Was Jesus a Revolutionary?
Was Jesus a Revolutionary?
Was Jesus a revolutionary? Against Brandon,88 little evidence connects Jesus with insurrectionist activity; one can unfortunately argue almost any case when one rejects as unreliable the only historical evidence we have.89 Revolutionary sentiments may have been widespread, shared even by many Pharisees and (before the war of 66-73 CE) some younger Sadducean priests. With that said, those actually directly involved in insurrectionary-type activity or even brigandage around the time of Jesus’ ministry must have been at most a small percentage of the population (see Appendix 1).
Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see how some would have understood his popular appeal to the masses and open challenges to some social customs as potential political threats.90 Indeed, his preaching about God’s “kingdom” could not but have some sort of political implications,91 whether achieved in the present or the (possibly near) future, through human agents or without them.92 Contrary to the assumptions of some western academicians today, theology and politics were not mutually exclusive interests in antiquity93 (or in some parts of the world today).
Yet Jesus’ actions (discussed later in the book) place him closer to another category of activity of his day, namely, the paradigm that depended on God to intervene supernaturally to consummate his kingdom. Josephus reports several prophetic figures who sought not to attack Rome but to produce signs of divine deliverance; apparently they expected God to act on their behalf. Nevertheless, because they (in contrast to John or Jesus) had armed followers, Rome’s soldiers intervened militarily; Jesus may have been more nonresistant than they. Similarly, Sanders94 cites the repeated expectation in some strands of early Jewish literature that God would bring down a new Temple,95 or fight for Israel and bring in the kingdom by his own power.96 Jesus may have overturned tables in and pronounced judgment on the temple of his day to prepare the way for a new one, yet done so as a prophetic sign, expecting God himself to bring about the kingdom.
Assuming that Jesus waited on God to act, submitting (as we will argue later in the book) even to an execution that he might have been able to avoid, those interested in Jesus for theological questions will ask, “Did God act as Jesus expected?” Some, following Schweitzer’s line of argument, contend that Jesus went to the cross as a deluded visionary, vainly hoping to provoke God’s hand. (In this, he would be like prophetic figures soon after him who expected God to make the Jordan part or Jerusalem’s walls collapse.)
Others, impressed by his teaching about a hidden kingdom (Mk 4:30-32) or the value of martyrdom (Mk 8:34-38), affirm instead that Jesus by dying accomplished exactly what he intended. One can affirm this much without asking the further theological question about whether God acted as Jesus expected, beyond Jesus’ execution. Jesus presumably expected to be raised; most Palestinian Jews apparently expected resurrection and reward at the end of the age. If Jesus expected a vindication earlier than this, one cannot answer the theological question without examining the question of his resurrection (introduced in ch. 22; Appendix 8). In any case, we must at least leave open the possibility that Jesus intended to die a martyr’s death in Jerusalem, and that he believed that this death would activate an important phase in God’s plan.