Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

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 firstcentury 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 agreedwith 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