Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (17 page)

Although the gospels portray Jesus as being in conflict with a whole range of Jewish
authorities who are often lumped together into formulaic categories such as “the chief
priests and elders,” or “the scribes and Pharisees,” these were separate and distinct
groups in first-century Palestine, and Jesus had different relationships with each
of them. While the gospels tend to paint the Pharisees as Jesus’s main detractors,
the fact is that his relations with the Pharisees, while occasionally testy, were,
for the most part, fairly civil and even friendly at times. It was a Pharisee who
warned Jesus that his life was in danger (Luke 13:31), a Pharisee who helped bury
him after his execution (John 19:39–40), a Pharisee who saved the lives of his disciples
after he ascended into heaven (Acts 5:34). Jesus dined with Pharisees, he debated
them, he lived among them; a few Pharisees were even counted among his followers.

In contrast, the handful of encounters Jesus had with the priestly nobility and the
learned elite of legal scholars (the scribes) who represent them is always portrayed
by the gospels in the most hostile light. To whom else was Jesus referring when he
said, “You have turned my house into a den of thieves”? It was not the merchants and
money changers he was addressing as he raged through the Temple courtyard, overturning
tables and breaking open cages. It was those who profited most heavily from the Temple’s
commerce, and who did so on the backs of poor Galileans like himself.

Like his zealous predecessors, Jesus was less concerned with the pagan empire occupying
Palestine than he was with the Jewish imposter occupying God’s Temple. Both would
come to view Jesus as a threat, and both would seek his death. But there can be no
doubt that Jesus’s main antagonist in the gospels is neither the distant
emperor in Rome nor his heathen officials in Judea. It is the high priest Caiaphas,
who will become the main instigator of the plot to execute Jesus precisely because
of the threat he posed to the Temple’s authority (Mark 14:1–2; Matthew 26:57–66; John
11:49–50).

As Jesus’s ministry expanded, becoming ever more urgent and confrontational, his words
and actions would increasingly reflect a deep antagonism toward the high priest and
the Judean religious establishment, who, in Jesus’s words, loved “to prance around
in long robes and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the front
seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.”

“They devour the homes of widows and make long prayers for the sake of appearance,”
Jesus says of the scribes. And for that, “their condemnation will be the greater”
(Mark 12:38–40). Jesus’s parables, especially, were riddled with the same anticlerical
sentiments that shaped the politics and piety of Galilee, and that would become the
hallmark of his ministry. Consider the famous parable of the Good Samaritan:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among thieves who stripped
him of his clothes, beat him, and left him half dead. By chance, a priest came down
that road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. A Levite (priest)
also came by that place and seeing the man, he, too, passed on the other side. But
a certain Samaritan on a journey came where the man was, and when he saw him, he had
compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds and poured oil and wine on them.
He placed the man on his own animal, and led him to an inn, and took care of him.
The following day he gave the innkeeper two denarii and said, “Take care of him; when
I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend” (Luke 10:30–37).

Christians have long interpreted this parable as reflecting the importance of helping
those in distress. But for the audience gathered
at Jesus’s feet, the parable would have had less to do with the goodness of the Samaritan
than with the baseness of the two priests.

The Jews considered the Samaritans to be the lowliest, most impure people in Palestine
for one chief reason: the Samaritans rejected the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem
as the sole legitimate place of worship. Instead, they worshipped the God of Israel
in their own temple on Mount Gerizim, on the western bank of the Jordan River. For
those among Jesus’s listeners who recognized themselves as the beaten, half-dead man
left lying on the road, the lesson of the parable would have been self-evident: the
Samaritan, who denies the authority of the Temple, goes out of his way to fulfill
the commandment of the Lord to “love your neighbor as yourself” (the parable itself
was given in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?”). The priests, who derive
their wealth and authority from their connection to the Temple, ignore the commandment
altogether for fear of defiling their ritual purity and thus endangering that connection.

The people of Capernaum devoured this brazenly anticlerical message. Almost immediately,
large crowds began to gather around Jesus. Some recognized him as the boy born in
Nazareth to a family of woodworkers. Others heard of the power of his words and came
to listen to him preach out of curiosity. Still, at this point, Jesus’s reputation
was contained along the shores of Capernaum. Outside this fishing village, no one
else had yet heard of the charismatic Galilean preacher—not Antipas in Tiberias, not
Caiaphas in Jerusalem.

But then something happened that would change everything.

While standing at the Capernaum synagogue, speaking about the Kingdom of God, Jesus
was suddenly interrupted by a man the gospels describe as having “an unclean spirit.”

“What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth?” the man cried out. “Have you come
to destroy us? I know who you are, oh holy one of God.”

Jesus cut him off at once. “Silence! Come out of him!”

All at once, the man fell to the floor, writhing in convulsions. A great cry came
out of his mouth. And he was still.

Everyone in the synagogue was amazed. “What is this?” the people asked one another.
“A new teaching? And with such authority that he commands the spirits and they obey
him” (Mark 1:23–28).

After that, Jesus’s fame could no longer be confined to Capernaum. News of the itinerant
preacher spread throughout the region, into the whole of Galilee. In every town and
village the crowds grew larger as people everywhere came out, not so much to hear
his message but to see the wondrous deeds they had heard about. For while the disciples
would ultimately recognize Jesus as the promised messiah and the heir to the kingdom
of David, while the Romans would view him as a false claimant to the office of King
of the Jews, and while the scribes and the Temple priests would come to consider him
a blasphemous threat to their control of the Jewish cult, for the vast majority of
Jews in Palestine—those he claimed to have been sent to free from oppression—Jesus
was neither messiah nor king, but just another traveling miracle worker and professional
exorcist roaming through Galilee performing tricks.

By the Finger of God

It did not take long for the people of Capernaum to realize what they had in their
midst. Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established
as that of woodworker or mason, and far better paid. Galilee especially abounded with
charismatic fantasts claiming to channel the divine for a nominal fee. Yet from the
perspective of the Galileans, what set Jesus apart from his fellow exorcists and healers
is that he seemed to be providing his services free of charge. That first exorcism
in the Capernaum synagogue may have shocked the rabbis and elders who saw in it a
“new kind of teaching”—the gospels say a slew of scribes began descending upon the
city immediately afterward to see for themselves the challenge posed to their authority
by this simple peasant. But for the people of Capernaum, what mattered was not so
much the source of Jesus’s healings. What mattered was their cost.

By evening, word had reached all of Capernaum about the free healer in their city.
Jesus and his companions had taken shelter in the house of the brothers Simon and
Andrew, where Simon’s mother-in-law lay in bed with a fever. When the brothers told
Jesus of her illness, he went to her and took her hand, and at once she was healed.
Soon after, a great horde gathered at Simon’s house, carrying with them the lame,
the lepers, and those possessed by demons. The next morning, the crush of sick and
infirm had grown even larger.

To escape the crowds Jesus suggested leaving Capernaum for a few days. “Let us go
into the next towns so I may proclaim my message there as well” (Mark 1:38). But news
of the itinerant miracle worker had already reached the neighboring cities. Everywhere
Jesus went—Bethsaida, Gerasa, Jericho—the blind, the deaf, the mute, and the paralytic
swarmed to him. And Jesus healed them all. When he finally returned to Capernaum a
few days later, so many had huddled at Simon’s door that a group of men had to tear
a hole in the roof just so they could lower their paralyzed friend down for Jesus
to heal.

To the modern mind, the stories of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms seem implausible,
to say the least. Acceptance of his miracles forms the principal divide between the
historian and the worshipper, the scholar and the seeker. It may seem somewhat incongruous,
then, to say that there is more accumulated historical material confirming Jesus’s
miracles than there is regarding either his birth in Nazareth or his death at Golgotha.
To be clear, there is no evidence to support any particular miraculous action by Jesus.
Attempts by scholars to judge the authenticity of one or another of Jesus’s healings
or exorcisms have proven a useless exercise. It is senseless to argue that it is
more likely
that Jesus healed a paralytic but
less likely
that he raised Lazarus from the dead. All of Jesus’s miracle stories were embellished
with the passage of time and convoluted with Christological significance, and thus
none of them can be historically validated. It is equally senseless to try to demythologize
Jesus’s miracles by searching for some rational basis to explain them away: Jesus
only
appeared
to walk on water because of the changing tides; Jesus only
seemed
to exorcise a demon from a person who was in reality epileptic. How one in the modern
world
views Jesus’s miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people
of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates
raged within the early church over who Jesus was—a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?—there
was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role
as an exorcist and miracle worker.

All of the gospels, including the noncanonized scriptures, confirm Jesus’s miraculous
deeds, as does the earliest source material,
Q
. Nearly a third of the gospel of Mark consists solely of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms.
The early church not only maintained a vivid memory of Jesus’s miracles, it built
its very foundation upon them. Jesus’s apostles were marked by their ability to mimic
his miraculous powers, to heal and exorcise people in his name. Even those who did
not accept him as messiah still viewed Jesus as “a doer of startling deeds.” At no
point in the gospels do Jesus’s enemies ever deny his miracles, though they do question
their motive and source. Well into the second and third centuries, the Jewish intellectuals
and pagan philosophers who wrote treatises denouncing Christianity took Jesus’s status
as an exorcist and miracle worker for granted. They may have denounced Jesus as nothing
more than a traveling magician, but they did not doubt his magical abilities.

Again, Jesus was not the only miracle worker trolling though Palestine healing the
sick and casting out demons. This was a world steeped in magic and Jesus was just
one of an untold number of diviners and dream interpreters, magicians and medicine
men who wandered Judea and Galilee. There was Honi the Circle-Drawer, so named because
during a time of drought he drew a circle in the dirt and stood inside it. “I swear
by your great name that I will not move from here until you have mercy on your sons,”
Honi shouted up to God. And the rains came at once. Honi’s grandsons Abba Hilqiah
and Hanan the Hidden were also widely credited with miraculous deeds; both lived in
Galilee around the same time as Jesus. Another Jewish miracle worker, Rabbi Hanina
ben Dosa,
who resided in the village of Arab just a few kilometers from Jesus’s home in Nazareth,
had the power to pray over the sick and even intercede on their behalf to discern
who would live and who would die. Perhaps the most famous miracle worker of the time
was Apollonius of Tyana. Described as a “holy man” who taught the concept of a “Supreme
God,” Apollonius performed miraculous deeds everywhere he went. He healed the lame,
the blind, the paralytic. He even raised a girl from the dead.