Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (7 page)

“Come,” they say. “Show yourself to the world.”

Jesus refuses. “You go,” he tells them. “I am not going to this festival. It is not
yet my time.”

Jesus’s family leave him behind and head off to Judea together. Yet, unbeknownst to
them, Jesus decides to follow them down to Judea after all, if for no other reason
than to secretly roam through the assembled crowd and hear what people are saying
about him.

“He is a good man,” someone whispers.

“No. He is leading the people astray,” says another.

Sometime later, after Jesus has revealed himself to the crowd, a few begin to make
guesses about his identity. “Surely, he is a prophet.”

And then someone finally says it. Everyone is clearly thinking it; how could they
not be, what with Jesus standing tall amid the crowd declaring, “Let he who thirsts
come to me and drink?” How are they to understand such heretical words? Who else would
dare say such a thing openly and within earshot of the scribes and the teachers of
the law, many of whom, we are told, would like nothing more than to silence and arrest
this irksome preacher?

“This man is the messiah!”

This is no simple declaration. It is, in fact, an act of treason. In first-century
Palestine, simply saying the words “This is the messiah,” aloud and in public, can
be a criminal offense, punishable by crucifixion. True, the Jews of Jesus’s time had
somewhat conflicting views about the role and function of the messiah, fed by a score
of messianic traditions and popular folktales that were floating around the Holy Land.
Some believed the messiah would be a restorative figure who would return the Jews
to their previous position of power and glory. Others viewed the messiah in more apocalyptic
and utopian terms, as someone who would annihilate the present world and build a new,
more just world upon its ruins. There were those who thought the messiah would be
a king, and those who thought he’d be a priest. The Essenes apparently awaited two
separate messiahs—one kingly, the other priestly—though
most Jews thought of the messiah as possessing a combination of both traits. Nevertheless,
among the crowd of Jews gathered for the Feast of Tabernacles, there seems to have
been a fair consensus about who the messiah is supposed to be and what the messiah
is supposed to do: he is the descendant of King David; he comes to restore Israel,
to free the Jews from the yoke of occupation, and to establish God’s rule in Jerusalem.
To call Jesus the messiah, therefore, is to place him inexorably upon a path—already
well trodden by a host of failed messiahs who came before him—toward conflict, revolution,
and war against the prevailing powers. Where that path would ultimately lead, no one
at the festival could know for sure. But there was some sense of where the path must
begin.

“Does not the scripture say that the messiah is of David’s seed?” someone in the crowd
asks. “That he comes from the village where David lived? From Bethlehem?”

“But we know where this man comes from,” claims another. Indeed, the crowd seems to
know Jesus well. They know his brothers, who are there with him. His entire family
is present. They traveled to the festival together from their home in Galilee. From
Nazareth.

“Look into it,” says a Pharisee with the confidence that comes from a lifetime of
scrutinizing the scriptures. “You will see: the prophet does not come out of Galilee.”

Jesus does not dispute their claim. “Yes, you all know me,” he admits. “And you know
where I am from.” Instead, he deflects the matter of his earthly home entirely, choosing
instead to emphasize his heavenly origins. “I have not come here on my own; the one
who sent me is true. And he, you do not know. But I know him. I am from him. He is
the one who sent me” (John 7:1–29).

Such statements are commonplace in John, the last of the four canonized gospels, composed
between 100 and 120
C.E
. John shows no interest at all in Jesus’s physical birth, though even he acknowledges
that Jesus was a “Nazarean” (John 18:5–7). In John’s view, Jesus is an eternal being,
the
logos
who was with God from
the beginning of time, the primal force through whom all creation sprang and without
whom nothing came into being (John 1:3).

A similar lack of concern about Jesus’s earthly origins can be found in the first
gospel, Mark, written just after 70
C.E
. Mark’s focus is kept squarely on Jesus’s ministry; he is uninterested either in
Jesus’s birth or, perhaps surprisingly, in Jesus’s resurrection, as he writes nothing
at all about either event.

The early Christian community appears not to have been particularly concerned about
any aspect of Jesus’s life before the launch of his ministry. Stories about his birth
and childhood are conspicuously absent from the earliest written documents. The
Q
material, which was compiled around 50
C.E
., makes no mention of anything that happened before Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist.
The letters of Paul, which make up the bulk of the New Testament, are wholly detached
from any event in Jesus’s life save his crucifixion and resurrection (though Paul
does mention the Last Supper).

But as interest in the person of Jesus increased after his death, an urgent need arose
among some in the early Christian community to fill in the gaps of Jesus’s early years
and, in particular, to address the matter of his birth in Nazareth, which seems to
have been used by his Jewish detractors to prove that Jesus could not possibly have
been the messiah, at least not according to the prophecies. Some kind of creative
solution was required to push back against this criticism, some means to get Jesus’s
parents to Bethlehem so that he could be born in the same city as David.

For Luke, the answer lies in a census. “In those days,” he writes, “there came a decree
from Caesar Augustus that the entire Roman world should be registered. This was the
first registration to take place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone went
to his own town to be registered. Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in
Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem, the city of David.” Then, in case his readers may
have missed the point, Luke adds, “because Joseph belonged to the house and the lineage
of David” (Luke 2:1–4).

Luke is right about one thing and one thing only. Ten years after the death of Herod
the Great, in the year 6
C.E.
, when Judea officially became a Roman province, the Syrian governor, Quirinius, did
call for a census to be taken of all the people, property, and slaves in Judea, Samaria,
and Idumea—not “the entire Roman world,” as Luke claims, and definitely not Galilee,
where Jesus’s family lived (Luke is also wrong to associate Quirinius’s census in
6
C.E
. with the birth of Jesus, which most scholars place closer to 4
B.C.E.
, the year given in the gospel of Matthew). However, because the sole purpose of a
census was taxation, Roman law assessed an individual’s property in the place of residence,
not in the place of one’s birth. There is nothing written in any Roman document of
the time (and the Romans were quite adept at documentation, particularly when it came
to taxation) to indicate otherwise. Luke’s suggestion that the entire Roman economy
would periodically be placed on hold as every Roman subject was forced to uproot himself
and his entire family in order to travel great distances to the place of his father’s
birth, and then wait there patiently, perhaps for months, for an official to take
stock of his family and his possessions, which, in any case, he would have left behind
in his place of residence, is, in a word, preposterous.

What is important to understand about Luke’s infancy narrative is that his readers,
still living under Roman dominion, would have known that Luke’s account of Quirinius’s
census was factually inaccurate. Luke himself, writing a little more than a generation
after the events he describes, knew that what he was writing was technically false.
This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp,
but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood
as historical fact. Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean
when we say the word “history.” The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable
and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been
an altogether foreign concept
to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering
facts
, but of revealing
truths
.

The readers of Luke’s gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make
a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together
in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually
happened than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal—indeed, expected—for
a writer in the ancient world to tell tales of gods and heroes whose fundamental facts
would have been recognized as false but whose underlying message would be seen as
true.

Hence, Matthew’s equally fanciful account of Jesus’s flight into Egypt, ostensibly
to escape Herod’s massacre of all the sons born in and around Bethlehem in a fruitless
search for the baby Jesus, an event for which there exists not a shred of corroborating
evidence in any chronicle or history of the time whether Jewish, Christian, or Roman—a
remarkable fact considering the many chronicles and narratives written about Herod
the Great, who was, after all, the most famous Jew in the whole of the Roman Empire
(the King of the Jews, no less!).

As with Luke’s account of Quirinius’s census, Matthew’s account of Herod’s massacre
was not intended to be read as what we would now consider
history
, certainly not by his own community, who would surely have remembered an event as
unforgettable as the massacre of its own sons. Matthew needs Jesus to come out of
Egypt for the same reason he needs him to be born in Bethlehem: to fulfill the scattered
prophecies left behind by his ancestors for him and his fellow Jews to decipher, to
place Jesus in the footsteps of the kings and prophets who came before him, and, most
of all, to answer the challenge made by Jesus’s detractors that this simple peasant
who died without fulfilling the single most important of the messianic prophecies—the
restoration of Israel—was in fact the “anointed one.”

The problem faced by Matthew and Luke is that there is simply
no single, cohesive prophetic narrative concerning the messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The passage from the gospel of John quoted above is a perfect example of the general
confusion that existed among the Jews when it came to the messianic prophecies. For
even as the scribes and teachers of the law confidently proclaim that Jesus could
not be the messiah because he is not, as the prophecies demand, from Bethlehem, others
in the crowd argue that the Nazarean could not be the messiah because the prophecies
say “When the messiah comes, no one will know where he is from” (John 7:27).

The truth is that the prophecies say
both
things. In fact, were one to take the advice given to the festival crowd by the skeptical
Pharisee and “look into it,” one would discover a host of contradictory prophecies
about the messiah, collected over hundreds of years by dozens of different hands.
A great many of these prophecies are not even actually prophecies. Prophets such as
Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah, who appear to be predicting the coming of a future salvific
character from the line of King David that would one day restore Israel to its former
glory, are in fact making veiled criticisms of their
current
king and the
present
order, which the prophets imply have fallen short of the Davidic ideal. (There is,
however, one thing about which all the prophecies seem to agree: the messiah is a
human being, not divine. Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything
Judaism represents, which is why, without exception, every text in the Hebrew Bible
dealing with the messiah presents him as performing his messianic functions on earth,
not in heaven.) So then, if you wish to fit your preferred messianic candidate into
this jumbled prophetic tradition, you must first decide which of the many texts, oral
traditions, popular stories, and folktales you want to consider. How you answer that
question depends largely on what it is you want to say about your messiah.

Matthew has Jesus flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre not because it happened,
but because it fulfills the words of the prophet
Hosea: “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Hosea 11:1). The story is not meant to
reveal any fact about Jesus; it is meant to reveal this truth: that Jesus is the new
Moses, who survived Pharaoh’s massacre of the Israelites’ sons, and emerged from Egypt
with a new law from God (Exodus 1:22).

Luke places Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem not because it took place there, but because
of the words of the prophet Micah: “And you Bethlehem … from you shall come to me
a ruler in Israel” (Micah 5:2). Luke means that Jesus is the new David, the King of
the Jews, placed on God’s throne to rule over the Promised Land. Simply put, the infancy
narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read
as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God.
The descendant of King David. The promised messiah.

That
Jesus—the eternal
logos
from whom creation sprang, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God—you will
find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem, surrounded by simple shepherds and
wise men bearing gifts from the east.

But the real Jesus—the poor Jewish peasant who was born some time between 4
B.C.E
. and 6
C.E
. in the rough-and-tumble Galilean countryside—look for him in the crumbling mud and
loose brick homes tucked within the windswept hamlet of Nazareth.