Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

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 tacklednicely 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.
CHAPTER THREE: YOU KNOW WHERE I AM FROM
    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 thesynagogue. 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