Since the emergence of the historical Jesus as a central topic of New Testament studies, every generation of researchers has put forward their own understanding of the figure of Jesus according to the ideas of that time. Many of these depictions have since been revised, while some others have not entirely left discussion, one of which being the zealot hypothesis, which will be discussed in this paper. One of the strongest voices in the early 20th century who put forward this hypothesis is Robert Eisler. He published a monograph in 1929-30 in which he arrived at the conclusion that Jesus was a political revolutionist of the apocalyptic kind who caused riots in Jerusalem and was detained and executed by the Romans (see Hengel 1969). Eisler assumes that Jesus had a propensity towards violence and an aspiration to become the earthly king of Israel as a descendant of David. The fact that the Gospels of Jesus mainly speak about peace and loving the neighbors, especially the enemies, is explained by Eisler as an attempt on the side of the evangelists not to transmit the zealotic elements of Jesus’s preaching, because this would have neither appealed to Jews nor Romans. 83 years later the American scholar of religious studies Reza Aslan published his book “Zealot. The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth”, in which he also depicts Jesus as a revolutionist with the disposition to violence who wants to ascend the earthly throne of Israel. According to Aslan, the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels is almost a total reversal of the historical truth because after the destruction of the temple nobody would have followed a zealot. However, the message of a pacifistic preacher could move the masses. In my paper, Eisler’s and Aslan’s constructions of Jesus will be thoroughly criticized. Controversial pericopes which are taken as arguments by Eisler and Aslan, among them Q 12:49, 51, will be analyzed and explained as an apocalyptic, not a zealotic statement. It will be shown that this was misinterpreted to fit those theses (see Schrey 1985). Had there been two kinds of apocalyptic movements, an active zealotic and a pacifistic one, Jesus would have surely belonged to the latter. It will be shown in my paper that nonviolence and loving the enemies are not desperate attempts to strengthen the image of Jesus. They are rather historically plausible (as can be seen in Jos. Bell. 2,174.195-198) demands and ethical instructions of the historical Jesus (see Theissen 1989) which can already be found in Q (see Luehrmann 2014). Therefore, it is historically impossible to allege Jesus political apathy as Aslan does. On the contrary, these instructions of nonviolence and love were just as much the right answer to political issues 2000 years ago as they are now.