Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan Read Free Book Online Page B

client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem
     now belonged wholly to Rome.
    According to tradition, Herod the Great died on the eve of Passover in 4 B.C.E. , at the ripe age of seventy, having reigned over the Jews for thirty-seven years.
     Josephus writes that on the day of Herod’s death, there was an eclipse of the moon,
     an inauspicious sign, perhaps presaging the tumult that would follow. There is, of
     course, another tradition told about the demise of Herod the Great: that sometime
     between his death in 4 B.C.E . and the Roman takeover of Jerusalem in 6 C.E. , in an obscure hillside village in Galilee, a child was born who would one day claim
     for himself Herod’s mantle as King of the Jews.

Chapter Three
You Know Where I Am From
    Ancient Nazareth rests on the jagged brow of a windy hilltop in lower Galilee. No
     more than a hundred Jewish families live in this tiny village. There are no roads,
     no public buildings. There is no synagogue. The villagers share a single well from
     which to draw fresh water. A single bath, fed by a trickle of rainfall captured and
     stored in underground cisterns, serves the entire population. It is a village of mostly
     illiterate peasants, farmers, and day laborers; a place that does not exist on any
     map.
    The homes in Nazareth are simple affairs: a single windowless room, divided in two—one
     room for the family, the other for the livestock—made of whitewashed mud and stone
     and crowned with a flat-topped roof where the householders gather to pray, where they
     lay out their wash to dry, where they take their meals on temperate evenings, and
     where, in the hot summer months, they roll out their dusty mats and sleep. The lucky
     inhabitants have a courtyard and a tiny patch of soil to grow vegetables, for no matter
     their occupation or skill, every Nazarean is a farmer. The peasants who call this
     secluded village home are, without exception, cultivators of the land. It is agriculture
     that feeds and sustains the meager population. Everyone raises their own livestock,
     everyoneplants their own crops: a bit of barley, some wheat, a few stalks of millet and oats.
     The manure collected from the animals feeds the earth, which in turn feeds the villagers,
     who then feed the livestock. Self-sufficiency is the rule.
    The hillside hamlet of Nazareth is so small, so obscure, that its name does not appear
     in any ancient Jewish source before the third century C.E .—not in the Hebrew Bible, not in the Talmud, not in the Midrash, not in Josephus.
     It is, in short, an inconsequential and utterly forgettable place. It is also the
     city in which Jesus was likely born and raised. 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. So identified was Jesus
     with Nazareth that he was known throughout his life simply as “the Nazarean.” Considering
     how common a first name Jesus was, the city of his birth became his principal sobriquet.
     It was the one thing about which everyone who knew him—his friends and his enemies
     alike—seemed to agree.
    Why, then, do Matthew and Luke—and
only
Matthew (2:1–9) and Luke (2:1–21)—claim that Jesus was born not in Nazareth but in
     Bethlehem, even though the name Bethlehem does not appear anywhere else in the entire
     New Testament (not even anywhere else in Matthew or Luke, both of which repeatedly
     refer to Jesus as “the Nazarean”), save for a single verse in the gospel of John (7:42)?
    The answer may be found in that verse from John.
    It was, the evangelist writes, early in Jesus’s ministry. Up to this point, Jesus
     had, for the most part, restricted himself to preaching his message to the poor farmers
     and fishermen of Galilee—his friends and neighbors. But now that the Feast of Tabernacles
     has arrived, Jesus’s family urge him to travel with them to Judea to celebrate