The Man Jesus (Part 5): Jesus Was Not Busy with a Religious Revival but with a Revolution

Chapters 13, 14  "Confrontation" (Jesus Before Christianity)

The next section of the book is comprised of seven chapters about the climax of Jesus' life and why he became such a target for both the Jewish leaders and for Rome. Nolan is attempting to peer into how the people in Jesus' day would have understood him and how he himself understood things before his followers later interpreted his life and words through an "end-of-the-world" lens. In this post we will look at chapters 13 and 14.

Chapter 13 looks at "politics and religion". The fact that Jesus of Nazareth was killed for high treason by Rome did not make him unique, because many thousands of Jewish revolutionaries were crucified by the Roman rulers of that day. Although the revolution that Jesus wanted certainly involved liberation of the Jews from oppressive rulers, his greater concern was that Israel have a change of heart. "...This is not a matter of resigning oneself to Roman oppression; nor is it a matter of trying to kill them with kindness. It is a matter of reaching down to the root cause of all oppression and domination: humanity's lack of compassion. If the people of Israel were to continue to lack compassion, would the overthrowing of the Romans make Israel any more liberated than before? If the Jews continued to live off the worldly values of money, prestige, group solidarity and power, would the Roman oppression not be replaced by an equally loveless Jewish oppression?..."

Unlike what many of us have been led to believe about the man Jesus, the men of his day would not have "thought of him as an eminently religious man who steered clear of politics and revolution. They would have seen him as a blasphemously irreligious man who under the cloak of religion was undermining all the values upon which religion, politics, economics and society were based...

He disapproved of (Rome's) way of 'making their authority felt' and their way of 'lording it over their subjects'. But he envisaged changing this by changing Israel so that Israel could present the Romans with a living example of the values and ideals of the 'kingdom.'"

"Jesus' social mixing with sinners in the name of God and his confidence that they (sinners) had God's approval while the virtuous did not were a violation of all that God and religion and virtue and justice had ever meant. But then Jesus was not busy with a religious revival; he was busy with a revolution - a revolution in religion and politics and everything else."

Chapter 14 deals with the dramatic confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish leaders which was the turning point in Jesus' life: the Temple incident. Up till this point he was confronting the men of religion but now confronts the men of affairs, the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem who were exploiting the poor.

This chapter tries to answer questions such as how did Jesus and his intentions become sufficiently well known to be of national concern so that the authorities wanted to arrest him while the people wanted to make him king? Why did he have to withdraw and become a fugitive? The timing of the temple confrontation has much to do with the answers to these questions.

The gospels are confusing concerning when this temple incident took place, but Nolan cites sources and proposes that it took place early in Jesus' public ministry as told in the gospel of John (rather than just before his death as Mark, Luke and Matthew tell it). This confrontation propelled Jesus into the national limelight. Because of this angry demonstration by Jesus towards the economic exploitation of the people's devotion and piety by the Temple system (for example, the widow giving her last penny), Jesus and his disciples were forced to change their whole way of life because of the danger they were in.

Jesus had been preaching about the need for Israel's change of heart in order to escape the coming catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem, but it was this confrontation in the Temple that made him a figure of national importance and forced the leaders to make a decision about taking action concerning him. They were further worried about the fact that he seemed to have great influence over the people. All of this caused Jesus to avoid going to Jerusalem and also to Galilee (where Herod was after him too) and when he did go to Jerusalem, it was under cover.