Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

about the life and ministry of Jesus, one that is greatly at odds with
     the fourth gospel, John, which was likely written soon after the close of the first
     century, between 100 and 120 C.E .
    These, then, are the canonized gospels. But they are not the only gospels. We now
     have access to an entire library of noncanonical scriptures written mostly in the
     second and third centuries that provides a vastly different perspective on the life
     of Jesus of Nazareth. These include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the
     Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a host of other so-called Gnostic
     writings discovered in Upper Egypt, near the town of Nag Hammadi, in 1945. Though
     they were left out of what would ultimately become the New Testament,these books are significant in that they demonstrate the dramatic divergence of opinion
     that existed over who Jesus was and what Jesus meant, even among those who claimed
     to walk with him, who shared his bread and ate with him, who heard his words and prayed
     with him.
    In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon
     which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular
     Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E .; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so. By themselves these two facts
     cannot provide a complete portrait of the life of a man who lived two thousand years
     ago. But when combined with all we know about the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived—and
     thanks to the Romans, we know a great deal—these two facts can help paint a picture
     of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by
     the gospels. Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise—a zealous
     revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political
     turmoil of first-century Palestine—bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle
     shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.
    Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively
     for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed
     in pain—“King of the Jews”—was called a
titulus
and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who
     hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being
     executed. Jesus’s crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e.,
     treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time
     was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus
     hung men who in Greek are called
lestai
, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but which actually means “bandits”
     and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.
    Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing theracked and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone
     should cast doubt upon the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace
     almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of his time. The notion that
     the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom
     of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying
     revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that
     had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.
    Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature
     of Jesus’s message and movement? To answer this question we must first recognize that
     almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth
     was composed
after
the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E . In that year, a band of Jewish rebels, spurred by their zeal for God, roused their
     fellow Jews in revolt. Miraculously, the rebels managed to liberate the Holy Land
     from the Roman occupation. For four glorious years, the city of God was once again
     under Jewish control. Then, in 70 C.E ., the Romans returned. After a brief siege of Jerusalem, the soldiers breached the
     city walls and unleashed an orgy of violence upon its residents. They butchered everyone
     in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount. A river of blood flowed down the
     cobblestone streets. When the