Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Jesus asks his incredulous disciples as he offers his hands and feet to touch
     as proof (Luke 24:36–39).
    Jesus’s body was stolen? How so, when Matthew has conveniently placed armed guards
     at his tomb—guards who saw for themselves the risen Jesus, but who were bribed by
     the priests to say the disciples had stolen the body from under their noses? “And
     this story has been spread among the Jews to this day” (Matthew 28:1–15).
    Again, these stories are not meant to be accounts of historical events; they are carefully
     crafted rebuttals to an argument that is taking place offscreen. Still, it is one
     thing to argue that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. That is, in the end, purely
     a matter of faith. It is something else entirely to say that he did so
according to the scriptures
. Luke portrays the risen Jesus as addressing this issue himself by patiently explaining
     to his disciples, who “had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), how
     his death and resurrection were in reality the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies,
     how everything written about the messiah “in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the
     Psalms” led to the cross and the empty tomb. “Thus it is written that the messiah
     would suffer and rise again on the third day,” Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke
     24:44–46).
    Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of Moses, not in the
     prophets, not in the Psalms. In the entire history of Jewish thought there is not
     a single line of scripture that says the messiah is to suffer, die, and rise again
     on the third day, which may explain why Jesus does not bother to cite any scripture
     to back up his incredible claim.
    No wonder Jesus’s followers had such a difficult time convincing their fellow Jews
     in Jerusalem to accept their message. WhenPaul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that the crucifixion is “a stumbling
     block to the Jews,” he is grossly understating the disciples’ dilemma (1 Corinthians
     1:23). To the Jews, a crucified messiah was nothing less than a contradiction in terms.
     The very fact of Jesus’s crucifixion annulled his messianic claims. Even the disciples
     recognized this problem. That is why they so desperately tried to deflect their dashed
     hopes by arguing that the Kingdom of God they had hoped to establish was in actuality
     a celestial kingdom, not an earthly one; that the messianic prophecies had been misconstrued;
     that the scriptures, properly interpreted, said the opposite of what everyone thought
     they did; that embedded deep in the texts was a secret truth about the dying and rising
     messiah that only they could uncover. The problem was that in a city as steeped in
     the scriptures as Jerusalem, such an argument would have fallen on deaf ears, especially
     when it came from a group of illiterate peasants from the backwoods of Galilee whose
     only experience with the scriptures was what little they heard of them in their synagogues
     back home. Try as they might, the disciples simply could not persuade a significant
     number of Jerusalemites to accept Jesus as the long-awaited liberator of Israel.
    The disciples could have left Jerusalem, fanned out across Galilee with their message,
     returned to their villages to preach among their friends and neighbors. But Jerusalem
     was the place of Jesus’s death and resurrection, the place to which they believed
     he would soon return. It was the center of Judaism, and despite their peculiar interpretation
     of the scriptures, the disciples were, above all else, Jews. Theirs was an altogether
     Jewish movement intended, in those first few years after Jesus’s crucifixion, for
     an exclusively Jewish audience. They had no intention of abandoning the sacred city
     or divorcing themselves from the Jewish cult, regardless of the persecution they faced
     from the priestly authorities. The movement’s principal leaders—the apostles Peter
     and John, and Jesus’s brother, James—maintained their fealty to Jewish customs and
     Mosaic Law to the end. Under their leadership, the Jerusalem church becameknown as the “mother assembly.” No matter how far and wide the movement spread, no
     matter how many other “assemblies” were established in cities such as Philippi, Corinth,
     or even Rome, no matter how many new converts—Jew or gentile—the movement attracted,
     every assembly, every convert, and every missionary would fall under