Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (27 page)

It was, the gospels say, the sixth hour of the day—three o’clock in the afternoon—on
the day before the Sabbath when Jesus of Nazareth breathed his last. According to
the gospel of Mark, a crowning darkness came over the whole of the earth, as though
all creation had paused to bear witness to the death of this simple Nazarean, scourged
and executed for calling himself King of the Jews. At the ninth hour, Jesus suddenly
cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Someone soaked a sponge in
sour wine and raised it to his lips to ease his suffering. Finally, no longer able
to bear the heaving pressure on his lungs, Jesus lifted his head to the sky and, with
a loud, agonized cry, gave up his spirit.

Jesus’s end would have been swift and unnoticed by all, save, perhaps, for the handful
of female disciples who stood weeping at the bottom of the hill, gazing up at their
maimed and mutilated master: most of the men had scattered into the night at the first
sign of trouble in Gethsemane. The death of a state criminal hanging on a cross atop
Golgotha was a tragically banal event. Dozens died with Jesus that day, their broken
bodies hanging limp for days afterward to serve the ravenous birds that circled above
and the
dogs that came out under cover of night to finish what the birds left behind.

Yet Jesus was no common criminal, not for the evangelists who composed the narrative
of his final moments. He was God’s agent on earth. His death could not have conceivably
gone unnoticed, either by the Roman governor who sent him to the cross or by the high
priest who handed him over to die. And so, when Jesus yielded his soul to heaven,
at the precise moment of his final breath, the gospels say that the veil in the Temple,
which separated the altar from the Holy of Holies—the blood-spattered veil sprinkled
with the sacrifice of a thousand thousand offerings, the veil that the high priest,
and only the high priest, would draw back as he entered the private presence of God—was
violently rent in two, from top to bottom.

“Surely this was a son of God,” a bewildered centurion at the foot of the cross declares,
before running off to Pilate to report what had happened.

The tearing of the Temple’s veil is a fitting end to the passion narratives, the perfect
symbol of what the death of Jesus meant for the men and women who reflected upon it
many decades later. Jesus’s sacrifice, they argued, removed the barrier between humanity
and God. The veil that separated the divine presence from the rest of the world had
been torn away. Through Jesus’s death, everyone could now access God’s spirit, without
ritual or priestly mediation. The high priest’s high-priced prerogative, the very
Temple itself, was suddenly made irrelevant. The body of Christ had replaced the Temple
rituals, just as the words of Jesus had supplanted the Torah.

Of course, these are theological reflections rendered years after the Temple had already
been destroyed; it is not difficult to consider Jesus’s death to have displaced a
Temple that no longer existed. For the disciples who remained in Jerusalem after the
crucifixion, however, the Temple and the priesthood were still very
much a reality. The veil that hung before the Holy of Holies was still apparent to
all. The high priest and his cohort still controlled the Temple Mount. Pilate’s soldiers
still roamed the stone streets of Jerusalem. Not much had changed at all. The world
remained essentially as it was before their messiah had been taken from them.

The disciples faced a profound test of their faith after Jesus’s death. The crucifixion
marked the end of their dream of overturning the existing system, of reconstituting
the twelve tribes of Israel and ruling over them in God’s name. The Kingdom of God
would not be established on earth, as Jesus had promised. The meek and the poor would
not exchange places with the rich and the powerful. The Roman occupation would not
be overthrown. As with the followers of every other messiah the empire had killed,
there was nothing left for Jesus’s disciples to do but abandon their cause, renounce
their revolutionary activities, and return to their farms and villages.

Then something extraordinary happened. What exactly that something was is impossible
to know. Jesus’s resurrection is an exceedingly difficult topic for the historian
to discuss, not least because it falls beyond the scope of any examination of the
historical Jesus. Obviously, the notion of a man dying a gruesome death and returning
to life three days later defies all logic, reason, and sense. One could simply stop
the argument there, dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen
Jesus to be the product of a deludable mind.

However, there is this nagging fact to consider: one after another of those who claimed
to have witnessed the risen Jesus went to their own gruesome deaths refusing to recant
their testimony. That is not, in itself, unusual. Many zealous Jews died horribly
for refusing to deny their beliefs. But these first followers of Jesus were not being
asked to reject matters of faith based on events that took place centuries, if not
millennia, before. They were being asked to deny something they themselves personally,
directly encountered.

The disciples were themselves fugitives in Jerusalem, complicit
in the sedition that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. They were repeatedly arrested and
abused for their preaching; more than once their leaders had been brought before the
Sanhedrin to answer charges of blasphemy. They were beaten, whipped, stoned, and crucified,
yet they would not cease proclaiming the risen Jesus. And it worked! Perhaps the most
obvious reason not to dismiss the disciples’ resurrection experiences out of hand
is that, among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus
alone is still called messiah. It was precisely the fervor with which the followers
of Jesus believed in his resurrection that transformed this tiny Jewish sect into
the largest religion in the world.

Although the first resurrection stories were not written until the mid- to late nineties
(there is no resurrection appearance in either the
Q
source materials, compiled in around 50
C.E
., or in the gospel of Mark, written after 70
C.E
.), belief in the resurrection seems to have been part of the earliest liturgical
formula of the nascent Christian community. Paul—the former Pharisee who would become
the most influential interpreter of Jesus’s message—writes about the resurrection
in a letter addressed to the Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth, sometime
around 50
C.E
. “For I give over to you the first things which I myself accepted,” Paul writes,
“that Christ died for the sake of our sins,
according to the scriptures
; that he was buried and that he rose again on the third day,
according to the scriptures
; that he was seen by Cephas [Simon Peter], then by the Twelve. After that, he was
seen by over five hundred brothers at once, many of whom are still alive, though some
have died. After that, he was seen by [his brother] James; then by all the apostles.
And, last of all, he was seen by me as well …” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).

Paul may have written those words in 50
C.E.
, but he is repeating what is likely a much older formula, one that may be traced
to the early forties. That means belief in the resurrection of Jesus was among the
community’s first attestations of faith—earlier than the passion narratives, earlier
even than the story of the virgin birth.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the resurrection is not a historical event. It
may have had historical ripples, but the event itself falls outside the scope of history
and into the realm of faith. It is, in fact, the ultimate test of faith for Christians,
as Paul wrote in that same letter to the Corinthians: “If Christ has not been risen,
then our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

Paul makes a key point. Without the resurrection, the whole edifice of Jesus’s claim
to the mantle of the messiah comes crashing down. The resurrection solves an insurmountable
problem, one that would have been impossible for the disciples to ignore: Jesus’s
crucifixion invalidates his claim to be the messiah and successor to David. According
to the Law of Moses, Jesus’s crucifixion actually marks him as the accursed of God:
“Anyone hung on a tree [that is, crucified] is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23).
But if Jesus did not actually die—if his death were merely the prelude to his spiritual
evolution—then the cross would no longer be a curse or a symbol of failure. It would
be transformed into a symbol of victory.

Precisely because the resurrection claim was so preposterous and unique, an entirely
new edifice needed to be constructed to replace the one that had crumbled in the shadow
of the cross. The resurrection stories in the gospels were created to do just that:
to put flesh and bones upon an already accepted creed; to create narrative out of
established belief; and, most of all, to counter the charges of critics who denied
the claim, who argued that Jesus’s followers saw nothing more than a ghost or a spirit,
who thought it was the disciples themselves who stole Jesus’s body to make it appear
as though he rose again. By the time these stories were written, six decades had passed
since the crucifixion. In that time, the evangelists had heard just about every conceivable
objection to the resurrection, and they were able to create narratives to counter
each and every one of them.

The disciples saw a ghost? Could a ghost eat fish and bread, as the risen Jesus does
in Luke 24:42–43?

Jesus was merely an incorporeal spirit? “Does a spirit have flesh and bones?” the
risen Jesus asks his incredulous disciples as he offers his hands and feet to touch
as proof (Luke 24:36–39).

Jesus’s body was stolen? How so, when Matthew has conveniently placed armed guards
at his tomb—guards who saw for themselves the risen Jesus, but who were bribed by
the priests to say the disciples had stolen the body from under their noses? “And
this story has been spread among the Jews to this day” (Matthew 28:1–15).

Again, these stories are not meant to be accounts of historical events; they are carefully
crafted rebuttals to an argument that is taking place offscreen. Still, it is one
thing to argue that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. That is, in the end, purely
a matter of faith. It is something else entirely to say that he did so
according to the scriptures
. Luke portrays the risen Jesus as addressing this issue himself by patiently explaining
to his disciples, who “had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), how
his death and resurrection were in reality the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies,
how everything written about the messiah “in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the
Psalms” led to the cross and the empty tomb. “Thus it is written that the messiah
would suffer and rise again on the third day,” Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke
24:44–46).

Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of Moses, not in the
prophets, not in the Psalms. In the entire history of Jewish thought there is not
a single line of scripture that says the messiah is to suffer, die, and rise again
on the third day, which may explain why Jesus does not bother to cite any scripture
to back up his incredible claim.

No wonder Jesus’s followers had such a difficult time convincing their fellow Jews
in Jerusalem to accept their message. When
Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that the crucifixion is “a stumbling
block to the Jews,” he is grossly understating the disciples’ dilemma (1 Corinthians
1:23). To the Jews, a crucified messiah was nothing less than a contradiction in terms.
The very fact of Jesus’s crucifixion annulled his messianic claims. Even the disciples
recognized this problem. That is why they so desperately tried to deflect their dashed
hopes by arguing that the Kingdom of God they had hoped to establish was in actuality
a celestial kingdom, not an earthly one; that the messianic prophecies had been misconstrued;
that the scriptures, properly interpreted, said the opposite of what everyone thought
they did; that embedded deep in the texts was a secret truth about the dying and rising
messiah that only they could uncover. The problem was that in a city as steeped in
the scriptures as Jerusalem, such an argument would have fallen on deaf ears, especially
when it came from a group of illiterate peasants from the backwoods of Galilee whose
only experience with the scriptures was what little they heard of them in their synagogues
back home. Try as they might, the disciples simply could not persuade a significant
number of Jerusalemites to accept Jesus as the long-awaited liberator of Israel.

The disciples could have left Jerusalem, fanned out across Galilee with their message,
returned to their villages to preach among their friends and neighbors. But Jerusalem
was the place of Jesus’s death and resurrection, the place to which they believed
he would soon return. It was the center of Judaism, and despite their peculiar interpretation
of the scriptures, the disciples were, above all else, Jews. Theirs was an altogether
Jewish movement intended, in those first few years after Jesus’s crucifixion, for
an exclusively Jewish audience. They had no intention of abandoning the sacred city
or divorcing themselves from the Jewish cult, regardless of the persecution they faced
from the priestly authorities. The movement’s principal leaders—the apostles Peter
and John, and Jesus’s brother, James—maintained their fealty to Jewish customs and
Mosaic Law to the end. Under their leadership, the Jerusalem church became
known as the “mother assembly.” No matter how far and wide the movement spread, no
matter how many other “assemblies” were established in cities such as Philippi, Corinth,
or even Rome, no matter how many new converts—Jew or gentile—the movement attracted,
every assembly, every convert, and every missionary would fall under the authority
of the “mother assembly” in Jerusalem, until the day it was burned to the ground.