Word: brandons
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Temple Trophies. Except for a few tantalizing hints ("I come not to bring peace but a sword"), little of Jesus' militancy appears in the Gospels. The reason, argues Brandon, was that Christianity early in its history underwent an earth-shaking trauma: the fall of Jerusalem. In A.D. 70, the legionaries of the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus put down a four-year rebellion led by a group of Jewish rebels known as the Zealots, and destroyed the city. In Rome, where Titus returned in triumph brandishing trophies from the ruined Temple, feelings were running high against Jewish intransigence...
...fact, Brandon argues, Mark had good reason for wanting to clear Christ's name. Brandon carefully avoids saying that Jesus was a Zealot himself, but cites evidence suggesting that he was sympathetic to their cause. Mark, he notes, obscured the fact that one of the Apostles-Simon the Zealot, as later Evangelists confirm-was an admitted member of the movement. And he argues further that Judas Iscariot may have been a Zealot as well. The two "thieves" who were crucified along with Jesus were, as the original Greek attests, really "brigands"-a common epithet for the Zealots. Even...
Mark was able to disguise these unpleasant truths, Brandon contends, because he sincerely believed that Jesus was "the son of God, incarnated to accomplish mankind's salvation." A theological polemicist rather than a biographer, he was thus able to adjust some facts and ignore others without any conscious deceit. As an example of Mark's revisionist writing, Brandon cites the use of one apparently authentic saying of Jesus: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." In the context of Mark's Gospel, it implies...
Most Jewish Gospel. Brandon argues that Mark's attempt to exonerate the Romans of any responsibility for Jesus' death and to play down Christian involvement in the Zealot revolt was further supported by the later Evangelists, who also emphasized Christ's pacifism. Although Matthew wrote for Jewish Christians, possibly in Alexandria, he was apparently so grief-stricken by the fall of Jerusalem that he could only ascribe it to unwise political activism and divine retribution for the rejection of Jesus-which explains why this "most Jewish" of the Gospels is steeped in collective Jewish guilt. Luke...
...primitive Christianity of Jerusalem, with its documents and traditions, perished in the city's destruction by Rome. What survived, argues Brandon, was not the Jesus remembered as a Messianic revolutionary who sought to cleanse Israel for the coming of God's kingdom, but a transcendent divinity who had come to all men and not merely the Jews. What also survived, says Brandon, was the anti-Semitic bias of the Evangelists that made scapegoats of Judaism-a nation of "Christ killers" for nearly 2,000 years...