Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

reappeared in their
     village. The gospels say Jesus’s mother, brothers, and sisters were scandalized by
     what people were saying about him; they tried desperately to silence and restrain
     him (Mark 3:21). Yet when they approached Jesus and urged him to return home and resume
     the family business, he refused. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Jesus asked,
     looking at those around him. “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the
     will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–34).
    This account in the gospel of Mark is often interpreted as suggesting that Jesus’s
     family rejected his teachings and denied his identity as messiah. But there is nothing
     in Jesus’s reply to his family that hints at hostility between him and his brothers
     and sisters. Nor is there anything in the gospels to indicate that Jesus’s family
     rebuffed his messianic ambitions. On the contrary, Jesus’s brothers played fairly
     significant roles in the movement he founded. His brother James became the leader
     of the community in Jerusalem after his crucifixion. Perhaps his family was slow in
     accepting Jesus’s teachings and his extraordinary claims. But the historical evidence
     suggests that they all eventually came to believe in him and his mission.
    Jesus’s neighbors were a different story, however. The gospel paints his fellow Nazareans
     as distressed by the return of “Mary’s son.” Although a few spoke well of him and
     were amazed by his words, most were deeply disturbed by his presence and his teachings.
     Jesus quickly became an outcast in the small hilltop community. The gospel of Luke
     claims the residents of Nazareth finally drove him out to the brow of the hill on
     which the village was built and tried to push him off a cliff (Luke 4:14–30). The
     story is suspect; there is no cliff to be pushed off in Nazareth, just a gentlysloping hillside. Still, the fact remains that, at least at first, Jesus was unable
     to find much of a following in Nazareth. “No prophet is accepted in his hometown,”
     he said before abandoning his childhood home for a nearby fishing village called Capernaum
     on the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee.
    Capernaum was the ideal place for Jesus to launch his ministry, as it perfectly reflected
     the calamitous changes wrought by the new Galilean economy under Antipas’s rule. The
     seaside village of some fifteen hundred mostly farmers and fishermen, known for its
     temperate climate and its fertile soil, would become Jesus’s base of operations throughout
     the first year of his mission in Galilee. The entire village stretched along a wide
     expanse of the seacoast, allowing the cool salt air to nurture all manner of plants
     and trees. Clumps of lush littoral vegetation thrived along the vast coastline throughout
     the year, while thickets of walnut and pine, fig and olive trees dotted the low-lying
     hills inland. The true gift of Capernaum was the magnificent sea itself, which teemed
     with an array of fish that had nourished and sustained the population for centuries.
    By the time Jesus set up his ministry there, however, Capernaum’s economy had become
     almost wholly centered on serving the needs of the new cities that had cropped up
     around it, especially the new capital, Tiberias, which lay just a few kilometers to
     the south. Food production had increased exponentially, and with it the standard of
     living for those farmers and fishermen who had the capacity to purchase more cultivatable
     land or to buy more boats and nets. But, as in the rest of Galilee, the profits from
     this increase in the means of production disproportionately benefited the large landowners
     and moneylenders who resided outside Capernaum: the wealthy priests in Judea and the
     new urban elite in Sepphoris and Tiberias. The majority of Capernaum’s residents had
     been left behind by the new Galilean economy. It would be these people whom Jesus
     would specifically target—those whofound themselves cast to the fringes of society, whose lives had been disrupted by
     the rapid social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.
    This is not to say that Jesus was interested solely in the poor, or that only the
     poor would follow him. A number of fairly prosperous benefactors—the toll collectors
     Levi (Mark 2:13–15) and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10) and the wealthy patron Jairus (Mark
     5:21–43), to name a few—would come to fund Jesus’s