Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

without reservation,
     calls Jesus of Nazareth God. “He was in the form of God,” Paul wrote, though he was
     “born in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2:6–7).
    How could this have happened? How could a failed messiah who died a shameful death
     as a state criminal be transformed, in the span of a few years, into the creator of
     the heavens and the earth: God incarnate?
    The answer to that question relies on recognizing this one rather remarkable fact:
     practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel
     story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and
     Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible
     exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named).
     Those who did know Jesus—those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped
     him cleanse the Temple in God’s name, who were there when he was arrested and who
     watched him die a lonely death—played a surprisingly small role in defining the movement
     Jesus left behind. The members of Jesus’s family, and especially his brother James,
     who would lead the community in Jesus’s absence, were certainly influential in the
     decades after the crucifixion. But they were hampered by their decision to remain
     more or less ensconced in Jerusalem waiting for Jesus to return, until they and their
     community, like nearly everyone else in the holy city, were annihilated by Titus’s
     army in 70 C.E . The apostles who were tasked by Jesus to spread his message did leave Jerusalem
     and fan out across the land bearing the good news. But they were severely limited
     by their inability to theologicallyexpound on the new faith or compose instructive narratives about the life and death
     of Jesus. These were farmers and fishermen, after all; they could neither read nor
     write.
    The task of defining Jesus’s message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized,
     Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion
     of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek
     philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’s message so as to
     make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile
     neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot
     to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman
     oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.
    This transformation did not occur without conflict or difficulty. The original Aramaic-speaking
     followers of Jesus, including the members of his family and the remnants of the Twelve,
     openly clashed with the Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews when it came to the correct understanding
     of Jesus’s message. The discord between the two groups resulted in the emergence of
     two distinct and competing camps of Christian interpretation in the decades after
     the crucifixion: one championed by Jesus’s brother, James; the other promoted by the
     former Pharisee, Paul. As we shall see, it would be the contest between these two
     bitter and openly hostile adversaries that, more than anything else, would shape Christianity
     as the global religion we know today.

Chapter Thirteen
If Christ Has Not Been Risen
    It was, the gospels say, the sixth hour of the day—three o’clock in the afternoon—on
     the day before the Sabbath when Jesus of Nazareth breathed his last. According to
     the gospel of Mark, a crowning darkness came over the whole of the earth, as though
     all creation had paused to bear witness to the death of this simple Nazarean, scourged
     and executed for calling himself King of the Jews. At the ninth hour, Jesus suddenly
     cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Someone soaked a sponge in
     sour wine and raised it to his lips to ease his suffering. Finally, no longer able
     to bear the heaving pressure on his lungs, Jesus lifted his head to the sky and, with
     a loud, agonized cry, gave up his spirit.
    Jesus’s end would have been swift and unnoticed by all, save, perhaps, for the handful
     of female disciples who stood weeping at the bottom of the hill, gazing up at their
     maimed and mutilated master: most of the men had scattered into the night at the first
     sign of trouble in Gethsemane. The death of a state criminal hanging on