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.