Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (23 page)

But then immediately this clearest and most concise statement yet by Jesus of his
messianic identity is muddied with an ecstatic exhortation, borrowed directly from
the book of Daniel, that once again throws everything into confusion: “And you will
see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds
of heaven” (Mark 14:62).

The first half of Jesus’s response to the high priest is an allusion to the Psalms,
in which God promises King David that he shall sit at his right hand, “until I make
your enemies a footstool for your
feet” (Psalm 110:1). But the phrase “coming with the clouds of heaven” is a direct
reference to the son of man of Daniel’s vision (Daniel 7:13).

This is not the first time that Jesus diverts someone’s declaration of him as messiah
into a diatribe about the Son of Man. After Peter’s confession near Caesarea Philippi,
Jesus first silences him, then goes on to describe how the Son of Man must suffer
and be rejected before being killed and rising again three days later (Mark 8:31).
After the transfiguration, Jesus swears the disciples to secrecy, but only until “after
the Son of Man is raised from the dead” (Mark 9:9). In both cases, it is clear that
Jesus’s conception of the Son of Man is to take precedence over other people’s assertion
of his messianic identity. Even at the end of his life, when he stands in the presence
of his accusers, he is willing to accept the generic title of messiah only if it can
be made to fit his specific interpretation, à la the book of Daniel, of the Son of
Man.

What this suggests is that the key to uncovering the messianic secret, and therefore
Jesus’s own sense of self, lies in deciphering his unique interpretation of the “one
like a son of man” in Daniel. And here is where one can come closest to discovering
who Jesus thought he was. For while the curious son-of-man figure in Daniel is never
explicitly identified as messiah, he is clearly and unambiguously called
king
—one who will rule on behalf of God over all peoples on earth. Could that be what
Jesus means when he gives himself the strange title “the Son of Man”? Is he calling
himself king?

To be sure, Jesus speaks at length about the Son of Man, and often in contradictory
terms. He is powerful (Mark 14:62) yet suffering (Mark 13:26). He is present on earth
(Mark 2:10) yet coming in the future (Mark 8:38). He will be rejected by men (Mark
10:33), yet he will judge over them (Mark 14:62). He is both ruler (Mark 8:38) and
servant (Mark 10:45). But what appears on the surface as a set of contradictory statements
is in fact fairly consistent with how Jesus describes the Kingdom of God. Indeed,
the
two ideas—the Son of Man and the Kingdom of God—are often linked together in the gospels,
as though they represent one and the same concept. Both are described in startlingly
similar terms, and occasionally the two are presented as interchangeable, as when
the gospel of Matthew changes the famous verse in Mark 9:1—“I tell you, there are
those here who will not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom of God come with
power”—to “I tell you there are those standing here who will not taste death until
they see the Son of Man
coming in his kingdom
” (Matthew 16:28).

By replacing one term with the other, Matthew implies that the kingdom belonging to
the Son of Man is one and the same as the Kingdom of God. And since the Kingdom of
God is built upon a complete reversal of the present order, wherein the poor become
powerful and the meek are made mighty, what better king to rule over it on God’s behalf
than one who himself embodies the new social order flipped on its head? A peasant
king. A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served.
A king riding on a donkey.

When Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, using the description from Daniel as a title,
he is making a clear statement about how he views his identity and his mission. He
is associating himself with the paradigm of the Davidic messiah, the king who will
rule the earth on God’s behalf, who will gather the twelve tribes of Israel (in Jesus’s
case, through his twelve apostles, who will “sit on twelve thrones”) and restore the
nation of Israel to its former glory. He is claiming the same position as King David,
“at the right hand of the Power.” In short, he is calling himself king. He is stating,
albeit in a deliberately cryptic way, that his role is not merely to usher in the
Kingdom of God through his miraculous actions; it is to rule that kingdom on God’s
behalf.

Recognizing the obvious danger of his kingly ambitions and wanting to avoid, if at
all possible, the fate of the others who dared claim the title, Jesus attempts to
restrain all declarations of him as messiah, opting instead for the more ambiguous,
less openly
charged title “the Son of Man.” The messianic secret was born precisely from the tension
that arises between Jesus’s desire to promote his son-of-man identity over the messianic
title given to him by his followers.

Regardless of how Jesus viewed himself, the fact remains that he was never able to
establish the Kingdom of God. The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus
was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus’s time expected of the
messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted. For those who fell into the latter camp,
the apocalyptic imagery of 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, both written long after Jesus’s death,
paved a way forward, allowing the early church to replace Jesus’s understanding of
himself as king and messiah with a new, post–Jewish Revolt paradigm of the messiah
as a preexistent, predetermined, heavenly, and divine Son of Man, one whose “kingdom”
was not of this world.

But Jesus’s kingdom—the Kingdom of God—was very much of this world. And while the
idea of a poor Galilean peasant claiming kingship for himself may seem laughable,
it is no more absurd than the kingly ambitions of Jesus’s fellow messiahs Judas the
Galilean, Menahem, Simon son of Giora, Simon son of Kochba, and the rest. Like them,
Jesus’s royal claims were based not on his power or wealth. Like them, Jesus had no
great army with which to overturn the kingdoms of men, no fleet to sweep the Roman
seas. The sole weapon he had with which to build the Kingdom of God was the one used
by all the messiahs who came before or after him, the same weapon used by the rebels
and bandits who would eventually push the Roman empire out of the city of God:
zeal
.

Now, with the festival of Passover at hand—the commemoration of Israel’s liberation
from heathen rule—Jesus will finally take this message to Jerusalem. Armed with zeal
as his weapon, he will directly challenge the Temple authorities and their Roman overseers
over who truly rules this holy land. But though it may be Passover, Jesus will not
be entering the sacred city as a lowly pilgrim. He is Jerusalem’s rightful king; he
is coming to stake his
claim to God’s throne. And the only way a king would enter Jerusalem is with a praiseful
multitude waving palm branches, declaring his victory over God’s enemies, laying their
cloaks on the road before him, shouting: “Hosanna! Hosanna to the
Son of David
! Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord” (Matthew 21:9; Mark 11:9–10;
Luke 19:38).

No King but Caesar

He is praying when they finally come for him: an unruly crowd wielding swords, torches,
and wooden clubs, sent by the chief priests and elders to seize Jesus from his hideout
in the Garden of Gethsemane. The crowd is not unexpected. Jesus had warned his disciples
they would come for him. That is why they are hiding in Gethsemane, shrouded in darkness,
and armed with swords—just as Jesus had commanded. They are ready for a confrontation.
But the arresting party knows precisely where to find them. They have been tipped
off by one of the Twelve, Judas Iscariot, who knows their location and can easily
identify Jesus. Still, Jesus and his disciples will not be taken easily. One of them
draws his sword and a brief melee ensues in which a servant of the high priest is
injured. Resistance is useless, however, and the disciples are forced to abandon their
master and flee into the night as Jesus is seized, bound, and dragged back to the
city to face his accusers.

They bring him to the courtyard of the high priest Caiaphas, where the chief priests,
the scribes, and elders—the whole of the Sanhedrin—have gathered. There, they question
him about the threats he’s made to the Temple, using his own words against him: “We
heard him say ‘I will bring down this Temple made with
human hands, and in three days I will build another made not with hands.’ ”

This is a grave accusation. The Temple is the chief civic and religious institution
of the Jews. It is the sole source of the Jewish cult and the principal symbol of
Rome’s hegemony over Judea. Even the slightest threat to the Temple would instantly
arouse the attention of the priestly and Roman authorities. A few years earlier, when
two zealous rabbis, Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, shared
with their students their plans to remove the golden eagle that Herod the Great had
placed above the Temple’s main gate, both rabbis and forty of their students were
rounded up and burned alive.

Yet Jesus refuses to answer the charges leveled against him, probably because there
is no answer to be made. After all, he has publicly and repeatedly threatened the
Temple of Jerusalem, vowing that “not one stone would be left upon another; all will
be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). He has been in Jerusalem only a few days but already
he has caused a riot at the Court of Gentiles, violently disrupting the Temple’s financial
transactions. He has replaced the costly blood and flesh sacrifice mandated by the
Temple with his free healings and exorcisms. For three years he has raged against
the Temple priesthood, threatening their primacy and power. He has condemned the scribes
and the elders as “a brood of vipers” and promised that the Kingdom of God would sweep
away the entire priestly class. His very ministry is founded upon the destruction
of the present order and the removal from power of every single person who now stands
in judgment of him. What else is there to say?

When morning comes, Jesus is bound again and escorted through the rough stone ramparts
of the Antonia Fortress to appear before Pontius Pilate. As governor, Pilate’s chief
responsibility in Jerusalem is to maintain order on behalf of the emperor. The only
reason a poor Jewish peasant and day laborer would be brought before him is if he
had jeopardized that order. Otherwise there
would be no hearing, no questions asked, no need for a defense. Pilate, as the histories
reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had
sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on
a slip of papyrus. The notion that he would even be in the same room as Jesus, let
alone deign to grant him a “trial,” beggars the imagination. Either the threat posed
by Jesus to the stability of Jerusalem is so great that he is one of only a handful
of Jews to have the opportunity to stand before Pilate and answer for his alleged
crimes, or else the so-called trial before Pilate is a fabrication.

There is reason to suspect the latter. The scene does have an unmistakable air of
theater to it. This is the final moment in Jesus’s ministry, the end of a journey
that began three years earlier on the banks of the Jordan River. In the gospel of
Mark, Jesus speaks only one other time after his interview with Pilate—when he is
writhing on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

Yet in Mark’s telling of the story, something happens between Jesus’s trial before
Pilate and his death on a cross that is so incredible, so obviously contrived, that
it casts suspicion over the entire episode leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion. Pilate,
having interviewed Jesus and found him innocent of all charges, presents him to the
Jews along with a bandit (
lestes
) named bar Abbas who has been accused of murdering Roman guards during an insurrection
at the Temple. According to Mark, it was a custom of the Roman governor during the
feast of Passover to release one prisoner to the Jews, anyone for whom they asked.
When Pilate asks the crowd which prisoner they would like to have released—Jesus,
the preacher and traitor to Rome, or bar Abbas, the insurrectionist and murderer—the
crowd demands the release of the insurrectionist and the crucifixion of the preacher.

“Why?” Pilate asks, pained at the thought of having to put an innocent Jewish peasant
to death. “What evil has he done?”

But the crowd shouts all the louder for Jesus’s death. “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
(Mark 15:1–20).

The scene makes no sense at all. Never mind that outside the gospels there exists
not a shred of historical evidence for any such Passover custom on the part of any
Roman governor. What is truly beyond belief is the portrayal of Pontius Pilate—a man
renowned for his loathing of the Jews, his total disregard for Jewish rituals and
customs, and his penchant for absentmindedly signing so many execution orders that
a formal complaint was lodged against him in Rome—spending even a moment of his time
pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser.