Some Thoughts on Borg and Crossan's Use of the Word Parable in The First Christmas

The Sunday morning adult ed group at Monroe Congregational UCC is reading the book The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.  In that book Borg and Crossan call the birth stories in Matthew and Luke parables.  I disagree that they are parables.  What they are is myths, in the technical meaning of that term.  Here are some thoughts on that issue that I've written for the Sunday morning group.

Some Thoughts on Borg’s and Crossan’s Use of Parable

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The First Christmas

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson, Co-Pastor

In their book The First Christmas Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan say that the birth stories in Matthew and Luke are “parables.”  They want us to understand them as parables. They quite correctly define the term parable and refer to the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels that we have always called parables. A parable is basically a story told to make a point, and it has other characteristics as well as we’ll see. The two birth stories in the Gospels are clearly told to make points, so Borg and Crossan teach us to understand them as parables. I disagree. The birth stories aren’t parables, they’re myths. Let me explain.

Jesus taught mostly in parables. At least, that is, in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) he taught mostly in parables. We all know the most famous parables of course. There’s the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke. There are parables about workers in the field, about unjust stewards, about a shepherd looking for a lost sheep and a woman looking for a lost coin, and many, many other parables as well. But just what is a parable? We can’t evaluate the claim that the birth stories are parables without addressing that question.

The first thing to notice about the parables in the Gospels is that they are all stories that Jesus tells. The Gospel writer doesn’t tell them. No character in the Gospel other than Jesus tells them. In the Synoptic Gospels the parable is Jesus’ primary teaching tool. It isn’t something that otherwise appears in the Gospels. That’s the first characteristic of a Gospel parable. Jesus tells it.

Next, a parable is a story told to make a point, as Borg and Crossan correctly say. Indeed. Jesus doesn’t tell parables to entertain, although at least some of them are quite entertaining. Jesus may have been a master storyteller, but telling stories wasn’t for him an end in itself. His stories all have the purpose of revealing some truth to Jesus’ audience. It’s almost always a subversive, even revolutionary truth, but the important point for our purposes is that Jesus’ parables always reveal some truth. They invite Jesus’ listeners into some truth. They invite people to enter into their story to discern the story’s truth for themselves. A parable is then a story that Jesus tells to make some point.

The parables of Jesus are stories that Jesus tells to make a point, but it seems to me that there is more to them being parables than merely that they are stories told to make a point. For one thing, the parables are all short. The longest of them is probably the Prodigal Son, and it takes up a total of 21 verses, Luke 15:11-32. Many of them are much shorter than that. The Parable of the Mustard Seed in Mark, for example, is only 3 verses long. Mark 4:30-32. The famous Parable of the Sower, the one about sown seed falling on different types of ground, is more complex than the one about the mustard seed, but it is only 9 verses long. Mark 4:1-9. So parables are short. They are precisely short sayings or stories, not long narrative accounts.

Moreover, most of the parables of Jesus are either clearly identified as parables (either at the beginning of the parable or somewhere else in the text) or are clearly parables because of their context or because of their content. Often the context is Jesus clearly telling stories to a crowd of people. Thus at Mark 4:2, at the beginning of a series of short stories that Jesus tells, we read “He began to teach them many things in parables….”  The stories that follow don’t say again that they are parables, but at the end of the series of stories Mark says “With many such parables he spoke the word them….”  Mark 4:33. The Parable of the Good Samaritan doesn’t call itself a parable, but it is perfectly clear in the text that Jesus is telling a story he’s made up to make a point, not that he is telling his audience about historical characters and events. Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan as the answer to a question about who one’s neighbor is. Luke 10:25-30. It’s clear from the context that he’s telling a story not relating supposed facts. The Parable of the Prodigal Son doesn’t use the word parable in that parable itself, but it is the third in a series of three stories that begins at Luke 15:1 with people grumbling about Jesus. The text then says “So he told them this parable….”  Luke 15:3. The Parable of the Lost Sheep immediately follows; but it is clear that all three stories that follow, including the Prodigal Son, are parables. In the Gospels, then, a parable is a story (not a history) that Jesus tells, that he tells to make a point, that is short, and that is clearly a parable from the text or its context.

The birth stories in Matthew and Luke fit only one of these four characteristics of a parable. They are indeed stories told to make a point, or several points. They are not history, they are stories. They do indeed have that characteristic in common with parables. To that extent, but only to that extent, Borg and Crossan are correct in calling the stories parables.

The birth stories fail, however, to meet our other three characteristics of a parable. First of all, Jesus doesn’t tell them. Of course other ancient preachers and teachers used the parable as a device, but in the Gospels only Jesus does that; and he doesn’t do it with the birth stories. As the stories are told, of course, Jesus appears in them as a newborn infant who could hardly be the narrator of the story. I suppose the Evangelists could have written the stories as Jesus speaking of the circumstances of his birth after he had grown to an age when he could have done that, but they didn’t. That Jesus doesn’t tell the stories is our first clue that they aren’t parables.

Next, the birth stories aren’t short, or at least by the standard of the Gospels they aren’t short. Matthew’s birth story takes up two full chapters and consists of 48 verses. Luke’s stories of Jesus’ birth and youth also take up two full chapters and consist of 132 verses. Thus, Matthew’s birth story has more than twice the number of verses of the Prodigal Son, and Luke’s story has more than four times the number of verses in that parable. The Gospels’ birth stories don’t fit the characteristic of a parable that it be short. They are rather relatively long narratives. That’s our second clue that they aren’t parables.

Finally, it does not appear from the texts of the birth stories themselves or from their context that they are parables. Matthew’s story begins with a long genealogy at Matthew 1:2. Its introductory language at Matthew 1:1 just reads “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”  When Matthew is done with his genealogy he just says “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”  Matthew 1:18a. He doesn’t say “Now here’s a parable about Jesus’ birth,” nor does he use any other language or context to suggest that what follows is a parable. Luke’s stories of the birth of Jesus and of John the Baptist which, as we have seen, he tightly intertwines, begins with what sounds like a factual statement:  “In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah….”  Luke 1:5a. When he gets to the Annunciation of the coming birth of Jesus Luke continues in this factually sounding voice:  “In the sixth month and angel Gabriel we sent by God to a town in Galilee, called Nazareth.”  Luke 1:26. As in Matthew there is no indication in the text or its context that what follows is supposed to be a parable.

So the stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke aren’t parables. It seems perfectly obvious to me that they aren’t parables and that parable is not a particularly useful concept for understanding them. Yes, it’s better than insisting on them as factual, historical or biographical accounts. They aren’t parables, but they aren’t factual accounts either. Parable is at least a non-literal category, and as such it represents an improvement over the way people understand the stories as history or biography. Still. the birth stories in Matthew and Luke aren’t parables.

So if they aren’t parables, why do Borg and Crossan call them parables?  I of course have never spoken with either of them about this issue, so I can only speculate. We have what they say in their book in defense of calling the stories parables, but if that defense isn’t convincing (which it isn’t) is there something else going on in their calling the stories parables?  I think that there is. I think Borg and Crossan call the birth stories parables rather than calling them what they really are because they know that a great many people react the way many of you do when you hear a Bible story called what it really is. What these stories of Jesus’ birth really are is myths. They are myths in the technical meaning of that word that I have tried so hard to teach you over the years. Well, some of you still resist the term; so here goes one more attempt to explain it, this time in the context of the birth stories of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.

As I’ve said so many times, I do not mean by myth what our popular culture means by myth. Sadly, the word myth has come to mean something that people think is factually true that isn’t factually true. When people say “That’s a myth” they mean that while someone might think it is true it isn’t true. I’ll say again. I’ll say ‘til I’m blue in the face. I may well say with my dying breath:  That’s not what I mean by myth!  That’s not what theologians mean by myth. It’s not what serious students of human culture mean by myth. When I say that the Gospels’ stories of Jesus’ birth are myths I do not mean that though many people think that they are factually true they are actually not true. That’s not what I mean!  Please get it. That’s not what I mean. Here, once again, is what I do mean by calling these Bible stories myths.

In technical usage a myth is a story about the gods or about God that has the function of conveying what the story teller believes to be a truth about the gods or about God and that functions further to connect the listener (and the teller) with the gods or with God. For a fuller discussion of the meaning of the word myth (and of the closely related word symbol, a myth being a story that functions as a symbol) please see either Chapter 3 of my Liberating Christianity or Chapter 3 of Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith. A myth may be true, but it is never factually true. Because we are all children of the Enlightenment we tend to be what Huston Smith called fact fundamentalists. That means that we think that if something isn’t factually true it isn’t true at all. Wrong! Myths convey truth, they just don’t necessarily contain factual truth. They invite us into truth. They seek to draw us beyond and out of ourselves into a truth to which they can point but which they can never contain or fully define. Myths speak allegorical truth (indeed it would be better to call the birth stories allegories than to call them parables, but what they really are is myths). They speak what sound like facts, but the elements of the story aren’t important as facts. Indeed, for the most part they aren’t facts. A myth may contain facts. The Gospel stories of Jesus’ Crucifixion are myths that are firmly grounded upon a historical fact, a fact of which they of course speak. The birth stories are grounded in the fact that a man named Jesus of Nazareth was born. A myth may contain factually correct statements, although it doesn’t have to. Even if the myth does contain historical facts however the facts aren’t what matter in themselves. What matters is the truth to which the myth, with its facts and non-facts alike, points.

The stories of Jesus birth in Matthew and Luke are myths in this sense. They are stories about God and about Jesus, about God’s relationship to Jesus and Jesus’ relationship to God. They are stories about who Jesus is for us. They point to his special, intimate relationship with God, not as a fact but as something that the early Christians experienced and that the birth stories invite us to experience. Matthew’s story points to the truth of Jesus as a new Moses. Luke’s story points to the truth of Jesus as good news for the poor. Both stories point to other truths as well.

They birth stories are myths. They aren’t Christological essays. People like me may be given to writing Christological essays. The Evangelists weren’t. They were given to telling stories. They conveyed truth not the way we children of the Enlightenment do, they told truth by telling stories. Because those stories communicate divine truth to us they are myths. They are not parables, although they do have in common with parables that they are non-literal conveyers of truth. They are myths. That doesn’t mean they aren’t true. They are for us profoundly true, they just aren’t factually true. It’s not my fault that Borg and Crossan are so intent on gaining a mass popular audience and so afraid of a popular reaction against the term for what these stories really are that they won’t call these stories myths. That, I suspect is what’s going on in their use of the term parable rather than the term myth. Yet myth is what these stories are. That doesn’t mean they aren’t true, it means that they are not factually true but are true in much more profound and powerful ways than mere facts can be true. So I will call them myths. I hope that that’s what you will call them too.

Some Concluding Thoughts on Reza Aslan's Zealot

Some Concluding Thoughts on Reza Alan's Zealot

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

September, 2013

 

We have decided not to continuing going through this book chapter by chapter but to spend just one more Sunday morning on it, then move on.  Here are some of my concluding remarks on the book.

 

Reza Aslan’s book Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth was, to me, a major disappointment.  I consider its scholarship to be shoddy, its argument amazingly weak, and its major conclusion about Jesus demonstrably wrong.  That major conclusion is that Jesus was essentially nothing but another in a long series of failed would-be messiahs who led popular movements, or armies, against Rome whom the Romans simply executed and were rid of.  Of course Aslan has to acknowledge that Jesus’ movement didn’t die with him, for it didn’t.  Still, Aslan’s major effort in the book is to present a Jesus who is essentially the opposite of the Jesus of the Gospels.  The Jesus of the Gospels is nonviolent.  He leads a nonviolent movement.  He preaches nonviolence.  He forbids his followers to use violence even to try to save his life.  Aslan acknowledges that Jesus was a healer, saying that the major difference between him and other healers of his time was that he didn’t charge for his services.  He acknowledges that something happened after Jesus was crucified that caused his followers to say that he had risen from the dead, although his discussion of the Resurrection is cursory at best.  Yet for Aslan Jesus is just another would-be messiah whom the Romans crucified.  I don’t expect Aslan to accept Jesus as the messiah.  After all, Aslan is Muslim.  That of course if fine with me.  I have no problem with a Muslim writing about Jesus.  I do have a problem, a big problem, with shoddy scholarship and sloppy reasoning.  Zealot is overflowing with both.  I have written previously in these notes about some of my problems with Aslan’s methodology.  Here I’ll just recap what I think his major argument is and why I think it is wrong. 

Aslan spends much of the book not on Jesus but on the socio-economic-political-cultural conditions of Palestine before Jesus, during Jesus’ life, and after Jesus’ death.  Some of that information is interesting and useful.  I think readers, including Christians, can benefit from a better understanding of the context in which Jesus lived than most actually have.  We so tend to think of Jesus as God and as universal that we forget how important his actual life context was to understanding what he said and did.  For Aslan that context was the context of revolution, revolution against Roman occupation and against the upper elite of the Jews, including the Temple authorities, who accepted Roman occupation and collaborated with it.  Aslan is correct that there were several different men before, during, and after Jesus’ time who led messianic movements that promised the coming of the Kingdom of God and an end to the Romans.  He correctly recounts the rebellion that broke out against Rome after the death of the Roman’s puppet king Herod the Great in 4 BCE.  He writes correctly of how the Romans leveled Sepphoris, the Hellenistic city a short distance from Nazareth that the Gospels never mention, as they crushed that rebellion.  He tells of the corruption of the Temple authorities, of how the Romans appointed the high priest, and how the priests worked with the Romans to maintain order.  He tells the story of the zealots of the early first century CE.  He tells of the Sicarii, the group of Jewish assassins in the period leading up to the rebellion of 66 CE.  He gives us the story of that rebellion, how it initially succeeded in driving the Romans out of Jerusalem and then, in 70 CE, was brutally crushed by the Roman army, which leveled the city and destroyed the Temple.  All of that is interesting and useful information.

Aslan speaks at some length about the personal and family background of Jesus of Nazareth.  He describes the poverty of tiny little Nazareth and the hard life of its people.  He speculates, along with many more reputable scholars, that Jesus, assuming he really was a “tekton,” a carpenter or (more likely) stonemason, probably did most of his work in Sepphoris.  He concludes that Jesus was almost certainly illiterate even in his native language Aramaic and certainly in Hebrew and Greek.  He accepts the Gospels’ mention of Jesus’ brothers and sisters as historical and speculates that Jesus might have been married because it would have been unusual in the extreme for a young Jewish man of Jesus’ time and place not to have been married.  In all of that Aslan is in step with other historians who have written about Jesus and his historical context.

Aslan accepts the Gospels’ account that Jesus led a popular movement in Galilee and that he then led his followers to Jerusalem.  He takes the Gospels’ story of Jesus riding into the city on a donkey at face value and says, probably correctly, that in doing it Jesus was proclaiming himself to be the king of the Jews.  He takes Jesus’ action in the Temple as historical, again probably correctly.  He correctly points out that it was the Romans who crucified Jesus not the Jews, although the Temple authorities probably cooperated with them in the deed or at least were happy that the Romans got rid of Jesus for them.  So Aslan gives us a picture of Jesus as essentially an illiterate, uneducated rube from remote Galilee who proclaimed himself to be the messiah, led a popular movement, and was executed for doing so.  Aslan stresses the similarity of this portrait of Jesus to the stories of the other self-proclaimed messiahs of the time, especially Judas the Galilean, whom the Romans also executed for leading a popular resistance movements and claiming to be the king of the Jews.

Aslan then makes the major assumption of the book.  He seems simply to assume that because he sees similarities between Jesus’ story and the stories of the other movement leaders of the day that Jesus was just like they were.  His argument, such as it is, seems to go like this:  Judas the Galilean (the leader of the rebellion in Galilee in 4 BCE) and other movement leaders led violent movements against Rome.  They raised armies.   They saw the Kingdom of God and the defeat of the Romans coming as a result of the violent zeal of God’s people in the same way that the violent zeal of the early Israelites had led to the initial conquest of Canaan.  Jesus also led a popular movement with anti-Roman components.  Therefore, Aslan concludes, Jesus, just like the others, was violent.  The movement he led was violent.  His followers were an army, which Aslan actually calls them on at least one occasion.  Anti-Roman, messianic violence was in the air in Jesus’ time, so Jesus must have been violent and must have led a violent movement.  I have commented before on how Aslan badly misconstrues one passage from Luke to support this theory, and I won’t repeat that analysis here.  I’ll just say that as nearly as I can tell Aslan’s argument really boils down to saying violence was in the air, there were other violent movement leaders, Jesus was a movement leader, therefore Jesus advocated zealous violence against Rome and the Romans’ Jewish collaborators in the same way the others did.

That argument is one of the weakest historical arguments I have ever heard seriously advanced by an author people take seriously.  It’s like saying that because I live in a place that consistently elects extremely conservative Republicans to public office I must be an extremely conservative Republican, which I assure you I am not.  Aslan never acknowledges what I have advanced as at least an equally plausible scenario for Jesus.  Aslan says that Jesus remembered Judas the Galilean and therefore was like Judas the Galilean.  I’ve said this before in these notes, but it’s so important that I’ll say it again.  Isn’t it at least equally likely, indeed actually more likely, that Jesus, knowing about Judas the Galilean and the tragic consequences of his violent rebellion against Rome, would have turned to an alternative vision of how to combat Rome?  Isn’t it at least equally likely that he would have said Judas got it all wrong, and look what happened?  Might he not have said we need a better vision?  We need a better way?  Oppose Rome, yes.  Oppose oppression, yes.  Stand up for the poor and the marginalized, yes.  But do it nonviolently!  Focus not on violent opposition to Rome and its Jewish henchmen but on transformation of the human heart from the ways of the world, from the ways of empire, to the ways of God.  Exorcize the demon Legion not by fighting it with swords but by cleansing our hearts of its corrupting influence. 

Then there’s an argument for the nonviolence of Jesus from John Dominic Crossan of which Aslan seems to be entirely unaware.  Crossan, a truly respectable historian of early Christianity, says that the Romans had a clear way of dealing with opposition movements.  They killed the movement’s leader.  Then, Crossan says, if the movement had been violent the Romans killed everyone who had been part of it.  If, however, the movement had been nonviolent they did not go after everyone in the movement but left them alone.  The Romans did not go after Jesus’ followers when they killed Jesus.  Roman persecution of Christians, such as it ever was, came decades later.  Crossan argues that this fact more than any other proves that the Jesus movement had been nonviolent.  Makes sense to me.  Besides, we know that the early Jesus movement was radically nonviolent.  Where did they learn that nonviolence?  From Jesus of course.

Now, you may say that it sounds like I’m speculating here as much as Aslan does; but consider this.  That alternative vision I just outlined is the vision of the Jesus of the Gospels.  In the Gospels, for all of the differences between them, Jesus calls us to a new way of being.  He calls us to justice, compassion, forgiveness, and peace.  He calls us to advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves.  He calls us to lives of prayer not lives of violence.  He calls us to see the face of God in the poor, the ill, the hungry, the prisoner.  Why should we assume that Jesus was radically different from that picture?  We shouldn’t.  There’s no reason to, and Aslan doesn’t give us one.

Aslan of course recognizes that on the whole, despite his misreading of the passage in Luke in which Jesus tells the disciples to buy swords, that the Jesus of the Gospels is a Jesus of peace not of war.  He quite wrongly says that that Jesus isn’t concerned with the affairs of the world at all, but at least he gets it that the Gospels give us a very different Jesus than the one he gives us.  He says that’s because the Gospels were all written after the year 70, the year in which the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and drove all the Jews out of what had been their major city and the seat of their faith.  He says that the Gospel writers radically changed who Jesus actually had been when they wrote their Gospels after the crushing defeat of a violent movement against Rome.  While I am convinced that Aslan is wrong about that, this claim is worthy of some consideration.

It is of course true that all of the canonical Gospels were written after the year 70.  Not all of the New Testament texts were written that late of course.  The authentic letters of Paul are earlier.  Matthew and Luke are later, but they contain Q material that is perhaps as old as Paul’s letters.  The first of the Gospels to be written is Mark, and Mark almost surely dates from a short time after 70 CE.  It is also true that the Gospels were not written to be historical documents in our sense of history.  That is, they are more faith proclamations than they are factual reports.  Surely not everything in them is factual.  People have tried for at least a couple of hundred years to get behind the Gospels to the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, as I talked about in my first sets of notes on this book.  Nonetheless, the Gospels are the only sources on Jesus we have; and the Gospels do not give us Aslan’s Jesus.  They give us a Jesus radically different from Aslan’s Jesus.  Aslan wants us to believe that the Gospel writers simply made that Jesus up, but does that conclusion actually make any sense?

I don’t think so.  Consider this question that Aslan never adequately asks much less answers.  If Jesus was just another failed messiah, why didn’t his movement die with him like the movements of all of the others did?  That it didn’t is undeniable historical fact.  Surely the event that we know as the Resurrection, whatever it actually was as a factual matter, is a big part of the answer to that question, yet I think there is more.  I think the Jesus movement didn’t die with him precisely because Jesus had given people a different vision, a better vision, a new vision of God and of human life.  Jesus taught them peace and justice because the God he knew and taught to us is a God of peace and justice.  Jesus taught them nonviolence because the God he knew and taught to us is a nonviolent God.  Jesus’ movement didn’t die with him because his message was so compelling, so new, so vital that it simply couldn’t die with him.  His followers had found new life in him.  His followers had found a new, better, deeper, truer vision of God in him.  The followers of Judas the Galilean or any of the other failed messiahs of the era found no such thing in their leaders.  All they found was someone who said he’d get rid of the Romans.  When he didn’t get rid of the Romans they all went home.  Jesus’ followers didn’t go home.  They stayed together.  They continued to preach the wisdom they had learned from him.  So I don’t believe that the Gospel writers simply turned a violent Jesus into a nonviolent one.  Yes, they mixed their faith in the risen Christ into their accounts of the man Jesus of Nazareth.  That doesn’t mean that everything they said about him was wrong.  It doesn’t mean that they just made their Jesus up.  It doesn’t mean that their nonviolent Jesus had actually been violent.

Now I need some full disclosure here.  Jesus’ nonviolence is really, really important to me.  It still is what it was two thousand years ago, a new vision that the world desperately needs.  I don’t want the historical Jesus to have been violent.  That’s part of why I react to strongly against this book.  Still, I think my criticisms of its methodology and argument are valid and not just my emotional reaction to the book.  I really don’t like its conclusions, but it really is a weak piece of scholarship and reasoning quite apart from my intense dislike of its thesis.

And here is perhaps the bottom line.  The only sources we have on Jesus are the Gospels.  There are non-canonical gospels of course, but they are mostly later and obviously less historical than the canonical Gospels, especially the Synoptic Gospels.  The Jesus we can know, love, follow, and believe in is the Jesus of the Gospels.  In the last line of his book Aslan says that the Jesus he give us is one who is “someone worth believing in.”  Wrong!  A failed, violent messiah is someone worth believing in?  I don’t think so.  I doubt that much of anyone thinks so.  The Jesus of peace, compassion, and justice that we can find in the Gospels, the Jesus who died for us and rose again, that is a Jesus worth believing in.  I wish Zealot were a better book.  I don’t mind if someone disagrees with me.  Still, the scholarship and the argument of this book are so weak that it really isn’t worth more of our time.

Notes to Chapter Four of Aslan's Zealot

Notes to Chapter Four of Reza Aslan’s Zealot

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

September, 2013

Chapter Four:  The Fourth Philosophy

By the term “The Fourth Philosophy” Aslan means revolutionary, anti-Roman zealotry, but he doesn’t start this chapter discussing that term.  He starts talking about Jesus’ family and early life.  That’s a bit problematic of course because we have essentially no sources on those subjects.  What Aslan gives, and what other scholars give as well, as Jesus’ family background and early life comes not from historical sources but from general knowledge about life in first century Palestine.

As far as we know Jesus learned the trade of “tekton,” the Greek word usually translated as “carpenter.”  Mark 6:3 calls Jesus a tekton, although that verse is the only place in the New Testament that says that he was one.  Despite the paucity of evidence essentially everyone assumes that that’s what Jesus was.  Although tekton is usually translated as “carpenter,” it actually means something more like “builder.”  Wood was scarce and expensive in first century Palestine.  It is unlikely that anyone in Nazareth actually make a living working with wood.  It is more likely that Jesus was more what we would call a stonemason, since all of the buildings in the area were made primarily of stone.  If Jesus actually was a tekton, Aslan says he would have “belonged to the lowest class of peasants in first-century Palestine, just above the indigent, the beggar, and the slave.”  A much more reliable source, John Dominic Crossan, says essentially the same thing about Jesus.  We tend to think of carpenters and stonemasons as skilled trades people who do complex work and make reasonably good money.  That wasn’t the case in Jesus’ time and place.  Trades people like a tekton were impoverished and barely able to survive on the meager income they could earn through their work.  Jesus was indeed from the poorest of the poor.  About that at least Aslan is correct.

Aslan says that Jesus was almost certainly uneducated and illiterate.  The stories of Jesus reading the scripture and arguing the finer points of the texts with scholars in Jerusalem—see Luke’s story of Jesus in the Temple at age twelve for example—are fictions the Gospel writers created decades after Jesus’ death.  Whether he was illiterate or not Jesus couldn’t have read scripture in the synagogue in Nazareth as Luke has him doing because there was no synagogue in Nazareth.  Jesus spoke Aramaic not Hebrew.  Aslan doesn’t explain it, but Aramaic was the common language of the people of Palestine in Jesus’ time.  It was (and is) a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew but distinctly different from Hebrew.  Aslan doesn’t say so, but by Jesus’ time Hebrew was a dead language used only in reading the scriptures, sort of like Latin was when the Catholic Church used it in the mass.  Aslan says that while he spoke Aramaic Jesus may have had a rudimentary knowledge of scriptural Hebrew that he would have learned not from studying Hebrew—there were no schools in Nazareth—but from hearing some of the biblical texts read in that language.  He may have had a smattering of the Greek language of the day, probably learned in Sepphoris and necessary to his work there.  Any education he had would have come from his family and would have focused heavily on the family’s trade, that of tekton. 

Let me add that scholars actually disagree about whether or not Jesus was illiterate and whether or not he knew biblical Hebrew.  Remember that the Gospels are the only things close to source materials that we have on the subject, so there’s not much we can really know.  Given the standards of the time and place in which Jesus was raised we’d expect him to be illiterate and not to know Hebrew.  The Gospels, however, present him as literate in Hebrew.  Was he?  There’s really no way to know, and, frankly, I don’t think it makes much difference.  Scholars likewise don’t really know if he knew any Greek.  The Gospels never tell of him speaking Greek, but if he worked in Sepphoris as everyone assumes he did he might have known some.  More than that we really cannot say, and, again, I don’t think it really matters.

We know that Jesus had brothers and sisters, or at least Aslan says that we know that.  The Gospels name four men as Jesus’ brothers.  They also say he had an unspecified number of sisters, but consistent with biblical practice it doesn’t name them.  We know that someone called “James the brother of the Lord” became the leader of the Christian movement in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death.  Roman Catholic doctrine insists that Jesus’ mother Mary remained a virgin all her life, a contention that assumes both Jesus’ virgin conception and that Mary never had any other children.  The Roman Catholic Church says that when the Gospels speak of Jesus’ brothers and sisters they really mean his cousins.  That doesn’t make much sense, and it’s compelled not by historical fact but by church doctrine; but never mind.  We know next to nothing about Jesus’ human father.  Matthew and Luke mention Mary’s husband Joseph in their birth narratives, although of course they deny that he was actually Jesus’ biological father.  Joseph is mentioned nowhere else in the New Testament, and he quickly disappears even from Matthew and Luke.  That one verse in Mark makes everyone assume that Jesus’ father was a tekton, but we don’t really know that either.

Aslan says that the tradition of Jesus’ virgin birth, which is really a tradition of his virgin conception, is an ancient one.  It is mentioned only in Matthew and Luke; but, Aslan says, because those two sources were written independently from each other but both have a virgin birth, the tradition of the virgin birth must be ancient.  Perhaps he’s right about that, but if it is so ancient why don’t our older sources like the authentic letters of Paul and the Gospel of Mark mention it?  More reliable scholars like Crossan and Borg have written at length about the meaning of the virgin birth, setting it in the context of imperial politics among other things and stressing its symbolic importance over its supposed factuality.  Aslan betrays no knowledge of their work. 

In this part of this chapter Aslan makes a huge mistake.  He says that Paul considered Jesus to have been literally God incarnate.  Wrong!  Paul really doesn’t consider Jesus to have been God incarnate.  For Paul Jesus was a man who was radically obedient to God and who God made God’s Son, raising him to power in heaven, upon his crucifixion, not before.  Aslan cites the kenosis hymn of Philippians 2 to support his wrong contention.  There Paul quotes what is almost certainly an older Christian hymn that says that Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and being born in human likeness.”  Philippians 2:6  That’s as close as Paul ever comes to saying that Jesus was God incarnate, but note that the passage says that Jesus gave up being God and became human (“taking the form of a slave, and being born in human likeness”).  Thus even in the kenosis hymn Jesus is human not divine while he is on earth.  Moreover, nowhere else in the authentic letters does Paul suggest that Jesus was God incarnate.  Aslan is simply and significantly wrong here.  This error is tangential to Aslan’s major thesis in the book, but it is one of many things in the book that cast significant doubt on his reliability as a biblical scholar.

So why do Matthew and Luke, but only they, say that Jesus’ birth was virginal?  Aslan suggests something that has been suggested for centuries, namely, that the story was concocted to counter claims that Jesus’ birth wasn’t virginal but illegitimate.  There are even hints in the Gospels that Matthew and Luke were trying to deny that rumor about him.  Again, Aslan betrays no knowledge of the scholarship on the issue of the virgin birth.  He says nothing about how that story relates to the Romans’ claim that Caesar was the child of a god, for example.  Aslan may have worked on this book for years as he apparently claims, but he sure missed a lot of relevant material.  At least, he never mentions that material.

There are some questions about Jesus’ marital status.  The Gospels never explicitly say he wasn’t married, but they never mention a wife or any children of his either.  Aslan says, as many others have, that it would have been unusual in the extreme for a young Jewish man of the time not to have been married.  That fact (and I think it is a fact) casts some doubt on the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as unmarried.  Still, it is striking that they never mention a wife or children.  Aslan doesn’t discuss the matter, but some theologians today, especially feminist theologians, conclude that he was in fact married, perhaps to Mary Magdalene.  It is also possible that Jesus had had a wife who had died by the time he began his public ministry and the Gospels just don’t bother to mention that fact.  Still, conclusions that have Jesus married at all sound like mere speculation to me.  We’re stuck with perhaps not really knowing but having to take the Gospels’ at face value and assuming that he was not married.  Does it really matter?  I don’t think so.

Continuing his brief account of Jesus’ probable early life Aslan notes that tiny, impoverished Nazareth could not have supported a family of tektons.  There was, however, a large city nearby that could have supported many of them, namely, Sepphoris.  Sepphoris is important to Aslan both because it is where Jesus probably did most of his work as a tekton and because of its role in the revolutionary history of Galilee.  Aslan makes Jesus out to have been a violent revolutionary (which I am absolutely convinced he was not), and Sepphoris plays quite a role in Aslan’s construction of that picture of Jesus.  Sepphoris was a large, wealthy, Hellenized (i.e., heavily Greek in culture) city a short distance from Nazareth.  Early in the first century CE Herod Antipas made it the capital of Galilee.  The city had rebelled against Rome on the death of Herod the Great, and the Romans had leveled it in retaliation.  Herod Antipas rebuilt it.  A bit more about that below.

Recall that Herod the Great (died 4 BCE) had engaged in massive public construction projects, principally the rebuilding of the Temple.  He had employed many thousands of workers in those projects.  When the projects were finished these men were left unemployed.  Aslan says that they became a “hotbed of revolutionary activity.”

Against that background, in the early first century CE, a movement arose that the historian Josephus called “the Fourth Philosophy.”  He probably called it “fourth” to distinguish it from three major sects of Judaism at the time, i.e., the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.  The fourth philosophy as an ideology (my term, not Aslan’s) was committed to freeing Palestine from foreign occupation and serving no master but God.  Aslan says that this belief was commonly called “zeal.”  Zeal refers to the zeal of the early Hebrew conquerors of Canaan.  Some, Aslan says, (but note, not all) adherents of the fourth philosophy resorted to acts of violence against the Romans and those Jews who willingly submitted to Rome.  These violent extremists were called “zealots.”  After the death of Herod the Great the zealots led a rebellion against Rome.  They objected particularly to Jews paying any tax to Rome.  Aslan says:  “If you thought it lawful to pay tribute to Caesar, then you were a traitor and apostate.  You deserved to die.”  Many people at the time, Aslan says, believed that the current age was coming to an end and that the Kingdom of God was at hand.  Aslan then insists that “God’s reign could only be ushered in by those with the zeal to fight for it.”  He at least strongly implies that that’s what pretty much everyone at the time thought.

The zealots were led by a man called Judas the Galilean.  The Romans killed him.  Then they leveled Sepphoris for having been part of his rebellion.  They slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery.  They crucified more than two thousand rebels.  Jesus almost certainly worked on Herod Antipas’ rebuilding of the city.  Aslan insists that Jesus would have known about Judas the Galilean and never forgotten him.

I need to comment here:  Zealot is of course the title of this book.  Aslan thinks that Jesus was one of the zealots, one of the violent extremists.  You are of course free to draw your own conclusion, but I am dead certain that Aslan is wrong about that.  Aslan thinks that because violent revolution was in the air during Jesus’ early life Jesus must have become a violent revolutionary.  He implies that his model was Judas the Galilean, the man who had led the rebellion that resulted in the leveling of Sepphoris and the slaughter of its inhabitants, but consider this other possibility.  Accept Aslan’s contention that Jesus knew about Judas the Galilean and what the Romans had done to him and his followers.  Accept Aslan’s contention that Jesus knew what had happened to Sepphoris and worked on its reconstruction.  Aslan implies that that knowledge made Jesus violent, but isn’t it more likely that that knowledge turned Jesus away from violence?  Jesus knew what violence against Rome had brought upon his people.  It brought massive death and destruction.  Jesus was as anti-Roman as anyone, that is, he was anti-empire although not against individual Roman people.  Aslan thinks the violence of his time made him violent.  I think it made him nonviolent.  I think that he developed a different way of resisting Rome, a way of creative nonviolence.  I’ve already spoken in these notes about the story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac as presenting a very different image of why Rome was a problem and how to deal with it than the one the violent revolutionaries had.  I am convinced that Aslan has just got Jesus wrong and that his scholarship and reasoning in support of his conclusion about Jesus are really weak.

Notes to Chapters Two and Three of Aslan' Zealot

Notes to Chapters Two and Three of Reza Aslan’s Zealot

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

September, 2013

Chapter Two

King of the Jews

Aslan begins Chapter Two by discussing the plight of the rural poor in Palestine in the first century BCE and describing how many of them had to move to the cities to look for work.  In Galilee the severe hardship under which the people lived produced some violence against Rome and the Jewish aristocracy.  Some people went around the countryside killing people.  The Romans called them “lestai.”  That word is usually translated as “bandits.”  Aslan says that they “represented the first stirrings of what would become a nationalist resistance movement against Roman occupation.”  The bandits themselves claimed to be God’s agents.  They “cloaked their leaders in the emblems of biblical kings and heroes and presented their actions as a prelude for the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth.”  Some of the bandit leaders proclaimed themselves to be the messiah.  Most people at the time believed that the messiah’s role would be to restore the Kingdom of David by making war on Rome.

Note here Aslan’s use of the term “nationalist” for these bandits, that is, for people who resorted to acts of violence against their oppressors.  His use of that term is at least somewhat problematic.  Nationalism as we know it is essentially a product of the nineteenth century in western Europe.  Nation as people’s primary concern really didn’t exist before then.  In the nineteenth century many nations in Europe, especially ethnic peoples who lived under the oppression of other people (Poles, Czechs, Serbians, the Irish, and others) or who did not live in an ethnically unified state (Germans, Italians) began to raise their national or ethnic identity as the primary part of their self identity.  Movements of national liberation or unification sprang up all over Europe.  Nationalism as we know it is a modern, western phenomenon.

Note what he says about the bandits’ self identity.  He says that they saw themselves a God’s agents.  Seeing oneself as doing God’s work and will is a very different think from seeing oneself as working for a nation.  Yes, the God of these Jews began in their history as the tribal god of the Hebrews; but since the late sixth century BCE the Jews had seen Yahweh as the one true, universal God of all creation.  Perhaps it’s a fine distinction, but opposing gentile occupation because it violates the will of God is a different thing from opposing Roman occupation because the Romans aren’t Jews.  Am I nit picking here?  Perhaps, but I think Aslan’s use of the term nationalist throughout this book is quite problematic.

In the 30s BCE Rome gave a man named Herod rule over Galilee.  He began a campaign against the bandits.  In 37 BCE Rome gave Herod Jerusalem as well and named him “King of the Jews.”  He was brutal but effective.  He brought stability to Judea.  He undertook large public building projects, the biggest of which was the expansion and rebuilding of the Temple.  All of his projects, however, were in the Greek style not the local style.  He put a Roman imperial eagle over the main entrance to the Temple and required the high priest to offer sacrifices to Caesar as “the Son of God.”  Aslan doesn’t say so, but “Son of God,” or perhaps more accurately “Son of the divine one” was a title the Roman Emperor claimed throughout the New Testamental period. 

Herod died in 4 BCE, the year most scholars think Jesus was born.  Rome divided his territory among his three sons.  Herod Antipas got Galilee.  Archelaus got Judea, Samaria, and a bit more.  A third son got the rest.  None of them was given the title King of the Jews.  After Herod, Aslan says, there was no King of the Jews.  He’s right to the extent that no one had that title; but of course Judea had a king, namely, the emperor in Rome.

Upon Herod’s death all hell broke loose in the territory he had ruled for Rome.  There were violent uprisings all over the place.  Eventually Rome sent in the troops to quiet things down.  Judea was placed under a Roman governor.  Aslan says that “Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.”  He also says that “These uprisings were no doubt fueled by the messianic expectations of the Jews.”  “No doubt”?  Sounds like speculation to me, and I’m not so sure that that speculation is necessarily correct.  A lot of pressure had built up under the grandiose and oppressive Herod, that particular Herod being known as Herod the Great.  Why isn’t the release of that pressure upon Herod’s death on its own enough to explain the violence that broke out?  Maybe some crackpot proclaimed himself messiah during that time, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who wanted a piece of the Romans and their Jewish collaborators was thinking in messianic terms.  Whenever you read an author saying things like “no doubt,” have your doubts about whatever it is you’re not supposed to have doubts about.

Chapter Three

You Know Where I Am From

Aslan starts this chapter with a description of tiny, impoverished, first century Nazareth.  There weren’t more than a hundred families there.  It was dirt poor and existed as a self-sufficient, subsistence level agricultural village.  It was “an inconsequential and utterly forgettable place.”  Aslan says, correctly, that it almost certainly was where Jesus was born.  He was known as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Nazarean, not Jesus of Bethlehem. 

So Aslan asks, appropriately, why Matthew and Luke, and in the New Testament only Matthew and Luke, insist that Jesus was born in Bethlehem?  To answer that question he spins a little fantasy off of one verse, John 7:42, in which someone in a crowd says that the messiah was to come from Bethlehem.  You have to read the verse from John to see that what Aslan says here isn’t actually in that verse.  I don’t mind people creating historical dramas based on scant evidence.  I do mind someone who presents himself as a scholar doing it without telling his readers that he’s doing it.

Declaring someone to be the messiah was an act of treason.  There were different understandings of the messiah among the populace, but most believed that he would be a descendant of King David.  He would restore Israel by defeating the Romans.  “To call Jesus messiah, therefore, is to place him inexorably upon a path…toward conflict, revolution, and war against the prevailing powers.”

And I say:  Whoa!  Hold on a minute.  Calling Jesus the messiah does that only if Jesus then fits himself into the popularly expected role.  But what if Jesus didn’t do that?  What if he saw messiahship differently?  What if he were a nonviolent messiah?  Crossan says that we know that Jesus was a nonviolent messiah because after the Romans executed him they didn’t come after his followers.  Crossan says that in cases like that of Jesus if the movement had been violent the Romans executed everyone involved.  If the movement were nonviolent they only killed the leader.  Crossan is a much better scholar than Aslan.  Crossan’s Jesus is nonviolent.  A nonviolent Jesus is of course is what Aslan wants to rule out, but bald statements about what being called the messiah meant don’t really get him where he wants to go.  Besides, do we really know that anyone called Jesus messiah during his lifetime?  Or that he ever called himself messiah?  I don’t think so.  The Gospel accounts on that issue just can’t be taken as factual.

Aslan does correctly say that the stuff in Matthew and Luke about Jesus being born in Bethlehem is late and clearly tied to the claim the Jesus is the messiah.  Matthew and Luke came up with “creative” solutions to the problem of a messiah from Nazareth when everyone knew the messiah would come from Bethlehem.  Aslan is quite correct here.  That’s exactly what Matthew and Luke did.  Aslan gives some of the details of the two birth stories and says that neither of them was ever intended to be taken factually.  I’m not sure how he claims to know that they weren’t intended to be taken factually.  They aren’t factual, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their authors didn’t intend them to be taken factually. 

It is common in scholarship today to say that taking things factually is only a modern phenomenon, a product of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.  I’m a lot less sure about that than many others.  Before the Enlightenment, it seems to me, nearly everyone took all of the biblical stories literally.  There were exceptions.  In the third century CE the church father Origen criticized people for taking the story of Adam and Eve literally for example.  Still, the revolutionary astronomers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, perhaps precursors of the scientific revolution but really working before it happened, got into trouble with Rome because their astronomy contradicted a literal reading of the Bible’s cosmology.  I frankly don’t think we know whether the biblical authors, including Matthew and Luke, intended their stories to be taken literally.  Whether they did or not, those stories certainly were taken literally.  Why else has there long been a church of the nativity in Bethlehem but none in Nazareth?

Bottom line of this chapter:  Jesus was from Nazareth not Bethlehem.  And all the people say “Duh!”  I suppose Aslan does still have to make that point, but for those of us who know Crossan and Borg it’s old news.

Notes to Chapter One of Aslan's Zealot

Notes to Chapter One of Reza Aslan’s Zealot

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

September, 2013

Aslan calls Chapter 1 of his book “A Hole In the Corner,” a line taken from an ancient quip by the Roman statesman Cicero about Jerusalem intended to indicate how remote and insignificant Palestine was within the huge Roman Empire.  Rome, he says (correctly) had ruled Jerusalem since 63 BCE.  He comments that by then Jerusalem was “recognized less for its beauty and grandeur than for the religious fervor of its troublesome population.”  A big part of Aslan’s thesis in this book, and a major reason why he concludes that Jesus was what he calls a zealot, is this religious fervor of the Jews under Roman occupation.  Please note:  This first chapter starts off about Jerusalem.  Jesus wasn’t from Jerusalem.  Galilee, where Jesus was from, also had a history of rebellion against Rome, but the last one had been crushed in 4 BCE, the year most scholars think Jesus was born.  As far as we know Jesus went to Jerusalem only once in his life, at what turned out to be the end of it.  So why Aslan starts with Jerusalem isn’t particularly clear.  To the Jews of course Jerusalem wasn’t insignificant at all.  Mixing his metaphors, Aslan says that to them Jerusalem was “the navel of the world, the axis of the universe.” 

Aslan then shifts from Jerusalem to Judea as a whole.  Jesus wasn’t from Judea either, but never mind.  The Jews, he says, knew Judea, loved it, and claimed all of it.  They claimed even more than Judea, however.  Aslan says (as usual without citing any sources) that they claimed Samaria, Galilee, and Idumea (Edom, located southeast of Judea).  They claimed that God had given them all of that land, but they ruled none of it in the first century CE.

Aslan really diminishes the international significance of Jerusalem in the ancient world.  In his review of its history of conquest by a succession of foreign empires he says that the Persians had allowed the Jews to return there from exile in Babylon in the sixth century BCE not because they respected the Jews or their faith (he calls it their cult) but because “they considered Jerusalem an irrelevant backwater of little interest or concern” to a huge empire like Persia.  Actually, that’s now what I have been taught about the Persians and the restoration after Persia defeated Babylon in 536 BCE.  Jerusalem actually sits on an important trade and military route between Mesopotamia and Egypt.  To control that route you had to control Jerusalem.  The Persians re-established Judah as a client state wholly subservient to them to act as a buffer between them and Egypt.  They seem to me not to have considered Jerusalem irrelevant, for in their world it truly was not.  That’s why it got conquered so often.

Aslan then notes the coming of Greek culture to Jerusalem with the armies of Alexander the Great after his defeat of Persia.  They were followed by Hellenistic (Greek) kings, ruling first from Egypt, then from Syria.  The Seleucid (Syrian) king Antiochus Epiphanes IV (although Aslan leaves off his number) tried to replace Judaism with Greek religion, thereby provoking the revolt of the Maccabees.  The Maccabees won Jerusalem from Seleucid control in 164 BCE and created the first independent Jewish state in many centuries.  Eventually, however, a civil war broke out between two brothers who both claimed the throne, and both sides appealed to Rome for help.  So in 63 BCE Rome came in and took Jerusalem for itself.

Judea (the Latin form of Judah) was never happy or particularly peaceful under Roman rule.  Rome put down a number of revolts, including the one in Galilee in 4 BCE.  In their attempt to rule the Jews, Aslan says, the Romans allied themselves with the landed Jewish aristocracy, most of whom were members of the priestly class.  They tied the temple in Jerusalem closely to themselves.  They took the power to appoint the high priest.  Aslan says that Rome “humored the Jewish cult,” allowing it to practice its rituals and festivals.  The Jews were even excused from emperor worship, the only people in the empire to gain that right.  In return the temple authorities had to offer an animal sacrifice for the emperor every day.

Aslan says that what Rome really didn’t get about the Jews was what he calls their “unfathomable superiority complex.”  Rome simply didn’t get how they could think that their tribal god was the one true God or how they could hold themselves apart from all other people.  A quick note on Aslan’s use of the term “cult.”  He uses it repeatedly when referring to the Jewish religion.  He may be using it in a technical sense as meaning the beliefs and practices of a religious system.  Be that as it may, the term cult seems to me immediately to cast Jewish religion into a negative light.  I wish he had used some other term.

Aslan doesn’t put it this way, but the Jews’ sense of superiority clashed with the Romans’ equally strong sense of superiority over all other people.  Rome was, after all, the mightiest empire the world had ever seen.  Aslan paints the Jews as pests who bothered the Romans but who weren’t really worth a lot of Rome’s time.  When Rome had to it swatted the pest and wondered why the Jews caused so much trouble, but that’s about all Judea was to the Romans in Aslan’s view.

Then Aslan ties the Jewish sense of religious superiority to Jewish nationalism.  He says:  “For the Jews, however, this sense of exceptionalism was not a matter of arrogance of pride.  It was a direct commandment from a jealous God who tolerated no foreign presence in the land he has set aside for his chosen people.”  This statement causes me to ask (without drawing any conclusions about the answer):  How much of this interpretation has more to do with Israel’s occupation of Muslim, Palestinian land today than with Roman occupation of that land two thousand years ago?  It is simply true that when the state of Israel was established by the victorious powers after World War II the Jews took over land that had belonged to Palestinian Arabs (most of the Muslims, a few of them Christians) for centuries.  Huge numbers of Palestinians were displaced off their land and forced to go into exile camps in Jordan and elsewhere.  Israel steadfastly defends its right to the land and denies that the Palestinians have any right to it at all.  Is Aslan projecting his dislike of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians onto ancient Judea and its attitude toward Romans occupying the holy land?  I don’t know, but Aslan’s writing here certainly raises the question for me.

Aslan says that this xenophobia (fear of foreigners), my term not his, explains the command to kill every living thing in the land that, in some parts of the Hebrew Bible, God gave the Israelites when they entered Canaan after the Exodus.  He gets the timing wrong, saying Israel occupied Canaan one thousand years before the first century BCE.  It was probably more like 1,250 or even more years earlier, but never mind.  Aslan says that killing every living thing in Canaan is what the Israelites did.  About that he is simply wrong.  The Hebrew Bible makes it clear that Canaanite religion survived for many centuries after the rise of the Hebrew state.  Contemporary archaeology makes that truth even clearer, but Aslan doesn’t indicate any awareness of that truth. 

I have grave doubts about the accuracy of Aslan’s theses in this chapter.  Yes, many Jews resented the Romans.  They resented the taxes they had to pay.  They resented Gentile domination of the temple.  Some of them resented Israel’s lack of political independence, but we have be careful about projecting modern notions of nationalism so far back into the past.  For Aslan all the Jews of first century Palestine were zealous nationalists.  Surely they weren’t.  For him all Jews longed to return to the ways of the heroes of old who would, he says, “drown the land in blood” to get rid of the Romans.  Yes, there were bloody Jewish rebellions against Rome, but the Jews weren’t the enraged monsters that Aslan more or less makes them out to be.  So again let me warn you.  Be very careful with this book.  Read it to learn what Aslan says, not to learn some truth about ancient Palestine or about Jesus that you didn’t know before.

Notes to the Prologue of Aslan's Zealot

Notes to the Prologue:  A Different Sort of Sacrifice

of

Reza Aslan, Zealot

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

This “Prologue” doesn’t even mention Jesus.  It sets up an account of the assassination of the high priest Jonathan son of Ananus in the year 56 CE.  Just why Aslan thinks that assassination is important to his historical reconstruction of Jesus won’t become clear for quite a while yet, if it ever does.  The Prologue is made up mostly of a description of the layout and functioning of the Jerusalem temple and a description of the function and role of its priests around that year.  That year is something like 26 years after the death of Jesus, but never mind.  Aslan isn’t a fan of the temple or of the priests, but then neither was Jesus—probably for at least some of the same reasons. 

Aslan gives a rather detailed description of the physical layout of the temple.  It was constructed as a series of decreasing tiers, most of them called “Courts.”  The first and largest of them was the Court of the Gentiles.  It was open to anyone, even non-Jews as the name suggests.  It was in many ways a marketplace.  Here merchants sold the animals that were to be sacrificed in a court deeper into the temple.  Here money changers changed people’s unclean Roman money for temple currency that had to be used to pay the temple tax all Jews owed.  Aslan doesn’t like these merchants and money changers.  He refers to merchants and “grubby money changers” who “lie in wait as you make your way up the underground stairs and onto the spacious sunlit plaza.”  I’m not sure why he calls them “grubby” money changers” or refers to them and the merchants as “lying in wait.”  He acknowledges that they played a vital role in the functioning of the temple.  Indeed, the temple couldn’t have functioned as the religion of the day needed it to function without them.  Sacrificial animals had to be bred for that purpose and free of all blemishes, so the people had to buy them at the temple.  Roman money had to be changed for temple money.  Sure, the merchants and the money changers made a profit.  Maybe it was even an exorbitant profit, but they still were necessary to the temple.  They didn’t defile it, they helped it work as it was supposed to work.  Still, Aslan doesn’t like these merchants and “grubby” money changers.

The tiers of the temple proceeded from the Court of the Gentiles, open to everyone, to the smaller Court of Women.  Any Jew who had no physical affliction and who had had a purifying bath could go this far.  It was as far as women were allowed to go.  Beyond the Court of Women was the Court of Israelites (as though the women, who weren’t allowed into the Court of Israelites, weren’t also Israelites, but never mind).  Men brought their sacrificial animals this far.  Aslan says that there the stench from the continuous animal sacrifices was overwhelming.  Perhaps it was; but remember that Aslan as a Muslim and we as Christians have nothing to do with animal sacrifice, and Aslan isn’t about to minimize its negative effects on the atmosphere of the temple.  The priests performed the sacrifices in the next court, the Court of Priests.  Only priests and other temple officials (think of the scribes) could go that far into the temple.

Beyond the Court of Priests lay the Holy of Holies.  The term Holy of Holies is, I think, widely misunderstood in our culture.  I’ve even heard it misused in popular music.  The Holy of Holies doesn’t refer to God, it refers to a place, a room essentially, the innermost room of the Jerusalem temple.  Only the high priest was allowed to enter it; and he did so only once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur).  Here’s how Aslan describes the Holy of Holies:  “This is where the glory of God physically dwells.  It is the meeting point between the earthly and heavenly realms, the center of all creation.” 

Aslan says, wrongly, that the Ark of the Covenant once stood there.  That’s wrong because the Ark of the Covenant never stood in the Holy of Holies of the temple Aslan is describing.  That temple is the second temple to have stood on Mount Moriah (known as the Temple Mount) in Jerusalem.  The first temple was built by King Solomon in the tenth century BCE.  The Ark of the Covenant was a chest in which, supposedly, the Israelites carried the stone tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai in the wilderness.  The Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s temple in the year 586 BCE.  The Ark of the Covenant was lost at that time and has never been found, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark to the contrary notwithstanding.  The temple Aslan is describing is the second temple on the temple mount and was first built in the late sixth century BCE after the return of the exiles to Jerusalem from Babylon.  Herod the Great (died 4 BCE) greatly expanded it and made it more elaborate and impressive.  That’s the temple Aslan is describing, and the Ark of the Covenant was never in it.

The Holy of Holies was an empty room, but it was seen as serving a divine purpose.  The Holy of Holies served, Aslan says, as “a conduit for the presence of God, channeling his (sic) divine spirit from the heavens….”  That divine spirit flowed out from the Holy of Holies, it was believed, into the entire world.  Aslan says that only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies because he was set apart from the rest of the people by his office.  Perhaps, but he was the only one who could enter at least for the additional reason that the Holy of Holies was so sacred.  Remember the ancient Israelite belief that no person could come into the immediate presence of God and live.  By the first century CE God perhaps didn’t physically live in the Holy of Holies as the Israelites had come to believe that their God Yahweh physically lived in the Holy of Holies of the first temple, but the Holy of Holies was nonetheless the most sacred place on earth.  To enter it was to come into the presence of God more immediately than one could at any other place.  Allowing no one but the high priest to enter it, and he doing so only once a year, preserved the sacredness of the place.

Aslan says that the it is impossible to overstate the importance of the temple.  I think he’s right about that, which made Jesus’ rejection of the temple so revolutionary.  The temple was the center of the Jews’ religious life.  It was a center for commerce and finances for all of Judea.  It was, Aslan says, the seat of a theocracy.  He cites Josephus (the late first century Rome-leaning Jewish historian) as having coined the word theocracy to apply specifically to Jerusalem and its temple.

The temple produced lavish incomes for the priests and other temple officials; and most Jews viewed “the entire priestly nobility, and the high priest in particular, as nothing but a band of avaricious ‘lovers of luxury’….”  Aslan stresses the opulence surrounding the high priest and the way the people resented it.  He’s probably right about that, but the high priest certainly isn’t the only supreme religious leader ever to be surrounded by opulence.  Consider the Pope.  The current guy rejects some of the papal opulence, but he’s an exception among Popes.

In 56 CE a member of a group of assassins called the Sicarii assassinated the high priest Jonathan.  Aslan calls that a different kind of sacrifice, different of course from the temple’s sacrifice of animals.  With that, the Prologue ends.  Aslan’s description of the temple in this Prologue is vivid and extensive.  I assume that it’s mostly historically correct, except for the part about the Ark of the Covenant.  Whatever you end up thinking about Aslan’s picture of Jesus, this Prologue gives a lot of good information about the temple.

Notes to the Introduction to Aslan's Zealot

Notes to the Introduction of Reza Aslan’s Zealot

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

August, 2013

In his Introduction to his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan sets out the task he undertakes in the book, namely, to paint an historically accurate, that is, factual, picture of Jesus of Nazareth.  This book is a quest for the historical Jesus, and I ask you please to read my piece on the quest and this book before you read these notes to the Introduction.  It’s on line at monroeuccadulted.blogspot.com, as these notes will be when I’m done with them.  I have serious reservations about any attempt to identify the historical person Jesus of Nazareth behind the Jesus, or the Jesuses, we have in the Gospels, our only sources of information on him.  I do not reject historical critical studies of the Bible.  I value them very highly.  I think we can say with some reasonable certainty at least some things about what in the Gospels is historical fact and what is not.  Doing so is vitally important in some contexts, as when we attribute the anti-Judaism and the Christian exclusivism of the Gospels to the books’ authors and not to Jesus himself despite the fact that the Gospels put anti-Jewish and exclusivist sayings into Jesus’ mouth.  I have no doubt that the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John are not authentic sayings of Jesus but are rather faith confessions of the Johanine community many decades after Jesus’ death.  That doesn’t necessarily make them untrue as faith confessions, but if they are true they are not true because Jesus said them.  He didn’t.  Historical criticism is essential, but that doesn’t mean that we have any way of reconstructing a Jesus radically different from the one(s) we find in the Bible.  I’m afraid that’s what Aslan is doing here, and these notes are going to be very critical of his work.  As always, you don’t have to agree with me, although I suspect that most of you will find Aslan’s Jesus disturbing and hard to believe in.  So read Aslan closely.  Read him critically, as you should anything you read.  Aslan isn’t gospel.  The Gospels are gospel.  This book is really interesting and challenging, but it doesn’t necessarily give you a truth you didn’t know before.  With that I’ll move on to comments about specific things Aslan says in his Introduction.

Eschatological holy men were common in Jesus’ day, a time of much apocalyptic expectation.  All kinds of people claimed to be messiahs and foretold the coming of the Kingdom of God.  Among them were the prophet Theudas mentioned in Acts; an figure known only as “the Egyptian,” whose army the Romans massacred; Athronges, a poor shepherd who crowned himself King of the Jews and was killed with his followers by the Romans; “The Samaritan,” whom Pontius Pilate crucified; Hezekiah the bandit chief; Simon of Peraea; Judas the Galilean, and Simon bar Kochba.  They all had messianic ambitions, and Rome killed all of them.  There were other groups as well, the Essenes (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame); the Sicarii (assassins who stabbed Romans and their Jewish collaborators with daggers), and later (at the time of the rebellion of 66CE) an organized party called the Zealots.  Aslan says that first century Palestine was “awash in messianic energy.”  As we go along we will see that Aslan considers Jesus to have been essentially another of these would be messiahs, not all that much different from the others, whom Rome handled the same way they handled all the rest of them.

Then we come to the first thing Aslan gets wrong about Jesus.  He says that Jesus called for violence, and he cites Luke 22:36 for that proposition.  In doing so he gets that passage from Luke all wrong.  He cites verse 36b (calling it only verse 36) but not verses 37 and 38 that immediately follow.  I’ll give you all three verses here:

He said to them, ‘But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag.  And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.  For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless’; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’  They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’  He replied, ‘It is enough.’

Aslan takes “the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one” as a call to violence.  In context we can see that it isn’t.  Jesus says that he’s saying that because “this scripture must be fulfilled in me.”  He doesn’t want his people to use violence, he wants some scripture to be fulfilled.  The scripture in question is Isaiah 53:12, part of one of Second Isaiah’s “suffering servant songs.”  The point is Luke’s, not Jesus’, and it is that Jesus is the suffering servant of whom Isaiah spoke.  Note also that the disciples produce two swords in response to what Jesus said.  Twelve disciples, two swords.  Jesus says it is enough.  Enough for what?  Certainly not to fight the Romans.  Not even enough for all twelve disciples from defend themselves from a robber.  It is, however, enough to fulfill the scripture; or at least Luke thought it was.  This passage quite simply is not the call to violence that Aslan says it is.  He’s just wrong.  He gives us very bad biblical exegesis here.

Aslan then admits that Jesus, historically speaking, is hard to pin down (which doesn’t stop him from pinning Jesus down, but never mind).  That’s because the New Testament, and specifically the first three Gospels, are our only sources that contain any historical information about him.  That’s a problem because the Gospels are not eyewitness documentation of historical events.  They are testimonies of faith written well after the fact.  Aslan says:  “Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man.”  (Which doesn’t stop him from using them to tell him about Jesus the man, but never mind.)  I would say that actually the Gospels, or at least the Synoptic Gospels, tell us about both Jesus the Christ and Jesus the man, as Aslan clearly thinks they do despite his statement here.  The problem is trying to figure out what in the Gospels is about Jesus the man and what in them is later faith confession about Jesus the Christ.

Aslan concludes that there are only two historical facts about Jesus “upon which we can confidently rely.”  They are that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular movement in Palestine early in the first century and that the Romans crucified him for doing so.  Aslan says that, but as he writes his book he more or less confidently relies on a whole lot more supposed facts about Jesus and what he said.  His method for moving forward despite the paucity of reliable facts about Jesus is, he says, to combine these two facts with everything else we know about the time and place where Jesus lived.  The history of Palestine from about 4 BCE and 73 CE is really important for Aslan.  It is a tumultuous and violent history, and Aslan claims that that history sheds significant light on Jesus.  He says that using that history together with those two bare bone facts about him “can help paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by the gospels.”  Note how careful he is here.  “May be” more historically accurate, not is more historically accurate.  It is commendable caution on his part, but of course he goes ahead and gives us his picture of Jesus nonetheless.

Then we come to a pretty good statement of Aslan’s thesis in the book: 

“Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise—a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine—bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.” 

Here Aslan calls Jesus a “zealous revolutionary”.  That’s his primary thesis.  Jesus is a zealous revolutionary.  We’ll get to what he means by “zealous” in due time.  His reference to the context of first century Palestine shows us where Aslan gets much of that image.  There were lots of zealous revolutionaries in first century Palestine.  Just about everyone in first century Palestine was in a revolutionary fervor, he thinks, so for him Jesus was too.

Then there’s the fact that the Romans crucified Jesus.  Crucifixion was the punishment for the crime of sedition.  Sedition is essentially anything that threatens the authority of the state.  The charge against Jesus was that he claimed to be the King of the Jews, Aslan says, taking the Gospels’ statements to that effect as factual history.  The sign on Jesus’ cross said King of the Jews, Aslan says, again taking biblical statements literally.  If I remember right, Crossan, a much better Jesus scholar then Aslan, denies that there would have been any sign on the cross at all.  Still, Aslan accepts the Gospels’ statements that there was, he takes those statements to be factual history, and so he concludes that Jesus claimed to be the King of the Jews. 

Then we come to a key passage of the Introduction that deserves some comment:

The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the ‘Kingdom of God’—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.

There are several things to say about this striking sentence.  First of all, the idea that Jesus called for the “imposition” of the Kingdom of God is just wrong.  He said that the Kingdom of God was already here.  He didn’t call for anyone to impose it on anyone else.  Aslan will later on make much of the fact that Jesus began as a disciple of John the Baptist.  True, but John didn’t call for the imposition of the Kingdom of God either, except perhaps by God.  Jesus changed John’s message.  He didn’t expect God to impose the Kingdom, at least not during Jesus’ lifetime.  Rather, he told people that the Kingdom was already in their midst and called on them to live the life of the Kingdom here and now.  That was a revolutionary message in a way, but it was not a call to revolution in any standard, worldly sense.  It was, and is, a call to us to transform ourselves from the inside.  It is not a call to violent revolution. 

Recall the story of the exorcism of the demon called Legion, usually called the exorcism of the Gerasene Daemoniac, Luke 8:26-33.  In that story Jesus exorcises a bunch of demons out of a man.  The demons identify themselves as “Legion.”  Jesus puts them into a herd of pigs, which all run down the hill into the sea of Galilee and drown.  That’s how Jesus wants to deal with Rome.  The demons are called Legion.  What’s a legion?  It is a basic large unit of the Roman army.  We’ve probably all heard of the Roman legions, that is, the Roman army.  In this story Rome isn’t an external occupying force, or at least that’s not primarily why Rome is such a problem.  Here Rome has occupied a man’s soul.  He has internalized the ways of the Empire.  Jesus symbolically drives the Roman army into the sea in this story, but he does it spiritually to heal a man’s spirit.  That’s how Jesus wanted to deal with Rome.  We need to free ourselves, with the help of the Holy Spirit, from the ways in which empire has occupied our hearts, minds, and souls.  Then we can live the Kingdom life, not the life of worldly empires, whether ancient Roman or modern American. 

Also, it may be true that Jesus could not have been untouched by the “revolutionary fervor” of his people and his homeland.  Galilee had rebelled against Rome in 4 BCE upon the death of Herod the Great.  That’s the year most scholars think Jesus was born.  That rebellion was crushed, and Aslan will have a lot to say about those events shortly.  Jerusalem rebelled in 66 CE and was crushed.  There was indeed a lot of revolutionary fervor in Jesus’ time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesus was a violent revolutionary or called for violent revolution.  I believe that he responded to that revolutionary fervor not by joining it but by giving people a different vision of how to deal with Rome.  Jesus wanted to create the fullness of the Kingdom of God on earth, but he didn’t want to do it by violent revolution.  He wanted to do it by the spiritual transformation of one person at a time.  Living with people who longed for violent revolution doesn’t necessarily make one a violent revolutionary.  Aslan almost seems to think that it does, or at least he thinks that the crucifixion of Jesus in that context means that it did that to Jesus.  I don’t.

Aslan then asks why the early Christian communities would turn this revolutionary who called for violence into a peaceful spiritual shepherd.  First of all, the Jesus of the Gospels isn’t only a peaceful, spiritual shepherd.  He rants and raves, he overturns tables and releases animals in the temple. he calls people hypocrites.  Never mind.  Aslan says that the process of changing Jesus from a zealous revolutionary into a “peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter” began after the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE.  He’s wrong about that in at least a couple of ways.  It is beyond me how anyone can read the Synoptic Gospels and think that Jesus has no interest in earthly matters.  In those Gospels Jesus deals with economic justice for the poor more than he deals with anything else.  He’s concerned with people’s physical and spiritual health—in this life, not so much in the next.  In the first, second, and third centuries CE Christianity was illegal.  Why?  Not because it had no interest in earthly matters but because it led people to break the law by not worshipping Caesar and the Roman gods and by refusing to serve in the army.  Yes, for much of Christianity Jesus became that spiritual leader with no interest in earthly matters, but that process didn’t begin in 70 CE.  It began only in the fourth century CE with the establishment of Christianity as the religion of empire.  Again, I couldn’t disagree with Aslan more here.

Aslan acknowledges that he really doesn’t have sufficient historical sources to do what he’s trying to do, although of course he doesn’t put it that way.  He says that trying to write a biography of Jesus “is somewhat akin to putting together a massive puzzle with only a few of the pieces in hand; one has no choice but to fill in the rest of the puzzle based on the best, most educated guess of what the completed image should look like.”  Again he’s wrong of course.  One has another choice.  One can recognize the inadequacy of the sources for the project one wants to undertake and give up the project as undoable.  Of course, you don’t end up with a No. 1 New York Times best seller if you do that, but you can do it nonetheless.  As Aslan concedes, if you write the biography despite the inadequacy of the sources you’re left with a “best guess.”  Why anyone should take a guess, best and most educated or not, seriously I frankly don’t quite understand.[1]

In the piece I wrote and put on the blog just before this one I told you about Albert Schweitzer’s critique of the first quest for the historical Jesus.  Aslan never mentions Schweitzer by name, but he does acknowledge the criticism that Schweitzer was the first to make about seeking the historical Jesus behind the Gospels.  He refers not to Schweitzer but to the prominent German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who said that the quest for the historical Jesus is in the end actually an internal quest.  Aslan paraphrases Bultmann as saying “Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see.  Too often they see themselves—their own reflection—in the image of Jesus they have constructed.”  That’s Schweitzer’s objection, and it is my objection too.  Aslan acknowledges that the objection gets made, but he presses on nonetheless.

He says:  “And yet that best, most educated guess may be enough to, at the very least, question our most basic assumptions about Jesus of Nazareth.”  Really?  Why?  If it’s only a guess, why should it lead anyone to question anything?  Maybe the problem here is that he uses the word “guess.”  Perhaps if he’d called it an informed hypothesis rather than I guess I wouldn’t react so negatively.  But guess is his word, so he’ll have to live with it.

Aslan acknowledges the criticisms of the quest for the historical Jesus, but he insists that his undertaking is legitimate nonetheless.  He says:  “If we expose the claims of the gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures of their literary and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate picture of the Jesus of history.”  That of course is the claim of all historical Jesus studies.  Yet that is precisely what Schweitzer and Bultmann said we can not do.  I don’t dismiss critical study of the Bible.  As I’ve said, I cherish it.  I am however very concerned that Aslan has gone far beyond what honest critical study will allow us to do.  O well.  His book is still interesting and popular, so we’ll press on.

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[1] Please understand.  I am among other things a professionally trained historian with a Ph.D. in that discipline.  Aslan has a Ph.D. in sociology, but he isn’t a professionally trained historian.  I and my Ph.D. candidate colleagues all had to write Ph.D. dissertations that met a high scholarly standard.  It was common for us to come up with ideas about an interesting and important subject but give those ideas up because we would never have been able to find sufficient historical sources to complete the work.  Neither Aslan nor anyone else who tries to write a true biography of Jesus has sufficient historical sources to complete the work.  That reality stopped us Ph.D. candidates.  It didn’t stop Aslan, just as it hasn’t stopped many others.