The Life and Times of Jesus

Recently, I read Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. This is my book report.

First of all, let us say that Professor Aslan has excellent credentials concerning the first century and events in southwest Asia at that time. That is to say, he holds a PhD degree in religious studies and is a tenured professor, I think I recall, at North Carolina State University. 

Dr. Aslan says in his preface that he became absorbed into the Christian tradition and fascinated by it as an adolescent. Since he has become an adult, however, he has decided that Islam is the truest reflection of God's desires for humanity. He is able to look at the life of Jesus with some detachment therefore. The first question any Christian would ask, of course, is whether Aslan is prone to prejudice concerning Jesus. Let's allow him to speak for himself, through his book, and then decide.

Judea, Galilee, and to a lesser extent the Jewish diaspora in Greece and what's now Turkey, were in a state of ferment at the time Jesus was born. Occupied and tyrannized by successive foreign powers, most recently the Romans, the Jews could hardly have helped being resentful and living in anticipation of a great leader, a warrior king, a messiah, who would expel the pagans and restore the kingdom of David in all its glory. That, Dr. Aslan writes, is what they believed in as the messianic tradition. Also, the Jews were furiously resentful of the priestly caste who lived in (comparative) luxury while trying to appease the Roman authorities. More than one high priest was assassinated during the years around the lifespan of Jesus.

The time and place were rife with would-be messiahs. Often considered outlaws by the Sanhedrin and the Romans, they zealously proclaimed the coming kingdom and offered themselves as kings. Almost all came to violent ends, usually at the hands of the Romans. 

It was into this world that Jesus was born. Professor Aslan dismisses the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke out of hand, however. He claims that Caesar Augustus never ordered a census, though Quirinius did. This occurred in 6 CE, when Jesus would have been about ten years old. No shepherds, no wise men, no birth in Bethlehem, and no virgin birth.  

He does believe that Jesus was a Nazarene. Nazareth was a tiny hamlet then, perhaps home to one hundred people. Certainly, it was not populous enough to support a carpenter, much less a family of carpenters. (Dr. Aslan pays considerable attention to James, Jesus' brother, as well as at least one other brother and possibly sisters.) There was a new Roman town abuilding near Nazareth, however, Sepphoris by name, and Aslan speculates that Jesus would have found work there as a day laborer.

Exactly when Jesus encountered John the Baptist is not known with any certainty, but the professor feels it was a hugely significant event. Jesus remained as a disciple of John until the wild holyman was arrested. Only then did Jesus start a ministry of his own. 

The men who wrote the gospels, of course, emphasized that Jesus was unlike the false messiahs of those times, that he proclaimed a kingdom not of this world, and by inference at least, that good people must comply with civil authorities, even tyrants. Dr. Aslan just doesn't think this was the real Jesus at all. "I come not with peace but with a sword," Jesus says, contradicting this view of a non-violent savior. That's the Jesus of Dr. Aslan.

Now, about the passion and death of Jesus. According to the professor, Jesus arrives in the big city of Jerusalem for the passover, perhaps greeted by enthusiastic crowds, perhaps not. He does go to the temple on Tuesday for the ritualistic cleansing and there causes a great disturbance. The temple was huge, however, and Aslan tells us it's likely that many people there that morning never noticed what was happening. 

The Jewish priestly class certainly noticed, however, and decided Jesus had to go. By Thursday night they had assembled a large arrest party, and, tipped off as to Jesus' location by Judas Iscariot, they made the pinch in the garden of Gethsemane. Please notice, Aslan says, that they took a bunch of people, expecting a brawl, and that Peter drew a sword to defend Jesus, confirming the professor's view of Jesus as not abjuring violence. Jesus, however, knowing his arrest must lead to his death, tells Peter to stop. He skips over the episode of Jesus putting the high priest's servant's ear back on, perhaps not believing it happened.

Of the trial, the crucifixion, and Jesus' death, Aslan follows what many other secular historians believe. Jesus was condemned as a blasphemer by the Sanhedrin, taken before Pontius Pilate (And there is documentary evidence that he existed.), who sentenced him to death after only a moment or two - just one more bit of business on a Friday morning - and Jesus suffered an awful death in the time honored Roman way.

What happened then? The gospels tell us that Jesus rose from the dead, and appeared to many people before ascending into heaven. Dr. Aslan does not believe in the resurrection - it does contradict everything we know about death after all - saying it's irrelevant what happened to Jesus' body. What is important is that the apostles began telling the Jews about Jesus and gathering a small number of believers. One of them, Stephen, was soon stoned to death in Jerusalem for blaspheming.

The murder of Stephen was a great event, Dr. Aslan claims. It clarified the thinking of the apostles and placed them squarely outside the mainstream of Jewish thought and practice. Led by James, Jesus' brother, they continued to tell any Jews who would listen that Jesus was the messiah and the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophesies. (Aslan says the Hebrew prophesies cannot be interpreted as leading to Jesus by any reasonable person.) Gradually the apostles and their followers became more and more estranged from the Jews of Jerusalem, though still complying with the Hebraic laws concerning diet and circumcision.

Enter Paul. Sometime during the two or three decades after Jesus' death Paul, who had been a Pharisee, comes to believe in the Jesus of the apostles and begins preaching to the Jews of the diaspora and to gentiles. He is soon summoned to Jerusalem by James and the others to answer for what they regard as apostasy - that gentile believers need not abstain from foods the Bible forbids, or undergo circumcision. Paul agrees to mend his ways, though he does call Peter to book for trying to have it both ways, but now carries his message further afield, ultimately to Rome, though Peter arrives first and warns the church there to be wary of Paul. How or when the two men died is not very important to Dr. Aslan. 

What is important is the Jewish rebellion against Rome and the suppression of that rebellion by the imperial legions. Wholesale murder, rape and destruction accompanied the Roman army, culminating in the famous mass suicide at Masada. Thereafter, the locus of Christianity shifted away from Israel and the church grew among the gentiles much much more than among the Jews. 

Dr. Aslan thinks it would have been impossible for Jesus to have become knowledgeable about the Hebrew Bible, growing up in what was almost literally the back of beyond. His scanty knowledge of the Bible explains the often confusing acts and sayings attributed to him. Now, I quarrel with that. I much prefer to think of Jesus as a bookish boy, a real Yeshiva paragon, devoting every spare moment to studying the Torah and the other books of the Bible. It's hard for me to imagine any other version of Jesus arguing successfully with his neighbors, much less the Pharisees. 

Likewise, I think Dr. Aslan takes some interpretive liberties. Documentary evidence about Jesus by contemporaries is almost entirely non-existent, it's true, and the historian must speculate a bit. Aslan is right to say the first gospel, Mark's, was written something like forty years after Jesus' death, meaning by someone who probably didn't know him, but that doesn't give him license to guess about Jesus' life any more than it gave to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. (On the other hand, if Mark was writing his gospel at about the age I am now - sixty-four - he might well have known Jesus, or known of Jesus, as a young man.)

Get this book and read it. I think Dr. Aslan has made an honest effort to explain Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity, though his version of it is much different from what we learned in Sunday school.