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4. AND HE WAS RICH

Christian tradition overwhelmingly places Jesus' execution on the eve of the Passover. That date provides the first Christian authors with an occasion rich in Old Testament symbolism, but it was an occasion no less rich in symbolism for intertestamental-era Jewish patriots. Passover celebrates the deliverance of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt , and it was always the favored opportunity for political protest against the pharaohs of the present age; the revolt of 4 B.C. started with a Passover protest. Passover also drew the largest crowd of any of the major festivals, which may have been important to a proselytizer as energetic as Jesus.

That Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem for the Passover was attended with an orchestrated sequence of signs and events is hardly a preposterous assumption, given the careful advance work we have already seen. One of Jesus' principle distinctions vis a vis his mentor and rival John the Baptist, as we are reminded in John 10.41, was that "John did no sign" (the Greek term, semeion, translated as "sign," is synonymous with "miracle," "portent," and "wonder"). And if Jesus preferred that his dozens of broadcasters announce their arrival in town with a healing or exorcism, he would hardly have been adverse to something spectacular to announce his arrival in Jerusalem -- something like raising a man from the dead.

In the commentarii of Pilate's wife, Jesus' raising of Eleazar ben Eleazar (Lazarus is the Greek equivalent of this Hebrew name) is a twofold sign: It proclaims the imminence of God's intervention in human events, and it declares the alliance of the poor with wealthy opponents of the Jewish ruling elite. We have already seen why some relatively wealthy Jews, particularly the disenfranchised remnants of the purged Hasmonean aristocracy, might have common cause with poor Jews in opposing Caiaphas and his supporters. But before we begin to consider whether or not Jesus might have brought a man believed dead out of his tomb, we should consider a more basic question. Is it reasonable to assume that Jesus, vociferous champion of the poor, sought and found the support of rich men?

Luke 19.1-5 gives us some evidence on that point:

And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. And, behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, who was the chief among the tax collectors, and he was rich. And he sought to see who Jesus was; and could not for the press [of the crowd], because he was little of stature. And he ran before [the crowd], and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for today I must stay at your house.

This is a remarkable view of Jesus' traveling road show in action. Evidently Jesus' advance men had done their work, because the crowd was so big that Zacchaeus, too short to see above them, had to climb a tree in order to see. Evidently the advance men had also identified to Jesus the rich men in town, because Jesus was able to walk up to Zacchaeus, whom he had never met, and address him by name. Certainly he seemed to know that Zacchaeus' house was suitable for his lodging. And certainly it would have been. Jericho was a principal customs collection site; the chief tax collector there was an independent contractor who purchased from Roman authorities the concession to collect the custom taxes (the Romans collected the other taxes directly). The Jericho concession would have been particularly expensive and particularly lucrative.

Jesus seems to have had an affinity for rich tax concessionaires. We also find him in the house of Levi, whom Jesus encountered sitting in his customs-collecting office. "Follow me," Jesus told him, at which Levi got up and left his work. "And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of tax collectors and of others that sat down with them" (Lk 5.27-29).

Of course tax-collectors, however wealthy, had an unsavory reputation. Jesus' associations with both Zacchaeus and Levi encouraged "murmuring" campaigns among his opponents, to the effect that Jesus was consorting with sinners -- an accusation he freely admitted, saying, as in Mark 21.17, "They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick [do]: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

In the gospels, Jesus is also associated with rich Jews of far more respectable social standing. There is Jairus, elder of a synagogue in Galilee, whose daughter Jesus raised from the dead with the command "Girl, get up" (Mk 5.21-42). Nicodemus, a "ruler of the Jews" (what Josephus would call a "leading man among us" -- a member of the Sanhedrin), came to Jesus at night to secretly profess his belief (Jn 3.1-3). All four gospels mention "a rich man of Arimathea, named Joseph," (Mt 27.57), also a member of the ruling Sanhedrin, who begged Jesus' body from Pilate; we will consider this rich man at greater length when we look at the accounts of Jesus' burial.

The gospels even offer what may be evidence that some of Jesus' disciples resented his attentions to wealthy patrons. In Mark 14.3-9, an unnamed woman anointed Jesus' head with a jar of nard oil, an extremely costly perfume that had to be imported from India and Nepal. Unnamed bystanders complained that the nard could be sold for three hundred denarii - about the yearly wage of a Roman legionary -- and the money given to the poor. Jesus responded, You will always have the poor to show kindness to, but you won't always have me -- this woman is anointing my body for burial. In typical New Testament spin-control, Mark adapted what may have a dispute over social goals into a prophecy of Jesus' imminent martyrdom.

The issue of the nard comes up again in John 12.3-8, also at Bethany. Five days before his martyrdom, Jesus arrived for dinner at the house of Lazarus, whom he had raised from his tomb only a few days previously. Lazarus' sister Mary anointed Jesus' feet with the nard, wiping them with her hair. At this, none other than Judas Iscariot protested that the three hundred denarii just wasted could have been given to the poor. To prevent us from finding any sympathy for Jesus' betrayer, we are then instructed that Judas only said this because he hoped to steal the three hundred denarii from the common purse, which he kept. The episode closes with the same prophetic apology Jesus issues in Mark 14.7-8.

Clearly many details of the incidents described by Mark and John are the same. Until recently this seemed a case of John merely stitching the traditional nard episode into his account of the raising of Lazarus -- which despite its familiarity does not appear in canonical Mark or in any of the other synoptic gospels. However, in 1958, Morton Smith, a professor of Oriental Religions at Columbia University, was rummaging through the library of the ancient Mar Saba Monastery in the Judean desert. There he discovered the text of a letter attributed to the celebrated second-century Christian writer Clement of Alexandria, copied on the inside cover of a book a mere two centuries old. But subsequent examination of the style and subject matter of the copied text has produced almost unanimous agreement among modern scholars that the original letter, long lost, had indeed been written by Clement of Alexandria. And in that letter, Clement quoted, by his own description "word for word," the partial text of a Christian gospel he attributed to the apostle Mark.

That text, as repeated by Clement and translated by Smith, tells a brief but important story: On the road to Bethany, Jesus was beseeched by a woman whose brother had just died; Jesus went with her into the garden where the tomb was located. At once "A great cry was heard from the tomb," whereupon Jesus rolled the stone from the door. He walked into the tomb, stretched out his hand to the "youth" inside, and raised him up. "But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich." After six days of instruction, Jesus told the youth to come to him, "wearing a linen shirt over [his] naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God."

In the letter in which he repeated this story, Clement told his correspondent that Mark left Rome after Peter's martyrdom -- sometime during the 60's A.D. and composed a second, "more spiritual" gospel containing "certain sayings" which might "lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of the truth." Clement insists that Mark left this document to the church in Alexandria, to be read only by those "who are being initiated into the great mysteries." Thus Clement reports that Mark censored himself when he wrote the canonical Mark, withholding passages that might be misunderstood as referring to obscene rites. These he included in the second, secret gospel. Modern text analysts, however, disagree with Clement on that point, suggesting that so-called "Secret Mark" was the earliest version of the Mark Gospel, and was censored by later editors to produce canonical Mark.

Whether Mark censored himself or was censored by a subsequent editor, the discovery of Secret Mark places the raising of Lazarus/"the rich youth" episode in the earliest Christian tradition; its independent existence in John's gospel suggests its considerable importance to that tradition. As with all but the most basic elements of Jesus' history, we cannot say with certainty that the raising of Lazarus crosses the gap between Christian tradition and history. But in the case of Lazarus, that gap is much narrower than it was less than fifty years ago, before the discovery of Secret Mark.

John goes on to tell us that the raising of Lazarus convinced the Temple hierarchy that Jesus' miracles would inspire "all men [to] believe in him" (Jn 11.48). So, "From that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death" (Jn 11.53). It is interesting here that the priests betrayed no fear of Jesus' manifest supernatural abilities. Instead they feared that the demonstration of those abilities had made Jesus even more appealing to the crowd.

Next: AND THE JEWS MARVELED

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