by freely associating with sinners and hosting meals for tax collectors. Jesus’s path was not the path of retreat into the desert in the name of maintaining personal or communal purity—a choice that would have allowed the principalities and powers in Jerusalem to continue on with business as usual. Instead, Yoder writes, Jesus “set out quite openly and consciously for the city and the conflict which was sure to encounter him there.”19 Central to Jesus’s kingdom announcement—which must be seen in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets who condemned the injustices and violence of Israel’s rulers, and who suffered ridicule and martyrdom as a result—was the message that God does not desire ritual piety or scrupulous law-keeping but a people committed to acts of justice and mercy (Matt 9:13).
The Ghetto or the Sword: The Ways of the Pharisees
Somewhere between the sheer pragmatism of the Herodians and the sectarian withdrawal of the Essenes we find the ways of the Pharisees. The broad agenda of the Pharisees was close in many ways to that of the Essenes. They too despised the religious-political compromisers, as much if not more than their pagan overlords, and they struggled to preserve Jewish identity in the face of imperial pressure. But while the Essenes proclaimed, in effect, “Just wait: God will bring about Israel’s liberation in his own time,” the Pharisees, like the Herodians, were prepared to take a more active and urban role as political agents of God’s will.20 When God finally did intervene to restore Israel, the Pharisees maintained, he would restore the nation as a whole, not merely a sectarian elite sequestered in the Judean hinterlands.
The Pharisees divided into two major schools of political thought. The first, following the teachings of the Rabbi Hillel, sought to avoid direct confrontation with Rome, emphasizing instead the importance of Torah study, religious purity and political prudence. These Pharisees sought to strengthen Jewish piety with a view to resisting Roman oppression, but only when absolute essentials of the faith, “religious liberty issues,” were at stake. In the eyes of these guardians of “proper” religion, Jesus was a threat who needed to be eliminated not only because he played fast and loose with Sabbath, purity and dietary laws (Mark 2:23–28; 7:1–19), but because his band had all the hallmarks of a radical political movement that would soon attract the heavy hand of Rome (Luke 13:31). Better, they decided in council with the Sadducees (normally their bitter foes) on the Sanhedrin, Israel’s highest political body, that “one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (John 11:50).
Other Pharisees, however, did not shy so quickly from the prospect of a “clash of civilizations” between Israel and Rome. These individuals, drawing their inspiration from the teachings of the Rabbi Shammai, urged immediate and violent revolt against Rome in the pattern of Judas Maccabaeus, who had led a seemingly miraculous guerrilla uprising against the Syrian megalomaniac Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 BCE (the event still celebrated by Jews during the festival of Hannakuh). Where the Hillelites represented the way of respectable or proper Judaism—the way of Mishnah and ghetto—these latter Shammaite Pharisees stood for revolutionary zeal, the way of the sword. The Apostle Paul, before his conversion, appears to have been one such Shammaite, fully prepared to use violence to rid Israel of apostates and traitors.21
The revolutionary zeal of the Shammaites was especially appealing to marginalized Jews living outside of the major centers of power—rural people in “underdeveloped regions” like Galilee, who fueled the economic dynamism of the empire by providing cheap labor and raw goods for export.22 Fully half of Jesus’s disciples may have had strong zealot leanings, if not outright zealot commitments.23 Beyond what may be inferred from the disciples’ social backgrounds, there are clues scattered throughout the Gospels. James and John urge Jesus to rain destruction on a group of offending Samaritans (Luke 9:51–56). Peter, along with James and John, is prepared to violently resist Jesus’s arrest in Gethsemane (Luke 22:49). One or more of these three is armed with a sword and wounds a slave of the high priest (Matt 26:51–52). Simon is directly identified as a zealot (Mark 3:18). Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that Judas Iscariot’s name contains a veiled allusion to the Sicarii, a band of urban intellectuals turned terrorist-assassins with dynastic links to Judas the Galilean, the failed messianic leader executed for sedition against Rome in 6 CE, whose sons were also crucified for their politics in the 40s.24
The fact that Jesus attracted individuals such as these, who harbored violent insurrectionist dreams, and who probably hoped that alignment with Jesus would help to realize them, as well as the fact that Jesus’s opponents could plausibly accuse him before Pilate of sedition against Rome, the legal charge on which he was finally crucified, points to the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s character and kingdom announcement. But while Jesus is repeatedly tempted in the Gospels to take up the sword—to launch a campaign of “just war” that will vindicate the Jewish faith once and for all—he steadfastly refuses the path of coercive power, the way of violence to establish God’s kingdom on earth (Matt 5:9, 38–48; 26:51–53; Luke 6:27; 22:50–53).25 Precisely because he is so deeply sympathetic with the insurgents, the religious freedom fighters, he is also in many ways most critically opposed to them.
But what path did Jesus take to build God’s kingdom? If not the way of the Herodians (calculation and compromise), the way of the Essenes (retreat into the desert), the way of the Hillelite Pharisees (Torah study and respectable religion), or the way of the zealots (violent revolution or “just war”), what other possible way? We have already begun to formulate a picture of Jesus’s politics by way of negation and contrast as: 1) demanding a radically different allegiance than that of nation, state, party or empire; 2) engaging rather than retreating from concerns of social justice; and 3) refusing the path of political violence and coercive power. But what made the Way of Jesus—the word used by the earliest Christians to describe their faith—a compelling message of good news for people living in a situation of crushing poverty and foreign military occupation?
The Politics of the Kingdom
Centuries before Jesus’s birth, Jewish apocalyptic writers struggled to understand the theological meaning of Israel’s exile in Babylon. They concluded, with paradoxical audacity, that pagan oppression was the result not of YHWH’s weakness but of his justice and strength: Israel was being punished by the Creator God for its failure to keep the covenant.26 Things would grow progressively worse, Jewish eschatology predicted, until a final, decisive moment when God would at last send a warrior-prince to restore his Chosen People to their rightful place among the nations. Jewish apocalyptic literature used cosmic and fantastic images to describe this future event, but Jewish hopes were firmly rooted in the realm of concrete, earthly politics. When God’s kingdom arrived, it would be plain for all to see by three material facts: 1) the Davidic monarchy would be restored in Jerusalem with unparalleled justice and prosperity; 2) the Temple would be rebuilt with unsurpassed splendor; and 3) the downtrodden Jews would emerge a triumphant superpower with their pagan enemies humiliated and defeated beneath them.
Jesus shared many of the basic assumptions of this traditional Jewish eschatology. He declared that oppression would increase before finally being overcome by God’s saving activity (Mark 13:7–13). He urged his disciples to be steadfast and courageous in the face of evil (Matt 10:16–42). And he taught them to pray not for a “spiritual” kingdom somewhere in the sky but for God’s kingdom to come “on earth as it is in heaven” (6:10). When Jesus talked about the kingdom, though, he did not talk about it in the future tense. Israel was still suffering under foreign oppression, economic injustice and religious corruption. But when Jesus talked about the kingdom he talked about it like it was going on then and there. He talked about it like it had already arrived. Even more shocking, the Gospel writers record, Jesus talked and acted like the kingdom was happening in him and through him. “But if I cast out demons by the finger of God,” Jesus said, “then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20).
Jesus’s kingdom announcement implied that conventional Jewish eschatology, with its vision of two successive historical ages, was either deeply flawed or had been gravely misread. Hebrew apocalyptic literature had depicted the coming of YHWH’s kingdom as a dramatic, earth-shattering
