Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

thousands of Jews to the cross that the people
     of Jerusalem felt obliged to lodge a formal complaint with the Roman emperor.
    Despite, or perhaps because of, his cold, hard cruelty to the Jews, Pontius Pilate
     became one of the longest-serving Roman governors in Judea. It was a perilous and
     volatile job. The governor’s most important task was to ensure the uninterrupted flow
     of tax revenues back to Rome. But to do so he had to maintain a functional, if fragile,
     relationship with the high priest; the governorwould administer the civil and economic affairs of Judea, while the high priest maintained
     the Jewish cult. The tenuous bond between the two offices meant that no Roman governor
     or Jewish high priest lasted very long, especially in those first few decades after
     Herod’s death. The five governors before Pilate served only a couple of years each,
     the lone exception being Pilate’s immediate predecessor, Valerius Gratus. But whereas
     Gratus appointed and dismissed five different high priests in his time as governor,
     throughout Pilate’s decade-long tenure in Jerusalem, he had only one high priest to
     contend with: Joseph Caiaphas.
    Like most high priests, Caiaphas was an extremely wealthy man, though his wealth may
     have come through his wife, who was the daughter of a previous high priest named Ananus.
     Caiaphas likely was appointed to the office of high priest not because of his own
     merit but through the influence of his father-in-law, a larger-than-life character
     who managed to pass the position to five of his own sons while remaining a significant
     force throughout Caiaphas’s tenure. According to the gospel of John, after Jesus was
     arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was first brought to Ananus for questioning
     before being dragged to Caiaphas for judgment (John 18:13).
    Gratus had appointed Caiaphas as high priest in the year 18 C.E. , meaning he had already served eight years in the office by the time Pilate arrived
     in Jerusalem. Part of the reason Caiaphas was able to hold the position of high priest
     for an unprecedented eighteen years was because of the close relationship he ended
     up forging with Pontius Pilate. The two men worked well together. The period of their
     combined rule, from 18 C.E . to 36 C.E. , coincided with the most stable period in the entire first century. Together they
     managed to keep a lid on the revolutionary impulse of the Jews by dealing ruthlessly
     with any hint of political disturbance, no matter how small.
    Yet despite their best efforts, Pilate and Caiaphas were unable to extinguish the
     zeal that had been kindled in the hearts of the Jewsby the messianic uprisings that took place at the turn of the century—those of Hezekiah
     the bandit chief, Simon of Peraea, Athronges the shepherd boy, and Judas the Galilean.
     Not long after Pilate arrived in Jerusalem, a new crop of preachers, prophets, bandits,
     and messiahs began traipsing through the Holy Land, gathering disciples, preaching
     liberation from Rome, and promising the coming of the Kingdom of God. In 28 C.E ., an ascetic preacher named John began baptizing people in the waters of the Jordan
     River, initiating them into what he believed was the true nation of Israel. When John
     the Baptist’s popularity became too great to control, Pilate’s tetrarch in Peraea,
     Herod Antipas, had him imprisoned and executed sometime around 30 C.E . A couple of years later, a woodworker from Nazareth named Jesus led a band of disciples
     on a triumphant procession into Jerusalem, where he assaulted the Temple, overturned
     the tables of the money changers, and broke free the sacrificial animals from their
     cages. He, too, was captured and sentenced to death by Pilate. Three years after that,
     in 36 C.E ., a messiah known only as “the Samaritan” gathered a group of followers atop Mount
     Gerizim, where he claimed he would reveal “sacred vessels” hidden there by Moses.
     Pilate responded with a detachment of Roman soldiers who climbed Gerizim and cut the
     Samaritan’s faithful multitude to pieces.
    It was that final act of unrestrained violence on Mount Gerizim that ended Pilate’s
     governorship in Jerusalem. Summoned to Rome to explain his actions to the emperor
     Tiberius, Pilate never returned to Judea. He was exiled to Gaul in 36 C.E . Considering their close working relationship, it may be no coincidence that Joseph
     Caiaphas was dismissed from his position as high