Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

marketplaces, and to have the front
     seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.”
    “They devour the homes of widows and make long prayers for the sake of appearance,”
     Jesus says of the scribes. And for that, “their condemnation will be the greater”
     (Mark 12:38–40). Jesus’s parables, especially, were riddled with the same anticlerical
     sentiments that shaped the politics and piety of Galilee, and that would become the
     hallmark of his ministry. Consider the famous parable of the Good Samaritan:
    A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among thieves who stripped
     him of his clothes, beat him, and left him half dead. By chance, a priest came down
     that road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. A Levite (priest)
     also came by that place and seeing the man, he, too, passed on the other side. But
     a certain Samaritan on a journey came where the man was, and when he saw him, he had
     compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds and poured oil and wine on them.
     He placed the man on his own animal, and led him to an inn, and took care of him.
     The following day he gave the innkeeper two denarii and said, “Take care of him; when
     I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend” (Luke 10:30–37).
    Christians have long interpreted this parable as reflecting the importance of helping
     those in distress. But for the audience gatheredat Jesus’s feet, the parable would have had less to do with the goodness of the Samaritan
     than with the baseness of the two priests.
    The Jews considered the Samaritans to be the lowliest, most impure people in Palestine
     for one chief reason: the Samaritans rejected the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem
     as the sole legitimate place of worship. Instead, they worshipped the God of Israel
     in their own temple on Mount Gerizim, on the western bank of the Jordan River. For
     those among Jesus’s listeners who recognized themselves as the beaten, half-dead man
     left lying on the road, the lesson of the parable would have been self-evident: the
     Samaritan, who denies the authority of the Temple, goes out of his way to fulfill
     the commandment of the Lord to “love your neighbor as yourself” (the parable itself
     was given in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?”). The priests, who derive
     their wealth and authority from their connection to the Temple, ignore the commandment
     altogether for fear of defiling their ritual purity and thus endangering that connection.
    The people of Capernaum devoured this brazenly anticlerical message. Almost immediately,
     large crowds began to gather around Jesus. Some recognized him as the boy born in
     Nazareth to a family of woodworkers. Others heard of the power of his words and came
     to listen to him preach out of curiosity. Still, at this point, Jesus’s reputation
     was contained along the shores of Capernaum. Outside this fishing village, no one
     else had yet heard of the charismatic Galilean preacher—not Antipas in Tiberias, not
     Caiaphas in Jerusalem.
    But then something happened that would change everything.
    While standing at the Capernaum synagogue, speaking about the Kingdom of God, Jesus
     was suddenly interrupted by a man the gospels describe as having “an unclean spirit.”
    “What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth?” the man cried out. “Have you come
     to destroy us? I know who you are, oh holy one of God.”
    Jesus cut him off at once. “Silence! Come out of him!”
    All at once, the man fell to the floor, writhing in convulsions. A great cry came
     out of his mouth. And he was still.
    Everyone in the synagogue was amazed. “What is this?” the people asked one another.
     “A new teaching? And with such authority that he commands the spirits and they obey
     him” (Mark 1:23–28).
    After that, Jesus’s fame could no longer be confined to Capernaum. News of the itinerant
     preacher spread throughout the region, into the whole of Galilee. In every town and
     village the crowds grew larger as people everywhere came out, not so much to hear
     his message but to see the wondrous deeds they had heard about. For while the disciples
     would ultimately recognize Jesus as the promised messiah and the heir to the kingdom
     of David, while the Romans would view him as a false claimant to the office of King
     of the Jews, and while the scribes and the Temple priests would come to consider him
     a blasphemous threat