NUMBERED AMONG THE
TRANSGRESSORS
Christ, what more do you need to convince you
That you've made it and you're easily as strong
As the filth from Rome who rape our country
And who've terrorized our people for so long?
With
these words, the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar portrays
"Simon Zelotes" trying to prompt Jesus to take revolutionary political
action. Even if the scene does not reflect the historical situation of
Jesus, it certainly shows the influence of modern discussions about
Jesus. Was he a revolutionist? Or are scholars merely trying, like
Simon, to make him one? The theory propounded by Samuel Reimarus, Karl
Kautsky, and Archibald Robertson has more recently been championed in
many books including Brandon's Jesus and the Zealots, Schonfield's The
Jesus Party, Carmichael's The Death of Jesus, Joyce's The Jesus Scroll,
Haley's The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ, and (with important
modifications) Maccoby' s Revolution in Judaea. The question is one both
tantalizing and notoriously difficult to settle. Plaguing the discussion
of the issues is an easily understandable tendency to cast the
alternatives in either anachronistic or too- strict categories. I would
like to undertake a brief rehearsal of some of the more important points
at issue.
The Evidence: Enough
to Convict?
Many have noted how, even
though some historical data might encourage us to see Jesus against the
background of first century revolution (e.g., the revolt. of Judas the
Galilean), other stubborn gospel texts make it more likely that Jesus
was an apocalyptic visionary who awaited a deus ex machina
salvation for Israel. I hope to show that this set of alternatives is
not quite as exclusive as it first appears. But the main point is
a good one: the evidence is hardly univocal. If this is so, must the
inquirer after the historical Jesus remain forever poised, like the
proverbial donkey, immobile between two hay stacks? How may we proceed?
Oscar Cullmann admits that
"The relevant sayings and narratives of Jesus in the Gospels may be
divided into two groups: those representing him as closely connected
with Zealotry, and those seeing him on the contrary set apart from it.”
(Jesus and the Revolutionaries, p. 7.) All too often, one
“suppresses those [texts] which contradict the thesis which one supports
himself.” (Ibid., p. 10.) Such a Procrustean procedure is arbitrary and
oversimplistic. But on the other hand, we ought to recognize that in the
gospels, the use of “ideal types” as experimental models for construing
the data is liable to prove as productive as in any other field of re
search (cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
Let us approach the data and see how well the revolutionist model can
explain the evidence. Then let us see whether some plausible explanation
can be found for the data that remain outstanding (e. g., the “pacifist"
texts mentioned by Cullmann, Martin Hengel, and others).
First, there is a
collection of very interesting hints that Jesus' disciples had some
revolutionary involvement. Brandon has made much of the supposed
presence of the Jerusalem Christians in the city at the time of the
Roman siege (a. d. 70). Earlier research of his had indicated that
traditional stories of the flight of the Christians across the desert
to Pella were legendary. Brandon supposes that they remained in the city
and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the Zealots against the Romans. But
this is an argument from silence, and it cannot carry much weight. The
legends might have originated as a pedigree for the Pella church, who
wanted to claim the clout of the Jerusalem Mother Church. Who knows?
Similarly, his attempt to
connect the Gospel of Matthew with Alexandria, and with the
Jewish revolt there, seems
highly tenuous. More suggestive are the "nicknames" given to some of the
disciples. Simon "Bar-jona” (Matthew 16:17), usually taken to mean that
Simon Peter was the “Son of Jonah," just might mean Simon "the
terrorist, " if barjona reflects a certain Akkadian loan-word.
The name of another disciple, “Simon the Zealot," is often (nowadays
even usually) interpreted as denoting his membership in the radical
Zealot Party. But as Michael Grant points out, the word "Zealot" as the
name of a revolutionary sect is not attested until after Jesus' day (Jesus:
"An Historian's Review of the Gospels, p. 132). The fact of its
current conventional use as a catch-all term for first-century
revolutionists has possibly misled scholars into retrojecting this
meaning onto the disciple Simon. For him, “Zealot" may simply have
denoted enthusiastic piety, much as the term is used in Acts 21:20 ("You
see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them
are zealous for the law.")
(On the other hand, it is
easy to show that the seditionists who actually bore the designation
“Zealots” saw themselves as in direct continuity with Judas of Galilee
and his successors, so the application of the name may be only barely,
and forgivably, anachronistic.)
Just as loudly trumpeted
has been the supposed revolutionary significance of Judas' epithet
"Iscariot." It is interpreted with some plausibility as "member of the
sicarii," an order of nationalist assassins mentioned in Josephus
and in Acts 21:38 ("Aren’t you the Egyptian who started a revolt
and led four thousand
terrorists [sicarii] out into the desert some time ago?"). But,
as Bertil Gärtner has shown (in his Iscariot), the name is quite
naturally explained as deriving from 'ishgarya, meaning “the
false one," thus "Judas the betrayer." But the question remains open,
and many still hold for “the sicarius” as Judas’ epithet.
The brothers James and John
are given the title "Boanerges," allegedly meaning "Sons of Thunder."
This name could perhaps refer to revolutionary leanings, though the
traditional opinion that it refers simply to a "stormy" emotional
disposition is no less likely. John M. Allegro (The Sacred
Mushroom and the Cross) has even suggested that it derives from the
hypothetical Sumerian word Geshpuanur, "upholder of the vault of
heaven," a reference to the mythological "heavenly twins" motif. Thus
“Boanerges” would rightly be rendered “Sons of the Thunderer.” That
would be a pretty odd coincidence.
So some of the most
strikingly attractive evidence for the Zealot hypothesis turns out to be
ambiguous. But the meat of the theory lies elsewhere. Here we must deal
with certain facts of Jesus’ career and the gospel writers'
interpretation of them, or rather, their attempts to rebut rival
interpretations. At the heart of our knowledge of Jesus is the fact of
his crucifixion. This was not the form of execution either for Roman
citizens (beheading) or for blasphemers (stoning), but rather for
sedition against Rome. The followers of Judas the Galilean and of
Spartacus met this gruesome fate.
Moreover, Jesus went to the
gallows in the company of two lestoi, or "brigands," the term
used by Josephus to refer to the revolutionaries a generation after
Jesus’ day. Jesus, then, died the death of a rebel against Rome. But was
it all a mistake, as the early Christians contended? A handful of
incidents may be cited to indicate that it was not.
The key narrative is that
of the so- called Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Jesus,
according to one plausible reading, is there hailed as the Messiah who
will restore “the kingdom of our father David" (Mark 11: 10). He
proceeds to enter the Temple and expel the merchants and moneychangers,
stampeding the livestock. Oddly, no mention is made of any action by
either the Temple Guard or the nearby Roman garrison. Yet later we are
told that along with Jesus, the authorities are holding one Barabbas
“who was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in
the uprising” (Mark 15:7). Wait a minute… what uprising? As
depicted in the TV movie Jesus of Nazareth, it is difficult not
to wonder if this riot were not connected with (or even identical with)
Jesus' "cleansing of the Temple.” The indirect evidence is, if anything,
even more intriguing. With regard to the Barabbas episode, there are
tell-tale signs of tampering. Pontius Pilate was known for his
propensity to outrage Jewish sensibilities every chance he got. Can we
then picture him knuckling under to the crowd and releasing a known
revolutionary instead of the pacifist Jesus? This whitewashing of Pilate
(which eventually went so far that he was canonized as a saint in the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church!) has long been seen as an attempt to shift
the blame for Jesus' death from the Romans to the Jews. This is not hard
to imagine in the light of the widely-recognized tendency of the
gospels, notably Luke, to defend Christianity from the dangerous charge
of sedition. The tendency is most pronounced in Luke's second New
Testament work The Acts of the Apostles, which is largely a series of
vindications of Paul by Roman authorities, before whom trouble-makers
have accused Paul and his companions: "These men are throwing our city
into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or
practice" (Acts 16:20-21). "They are all defying Caesar's decree, saying
that there is another king, one called Jesus" (Acts l7:7).
Remembered as a Rebel
Historically, it does seem
that much persecution of Christians by Roman authorities was based on
misapprehensions, such as that the Lord's Supper was cannibalism. Also,
the government resented the pacificism of some early Christians
including Tertullian and Origen. But what is interesting for our
purposes is that the gospels (especially Luke and John) are at pains to
refute popular beliefs that Jesus himself was a political rebel. Now
such beliefs might have been generated after Jesus' death by people
believing lies spread about Jesus, if lies they were. Some of the
evidence could be explained this way, though it needn't. For instance,
Luke is keenly aware that Jesus is remembered as being one of a group of
religious revolutionaries. He has Rabbi Gamaliel address the Sanhedrin,
comparing Jesus to two earlier notorious figures:
Some time ago Theudas
appeared, claiming to be somebody [cf. Luke 21:8, “Many will come in my
name claiming 'I am he.’”], and about four hundred men rallied to him.
He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to
nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the
census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all
his followers were scattered. Therefore, in the present case I advise
you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or
activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you
will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourself fighting
against God (Acts 5:36-39).
Similarly, Paul is mistaken
for an Egyptian leader of sicarii in Acts 21:38. Significantly,
Josephus mentions all three of these rebels, noting that the Egyptian
claimed he would part the Jordan River as did Joshua of old. Theudas
also predicted he would repeat one of Joshua's miracles; he would topple
the walls of Jerusalem, as Joshua had done to Jericho. Could Jesus
(Greek for "Joshua," of course) have been another would-be deliverer who
staked everything on a climactic miracle to be performed by him at
Jerusalem? Luke attests, perhaps unwittingly, that he was remembered
shortly after his death in precisely these terms. Luke and John also
give evidence that Jesus was seen this way by worried authorities even
before his death. John reports a clandestine meeting of the Sanhedrin:
"If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then
the Romans will come and take away both our place [= either
"jurisdiction" or "temple”] and our nation" (John 11:48). As Brandon
points out, the issue is seen by Jesus' opponents in purely political
terms. This is doubly striking, since this is not even supposed to be
the issue in the rest of John's gospel, where the Pharisees oppose Jesus
for his claims to be God’s Son.
Luke portrays the Sanhedrin
"falsely" charging Jesus before Pilate with sedition: "We have found
this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar
and claims to be Christ, a king" (Luke 23:2). Luke clearly intends his
readers to discount these charges, since he has already shown Jesus
commanding payment of taxes to Caesar ("Give to Caesar what is Caesar's"
Luke 20:25). Brandon tries to interpret this text so as to make it
forbid tribute to Caesar, but his attempt is hardly convincing. The
passage may be simply a cosmetic addition by Christian apologists who
wanted to avoid trouble. We find a trend in the same direction elsewhere
in the gospels. For instance, Jesus is "falsely" charged with predicting
to miraculously rebuild the Temple after its destruction (Mark 14:58),
yet John records that he did make such a claim (John 2: 19), though John
tries to reinterpret it. Also, the appendix to John's gospel denies that
Jesus ever claimed that at least some disciples would live until the end
of the world (John 21 :22- 23). Yet according to Mark, Jesus claimed
precisely this (Mark 8:38-9:11), a prediction that is likely to be the
origin of the legend of the Wandering Jew ("Tarry thou until I come
again"). But what does all this have to do with the charge that Jesus
forbade the payment of Roman taxes? I suggest that the charges may have
been true, but that Luke is trying to obscure the fact. Cullmann is
right: it is simply arbitrary to reject as spurious texts which conflict
with one's theory. So we would feel more comfortable classing the "Give
to Caesar that which is Caesar's" saying as another apologetical
negation like those just listed if we had a close parallel or precedent.
As it happens, we do. In
Matthew 17:24 27, we find the famous legend of the coin in the fish's
mouth. Simon Peter has just assured the collectors of the Jewish Temple
Tax that Jesus intends to pay the tax. Jesus then asks him: "From whom
do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes- -from their own sons
or from others?" "From others," comes Peter's answer. "Then the sons are
exempt," replies Jesus. The whole point is that Jesus, being God's son,
has no intention of paying. So far so good. But the story continues:
"But so that we may not offend them, go to the lake and throw out your
line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a
four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours."
The saying is thus de-fused, and the point is completely reversed.
Someone, afraid of the original radical threat of the passage, has
tacked on a pious legend which makes the text "safe." May we not wonder
if exactly the same thing has not transpired with respect to Jesus’
teaching on another tax, that paid to Caesar?
In the Memory of the
Disciples
We have seen that the
gospel writers preserve the memory that Jesus was seen by his enemies as
a political subversive both during and shortly after his ministry. Now
it is still possible that the early Christians were actually fending off
misunderstandings. But the likelihood of this shrinks visibly when we
realize that Luke and John also attest that during his career Jesus' own
followers saw him in the same light. John tells us that after Jesus'
miraculous feeding of the crowds, "They intended to make him king by
force” (John 6:15). John says that Jesus rejected the idea, but remember
the fears of the Sanhedrin that Jesus’ movement would bring political
ruin (John 11:48). Luke is aware that as Jesus approached Jerusalem,
"The people thought that the Kingdom of God was going to appear at once”
(Luke 19:11), and that when it did not, and Jesus died instead, they
were bitterly disillusioned. "We had hoped that he was the one who was
going to redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21). In answer to the question "Lord,
are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts
1:6), Luke's Jesus reformulates the messianic kingdom in spiritual and
religious terms. Now could all this have been the result of
misunderstanding?
True, Mark constantly
depicts the disciples as a bunch of thick-headed dunces, but this is
less a historical reminiscence than a factional polemic. Typical of
early Christian and
Gnostic tracts, Mark repudiates the teaching of the twelve apostles, so
he must dismiss it as their distortion of what Jesus taught them. In
fact, it is hard to believe Jesus' followers could have so completely
mistaken Jesus’ intentions. As Reimarus pointed out, Jesus had sent the
twelve (and according to Luke, seventy others) to preach his views of
the coming Kingdom all across Judaea. Did he send them out with out
double-checking that they had the message right? The gospels also record
a few "hard sayings" which have always proven baffling to exegetes, but
which take on new meaning in light of the preceding.
For instance, at the Last
Supper, Jesus instructs the disciples to go sell their coats and buy
swords if they are not already carrying some (Luke 22:36). In fact, some
of them are (and they do not fail to use them later that night, when
Jesus is apprehended at the Garden of Gethsemane). The attempts of
Martin Hengel (Was Jesus a Revolutionist?) and others to
spiritualize this text are unconvincing. Luke himself intends us to
understand that Jesus commanded the bearing of swords simply in order to
fulfill a prophecy that he would be among bad company (Luke 22:37). This
has all the
artificiality of Schonfield's scheming Jesus in The Passover Plot.
Clearly, it represents Luke’s tendency to attribute the Passion with all
its details to the letter of predictive prophecy.
Another traditional stumper
is Matthew 11:12: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and violent
men take it by force." Clifford Wilson comments:
Possibly our Lord was
suggesting that some were attempting to force the emergence of the
Kingdom of God by compelling God to usher in His Kingdom in the special
sense they hoped for. He went on to say that forceful men seize
it--possibly referring to men such as the Zealots and the Sicarii.
Wilson adds, “These men
were outside the will of God in attempting to set up the Kingdom of God
by force” (New Light on the Gospels, p. 66). But this last
sentiment is gratuitous and finds no justification in the text. I have
already had occasion to mention Barabbas. Now I want to propose a fresh
interpretation of the whole scene. Brandon is right; it is hard to
imagine Pilate dismissing a known insurrectionist instead of a
pacifist. But if the story is thus evidence of Christian tampering, a
new question is raised: Why introduce the Barabbas incident with its
embarrassing improbabilities at all? The answer lies in a curious
marginal variant preserved in some Old Latin manuscripts of Matthew,
where Barabbas is called “Jesus Barabbas" ("Which would you like me to
release to you: Jesus Bar-Abbas, or Jesus called Messiah?” Matthew
27:17). Barabbas, or Bar-Abbas, means “Son of the Father"! Is it
possible that the original point of the story was to refute the belief
that the Christians’ founder, Jesus the Son of the Father (= Son of
God), was an insurrectionist? “Oh, to be sure, there was a 'Jesus Son of
the Father' (Bar-Abbas) who was a rebel, but he wasn't crucified. Our
Jesus was crucified in his place. It's really all a simple case of
mistaken identity."
If this admittedly
speculative reconstruction were correct, we would have already in the
New Testament a precursor to the “docetic" heresy (the belief either
that someone else took Jesus' place or that his "Son of God" nature
departed, just before the crucifixion).
A Zealot, A
Visionary, or What?
Up to this point, a good
deal of evidence has combined to place Jesus among the ranks of
first-century resistance leaders such as Theudas, Judas the Galilean,
and the anonymous Egyptian. Yet, as we anticipated, the picture is not
so simple. What are we to make of those texts in which Jesus inculcates
pacifism, individual piety, and the expectation of divine deliverance?
Albert Schweitzer (The Mystery of the Kingdom of God) and
Johannes Weiss (Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God) have
shown that the model of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher of repentance
is at least as fruitful in understanding the gospels as the
"revolutionist" model we have been exploring. To recall our earlier
conundrum, are we stuck with a dilemma, asking "Will the real Jesus
please stand up?” but with little hope that he will? Cullmann decided
that things are not so simple. The historian must at least explore the
possibility that the picture is not so simple as making Jesus into a
first-century member of either the Jehovah's Witnesses or the PLO. And
he is right. Cullmann's own reconstruction, however, seems too much of a
theological harmonization, dependent as it is on his prior theory that
Jesus saw his mission as combining the functions of the Old Testament
"Son of Man" and "Suffering Servant" figures. The resulting “Mennonite”
picture of a Jesus who combined a damning critique of the present order
with a repudiation of al fleshly revolutionary movements, represents
more Cullmann's own theological evaluation of Jesus than a sketch of
Jesus' own views.
Cullmann would have been on
safer ground if he had chosen a model with a precedent in Jesus' own
milieu. And there is such a model available. The Qumran Scrolls from the
Dead Sea monastery document the history and beliefs of a sectarian group
possibly to be identified with the Essenes. While the notion that Jesus
had been a member of this community is an occultist fantasy akin to the
belief that he had traveled to Tibet, the Dead Sea Scrolls do shed light
on the religious thought-world of Jesus. Like Jesus, the Qumran
sectarians expected the imminent end of the world, at which time legions
of angels would intervene to sweep the pagans off the face of the earth,
or at least out of Palestine. This belief is attested in the Qumran work
The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness. What is
especially interesting for our purposes is that the function of the
angelic hosts was not to substitute for the efforts of the faithful, but
to augment them. It was believed that divisions of angels would fight
side-by-side with the sectarians against the Kittim, or Romans.
"Valiant warriors of the angelic host are among our numbered men, and
the Hero of war is with our congregation; the host of His spirits is
with our foot-soldiers and horsemen" (Chapter. XII, Vermes's
translation).
The point of all this is
that Jesus could have been an apocalyptic visionary 'awaiting the
deus _ machina ending of history, and a revolutionary. He and
his followers, then, would only unsheath their swords at the proper
time, at the very end. The parallels noted earlier with Theudas and the
Egyptian terrorist, should have alerted us to this possibility. Both men
seem to have staked everything on one last miraculous act, unlike Judas
the Galilean, Judas Maccabeus, or Bar Kochba, all of whom conducted
sustained campaigns of armed resistance. So Jesus may have been an
"apocalyptic revolutionary,” neither a pacifistic quietist nor a
freedom-fighter in today’s sense.
By
Robert M. Price