Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

a cross atop
     Golgotha was a tragically banal event. Dozens died with Jesus that day, their broken
     bodies hanging limp for days afterward to serve the ravenous birds that circled above
     and thedogs that came out under cover of night to finish what the birds left behind.
    Yet Jesus was no common criminal, not for the evangelists who composed the narrative
     of his final moments. He was God’s agent on earth. His death could not have conceivably
     gone unnoticed, either by the Roman governor who sent him to the cross or by the high
     priest who handed him over to die. And so, when Jesus yielded his soul to heaven,
     at the precise moment of his final breath, the gospels say that the veil in the Temple,
     which separated the altar from the Holy of Holies—the blood-spattered veil sprinkled
     with the sacrifice of a thousand thousand offerings, the veil that the high priest,
     and only the high priest, would draw back as he entered the private presence of God—was
     violently rent in two, from top to bottom.
    “Surely this was a son of God,” a bewildered centurion at the foot of the cross declares,
     before running off to Pilate to report what had happened.
    The tearing of the Temple’s veil is a fitting end to the passion narratives, the perfect
     symbol of what the death of Jesus meant for the men and women who reflected upon it
     many decades later. Jesus’s sacrifice, they argued, removed the barrier between humanity
     and God. The veil that separated the divine presence from the rest of the world had
     been torn away. Through Jesus’s death, everyone could now access God’s spirit, without
     ritual or priestly mediation. The high priest’s high-priced prerogative, the very
     Temple itself, was suddenly made irrelevant. The body of Christ had replaced the Temple
     rituals, just as the words of Jesus had supplanted the Torah.
    Of course, these are theological reflections rendered years after the Temple had already
     been destroyed; it is not difficult to consider Jesus’s death to have displaced a
     Temple that no longer existed. For the disciples who remained in Jerusalem after the
     crucifixion, however, the Temple and the priesthood were still verymuch a reality. The veil that hung before the Holy of Holies was still apparent to
     all. The high priest and his cohort still controlled the Temple Mount. Pilate’s soldiers
     still roamed the stone streets of Jerusalem. Not much had changed at all. The world
     remained essentially as it was before their messiah had been taken from them.
    The disciples faced a profound test of their faith after Jesus’s death. The crucifixion
     marked the end of their dream of overturning the existing system, of reconstituting
     the twelve tribes of Israel and ruling over them in God’s name. The Kingdom of God
     would not be established on earth, as Jesus had promised. The meek and the poor would
     not exchange places with the rich and the powerful. The Roman occupation would not
     be overthrown. As with the followers of every other messiah the empire had killed,
     there was nothing left for Jesus’s disciples to do but abandon their cause, renounce
     their revolutionary activities, and return to their farms and villages.
    Then something extraordinary happened. What exactly that something was is impossible
     to know. Jesus’s resurrection is an exceedingly difficult topic for the historian
     to discuss, not least because it falls beyond the scope of any examination of the
     historical Jesus. Obviously, the notion of a man dying a gruesome death and returning
     to life three days later defies all logic, reason, and sense. One could simply stop
     the argument there, dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen
     Jesus to be the product of a deludable mind.
    However, there is this nagging fact to consider: one after another of those who claimed
     to have witnessed the risen Jesus went to their own gruesome deaths refusing to recant
     their testimony. That is not, in itself, unusual. Many zealous Jews died horribly
     for refusing to deny their beliefs. But these first followers of Jesus were not being
     asked to reject matters of faith based on events that took place centuries, if not
     millennia, before. They were being asked to deny something they themselves personally,
     directly encountered.
    The disciples were themselves fugitives in Jerusalem, complicitin the sedition that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. They were repeatedly arrested and