Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

(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-Christianemperor, 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).
PART I PROLOGUE: A DIFFERENT SORT OF SACRIFICE
    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