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.