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.