Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

been
     duped into buying. I began to rethink the faith and culture of my forefathers, finding
     in them as an adult a deeper, more intimate familiarity than I ever had as a child,
     the kind that comes from reconnecting with an old friend after many years apart.
    Meanwhile, I continued my academic work in religious studies, delving back into the
     Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar. No longer chained
     to the assumption that the stories I read were literally true, I became aware of a
     more meaningful truth in the text, a truth intentionally detached from the exigencies
     of history. Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus,
     the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that
     he defied, the more I was drawn to him. Indeed, the Jewish peasant and revolutionary
     who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost
     became so much more real to me than the detached, unearthly being I had been introduced
     to in church.
    Today, I can confidently say that two decades of rigorous academicresearch into the origins of Christianity has made me a more genuinely committed disciple
     of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ. My hope with this book is to
     spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied
     to spreading the story of the Christ.
    There are a few things to keep in mind before we begin our examination. For every
     well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about
     the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally
     authoritative argument opposing it. Rather than burden the reader with the centuries-long
     debate about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth, I have constructed my narrative
     upon what I believe to be the most accurate and reasonable argument, based on my two
     decades of scholarly research into the New Testament and early Christian history.
     For those interested in the debate, I have exhaustively detailed my research and,
     whenever possible, provided the arguments of those who disagree with my interpretation
     in the lengthy notes section at the end of this book.
    All Greek translations of the New Testament are my own (with a little help from my
     friends Liddell and Scott). In those few cases in which I do not directly translate
     a passage of the New Testament, I rely on the translation provided by the New Revised
     Standard Version of the Bible. All Hebrew and Aramaic translations are provided by
     Dr. Ian C. Werrett, associate professor of religious studies at St. Martin’s University.
    Throughout the text, all references to the
Q
source material (the material unique to the gospels of Matthew and Luke) will be
     marked thus: (Matthew | Luke), with the order of the books indicating which gospel
     I am most directly quoting. The reader will notice that I rely primarily on the gospel
     of Mark and the
Q
material in forming my outline of the story of Jesus. That is because these are the
     earliest and thus most reliable sources available to us about the life of the Nazarean.
     In general I have chosen not to delve too deeply into the so-called Gnostic Gospels.
     While thesetexts are incredibly important in outlining the wide array of opinions among the early
     Christian community about who Jesus was and what his teachings meant, they do not
     shed much light on the historical Jesus himself.
    Although it is almost unanimously agreed that, with the possible exception of Luke-Acts,
     the gospels were not written by the people for whom they are named, for ease and the
     sake of clarity, I will continue to refer to the gospel writers by the names by which
     we now know and recognize them.
    Finally, in keeping with scholarly designations, this text employs C.E ., or Common Era, instead of A.D . in its dating, and B.C.E . instead of B.C . It also more properly refers to the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible or the Hebrew
     Scriptures.

Introduction
    It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth.
     The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of
     the world, a band of ragged followers trailing behind, was a common a sight in Jesus’s
     time—so common, in fact, that it had become a kind of caricature among the Roman elite.
     In a farcical passage about just such a figure, the