Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

difficult to know just how successful Peter had become in his task before Paul
     arrived. But according to Acts, the Hellenists in Rome reacted so negatively to Paul’s
     preaching that he decided to cut himself off once and for all from his fellow Jews
     “who listen but never understand … who look but never perceive.” Paul vowed from that
     moment on to preach to none but the gentiles, “for they will listen” (Acts 28:26–29).
    No record exists of these final years in the lives of Peter and Paul, the two men
     who would become the most important figures of Christianity. Strangely, Luke ends
     his account of Paul’s life with his arrival in Rome and he does not mention that Peter
     was in the city, too. Stranger still, Luke does not bother to record the most significant
     aspect of the two men’s years together in the Imperial City. For in the year 66 C.E ., the same year that Jerusalem erupted in revolt, the emperor Nero, reacting to a
     sudden surge of Christian persecution in Rome, seized Peter and Paul and executed
     them both for espousing what he assumed was the same faith.
    He was wrong.

Chapter Fifteen
The Just One
    They called James, the brother of Jesus, “James the Just.” In Jerusalem, the city
     he had made his home after his brother’s death, James was recognized by all for his
     unsurpassed piety and his tireless defense of the poor. He himself owned nothing,
     not even the clothes he wore—simple garments made of linen, not wool. He drank no
     wine and ate no meat. He took no baths. No razor ever touched his head, nor did he
     smear himself with scented oils. It was said he spent so much time bent in worship,
     beseeching God’s forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew hard as a camel’s.
    To the followers of Jesus, James was the living link to the messiah, the blood of
     the Lord. To everyone else in Jerusalem, he was simply “the just one.” Even the Jewish
     authorities praised James for his rectitude and his unshakable commitment to the law.
     Was it not James who excoriated the heretic Paul for abandoning the Torah? Did he
     not force the former Pharisee to repent of his views and cleanse himself at the Temple?
     The authorities may not have accepted James’s message about Jesus any more than they
     accepted Paul’s, but they respected James and viewed him as a righteous and honorable
     man. According to the early Christian historian Hegesippus (110–180 C.E .), the Jewish authorities repeatedly asked Jamesto use his influence among the people to dissuade them from calling Jesus messiah.
     “We entreat you, restrain the people, for they have gone astray in regard to Jesus,
     as if he were the Christ,” they begged. “For we bear you witness, as do all the people,
     that you are just and that you do not respect persons. Persuade, therefore, the multitude
     not to be led astray concerning Jesus.”
    Their entreaties went unheeded, of course. For although James was, as everyone attests,
     a zealous devotee of the law, he was also a faithful follower of Jesus; he would never
     betray the legacy of his elder brother, not even when he was martyred for it.
    The story of James’s death can be found in Josephus’s
Antiquities
. The year was 62 C.E . All of Palestine was sinking into anarchy. Famine and drought had devastated the
     countryside, leaving fields fallow and farmers starving. Panic reigned in Jerusalem,
     as the Sicarii murdered and pillaged at will. The revolutionary fervor of the Jews
     was growing out of control, even as the priestly class upon which Rome relied to maintain
     order was tearing itself apart, with the wealthy priests in Jerusalem having concocted
     a scheme to seize for themselves the tithes that were meant to sustain the lower-class
     village priests. Meanwhile, a succession of inept Roman governors—from the hotheaded
     Cumanus to the scoundrel Felix and the hapless Festus—had only made matters worse.
    When Festus died suddenly and without an immediate successor, Jerusalem descended
     into chaos. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the emperor Nero hurriedly dispatched
     Festus’s replacement, Albinus, to restore order in the city. But it would take weeks
     for Albinus to arrive. The delay gave the newly appointed high priest, a rash and
     irascible young man named Ananus, the time and opportunity to try to fill the vacuum
     of power in Jerusalem himself.
    Ananus was the son of the extremely influential former high priest,