Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (8 page)

The Fourth Philosophy

Here is what we know about Nazareth at the time of Jesus’s birth: there was little
there for a woodworker to do. That is, after all, what tradition claims was Jesus’s
occupation: a
tekton
—a woodworker or builder—though it bears mentioning that there is only one verse in
the whole of the New Testament in which this claim about him is made (Mark 6:3). If
that claim is true, then as an artisan and day laborer, Jesus would have belonged
to the lowest class of peasants in first-century Palestine, just above the indigent,
the beggar, and the slave. The Romans used the term
tekton
as slang for any uneducated or illiterate peasant, and Jesus was very likely both.

Illiteracy rates in first-century Palestine were staggeringly high, particularly for
the poor. It is estimated that nearly 97 percent of the Jewish peasantry could neither
read nor write, a not unexpected figure for predominantly oral societies such as the
one in which Jesus lived. Certainly the Hebrew Scriptures played a prominent role
in the lives of the Jewish people. But the overwhelming majority of Jews in Jesus’s
time would have had only the most rudimentary grasp of Hebrew, barely enough to understand
the scriptures when they were read to them at the synagogue. Hebrew
was the language of the scribes and scholars of the law—the language of learning.
Peasants like Jesus would have had enormous difficulty communicating in Hebrew, even
in its colloquial form, which is why much of the scriptures had been translated into
Aramaic, the primary language of the Jewish peasantry: the language of Jesus. It is
possible that Jesus had some basic knowledge of Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman
Empire (ironically, Latin was the language least used in the lands occupied by Rome),
enough perhaps to negotiate contracts and deal with customers, but certainly not enough
to preach. The only Jews who could communicate comfortably in Greek were the Hellenized
Herodian elite, the priestly aristocracy in Judea, and the more educated Diaspora
Jews, not the peasants and day laborers of Galilee.

Whatever languages Jesus may have spoken, there is no reason to think he could read
or write in any of them, not even Aramaic. Luke’s account of the twelve-year-old Jesus
standing in the Temple of Jerusalem debating the finer points of the Hebrew Scriptures
with rabbis and scribes (Luke 2:42–52), or his narrative of Jesus at the (nonexistent)
synagogue in Nazareth reading from the Isaiah scroll to the astonishment of the Pharisees
(Luke 4:16–22), are both fabulous concoctions of the evangelist’s own devising. Jesus
would not have had access to the kind of formal education necessary to make Luke’s
account even remotely credible. There were no schools in Nazareth for peasant children
to attend. What education Jesus did receive would have come directly from his family
and, considering his status as an artisan and day laborer, it would have been almost
exclusively focused on learning the trade of his father and his brothers.

That Jesus
had
brothers is, despite the Catholic doctrine of his mother Mary’s perpetual virginity,
virtually indisputable. It is a fact attested to repeatedly by both the gospels and
the letters of Paul. Even Josephus references Jesus’s brother James, who would become
the most important leader of the early Christian church after Jesus’s death. There
is no rational argument that can be made against the
notion that Jesus was part of a large family that included at least four brothers
who are named in the gospels—James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas—and an unknown number
of sisters who, while mentioned in the gospels, are unfortunately not named.

Far less is known about Jesus’s father, Joseph, who quickly disappears from the gospels
after the infancy narratives. The consensus is that Joseph died while Jesus was still
a child. But there are those who believe that Joseph never actually existed, that
he was a creation of Matthew and Luke—the only two evangelists who mention him—to
account for a far more contentious creation: the virgin birth.

On the one hand, the fact that both Matthew and Luke recount the virgin birth in their
respective infancy narratives, despite the belief that they were completely unaware
of each other’s work, indicates that the tradition of the virgin birth was an early
one, perhaps predating the first gospel, Mark. On the other hand, outside of Matthew
and Luke’s infancy narratives, the virgin birth is never even hinted at by anyone
else in the New Testament: not by the evangelist John, who presents Jesus as an otherworldly
spirit without earthly origins, nor by Paul, who thinks of Jesus as literally God
incarnate. That absence has led to a great deal of speculation among scholars over
whether the story of the virgin birth was invented to mask an uncomfortable truth
about Jesus’s parentage—namely, that he was born out of wedlock.

This is in actuality an old argument, one made by opponents of the Jesus movement
from its earliest days. The second-century writer Celsus recounts a scurrilous story
he claims to have heard from a Palestinian Jew that Jesus’s mother was impregnated
by a soldier named Panthera. Celsus’s story is so clearly polemical that it cannot
be taken seriously. However, it does indicate that, less than a hundred years after
Jesus’s death, rumors about his illegitimate birth were already circulating throughout
Palestine. Such rumors may have been current even in Jesus’s lifetime. When Jesus
first begins preaching in his hometown of Nazareth, he is confronted
with the murmuring of neighbors, one of whom bluntly asks, “Is this not Mary’s son?”
(Mark 6:3). This is an astonishing statement, one that cannot be easily dismissed.
Calling a first-born Jewish male in Palestine by his mother’s name—that is, Jesus
bar Mary
, instead of Jesus
bar Joseph
—is not just unusual, it is egregious. At the very least it is a deliberate slur with
implications so obvious that later redactions of Mark were compelled to insert the
phrase “son of the carpenter, and Mary” into the verse.

An even more contentious mystery about Jesus involves his marital status. Although
there is no evidence in the New Testament to indicate whether Jesus was married, it
would have been almost unthinkable for a thirty-year-old Jewish male in Jesus’s time
not to have a wife. Celibacy was an extremely rare phenomenon in first-century Palestine.
A handful of sects such as the aforementioned Essenes and another called the Therapeutae
practiced celibacy, but these were quasimonastic orders; they not only refused to
marry, they completely divorced themselves from society. Jesus did nothing of the
sort. Yet while it may be tempting to assume that Jesus was married, one cannot ignore
the fact that nowhere in all the words ever written about Jesus of Nazareth—from the
canonical gospels to the gnostic gospels to the letters of Paul or even the Jewish
and pagan polemics written against him—is there ever any mention of a wife or children.

In the end, it is simply impossible to say much about Jesus’s early life in Nazareth.
That is because before Jesus was declared messiah, it did not matter what kind of
childhood a Jewish peasant from an insignificant hamlet in Galilee may or may not
have had. After Jesus was declared messiah, the only aspects of his infancy and childhood
that did matter were those that could be creatively imagined to buttress whatever
theological claim one was trying to make about Jesus’s identity as Christ. For better
or worse, the only access one can have to the real Jesus comes not from the stories
that were told about him after his death, but rather from the smattering of facts
we can gather from his life as part of a large Jewish
family of woodworkers/builders struggling to survive in the small Galilean village
of Nazareth.

The problem with Nazareth is that it was a city of mud and brick. Even the most elaborate
buildings, such as they were, would have been constructed of stone. There were wooden
beams in the roofs, and surely the doors would have been made of wood. A handful of
Nazareans may have been able to afford wooden furniture—a table, some stools—and perhaps
a few could have owned wooden yokes and plows with which to sow their meager plots
of land. But even if one considers
tekton
to mean an artisan who deals in any aspect of the building trades, the hundred or
so impoverished families of a modest and utterly forgettable village such as Nazareth,
most of whom themselves lived barely above subsistence level, could in no way have
sustained Jesus’s family. As with most artisans and day laborers, Jesus and his brothers
would have had to go to bigger towns or cities to ply their trade. Fortunately, Nazareth
was just a day’s walk from one of the largest and most affluent cities in Galilee—the
capital city, Sepphoris.

Sepphoris was a sophisticated urban metropolis, as rich as Nazareth was poor. Whereas
Nazareth had not a single paved road, the roads in Sepphoris were wide avenues surfaced
with polished slabs of stone and lined with two-story homes boasting open courtyards
and private rock-cut cisterns. The Nazareans shared a single public bath. In Sepphoris,
two separate aqueducts merged in the center of the city, providing ample water to
the large lavish baths and public latrines that served nearly the entire population
of some forty thousand inhabitants. There were Roman villas and palatial mansions
in Sepphoris, some covered in colorful mosaics featuring sprightly nudes hunting fowl,
garlanded women bearing baskets of fruit, young boys dancing and playing musical instruments.
A Roman theater in the center of town seated forty-five hundred people, while an intricate
web of roads and trade routes connected Sepphoris to Judea and the rest of the towns
of Galilee, making the city a major hub of culture and commerce.

Although Sepphoris was a predominantly Jewish city, as evidenced by the synagogues
and ritual bath houses that have been unearthed there, these were a wholly different
class of Jews than those found in much of Galilee. Rich, cosmopolitan, deeply influenced
by Greek culture, and surrounded by a panoply of races and religions, the Jews of
Sepphoris were the product of the Herodian social revolution—the nouveaux riches who
rose to prominence after Herod’s massacre of the old priestly aristocracy. The city
itself had been a major landmark for years; after Jerusalem, it is the most frequently
mentioned city in rabbinic literature. Sepphoris served as the administrative center
of Galilee throughout the Hasmonaean Dynasty. During the reign of Herod the Great,
it became a vital military outpost where weapons and war provisions were stored. However,
it was not until Herod’s son Antipas (“the Fox”) chose it as the royal seat of his
tetrarchy, probably sometime around the turn of the first century
C.E.
, that the stalwart city of Sepphoris became known throughout Palestine as “the Ornament
of Galilee.”

Like his father, Antipas had a passion for large-scale building projects, and in Sepphoris
he found a blank slate upon which to design a city in his own image. That is because
when Antipas arrived at Sepphoris with a cohort of Roman soldiers in tow, the city
was no longer the central hub of Galilee it had been under his father’s rule. It was
a still smoldering heap of ash and stone, a victim of Roman retribution for the rebellions
that had broken out across Palestine in the wake of Herod the Great’s death in 4
B.C.E
.

When Herod died, he left behind far more than a seething populace eager to exact revenge
on his friends and allies. He also left a mob of jobless poor who had flooded into
Jerusalem from the rural villages to build his palaces and theaters. Herod’s monumental
building spree, and especially his Temple expansion project, had employed tens of
thousands of peasants and day laborers, many of whom had been driven off their land
by drought or famine or, often enough, the malevolent persistence of the debt collector.
But
with the end of the building boom in Jerusalem and the completion of the Temple shortly
before Herod’s death, these peasants and day laborers suddenly found themselves unemployed
and cast out of the holy city to fend for themselves. As a result of the mass rustication,
the countryside once again became a hotbed of revolutionary activity, just as it had
been before Herod was declared king.

It was around this time that a new and far more fearsome group of bandits arose in
Galilee, led by a magnetic teacher and revolutionary known as Judas the Galilean.
The traditions say that Judas was the son of the famed bandit chief Hezekiah, the
failed messiah whom Herod had captured and beheaded forty years earlier as part of
his campaign to clear the countryside of the bandit menace. After Herod’s death, Judas
the Galilean joined forces with a mysterious Pharisee named Zaddok to launch a wholly
new independence movement that Josephus terms the “Fourth Philosophy,” so as to differentiate
it from the other three “philosophies”: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.
What set the members of the Fourth Philosophy apart from the rest was their unshakable
commitment to freeing Israel from foreign rule and their fervent insistence, even
unto death, that they would serve no lord save the One God. There was a well-defined
term for this type of belief, one that all pious Jews, regardless of their political
stance, would have recognized and proudly claimed for themselves:
zeal
.