Skip to content

Zealot

Metadata

Highlights

spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied to spreading the story of the Christ. — location: 132 ^ref-54306

passages in which Jesus emphasizes the exclusivity rather than the universality of his message are widely acknowledged to be historically reliable because they conflict with the early church’s emphasis on the universality of Christianity. — location: 152 ^ref-57638

those passages that coincide with what we know about the political, social, and religious milieu of first-century Palestine are generally accepted as historical, while those that do not are rejected. — location: 155 ^ref-31476

the resurrection, without which, he claims, “our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” — location: 207 ^ref-47834

calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous. — location: 256 ^ref-15015

almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth was composed after the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 — location: 259 ^ref-54308

So complete was the devastation wrought upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were marched out of the city in chains. — location: 266 ^ref-21451

The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged. — location: 270 ^ref-29804

with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s evangelism. Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, — location: 273 ^ref-5942

in the aftermath of Jesus’s failure to establish God’s reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted not only Jesus’s mission and identity, but also the very nature and definition of the Jewish messiah. — location: 280 ^ref-56460

If we expose the claims of the gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures of their literary and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate picture of the Jesus of history. — location: 291 ^ref-7815

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that many modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. — location: 295 ^ref-51241

when civil war broke out between the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus over control of the throne, each brother foolishly reached out to Rome for support. Pompey took the brothers’ entreaties as an invitation to seize Jerusalem for himself, thus putting an end to the brief period of direct Jewish rule over the city of God. — location: 486 ^ref-15403

It was standard Roman policy to forge alliances with the landed aristocracy in every captured city, making them dependent on the Roman overlords for their power and wealth. — location: 493 ^ref-10525

Rome even kept custody of the high priest’s sacred garments, handing them out only on the sacred festivals and feast days and confiscating them immediately after the ceremonies were complete. — location: 504 ^ref-26335

For the most part, the Romans humored the Jews, allowing them to conduct their rituals and sacrifices without interference. The Jews were even excused from the direct worship of the emperor, which Rome imposed upon nearly every other religious community under its dominion. — location: 506 ^ref-37454

The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred,” Tacitus wrote, “while they permit all that we abhor”— — location: 519 ^ref-36136

The Stoic philosopher Seneca was not alone among the Roman elite in wondering how it had possibly come to pass in Jerusalem that “the vanquished have given laws to the victors.” — location: 525 ^ref-19958

Within a few years after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, an entire crop of landless peasants found themselves stripped of their property with no way to feed themselves or their families. — location: 563 ^ref-33521

peasant-warriors launched a wave of attacks against the Jewish aristocracy and the agents of the Roman Republic. — location: 567 ^ref-59606

The messiah was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, and so his principal task was to rebuild David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome. — location: 582 ^ref-10703

neutered the political influence of the Temple and redistributed power to a new class of Jews whose reliance on the favors of the king transformed them into a sort of nouveau riche aristocracy. — location: 606 ^ref-10185

Herod imposed a crushing tax rate upon his subjects, from which he continued to dispatch a hefty tribute to Rome, and with pleasure, as an expression of his esteem for his Roman masters. — location: 620 ^ref-63819

Herod was a convert, after all. His mother was an Arab. — location: 628 ^ref-21352

Herod placed a golden eagle—the sign of Roman dominion—over its main portal and forced his handpicked high priest to offer two sacrifices a day on behalf of Caesar Augustus as “the Son of God.” — location: 634 ^ref-27657

That he came from this tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews may very well be the only fact concerning Jesus’s childhood about which we can be fairly confident. — location: 676 ^ref-20715

“Come,” they say. “Show yourself to the world.” Jesus refuses. “You go,” — location: 687 ^ref-32487

“This man is the messiah!” This is no simple declaration. It is, in fact, an act of treason. In first-century Palestine, simply saying the words “This is the messiah,” aloud and in public, can be a criminal offense, punishable by crucifixion. — location: 696 ^ref-23733

Some believed the messiah would be a restorative figure who would return the Jews to their previous position of power and glory. Others viewed the messiah in more apocalyptic and utopian terms, as someone who would annihilate the present world and build a new, more just world upon its ruins. — location: 700 ^ref-2739

The Essenes apparently awaited two separate messiahs—one kingly, the other priestly—though most Jews thought of the messiah as possessing a combination of both traits. — location: 702 ^ref-19382

among the crowd of Jews gathered for the Feast of Tabernacles, there seems to have been a fair consensus about who the messiah is supposed to be and what the messiah is supposed to do: he is the descendant of King David; he comes to restore Israel, to free the Jews from the yoke of occupation, and to establish God’s rule in Jerusalem. — location: 704 ^ref-53078

The early Christian community appears not to have been particularly concerned about any aspect of Jesus’s life before the launch of his ministry. — location: 724 ^ref-28944

The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths. — location: 751 ^ref-34673

(There is, however, one thing about which all the prophecies seem to agree: the messiah is a human being, not divine. The idea of a divine messiah is anathema to Judaism, which is why, without exception, every text in the Hebrew Bible dealing with the messiah presents him as performing his messianic functions on earth, not in heaven.) — location: 777 ^ref-28083

the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God. The descendant of King David. — location: 788 ^ref-46466

Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire — location: 808 ^ref-39435

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. — location: 809 ^ref-29896

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. — location: 823 ^ref-41616

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. — location: 827 ^ref-35535

less than a hundred years after Jesus’s death, rumors about his illegitimate birth were already circulating throughout Palestine. — location: 834 ^ref-4239

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. — location: 837 ^ref-1073

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. — location: 844 ^ref-36582

Herodian social revolution—the nouveaux riches who rose to prominence after Herod’s massacre of the old priestly aristocracy. — location: 869 ^ref-65053