Jesus a Jewish Zealot-Not a Christian
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Jesus, if he existed, was someone quite different from the character in the gospels. Rather than accepting the conventional Christian account, we should pay him the respect of acknowledging his humanity, family, society, and religion. It makes sense to circumvent Christian mythology and place him in the religious context of first-century Judaism, the political context of Roman occupation and oppression, and the social context of poverty.
He was the first-born child of a young Jewish girl named Mary, and his biological father, identity unknown, may not have been in the picture to offer him direction. He was part of a large family of poor Jewish peasants.
We know a lot about the political, social and religious climate in Jesus’ day from sources such as Josephus, Philo and the Dead Sea scrolls. Religion and politics were more closely intertwined than we usually think of them today, because political power was employed using religion. The Jews’ identity, both nationalistic and religious, was derived from their fanatical belief in their one and only god, who they imagined had an interest in them and actively intervened in their affairs. Their scripture handed them a history, a set of laws, and a guide to what they could expect in the future. It also propped up the power of priests.
Jews were clearly separate from non-Jewish people (gentiles or “pagans.”) The Jewish population was spread throughout all parts of Palestine, whereas gentiles lived in the larger cities such as Caesaria, Sepphoris, Jerusalem, and Tiberias. Gentiles didn’t reside in rural villages, so Jesus would have had very little contact with them.
The gospels portray Jesus as a Galilean rustic, and may be true. Judaism, being the most important aspect of his identity, would have elevated his life above the everyday humdrum struggle for survival. He would have been circumcised, and proud to be David’s descendant. He would have eaten only kosher food, and kept holy the Sabbath, which meant that every Saturday he didn’t do business. Jews weren’t permitted to cook, clean, entertain guests, feed animals, hunt, or perform a myriad of other minor chores on the Sabbath. He would have partaken in the Passover celebrations, which meant an annual trip to Jerusalem. He must have imagined the land of Israel was in part his, as God had given it to the Jewish people. He would have gone to a local synagogue to talk about the Torah and the prophets’ books with his fellow Jews. He could have considered himself one of God’s chosen, superior to gentiles. Many Jews didn’t eat with, marry or even mix with pagans if they could avoid it. He may have told his disciples:
“Do not turn your steps to pagan territory, and do not enter any Samaritan town. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matt. 10:6, NJB,) and
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” (Matt. 15:24, NJB.)
He would have been very familiar with the predictions of the prophets. Like many Jews of his time, he would have had some grandiose delusions, such as that Jews were the world’s superior people, specially favored by God and destined to show pagans the proper way to live. He imagined he was the messiah, a person predicted in scripture whose mission was to establish social and economic equity on earth. It is likely he was convinced his God was intending to intervene in the affairs of men to initiate the kingdom of God. None of these fantasies ever came to fruition.
As he grew up, he would have seen his fellow Galileans violently oppressed and impoverished by the Romans. He had a close relationship with his cousin John, who created a grassroots anti-Roman movement, which he joined. Herod Antipas had John murdered because he was a threat to the political stability of Galilee. Jesus was brave enough to take over the leadership, and he worked hard to rally common Jews to his cause, although his less militant countrymen eschewed joining his ranks.
His attempt to overthrow the Romans looked promising because of the enthusiasm with which he was sometimes received, yet he had no military experience or intelligence, and no cachet of weapons, so it’s not surprising that he fell flat. He had talked the talk but couldn’t walk the walk. The Romans captured, scourged, and crucified him, a punishment reserved for rebellious rascals who threatened Roman rule.
Jesus didn’t achieve much. As he was dying in agony on a cross, he would have 
wondered why his God hadn’t helped him, and he must have figured he was a failure. Memories of other Jews crucified by the Romans may have flashed through his mind. His goal had been to bring forth a glorious Israel, yet he became the latest inclusion to a long list of dead messiahs. Before he took his last breath, it may have dawned on him that the Romans might never be defeated.
It’s ironic that the Romans, the very people Jesus despised, adopted him as their hero some three centuries after they killed him, and then blamed his own people, the Jews, for his death.
I do feel some respect for him because he had a hard life, and stood up for what he believed in. He tried hard to make a difference for his Jewish compatriots. Many decades later, the gospels would falsely portray him as a person who praised the meek, yet he was a proud man who refused to accept poverty and oppression.
This assessment fits well, I believe, with what we do know about the place and time in which he is said to have existed. I admit that my assessment doesn’t lie well with everything he allegedly said. John’s gospel has Jesus saying
“… My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.” (John 18:36 KJB.) Matthew has Jesus say
“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” (Mattthew 5:9 KJB.) I hope the reader appreciates how unhistorical and silly quotes such as these are. As a consequence, “Jesus” is inconsistent. The honest historian must at some point have an educated guess as to what may be fact and what is fiction, and I think lines like these are fictional.
The first known documents that can be considered “Christian” were Paul’s writings, written at least fifteen plus years after Jesus died. Those documents defined Christianity, yet they were unknown to Jesus. Many of the basic beliefs of Judaism and Christianity are mutually exclusive. Christianity was a brand new religion hoping to appeal to mainly gentiles, and it claimed that the celibate Yahweh somehow had a son who was his equal. It also attempted to undermine the importance of the Jewish Law. It’s impossible to imagine that Jesus, a Galilean peasant, would try to invent a new doctrine. He no doubt discussed the substance of scripture, but wouldn’t have reinvented his basic beliefs.
The Jesus of theology has replaced the Jesus of history. One has to winnow out the substance from the gloss, and ignore the gloss.
His primary agenda wasn’t to preach philosophy. A wandering teacher’s pithy observations on life wouldn’t have wooed crowds of thousands, nor would they have attracted the attention of the Romans, Herod, Sadducees, or Pharisees. People were too poor and the times too hard for that. Jesus was popular because he was a potential messiah, a charismatic young zealot supposedly from David’s bloodline who was crazy brave enough to stand up to the Romans.
Churches have misrepresented his message to make it personal rather than social, for gentiles rather than Jews, and spiritual rather than political. The real Jesus has been buried beneath a mountain of creeds, jargon and mysteries concocted many years after he died. Christianity only emerged decades after his death – and became a religion primarily for gentiles. It used a story about him to create something new that wasn’t Jewish and that he wouldn’t have understood or approved of.
He wasn’t the meek lamb of God. He didn’t think he was God’s son, and nor did any of his original disciples. He didn’t suppose he was the savior of the world. To sacrifice himself for gentile sinners wouldn’t have crossed his mind. He never once thought he was the central figure of a new religious cult. He didn’t rise from the dead. The imaginative Paul of Tarsus put forward all these fictions. Jesus never met Paul, yet if he had would have despised him for promoting pagan propaganda.
The Romans actually crucified Jesus twice; once in real life, and then again by lying about his legacy. Why they repeated the act is discussed in my book.
It can be argued that to keep Jesus trapped in the Christian paradigm is disrespectful to the real man, and, more importantly, confuses many people with a web of complex falsehoods. Christians may ask whether it makes any sense to:
– Praise a Jewish peasant who would never have presumed he was a god?
– Believe that Jesus loved gentiles, the very people who humiliated, tortured, and executed him?
– Decide that a dead Jesus can somehow control the state of the world or an individual’s destiny?
Many commentators over the last couple of centuries have reached some of the same conclusions. They believed in the importance of the truth.
For more from Dr Mark Fulton CLICK HERE.
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You know you will got to hell when you;re tie comes because you don’t embrace jesus and he will not forget. I veel sorry for you athists and will pray for you tonight.
More typical christian threats in place of facts and rational thinking. Maybe that’s because facts and rational thinking are always fatal to any religion?
It’s also badly spelled and ungrammatical. Those are also typical of christian nonsense.
“Praying for us” is another arrogantly obnoxious christian statement.
I’ll light a candle to Darwin for you, too.
I often wonder why most Christian apologists can’t spell, or use the correct grammar. It’s either because they’re not particularly well educated, or they’re angry. I suspect it’s a bit of both.
Maybe they are angry abut being uneducated? But if they were educated and used that education would they still be christian zealots?
I doubt even atheist groups that consider themselves intellectually honest would swallow what Mark Fulton is peddling.
James, you’re still a hypocrite. You criticize the spelling of others while you continually misspell words: Maybe they are angry “abut” being uneducated?
Exactly what words have I misspelled? “Abut” was a typo not flagged by my spell checker. That’s because it is a real word. You probably didn’t know that, either.
How does t make me a hypocrite? I never claimed to never make a typo. Nor have a stated that my, or any spell checker, was perfect.
I do say you are of the mistaken belief that because you say something or agree with what some other moron says, that makes it true. It does not.
Prove that anything I have ever posted on here is not true. Prove that you are not a liar and a hypocrite yourself. But wait, christian, liar, and hypocrite are all semantically equal.
I do note that you are pretending that I didn’t ask you to prove anything. That also makes you intellectually dishonest. No surprise there, either.
Jesus clearly existed. It’s merely an argument of quite how he existed and quite what he really meant.
Personally I think he just got fed up of hanging around 😉
Clearly? That’s where I’m not sold, yet. There’s hearsay, certainly. But is there any evidence that would hold up, say, in a court of law?
Of course Jesus existed; I worked with a guy named Jesus 🙂 . One of our colleagues refuse to call him “Jesus”, although that was clearly his name. He was called “Jess”. Whatever.
Anyway, I’m happy to see someone point out that in fact “he” was NOT theoretically Christian. He WAS theoretically Jewish. And yes, the Jews did have several “false prophets”. Many of us don’t even recognize Jesus as one; we don’t necessarily recognize that “Jesus of Nazareth” ever existed. But yes, “Jesus” existed, and probably exists. It’s a fairly common name in Mexico.
What’s in a name? I suppose it depends on the name, and the one evaluating. My own belief? A name is just a name. If the name is Jesus, then it’s Jesus. My father wanted me to “name one of my sons” after my cousin who threw himself off a 14 floor building in New York. First of all, you are choosing the name to remind you of someone. I’m not sure I want to remember Michael who was manic depressive, tried more than once to shoot himself, and ended up throwing himself off of 14 floor building. Had I had a daughter, it’s conceivable that I would have used her name to remind me of my father’s mother’s name, “Bella”. But the name was just to remind me of my grandmother, not to try to bring Grandma back in any sense.
“Jesus of Nazareth”, if he was, WAS a Jew. And his religion would have been extremely important to him. He didn’t even begin to resemble the modern-day Americans view of Jesus. He kept kosher (I don’t, not that anyone asked :-)). He believed in the Jewish form of the 10 Commandments (which differ from ALL Christian forms (the most obvious difference being that there is not a Jewish commandment “Thou shalt not KILL”. It’s “Thou shalt not MURDER”.).
The other main thing is that there is no instruction that you have to believe any certain way.
Enough of my Jewish lesson. And I haven’t even gotten into the differences between the reform, conservative, orthodox, Reconstructionist, and the Hasdim (my father’s whole side of my family. Talk about wackos although they still don’t even come close to Bachmann…)
Oh, and Norman: I think that Monty Python is right for almost every topic 🙂
Love Monty Python….
You know from time to time we get these observations that God or Jesus never existed, or don’t exist today. Personally I could care less what anyone else believes I shall continue to stay on my particular path. However, contrary to this post and you great commentators, I have it on good authority that both do exist and reside in this nation’s jails and prisons. In my line of work I have been in an out of jails and prisons at all levels, local, state, and federal, minimum and maximum security, and both are always there. I would be very careful about going into one of these institutions, if I were you, and denying the existence of either God or Jesus. Many people are at the end of their rope and the last knot they are holding onto is Jesus or God. You “diss” on that and you a man with no more purpose in life but to die and take as many with him as possible.
Just saying …. 🙂
You’re so right Bill, and well said man. Like you I’ve spent a lot of time in jails and prisons, albeit on the other side of the aisle from you, and dissing the J-man to a brand new born again is dangerous. Inmates tend to find Jesus shortly after entering prison because it is supposed to impress the parole board when that time comes. It’s also exchanging one crutch for another.
And by the way, Aslan’s book is a great summary although you’ll find much the same elsewhere. His book on Islam is, (I’m in the middle of it) is just as enlightening as regards the historical Mohammad.
The sheer number of insurgents, rebel leaders, partisans, assassins and miracle workers in the Roman period makes his existence plausible if not provable. Contemporary accounts, on the other hand were very dangerous to write and to possess. It’s hard to compare the level of oppression in that time to anything we have experienced in modern times. suspicion was quite sufficient for summary execution and a trial such as is described is an absurd notion to anyone who has studied the laws, customs and history of the time. People didn’t just write stuff down. Books would get you killed and no questions asked.
Was Jesus a composite, a real man or a total fabrication? I don’t think it matters. So may were executed without trial, cut down in battle and crucified by the tens of thousands that Jesus might have been any of them or all of them.
Jesus the Christ, Jesus the messiah is absurd, but more absurd is the idea that he was able to save the immortal souls that only pagans believe in, that he was a human sacrifice that Jewish Scriptures consider blasphemy or that he was about bringing peace in any other fashion but by destroying an occupying power. The kingdom of god was to the Jews only a restorer of the Kingdom of David and not some mystical place in another mystical world. Heaven wasn’t a Jewish concept either. In this regard, not only was David the son of God, but so were his descendants, but in a metaphorical sense. Son of Man is simply how you say “man” in semitic parlance and in fact most every Jewish king was both kinds of son and that includes non-Jews such as Cyrus the Great of Persia, because he restored the Jewish Theocracy.
The gospel writers, or at least the later editors and apologists didn’t understand Judaism, the mechanics of the occupation and in describing the execution of Jesus didn’t bother to mention that there had been a war going on for quite some time. That’s only a small clue to the fact that jesus doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter if he was one man or 20 or none at all. The history without him, would have been the same but that the Greco-Roman-Persian God he was made into and sold as after Jerusalem was ashes and dust spread like only a lie can.
There’s no Jesus as described by the crazies, but more as Dr Fulton describes, if he even existed at all. I think the whole thing is a lot of bloody nonsense myself. Dying on the cross, flying up to heaven. BS all of it.
“Religion and politics were more closely intertwined than we usually think of them today, because political power was employed using religion.” How is that different from today?
Then there is the little stumbling block that there is not one contemporary account of the jesus person.
As stated by Dr. Bart Ehrman, Professor of religious studies at the University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill, NC said, “In the entire first Christian century, Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman scholar, politician, philosopher, or poet. His name never appears in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!”
The hypothesis presented is interesting but it is rather a moot point in the face of no evidence of any such character ever exiting.
Hi James. I agree that religion and politics are still closely linked.
In Jesus’ day, the Jewish political leaders were priests. Fortunately in Australia where I live, no member of the federal government is a priest, and I think that may be the case in the United States too. My point is that in ancient Palestine religion was politics.
I’ll throw my two cents worth in about whether an historical Jesus ever existed in my next blog.
Thanks for your comments.
Priests and politic are closely intertwined. Think of Martin Luther King, Al Sharpton, and all the priests, ministers, and other “Holy” men why preach politics from the pulpit.
Some of them have been elected to political office where they are in a better position to impose their beliefs into law. Others has tried very hard to be elected but were not successful, thank god. (pun intended)
It seems not much has changed.