Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

with them against
     Rome and fight for their freedom. The census, they argued, was an abomination. It
     was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was,
     in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It was an admission that
     the Jews were not the chosen tribe of God but the personal property of the emperor.
    It was not the census itself that so enraged Judas and his followers; it was the very
     notion of paying any tax or tribute to Rome. What more obvious sign was needed of
     the subservience of the Jews? The tribute was particularly offensive as it implied
     that the land belonged to Rome, not God. Indeed, the payment of tribute became, for
     the zealots, a test of piety and allegiance to God. Simply put, if you thought it
     lawful to pay tribute to Caesar, then you were a traitor and apostate. You deserved
     to die.
    Inadvertently helping Judas’s cause was the bumbling high priest at the time, a Roman
     lackey named Joazar, who happily went along with Quirinius’s census and encouraged
     his fellow Jews to do the same. The collusion of the high priest was all the proof
     Judas and his followers needed that the Temple itself had been defiled and must be
     forcibly rescued from the sinful hands of the priestly aristocracy. As far as Judas’s
     zealots were concerned, Joazar’s acceptance of the census was his death warrant. The
     fate of theJewish nation depended on killing the high priest. Zeal demanded it. Just as the sons
     of Mattathias “showed zeal for the law” by killing those Jews who sacrificed to any
     but God (Maccabees 2:19–28), just as Josiah, King of Judah, butchered every uncircumcised
     man in his land because of his “zeal for the Mighty One” (2 Baruch 66:5), so now must
     these zealots turn back the wrath of God upon Israel by ridding the land of treasonous
     Jews like the high priest.
    It is clear from the fact that the Romans removed the high priest Joazar from his
     post not long after he had encouraged the Jews to obey the census that Judas won the
     argument. Josephus, who has very little positive to say about Judas the Galilean (he
     calls him a “sophist,” a pejorative that to Josephus signifies a troublemaker, a disturber
     of the peace, a deceiver of the young), notes somewhat cryptically that Joazar was
     “overpowered” by the argument of the zealots.
    Josephus’s problem with Judas seems not to have been his “sophistry” or his use of
     violence, but rather what he derisively calls Judas’s “royal aspirations.” What Josephus
     means is that in fighting against the subjugation of the Jews and preparing the way
     for the establishment of God’s reign on earth, Judas, like his father Hezekiah before
     him, was claiming for himself the mantle of the messiah, the throne of King David.
     And, like his father before him, Judas would pay the price for his ambition.
    Not long after he led the charge against the census, Judas the Galilean was captured
     by Rome and killed. As retribution for the city’s having given up its arms to Judas’s
     followers, the Romans marched to Sepphoris and burned it to the ground. The men were
     slaughtered, the women and children auctioned off as slaves. More than two thousand
     rebels and sympathizers were crucified en masse. A short time later, Herod Antipas
     arrived and immediately set to work transforming the flattened ruins of Sepphoris
     into an extravagant royal city fit for a king.
    Jesus of Nazareth was likely born the same year that Judas the Galilean—Judas the
     failed messiah, son of Hezekiah the failedmessiah—rampaged through the countryside, burning with zeal. He would have been about
     ten years old when the Romans captured Judas, crucified his followers, and destroyed
     Sepphoris. When Antipas began to rebuild Sepphoris in earnest, Jesus was a young man
     ready to work in his father’s trade. By then practically every artisan and day laborer
     in the province would have poured into Sepphoris to take part in what was the largest
     restoration project of the time, and one can be fairly certain that Jesus and his
     brothers, who lived a short distance away in Nazareth, would have been among them.
     In fact, from the time he began his apprenticeship as a
tekton
to the day he launched his ministry as an itinerant preacher, Jesus would have spent
     most of his life not in the tiny hamlet of Nazareth, but in the cosmopolitan capital
     of Sepphoris: a peasant boy