I have deleted from this blog all of my handouts to the introduction to the Bible series that I did at my church back in 2012 and 2013. I deleted them because I am reworking them into a book, and I don't want to have them out there floating around in their original form. The book will done in the relatively new future. I'll post here how you can get it once it's available. Pastor Tom Sorenson
Monroe UCC Adult Education
Friday, March 7, 2014
Friday, November 8, 2013
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
in
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.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
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.
Friday, September 13, 2013
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.
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
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.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
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.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
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.
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