Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism
     and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one
     for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make.
    Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus
     of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering
     an army ofdisciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic
     preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical
     Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely
     lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of
     the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus the
man
—is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He
     is, in short, someone worth believing in.

For my wife, Jessica Jackley, and the entire Jackley clan,
whose love and acceptance have taught me more about Jesus
than all my years of research and study
.

Acknowledgments
    This book is the result of two decades of research into the New Testament and the
     origins of the Christian movement conducted at Santa Clara University, Harvard University,
     and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Although I am obviously indebted
     to all my professors, I would like to single out my extremely patient Greek professor
     Helen Moritz, and my brilliant adviser, the late Catherine Bell, at Santa Clara, Harvey
     Cox and Jon Levinson at Harvard, and Mark Juergensmeyer at UCSB. I am also grateful
     for the unconditional support I received from my editor Will Murphy and the entire
     team at Random House. Special thanks to Elyse Cheney, the best literary agent in the
     world, and to Ian Werrett, who not only translated all the Hebrew and Aramaic passages
     in the book, but also read multiple drafts and provided vital feedback on the manuscript.
     But the biggest thanks of all goes, as always, to my beloved wife and best friend
     Jessica Jackley, whose love and devotion have made me the man I always hoped I could
     be.

Notes
INTRODUCTION
    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
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