Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Judas was the son of the famed bandit chief Hezekiah, the
     failed messiah whom Herod had captured and beheaded forty years earlier as part of
     his campaign to clear the countryside of the bandit menace. After Herod’s death, Judas
     the Galilean joined forces with a mysterious Pharisee named Zaddok to launch a wholly
     new independence movement that Josephus terms the “Fourth Philosophy,” so as to differentiate
     it from the other three “philosophies”: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.
     What set the members of the Fourth Philosophy apart from the rest was their unshakable
     commitment to freeing Israel from foreign rule and their fervent insistence, even
     unto death, that they would serve no lord save the One God. There was a well-defined
     term for this type of belief, one that all pious Jews, regardless of their political
     stance, would have recognized and proudly claimed for themselves:
zeal
.
    Zeal implied a strict adherence to the Torah and the Law, a refusal to serve any foreign
     master—to serve any human master at all—and an uncompromising devotion to the sovereignty
     of God. To be zealous for the Lord was to walk in the blazing footsteps of the prophets
     and heroes of old, men and women who tolerated no partner to God, who would bow to
     no king save the King of the World, and who dealt ruthlessly with idolatry and with
     those who transgressed God’s law. The very land of Israel was claimed through zeal,
     for it was the zealous warriors of God who cleansed it of all foreigners and idolaters,
     just as God demanded. “Whoever sacrificesto any god but the Lord alone shall be utterly annihilated” (Exodus 22:20).
    Many Jews in first-century Palestine strove to live a life of zeal, each in his or
     her own way. But there were some who, in order to preserve their zealous ideals, were
     willing to resort to extreme acts of violence if necessary, not just against the Romans
     and the uncircumcised masses, but against their fellow Jews, those who dared submit
     to Rome. They were called
zealots
.
    These zealots should not be confused with the Zealot Party that would arise sixty
     years later, after the Jewish Revolt in 66 C.E . During Jesus’s lifetime, zealotry did not signify a firm sectarian designation or
     political party. It was an idea, an aspiration, a model of piety inextricably linked
     to the widespread sense of apocalyptic expectation that had seized the Jews in the
     wake of the Roman occupation. There was a feeling, particularly among the peasants
     and the pious poor, that the present order was coming to an end, that a new and divinely
     inspired order was about to reveal itself. The Kingdom of God was at hand. Everyone
     was talking about it. But God’s reign could only be ushered in by those with the
zeal
to fight for it.
    Such ideas had existed long before Judas the Galilean came along. But Judas was perhaps
     the first revolutionary leader to fuse banditry and zealotry into a single revolutionary
     force, making resistance to Rome a religious duty incumbent on all Jews. It was Judas’s
     fierce determination to do whatever it took to free the Jews from foreign rule and
     cleanse the land in the name of Israel’s God that made the Fourth Philosophy a model
     of zealous resistance for the numerous apocalyptic revolutionaries who would, a few
     decades later, join forces to expel the Romans from the Holy Land.
    In 4 B.C.E ., with Herod the Great dead and buried, Judas and his small army of zealots made
     a daring assault on the city of Sepphoris. They broke open the city’s royal armory
     and seized for themselves the weapons and provisions that were stored inside. Now
     fully armed and joined by a number of sympathetic Sepphoreans,the members of the Fourth Philosophy launched a guerrilla war throughout Galilee,
     plundering the homes of the wealthy and powerful, setting villages ablaze, and meting
     out the justice of God upon the Jewish aristocracy and those who continued to pledge
     their loyalty to Rome.
    The movement grew in size and ferocity throughout the following decade of violence
     and instability. Then, in the year 6 C.E. , when Judea officially became a Roman province and the Syrian governor, Quirinius,
     called for a census to tally, register, and properly tax the people and property in
     the newly acquired region, the members of the Fourth Philosophy seized their opportunity.
     They used the census to make a final appeal to the Jews to stand