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Bart Ehrman on Resa Aslan’s Zealot http://ehrmanblog.org/aslans-zealot-start-members/ I have promised for some time to make some comments on Reza Aslan’s bestselling reconstruction of the historical : Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. And now the time is come. As I’ve indicated in my earlier posts, I had my first-year students in my seminar “Jesus in Scholarship and Film” read the book and make an evaluation of it. Most of the students thought very highly of it. In particular they thought it was unusually well written and that it made an interesting case for its thesis that Jesus was a politically motivated zealot who believed in the violent overthrow of the Roman empire, or at least believed that the Romans should be driven out of the Promised Land, as did so many others in his time and place. (Aslan does not argue that Jesus was a member of the Zealot party; he realizes that this party did not arise until after Jesus’ death.) I have already made a couple of comments about the book that I felt safe in saying without having read it, and now that I have read it, I stand by them both. (1) In response to a question about whether Aslan was a recognized scholar in the field of NT or early Christian studies, I indicated that he is not – and does not claim to be. He teaches creative writing and as one might suspect, he is indeed a highly talented writer. And he’s smart. And for a lay person venturing into a field other than his own expertise, he has read a lot. Not as much as he should have, but still, it’s a lot and it’s impressive that he has done as much reading as he has. But no, he is decidedly not a scholar in the field. More on that later. (But for now, let me stress what I indicated in my earlier post: his lack of scholarly credentials does NOT disqualify him from writing an interesting and informed book.) (2) His basic thesis about who Jesus was (a zealot, obviously), has been floated for over three hundred years, and has never seemed convincing to the majority of experts, or even a large minority of experts, or even a, well reasonable minority of experts. That doesn’t make it wrong! But my point is simply that it’s not a new thesis, although Aslan does not acknowledge his prececessors and the responses to them by others who weren’t convinced. So let me make a further comment about these two points. As I’ve indicated, the problem with not being an expert in the field is not that books should only be written by experts. Books should be written by people who are knowledgeable and who can write. Most experts can’t write worth beans, so that’s obviously a problem. Aslan on the other hand is a terrific writer. But the problems with not being an expert are the following: (1) Ancient history, the critical study of the New Testament, the history of early , and all cognate fields are incredibly complicated and not easily mastered. If you don’t master a field, you are likely to make mistakes. And for a book of Zealot’s scope, there are several fields that require mastery. Aslan has not mastered the field(s), and he has made mistakes. Lots of them. Maybe they don’t matter. Or maybe they do. The problem is that if you make lots of little mistakes, well, that could add up to a big problem. 2

(2) The reason experts in a field such as research, or NT studies more broadly, or early Christian history more broadly still, or ancient history even more broadly still do not, as a rule, like it when someone from outside the field writes a book about the field is not simply because they are intellectual elitists and academic snobs (although a lot are! trust me on that one….), but also for another reason. If a non-expert advances a thesis in a first-time, one-off publication, the thesis has not been vetted by experts in the field and gone through the rigorous review process that we all have to go through when we are testing out our academic ideas. Let me explain more fully: A scholar of, say, the historical Jesus (and yes, there are lots and lots of scholars who specialize not just in early Christianity or not just in the New Testament or not just in the Gospels – but actually completely on the historical Jesus), has been thoroughly trained in the field. This means, to begin with, knowing the relevant languages and having PhD level training. This training, at least in this country, includes a (very smart) person sitting through two years of PhD seminars in this and related fields, where s/he has argued ideas, been shot down, gotten back up, written term papers, had them evaluated, gone back to the drawing board, tried out something new, and so on. Then s/he has taken a battery of PhD examinations in this and related fields, evaluated by their professors who have greater expertise and grilled over his/her views and knowledge. Then s/he has written a dissertation in the field, under direction by an expert, trying out ideas in the process, getting them discussed, evaluated, assessed, shot down, forcing him/her to start over and try again. The dissertation normally has to be defended orally in front of a committee (in my university it is a committee of five), who does their utmost to find problems with it and requiring revisions if it doesn’t pass muster. Once the person has a PhD, after all this rigorous testing of ideas, s/he begins to write academic articles in the field. Normally a graduated student (or a graduate student while still in a graduate program) will float an article by a group of friends who are experts, and possibly former professors; the article will be revised, sent to a journal, the editor of the journal will read it to decide if it is worth pursuing, if so it is sent to two or three of the world’s top experts in the field for evaluation – not to see if the author is “right” but to see if a case has been made that can hold up to scrutiny. It’s a rigorous process. Publishing a scholarly book is even more rigorous. A reputable academic press is not eager to publish something that will not be academically respectable, and so it goes out of its way to pick evaluators who really know what they’re talking about, to see if the book holds up (in every way: does the author know the field inside out? Is it a serious piece of scholarship? Is it sufficiently documented? Is it coherently argued? Is it well written? There’s a whole host of issues). Only after getting positive reports from outside readers does the publisher even think about extending a contract. My point: experts in any field of research are accustomed to having their ideas tried out, attacked, rethought, re-expressed, hammered out, vetted, and so on. 3

It is not like that with a trade book written for a popular audience. I don’t know what ’s policy is – and maybe someone can tell me. But the trade presses I have worked with do not have the same kind of evaluation system. They tend to be interested more in whether the author has a good idea, whether it is intriguingly advanced, whether in general the author seems to know what s/he is talking about, whether it is engagingly written. Trade presses of course want the scholarship to be sound, but there are not the same mechanisms in place for it to happen, and not the same process for making sure the ideas hold up – or that inaccuracies are avoided. And if the person writing the book has not been through the process of earning a PhD, floating ideas/thoughts/views/theses in front of smart colleagues, professors, and experts in the field for years – then the thesis that is presented may or may not have any serious scholarly weight. And the reading public has no way of knowing. OK, this is a bit long-winded. But I thought it was important, before saying a few things about the book in detail, to set out the general concern that scholars typically have about non-scholars writing books in their fields. Some people may think this is academic snobbery, but I’m trying to say that it is not only or principally that. It’s that without becoming an expert a person is liable to make mistakes, and to advance an idea that has not been through the rigors of testing. Again, I’m NOT saying that non-scholars should not write books in an academic field. But if they do so, they need to realize that it is very, very difficult to do so without encountering these problems. So in my next post I’ll say a few things about some of the problems that I see in Aslan’s treatment. http://ehrmanblog.org/aslans-zealot-factual-mistakes-members/ Yesterday I pointed out some of the features of Reza Aslan’s Zealot that I found to be commendable. In the next series of posts, starting with today’s, I’ll be pointing out the problems. There are lots of them. Some readers of the blog have objected to my (repeatedly, I’ll grant) pointing out that Aslan is not an expert. Now I’ll try to show why that is both obvious and unfortunate. There are mistakes scattered throughout the book. I’d say 1/3 to 1/2 of the pages in my copy have bright yellow large question marks on them, where (when highlighting) I found factual errors, misstatements, dubious claims, inconsistencies of logic, and so on. I obviously am not going to provide a full list here. In today’s post I’ll begin by mentioning some of the raw, factual mistakes. These are only from his Part I; I’ll probably provide some more in a subsequent post, from other Parts of the book in order to round out the picture a bit (There are other kinds of problems I’ll note in later posts – including mistakes about the New Testament, his primary source of information about the historical Jesus.) But for now, here are some mistaken historical statements. Some may strike you as picayune, but some of them matter. And there are a lot of them; one wonders why they’re there at all. In each case I’ll cite his claim and then explain the problem. 4

****************************************************************************** ********* Claim: After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Jews were “exiled from the land” (p. xxix). This isn’t true. The Jews were not exiled from the land of Palestine by the Romans. Claim: Legions of Roman troops were stationed throughout Judea. This is not right. The legions were kept up in Syria. (By saying they were stationed throughout Judea Aslan makes it sound as if Jews were constantly confronted with Roman soldiers. In fact they weren’t. The governor had some troops with him in Caesarea. Otherwise there were not Roman soldiers everywhere – let along legions!) Claim: “Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything Judaism represents” (p. 32). Not so. This assumes that “Judaism” was some kind of monolithic entity and that all Jews had basically the same idea of a messiah. In fact, the king of Israel – even in the Hebrew Bible – is sometimes called God, and other exalted divine names (e.g. Psalm 2; 110; see esp. Ps. 45:6-7; Isa. 9:6-7), and the messiah was to be the descendant of the kings, himself the “son of God.” And in some parts of Judaism it was believed that the messiah would be the divine Son of Man come from heaven (thus 1 Enoch). Claim: “It would have been almost unthinkable for a thirty-year-old Jewish male in Jesus’ time not to have a wife” (p. 37). Well, it was unthinkable for Dan Brown, in the Da Vinci Code, but it’s not unthinkable to those who know about ancient Judaism! For one thing, except in times of war (and Palestinian Jews were not fighting wars during Jesus’ life time) men outnumbered women by a good margin, since so many women died in childbirth. So it was literally impossible for every man to be married. More than that, we know for a fact that there were Jewish men at the time of Jesus who were not married – especially apocalypticists who were expecting the end of the age to come very soon. This was the case with groups of Essenes, for example, before Jesus, and the apostle Paul – himself an apocalyptic Jew after Jesus – who was also unmarried. There was nothing unthinkable. (Aslan does allow that world-denying Essenes were an exception to his “rule.” But the rule itself is wrong; it’s just a commonplace that does not have historical basis.) Claim: “Nazareth was just a day’s walk from …the capital city, Sepphoris” (p. 38). Not that it matters much for his case, but it’s only about an hour and a half walk, depending on how fast you walk. Claim: “[Pilate] announced his presence in the holy city [Jerusalem] by marching through Jerusalem’s gates trailed by a legion of Roman soldiers carrying standards bearing the emperor’s image.” Our source for this information is Josephus Antiquities, 18.3.1 with a shorter version in Wars 2.9.2, and it appears that Aslan didn’t actually read the passages. Josephus is quite explicit that Pilate brought the standards in stealthily so no one saw it – he did it at night when no one 5 was around, and had them set up around the city, so that when the inhabitants woke up, they saw them to their dire consternation. Claim: “A mysterious Jewish sorcerer called ‘the Egyptian,” declared himself King of the Jews and gathered thousands of followers on the Mount of Olives.” Again this is from Josephus (Jewish Wars 2. 13, 5), and again Aslan apparently hasn’t read the source. Josephus indicates nothing about “the Egyptian” being a sorcerer and certainly says nothing about him declaring himself the “King of the Jews.” Josephus portrays him simply as a false prophet. Claim: “Henceforth [after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE] Judaism would no longer be deemed a worthy cult. The Jews were now the eternal enemy of Rome.” This simply is not true. The Romans never declared war on the Jews or required them to stop observing their religion. The Roman concern was with the political entity of Palestine, and its uprising. The vast majority of Jews did not live in Jerusalem, or in Judea, or even throughout Palestine. Much like today, there were far, far more Jews living outside the national boundaries of Israel than within it. And remarkably, and strikingly, Romans did not punish other Jews outside of Palestine for the uprising within Palestine. Jews were allowed to continue to worship God as they always had (except, of course, in the Temple, which no longer existed). Jews were not declared the enemies of Rome. Far from it. In most places, Jews had a privileged status in relationship to Romans (they were not required to participate in public sacrifices to the Roman gods, for example). The Jewish uprising in Palestine had nothing to do with that. Claim: [After 70 CE] “Rome expelled every surviving Jew from Jerusalem and its surrounding environs.” Once again, this is flat-out wrong. After Jerusalem was destroyed, Jews were not expelled from the city. They continued to live, and even thrive there, for over sixty more years. It was not until the second uprising (the Bar Kochba revolt) in 132-35 CE that the Romans expelled Jews from Jerusalem and renamed the city Aelia Capitolina.

It should be noted that the majority of these mistakes are closely tied to his overarching themes about the political situation in Palestine that Jesus’ found himself in – a central feature of the book, since Aslan wants to claim precisely that this political situation is what explains Jesus’ life, ministry, and death. Not getting the political picture straight is therefore a particular problem for the book. In the next post I’ll give a few more of these kinds of problems, before turning my attention to other kinds. http://ehrmanblog.org/historical-mistakes-aslans-zealot-members/ In this post I would like to continue with some of the historical mistakes in Aslan’s Zealot. When reading these, do bear in mind that I also had positive things to say about the book. As in the previous post, I would like this one to focus on historical errors, or historical claims that have no basis in either our ancient sources or modern scholarship. I will not be discussing, in this post, the mistakes Aslan has made about the New Testament. That will be my next post. 6 ************************************************************************ Aslan wants to argue that John the Baptist may have been an Essene ( I think there’s no way that’s true, but the idea has been floated ever since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls; still, John’s baptism for remission of sins is completely different from what was going on among the Essenes, who believed in lengthy periods of ritual purification, not a one-time baptism in view of “repentance.” But thinking he was an Essene is not a flat-out mistake; it’s just a historical hypothesis. The mistake is this:). In doing so Aslan argues that this view might be supported by the fact that “John is presented as going off into the Judean wilderness at a young age” (p. 84). That’s not true. I might have reserved this comment for my next post on errors related to the NT, except there is another source for John the Baptist – Josephus (Antiquities, 18, 5, 2). Neither source says a word about John’s age when he went to the wilderness (and neither connects him in any way with the Essenes – but that’s not a pure mistake on Aslan’s part). Aslan – in order to heighten the horrific relations between Pilate, governor of Judea, and his Jewish subjects – claims that “in his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on a slip of papyrus” (p. 148). Aslan is making this up. Our sources for Pilate are: (a) the New Testament Gospels; (b) Josephus; (c) Philo of Alexandria (a prominent Jewish philosopher of the first century); (d) an inscription bearing Pilate’s name, discovered in Caesarea in 1961; (e ) several coins minted during his rule. In NONE of these sources is there any reference at all to Pilate crucifiying “thousands and thousands” of Jews. In all these sources, there is reference only to three crucifixions, Jesus and the two crucified with him. We have no idea how many Pilate condemned to crucifixion. Relatedly, Aslan claims that Jesus was crucified, “on a bald hill covered in crosses, beset by the cries and moans of agony from hundreds of dying criminals” (p. 158). Is this a historical sketch we’re reading? Hundreds of dying criminals? Aslan again is making this up. It certainly suits his purpose to make it up – but where’s he getting it? The only accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion from antiquity are in the Gospels, and they speak of two others crucified with him. Aslan also indicates that being “savagely scourged” was “the custom for all those sentenced to the cross.” And how does he know that? I have no idea. We have no indication in any source from the ancient world that this was the custom that was regularly followed. All we have are the Gospels, which indicate that this is what happened to Jesus (they say nothing about the other two being scourged either….) Aslan goes on to claim that the disciples of Jesus all were martyred for believing in the resurrection. This is often claimed by Christian apologists as well, but they are trying to convince people that Jesus must have been raised from the dead (since no one would die for a view they knew wasn’t true); Aslan has a different purpose: he claims he is writing a historical account. What he says here is that “there is this nagging fact to consider: one after another of those who claimed to have witnessed the risen Jesus came to their own gruesome deaths refusing to recant their testimony” (p. 174). I’m afraid this is not history. We simply have no record of 7 any kind any reliable ancient source about how the disciples of Jesus died. We do have some highly legendary “Apocryphal Acts” of some of the apostles – chiefly John, Andrew, Thomas, Peter, and Paul, from the later second century. But there’s not a scholar on the planet who thinks these give historical accounts of these people’s lives (if you read them yourself, you’ll quickly see why!) – and even these do not indicate that all the apostles died for refusing to recant their belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Relatedly, Aslan claims that the emperor Nero, during a persecution in Rome in 66 CE, “seized Peter and Paul and executed them both for espousing what he assumed was the same faith” (p. 196) This is popular imagination, not history. We have no ancient source that indicates that Nero singled out Peter and Paul and martyred them. They both may have been martyred; and that may have been during the time Nero was emperor (it’s hard to tell; our earliest sources don’t say so), but the idea that Nero himself had anything to do with their deaths is just Christian legend. Our main source for Nero’s persecution of Christians for setting fire to Rome is the Roman historian Tacitus who, of course, says no word about Peter and Paul. Aslan suggests that the Christian mission to convert Jews ended after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (p. 182). That’s just not true. Aslan indicates that it was a perfectly acceptable practice in antiquity for an author to write a book in the name of someone else (what today we would call forgery); he claims that this “was a common way of honoring that person and reflecting his views” (p. 204). OK, in this case he is simply repeating what certain NT scholars have also said. And like them he can’t cite a single instance where this was the case. In fact, as more recent scholarship has shown, there’s no instance in Christian antiquity (or any antiquity – say from the time of Alexander the Great to that of Constantine) in which this practice was approved. Every time the practice is mentioned by an ancient author, it is flat-out condemned as a form of lying and deceit. No one liked having someone else write books in their names – including the Christians. Aslan appears not to know anything about the Council of Nicea or the Arian controversy (the subject of his last chapter). He indicates that “there had been a great deal of discord and debate among the leaders of the church over whether Jesus was human or divine” (p. 213). This is not true. With the exception of a few teachers on the margins (in earlier centuries), the divinity of Christ was agreed on all hands – and most importantly, on the hands of those that had anything to do with the council of Nicea. Of the 318 bishops or so at the conference, there was not a single one who doubted for a second that Christ was divine. Their debate was over in what sense he was divine. When Aslan indicates that “the followers of Arius seemed to suggest” that Christ was “just a man,” that simply is not true or even near the truth. All of the ancient sources are unified on this point, as is every scholarly treatment of the Arian controversy. The Arians agree that Christ was God and that through him God had created the universe. None of them thought that Christ was merely human. 8

Well this is enough. More than enough, you may think! There are other mistakes, but this will do for now. In my next post on the book I’ll talk about the mistakes Aslan makes with respect to the New Testament. http://ehrmanblog.org/mistakes-new-testament-aslans-zealot-members/ n my previous two posts I detailed some of the historical errors in Aslan’s interesting and readable book Zealot. In this post I’ll say some things about mistakes he makes about the New Testament. I’m not sure which kind of mistake is more troubling – the book is dealing both with ancient history and with the accounts of Jesus in the NT, so both history and the Gospels are of central importance. In any event, here is a sampling of the latter. ************************************************************************* Aslan indicates that Mark is uninterested in both Jesus’ birth and “surprisingly, in Jesus’s resurrection as he writes nothing at all about either event” (p. 29). Of course it is true that Mark begins with Jesus’ adult life and says nothing about his birth. But it’s absolutely wrong to say that he says nothing about the resurrection. Quite the contrary, one need only read Mark 16:1-8 and it becomes clear that Mark both knows about the resurrection and considers it to be of utmost importance. In the narrative, Jesus is dead and buried. On the third day the women go to the tomb. Jesus’ body is not there. A young man at the tomb informs them, explicitly, that Jesus has been raised and that they are to tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. There is no ambiguity here: for Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has been raised and the women have been told about it. What Mark lacks is not a resurrection but an account of Jesus appearing to anyone after the resurrection That’s a very different thing altogether! (That Mark is fundamentally committed to showing his readers that Jesus’ life ended in a resurrection is shown, as well, throughout the Gospel, in the three passion predictions of Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34; in each case Jesus tells his disciples that he will be killed and raised from the dead. He indicates the same thing in 9:9. And so on. To say that Mark doesn’t say anything about the resurrection is not only wrong, it is flatly to misread (or not to read) Mark. Aslan indicates that Luke’s birth narrative is meant to show that Jesus as “the eternal logos from whom creation sprang…you will find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem…” (P. 33). This kind of statement is a typical kind of error that you find in writers who are not biblical scholars – it’s something a biblical scholar would never ever say, for a fundamental reason. Scholars realize that each of the Gospels has its own theology, its own views of Jesus, its own ways of understanding him. The idea that Christ is the “logos” who was involved in the “creation” has nothing to do with Luke’s Gospel, let alone his birth narrative. That idea comes only from John’s Gospel, the prologue (1:1-18) that speaks of the logos of God who was with God and was God and was the one through whom God made all things. Luke doesn’t have that view. And John doesn’t have the birth in Bethlehem or the manger. Aslan here has simply conflated the two Gospels, making Luke embrace a theology that is nowhere near what his theology actually was (in that Luke has no conception of Christ as Logos, as the pre-existent son of God [when 9

Jesus is born in Luke is when he comes into being], or as the creator of all things.) That is not heartening if one wants to take his skills as a biblical exegete seriously. Aslan states that “if there is one thing about which all four gospels agree when it comes to John the Baptist, it is that sometime around his thiritieth year…Jesus of Nazareth…trekked down to Judea to be baptized by John” (pp. 85-86). Actually, the Gospels don’t agree on that. Only Luke indicates that Jesus was thirty at the time. That’s significant because the standard view of Jesus’ age is based on a conflation of Luke and John; in Luke he is “about 30” when he comes to be baptized; in John he ministers for something like 3 years. So he dies, if you add the numbers, at age 33. But Luke says nothing about how long Jesus ministered; John says nothing about how old he was when he was baptized; and Mark and Luke say nothing about either one. Here again I should stress that biblical scholars generally think it’s important not to attribute the words of one Gospel to another. Aslan claims that the author of the Gospel of Mark was a “Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora” (p. 168). Actually, there is every good reason for thinking that Mark could not have been a Jew. He misunderstands Jewish rituals of cleansing and purity, and assigns to “all Jews” a view of hand washing attested only among Pharisees (7:3), a mistake that is virtually inexplicable of Mark himself were raised in the Jewish tradition. Aslan also claims that Luke two was a Greek-speaking Jew. Here I have no idea what he has in mind. The traditional ascription of Luke’s Gospel is to Luke, the gentile traveling companion of Paul, precisely because it was always recognized that the book was written by a gentile, and it was thought that it must have been one of Paul’s associates because of certain passages in the book of Acts. Even critical scholars who doubt whether this traditional ascription to Luke is right agree that the book was written by a non-Jew. Aslan indicates that when Stephen was stoned after saying that he had a vision of “the Son of Man standing by the right hand of God” that it was a vision of Christ as a “pre-existent, heavenly being whose kingdom is not of this world… who in form and substance is God made flesh” (his italics; p. 169). That’s not at all what Luke thinks of Christ. Here again Aslan is conflating John’s view of Jesus with Luke’s. Christ for Luke was born of the union of a divine being (God) and a mortal (Mary). He did not pre-exist. And he was exalted to God’s right hand not because he had been incarnated. Luke does not have an incarnation christology (“God made flesh”). That’s the Gospel of John. You won’t find that christology in either the Gospel of Luke or the book of Acts. Aslan claims that the book of Acts maintains that “there are only twelve apostles” and that Luke does not, therefore, ever refer “to Paul as an apostle” (p. 185). That’s not true. Acts 14:14: “When the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd….” Aslan argues that Paul never “actually quote[s] Jesus’s words” (p. 187). The one exception he cites are the words at the Eucharist in 1 Cor. 11:22-24. But in fact Paul does quote Jesus on 10 other occasions, in 1 Cor. 7:10 “that the wife should not divorce her husband (he indicates this that this is a “command” of “the Lord”; see Mark 10:2-12); and in 1 Cor. 9:14 he indicates that “the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel” (see Matt. 10:10; Luke 10:7). Well, that’s enough to give the idea. Again, these may seem like unimportant matters to some readers. Still, others may feel as I do, that even though anyone on the planet is, of course, free to write a book about Jesus, they should not do so claiming either explicitly or implicitly to be an authority if they are going to make basic mistakes on the very sources that stand at the center of their investigation. http://ehrmanblog.org/final-loose-threads-zealot-hypothesis-members/ I think I’ve gone on about Aslan’s Zealot long enough. Maybe more than long enough, many of you may think. My plan is to make this the last post. Let me reiterate that I think it is an exceptionally well-written, engaging book, and we can all be thankful to Aslan for bringing important historical issues about Jesus to the public attention. I may think that he’s wrong about his central thesis, and I may recognize a lot of errors in his book (about history, about the NT, about early Christianity). But I appreciate very much that he has gotten people talking about Jesus from a historical perspective – something that I think is of utmost importance, especially in our American context where Jesus typically is only spoken of by believers who do not appreciate the importance of history for knowing, well, about the past! In this final post I want to speak about a couple of threads, loose traditions that are sometimes used to argue that Jesus was most likely a zealot, someone who was so zealous for the law, and the land, that he believed that the Romans should be driven out so that Israel could have what was hers as prescribed in the law of Moses. I’ll just deal with both of these traditions briefly, since I don’t want to belabor the point. In my estimation both traditions actually say the *opposite* of what they are said to say by those who support the idea that Jesus was a zealot. The first tradition is that he had a follower called Simon the Zealot, and the second tradition is that his disciples were armed when Jesus was arrested and that they put up a fight for him (what were they doing with swords if they were not in favor of violent opposition to the Roman invaders?). I will argue that the first may be accurate, or not, but in either event it shows that Jesus himself was not a zealot; and that the second is not a historical datum. According to Luke 6:15, one of Jesus’ twelve disciples was “Simon the Zealot.” Two things to note. First, this is not found in Luke’s source, Mark, or in Matthew, or in John. If it’s a historical datum, why does this figure never show up elsewhere? But even if it is a historical datum, I think it must show that Jesus himself was not a zealot. The reason to identify one of the twelve as a zealot is because that is the characteristic that made him stand out among the others. In other words, the great majority of Jesus’ followers were not zealots. If Jesus was (principally?) a zealot, with a zealot attitude, and a zealot agenda, and a zealot message, why is it that his closest 11 followers (who presumably followed him because of his message) were not zealots? Instead, the fact that one of them is identified as a zealot must surely mean that the author of Luke is trying to emphasize that “EVEN A ZEALOT was one of his followers.” In other words, the identity of this person is worth noting precisely because it is not what would be expected, given Jesus’ message and mission. Second: according to the Gospel traditions (both Synoptic and Johannine) Jesus’ followers were armed in the garden of Gethsemane and put up armed resistance to those who came to arrest Jesus. I have come to think that this is not a historical datum. I’ll explain where the tradition came from in a second, but for now I’ll give the reason that I don’t see how it could be historical. If the disciples were armed and fought those who came to arrest Jesus: why were they not arrested and tried as well??? If the problem with Jesus is that he was in favor of armed resistance, and his followers put up armed resistance, then why weren’t they a problem as well? To take it a step further, if Jesus was the leader of a band of lestai – armed resisters – why is it that the whole group was not rounded up and destroyed??? Josephus tells us of other resistance leaders with groups of followers (for example, one named Theudas, and another mysteriously called “the Egyptian”). And what happens to these leaders and their followers when the authorities decide that they have become a problem? They are *all* attacked, and usually killed by the troops (unless they happen to escape). But what about Jesus and his followers? He is arrested, and they are let go. Why? For a simple reason: it is because they were not thought to be a band of lestai – armed resisters. The problem was just with Jesus. And the problem is not that he was a lestes. The problem was that he was calling himself the king. Of course he wasn’t a king. He had no army, no political power, no huge following. His followers were no threat to an established order. But he could not be allowed to call himself king, as crazy as the claim was; and so the Romans executed him. The followers were not making any claims about themselves (that the Romans knew of). They were a rag-tag group of illiterate Galilean peasants. They weren’t an armed force to be reckoned with. So where did the idea that they were armed in the Garden come from? This is a bit tricky, and I’m trying to be brief. We have a number of instances in the traditions about Jesus where there is a story connected to one of his fantastic one-liners. And so, for example, if Jesus says that “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, therefore the son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath” a story is told which shows Jesus’ superiority to Sabbath rules (e.g., where he shows his superiority to the Sabbath by healing on it). If Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life,” a story is told that shows him raising someone from the dead. And on and on and on. A view that has been around scholarship for a long time is that these great one liners are older than the stories, that in fact the stories were made up in order to provide a narrative context for the one-liner. (You can see how it happens if you search for “squirrel” on the blog, and look at the story told about my professor Bruce Metzger and the falling squirrel). 12

There was a great one-liner in circulation that probably goes back to Jesus (it coincides well with all the other pacifist things he says in the tradition): “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.” Since I think the disciples could *not* actually have been armed in the garden, I think the story that they *were* armed is one of those stories that was made up in order to provide a narrative context for this one-liner. The “invented context” is that Peter pulls out a sword and lops off the ear of a servant of the high priest, and Jesus rebukes him, “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.” In other words: don’t use a sword to oppose those who are your enemies. That idea is in line with Jesus’ teaching otherwise, as attested all throughout the Gospels. It may go back to him. But if that’s what he was teaching, why would he urge or allow his followers to be armed in the first place? He almost certainly wouldn’t. The story that they were armed was made up in order to provide narrative support for a great one-liner of his. That, in my judgment, is the best way to explain the evidence. Jesus throughout his ministry preached non-violence. He was not a zealot. He was an apocalyptic preacher who thought that God was soon to intervene in human affairs. The change that was coming would not be by political or military action. It would come from God. And it was going to happen very soon. “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place.”