Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

To begin with, apparently quite a bit, because they too were about the reign of God. Josephus writes of Judas the Galilean: “Under his administration [i.e., that of the procurator Coponius], a Galilaean, named Judas, incited his countrymen to revolt, upbraiding them as cowards for consenting to pay tribute to the Romans and tolerating mortal masters, after having God for their lord.”⁷

The Zealots (zealot = fanatic) were thus concerned about Israel’s faith. As once the prophet Elijah, with burning zeal, had demanded a choice between YHWH and Baal, so Judas the Galilean demanded that Israel choose between the God of their ancestors and the divine Roman emperor. For the Zealots, then, the fight against Rome was a matter of faith. They passionately called people to enter into the true faith as they saw it. They could only imagine Israel as a state ruled by God alone. Therefore they called all Israel to follow them, which in the great majority of cases meant leaving home and household and removing to the wilderness. Charlatans within or alongside the Zealot movement, like Theudas and “the Egyptian,” even promised their followers showy messianic miracles, eschatological miracles in the wilderness.

At first glance the correspondences with the Jesus movement are striking: the theme of the reign of God, the demand for faith, the call to discipleship to the point of endangering one’s own life, the unconditional surrender of property and goods for the cause of God, and above all the eschatological horizon. Here we are much closer to the phenomenon of discipleship than with the rabbis. Above all, it is historically certain that these movements were contemporary with the Jesus movement; the rabbinic practices we spoke of before can only be derived from later sources.

But despite these parallels that seem so striking, discipleship of Jesus is something different. Jesus and his disciples were far removed in their thinking and acting from the Jewish freedom fighters. Jesus, when he was asked whether it was permissible to pay Roman taxes, emphatically affirmed that it was. When people tried to draw him into a political trap with this problem, the subject of such heated discussion in Israel at the time, he made a distinction: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). “The things that are God’s”—that is something different. That is not battle with weapons for a theocratic state, which is what Zealot fanaticism longed for. “The things that are God’s” or “what belongs to God”—that is one’s whole existence; that is faith in the “today” of the Good News; that is turning back to that message and to a nonviolent community in Israel that is now beginning.

For according to Jesus, God does not want Israel to be a people that fights, like all others, to assert itself as a nation. God wants a people in which the peace of God and God’s kind of rule become reality. That is the reason for the unbelievably sharp demand for nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount: “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile” (Matt 5:39-41). The Zealots demanded precisely the opposite. They said: don’t take it! Fight back! Don’t help the Roman soldiers (for example, by carrying their baggage for miles)! No, help us in the underground to arm against the occupation force!

When Jesus talks about nonviolence he is first of all placing a clear distance between himself and the fighters-for-God in his time. That the disciples, in accordance with the equipment rule described above, were to take no staff, no shoes, and no money with them was not only an indicative sign of the eschatological-solidary community in the people of God. It was intended, beyond that, to make visible the difference between them and the Zealot God’s-army types: someone who does not even have a staff cannot protect himself. He is defenseless. And someone who has no shoes on her feet cannot even flee, given the stony soil of Palestine, if she is attacked. This is a sign of pure nonviolence that positively shouts its character. All of it goes contrary to the Zealots and their ideology of a military theocratic state.

But also the fact that the disciples were to have no money in their belts was directed against the Zealots, because they collected and extorted money for their struggle against the Romans. None of that had anything to do with modesty of demands or asceticism. Jesus simply did not want his disciples to be confused with rebels against Roman rule.

Free Discipleship

Thus nonviolence signals the fundamental difference between Jesus and the Zealots. But that difference is also indicated by the idea of freedom. What does that mean?