I tend to be skeptical of Rolling Stone, so I’m not going to comment on the expose of Ron Luce until I read more, if then. After all, Luce seems to oppose what RS peddles for a living, so they’re hardly unbiased.
But, if the stuff is true (or at least half of it), it does provide us with a very good window into what prompted Pharisaism in Israel in Jesus’ day. And it has been extremely gratifying to read the iMonk channel N. T. Wright on this issue:
When you read the New Testament, you never see the name Zealots, and there is some scholarly discussion over how definable the Zealot movement was in Israel in the first century. What’s not arguable is that there were people in Israel in the time of Jesus who were angry and believed that their anger was redemptive if channeled into a response that would overthrow the existing order. In other words, they were culture warriors.
These were Jews who felt their culture had been corrupted and violated by Greeks and now Romans. They resented what had happened to their children in a Hellenized, Romanized world. They weren’t surprised that God seemed to be letting things get worse and worse, leaving them in “exile,” because God’s people were compromising and “wimping out” when the times demanded strong action. These were people who were mad at culture, entertainment, moral standards and religious compromise. They despised those who preached tolerance and cultural diversity. They had their own rhetoric of anger. From time to time, extremists acted on these views and paid the cost.
These were people who wanted to purify Israel, march on Jerusalem, overthrow the corrupt political puppet regime of Herod and set the God of Israel against the pagan idolators from Rome. This was a culture war, a religious war and eventually, a real war.
Jesus was surrounded with this kind of anger from the time he was a child. He heard the Zealot voices in the synagogues, in the shops, and in the village square. He heard those who applauded John the Baptists direct attack on the immorality of the Herod family, and he felt the pressure to declare his movement a servant of that larger culture war.
Patriotism, zealotry and faith were never separated in Jesus’ world. To be a traitor to the cause of a renewed and liberated Israel was to be a traitor to God. There were plenty of people doing nothing, plenty of people to blame and plenty of targets for action and revolution.
What was astounding about Wright (well, there were several things, but this was definitely one of the top ones for me), was that he took a look at the Gospels, and, in the course of understanding the theological mindset of Jesus (in a way that was obviously faithful to the text) produced a call to repentance to “the Religious Right.” I don’t mean Wright’s actual political opinions, which I think are dreadfully leftist (and why in God’s name does the anti-imperialism apply to the Bush Administration but not the U.N.), but his point about how God saves us and how this applies to all forms of salvation, including any wish to “save” America. Wright showed me that Jesus had something to say about the culture war, and it was more or less that I was in danger of choosing an murderer as more like God than Jesus.