Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

enemies”
     and “turn the other cheek” were deliberately cleansed of their Jewish context and
     transformed into abstract ethical principles that all peoples could abide regardless
     of their ethnic, cultural, or religious persuasions.
    Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose
     sight of this fundamental fact:
Jesus of Nazareth was first and finally a Jew
. As a Jew, Jesus was concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews. Israel
     was all that mattered to Jesus. He insisted that his mission was “solely to the lost
     sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24) and commanded his disciples to share
     the good news with none but their fellow Jews: “Go nowhere near the gentiles and do
     not enter the city of the Samaritans” (Matthew 10:5–6). Whenever he himself encountered
     gentiles, he always kept them at a distance and often healed them reluctantly. As
     he explained to the Syrophoenician woman who came to him seeking help for her daughter,
     “Let the children [by which Jesus means Israel] be fed first, for it is not right
     to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs [by which he means gentiles
     like her]” (Mark 7:27).
    When it came to the heart and soul of the Jewish faith—the Law of Moses—Jesus was
     adamant that his mission was not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17).
     That law made a clear distinction between relations
among
Jews and relations
between
Jews and foreigners. The oft-repeated commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself”
     was originally given strictly in the context of internal relations within Israel.
     The verse in question reads: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge
against any of your people
, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). To the Israelites,
     as well as to Jesus’s community in first-century Palestine, “neighbor” meant one’s
     fellow Jews. With regard to the treatment of foreigners and outsiders, oppressors
     and occupiers, however, the Torah could not be clearer: “You shall drivethem out before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods.
They shall not live in your land
” (Exodus 23:31–33).
    For those who view Jesus as the literally begotten son of God, Jesus’s Jewishness
     is immaterial. If Christ is divine, then he stands above any particular law or custom.
     But for those seeking the simple Jewish peasant and charismatic preacher who lived
     in Palestine two thousand years ago, there is nothing more important than this one
     undeniable truth: the same God whom the Bible calls “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3),
     the God who repeatedly commands the wholesale slaughter of every foreign man, woman,
     and child who occupies the land of the Jews, the “blood-spattered God” of Abraham,
     and Moses, and Jacob, and Joshua (Isaiah 63:3), the God who “shatters the heads of
     his enemies,” bids his warriors to bathe their feet in their blood and leave their
     corpses to be eaten by dogs (Psalms 68:21–23)—that is the
only
God that Jesus knew and the
sole
God he worshipped.
    There is no reason to consider Jesus’s conception of his neighbors and enemies to
     have been any more or less expansive than that of any other Jew of his time. His commands
     to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” must be read as being directed exclusively
     at his fellow Jews and meant as a model of peaceful relations exclusively within the
     Jewish community. The commands have nothing to do with how to treat foreigners and
     outsiders, especially those savage “plunderers of the world” who occupied God’s land
     in direct violation of the Law of Moses, which Jesus viewed himself as fulfilling.
They shall not live in your land
.
    In any case, neither the commandment to love one’s enemies nor the plea to turn the
     other cheek is equivalent to a call for nonviolence or nonresistance. Jesus was not
     a fool. He understood what every other claimant to the mantle of the messiah understood:
     God’s sovereignty could not be established except through force. “From the days of
     John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of God has been coming violently, and the violent
     ones try to snatch it away” (Matthew 11:12 | Luke 16:16).
    It was precisely to prepare for the unavoidable consequences of establishing the Kingdom
     of God on earth that Jesus handpicked his twelve apostles. The Jews of Jesus’s time
     believed