Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

mission by providing food and lodging
     to him and his followers. But Jesus’s message was designed to be a direct challenge
     to the wealthy and the powerful, be they the occupiers in Rome, the collaborators
     in the Temple, or the new moneyed class in the Greek cities of Galilee. The message
     was simple: the Lord God had seen the suffering of the poor and dispossessed; he had
     heard their cries of anguish. And he was finally going to do something about it. This
     may not have been a new message—John preached much the same thing—but it was a message
     being delivered to a new Galilee, by a man who, as a tried and true Galilean himself,
     shared the anti-Judea, anti-Temple sentiments that permeated the province.
    Jesus was not in Capernaum for long before he began gathering to himself a small group
     of like-minded Galileans, mostly culled from the ranks of the fishing village’s disaffected
     youth, who would become his first disciples (actually, Jesus had arrived with a couple
     of disciples already in tow, those who had left John the Baptist after his capture
     and followed Jesus instead). According to the gospel of Mark, Jesus found his first
     followers while walking along the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Spying two young fishermen,
     Simon and his brother Andrew, casting nets, he said, “Follow me, and I will make you
     fishers of men.” The brothers, Mark writes, immediately dropped their nets and went
     with him. Sometime later Jesus came upon another pair of fishermen—James and John,
     the young sons of Zebedee—and made them the same offer. They, too, left their boat
     and their nets and followed Jesus (Mark 1:16–20).
    What set the disciples apart from the crowds that swelled andshrank whenever Jesus entered one village or another is that they actually traveled
     with Jesus. Unlike the enthusiastic but fickle masses, the disciples were specifically
     called by Jesus to leave their homes and their families behind to follow him from
     town to town, village to village. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father
     and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—yes even his life—he cannot
     be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26 | Matthew 10:37).
    The gospel of Luke claims that there were seventy-two disciples in all (Luke 10:1–12),
     and they undoubtedly included women, some of whom, in defiance of tradition, are actually
     named in the New Testament: Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Chuza; Mary, the
     mother of James and Joseph; Mary, the wife of Clopas; Susanna; Salome; and perhaps
     most famous of all, Mary from Magdala, whom Jesus had cured of “seven demons” (Luke
     8:2). That these women functioned as Jesus’s disciples is demonstrated by the fact
     that all four gospels present them as traveling with Jesus from town to town (Mark
     15:40–41; Matthew 27:55–56; Luke 8:2–3; 23:49; John 19:25). The gospels claim “many
     other women … followed [Jesus] and served him,” too (Mark 15:40–41), from his first
     days preaching in Galilee to his last breath on the hill in Golgotha.
    But among the seventy-two, there was an inner core of disciples—all of them men—who
     would serve a special function in Jesus’s ministry. These were known simply as “the
     Twelve.” They included the brothers James and John—the sons of Zebedee—who would be
     called
Boanerges
, “the sons of thunder”; Philip, who was from Bethsaida and who began as one of John
     the Baptist’s disciples before he switched his allegiance to Jesus (John 1:35–44);
     Andrew, who the gospel of John claims also began as a follower of the Baptist, though
     the synoptic gospels contradict this assertion by locating him in Capernaum; Andrew’s
     brother Simon, the disciple whom Jesus nicknames Peter; Matthew, who is sometimes
     erroneously associated with another of Jesus’s disciples, Levi, the toll collector;
     Jude the son of James; James the son of Alphaeus; Thomas,who would become legendary for doubting Jesus’s resurrection; Bartholomew, about whom
     almost nothing is known; another Simon, known as “the Zealot,” a designation meant
     to signal his commitment to the biblical doctrine of zeal, not his association with
     the Zealot Party, which would not exist for another thirty years; and Judas Iscariot,
     the man the gospels claim would one day betray Jesus to the high priest Caiaphas.
    The Twelve will become the principal bearers of Jesus’s message—the
apostolou
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