Notes to the
Introduction of Reza Aslan’s Zealot
Rev. Dr. Tom
Sorenson
August, 2013
In his Introduction to his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of
Nazareth, Reza Aslan sets out the task he undertakes in the book, namely,
to paint an historically accurate, that is, factual, picture of Jesus of
Nazareth. This book is a quest for the
historical Jesus, and I ask you please to read my piece on the quest and this book
before you read these notes to the Introduction. It’s on line at
monroeuccadulted.blogspot.com, as these notes will be when I’m done with
them. I have serious reservations about
any attempt to identify the historical person Jesus of Nazareth behind the
Jesus, or the Jesuses, we have in the Gospels, our only sources of information
on him. I do not reject historical
critical studies of the Bible. I value
them very highly. I think we can say
with some reasonable certainty at least some things about what in the Gospels
is historical fact and what is not. Doing
so is vitally important in some contexts, as when we attribute the anti-Judaism
and the Christian exclusivism of the Gospels to the books’ authors and not to
Jesus himself despite the fact that the Gospels put anti-Jewish and exclusivist
sayings into Jesus’ mouth. I have no
doubt that the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John are not
authentic sayings of Jesus but are rather faith confessions of the Johanine
community many decades after Jesus’ death.
That doesn’t necessarily make them untrue as faith confessions, but if
they are true they are not true because Jesus said them. He didn’t.
Historical criticism is essential, but that doesn’t mean that we have
any way of reconstructing a Jesus radically different from the one(s) we find
in the Bible. I’m afraid that’s what
Aslan is doing here, and these notes are going to be very critical of his
work. As always, you don’t have to agree
with me, although I suspect that most of you will find Aslan’s Jesus disturbing
and hard to believe in. So read Aslan
closely. Read him critically, as you
should anything you read. Aslan isn’t
gospel. The Gospels are gospel. This book is really interesting and
challenging, but it doesn’t necessarily give you a truth you didn’t know
before. With that I’ll move on to
comments about specific things Aslan says in his Introduction.
Eschatological holy men were
common in Jesus’ day, a time of much apocalyptic expectation. All kinds of people claimed to be messiahs
and foretold the coming of the Kingdom of God.
Among them were the prophet Theudas mentioned in Acts; an figure known
only as “the Egyptian,” whose army the Romans massacred; Athronges, a poor
shepherd who crowned himself King of the Jews and was killed with his followers
by the Romans; “The Samaritan,” whom Pontius Pilate crucified; Hezekiah the
bandit chief; Simon of Peraea; Judas the Galilean, and Simon bar Kochba. They all had messianic ambitions, and Rome
killed all of them. There were other
groups as well, the Essenes (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame); the Sicarii (assassins
who stabbed Romans and their Jewish collaborators with daggers), and later (at
the time of the rebellion of 66CE) an organized party called the Zealots. Aslan says that first century Palestine was
“awash in messianic energy.” As we go
along we will see that Aslan considers Jesus to have been essentially another
of these would be messiahs, not all that much different from the others, whom
Rome handled the same way they handled all the rest of them.
Then we come to the first thing
Aslan gets wrong about Jesus. He says
that Jesus called for violence, and he cites Luke 22:36 for that
proposition. In doing so he gets that
passage from Luke all wrong. He cites
verse 36b (calling it only verse 36) but not verses 37 and 38 that immediately
follow. I’ll give you all three verses
here:
He said to them, ‘But now, the one
who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his
cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this
scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless’; and
indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’ They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’ He replied, ‘It is enough.’
Aslan takes “the one who has no sword must sell his cloak
and buy one” as a call to violence. In
context we can see that it isn’t. Jesus
says that he’s saying that because “this scripture must be fulfilled in
me.” He doesn’t want his people to use
violence, he wants some scripture to be fulfilled. The scripture in question is Isaiah 53:12,
part of one of Second Isaiah’s “suffering servant songs.” The point is Luke’s, not Jesus’, and it is
that Jesus is the suffering servant of whom Isaiah spoke. Note also that the disciples produce two
swords in response to what Jesus said.
Twelve disciples, two swords.
Jesus says it is enough. Enough
for what? Certainly not to fight the
Romans. Not even enough for all twelve
disciples from defend themselves from a robber.
It is, however, enough to fulfill the scripture; or at least Luke
thought it was. This passage quite
simply is not the call to violence that Aslan says it is. He’s just wrong. He gives us very bad biblical exegesis here.
Aslan then admits that Jesus,
historically speaking, is hard to pin down (which doesn’t stop him from pinning
Jesus down, but never mind). That’s
because the New Testament, and specifically the first three Gospels, are our
only sources that contain any historical information about him. That’s a problem because the Gospels are not
eyewitness documentation of historical events.
They are testimonies of faith written well after the fact. Aslan says:
“Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the
man.” (Which doesn’t stop him from using
them to tell him about Jesus the man, but never mind.) I would say that actually the Gospels, or at
least the Synoptic Gospels, tell us about both Jesus the Christ and Jesus the
man, as Aslan clearly thinks they do despite his statement here. The problem is trying to figure out what in
the Gospels is about Jesus the man and what in them is later faith confession
about Jesus the Christ.
Aslan concludes that there are
only two historical facts about Jesus “upon which we can confidently
rely.” They are that Jesus was a Jew who
led a popular movement in Palestine early in the first century and that the
Romans crucified him for doing so. Aslan
says that, but as he writes his book he more or less confidently relies on a
whole lot more supposed facts about Jesus and what he said. His method for moving forward despite the
paucity of reliable facts about Jesus is, he says, to combine these two facts
with everything else we know about the time and place where Jesus lived. The history of Palestine from about 4 BCE and
73 CE is really important for Aslan. It
is a tumultuous and violent history, and Aslan claims that that history sheds
significant light on Jesus. He says that
using that history together with those two bare bone facts about him “can help
paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate
than the one painted by the gospels.”
Note how careful he is here. “May
be” more historically accurate, not is more historically accurate. It is commendable caution on his part, but of
course he goes ahead and gives us his picture of Jesus nonetheless.
Then we come to a pretty good
statement of Aslan’s thesis in the book:
“Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from
this historical exercise—a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the
era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century
Palestine—bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd
cultivated by the early Christian community.”
Here Aslan calls Jesus a “zealous
revolutionary”. That’s his primary
thesis. Jesus is a zealous
revolutionary. We’ll get to what he
means by “zealous” in due time. His
reference to the context of first century Palestine shows us where Aslan gets
much of that image. There were lots of
zealous revolutionaries in first century Palestine. Just about everyone in first century
Palestine was in a revolutionary fervor, he thinks, so for him Jesus was too.
Then there’s the fact that the
Romans crucified Jesus. Crucifixion was
the punishment for the crime of sedition.
Sedition is essentially anything that threatens the authority of the
state. The charge against Jesus was that
he claimed to be the King of the Jews, Aslan says, taking the Gospels’
statements to that effect as factual history.
The sign on Jesus’ cross said King of the Jews, Aslan says, again taking
biblical statements literally. If I
remember right, Crossan, a much better Jesus scholar then Aslan, denies that
there would have been any sign on the cross at all. Still, Aslan accepts the Gospels’ statements
that there was, he takes those statements to be factual history, and so he
concludes that Jesus claimed to be the King of the Jews.
Then we come to a key passage of
the Introduction that deserves some comment:
The notion that the leader of a
popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the ‘Kingdom of God’—a
term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying
revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor
that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.
There are several things to say
about this striking sentence. First of
all, the idea that Jesus called for the “imposition” of the Kingdom of God is
just wrong. He said that the Kingdom of
God was already here. He didn’t call for
anyone to impose it on anyone else.
Aslan will later on make much of the fact that Jesus began as a disciple
of John the Baptist. True, but John
didn’t call for the imposition of the Kingdom of God either, except perhaps by
God. Jesus changed John’s message. He didn’t expect God to impose the Kingdom,
at least not during Jesus’ lifetime.
Rather, he told people that the Kingdom was already in their midst and
called on them to live the life of the Kingdom here and now. That was a revolutionary message in a way,
but it was not a call to revolution in any standard, worldly sense. It was, and is, a call to us to transform
ourselves from the inside. It is not a
call to violent revolution.
Recall the story of the exorcism
of the demon called Legion, usually called the exorcism of the Gerasene Daemoniac,
Luke 8:26-33. In that story Jesus
exorcises a bunch of demons out of a man.
The demons identify themselves as “Legion.” Jesus puts them into a herd of pigs, which
all run down the hill into the sea of Galilee and drown. That’s how Jesus wants to deal with Rome. The demons are called Legion. What’s a legion? It is a basic large unit of the Roman
army. We’ve probably all heard of the
Roman legions, that is, the Roman army.
In this story Rome isn’t an external occupying force, or at least that’s
not primarily why Rome is such a problem.
Here Rome has occupied a man’s soul.
He has internalized the ways of the Empire. Jesus symbolically drives the Roman army into
the sea in this story, but he does it spiritually to heal a man’s spirit. That’s how Jesus wanted to deal with
Rome. We need to free ourselves, with
the help of the Holy Spirit, from the ways in which empire has occupied our
hearts, minds, and souls. Then we can
live the Kingdom life, not the life of worldly empires, whether ancient Roman
or modern American.
Also, it may be true that Jesus
could not have been untouched by the “revolutionary fervor” of his people and
his homeland. Galilee had rebelled
against Rome in 4 BCE upon the death of Herod the Great. That’s the year most scholars think Jesus was
born. That rebellion was crushed, and
Aslan will have a lot to say about those events shortly. Jerusalem rebelled in 66 CE and was crushed. There was indeed a lot of revolutionary
fervor in Jesus’ time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesus was a
violent revolutionary or called for violent revolution. I believe that he responded to that
revolutionary fervor not by joining it but by giving people a different vision
of how to deal with Rome. Jesus wanted
to create the fullness of the Kingdom of God on earth, but he didn’t want to do
it by violent revolution. He wanted to
do it by the spiritual transformation of one person at a time. Living with people who longed for violent
revolution doesn’t necessarily make one a violent revolutionary. Aslan almost seems to think that it does, or
at least he thinks that the crucifixion of Jesus in that context means that it
did that to Jesus. I don’t.
Aslan then asks why the early
Christian communities would turn this revolutionary who called for violence
into a peaceful spiritual shepherd.
First of all, the Jesus of the Gospels isn’t only a peaceful, spiritual
shepherd. He rants and raves, he
overturns tables and releases animals in the temple. he calls people
hypocrites. Never mind. Aslan says that the process of changing Jesus
from a zealous revolutionary into a “peaceful spiritual leader with no interest
in any earthly matter” began after the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in
70 CE. He’s wrong about that in at least
a couple of ways. It is beyond me how
anyone can read the Synoptic Gospels and think that Jesus has no interest in
earthly matters. In those Gospels Jesus
deals with economic justice for the poor more than he deals with anything
else. He’s concerned with people’s
physical and spiritual health—in this life, not so much in the next. In the first, second, and third centuries CE
Christianity was illegal. Why? Not because it had no interest in earthly
matters but because it led people to break the law by not worshipping Caesar and
the Roman gods and by refusing to serve in the army. Yes, for much of Christianity Jesus became
that spiritual leader with no interest in earthly matters, but that process
didn’t begin in 70 CE. It began only in
the fourth century CE with the establishment of Christianity as the religion of
empire. Again, I couldn’t disagree with
Aslan more here.
Aslan acknowledges that he
really doesn’t have sufficient historical sources to do what he’s trying to do,
although of course he doesn’t put it that way.
He says that trying to write a biography of Jesus “is somewhat akin to
putting together a massive puzzle with only a few of the pieces in hand; one
has no choice but to fill in the rest of the puzzle based on the best, most
educated guess of what the completed image should look like.” Again he’s wrong of course. One has another choice. One can recognize the inadequacy of the
sources for the project one wants to undertake and give up the project as
undoable. Of course, you don’t end up
with a No. 1 New York Times best seller if you do that, but you can do it
nonetheless. As Aslan concedes, if you
write the biography despite the inadequacy of the sources you’re left with a
“best guess.” Why anyone should take a
guess, best and most educated or not, seriously I frankly don’t quite
understand.[1]
In the piece I wrote and put on
the blog just before this one I told you about Albert Schweitzer’s critique of
the first quest for the historical Jesus.
Aslan never mentions Schweitzer by name, but he does acknowledge the
criticism that Schweitzer was the first to make about seeking the historical
Jesus behind the Gospels. He refers not
to Schweitzer but to the prominent German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who said
that the quest for the historical Jesus is in the end actually an internal
quest. Aslan paraphrases Bultmann as
saying “Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves—their own reflection—in the image of Jesus they have
constructed.” That’s Schweitzer’s
objection, and it is my objection too.
Aslan acknowledges that the objection gets made, but he presses on
nonetheless.
He says: “And yet that best, most educated guess may
be enough to, at the very least, question our most basic assumptions about
Jesus of Nazareth.” Really? Why?
If it’s only a guess, why should it lead anyone to question
anything? Maybe the problem here is that
he uses the word “guess.” Perhaps if
he’d called it an informed hypothesis rather than I guess I wouldn’t react so
negatively. But guess is his word, so
he’ll have to live with it.
Aslan acknowledges the
criticisms of the quest for the historical Jesus, but he insists that his
undertaking is legitimate nonetheless.
He says: “If we expose the claims
of the gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures
of their literary and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate
picture of the Jesus of history.” That
of course is the claim of all historical Jesus studies. Yet that is precisely what Schweitzer and
Bultmann said we can not do. I don’t dismiss critical study of the
Bible. As I’ve said, I cherish it. I am however very concerned that Aslan has
gone far beyond what honest critical study will allow us to do. O well.
His book is still interesting and popular, so we’ll press on.
[1] Please understand. I am among other things a professionally
trained historian with a Ph.D. in that discipline. Aslan has a Ph.D. in sociology, but he isn’t
a professionally trained historian. I
and my Ph.D. candidate colleagues all had to write Ph.D. dissertations that met
a high scholarly standard. It was common
for us to come up with ideas about an interesting and important subject but
give those ideas up because we would never have been able to find sufficient
historical sources to complete the work.
Neither Aslan nor anyone else who tries to write a true biography of
Jesus has sufficient historical sources to complete the work. That reality stopped us Ph.D. candidates. It didn’t stop Aslan, just as it hasn’t
stopped many others.
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