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.

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.

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.

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.