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.