework of John’s movement in certain respects. Yet Jesus always appears appreciative of the foundation that John’s framework initially provided for him.”
Regarding Jesus’s sojourn in the wilderness, one must remember that “the wilderness” is more than a geographic location. It is where the covenant with Abraham was made, where Moses received the Law of God, where the Israelites wandered for a generation; it is where God dwelt and where he could be found and communed with. The gospel’s use of the term “forty days”—the number of days Jesus is said to have spent in the desert—is not meant to be read as a literal number. In the Bible, “forty” is a byword for “many,” as in “it rained for forty days and nights.” The implication is that Jesus stayed in the wilderness for a long time.
I disagree with Rudolf Otto, who claims that “John did not preach the coming of the kingdom of heaven, but of the coming judgment of wrath”; The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, 69. It is Otto’s point that John was concerned chiefly with the coming judgment of God, what he calls “the Day of Yahweh,” whereas Jesus’s focus was on the redemptive nature of God’s kingdom on earth. Yet even Jesus marks John’s activities as part of the inauguration of the Kingdom of God on earth: “The Law and Prophets were [in effect] until John; afterward, the Kingdom of God is proclaimed” (Luke 16:16).
Josephus’s description of the Galileans can be found in The Jewish War 3.41–42. Richard Horsley expertly details the history of Galilean resistance, even when it came to the “political-economic-religious subordination to the Hasmonean high priesthood in Jerusalem,” in Galilee: History, Politics, People (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1995). Horsley writes that “the Temple itself, temple dues, and rule by the high priesthood would all have been foreign to the Galileans, whose ancestors had rebelled centuries earlier against the Solomonic monarchy and the Temple. Thus the Galileans, like the Idumeans, would have experienced the laws of the Judeans superimposed on their own customs as the means to define and legitimate their subordination to Jerusalem rule” (51). Hence Luke’s assertion that Jesus’s parents went to the Temple for Passover every year quite clearly reflects a Lukan agenda rather than Galilean practices (Luke 2:41–51). See also Sean Freyne, Galilee, Jesus, and the Gospels (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1988), 187–89.
On the distinctive accent of the Galileans, see Obery M. Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 70–73. For the implications of the term “people of the land,” see the comprehensive study done by Aharon Oppenheimer, The ’Am Ha-Aretz: A Study in the Social History of the Jewish People in the Hellenistic-Roman Period (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1977).
For more on Jesus’s family as followers, see John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press), 14–31.
The Greek word for “disciples,” hoi mathetai, can mean both male and female disciples. Obviously the sight of unaccompanied women following an itinerant preacher and his mostly male companions from town to town would have caused a scandal in Galilee, and in fact there are numerous passages in the gospels in which Jesus is accused of consorting with “loose women.” Some variants of the gospel of Luke say Jesus had seventy, not seventy-two, disciples. The discrepancy is irrelevant, as numbers in the Bible—especially evocative numbers such as three, twelve, forty, and seventy-two—are meant to be read symbolically, not literally, with the exception of the twelve disciples, which should be read both ways.
There can be no doubt that Jesus specifically designated twelve individuals to represent the twelve tribes of Israel. However, there is much confusion about the actual names and biographies of the Twelve. Thank God for John Meier, who presents everything there is to know about the Twelve in Marginal Jew, vol. 3, 198–285. That the Twelve were unique and set apart from the rest of the disciples is clear: “And when it was day, he called his disciples to him and from them he chose twelve whom he named apostles” (Luke 6:13). Some scholars insist that the Twelve was a creation of the early church, but that is unlikely. Otherwise, why make Judas one of the Twelve? See Craig Evans, “The Twelve Thrones of Israel: Scripture and Politics in Luke 22:24–30,” in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke-Acts, ed. Craig Evans and J. A. Sanders (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 154–70; Jacob Jervell, “The Twelve on Israel’s Thrones: Luke’s Understanding of the Apostolate,” in Luke and the People of God: A New Look at Luke-Acts, ed. Jacob Jervell (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1972), 75–112; and R. P. Meyer, Jesus and the Twelve (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1968).
For more on Jesus’s anticlerical message, see John Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 346–47. Meier notes that by the time the gospels were written there were no more priests in Judaism. After the destruction of the Temple, the spiritual heirs of the Pharisees—the rabbinate—became the primary Jewish opponents of the new Christian movement, and so it is natural that the gospels would have made them appear as Jesus’s chief enemies. This is all the more reason why the few hostile encounters that Jesus is presented as having with the Temple priests should be seen as genuine. Helmut Merkel expands on the division between Jesus and the Temple priesthood in “The Opposition Between Jesus and Judaism,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 129–44. Interestingly, Jesus is seen in conversation with the Sadducees only once, during a debate around the resurrection on the last day; Mark 12:18–27.
A comprehensive treatment of Jesus’s individual miracles can be found in H. van der Loos, The Miracles of Jesus (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1965).
For more on Honi and Hanina ben Dosa, see Geza Vermes, “Hanina ben Dosa: A Controversial Galilean Saint from the First Century of the Christian Era,” Journal of Jewish Studies 23 (1972): 28–50, and Jesus the Jew (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1981), 72–78. For a more general study of miracle workers in the time of Jesus, see William Scott Green, “Palestinian Holy Men: Charismatic Leadership and Rabbinic Tradition,” ANRW 19.2 (1979): 619–47. A very good critique of scholarly work on Hanina can be found in Baruch M. Bokser, “Wonder-Working and the Rabbinic Tradition: The Case of Hanina ben Dosa,” Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (1985): 42–92.
The earliest work on Apollonius is the third-century text by Philostratus of Athens titled The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. For an English translation, see F. C. Conybeare, ed., Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (London: Heinemann, 1912). Conybeare’s book also includes a translation of a later work on Apollonius by Hierocles titled Lover of Truth, which expressly compares Apollonius to Jesus of Nazareth. See also Robert J. Penella, The Letters of Apollonius of Tyana (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1979). For an analysis of the parallels between Apollonius and Jesus, see Craig A. Evans, “Jesus and Apollonius of Tyana,” in Jesus and His Contemporaries, 245–50.
Research done by Harold Remus indicates no difference in the way pagans and early Christians described either miracles or the miracle workers; “Does Terminology Distinguish Early Christian from Pagan Miracles?” Journal of Biblical Literature 101.4 (1982): 531–51; see also Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 536. More on Eleazar the exorcist can be found in Josephus, Antiquities 8.46–48.
A survey of magic and the laws against it in the Second Temple period is provided by Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (London: Cambridge University Press, 2008). As in the fable of Rumpelstiltskin, there was a general belief that knowledge of another’s name establishes a certain power over him. Magical prayers quite often derived their power from the name of whoever was being cursed or blessed. Per Bultmann: “The idea … that to know the name of the demon gives power over it is a well-known and widespread motif.” See History of the Synoptic Tradition, 232. Ulrich Luz cites as a Hellenistic example the story of Chonsu, “the God who drives out demons,” as an instance of demon recognition; “The Secrecy Motif and the Marcan Christology,” The Messianic Secret, ed. Christopher Tuckett (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 75–96.
Joseph Baumgarten discusses the relationship between illness and demon possession and provides a host of references to other articles on the topic in “The 4Q Zadokite Fragments on Skin Disease,” Journal of Jewish Studies 41 (1990): 153–65.
Additional useful studies on magic in the ancient world are Matthew W. Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001); Naomi Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001); and Ann Jeffers, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1996). The word “magic” comes from the Greek term mageia, which has its roots in the Persian term for priest, magos. As in “the Magi.”
Contrary to popular perception, Jesus’s miracles were not meant to confirm his messianic identity. In all the biblical prophecies ever written about the messiah, there is no characterization of him as either a miracle worker or an exorcist; the messiah is king, his task is to restore Israel to glory and destroy its enemies, not heal the sick and cast out demons (indeed, there are no such things as demons in the Hebrew Bible).
Justin Martyr, Origen, and Irenaeus are quoted in Anton Fridrichsen, The Problem of Miracle in Primitive Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1972), 87–95. Perhaps the most famous argument made about Jesus as a magician is Morton Smith’s controversial thesis, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). Smith’s argument is actually quite simple: Jesus’s miraculous actions in the gospels bear a striking resemblance to what we see in the “magical texts” of the time, which indicates that Jesus may have been seen by his fellow Jews and by the Romans as just another magician. Other scholars, most notably John Dominic Crossan, agree with Morton’s analysis. See Crossan, Historical Jesus, 137–67. Smith’s argument is sound and it does not deserve the opprobrium it has received in some scholarly circles, though my objections to it are clear in the text. For parallels between the miracle stories in the gospels and those in rabbinic writings, see Craig A. Evans, “Jesus and Jewish Miracle Stories,” in Jesus and His Contemporaries, 213–43.
Regarding the law for cleansing lepers, it should be noted that the Torah allows for those who are poor to substitute two turtledoves or two pigeons for two of the lambs (Leviticus 14:21–22).
For a clear and concise treatment of the notion of the Kingdom of God in the New Testament, see Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971). Jeremias calls the Kingdom of God the “central theme of the public proclamation of Jesus.” See also Norman Perrin, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963) and Rediscovering the Teachings of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). Perrin refers to the Kingdom of God as being the very heart of the message of Jesus: “all else in his teaching takes its point of departure from this central, awe-inspiring—or ridicule-inspiring, according to one’s perspective—conviction.”
According to John Meier, “outside of the Synoptic Gospels and the mouth of Jesus, [the term Kingdom of God] does not seem to have been widely used by either Jews or Christians in the early 1st century A.D.”; Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 239. The Hebrew Bible never uses the phrase the “Kingdom of God,” but it does use “Kingdom of Yahweh” in 1 Chronicles 28:5, wherein David speaks of Solomon sitting on the throne of the Kingdom of Yahweh. I think it is safe to say that this phrase means the same thing as Kingdom of God. That said, the exact phrase “Kingdom of God” is found only in the apocryphal text The Wisdom of Solomon (10:10). Examples of God’s kingship and his right to rule are, of course, everywhere in the Hebrew Bible. For example, “God will reign as king forever and ever” (Exodus 15:18). Perrin thinks the impetus for the use of the word “kingdom” in the Lord’s Prayer can be seen in an Aramaic Kaddish prayer found in an ancient synagogue in Israel, which he claims was in use during Jesus’s lifetime. The prayer states: “Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world which he has created according to his will. May he establish his kingdom in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of all the house of Israel even speedily and at a near time.” See Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus, 19.
Like many other scholars, Perrin is convinced that Jesus uses the term “Kingdom of God” in an eschatological sense. But Richard Horsley notes that while God’s actions with regard to the Kingdom may be thought of as “final,” that does not necessarily imply an eschatological event. “The symbols surrounding the Kingdom of God do not refer to ‘the last,’ ‘final,’ ‘eschatological,’ and ‘all-transforming’ ‘act’ of God,” Horsley writes. “If the original kernel of any of the sayings about ‘the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven’ … stem from Jesus, then, like the image in Daniel 7:13 to which they refer, they are symbolizations of the vindication of the persecuted and suffering righteous.” Horsley’s point is that the Kingdom of God may be properly understood in eschatological terms but only insofar as that implies God’s final and definitive activity on earth. He correctly observes that once we abandon the notion that Jesus’s preaching about the Kingdom of God refers to an End Times, we can also abandon the historic debate about whether Jesus thought of the Kingdom as a present or as a future thing. See Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 168–69. Nevertheless, for those interested in the “present or future” debate, John Meier, who himself believes the Kingdom of God was meant as an eschatological event, lays out the argument on both sides in Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 289–351. Among those who disagree with Meier are John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 54–74; Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 1–21; and, of course, me. In the words of Werner Kelber, “the Kingdom spells the ending of an older order of things.” See The Kingdom in Mark (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 23.
For more on the “Jewishness” of Jesus of Nazareth, see Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew (New York: HarperOne, 2006). Jesus’s statements against gentiles can be pretty firmly accepted as historical, considering that the early Christians were actively courting gentiles for conversion and would not have been well served in their efforts by such verses in the gospels. It is true that Jesus believed that gentiles would ultimately be allowed into the Kingdom of God once it was established. But as John Meier notes, Jesus seemed to have considered this to be the case only at the end of Israel’s history, when the gentiles would be allowed entry into the kingdom as subservient to the Jews. Marginal Jew, vol. 3, 251.
I agree with Richard Horsley that the commandments to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” in the gospel of Luke are likely closer to the original Q material than the parallel statements in Matthew, which juxtapose Jesus’s commandments with the Hebrew Bible’s command for “an eye for an eye” (lex talionis). See Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, 255–65.
Regarding Matthew 11:12, I have included here the variant version of the verse—“the Kingdom of Heaven has been coming violently”—both because I am convinced it is the original form of the verse and because it fits better with the context of the passage. The standard version of the passage reads: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven operates by force, and forceful men snatch it away.” That is the translation by Rudolf Otto in The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, 78. Note that this version of the verse is more often imprecisely translated as “From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and violent men snatch it away,” though even those translations will include a variant reading to indicate the active voice that I use in my translation. The problem lies in the verb biazomai, which means “to use violence or force.” In the present perfect tense, biazomai can mean “to have violence done to one,” but it is not the perfect tense that is operative in this passage. Similarly, in the passive voice biazomai can mean “to suffer violence,” but again, it is not the passive voice that is used in Matthew 11:12. According to the UBS Lexicon, the word biazomai in this passage is actually in the Greek middle voice and thus means “to exercise violence.” A clue to how to translate the passage in Matthew 11:12 can be found in the parallel passage in Luke 16:16. Luke, perhaps wanting to avoid the controversy, omits altogether the first half of the verse—“the Kingdom of God operates through force/violence.” However, in the latter half of the verse he uses the exact same word, biazetai, actively in the phrase “everyone uses violence in entering it.” Ultimately the usual translation, “the kingdom of heaven suffers violence,” agrees neither with the time when Jesus spoke the words nor with the context in which he lived. And context is everything. See Analytic Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1981). Also see note on Matthew 11:12 in Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, ed. Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida (Grand Rapids, Mich.: United Bible Societies, 1988). Louw and Nida correctly note that “in many languages it may be difficult, if not impossible, to speak of the kingdom of heaven ‘suffering violent attacks,’ ” though they do concede that “some active form may be employed, for example, ‘and violently attack the kingdom of heaven’ or ‘… the rule of God.’ ”
On the expectation among the Jews in first-century Palestine for Elijah’s return and the inauguration of the messianic age, see John J. Collins, Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge, 1997). On Jesus’s deliberate imitation of Elijah, see John Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 3, 622–26.
Unlike Matthew and Luke, who report a change in the physical appearance of Jesus in the transfiguration (Matthew 17:2; Luke 9:29), Mark claims that Jesus was transfigured in a way that only affected his clothes (9:3). The parallels to Exodus in the transfiguration account are clear: Moses takes Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu to Mount Sinai, where he is engulfed by a cloud and given the Law and the design for building God’s tabernacle. Like Jesus, Moses is transformed on the mountain in the presence of God. But there is a great difference between the two stories. Moses received the Law from God himself, whereas Jesus only sees Moses and Elijah while physically receiving nothing. The difference between the two stories serves to highlight Jesus’s superiority over Moses. Moses is transformed because of his confrontation with God’s glory, but Jesus is transformed by his own glory. The point is driven home for Morton Smith by the fact that Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, appear as Jesus’s subordinates. See “The Origin and History of the Transfiguration Story,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 36 (1980): 42. Elijah, too, went up a mountain and experienced the spirit of God passing over him. “The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:11–12). It should be noted that Smith thinks the transfiguration story to be “from the world of magic.” His thesis deals with his concept of Jesus as a magician “like other magicians.” Smith, therefore, believes the transfiguration to be some hypnotically induced mystical event that required silence; consequently, the spell was broken when Peter spoke. Mark’s attempt to use this story as a confirmation of Jesus’s messiahship is, for Smith, an error on the part of the evangelist. All of this demonstrates Mark’s notion that Jesus surpasses both characters in glory. This is of course not a new notion in New Testament Christology. Paul explicitly states Jesus’s superiority over Moses (Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 10:2), as does the writer of Hebrews (3:1–6). In other words, Mark is simply stating a familiar belief of the early Church that Jesus is the new Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18:15. See also Morna D. Hooker, “ ‘What Doest Thou Here, Elijah?’ A Look at St. Mark’s Account of the Transfiguration,” The Glory of Christ in the New Testament, ed. L. D. Hurst et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 59–70. Hooker sees great significance in the fact that Mark’s gospel presents Elijah first, stating that Moses was with him.
The term “messianic secret” is a translation of the German word Messiasgeheimnis and is derived from William Wrede’s classic study, The Messianic Secret, trans. J.C.G. Greig (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Theories about the messianic secret can be divided into two schools of thought: those who believe the secret can be derived from the historical Jesus and those who consider it a creation of either the evangelist or the early Markan community. Wrede argued that the messianic secret is a product of the Markan community and a redaction element of the gospel itself. He claimed that the messianic secret stems from an attempt by Mark to reconcile a primitive Christian belief in first-century Jerusalem that regarded Jesus as becoming messiah only after the resurrection, with the view that Jesus was messiah throughout his life and ministry. The problem with Wrede’s theory is that there is nothing in Mark 16:1–8 (the original ending of the gospel of Mark) to suggest a transformation in the identity of Jesus other than his inexplicable disappearance from the tomb. In any case, it is difficult to explain how the resurrection, an idea that was alien to messianic expectations in first-century Palestine, could have raised the belief that Jesus was messiah. The point of Wrede’s study was to use the “messianic secret” to show that, in his words, “Jesus actually did not give himself out as messiah” in his lifetime, an intriguing and probably correct hypothesis. Those who disagree with Wrede and argue that the messianic secret can actually be traced to the historical Jesus include Oscar Cullman, Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), 111–36, and James D. G. Dunn, “The Messianic Secret in Mark,” The Messianic Secret, ed. Christopher Tuckett (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 116–36. For more general information about the messianic secret, see James L. Blevins, The Messianic Secret in Markan Research, 1901–1976 (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981), and Heikki Raisanen, The “Messianic Secret” in Mark (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990). Raisanen correctly argues that many of the theories offered for the “messianic secret” generally presume the notion that “the theological viewpoint of Mark’s gospel is based on a single secrecy theology.” He believes, and most contemporary scholars agree, that the “messianic secret” can be understood only when the secrecy concept is “broken down … into parts which are only relatively loosely connected with each other”; Raisanen, Messianic Secret, 242–43.
For a brief précis on the many messianic paradigms that existed in first-century Palestine, see Craig Evans, “From Anointed Prophet to Anointed King: Probing Aspects of Jesus’ Self-Understanding,” Jesus and His Contemporaries, 437–56.
Although many contemporary scholars would agree with me that the use of the title Son of Man can be traced to the historical Jesus, there remains a great deal of debate over how many, and which, of the Son of Man sayings are authentic. Mark indicates three primary functions of Jesus’s interpretation of this obscure title. First, it is used in the descriptions of a future figure that comes in judgment (Mark 8:38, 13:26, 14:62). Second, it is used when speaking of Jesus’s expected suffering and death (Mark 8:31, 9:12, 10:33). And finally, there are a number of passages in which the Son of Man is presented as an earthly ruler with the authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:10, 2:28). Of these three, perhaps the second is most influential in Mark. Some scholars, including Hermann Samuel Reimarus, The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1970), accept the historicity only of the noneschatological, so-called lowly sayings. Others, including Barnabas Lindars, Jesus Son of Man (London: SPCK Publishing, 1983), accept as authentic only those among the “sayings traditions” (Q and Mark) that reproduce the underlying bar enasha idiom (there are nine of them) as a mode of self-reference. Still others believe only the apocalyptic sayings to be authentic: “The authentic passages are those in which the expression is used in that apocalyptic sense which goes back to Daniel,” writes Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 283. And of course there are those scholars who reject nearly all of the Son of Man sayings as inauthentic. Indeed, that was more or less the conclusion of the famed “Jesus Seminar” conducted by Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Polebridge Press, 1993). A comprehensive analysis of the centuries-long debate about the Son of Man is provided by Delbert Burkett in his indispensable monograph The Son of Man Debate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). An interesting comment by Burkett is that the Gnostics apparently understood “son” literally, believing that Jesus was stating his filial relation to the gnostic “aeon” or god Anthropos, or “Man.”
Geza Vermes demonstrates that bar enasha is never a title in any Aramaic sources; “The Son of Man Debate,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 1 (1978): 19–32. It should be mentioned that Vermes is among a handful of scholars who believe that “Son of Man” in its Aramaic expression is just a circumlocution for “I”—an indirect and deferential way to refer to oneself, as in when Jesus says, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has [that is, I have] no place to lay his [my] head” (Matthew 8:20 | Luke 9:58). See also P. Maurice Casey, Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of Daniel 7 (London: SPCK Publishing, 1979). But as Burkett notes, the basic problem with the circumlocution theory is that “the idiom requires a demonstrative pronoun (‘this man’) which the gospel expression lacks.” The Son of Man Debate, 96. Others take the opposite tack, claiming that “Son of Man” does not refer to Jesus at all but to some other figure, someone Jesus expected would follow him. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and the holy angels with him, he shall sit upon the throne of his glory” (Matthew 25:31). Prominent proponents of the theory that Jesus was referring to someone else as the Son of Man include Julius Wellhausen and Rudolf Bultmann. However, that, too, is unlikely; the context of most of Jesus’s Son of Man sayings makes it clear that he is speaking about himself, as when he compares himself to John the Baptist: “John came neither eating nor drinking and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man [i.e., I] came eating and drinking and they say ‘Look! A glutton and drunk’ ” (Matthew 11:18–19 | Luke 7:33–34). Among those who believe that “the Son of Man” is an Aramaic idiomatic expression meaning either “a man” in general, or more specifically “a man like me,” are Barnabas Lindars, Jesus Son of Man, and Reginald Fuller, “The Son of Man: A Reconsideration,” The Living Texts: Essays in Honor of Ernest W. Saunders, ed. Dennis E. Groh and Robert Jewett (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 207–17. These scholars note that God addresses the prophet Ezekiel as ben adam, meaning a human being but perhaps implying an ideal human. For the lack of unified conception among the Jews of the Son of Man, see Norman Perrin, “Son of Man,” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1976), 833–36, and Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Influence of Daniel on the New Testament,” Daniel, ed. John J. Collins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 90–123.
Although the “one like a son of man” is never identified as the messiah, it seems that the Jewish scholars and rabbis of the first century understood him as such. Whether Jesus also understood Daniel’s “one like a son of man” to be a messianic figure is unclear. Not all scholars believe that Daniel is referring to a distinct personality or a specific individual when he uses the phrase “son of man.” He may be using the term as a symbol for Israel as victorious over its enemies. The same is true of Ezekiel, where “son of man” may be not a distinct individual named Ezekiel but a symbolic representative of the ideal man. In fact, Maurice Casey thinks even the “son of man” in Enoch is not a distinct individual but simply a generic “man”; see “The Use of the Term ‘Son of Man’ in the Similitudes of Enoch,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 7.1 (1976): 11–29. I do not disagree with this position, but I do think there is a significant difference between the way the generic term is used in, say, Jeremiah 51:43—“Her cities have become an object of horror, and a land of drought and a desert, a land in which no man lives, nor any son of man [ben adam] passes”—and the way it is used in Daniel 7:13 to refer to a singular figure.
Both Enoch and 4 Ezra explicitly identify the son of man figure with the messiah, but in 4 Ezra he is also called “my son” by God: “For my son the messiah shall be revealed with those who are with him, and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred years. And after these years my son the Messiah shall die, and all who draw human breath” (4 Ezra 7:28–29). There’s no question that 4 Ezra was written at the end of the first century, or perhaps the beginning of the second century C.E. However there has long been a debate over the dating of the Similitudes. Because no copies of the Similitudes were found among the many copies of Enoch found at Qumran, most scholars are convinced that it was not written until well after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. See Matthew Black, The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch: A New English Edition with Commentary and Textual Notes (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1985). See also David Suter, “Weighed in the Balance: The Similitudes of Enoch in Recent Discussion,” Religious Studies Review 7 (1981): 217–21, and J. C. Hindly, “Towards a Date for the Similitudes of Enoch: A Historical Approach,” New Testament Studies 14 (1967–68): 551–65. Hindly offers a date between 115 and 135 C.E. for the Similitudes, which is a bit late, in my opinion. For better or worse, the best date we can give for the Similitudes is sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., but before the composition of the gospel of Matthew in around 90 C.E.
On the parallels between the Enoch Son of Man and the gospel Son of Man in the material that is unique to Matthew, see Burkett, The Son of Man Debate, 78; see also John J. Collins, “The Heavenly Representative: The ‘Son of Man’ in the Similitudes of Enoch,” in Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism: Profiles and Paradigms, ed. John J. Collins and George Nickelsburg (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1980), 111–33. On the Son of Man as a preexistent heavenly being in the fourth gospel, see Delbert Burkett, The Son of the Man in the Gospel of John (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991) and R. G. Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-Existence, Wisdom, and the Son of Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). It should be noted that neither in the Similitudes nor in 4 Ezra is “Son of Man” used as a title, certainly not the way Jesus uses it.
Jesus standing before Caiaphas quotes not only Daniel 7:13 but also Psalms 110:1 (“The Lord says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool’ ”). The integration of Daniel 7:13 and Psalms 110:1 in Jesus’s reply to the high priest may at first seem somewhat disjointed. But according to T. F. Glasson, Jesus is making a natural connection. Glasson notes that in Daniel, the coming of the Son of Man “with the clouds of heaven” symbolizes the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Thus, once Jesus is exalted to the right hand of God, the kingdom he preached in 1:15 will emerge as the “new community of the saints.” According to Glasson, the reference to the Psalms demonstrates Jesus’s personal exaltation, while the reference to Daniel indicates the inauguration of the kingdom on earth—an event that must begin with his death and resurrection. This idea is quite in league with Jesus’s threefold interpretation of the Son of Man. In other words, Glasson believes that this is the moment when the two titles, messiah and Son of Man, come together for Jesus. See Thomas Francis Glasson, “Reply to Caiaphas (Mark 14:62),” New Testament Studies 7 (1960): 88–93. Mary Ann L. Beavis notes the parallels between the story of Jesus before Caiaphas and the previous confession made by Peter. Both scenes begin with a question of Jesus’s identity (8:27, 14:60), and both end with a Son of Man discourse. Furthermore, in both instances Jesus’s reinterpretation of the messianic title is met with a resounding condemnation (8:32–33, 14:63–65); see Mary Ann L. Beavis, “The Trial Before the Sanhedrin (Mark 14:53–65): Reader Response and Greco-Roman Readers,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 49 (1987): 581–96.
As tempting as it may be to dismiss the betrayal of Judas Iscariot as nothing more than a narrative embellishment, the fact is that it is a detail attested to by all four gospel writers, though each presents a different reasoning for his betrayal.
Mark and Matthew make it clear that “the crowd” had been expressly sent by the Sanhedrin, and Luke adds the presence of the Temple captains to the arresting party to make the point clearer. Only the gospel of John indicates the presence of Roman troops in the arresting party. That is highly unlikely, as no Roman soldier would seize a criminal and deliver him to the Sanhedrin unless he was ordered to do so by his prefect, and there is no reason to think that Pilate became involved in Jesus’s situation until Jesus was brought before him. Although Mark seems to suggest that the one wielding the sword was not a disciple but “a certain one of those standing by” (Mark 14:47), the rest of the gospels make it clear that this was indeed a disciple who cut off the servant’s ear. In fact, John identifies the sword-wielding disciple as Simon Peter (John 18:8–11). Luke’s discomfort with a Jesus who seems to resist arrest is ameliorated by his insistence that Jesus stopped the melee and healed the poor servant’s ear before allowing himself to be taken away (Luke 22:49–53). That said, it is Luke who specifically claims that the disciples were commanded by Jesus to bring two swords to Gethsemane (Luke 22:35–38).
On Eusebius, see Pamphili Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History III.3, quoted in George R. Edwards, Jesus and the Politics of Violence (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 31. Eusebius’s account has been challenged by some contemporary scholars including L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2004), 230.
Raymond Brown outlines the argument for a set of pregospel passion narratives in his encyclopedic two-volume work The Death of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 53–93. Contra Brown is the so-called Perrin School, which rejects the notion of a pre-Markan passion narrative and claims that the narrative of the trial and crucifixion was shaped by Mark and adapted by all the canonized gospels, including John. See The Passion in Mark: Studies on Mark 14-16, ed. W. H. Kelber (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976).
For the use of crucifixion among the Jews, see Ernst Bammel, “Crucifixion as a Punishment in Palestine,” The Trial of Jesus, ed. Ernst Bammel (Naperville, Ill.: Alec R. Allenson, 1970), 162–65. Josef Blinzler notes that by Roman times there was some sense of uniformity in the process of crucifixion, especially when it came to the nailing of the hands and feet to a crossbeam. There was usually a flogging beforehand, and at least among the Romans it was expected that the criminal would carry his own cross to the site of the crucifixion. See Blinzler, The Trial of Jesus (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1959).
Josephus notes that the Jews who tried to escape Jerusalem as it was besieged by Titus were first executed, then crucified; The Jewish War 5.449–51. Martin Hengel writes that although crucifixion was a punishment reserved for non-Roman citizens, there were instances of Roman citizens being crucified. But these were deliberately done in response to crimes that were deemed treasonous. In other words, by giving the citizen a “slave’s punishment,” the message was that the crime was so severe that it forfeited the criminal’s Roman citizenship. See Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 39–45. Cicero’s quote is from Hengel, 37. See also J. W. Hewitt, “The Use of Nails in the Crucifixion,” Harvard Theological Review 25 (1932): 29–45.
Regarding Jesus’s trial before Caiaphas in the gospels, Matthew and Mark claim that Jesus was brought to the courtyard (aule) of the high priest and not to the Sanhedrin. Unlike Mark, Matthew specifically names the high priest Caiaphas. John claims that Jesus was first taken to the previous high priest, Ananus, before being transferred to Ananus’s son-in-law and the present high priest, Caiaphas. It is interesting to note that Mark treats as false the claim that Jesus will bring down the Temple and build another without human hands. As Matthew, Luke-Acts, and John make clear, that is precisely what Jesus threatened to do (Matthew 26:59–61; Acts 6:13–14; John 2:19). In fact, a version of that very statement can be found in the Gospel of Thomas: “I shall destroy this house, and no one will be able to rebuild it.” Even Mark puts Jesus’s threat into the mouths of the passersby who mock him on the cross. If the statement were false, as Mark contends, where would the passersby have heard it? From the closed night session of the Sanhedrin? Unlikely. Indeed, such a statement seems to have been part of the post–70 C.E. Christological foundation of the Church, which considered the Christian community to be the “temple made not with human hands.” There can be no doubt that whatever Jesus’s actual words may have been, he had in fact threatened the Temple in some way. Mark himself attests to this: “Do you see these buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). For more on Jesus’s threats to the Temple, see Richard Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, 292–96. With all this in mind, Mark’s apologetic overlay in the trial before the Sanhedrin comes across as a ridiculously contrived attempt to show the injustice of those who made accusations against Jesus, regardless of whether those accusations were true, which in this case they most certainly were.
Raymond Brown lists twenty-seven discrepancies between the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and later rabbinic procedure; Death of the Messiah, 358–59. D. R. Catchpole examines the argument against the historicity of the trial in “The Historicity of the Sanhedrin Trial,” Trial of Jesus, 47–65. That nocturnal trials were, at the very least, unusual is demonstrated by Acts 4:3–5, in which Peter and John are arrested at night but must wait until daylight to be judged before the Sanhedrin. Luke, who wrote that passage in Acts, tries to fix his fellow evangelists’ blunder by arguing for two Sanhedrin meetings: one on the night Jesus was arrested and another “when day came.” In Acts 12:1–4, Peter is arrested during Passover but not brought before the people for judgment until after the feast is over, though Solomon Zeitlin takes exception to the idea that the Sanhedrin could not meet on the eve of the Sabbath; Zeitlin, Who Crucified Jesus? (New York: Bloch, 1964). One could argue here for John’s sequence of events, wherein the Sanhedrin met days before arresting Jesus, but considering that in John, Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple, which all scholars agree was the impetus for his arrest, were among the first acts of his ministry, John’s logic falls apart.
On the argument about whether the Jews had the right under Roman occupation to put criminals to death, see Raymond Brown, Death of the Messiah, vol. 1, 331–48. Catchpole’s conclusion on this issue is, in my opinion, the correct one: “The Jews could try [a death penalty case], but they could not execute.” See “The Historicity of the Sanhedrin trial,” The Trial of Jesus, 63. G.W.H. Lampe suggests that an official record of Jesus’s “trial” before Pilate could have been preserved, considering the preservation of similar acta of Christian martyrs. Apparently several Christian writers mention an Acta Pilati existing in the second and third centuries. But even if that were true (and it very likely is not), there is no reason to believe that such a document would represent anything other than a Christological polemic. See G.W.H. Lampe, “The Trial of Jesus in the Acta Pilati,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 173–82.
Plutarch writes that “every wrongdoer who goes to execution carries his own cross.”
The evidence that Stephen was a Diaspora Jew comes from the fact that he is designated as the leader of the Seven, the “Hellenists” who fell into conflict with the “Hebrews,” as recounted in Acts 6 (see below for more on the Hellenists). Stephen’s stoners were freedmen, themselves Hellenists, but recent émigrés to Jerusalem theologically aligned with the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. See Marie-Éloise Rosenblatt, Paul the Accused (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 24.
The earliest sources we have for belief in the resurrection of the dead can be found in the Ugaritic and Iranian traditions. Zoroastrian scriptures, primarily the Gathas, present the earliest and perhaps most well-developed concept of the resurrection of the individual when it speaks of the dead “rising in their bodies” at the end of time (Yasna 54). Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh would be resurrected, but they did not accept the resurrection of the masses.
Stanley Porter finds examples of bodily resurrection in Greek and Roman religions but claims there is little evidence of the notion of physical resurrection of the dead in Jewish thought. See Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs, Resurrection (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). Jon Douglas Levenson disagrees with Porter, arguing that belief in the resurrection of the body is rooted in the Hebrew Bible and is not, as some have argued, merely part of the Second Temple period or the apocalyptic literature written after 70 C.E.; Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Levenson argues that after the destruction of Jerusalem there was a growing belief among the rabbinate that the redemption of Israel required the flesh-and-blood resurrection of the dead. But even he admits that the vast majority of the resurrection traditions found in Judaism are not about individual exaltation but about national restoration. In other words, this is about a metaphorical resurrection of the Jewish people as a whole, not the literal resurrection of mortals who had died and come back again as flesh and blood. Indeed, Charlesworth notes that if by “resurrection” we mean “the concept of God’s raising the body and soul after death (meant literally) to a new and eternal life (not a return to mortal existence),” then there is only one passage in the entire Hebrew Bible that fits such a criterion—Daniel 12:2–3: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” The many other passages that have been interpreted as referencing the resurrection of the dead simply do not pass scrutiny. For instance, Ezekiel 37—“Thus said the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live again …”—explicitly refers to these bones as “the House of Israel.” Psalm 30, in which David writes, “I cried out to you and you healed me. O Lord, you brought me up from Sheol, preserved me from going down into the pit” (30:2–4), is very obviously about healing from illness, not literally being raised from death. The same holds true for the story of Elijah resurrecting the dead (1 Kings 17:17–24), or, for that matter, Jesus raising Lazarus (John 11:1–46), both of which fall into the category of healing stories, not resurrection stories, as the person “resurrected” will presumably die again. Charlesworth, however, does find evidence of belief in the resurrection of the dead into immortality in the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially in a scroll called On Resurrection (4Q521), which claims that God, through the messiah, will bring the dead to life. Interestingly, this seems to fit with Paul’s belief that believers in the risen Christ will also be resurrected: “and the dead in Christ shall rise” (1Thessalonians 4:15–17). See James H. Charlesworth et al., Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine (London: T&T Clark, 2006). Those scrolls that seem to imply that the Righteous Teacher of Qumran will rise from the dead are speaking not about a literal resurrection of the body but about a metaphorical rising from disenfranchisement for a people who had been divorced from the Temple. There is something like a resurrection idea in the pseudepigrapha—for instance, in 1 Enoch 22–27, or in 2 Maccabees 14, in which Razis tears out his entrails and God puts them back again. Also, The Testament of Judah implies that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will rise to live again (25:1). With regard to ideas of the resurrection in the Mishnah, Charlesworth correctly notes that such passages are too late (post–second century C.E.) to be quoted as examples of Jewish beliefs prior to 70 C.E., though he admits it is conceivable that “the tradition in Mishnah Sanhedrin defined the beliefs of some pre-70 Pharisees.”
Rudolf Bultmann finds evidence for the concept of the dying and rising son-deity in the so-called mystery religions of Rome. He states that “gnosticism above all is aware of the notion of the Son of God become man—and the heavenly redeemer man.” See Essays: Philosophical and Theological (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 279. But I think Martin Hengel is right to note that the great wave of interest in “mystery religions” that arose in the Roman Empire, and the synthesis with Judaism and proto-Christianity that resulted, did not take place until the second century. In other words, it may have been Christianity that influenced the dying and rising deity concept in gnosticism and the mystery religions, not the other way around. See Martin Hengel, The Son of God (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 1976), 25–41.
Other important texts for the historical and cultural study of resurrection in the ancient world include Geza Vermes, The Resurrection: History and Myth (New York: Doubleday, 2008) and N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).
There can be no question whatsoever that Psalm 16 is self-referential, as the first person singular form is used from the beginning: “Preserve me, O God, for in thee I take refuge.” The Hebrew word translated here as “godly one” is chasid. It seems obvious to me that David’s reference to himself as “godly one” has more to do with his piety and devotion to God than it does with the deification of either David himself (which would have been unimaginable) or any future Davidic figure. Of course, Luke would have been using the Septuagint of Psalm 16:8–11, which translates the Hebrew chasid into the Greek hosion, meaning “holy one,” which, given the context and meaning of the psalm, should be seen as synonymous with “godly one.” It may be a huge stretch of the imagination to consider this psalm to be about the messiah, but it is ridiculous to interpret it as predicting Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Stephen’s lengthy defense in the book of Acts is obviously Luke’s composition; it was written six decades after Stephen’s death. But it bears scrutiny, nonetheless, as Luke was himself a Diaspora Jew—a Greek-speaking Syrian convert from the city of Antioch—and his perception of who Jesus was would have aligned with Stephen’s.
Among the more egregious errors in Stephen’s slipshod account of the biblical story: Stephen speaks of Abraham buying the tomb at Schechem for his grandson Jacob to be buried in, whereas the Bible says it was Jacob who bought the tomb at Schechem (Genesis 33:19), though he himself was buried with Abraham in Hebron (Genesis 50:13). Stephen contends that Moses saw the burning bush on Mount Sinai, when in fact it appeared to him on Mount Horeb, which, despite some arguments to the contrary, was not the same place as Sinai (Exodus 3:1). He then goes on to state that an angel gave the law to Moses, when it was God himself who gave Moses the law. It is possible, of course, that Luke has been influenced by the Jubilean tradition, which claims that Moses was given the law by the “Angel of the Presence.” Jubilees 45.15–16 states, “and Israel blessed his sons before he died and told them everything that would befall them in the land of Egypt; and he made known to them what would come upon them in the last days, and blessed them and gave to Joseph two portions in the land. And he slept with his fathers, and he was buried in the double cave in the land of Canaan, near Abraham his father in the grave which he dug for himself in the double cave in the land of Hebron. And he gave all his books and the books of his fathers to Levi his son that he might preserve them and renew them for his children until this day.” Interestingly, Jubilees also suggests that the Torah was written down by Moses, which is the oldest witness to the tradition of Mosaic authorship for the Torah.
For more on the significance of the phrase “the right hand of God,” see entry in David Noel Freedman et al., Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000). Per Freedman, the signet ring was worn on the royal right hand (Jeremiah 22:24); the elder son received the greater blessing via the right hand (Genesis 48:14, 17); the position of honor was at one’s right hand (Psalm 110:1); and the right hand of God performs acts of deliverance (Exodus 15:6), victory (Psalms 20:6), and might (Isaiah 62:8). Thomas Aquinas’s remarks are from Summa Theologica, question 58.
There were, in actuality, two (though some say three) veils that divided the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple: an outer veil that hung at the entrance to the inner sanctuary, and an inner veil within the sanctuary itself that separated the hekal, or portal, from the smaller chamber within which the spirit of God dwelt. Which veil is meant by the gospels is irrelevant, since the story is legend, though it should be noted that only the outer veil would have been visible to anyone but the high priest. See Daniel Gurtner, Torn Veil: Matthew’s Exposition of the Death of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Although the historical evidence and the New Testament both clearly demonstrate that the followers of Jesus remained in Jerusalem after his crucifixion, it is interesting to note that the gospel of Matthew has the risen Jesus telling the disciples to meet him back in Galilee (Matthew 28:7).
Oscar Cullman, The State in the New Testament (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956); The Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959); John Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of the Early Christians (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975); and Martin Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956), have all demonstrated that the early followers of Jesus were unsuccessful in persuading other Jerusalemites to their movement. Gager notes correctly that, in general, “early converts did not represent the established sectors of Jewish society” (26). Dibelius suggests that the Jerusalem community wasn’t even interested in missionizing outside Jerusalem but led a quiet life of piety and contemplation as they awaited Jesus’s second coming.
Gager explains the success of the early Jesus movement, despite its many doctrinal contradictions, by relying on a fascinating sociological study by L. Festinger, H. W. Riecken, and S. Schachter titled When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), which, in Gager’s words, demonstrates that “under certain conditions a religious community whose fundamental beliefs are disconfirmed by events in the world will not necessarily collapse and disband. Instead it may undertake zealous missionary activity as a response to its sense of cognitive dissonance, i.e., a condition of distress and doubt stemming from the disconfirmation of an important belief” (39). As Festinger himself puts it in his follow-up study, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957): “the presence of dissonance gives rise to pressures to reduce or eliminate the dissonance. The strength of the pressure to reduce the dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance” (18).
There is a great deal of debate about what exactly “Hellenist” meant. It could have meant that these were gentile converts to Christianity, as Walter Bauer argues in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Mifflintown, Pa.: Sigler Press, 1971). H. J. Cadbury agrees with Bauer. He thinks the Hellenists were gentile Christians who may have come from Galilee or other gentile regions and who were not favorably disposed toward the Law. See “The Hellenists,” The Beginnings of Christianity, vol. 1, ed. K. Lake and H. J. Cadbury (London: Macmillan, 1933), 59–74. However, the term “Hellenist” most likely refers to Greek-speaking Jews from the Diaspora, as Martin Hengel convincingly demonstrates in Between Jesus and Paul (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 1983). Marcel Simon agrees with Hengel, though he also believes (contra Hengel) that the term had derogatory connotations among the Jews of Judea for its Greek (that is, pagan) accommodations. Simon notes that Hellenism is numbered among Justin Martyr’s list of heresies in Trypho (80.4). See St. Stephen and the Hellenists in the Primitive Church (New York: Longmans, 1958).
That the Seven were leaders of an independent community in the early church is proven by the fact that they are presented as actively preaching, healing, and performing signs and wonders. They are not waiters whose main responsibility is food distribution, as Luke suggests in Acts 6:1–6.
Hengel writes that “the Aramaic-speaking part of the community was hardly affected” by the persecution of the Hellenists, and he notes that, considering the fact that the Hebrews stayed in Jerusalem until at least the outbreak of war in 66 C.E., they must have come to some sort of accommodation with the priestly authorities. “In Jewish Palestine, only a community which remained strictly faithful to the law could survive in the long run”; Between Jesus and Paul, 55–56.
Another reason to consider the Jesus movement in the first few years after the crucifixion to be an exclusively Jewish mission is that among the first acts of the apostles after Jesus’s death was to replace Judas Iscariot with Matthias (Acts 1:21–26). This may indicate that the notion of the reconstitution of Israel’s tribes was still alive immediately after the crucifixion. Indeed, among the first questions the disciples ask the risen Jesus is whether, now that he was back, he intended to “restore the kingdom to Israel.” That is, will you perform now the messianic function you failed to perform during your lifetime? Jesus brushes off the question: “it is not for you to know the times or the season that the Father has put down in his power [to accomplish such things]” (Acts 1:7).
Of the letters in the New Testament that are attributed to Paul, only seven can be confidently traced to him: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. Letters attributed to Paul but probably not written by him include Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.
There is some debate over the date of Paul’s conversion. The confusion rests with Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:1 that he went to the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem “after fourteen years.” Assuming that the council was held around the year 50 C.E., that would place Paul’s conversion around 36 or 37 C.E. This is the date favored by James Tabor, Paul and Jesus (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012). However, some scholars believe that by “after fourteen years,” Paul means fourteen years after his initial appearance before the Apostles, which he claims took place three years after his conversion. That would place his conversion closer to 33 C.E., a date favored by Martin Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, 31. Adolf Harnack, in The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), calculates that Paul was converted eighteen months after Jesus’s death, but I think that is far too early a date for Paul’s conversion. I agree with Tabor and others that Paul’s conversion was more likely sometime around 36 or 37 C.E., fourteen years before the Apostolic Council.
That these lines of Paul in the letter to the Galatians regarding the “so-called pillars of the church” were directed specifically toward the Jerusalem-based Apostles and not some unnamed Jewish Christians with whom he disagreed is definitely proven by Gerd Ludemann in his indispensable works Paul: The Founder of Christianity (New York: Prometheus Books, 2002), especially page 69 and 120; and, with M. Eugene Boring, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). See also Tabor, Paul and Jesus, 19; and J.D.G. Dunn, “Echoes of the Intra-Jewish Polemic in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” Journal of Biblical Literature 112/3 (1993): 459–77.
There has been a fierce debate recently about the role of Paul in creating what we now consider Christianity, with a number of contemporary scholars coming to Paul’s defense and painting him as a devout Jew who remained loyal to his Jewish heritage and faithful to the laws and customs of Moses but who just happened to view his mission as adapting messianic Judaism to a gentile audience. The traditional view of Paul among scholars of Christianity could perhaps best be summed up by Rudolf Bultmann, Faith and Understanding (London: SCM Press, 1969), who famously described Paul’s doctrine of Christ as “basically a wholly new religion, in contrast to the original Palestinian Christianity.” Scholars who more or less agree with Bultmann include Adolf Harnak, What Is Christianity? (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902); H. J. Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish History (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961); and Gerd Ludemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity. Among the recent scholars who see Paul as a loyal Jew who merely tried to translate Judaism for a gentile audience are L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity, and my former professor Marie-Éloise Rosenblatt, Paul the Accused (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995).
Ultimately, there is some truth in both views. Those who believe that Paul was the creator of Christianity as we know it, or that it was he who utterly divorced the new faith from Judaism, often do not adequately take into consideration the eclecticism of Diaspora Judaism or the influence of the Greek-speaking Hellenists, from whom Paul, himself a Greek-speaking Hellenist, likely first heard about Jesus of Nazareth. But to be clear, the Hellenists may have deemphasized the Law of Moses in their preaching, but they did not demonize it; they may have abandoned circumcision as a requirement for conversion, but they did not relegate it to dogs and evildoers and suggest those who disagree should be castrated, as Paul does (Galatians 5:12). Regardless of whether Paul adopted his unusual doctrine from the Hellenists or invented it himself, however, what even his staunchest defenders cannot deny is just how deviant his views are from even the most experimental Jewish movements of his time.
That Paul is speaking about himself when he cites Isaiah 49:1–6 regarding “the root of Jesse” serving as “a light to the Gentiles” is obvious, since even Paul admits that Jesus did not missionize to the gentiles (Romans 15:12).
Research done by N. A. Dahl demonstrates just how unusual Paul’s use of the term Xristos (Christ) was. Dahl notes that for Paul, Xristos is never a predicate, never governed by a genitive, never a title but always a designation, and never used in the appositional form, as in Yesus ha Xristos, or Jesus the Christ. See N. A. Dahl, Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).
It was not unusual to be called Son of God in ancient Judaism. God calls David his son: “today I have begotten you” (Psalms 2:7). He even calls Israel his “first-born son” (Exodus 4:22). But in every case, Son of God is meant as a title, not a description. Paul’s view of Jesus as the literal son of God is without precedence in second Temple Judaism.
Luke claims that Paul and Barnabas separated because of a “sharp contention,” which Luke claims was over whether to take Mark with them on their next missionary trip but which is obviously tied to what happened in Antioch shortly after the Apostolic Council. While Peter and Paul were in Antioch, they engaged in a fierce public feud because, according to Paul, Peter stopped sharing a table with gentiles as soon as a delegation sent by James arrived in the city, “for fear of the circumcision faction” in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:12). Of course, Paul is our only source for this event, and there are plenty of reasons for doubting his version of the story, not the least of which is the fact that sharing a table with gentiles is in no way forbidden under Jewish law. It is more likely that the argument was about the keeping of Jewish dietary laws—that is, not eating gentile food—an argument in which Barnabas sided with Peter.
Luke says Paul was sent to Rome to escape a Jewish plot to have him killed. He also claims that the Roman tribune ordered nearly five hundred of his soldiers to personally accompany Paul to Caesarea. This is absurd and can be flatly ignored.
Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, according to the historian Suetonius, “because the Jews of Rome were indulging in constant riots at the instigation of Chrestus.” It is widely believed that by Chrestus, Suetonius meant Christ, and that this spat among the Jews was between the city’s Christian and non-Christian Jews. As F. F. Bruce notes, “we should remind ourselves that, while we with our hindsight can distinguish between Jews and Christians as early as the reign of Claudius, no such distinction could have been made at that time by the Roman authorities.” F. F. Bruce, “Christianity Under Claudius,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 44 (March 1962): 309–26.
The description of James and the entreaties of the Jews are both taken from the account of the Palestinian Jewish Christian Hegesippus (100–180 C.E.). We have access to Hegesippus’s five books of early Church history only through passages cited in the third-century text of Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–c. 339 C.E.), an archbishop of the Church under the Emperor Constantine.
How reliable a source Hegesippus may be is a matter of great debate. On the one hand, there are a number of statements by Hegesippus whose historicity the majority of scholars accept without dispute, including his assertion that “control of the Church passed together with the Apostles, to the brother of the Lord James, whom everyone from the Lord’s time till our own has named the Just, for there were many Jameses, but this one was holy from his birth” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23). This claim is backed up with multiple attestations (see below) and can even be traced in the letters of Paul and in the book of Acts. However, there are some traditions in Hegesippus that are confused and downright incorrect, including his claim that James was allowed to “enter the Sanctuary alone.” If by “Sanctuary” Hegesippus means the Holy of Holies (and there is some question as to whether that is indeed what he means), then the statement is patently false; only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies. There is also a variant tradition of James’s death in Hegesippus that contradicts what scholars accept as the more reliable account in Josephus’s Antiquities. As recorded in the Ecclesiastical History, it was James’s response to the request of the Jews to help dissuade the people from following Jesus as messiah that ultimately leads to his death: “And [James] answered with a loud voice: Why do you ask me concerning Jesus, the Son of Man? He himself sits in heaven at the right hand of the great power, and is about to come upon the clouds of heaven! So they went up and threw down the just man, and said to each other: Let us stone James the Just. And they began to stone him, for he was not killed by the fall; but he turned and knelt down and said: I entreat you, Lord God our father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
What is fascinating about this story is that it seems to be a variant of the story of Stephen’s martyrdom in the book of Acts, which was itself swiped from Jesus’s response to the high priest Caiaphas in the gospel of Mark. Note also the parallel between James’s death speech and that of Jesus’s on the cross in Luke 23:24.
Hegesippus ends the story of James’s martyrdom thus: “And one of them, one of the fullers, took the club with which he beat out clothes and struck the just man on the head. And thus he suffered martyrdom. And they buried him on the spot, by the temple, and his monument still remains by the temple. He became a true witness, both to Jews and Greeks, that Jesus is the Christ. And immediately Vespasian besieged them” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.1–18). Again, while scholars are almost unanimous in preferring Josephus’s account of James’s death to Hegesippus, it bears mentioning that the latter tradition is echoed in the work of Clement of Alexandria, who writes: “there were two Jameses, one the Just, who was thrown down from the parapet [of the Temple] and beaten to death with the fuller’s club, the other the James [son of Zebedee] who was beheaded” (Clement, Hypotyposes, Book 7).
Josephus writes of the wealthy priestly aristocracy seizing the tithes of the lower priests in Antiquities 20.180–81: “But as for the high priest, Ananias, he increased in glory every day, and this to a great degree, and had obtained the favor and esteem of the citizens in a signal manner; for he was a great hoarder up of money: he therefore cultivated the friendship of Albinus, and of the high priest [Jesus, son of Danneus], by making them presents; he also had servants who were very wicked, who joined themselves to the boldest sort of the people, and went to the thrashing-floors, and took away the tithes that belonged to the priests by violence, and did not refrain from beating such as would not give these tithes to them. So the other high priests acted in the like manner, as did those his servants, without any one being able to prohibit them; so that [some of the] priests, that of old were wont to be supported with those tithes, died for want of food.” This Ananias was probably Ananus the Elder, father to the Ananus who killed James.
Josephus’s account of James’s martyrdom can be found in Antiquities 20.9.1. Not everyone is convinced that James was executed for being a Christian. Maurice Goguel, for instance, argues that if the men executed along with James were also Christians then their names would have been preserved in Christian tradition; Goguel, Birth of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1954). Some scholars, myself included, believe that he was executed for condemning Ananus’s seizure of the tithes meant for the lower-class priests; see S.G.F. Brandon, “The Death of James the Just: A New Interpretation,” Studies in Mysticism and Religion (Jerusalem: Magnus Press, 1967): 57–69.
Whether the Jews were outraged by the unlawful procedure of the trial or by the unjust verdict is difficult to decipher from Josephus’s account. The fact that they complain to Albinus about the illegality of Ananus’s calling the Sanhedrin without a procurator in Jerusalem seems to suggest that it was the procedure of the trial they objected to, not the verdict. However, I agree with John Painter who notes that “the suggestion that what the group objected to was Ananus taking the law into his own hands when Roman authority was required for the imposition of the death penalty (see John 18:31) does not fit an objection raised by ‘the most fair-minded … and strict in the observance of the law’.… Rather it suggests that those who were fair-minded and strict in their observance of the law regarded as unjust the verdict that James and the others had transgressed the law.” See John Painter, “Who Was James?” in The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission, Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner, eds. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 10–65; 49.
Pierre-Antoine Bernheim agrees: “Josephus, by indicating the disagreement of the ‘most precise observers of the law,’ probably wanted to emphasize not the irregularity of the convening of the Sanhedrin in terms of the rules imposed by the Romans but the injustice of the verdict in relation to the law of Moses as this was interpreted by the most widely recognized experts …” James, the Brother of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1997), 249.
While some scholars—for instance, Craig C. Hill, Hellenists and Hebrews (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992)—disagree with Painter and Bernheim, arguing that the complaint of the Jews had nothing to do with James himself, most (myself included) are convinced that the Jews’ complaint was about the injustice of the verdict, not the process of the trial; see also F. F. Bruce, New Testament History (New York: Doubleday, 1980), especially pages 372–73.
Hegesippus’s quote regarding the authority of James can be found in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.4–18. It is unclear whether Hegesippus means that control of the church passed to the apostles and to James, or that control over the apostles also passed to James. Either way, James’s leadership is affirmed. Gerd Ludemann actually thinks the phrase “with the apostles” is not original but was added by Eusebius to conform with the mainstream view of apostolic authority. See Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989).
The material from Clement of Rome is taken from the so-called Pseudo-Clementines, which, while compiled sometime around 300 C.E., reflects far earlier Jewish-Christian traditions that can be traced through the text’s two primary documents: the Homilies and the Recognitions. The Homilies contain two epistles: The Epistle of Peter, from which the reference to James as “Lord and Bishop of the Holy Church” is cited, and the Epistle of Clement, which is addressed to James “the Bishop of Bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the Holy Assembly of the Hebrews, and all the Assemblies everywhere.” The Recognitions is itself probably founded upon an older document titled Ascent of James, which most scholars trace to the mid-100s. Georg Strecker thinks the Ascent was written in Pella, where the Jerusalem-based Christians allegedly congregated after the destruction of Jerusalem. See his entry “The Pseudo-Clementines,” in New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, Wilhelm Schneemelker, ed. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 483–541.
The passage from the Gospel of Thomas can be found in Chapter 12. Incidentally the surname “James the Just” also appears in the Gospel of the Hebrews; see The Nag Hammadi Library for the complete text of both. Clement of Alexandria is quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.1.2–5. Obviously the title of bishop in describing James is anachronistic, but the implication of the term is clear. Jerome’s Lives of Illustrious Men can be found in an English translation by Ernest Cushing Richardson in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1892). The no longer extant passage in Josephus blaming the destruction of Jerusalem on James’s unjust death is cited by Origen in Contra Celsus 1.47, by Jerome in Lives and in his Commentary on Galatians, and by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 2.23.
That James is in the position of presiding authority in the Apostolic Council is proven by the fact that he is the last to speak and begins his judgment with the word krino, or “I decree.” See Bernheim, James, Brother of Jesus, 193. As Bernheim correctly notes, the fact that Paul, when referencing the three pillars of the church, always mentions James first is due to his preeminence. This is affirmed by later redactions of the text in which copyists have reversed the order to put Peter before James in order to place him as head of the church. Any question of James’s preeminence over Peter is put to rest in the passage of Galatians 2:11–14 in which emissaries sent by James to Antioch compel Peter to stop eating with Gentiles, while the ensuing fight between Peter and Paul leads Barnabas to leave Paul and return to James.
Bernheim outlines the role of dynastic succession and its use among the early Christian church in James, Brother of Jesus, 216–17. It is Eusebius who mentions that Simeon, son of Clopas, succeeded James: “After the martyrdom of James and the taking of Jerusalem which immediately ensued, it is recorded that those apostles and disciples of the Lord who were still surviving met together from all quarters and, together with our Lord’s relatives after the flesh (for the most part of them were still alive), took counsel, all in common, as to whom they should judge worthy to be the successor of James; and, what is more, that they all with one consent approved Simeon the son of Clopas, of whom also the book of the Gospels makes mention, as worthy of the throne of the community in that place. He was a cousin—at any rate so it is said—of the Savior; for indeed Hegesippus relates that Clopas was Joseph’s brother” (Ecclesiastical History 3.11; italics mine). Regarding the grandsons of Jesus’s other brother, Judas, Hegesippus writes that they “ruled the churches, inasmuch as they were both martyrs and of the Lord’s family” (Ecclesiastical History 3.20).
It should be noted that the famous statement of Jesus calling Peter the rock upon which he will found his church is rejected as unhistorical by most scholars. See for example Pheme Perkins, Peter, Apostle for the Whole Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2000); B. P. Robinson, “Peter and His Successors: Tradition and Redaction in Matthew 16:17–19,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 21 (1984), 85–104; and Arlo J. Nau, Peter in Matthew (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992). John Painter demonstrates that no tradition exists concerning Peter’s leadership of the Jerusalem church. Such traditions that exist are only concerning Rome. See Painter, “Who Was James?” 31.
Some scholars think that Peter was the head of the church until he was forced to flee Jerusalem. See, for instance, Oscar Cullman, Peter: Disciple. Apostle. Martyr (London: SCM Press, 1953). But that view is based mostly on an erroneous reading of Acts 12:17, in which Peter, before being forced to flee from Jerusalem, tells John Mark to inform James of his departure to Rome. Cullman and others argue that this is the moment in which leadership of the Jerusalem church transfers from Peter to James. However, as John Painter demonstrates, the proper reading of Acts 12:17 is that Peter is merely informing James (his “boss,” if you will) of his activities before fleeing Jerusalem. There is nothing in this passage, or for that matter, in any passage in Acts, which suggests Peter ever led the Jerusalem church. See Painter, “Who was James?” 31–36.
Cullman also claims that the church under Peter was far more lax in its observance of the law before James took over and made the observance more rigid. The only evidence for this view comes from Peter’s conversion of the Roman Cornelius. While this is a story whose historicity is doubtful, it still does not prove a laxity of the law on the part of Peter, and it most definitely does not indicate Peter’s leadership of the Jerusalem assembly. The book of Acts makes it abundantly clear that there was a wide divergence of views among Jesus’s first followers over the rigidity of the law. Peter may have been less rigid than James when it came to observance of the law, but so what? As Bernheim notes: “There is no reason to suppose that the Jerusalem church was less liberal in 48/49 [than it was] at the beginning of the 30s,” James, Brother of Jesus, 209.
Wiard Popkes details the evidence for a first-century dating of James’s epistle in “The Mission of James in His Time,” The Brother of Jesus, 88–99. Martin Dibelius disagrees with the first-century dating. He believes that the epistle is actually a hodgepodge of Jewish-Christian teachings that should be dated to the second century. See Martin Dibelius, James (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). It is interesting to note that James’s epistle is addressed to “the Twelve Tribes of Israel scattered in the Diaspora.” James seems to continue to presuppose the fulfillment that the tribes of Israel will be restored to their full number and Israel liberated. Scholars believe that the reason so much of James’s epistle has echoes in the gospel of Matthew is that embedded within the gospel is a tradition, often referred to as M, that can traced to James.
Bruce Chilton writes about the Nazirite vow that Paul is forced to undergo in “James in Relation to Peter, Paul, and Jesus,” The Brother of Jesus, 138–59. Chilton believes that not only was James a Nazirite, but Jesus was one, too. Indeed, he believes the reference to Jesus as the Nazarean is a corruption of the term Nazirite. Note that Acts 18:18 portrays Paul as taking part in something similar to a Nazirite vow. After setting off by ship for Syria, Paul lands at Cenchreae, in the eastern port of Corinth. There, Luke writes that, “he had his hair cut, for he was under a vow.” Although Luke is clearly referring to a Nazirite vow here, he seems to be confused about the nature and practice of it. The entire point of the ritual was to cut the hair at the end of the vow. Luke gives no hint as to what Paul’s vow may have been, but if it was for a safe journey to Syria he had not reached his destination and thus had not fulfilled his vow. Moreover, Paul’s Nazirite vow is not taken at the Temple and does not involve a priest.
John Painter outlines all of the anti-Pauline material in the Pseudo-Clementines, including the altercation at the Temple between Paul and James, in “Who Was James?” 38–39. Painter also addresses Jesus’s expansion of the Law of Moses in 55–57.
The community that continued to follow the teachings of James in the centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem referred to itself as the Ebionites, or “the Poor,” in honor of James’s focus on the poor. The community may have been called the Ebionites even during James’s lifetime, as the term is found in the second chapter of James’s epistle. The Ebionites insisted on circumcision and strict adherence to the law. Well into the fourth century they viewed Jesus as just a man. They were one of the many heterodox communities who were marginalized and persecuted after the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. essentially made Pauline Christianity the orthodox religion of the Roman Empire.