Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

authority to execute
     criminals (though that did not stopthem from killing Stephen). But one cannot lose sight of the fundamental fact with
     which we began: Jesus is not stoned to death by the Jews for blasphemy; he is crucified
     by Rome for sedition.
    Just as there may be a kernel of truth in the story of Jesus’s trial before Pilate,
     there may also be a kernel of truth in the story of the Sanhedrin trial. The Jewish
     authorities arrested Jesus because they viewed him both as a threat to their control
     of the Temple and as a menace to the social order of Jerusalem, which under their
     agreement with Rome they were responsible for maintaining. Because the Jewish authorities
     technically had no jurisdiction in capital cases, they handed Jesus over to the Romans
     to answer for his seditious teachings. The personal relationship between Pilate and
     Caiaphas may have facilitated the transfer, but the Roman authorities surely needed
     little convincing to put yet another Jewish insurrectionist to death. Pilate dealt
     with Jesus the way he dealt with all threats to the social order: he sent him to the
     cross. No trial was held. No trial was necessary. It was Passover, after all, always
     a time of heightened tensions in Jerusalem. The city was bursting at its seams with
     pilgrims. Any hint of trouble had to be immediately addressed. And whatever else Jesus
     may have been, he was certainly trouble.
    With his crime recorded in Pilate’s logbook, Jesus would have been led out of the
     Antonia Fortress and taken to the courtyard, where he would be stripped naked, tied
     to a stake, and savagely scourged, as was the custom for all those sentenced to the
     cross. The Romans would then have placed a crossbeam behind the nape of his neck and
     hooked his arms back over it—again, as was the custom—so that the messiah who had
     promised to remove the yoke of occupation from the necks of the Jews would himself
     be yoked like an animal led to slaughter.
    As with all those condemned to crucifixion, Jesus would have been forced to carry
     the crossbeam himself to a hill situated outside the walls of Jerusalem, directly
     on the road leading into the city gates—perhaps the same road he had used a few days
     earlier toenter the city as its rightful king. This way, every pilgrim entering Jerusalem for
     the holy festivities would have no choice but to bear witness to his suffering, to
     be reminded of what happens to those who defy the rule of Rome. The crossbeam would
     be attached to a scaffold or post, and Jesus’s wrists and ankles would be nailed to
     the structure with three iron spikes. A heave, and the cross would be lifted to the
     vertical. Death would not have taken long. In a few short hours, Jesus’s lungs would
     have tired, and breathing become impossible to sustain.
    That is how, on a bald hill covered in crosses, beset by the cries and moans of agony
     from hundreds of dying criminals, as a murder of crows circled eagerly over his head
     waiting for him to breathe his last, the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth would
     have met the same ignominious end as every other messiah who came before or after
     him.
    Except that unlike those other messiahs, this one would not be forgotten.

PART III

    Blow a trumpet in Zion;
    raise a shout on my holy mountain!
    Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble
,
    for the day of the Lord is coming
,
    it is near;
    a day of darkness and gloom
,
    a day of clouds and thick darkness
.
    J OEL 2:1–2

Prologue
God Made Flesh
    Stephen—he who was stoned to death by an angry mob of Jews for blasphemy—was the first
     of Jesus’s followers to be killed after the crucifixion, though he would not be the
     last. It is curious that the first man martyred for calling Jesus “Christ” did not
     himself know Jesus of Nazareth. Stephen was not a disciple, after all. He never met
     the Galilean peasant and day laborer who claimed the throne of the Kingdom of God.
     He did not walk with Jesus or talk to him. He was not part of the ecstatic crowd that
     welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as its rightful ruler. He took no part in the disturbance
     at the Temple. He was not there when Jesus was arrested and charged with sedition.
     He did not watch Jesus die.
    Stephen did not hear about Jesus of Nazareth until after his crucifixion. A Greek-speaking
     Jew who lived in one of the many Hellenistic provinces outside the Holy Land, Stephen
     had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, along with