Thousands of years ago when I was a teenager and a brand-new Christian, I happened to read an article by S.G.F. Brandon about Jesus being a Zealot, in which he questioned much if not most of the Gospel portrait of Jesus and suggested that the Gospels (particularly that of Mark) constituted a whitewash of Jesus, eliminating His Zealotry from the Gospel picture to make Him and His movement more acceptable in Roman eyes. It was, of course, a precis of his 1967 book Jesus and the Zealots which created something of an academic dust up in its day.
I remember being quite shaken by this frontal assault on my newfound faith. Being a high school kid, I had not yet read any of the multitude of books I was soon to read for my Arts degree in Religious Studies and for my Master of Divinity degree. I was therefore a guileless innocent, a naif who assumed that since scholars were smart, everything written by them must be right. I had not yet discovered the immense amount of academic horse manure that gets published every year in the academic world. I had also not yet heard the magic words “hermeneutic of suspicion” which explained much of such academic work in the past one hundred years.
Apparently Fr. Brandon’s thesis (until his death in 1971 he was a clergyman in the Church of England) has a long shelf life; Reza Aslan was found advancing the same theory (while not acknowledging his dependence on Brandon) in his 2013 book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. What are we to say about this thesis? What were some of these arguments? Let us take them in turn.
First of all, it is argued that Jesus had a Zealot as His disciple (see Luke 6:16, “Simon who was called the Zealot”). In Matthew 10:4 he is called “Simon the Cananaean”.
The term “Cananaean”, be it noted, does not mean that he was from the land of Canaan or was a Canaanite. Rather it comes from the Semitic root qna, meaning “jealous, full of zeal”. Most scholars now say that the Zealots as an identifiable group committed to armed revolution did not emerge until well after Christ’s ministry, in the time just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. This of course does not mean that there did not exist in our Lord’s time men who were jealous for God’s honour and indignant at Rome’s occupation of their land. Doubtless there were, and it is probable that this group later morphed into the identifiable Zealot movement. Luke therefore, writing for a Gentile audience unfamiliar with Jews who were qna for the Law, uses the later term to explain this early jealousy. Simon therefore was not a Zealot, ready for armed revolution, but simply one of many who were indignant at the Roman domination of his homeland.
But even if this distinction is regarded as splitting hairs and devoid of real significance, what of it? Simon was only one out of twelve. If Jesus was a Zealot and His movement a Zealot movement, shouldn’t there have been more than one Zealot among them? Jesus’ movement was an offshoot of John the Baptist’s movement and there was indeed more than one of the Baptist’s followers among Jesus’ own first disciples (see John 1). If Jesus were a Zealot, why did more Zealots not sign on with Him?
The argument from the presence of “Simon called the Zealot” proves nothing. Jesus had a tax-collector among the Twelve too—did that mean that He and His movement were collaborators with the Romans and in Rome’s pocket? It seems clear that Simon’s zealotry was a part of his past life in the same way as was Matthew’s tax-collecting, and that Luke only refers to him as “Simon who was called the Zealot” (or “the Cananaen”) to distinguish him from Simon Peter.
Secondly, it is argued that Jesus never spoke a word against the Zealots and that this proves His sympathy for them if not His identification with them. If, as most scholars now think, the fervent in Palestine had not yet united and become an identifiable Zealot movement, this is hardly surprising. How would Jesus express an opinion about a group yet to be formed? Besides, He never spoke a word about the Essenic Qumran movement near the Dead Sea either, but this hardly proves His sympathy with them, for the Essenes rejected the Temple, but Jesus did not.
The Gospels do not claim to capture all of Jesus’ teachings or beliefs, so it is possible that he spoke against armed uprisings without it being recorded. The argument that Jesus’ actions in the Temple support a violent revolution is refuted by the fact that driving out vendors is different from killing Romans. His references to swords were metaphorical and meant for self-defense, not aggression. Liberal scholars like Brandon and Aslan ignore contradictory evidence in the Gospels to support their theories. When faced with Pilate, Jesus denied any intention of violent overthrow. His parables also emphasized a non-violent Kingdom, contrary to the belief in a violent overthrow of Rome. There is no evidence in the epistles or early Church history to suggest Jesus was starting a revolutionary movement. The earliest Christians believed in a spiritual Kingdom, not the overthrow of Rome.
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