Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

massacre was complete, the soldiers set fire to the
     Temple of God. The fires spread beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem’s meadows,
     the farms, the olive trees. Everything burned. So complete was the devastation wrought
     upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem
     had ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were
     marched out of the city in chains.
    The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic event is hard
     to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to live as outcasts
     among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the second century gradually anddeliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched
     the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish
     life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged.
    The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal
     that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because it allowed the early church
     to ward off the wrath of a deeply vengeful Rome, but also because, with the Jewish
     religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s
     evangelism. Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary
     Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly
     matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries
     later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish
     preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize
     as orthodox Christianity was born.
    This book is an attempt to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the
     Jesus
before
Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary who, two thousand years
     ago, walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement
     with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after
     a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested
     and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. It is also about how, in the aftermath
     of Jesus’s failure to establish God’s reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted
     not only Jesus’s mission and identity, but also the very nature and definition of
     the Jewish messiah.
    There are those who consider such an endeavor to be a waste of time, believing the
     Jesus of history to be irrevocably lost and incapable of recovery. Long gone are the
     heady days of “the quest for the historical Jesus,” when scholars confidently proclaimed
     that modern scientific tools and historical research would allow us to uncover Jesus’s
     true identity. The
real
Jesus no longer matters, thesescholars argue. We should focus instead on the only Jesus that is accessible to us:
     Jesus
the Christ
.
    Granted, writing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth is not like writing a biography
     of Napoleon Bonaparte. The task is somewhat akin to putting together a massive puzzle
     with only a few of the pieces in hand; one has no choice but to fill in the rest of
     the puzzle based on the best, most educated guess of what the completed image should
     look like. The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest
     for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the
     Jesus they want to see. Too often they see
themselves
—their own reflection—in the image of Jesus they have constructed.
    And yet that best, most educated guess may be enough to, at the very least, question
     our most basic assumptions about Jesus of Nazareth. If we expose the claims of the
     gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures of their literary
     and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate picture of the Jesus of history.
     Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political
     context of the era in which he lived—an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against
     Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism—then, in some
     ways, his biography writes itself.
    The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly
     will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end,
     he is the only Jesus that we can