Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

brings from Jerusalem
     the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother”), the Jerusalem assembly under James’s
     leadership thrived. The Hebrews in Jerusalem were certainly not immune to persecution
     by the religious authorities. They were often arrested and sometimes killed for their
     preaching. James the son of Zebedee, one of the original Twelve, was even beheaded
     (Acts 12:3). But these periodic bouts of persecution were rare and seem not to have
     been the result of a rejection of the law on the part of the Hebrews, as was the case
     with the Hellenists who were expelled from the city. Obviously, the Hebrews had figured
     out a way to accommodate themselves to the Jewish priestly authorities, or else they
     could not have remained in Jerusalem. These were by all accounts law-abiding Jews
     who kept the customs and traditions of their forefathers but who happened also to
     believe that the simple Jewish peasant from Galilee named Jesus of Nazareth was the
     promised messiah.
    That is not to say that James and the apostles were uninterested in reaching out to
     gentiles, or that they believed gentiles could not join their movement. As indicated
     by his decision at the Apostolic Council, James was willing to forgo the practice
     of circumcision and other “burdens of the law” for gentile converts. James did not
     want to force gentiles to first become Jews before they were allowed to become Christians.
     He merely insisted that they not divorce themselves entirely from Judaism, that they
     maintain a measure of fidelity to the beliefs and practices of the very man they claimed
     to be following (Acts 15:12–21). Otherwise, the movement risked becoming a wholly
     new religion, and that is something neither James nor his brother Jesus would have
     imagined.
    James’s steady leadership over the Jerusalem assembly came to an end in 62 C.E ., when he was executed by the high priest Ananus, not just because he was a follower
     of Jesus and certainly not because he transgressed the law (or else “the most fair-minded
     and … strict in the observance of the law” would not have been up inarms about his unjust execution). James was likely killed because he was doing what
     he did best: defending the poor and weak against the wealthy and powerful. Ananus’s
     schemes to impoverish the lower-class priests by stealing their tithes would not have
     sat well with James the Just. And so, Ananus took advantage of the brief absence of
     Roman authority in Jerusalem to get rid of a man who had become a thorn in his side.
    One cannot know how Paul felt in Rome when he heard about James’s death. But if he
     assumed the passing of Jesus’s brother would relax the grip of Jerusalem over the
     community, he was mistaken. The leadership of the Jerusalem assembly passed swiftly
     to another of Jesus’s family members, his cousin Simeon son of Clopas, and the community
     continued unabated until four years after James’s death, when the Jews suddenly rose
     up in revolt against Rome.
    Some among the Hebrews seem to have fled Jerusalem for Pella when the uprising began.
     But there is no evidence to suggest that the core leadership of the mother assembly
     abandoned Jerusalem. Rather, they maintained their presence in the city of Jesus’s
     death and resurrection, eagerly awaiting his return, right up to the moment that Titus’s
     army arrived and wiped the holy city and its inhabitants—both Christians and Jews—off
     the face of the earth. With the destruction of Jerusalem, the connection between the
     assemblies scattered across the Diaspora and the mother assembly rooted in the city
     of God was permanently severed, and with it the last physical link between the Christian
     community and Jesus the Jew. Jesus the zealot.
    Jesus of Nazareth.

Epilogue
True God from True God
    The balding, gray-bearded old men who fixed the faith and practice of Christianity
     met for the first time in the Byzantine city of Nicaea, on the eastern shore of Lake
     Izmit in present-day Turkey. It was the summer of 325 C.E . The men had been brought together by the emperor Constantine and commanded to come
     to a consensus on the doctrine of the religion he had recently adopted as his own.
     Bedecked in robes of purple and gold, an aureate laurel resting on his head, Rome’s
     first Christian emperor called the council to order as though it were a Roman Senate,
     which is understandable, considering that every one of the nearly two