Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• In a farcical passage about just such a figure, the Greek philosopher Celsus imagines a Jewish holy man roaming the Galilean countryside, shouting to no one in particular: “I am God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit. But I am coming, for the world is already in the throes of destruction. And you will soon see me coming with the power of heaven.” (Location 165)
• Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God’s imminent judgment. (Location 170)
• The first written testimony we have about Jesus of Nazareth comes from the epistles of Paul, an early follower of Jesus who died sometime around 66 C.E. (Paul’s first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, can be dated between 48 and 50 C.E., some two decades after Jesus’s death.) (Location 203)
• The trouble with Paul, however, is that he displays an extraordinary lack of interest in the historical Jesus. (Location 205)
• the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds recorded by people who knew him. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man. (Location 213)
• In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so. (Location 240)
• Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. (Location 247)
• The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous. (Location 255)
• The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, (Location 271)
• Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later (Location 273)
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• with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s evangelism. (Location 273)
• (though the prophet Isaiah would thank the Persian king Cyrus by anointing him messiah). (Location 477)
• It was standard Roman policy to forge alliances with the landed aristocracy in every captured city, making them dependent on the Roman overlords for their power and wealth. By aligning their interests with those of the ruling class, Rome ensured that local leaders remained wholly vested in maintaining the imperial system. (Location 493)
• What most puzzled Rome about the Jews was not their unfamiliar rites or their strict devotion to their laws, but rather what the Romans considered to be their unfathomable sense of superiority. (Location 521)
• How dare they consider their god to be the sole god in the universe? How dare they keep themselves separate from all other nations? (Location 524)
• “Bandit” was the generic term for any rebel or insurrectionist who rose up against Rome or its Jewish collaborators. To some, the word “bandit” was synonymous with “thief” or “rabble-rouser.” But these were no common criminals. The bandits represented the first stirrings of what would become a nationalist resistance movement against the Roman occupation. This may have been a peasant revolt; the bandit gangs hailed from impoverished villages like Emmaus, Beth-horon, and Bethlehem. But it was something else, too. The bandits claimed to be agents of God’s retribution. They cloaked their leaders in the emblems of biblical kings and heroes and presented their actions as a prelude for the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth. The bandits tapped into the widespread apocalyptic expectation that had gripped the Jews of Palestine in the wake of the Roman invasion. (Location 571)
• The messiah was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, and so his principal task was to rebuild David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome. (Location 582)
• It is, in fact, an act of treason. In first-century Palestine, simply saying the words “This is the messiah,” aloud and in public, can be a criminal offense, punishable by crucifixion. (Location 697)
• What is important to understand about Luke’s infancy narrative is that his readers, still living under Roman dominion, would have known that Luke’s account of Quirinius’s census was factually inaccurate. Luke himself, writing a little more than a generation after the events he describes, knew that what he was writing was technically false. (Location 747)
• The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths. (Location 751)
• The readers of Luke’s gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal—indeed, expected—for a writer in the ancient world to tell tales of gods and heroes whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false but whose underlying message would be seen as true. (Location 754)
• Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. (Location 788)
• Illiteracy rates in first-century Palestine were staggeringly high, particularly for the poor. It is estimated that nearly 97 percent of the Jewish peasantry could neither read nor write, (Location 801)
• Peasants like Jesus would have had enormous difficulty communicating in Hebrew, even in its colloquial form, which is why much of the scriptures had been translated into Aramaic, the primary language of the Jewish peasantry: the language of Jesus. (Location 806)
• Luke’s account of the twelve-year-old Jesus standing in the Temple of Jerusalem debating the finer points of the Hebrew Scriptures with rabbis and scribes (Luke 2:42–52), or his narrative of Jesus at the (nonexistent) synagogue in Nazareth reading from the Isaiah scroll to the astonishment of the Pharisees (Luke 4:16–22), are both fabulous concoctions of the evangelist’s own devising. (Location 812)
• The consensus is that Joseph died while Jesus was still a child. But there are those who believe that Joseph never actually existed, that he was a creation of Matthew and Luke—the only two evangelists who mention him—to account for a far more contentious creation: the virgin birth. (Location 823)
• That absence has led to a great deal of speculation among scholars over whether the story of the virgin birth was invented to mask an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’s parentage—namely, that he was born out of wedlock. (Location 829)
• he is confronted with the murmuring of neighbors, one of whom bluntly asks, “Is this not Mary’s son?” (Mark 6:3). This is an astonishing statement, one that cannot be easily dismissed. Calling a first-born Jewish male in Palestine by his mother’s name—that is, Jesus bar Mary, instead of Jesus bar Joseph—is not just unusual, it is egregious. At the very least it is a deliberate slur with implications so obvious that later redactions of Mark were compelled to insert the phrase “son of the carpenter, and Mary” into the verse. (Location 836)
• The gospels present Pilate as a righteous yet weak-willed man so overcome with doubt about putting Jesus of Nazareth to death that he does everything in his power to save his life, finally washing his hands of the entire episode when the Jews demand his blood. That is pure fiction. (Location 981)
• What Pilate was best known for was his extreme depravity, his total disregard for Jewish law and tradition, and his barely concealed aversion to the Jewish nation as a whole. During his tenure in Jerusalem he so eagerly, and without trial, sent thousands upon thousands of Jews to the cross that the people of Jerusalem felt obliged to lodge a formal complaint with the Roman emperor. (Location 983)
• A couple of years later, a peasant day laborer from Nazareth named Jesus led a band of disciples on a triumphant procession into Jerusalem, where he assaulted the Temple, overturned the tables of the money changers, and broke free the sacrificial animals from their cages. He, too, was captured and sentenced to death by Pilate. (Location 1010)
• For the most part, however, the rabbis of the second century would be compelled by circumstance and by fear of Roman reprisal to develop an interpretation of Judaism that eschewed nationalism. They would come to view the Holy Land in more transcendental terms, fostering a messianic theology that rejected overt political ambitions, as acts of piety and the study of the law took the place of Temple sacrifices in the life of the observant Jew. (Location 1312)
• Meanwhile, in triumphant Rome, a short while after the Temple of the Lord had been desecrated, the Jewish nation scattered to the winds, and the religion made a pariah, tradition says a Jew named John Mark took up his quill and composed the first words to the first gospel written about the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth—not in Hebrew, the language of God, nor in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, but in Greek, the language of the heathens. The language of the impure. The language of the victors. This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus the Christ (Location 1318)
• It is not the accuracy of Jesus’s prediction about the Temple that concerns us. The gospels were all written after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E.; Jesus’s warning to Jerusalem that “the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you and crush you to the ground—you and your children—and they will not leave within you one stone upon another” (Luke 19:43–44) was put into his mouth by the evangelists after the fact. (Location 1371)
• It is astonishing that centuries of biblical scholarship have miscast these words as an appeal by Jesus to put aside “the things of this world”—taxes and tributes—and focus one’s heart instead on the only things that matter: worship and obedience to God. (Location 1390)
• Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities. (Location 1430)
• both John and the Essenes seem to have identified themselves as “the voice crying out in the wilderness” spoken of by the Prophet Isaiah: (Location 1504)
• Luke buttresses his point by giving John his own infancy narrative alongside the one he invents for Jesus to prove that even as fetuses, Jesus was the superior figure: (Location 1551)
• whoever the Baptist was, wherever he came from, and however he intended his baptismal ritual, Jesus very likely began his ministry as just another of his disciples. (Location 1566)
• Of this there can be no doubt: the central theme and unifying message of Jesus’s brief ministry was the promise of the Kingdom of God. (Location 1966)
• The phrase ouk estin ek tou kosmou is perhaps better translated as “not part of this order/system [of government].” Even if one accepts the historicity of the passage (and very few scholars do), Jesus was not claiming that the Kingdom of God is unearthly; he was saying it is unlike any kingdom or government on earth. (Location 1982)
• But far from auguring some future apocalypse, Jesus’s words were in reality a perfectly apt description of the era in which he lived: an era of wars, famines, and false messiahs. In fact, Jesus seemed to expect the Kingdom of God to be established at any moment: (Location 1988)
• If the Kingdom of God is neither purely celestial nor wholly eschatological, then what Jesus was proposing must have been a physical and present kingdom: a real kingdom, with an actual king that was about to be established on earth. That is certainly how the Jews would have understood it. (Location 1991)
• Jesus was merely reiterating what the zealots had been preaching for years. (Location 1994)
• The same belief formed the foundation of nearly every Jewish resistance movement, (Location 2000)
• The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution, plain and simple. (Location 2024)
• But for those seeking the simple Jewish peasant and charismatic preacher who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago, there is nothing more important than this one undeniable truth: the same God whom the Bible calls “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3), the God who repeatedly commands the wholesale slaughter of every foreign man, woman, and child who occupies the land of the Jews, the “blood-spattered God” of Abraham, and Moses, and Jacob, and Joshua (Isaiah 63:3), the God who “shatters the heads of his enemies,” bids his warriors to bathe their feet in their blood and leave their corpses to be eaten by dogs (Psalms 68:21–23)—that is the only God that Jesus knew and the sole God he worshipped. (Location 2058)
• This is not the statement of self-denial it has so often been interpreted as being. The cross is the punishment for sedition, not a symbol of self-abnegation. Jesus was warning the Twelve that their status as the embodiment of the twelve tribes that will reconstitute the nation of Israel and throw off the yoke of occupation would rightly be understood by Rome as treason and thus inevitably lead to crucifixion. It was an admission that Jesus frequently made for himself. Over and over again, Jesus reminded his disciples of what lay ahead for him: rejection, arrest, torture, and execution (Location 2091)
• That explains why Jesus went to such lengths to hide the truth about the Kingdom of God from all but his disciples. Jesus recognized that the new world order he envisioned was so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response to it would be to arrest and execute them all for sedition. He therefore consciously chose to veil the Kingdom of God in abstruse and enigmatic parables that are nearly impossible to understand. “The secret of the Kingdom of God has been given to you to know,” Jesus tells his disciples. “But to outsiders, everything is said in parables so that they may see and not perceive, they may hear and not understand” (Location 2101)
• What, then, is the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings? It is at once the joyous wedding feast within the king’s royal hall, and the blood-soaked streets outside its walls. It is a treasure hidden in a field; sell all you have and buy that field (Matthew 13:44). It is a pearl tucked inside a shell; sacrifice everything to seek out that shell (Matthew 13:45). It is a mustard seed—the smallest of seeds—buried in soil. One day soon it will bloom into a majestic tree, and birds shall nest in its branches (Matthew 13:31–32). It is a net drawn from the sea, bursting with fish both good and bad; the good shall be kept, the bad discarded (Matthew 13:47). It is a meadow choking with both weeds and wheat. When the reaper comes, he will harvest the wheat. But the weeds he will bundle together and toss into the fire (Matthew 13:24–30). And the reaper is nearly here. God’s will is about to be done on earth, just as it is in heaven. So then, take your hand off the plow and do not look back, let the dead bury the dead, leave behind your husband and your wife, your brothers and sisters and children, and prepare yourself to receive the Kingdom of God. “Already, the ax is laid at the root of the tree.” (Location 2106)
• (Mark’s gospel is written in a coarse, elementary Greek that betrays the author’s limited education). (Location 2218)
• (Contrary to Christian conceptions, the title “Son of God” was not a description of Jesus’s filial connection to God but rather the traditional designation for Israel’s kings. (Location 2277)
• The fisherman, Simon Peter, displaying the reckless confidence of one uninitiated in the scriptures, even went so far as to argue that King David himself had prophesied Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in one of his Psalms. (Location 2678)
• But—and here lies the key to understanding the dramatic transformation that took place in Jesus’s message after his death—Stephen was not a scribe or scholar. He was not an expert in the scriptures. He did not live in Jerusalem. As such, he was the perfect audience for this new, innovative, and thoroughly unorthodox interpretation of the messiah being peddled by a group of unschooled ecstatics whose certainty in their message was matched only by the passion with which they preached it. (Location 2691)
• The speech, which is obviously Luke’s creation, is riddled with the most basic errors: it misidentifies the burial site of the great patriarch Jacob, and it inexplicably claims that an angel gave the law to Moses when even the most uneducated Jew in Palestine would have known it was God himself who gave Moses the law. (Location 2708)
• Understand that there can be no greater blasphemy for a Jew than what Stephen suggests. (Location 2725)
• But the presumption of a “god-man” was simply anathema. What Stephen cries out in the midst of his death throes is nothing less than the launch of a wholly new religion, one radically and irreconcilably divorced from everything Stephen’s own religion had ever posited about the nature of God and man and the relationship of the one to the other. One can say that it was not only Stephen who died that day outside the gates of Jerusalem. Buried with him under the rubble of stones is the last trace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. (Location 2726)
• The story of the zealous Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation comes to an abrupt end, not with his death on the cross, nor with the empty tomb, but at the first moment one of his followers dares suggest he is God. (Location 2730)
• practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (Location 2741)
• The task of defining Jesus’s message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. (Location 2751)
• they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter. (Location 2754)
• The discord between the two groups resulted in the emergence of two distinct and competing camps of Christian interpretation in the decades after the crucifixion: one championed by Jesus’s brother, James; the other promoted by the former Pharisee, Paul. As we shall see, it would be the contest between these two bitter and openly hostile adversaries that, more than anything else, would shape Christianity as the global religion we know today. (Location 2758)
• The story of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus is a bit of propagandistic legend created by the evangelist Luke; Paul himself never recounts the story of being blinded by the sight of Jesus. (Location 2936)
• Luke wrote the book of Acts as a kind of eulogy to his former master some thirty to forty years after Paul had died. (Location 2938)
• Paul does not consider himself the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the first apostle. (Location 2963)
• The claim of apostleship is an urgent one for Paul, as it was the only way to justify his entirely self-ascribed mission to the gentiles, (Location 2964)
• One would think that Jesus’s admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything “Jesus-in-the-flesh” may or may not have said. (Location 2983)
• Paul does not narrate a single event from Jesus’s life. Nor does Paul ever actually quote Jesus’s words (Location 2986)
• Paul’s lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care. He repeatedly boasts that he has not learned about Jesus either from the apostles or from anyone else who may have known him. (Location 2990)
• Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought, that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly get away with preaching them. (Location 2999)
• (when Paul does look to the Hebrew prophets—for instance, Isaiah’s prophecy about the root of Jesse who will one day serve as “a light to the gentiles” (11:10)—he thinks the prophets are predicting him, not Jesus). (Location 3009)
• The bishops who succeeded Peter in Rome (and who eventually became infallible popes) justified the chain of authority they relied upon to maintain power in an ever-expanding church by citing a passage in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells the apostle, “I say to you that you shall be called Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church” (Matthew 16:18). The problem with this heavily disputed verse, which most scholars reject as unhistorical, is that it is the only passage in the entire New Testament that designates Peter as head of the church. (Location 3230)