What entailed was a mass suicide, allegedly of 960 people. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is a book by Iranian-American writer and scholar Reza Aslan. Subscribe to the CompellingTruth.org Newsletter: Who were the Zealots in the New Testament? Their founder, Judas (not Iscariot), was himself a Galilean who had led a revolt against Rome in AD 6 in response to the passage of a Roman census tax. They strongly opposed Roman rule and turned on everyone, including other Jews, who cooperated with Rome. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/judaismjesus/7, This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License, Home | 2021 14 Jun. The spirit of their movement was an insane, and ultimately self-destructive fanaticism. (MacArthur, 177). The Zealots were members of a first-century political movement among Judean Jews who sought to overthrow the occupying Roman government. The Essenes, though not mentioned in Scripture, were a third Jewish party and a more monk-like group of aesthetics and celibates who lived in the desert and devoted themselves to the study of the Old Testament. [CDATA[// >