When I was considering buying this book I wondered how someone who came from a background of Islam and born in Iran would portray Jesus. I learned that Aslan was a scholar holding a Ph.D. in the sociology of religions from the University of California in addition to other degrees and is a writer of international fame.
Aslan was born in Iran and came from a family of as he puts it "lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists." The Iranian revolution made his family flee Iran and at the age of fifteen he was converted to Christianity at a summer evangelical youth camp in Northern California. He later, after much study, became convinced that: "The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions-just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years---left me confused and spiritually unmoored. And so, like many people in my situation, I angrily discarded my faith as if it were a costly forgery I had been duped into buying. I began to rethink the faith and culture of my forefathers, finding in them as an adult a deeper, more intimate familiarity than I ever had as a child, the kind that comes from reconnecting with an old friend after many years apart." [Azlan, Reza. Zealot: Author's Note, p. xix. (New York: Random House. 2013)].
He continued his work in religious studies and after decades of academic research finds that he is a more committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than he ever could be of Jesus the Christ. Throughout the book there is always the juxtaposition of two concepts: "Jesus of Nazareth as the Historical Jesus and Jesus the Christ which is the creation of subsequent writers including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul who never knew the Historical Jesus because among the gospels none of them are written by the people they are named for with the possible exception of Luke and all were written by persons who did not know Jesus of Nazareth while he was living and were written many years later.
He warns the readers that "for every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it." He has recorded the sources for other arguments, also, but presents his view of what can be known of the historical Jesus in this book.
To some people the notion that Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem because of an order to go to the places of their birth because of an order of the Romans has been puzzling because it appears that no Roman record of such a thing exists. Aslan offers a very intelligent explanation of the need for Jesus to have been born in Bethelehem and how this story came to have been in the New Testament.
Also, it must have occurred to many people that there is such a distinction between the Jesus of the New Testament and the Teachings of the early church that it is necessary to attribute to Paul the creation of the Christian Church. Aslan gives extensive and thorough arguments in support of that hypothesis in this book.
As far back as the 1960's and possibly before studies of the beginnings of Christianity seemed to indicate that Jesus was a revolutionary figure. I think that Aslan has made a compelling argument that this is the case.
Some scholars have thought that the historic Jesus cannot be found. I believe this was the viewpoint of Albert Schweitzer after his study of the problem. Aslan correctly points out that even though very little has been documented of the Historic Jesus the Romans kept quite good records of the first century and beyond and it is possible to reconstruct the times in which Jesus lived.
Pontius Pilate is shown to have been a cruel procurator although his mention in the gospels has been whitewashed to appeal to the Romans and the Jews were maligned in a gospel causing two thousand years of anti-Semitism.
I have had a vague notion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and knew that this was destroyed by Titus in about 70 C.E. In this book Aslan gives a literary picture of that temple so vivid that one can almost smell it and see the various parts of it. This was an outstanding portrait of that Temple which was the site of so many happenings and the seat of so many High Priests prior to the dispersion of the Jews by the Romans.
I think that the persons who will most value this book are those who are aware of the scholarship regarding the Bible and are aware that the viewpoint of the scholars does not necessarily conform to the viewpoint of various churches. In trying to excuse this Aslan makes the distinction between Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ. Jesus the man being an illiterate Jewish peasant from a tiny village named Nazareth and Jesus the Christ being the Jesus who was created by the Paul and other writers seeking to appeal to the Greeks and the Romans. In this Jesus the man is lost to the New Testament and Jesus the Christ becomes the Jesus of organized religion. This is a valid distinction and one that persons believing in a literal acceptance of the Bible stories find hard to make.
If Jesus is placed firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the time in which he lived with the revolt against Rome that transformed the faith and practice of Judaism, then the biography of Jesus in some ways writes itself according to Aslan.
Most modern Christians would not recognize this Jesus but this Jesus may be the only Jesus that can be accessed by historical means. All else is a matter of faith.
Aslan states that there are only two historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can rely:
1. "Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E."
2."Rome crucified him for doing so."
Aslan writes that his book is an attempt "to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary who, two thousand years ago walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. It is also about how, in the aftermath of Jesus' failure to establish God's reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted not only Jesus' mission and identity, but also the very nature and definition of the Jewish messiah." [Aslan, Reza. Zealot, Introduction p. xxx. (New York: Random House, 2013)]
According to Aslan, when these facts are combined by what we know of the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived and a lot about this is known thanks to the Romans, the Jesus that emerges is not the gentle shepherd of the early Christian community but a zealous revolutionary swept up in the turmoil of the first -century Palestine.
To justify this belief Aslan points out that:
1. Crucifixion was a punishment Rome used almost completely for the crime of sedition. The plaque hung on the cross stating "King of the Jews" was like plaques hung on all the other crosses showing the crime for which he was executed. The crime was striving for kingly rule or treason. This was the same crime that all the other messianic aspirants of the time had been executed for.
2. The men on each side of Jesus were in Greek called lestai translated into English as "thieves" but which actually means "bandits" and was the most common Roman word for an insurrectionist or rebel.
Aslan states that the above image of the crucifixion should cast doubt on the Gospel portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace separated from the political upheavals of his time. The term "Kingdom of God" would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome. The notion that someone talking about "Kingdom of God" could be uninvolved in the revolutionary forces that gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.
He next considers the question of why the gospel writers went to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of Jesus' message and movement.
It is necessary to realize that almost every gospel story written regarding the life and mission of Jesus was written after the Jewish rebellion in 66 C.E. against Rome. These rebels somehow managed to take the Holy Land away from the Romans for four years until the Romans returned in 70 C.E. The soldiers destroyed everyone they reached who was in their path and set fire to the Temple. Everything burned. Josephus wrote that there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. According to Aslan tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered and the rest were taken from the city in chains.
Aslan believes that there was a spiritual trauma suffered by the Jews because of the above. They were exiled from the promised land and forced to live as outcasts among the pagans.
The rabbis deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism which had caused the war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in Jewish life. Rabbinic Judaism emerged.
According to Aslan, the Christians also felt a need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal causing the sacking of Jerusalem not only to protect themselves from the wrath of Rome but because, with the Jewish religion becoming pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church's evangelism.
So a long process of transforming Jesus from a Jewish nationalist into a spiritual leader having no interest in earthy matters began. The Romans could accept such a Jesus.
After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and Jerusalem destroyed what remained of the Jerusalem assembly dispersed and Paul took over the Christian community. Except for a hypothetical work known as the Q document the only literature about Jesus existing in 70 C.E. were letters of Paul in circulation from 50 C.E. These were letters of Paul to the Christian communities left known as the Diaspora communities. Without the assembly in Jerusalem to guide these communities the movement's connection to Judaism was broken. Paul became the person by which a new generation was introduced to Jesus the Christ.
According to Aslan there is a trace of Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew but the gospel of Luke which was written by one of the followers of Paul shows the dominance of Paul and the gospel of John is Paul's theology in narrative form.
In 398 C.E., according to legend, a council in the city of Hippo Regius gathered to canonize what was to become the New Testament. They chose, according to Aslan:
1. One letter from James, the brother and successor of Jesus.
2. Two letters from Peter, the chief apostle and first among the Twelve.
3. Three letters from John, the beloved disciple and pillar of the church.
4. Fourteen letters from Paul, the deviant and outcast who had been rejected and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem.
Aslan states that more than half of the twenty-seven books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul.
Aslan does not consider the above surprising because after Jerusalem was destroyed Christianity was almost exclusively a gentile religion which needed a gentile theology. Aslan believes that is what Paul provided.
The choice was between the vision of James of a Jewish religion following the Law of Moses coming from a Jewish nationalist who fought Rome, and Paul's vision of a Roman religion divorced from Jewish provincialism and requiring nothing for salvation but a belief in Christ. It was not difficult for second and third generations of Jesus' followers to make this choice.
In Alan's words: "Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth-Jesus the man-is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in." (Aslan, Reza. Zealot. New York: Random House, 2013 Page 216.)
I believe that Aslan has accomplished his goal of presenting the Historical Jesus in the context of the times in which he lived. He has referenced more than one hundred twenty seven books by various scholars in support of or against his views and articles by more than forty-one different scholars.
The book is highly readable by non-scholars as well as by scholars which accounts for Aslan's previous and current success as a best selling author and I do not hesitate to recommend this book to all thinking persons.
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Worth every penny
Even though I’m a Christian, I have to admire that I love and admire Reza Aslan’s work. This book is a must read for everyone who is seriously studying Jesus and would like to know the tipe of live, town and job as He grows.The best is the background cultural and historical context Reza covers on the book.Totally recommended, even though there are very debatable affirmations Reza makes.Loved it
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