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.