Zealot

reza aslan

This is a great book. It’s all about the bajeezus himsellf. It’s about some baselines for the historical vs the biblical Jesus. How he was from a little shanty town in Nazareth and he was not the first son of god, first messiah, first king of the Jews even in his lifetime. During the time of Roman occupation, Jerusalem in Palestine was one of the most resistant territories because people had literally, under what they thought were god’s orders, burned Jerusalem, it’s people and animals, all to ashes to start the land anew. God told them in Luke - “ If you do not have a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one”

The first historical reference to Jesus came from the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus who in Antiquities wrote of the messiah Jesus of Nazareth and his brother James. Back then they referred to people’s surnames as the town they were from, especially because names like Jesus were so common. 

There were others, though, who did what Jesus did, just less successfully. 

- Hezekiah the bandit

- Simon of Paraea

- Judas the Galilean and his grandson Menaham 

- Simon son of Giora

- Simon son of Kochba

The new testaments were written in what’s called a pseudepigraphical fashion, where they are admittedly written by scores of people and only named after peoples whose tone they possessed. There was no Luke. These Gospels, or good news, were a new genre created in the century following the death of the nazarean. 

They got their info in the gospel from an account titled Q for Quelle. They produced the gospels known as the Synoptics. These are the canonical stories of biblical Jesus. 

Orthodox Christianity did not even rear its head after Jesus’ death until the year 395.

These areas where people prayed were set up in a way where only priests could enter. The Holy of Holies. On Yom Kippur, the high priest would enter the temple. If he’s worthy of gods blessings, all of Israel would be forgiven. If he’s not, a rope is tied around his waist so that if god strikes him dead he can be dragged out without anyone else having to enter the temple.

Chapter 1

ALl of Judaea and the Persian empire fell to Alexander the Great. When he died, Jerusalem was passed as spoils on to the ptolemaic dynasty ruled from Egypt. 

Rome in control, Jeruselum was actually not in a terrible situation. They left the Jewish cult alone more or less. All they asked for were twice daily sacrifices of bulls and lambs and keeping up with taxes. 

It was a good deal because most territories under Roman control were assimilated with Roman gods (i.e., how the Canaanite god Baal became associated with the Roman god Saturn). 

The Jews did not see this as exceptionalism, but as commandment from a jealous god who tolerated no foreign presence. Jews didn’t commit untold amounts of murder in order to again then be ruled by someone else. 

Chapter 2

The peasants in Jerusalem had to pay hefty taxes to Rome, so much so that it would wipe out half of farmers yields. 

The Roman bankers gave loans to Jews in hopes they’d default so Rome could begin claiming Jewish land parcel by parcel. 

Bandits began to rise up in resistance, and they would be the first stirrings of a nationalist movement against the Roman occupation. 

One of the most fierce bandits was Hezekiah, openly declared bandit messiah who would bring the Jews to glory. To call oneself messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount of declaring war on Rome. 

A man named Herod the great beheaded Hezekiah, he was named king of the jews. He massacred the Jews and treated people like shit. Ceasar once said he’d rather be a pig than Herod’s son. 

He pretty much built jeruseulm into a livable town with theaters and palaces and ports, and paid for it by taxing its residents. He also rebuilt the temple of Jerusalem, but people hated him for it. Shortly before its completion, Herod placed a golden eagle (sign of Roman dominion) over its main portal and forced his handpicked high priest to offer two daily sacrifices to ceaser as the “son of god.”

He died in 6 bce, ten years before Jesus was born. 

Chapter 3 

Here Reza talks about why only Matthew and Luke mention Jesus’ birth, and it being in Nazareth and not Bethlehem. The only time Bethlehem is mentioned in the entire New Testament. 

When Jesus is declared messiah, it is not a crown, but an act of treason. Mark doesn’t focus on anything but Jesus’ ministry, not even mentioning his birth death or resurrection. 

Luke’s infancy narrative shows off that anyone living under Roman dominion at the time would have known it to be factually inaccurate, and he never meant it to be read as historical fact.

This is where reading two thousand years ago varies wildly from reading today, because the readers of the gospel did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. People were less interested in what happened than what it meant. 

The reason Matthew writes of Jesus coming out of Egypt and why he needs him to be born in Bethlehem is so that his life can align the scattered Jewish prophecies written long before. 

Jesus lived and died without fulfilling the most important messianic part of the prophecies: he did not restore Israel. 

The prophecies themselves exist more as a way for prophets of the day to make veiled criticisms about the current nobility falling short of king David. 

The fact that Jesus came out of Egypt was not meant to reveal any fact about Jesus, but to reveal the “truth” that he is the new Moses, surviving the massacre of the Israelite sons, and emerged a god. 

Chapter 4

There is only one verse in the whole New Testament that calls Jesus a builder, a Tekton, in Mark, which was slang for uneducated and illiterate peasant. Peasants like Jesus would have had almost no luck communicating in Hebrew, which was how all jews talked about the scriptures, which is why they had to eventually be converted into Aramaic, aka the language of Jewish peasantry, aka the language of Jesus. 

Luke’s account of Jesus arguing the finer point of Pharisees is insane because he would not have had access to the formal education necessary to do so. 

Josephus references Jesus’ brother James, who would be the most important leader of the church after Jesus’ death. 

Nobody really mentions the virgin birth outside Luke and Matthew’s infancy narratives. John says Jesus has no earthly origins while Paul says Jesus is god incarnate. 

The 2nd century writer Celsus recounts a scurrilous story he claims to have heard from a Palestinian Jew that Jesus’ mother was impregnated by a soldier named Panthera. 

In the Testaments, when Jesus first preached in his hometown, one neighbor asks another “Is that not Mary’s son?” Mark 6:3 Which is a crazy statement because calling a first-born Jewish male in Palestine by his mothers name is egregious. It’s a slur, which is why the testament was altered to add “and the carpenter.”

Jesus should be married according to culture but there is no lore about it.

None of this seemed to matter. All that did matter was that after he was declared messiah, the only aspects of his infancy and childhood stories that mattered were those that could be creatively imagined to buttress whatever theological claim one was trying to make about his identity as Christ. 

Galilee, the capital city Sepphoris, was where all the good shit went down. Jews from here were the product of Herod’s revolution.

Another great king of jews before Jesus was Judas the Galilean, son of Hezekiah. He was the first zealot, an evangelist who said jews should die before letting Rome take their land. He claimed to be messiah and wanted the mantle of king David.

He was one of two thousand massacred, crucified en masse. 

Sepphoris was burned to the ground, and as part of this restoration the ‘carpenters’ were brought from neighboring villages, including Nazareth, which is where Jesus would have gotten his wood-working experience. He would have spent his days building rich houses for pretentious people before going back to his mud hut. 

Chapter 5

This is such a juicy book! Chapter 5 introduces Pontius Pilate, 5th prefect/governor of Jerusalem to oversee the occupation of Judaea.

His name meant “good with a Javelin.” The gospels describe Pilate as a righteous but weak-willed man who was so overcome with doubt about putting Jesus to death that he does everything to save his life, but this is fiction. Trash. In fact, during his time in jeruselam, he sent thousands and thousands of jews to the cross. 

These governors were meant to quell the Jewish rebellions, so often they tried to partner with the high priests. It was semieffective.

John the Baptist got too popular and Pilate had him beheaded. 

A woodworker named Jesus led a band of disciples on a triumphant procession into Jerusalem where he assaulted the temple, overturned the tables of the money changers, and broke free the sacrificial animals from their cages. He too was captured and sentence to death by Pilate. 

In 44 ce a prophet named Theudas crowned himself messiah and brought hundreds of followers to the Jordan river, saying he was going to part the sea like Moses. 

This time was seen as a montage of governors failing to cull the Jewish zeal, and time and time again using violence to kill large groups before being replaced with a new governor. 

As a result of multiple failed attempts, Menahem, grandson of Judas the Galilean, started the assassins group Sicarii, the dagger men, who assassinated romans and Jewish priests working with them. 

In Jerusalem afterwards, a holy man named Jesus son of Ananias prophecized the destruction on the city and a return of the messiah. 

A mysteries Egyptian sorcerer declared himself king of the jews and gathered thousands on the mount of olives talking of bringing the walls down. Time and time against they were all slaughtered by the romans.

Things came to a final head when the last Roman governor of Jeresulam, Florus, ransacked the temple treasury and took all the money that had been made as a sacrifice to god. 

The Sicarii set fire to the public archives to make sure that no one had a record of owing anyone anything else. He wanted everyone to start over. 

It was the official open act of war against Rome. 

Chapter 6

Chapter six was sort of the last ditch efforts of the Sicarii trying to stave off the Roman occupation. They took control of Jerusalem in 66ce and imprinted coins with “year one” to establish a new era of jews.

Once they had established the kingdom of god, Menahem draped himself in purple and claimed himself messiah and king of the jews. 

His step to usher in the final step of the Hebrew philosophy and the last days were the same as his grandfather’s (Judas the Galilean) and his father before him (Hezekiah the bandit chief)

Unfortunately, Rome wasn’t having it. They cut off supply lines to jereselam and Masada and starved them out. Eventually, the Sicarii committed mass suicide because they would never be slaves to the Romans. They killed all themselves, their wives, their children. 960 dead.

By 68ce Titus had laid waist to the rest of the rebellious cities. What was crazy was that the rebellions inadvertently worked. The very scale of the Jewish revolt during a time of profound social and political distress in Rome created something of an identity crisis amongst the Roman citizenry. 

Vespasian sought to remedy this by not simply squashing the rebellion, but utterly annihilate the jews, destroy man and god alike. 

Unfortunately for the Romans, as always, was the building Jewish zeal. A coalition began to form, built of peasants, low priests, bandit gangs and refugees, forming a faction called the Zealot Party. They set up their own shadow government and picked straws to see who their high priest would be. It fell to Phanni son of Samuel. 

The third and largest rebel camp was eventually led by Simon son of Gibraltar. What set him apart from the other rebels was that he began unabashedly as the self-proclaimed messiah and king of the jews. 

The romans, and i know this is getting repetitive, fucked them up, starved them out, tried to burn them from existence. 

After this Vespasian was like ok, no more temple building, and now you pay twice the tax so you can help rebuild the Roman temple of Jupiter. Rome declared them no longer a legitimate cult, and they were officially eternal enemies of Rome. 

Jerusalem and the surrounding areas were renamed Aelia Capitolina, 

Rome strove to create the impression that no jews had ever been to Jerusalem, and by 135ce the name Jerusalem ceased to exist in Roman record. 

In the years to come, the Jewish community would begin to distance themselves from the revolutionary idealism that led to war with Rome. Partly failing that idea was that a flourish of apocalyptic writings would emerge over the next century that reflected the continued longing for the divine deliverance from Roman rule. 

In 132ce, a second Jewish war broke out, led by the messiah Simon son of Kochba. This was, as always, short lived, and the jews came to view the holy land in more transcendental terms, fostering a messianic theology that rejected overt political ambitions, as acts of piety and the study of the law took the place of temple sacrifices. 

A short while after the temple of god was desecrated, the nation scattered, the religion made into a pariah, tradition says a Jew named John Mark took up his quill and composed the first words to the first gospel written about the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth, not in Hebrew, the language of god, or Aramaic, the language of Jesus, but in Greek, the language of romans. The language of the victors. 

PART II

In 30ce Jesus cleansed the courtyard of gentiles. In a rage he flipped tables, driving vendors from the outer court, letting loose animals. He apparently gets to walk out after threatening that if the temple is destroyed he will raise it again within 3 days. He is a zealot rebel who tells other devout jews not to pay tribute to ceasar. 

Give ceasar his money back, because that belongs to him. He can give us this land back, because it belongs to god. Jesus preaches this from the garden of Gethsemane, until a Roman cohort picks him up and takes him in. Jesus was prepared for this, as he told his followers, “if you do not have a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one.”

He is strung up like every other traitor, no different, given a title, no different for sedition. 

The fact that he was crucified because Rome felt threatened by his aspiration to occupy Palestine, that his zealotry engangered temple authorities.

The point is we should keep this in mind as we learn more about his death on a cross in Golgotha to the launch of his public ministry on the banks of the jordan river. 

Chapter 7 

John the Baptist, what can we say about John. John may have been the real Jesus. He was likely an Essene Jew. He came from the woods, like the essenes and started cleansing people in the river Jordan. 

Being dipped in the water was a tradition of only the essene jews, who believed in the liminal, or the cleansing power of water (like a morning shower!). 

The gospel version of John is crazy inaccurate. It reads like a fanciful folktale intentionally echoing the biblical account of Elijah’s conflict with Jezebel, wife of king ahab. Of course, Josephus’s Antiquities has a better about. 

John promised the jews a new world order. He didn’t, only the allure of it while baptizing serf and soldier alike. He was put to death, like any other zealot, around 30ce.

After his death, though, his disciples still wandered the lands trying to decipher his teachings. Many assumed he was the messiah and thought he would rise from the dead. 

What made johns way of life popular is that he, like the other wildnerness living essene jews, stripped themselves of earthly delights. Baptism was salvation, not things, not temples. Baptism wasn’t new, as the old Syrians and Palestinians did it, gentiles converting to Judaism would be cleansed.

The Essenes were known for wearing a cloak, a cloth, and a hatchet, in order to dig a latrine for when they needed to make doodoo. 

Immersion baths were the way to maintain a state of perpetual purity. 

The Essenes rejected temple authority and animal sacrifices. They eagerly awaited the apocalypse. Sons of light = Essenes, sons of darkness = temple worshippers. 

“The voice crying out through the darkness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our god.” John and the essenes identified themselves this way, the gospels giving this verse to john, but the most significant thing for the Essenes. 

What’s interesting is that the quote “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” sounds more like a Christian projection upon Baptist’s actions. It’s odd because it’s something that suggests john had the power to forgive sins even before he knew Jesus. 

Jesus for some reason left his little hut in Nazareth to get baptized by john. The life of historical Jesus begins with this. 

this is something the early Christians couldn’t accept because it implied john was superior to Jesus, because it means Jesus’ sins were forgiven by john. 

The gospels slowly work john’s importance out of history with the gospels, because their roles needed to be reversed. 

Mark - john as a prophet and mentor to Jesus (“the one who comes after”)

Matt - john refuses to baptize Jesus until Jesus baptizes john

Luke - glosses over baptism, gives john an infancy narrative to make his birth from a barren mother less superior than Jesus from a virgin.

John - john has no purpose other than to acknowledge Jesus’ divinity. John is no longer a baptist, Jesus is never baptized by him. Says Jesus “existed before me.”

Whoever john was, Jesus very likely began his ministry as another disciple of john. 

Jesus even “Went into the wilderness after his baptism” just like John would to return to the Essenes. 

Jesus’ first disciples were john’s only until john was arrested. 

Jesus would be more dangerous. 

Chapter 8 

So Jesus got bathed by John, and then he went back to Galilee, a Galilee that had been fucked up by Rome. Galilee had the topographical setup to be really good at resisting Rome, so Rome was especially thorough with them. 

They even differed themselves from the rest of the jews, Ethnoi, separate nation. Jesus’s disciples could even be identified by their accents. They had an uneducated connotation as Galileans, as bandits, not offering tithes. They recognized the temple, just not the people who ran it. 

Once Herods son Antipas controlled Galilee, the divide got bigger.

There was actually a small pocket of peace during this time. Jesus was born in a town aflame with plunder and destruction, his second decade under antipas. He left Galilee when it was fucked up and came back to see it urbanized, under Roman influence. 

Initially hearing of his preachings, Jesus’s family tried to stop him. They rejected his teachings and denied his identity as messiah. 

Eventually though his brother James took over. He didn’t get good traction in Nazareth so he went to Capernaum, town of fishermen and farmers (oh, grapes and wheat and fish, hm). Jesus pandered to all, but his message was still a challenge to the wealthy and powerful, the occupiers of Rome, the temple collaborators. The lord knows people are suffering and is going to do something about it. 

He had 72 followers, and his twelve ambassadors, who would come to represent the 12 tribes of israel. 

His teachings were in Aramaic, the people’s language, and his sermons were plagiarized from John the Baptist. “the kingdom of heaven is near!”

He went out of his way to set himself in direct opposition with the gaurdians of the Temple and the Jewish cult by challenging their authority as gods representatives on earth. 

Jesus was less concerned with the pagan empire occupying Palestine than the Jewish imposter occupying god’s temple. 

The high pries Caiaphas would be Jesus’s antagonist and have him executed because of the threat he posed to the temple’s authority. 

The Good Samaritan example would’ve been about how the person so hated by the temple, the Samaritan, would do the right thing where the Jewish priests would not. 

The turning point was when someone interrupted Jesus and said what have we to do with you, JN, have you come to destroy us oh holy one of god? Jesus silenced him as if in exorcism, and the man fell to the ground. This mythos created the initial zeal around the charletain god-man. 

He never claimed to be god or king, but a miracle worker and professional exorcist roaming through Galilee performing tricks. 

Chapter 9

People don’t realize that in 1st century Palestine, the vocation of professional miracle worker was as common as woodworker (like Jesus) or mason, and better paid. Especially in Galilee. What set Jesus apart was that he was doing it for free.

He and his followers had taken shelter in his brothers’ house (simon and Andrew) where one’s mom was sick with fever.

Acceptance of the micacle-working nature of Jesus is what separates historian and worshiper, scholar and seeker, because there is not evidence to support any miraculous action by Jesus. All of his miracle stories were embellished with the passing of time and convoluted with Christological significance, and thus cannot be validated. Really, though, how one views his miraculous actions is irrelevant. All we know is how the people of his time viewed him.

The early church not only maintained a vivid memory of his miracles, but built its very foundation upon them. His apostles were marked by their ability to mimic what Jesus’s powers, to heal and exorcise people in his name. 

Well into the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Jewish intellectuals and pagan philosophers who denounced Christianity took Jesus’s status as exorcist and miracle worker for granted. They may have denounced him as nothing more than a traveling magician, but they never doubted his magical abilities. 

- He was not the only miracle worker around, or even in Judaea or Galilee. 

- Honi the circle-drawer, who could draw a circle during a drought and held the gods hostage until he made it rain.

- Abba Hilqiah and Hanan the hidden, who were widely credited with miracles. 

- Rabbi Hanina Ben Dosa, who could pray over the sick and see who would die and who would live. 

- Apollonius of Tyana, the most famous, who healed the lame, the blind, the paralytic, even raise the dead. 

- There were also many exorcists in the area. 

- Eleazar, an Essene, who used amulets and incantations to draw demons through noses. 

- Rabbi Simon Ben Yohai, who could cast out demons simply by casting their names. Like Jesus he would tell it to identify itself which gave him authority over it. 

- Paul who used Jesus’s name as a talisman against demonic forces.

The reason exorcisms were so commonplace in Jesus’s lifetime were because in pre-medicine times Jews viewed illness as a manifestation of divine judgment or of demonic activity. Palestine understood what we would now call medical problems, mental illness, epilepsy or schizophrenia as signs of possession, and they saw Jesus as an exorcist. 

Jesus, though, maintained messianic ambitions, like Theudas and the Egyptian. 

Through and through these collection of men were known as “men of deeds.”

What’s more interesting, still, is that the miracle stories of Jewish and pagan writings of the first and second centuries were almost identical to that of the gospels, the same vocabulary being used to describe the miracle and the miracle worker. 

All people in the ancient near east viewed magic and miracle as a standard facet of their world. There was a difference, though, in magic and miracles. Not in method or outcome, but in the way each was perceived. 

Magicians practiced things sometimes seen as bad by the state, or “black magic.”

Moses even prohibits magic. No one shall consult with spirits, or be a wizard or necromancer. 

God forbids magic, and yet regularly has his servants engage in magical acts in order to prove his might. The distinction arises as a factor of representation. a “representative of god” performs miracles. A false prophet, like one representing Baal. Performs magic. 

Epphatha, be opened. The magical nature of the gospels rises with each version. Mark is more tempered than Matthew. 

Jesus, interestingly enough, when accused of sedition, blasphemy, rejecting Moses, refusing to pay tribute, threatening the temple, was never accused of being a magician. 

Eleazar performed for Emporer Vespasian. Simon Magus offered his apostles money to be trained in the art of manipulating the Holy Spirit to heal the sick. 

Magic and miracles, truly, are just different sides to the same Palestinian coin. John the Baptist is waiting to be beheaded when he hears about what Jesus is doing. 

In the gospels, Jesus cites a quote to this which is just a ripoff of Isiah’s prophecy of Israel’s redemption. 

By connecting the miracles with isiah’s prophecy the writers of the gospel got to claim he was the one. It was weird, though, because god already had agents on earth. The priests in the temples. 

Jesus makes a big jab at the priests after healing a leper and then telling him to go seek refuge with the priests. The kingdom of god is at hand, and this man is fucking dangerous. 

Chapter 10

This chapter just talks more about Jesus being a revolutionary. His single promise during his 3 year ministry was the promise of the kingdom of heaven, but how that wasn’t really what it sounded like.

It was the core of the Lord’s Prayer, but really signified a physical kingdom on earth, and less the cosmic one we think of today. It’s about the phrase Kingdom of God and how it only appears in the apocryphal text The Wisdom of Solomon, where the kingdom is envisioned as physically situated in heaven. 

Those who claim otherwise really cant really point to another place. Maybe in John where he says my kingdom is not in this world, which really translates to “not a part of this system.” Jesus never said the kingdom of heaven wasn’t on earth, he was just saying saying it wasn’t a part of any government on earth. 

Jesus’ words weren’t so much apocryphal as they were indicative of the times: times of war, famine, and false messiahs. He’s just saying a real kingdom with an actual king was right around the corner (in terms of time). And his tune was no different than the zealots that came before him.

His view, naturally, was similar to john the baptists as well, which is where he even got the phrase “kingdom of god.” His words really meant he was looking for a transformation toward justice and righteousness, a reversal of political, religious and economic systems. 

The idea makes it seem like gods kingdom will come to earth, the rich will be made poor, the strong will be made weak, the powerful will be displaced by the powerless.

It’s chilling to think that bringing about the kingdom of god means tearing this one down. The new couldn’t happen without the utter destruction of the old. Jesus’s words indicate the Roman Empire is about to be dismantled. These are the words of an anarchist. 

It’s a call to revolution. The question becomes did Jesus agree with all those who came before him that violence was necessary to revolt. It’s important because Jesus the Christ is a peacemaker who loves his enemies and turns the other cheek.

Jesus the Christ speaks as if he has no indication of the political world happening outside his words. “Do not think that i have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword.”

These love enemy and turn cheek statements were deliberately cleansed of their Jewish context and transformed into these abstract ethical principles that all people’s could abide regardless of their persuasion. 

“Go nowhere near the gentiles or enter the city of samaritans.” Jesus’s peace extended to his poor jews and no one else. 

Love your neighbor was really just about other Israelites. Jesus was a nationalist. The Torah was clear: these gentiles shall not live in your land. 

This same slaughtering god, the one who called for genocide, this is the only god Jesus knew and the sole god that he worshipped. 

Jesus knew as any other claimant to the mantle of messiah that gods sovereignty could only be established via force. That’s why he handpicked his 12 apostles, because he needed someone to rule over each of the 12 Israeli tribes after the revolution.

God would gather everyone for war, to swoop down on the Philistines in the west and plunder the people of the East. 

Take up your cross and follow me was a testament to the fact that they’d all likely be executed for what they were doing. What’s likely is that the evangelists who wrote Jesus’s story decades after his death knew his journey would end at golgotha, and so they put these predictions into Jesus’s mouth to prove his prowess as a prophet. 

Jesus parabolizes everything for this reason. The veils of the kingdom of heaven are to make secret his mission. 

People thought Jesus was god because he was bringing about the kingdom of god on earth by starting the revolution. He was the kingdom of god personified. 

Chapter 11

Jesus, through his ministries, not only carried out his master’s message, but also found a movement on the promise that god would soon intervene on behalf of the meek/poor. His veiling efforts in speaking in parables aside, he knew he was following a well-worn path of sedition, and so kept to small towns, avoiding Judea and Jerusalem. He focused his attention, as many cultists do, on the oppressed, not on those in the metropolitan areas. he went for the low-hanging fruit. 

People kept wanting him to prove he was the powerful person they’d heard of, but he would say people shouldn’t need proof. 

He was often thought as Elijah reincarnated. Elijah was a warrior for Yahweh and strove to drive isrealites away from Canaanite god Baal. Elijah was meant to return at the end of time and united the 12 tribes of isreal and sweep in the messianic age predicted by Malachi. 

Jesus doesn’t necessarily discourage these comparisons. There are also weird similarities between the transfiguration story and Moses receiving the law of mount Sinai. 

Mark’s telling (which is in course, elementary Greek, a dialect betraying the author’s limited education. 

Jesus was likely the one to bolster the messianic secret, reconstructed from Mark’s gospel in Matt and Luke. It explains why marks redactors went crazy to compensate for mark painting an image of Jesus as someone who wanted nothing to do with the title messiah. 

As a reminder, the gospels are not about a man named Jesus who lived 2k years ago, they are about an eternal being sitting at the right hand of god. The writers were constructing a theological argument about nature and function of Jesus the Christ, not composing a biography about a human being. 

We shouldn’t forget that messianic expectations were hardly defined in the 1st century Palestine. Many are confusing and contradictory. Pretty much all the messiahs that came before JC neatly fit into one of the paradigms. Oracular prophets like John the Baptist and Jesus Ben Ananias had end time prophecies that conform to those found in Hebrew scripture and in the Targum. 

Jesus didn’t do any of the things he or his mantle said they would. As a messiah he was as successful as the rest of his predecessors.

SO WHY WAS JESUS SO POPULAR AMONGST THE ZEALOTS!

Recognizing this pattern, the early church made a conscious decision to change the messianic standards. the mixed and matched different depictions of the messiah found in the Hebrew bible to create the candidate that transcended any particular messianic model or expectation. 

The stories wrote him as superior to any previous messiah, false or otherwise. They made him transcendent of the traditional messianic paradigms. 

In the entire first gospel there is not a single messianic statement from Jesus, not even when he stands trial before Caiaphas. Q neither contains any statements. The early gospels do indicate that Jesus didn’t like to refer to himself as messiah, though he did announce himself as SON OF GOD, something which we’ve always mistranslated. Jesus was really just calling himself SON OF MAN. Something which Christians explicitly use to refer to him after his death. 

Modern Christians consider Jesus god incarnate, but that idea is anathema to 5k years of Jewish scripture, thought and theology. 

There was a man who did think he was a god, and that was the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes 

What likely happened was that Ezra and Enochs writings nearly a century after Jesus’ death influenced the early Christians, who latched onto the preexistent son of man ideal described in them to reinterpret Jesus’ mission and identity and help explain why he failed to accomplish any of his jobs. 

When he is condemned to death is the only time he says he’s the son of man, followed by a line taken directly from the book of Daniel. 

Chapter 12

This chapter discusses Jesus in the last few days and hours before his crucifixion and how most of it is, unsurprisingly, bullshit. 

They came down on him in the garden of Gethsemane. The romans know where to find him because his apostle, Judas, helps them identify Jesus. He’s arrested for that threat he made against the temple previously, which is a big deal as the Jewish cult’s principle symbol of Rome’s hegemony over Judea. 

Two zealous rabbis, Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, tried removing the golden eagle Herod the Great had placed above the temple’s gate. They were burned alive.

A large focus in this chapter is on Pilate, and how he didn’t like trials. During his reign he sent 10s of thousands of people on the cross with a simple line in a logbook. It’s strange that the gospels paint him as someone who would give the slightest shit about another peasant Jew rebel. In the gospels [over time at least, which i talk about at length] Pilate says Jesus is innocent. He goes so far in the gospel to give a Jewish riot crowd the option to pick him or a murderer to crucify, and they choose Jesus. Also, there exists no shred of evidence of any Passover customer where a Roman governor does this.

What’s interesting to remember, too, is as the gospels were beginning to be written, Mark and the others were not writing for a Jewish audience. They were writing for the romans. His account of Jesus’s life was written shortly after the Jewish revolt was crushed. The early Christians (romans) had to reinterpret Jesus’s revolutionary message and his self-identity as kingly son of man in light of the fact that the kingdom of go never materialized.

They distanced themselves from the Jewish independence, erasing any hint of radicalism or violence or revolution or zealotry. They had to divorce themselves from the Judaism and transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher of good works whose kingdom was not of this world. 

After 70ce, the Christian movement shifted from Jewish jerusalem to Greco-Roman cities. After a generation, his non-Jewish followers outnumbered his first generation Jewish ones. At the end of the first century, the Roman intellectual elite had become the primary target of Christian evangelism. And bc of that, in the story of Jesus, they had to be absolved of any responsibility for their messiahs death. THE JEWS DID IT.

The farther each gospel gets from 70ce, the more detached and outlandish pilate’s role in Jesus’s death became. 

- Matthew, written in Damascus, Luke, written in Antioch, John, written in Ephesus. 

- Pilate went from condemning Jesus with an audience that likely never happened to saying Jesus was probably the son of god. John even writes the fiction that when asking the jews who their king was, they shouted the Roman creed, no one but ceasar! 

Thus, Mark’s fabricated story designed to shift blame of Jesus’s death away from Rome is stretched so absurdly that it became the basis for 2k years of anti-semitism. 

His last day is the one that is hardest to historically confirm. None of it even happened. The sequence of events didn’t even contain a narrative. It was built for strictly liturgical purposes. It was a means for early Christians to relive the last days of their messiah through ritual [by sharing the same meal he shared with his disciples] praying the same prayers and so on. 

The story of his arrest, trial and execution exist solely to prove that he was the promised messiah. 

The only thing that was real about it was the crucifixion, which was a common practice because it was cheap. Lots of people, including the jews, did it, but Rome made it common practice. It wasn’t quite the death penalty either, as people were executed and then strung up. 

The bones, after being picked clean, would be thrown in the trash. That’s how Golgotha got its name (the place of skulls). Crucifixions were public reminders of what happened when you thought to challenge the empire. 

Jesus was executed for sedition, something the gospels try to change but cannot. He was a bandit! 

Chapter 12.5

This chapter is about the days after the death of the jeebs. It’s about Stephen, a follower stoned for blasphemy who never even met Jesus. What caught his eye was that this Jesus was not eaten by carrion on the cross. No, he was brought down from the cross and placed in an extravagant tomb fit for the wealthiest men in Judea. 

Fisherman Simon Peter swore he saw Jesus scoot on out of there after 3 days. This was nothing like a ressurection from the Hebrew bible. Sure, ideas of resurrection were common amongst the Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, but never of a God Man. That was absolutely nonexistent in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints at resurrection.

It might be true that centuries after his death, Christians would interpret versus that sounded like there was mention of it as a way to make sense of their messiahs failures to accomplish a single messianic task. 

His followers were suggesting something else entirely. Luke’s follow up to his gospel, acts, tells of Stephens death in the exact fashion he tells of Jesus’s death, is the centerpiece. Stephen is wise and well-spoken, so says acts, and yet he buggers up even the things the most uneducated jews would call bullshit (an angel gave Moses the law, when really god himself did. 

In Stephens words, Jesus isn’t even any longer the messiah. He’s a preexistent heavenly being not of this world, equal to god. 

Around 50 ce, fifteen years after Stephen, a once denouncer of his now renames himself as Paul and writes letter saying Jesus was god. 

How could a failed messiah who died a shameful death as a state criminal be transformed in the span of a few years into the creator of the heavens and earth, god himself?

The answer is simple: Practically every word written about Jesus including the gospels is written by people who actually knew Jesus when he was alive. Those who watched him die played a very small role in defining the movement Jesus left behind, although his brother James was influential in the decades after the crucifixion. 

Most returned to Jerusalem to await his return, and were instead burned to the ground by Titus’s army in 70ce. The apostles were sort of hamstrung too, as they were all illiterate farmers and fishermen. 

The Jesus we know was instead crafted by educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking diaspora jews, many immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought. they began to reinterpret his message for the Jews and gentile neighbors from a revolutionary zealot to a romanized demigod, from someone who failed to free the jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being unconcerned with earthly matters. 

Jesus’s family and the 12 clashed with the diaspora jews when it came to Jesus’s correct message. The discord resulted in the emergence of two competing camps of Christian interpretation in the decades after the crucifixion: one championed by James, and the other championed by the Pharisee once-nonbeliever Paul. 

It is this contest between these two bitterly and openly hostile adversaries that would shape Christianity as the global religion we know today.

Chapter 13

The gospel said Jesus died at 3pm (6th hour of the day) when the J died. As he breathed his last, 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 was ash. 

The disciples in jerusalem after the crucifixion went back to a temple that was still around, though. His resurrection is a tough one. 

The disciples were systematically murdered for claiming Jesus was resurrected and not personally denouncing that fact. The most obvious reason not to dismiss the dispiples resurrection tales is because Jesus is the only messiah still named so after his death. No one but Paul talks of resurrection as a thing after the crucifixion. He talks about how about how many people see Jesus afterwards and blah blah, but he makes a good point: without the resurrection, the whole edifice of Jesus’s claim to the mantle of messiah comes crashing down. His crucifixion invalidates his messianic claim to replace king David. 

God: “Anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” But if Jesus did not actually die, if his death (which is still a fucking death) was just a prelude of spiritual evolution, then the cross would no longer be a curse of symbol of failure. 

The resurrection stories were constructed for this reason. But flesh and bones to an existing creed. Create narrative from established belief. Counter the charges of critics who denied the claim and argued his followers were seeing ghosts, or maybe thought the disciples themselves were the one who stole his body from the tomb. 

By the time the stories were written, six decades had passed since the crux, giving plenty of time for the evangelists to hear all the objections and create counter arguments. The stories of the passion aren’t meant to be accounts of historical events. They’re meant as rebuttals to arguments taking place offscreen. 

In the entirety of Jewish thought there was never anything that said the messiah needed to die suffer and be reborn, which is why Jesus never cites any scriptures about it. That part of the problem, the part that his crux annulled his messianic claims, was recognized. They tried deflecting that the kingdom of god was celestial, not earthly. That the prophecies were misconstrued. Properly interpreted, they said the opposite of what everyone thought. The problem of trying to convince Jerusalemites of this was that the disciples were illiterate, having heard the scriptures from whatever synagogue delivered them back home. 

They all stayed in Jerusalem, thinking he would return. They were above all else jews, and they were peddling for a Jewish audience. The leaders, john and peter of the 12, and brother James, maintained roots to Judaism.

Unlike the jews of jerusalem who dismissed the 12, the diaspora jews lived far from all the drama. The were beyond temple reach many more susceptible to the message. As small minorities, they’d become acculturated to Roman society and Greek ideas, surrounded by many religions and more opening to question Jewish beliefs. They also spoke Greek, not aramaic, and the translation offered new and originative ways to express their faith, allowing them to more easily harmonize traditional biblical cosmology with Greek philosophy. 

Their texts, The Wisdom of Solomon and Jesus Son of Sirach, read like philosophical tracts and less like Semitic scriptures. 

The camp became defined between two groups: The Hebrews and the Hellenists, the latter being more educated. The division in language would ultimately provide decisive in differentiating the two communities. The hellenists worshipped Jesus in Greek, the Hebrews in Hebrew or Aramaic. The difference in symbols led to differences in doctrine, as hellenists began to meld their Greek-inspired worldviews with the hebrews’ already idiosyncratric reading of the Jewish scriptures. 

Expelled hellenists went back to their cities and translated the message. It was in Antioch that they were first referred to as Christians. 

The Jewish sect founded by a group of rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. The Hellenist preachers began to gradually shed Jesus’s message of its nationalistic concerns, transforming it into a universal calling that would be more appealing to the Greco-romans.

Doing this allowed them to unchain themselves from the strictures of Jewish law until it ceased to be important. They argued Jesus didn’t come to fulfill Jewish law, but abolish it. His condemnation was not of the priests who defied the temple with their wealth and hypocrisy, but the Temple itself. 

The farther they spread from Jerusalem and the heart of the Jesus movement, the more their focus shifted from an exclusively Jewish audience to a primarily gentile one. The tipping point of moving towards gentiles came from a young Pharisee and Hellenistic Jew named Saul of Tarsus, the same Saul who countenanced stephen’s stoning for blasphemy. He met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and became thereafter known as Paul. 

Chapter 14

Paul the most jewy Jew. He was an educated, Greek-speaking diaspora jew and citizen. He was zealously devoted to the temple and Torah. 

He met risen Jesus, the only to ever claim to speak to him, and his worldview changed. His dramatic conversation is propagandistic legend created by Luke. Luke was a young devotee of Paul. 

Acts, written by Luke, is less an account of the Apostles than a reverential biography of Paul. Luke says it is Paul, not James or peter or john or the 12, who is the true successor to Jesus. 

Paul says he should be considered an apostle, but he didn’t convert until a decade after Jesus’s death. He insists he be called an apostle and insists he is superior to the others. He claims Jesus chose him before birth. He claims not to be the 13th apostle, but the first. 

The Jerusalem jews, the 12, thought the law of Moses should be adhered to. Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. Jesus claimed to fulfill the law of Moses, not abolish it. Far from rejecting it, Jesus constantly strove to expand and intensify it. 

Paul is unconcerned with anything “Jesus in the flesh” may or may not have said. He shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus. There is no trace, with exception of the crucifixion and last supper, of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his letters. He narrates no event from Jesus’s life. 

Paul actually sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. He does so because he just had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care. He boasts what he knows of Jesus was not learned from the apostles or those that knew him. 

Paul did, however, solve the dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the jews by simply discarding them and transforming Jesus into a creature, on that seems of his own making: Christ.

Christ is the Greek word for messiah, but that’s not how Paul uses it. He doesn’t endow Christ with any connotations attached to the term messiah in the Hebrew scriptures. he never speaks of him as “anointed of Israel.” 

He recognizes him as a descendent of king David, but doesn’t use the scriptures to argue he was the Davidic liberator come to save the jews. he ignores all messianic prophecies the gospels rely on to privy Jesus was messiah, and when he does look at the prophecies, like the one that says he who will serve as a light to the gentiles, he thinks they’re predicting him, not Jesus. He instead uses Christ as if it is a surname, like Caesar.

His portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar, since its now standard doctrine in the church. The transformation from the nazarean to a literal son of god whose death and resurrection launch a new genus of eternal beings responsible for judging others has no basis in any writings about Jesus that are even remotely contemporary with Paul’s. 

Christ isn’t the son of man appearing in Mark. Nowhere in Matthew or Luke is Jesus considered the literal son of god. When it’s used, its as a royal title and not a description. It’s only in John that he is, which was written long after the destruction of Jerusalem and Christianity was a thoroughly romanized religion. 

His writings are so heretical of Jesus that Jesus’s brother makes Paul come to Jerusalem to answer for his deviant teachings. After Paul came and said sorry, James began sending missionaries to Paul’s congregations to correct Paul’s unorthodox teaching about Jesus. 

Paul even asked people to denounce the gospels, and imitate only him, as he was of Christ. James is pretty pissed and calls Paul in again. James confronts him directly once he realizes Paul has been teaching believers to forsake Moses. Paul: “if you allow yourself to be circumcised, you cut yourself off from Christ. 

James and Paul throw down, and Paul is taken into custody because the Roman soldiers think he is The Egyptian, a leader of the Sicarii. 

One by one, claimants to the mantle of the messiah had arisen to liberate the Jews from the yoke of Roman occupation. Theudas the wonder worker had already been cut down by Rome for his messianic aspirations. The rebellious sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, had been crucified. The bandit chief Eleazar son of Dinaeus, who had been ravaging the countryside, slaughtering Samaritans in the name of the God of Israel, had been captured and beheaded by the Roman prefect Felix. And then the Egyptian had suddenly appeared on the Mount of Olives, vowing to bring the walls of Jerusalem tumbling down at his command.

By the time he gets to Rome it was ripe for his message. Seems though that he had trouble converting Rome’s jews. They were not just unreceptive to it, they were openly hostile. This is because peter was already there preaching what Jesus actually did.

Luke ends his account of Paul when he arrives in Rome and doesn’t bother to recount what happens between him and peter. In 66ce, the same year jerusalem erupted into revolt, Nero seized both of them and killed them, thinking they were espousing the same faith. He was wrong. 

Chapter 15

The last chapter focuses on James the Just, younger brother of Jesus. The authorities didn’t really accept his message about Jesus any more than they did Puals, but at least he respected the laws. 

Nero had sent albinis to replace the recently deceased Festus during the Jewish revolt, but because it would take time, Ananus was the interim, and he hated James and James hated him. 

James was the undisputed leader of the movement Jesus left behind. The apostles appointed him Bishop of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the city was believed to have occurred on account of his death. Although Luke’s Acts seems to pare out the apostles, the leave James in. 

It’s weird then, that James has been wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church was displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of modern chiristians. 

Partly it was a result of his blood relation to Jesus, because even bandit gangs practiced hereditary succession. After James was cousin Simeon, and then two grandsons of Jesus’s other brother, Judas. As Christianity transformed from a Jewish movement into a rigid imperial orthodox religion of Rome, James’s identity as Jesus’s brother was an obstacle to those who advocated the perpetual virginity of his mother Mary.

Imperial Christianity demanded a determinable power structure, hq in Rome not Jerusalem. Peter’s role as the first bishop of Rome and chief apostle made him ideal to base the authority of the Roman church. Matthew, in a single verse, declares peter as the head of the church. There is no other record of anyone saying he was the leader of the church, whereas there are dozens of passages citing James as such. 

James was more than likely denounced less because of his relationship to Jesus than his continued jesus-esque beliefs. He bitterly condemns the rich in his epistle, which is likely mostly from a sermon he gave soon before his death. He didn’t write the epistle, but remember that naming a book after someone is a way of honoring the person and reflecting their views. He says one cant be a follower of Jesus is one doesn’t actively favor the poor. His fierce judgment of the rich explains how he drew the ire of the greedy high priest Ananus. 

The most important parts of James’s epistle are where he tries to balance devotion to the Torah and faith in Jesus as messiah. He says follow the law, but the law is not perfect. He is also openly hostile towards Paul’s way of teaching in his epistle. 

James didn’t want to force gentiles to first become jews before they were allowed to become Christians. 

James was stoned to death, Jerusalem revolted, titus’s army destroyed them, and with it’s destruction, all connection between the mother assembly and the diaspora severed, the last physical link between the Christian community and Jesus was cut. 

In 398, Constantine held the Nicene Creed, where the gospel was officially canonized. They were all Roman. Paul was transformed as the only person who spoke for Jesus. After Jerusalem went down, the movements connection to Judaism was severed, and Paul became the primary vehicle through which a new generation of Christians was introduced to Jesus the Christ. In the canon, they chose one letter from James, two from Peter three from John, and 14 from Paul, the deviant and outcast who was rejected and scorned by its once-leaders. More than half of what makes up the New Testament are either by or about Paul. 

This wasn’t surprising. A gentle religion needed gentile theology. 

- James vision: a Jewish religion anchored in the law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome.

- Pauls vision: a Roman religion divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ. 

The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.

The real shame is that the real Jesus is the someone who would’ve been worth following.