At first blush, Reza Aslan – an Iranian émigré turned Born Again Christian turned Shia Muslim Creative Writing professor – isn’t the ideal candidate to write an historical narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. But he does it rather well, at least from my rather uninformed perspective.
Aslan’s central thesis in “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” is that modern Christianity and the associated story of Jesus bears little resemblance to the real Jesus – or what we know about the real Jesus – and that Jesus likely would be shocked and deeply disappointed to learn that Christianity today is a separate religion. I found the author’s wholesale dismantling of the traditional story of Jesus to be controversial, to say the least. In a thoughtful, but lukewarm review in the New York Times, Yale University religious studies professor Dale Martins summarizes Aslan’s argument this way: “Jesus was born in Nazareth and grew up a poor laborer. He was a disciple of John the Baptist until John’s arrest. Like John, Jesus preached the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God, which would be an earthly, political state ruled by God or his anointed, a messiah. Jesus never intended to found a church, much less a new religion. He was loyal to the law of Moses as he interpreted it. Jesus opposed not only the Roman overlords…but also their representatives in Palestine: the Temple priests, the wealthy Jewish aristocracy, the Herodian elite.”
To my surprise, Professor Martins characterizes this version of events as “not as startling, original or ‘entirely new’ as the book’s publicity claims… ‘Zealot’ is not innovative or original scholarship, but it makes an entertaining read. It is also a serious presentation of one plausible portrait of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.” I’m guessing that the nuns who taught me CCD many years ago would beg to differ.
What I loved about this book is how Aslan nests the story of Jesus into that of the early Roman Empire, a subject I happen to know far better than the Bible. First century Judea is described as a seething cauldron of revolt and social unrest. Rome took over in 63 B.C. but direct political control was relatively recent, 6 A.D . They secured their hold on the conquered land as they often did, by co-opting and coercing the indigenous leadership class, in this case the High Priests of the cultish Jewish religion, which ruled over the Temple in Jerusalem, the Holiest of Holies for the Jews. Here, immense tithes were paid and animals slaughtered for sacrifice by the thousands. But outside of Jerusalem and in the countryside of Galilee the mostly indigent, illiterate, pious subsistence farmers pulsed with insurrection against the Romans and the quisling Priesthood. Scores of itinerant preachers and miracle workers and would-be prophets wandered the roads and villages curing the sick and foretelling the coming Kingdom of God. Thus, as Aslan tells the story, Jesus of Nazareth was just one among countless others telling the same story – and usually with the same end result: crucifixion by the Roman authorities for the crime of sedition (attempting to overthrow Roman authority). After all, Aslan claims, “The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution, plain and simple.” The story of Jesus presented in “Zealot” is much more like a first century Jewish Che Guevara than that of a divine prophet preaching redemption in the afterlife by faith in the one True God. How can such a radical reinterpretation of history be explained? Aslan cites two reasons, primarily.
First, by 70 A.D. (i.e. before the Gospels of the New Testament were written) the Jewish faith had become a pariah. On Yom Kippur in 56 A.D. the High Priest of Jerusalem, Jonathan of Ananus, was assassinated by Jewish radicals within the walls of the Temple. Order was crumbling; the mighty Romans losing their grip. In 66 A.D. the last Roman governor that Judea would know took the fateful step of confiscating money from the Temple for unpaid taxes. The priests responded by ceasing to perform sacrifices daily to the Roman Emperor, an act that was interpreted as a declaration of independence. Jewish radicals then burnt the city archives thus wiping out any record of wealth and debt. Revolution was at hand. The inevitable Roman response was delayed by events at home. Nero had committed suicide and the local Roman commander in Judea, Vespasian, returned to seize the emperorship. He then returned to Jerusalem and by 70 A.D. had essentially wiped Judea off the map. The Temple was razed, Jerusalem was burned, the Jews dispersed around the empire, and the last hold outs, the zealots at Masada, destroyed by mass suicide.
It is from this perspective of complete and utter destruction of the Jewish theocratic state founded at the Temple in Jerusalem that the early story of Christianity must be understood, Aslan writes. The real Jesus of Nazareth, was, according to Aslan, first and foremost a Jew who prophesized that the Kingdom of God was coming, not at some undefined future point, but any day, and that he would be the messiah who would rule on earth. The author notes that there were many interpretations of the messiah in first century Judea, but this one – the salvation of the Jews and the establishment of the rule of God on earth — was the most common and familiar. When Jesus’s prophecies were demonstrated to be so clearly false and when the Jewish religion became something dangerous to be associated with, the early followers of the movement established in his name began to re-write history, Aslan says. No one was more critical in this historical revisionism than Paul, the former Jewish Pharisee who never once met Jesus, but who gladly witnessed the death by stoning of the first martyr in his name, Stephen, in Jerusalem in 34 A.D. According to the author, it is Paul’s interpretation of Jesus that forms the foundation of Christianity as we know it today, from Roman Catholic to Southern Baptist and everything in between.
The true leader of the Jewish sect movement inspired by Jesus was his younger brother, James, a resident of Jerusalem and known widely as “The Just One” for his extreme piety and strict observation of Jewish law and customs. He and the other apostles focused their evangelism on fellow Jews, but won few converts, mainly because the messiah in Jewish tradition was not captured and killed, but was victorious and ruled on earth. Thus, the early Christian movement made in-roads and grew fastest among the gentile communities in the Levant but distant from Jerusalem, precisely the audience that Paul targeted despite the protestations of James and the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, which “viewed Paul with wariness and suspicion.” Paul was called back to Jerusalem to answer for his teachings. “Put simply, Paul [viewed observance of Jewish law and traditions] as irrelevant to salvation, while James [viewed] them as a requirement for belief in Jesus as Christ.”
After 70 A.D., Paul and those who followed him “…gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in earthly matter.” With James dead (executed in 62 A.D.), the Temple and Jerusalem a smoldering ruins, and the Jewish religion made a pariah, “The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make.”
The denouement came in Nicea in 328 A.D. as Christianity emerged as the religion of Constantine and thus the Roman Empire. Differences over opinion had to be settled. A complete story told. The end result was the New Testament that we know today. Aslan highlights the “…rather remarkable fact [that] practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen (the first Christian martyr) and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive.” Moreover, “more than half of the twenty-seven books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul…the deviant and outcast who was rejected and scorned by the [early Christian] leaders in Jerusalem.”
The story this New Testament told is the story that captured the heart of a young, agnostic Iranian émigré several decades ago. It is the story of Jesus that most Christians adhere to today. It is the story that Paul created. In Aslan’s own powerful words: “Two thousand years ago…in an ancient land called Galilee, the God of heaven and earth was born in the form of a helpless child. The child grew into a blameless man. The man became the Christ, the savior of humanity. Through his words and miraculous deeds, he challenged the Jews, who thought they were the chosen of God, and in return the Jews had him nailed to a cross. Though he could have saved himself from that gruesome death, he freely chose to die. His death was the point of it all, for his sacrifice freed us all form the burden of our sins. But the story did not end there, because three days later, he rose again, exalted and divine, so that now, all who believe in him and accept him into their hearts will also never die, but have eternal life.”
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