Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

thousands of other Diaspora Jews just
     like him. He was probably presenting his sacrifice to the Temple priests when he spied
     a band of mostly Galilean farmers and fishermen wandering about the Court of Gentiles,
     preaching about a simple Nazarean whom they called messiah.
    By itself, such a spectacle would not have been unusual in Jerusalem,certainly not during the festivals and feast days, when Jews from all over the Roman
     Empire flocked to the sacred city to make their Temple offerings. Jerusalem was the
     center of spiritual activity for the Jews, the cultic heart of the Jewish nation.
     Every sectarian, every fanatic, every zealot, messiah, and self-proclaimed prophet,
     eventually made his way to Jerusalem to missionize or admonish, to offer God’s mercy
     or warn of God’s wrath. The festivals in particular were an ideal time for these schismatics
     to reach as wide and international an audience as possible.
    So when Stephen saw the gaggle of hirsute men and ragged women huddled beneath a portico
     in the Temple’s outer court—simple provincials who had sold their possessions and
     given the proceeds to the poor; who held all things in common and owned nothing themselves
     save their tunics and sandals—he probably did not pay much attention at first. He
     may have pricked up his ears at the suggestion that these particular schismatics followed
     a messiah who had already been killed (crucified, no less!). He may have been astonished
     to learn that, despite the unalterable fact that Jesus’s death
by definition
disqualified him as liberator of Israel, his followers still called him messiah.
     But even that would not have been completely unheard of in Jerusalem. Were not John
     the Baptist’s followers still preaching about their late master, still baptizing Jews
     in his name?
    What truly would have caught Stephen’s attention was the staggering claim by these
     Jews that, unlike every other criminal crucified by Rome, their messiah was not left
     on the cross for his bones to be picked clean by the greedy birds Stephen had seen
     circling above Golgotha when he entered the gates of Jerusalem. No, the corpse of
     this particular peasant—this Jesus of Nazareth—had been brought down from the cross
     and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest of men in Judea.
     More remarkable still, his followers claimed that three days after their messiah had
     been placed in the rich man’s tomb, he came back to life. God raised him up again,
     freed him from death’s grip. The spokesmanof the group, a fisherman from Capernaum called Simon Peter, swore that he witnessed
     this resurrection with his own eyes, as did many others among them.
    To be clear, this was not the resurrection of the dead that the Pharisees expected
     at the end of days and the Sadducees denied. This was not the gravestones cracking
     open and the earth coughing up the buried masses, as the prophet Isaiah had envisioned
     (Isaiah 26:19). This had nothing to do with the rebirth of the “House of Israel” foretold
     by the prophet Ezekiel, wherein God breathes new life into the dry bones of the nation
     (Ezekiel 37). This was a lone individual, dead and buried in rock for days, suddenly
     rising up and walking out of his tomb of his own accord, not as a spirit or ghost,
     but as a man of flesh and blood.
    Nothing quite like what these followers of Jesus were contending existed at the time.
     Ideas about the resurrection of the dead could be found among the ancient Egyptians
     and Persians, of course. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, though
     not of the body. Some gods—for instance, Osiris—were thought to have died and risen
     again. Some men—Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—became gods after they died. But the
     concept of an individual dying and rising again, in the flesh, into a life everlasting
     was extremely rare in the ancient world and practically nonexistent in Judaism.
    And yet what the followers of Jesus were arguing was not only that he rose from the
     dead, but that his resurrection confirmed his status as messiah, an extraordinary
     claim without precedent in Jewish history. Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics,
     the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism.
     In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or
     prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death,