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ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth Hardcover – Illustrated, July 16, 2013
| Reza Aslan (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was executed as a state criminal. Within decades after his death, his followers would call him God.
Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most enigmatic figures by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived. Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction. He explores the reasons the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.
Zealot yields a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of Jesus’ life and mission.
Praise for Zealot
“Riveting . . . Aslan synthesizes Scripture and scholarship to create an original account.”—The New Yorker
“Fascinatingly and convincingly drawn . . . Aslan may come as close as one can to respecting those who revere Jesus as the peace-loving, turn-the-other-cheek, true son of God depicted in modern Christianity, even as he knocks down that image.”—The Seattle Times
“[Aslan’s] literary talent is as essential to the effect of Zealot as are his scholarly and journalistic chops. . . . A vivid, persuasive portrait.”—Salon
“This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“A special and revealing work, one that believer and skeptic alike will find surprising, engaging, and original.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
“Compulsively readable . . . This superb work is highly recommended.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
- Print length296 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJuly 16, 2013
- Dimensions6.4 x 6.1 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-10140006922X
- ISBN-13978-2523470201
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Q&A with Reza Aslan
Q. Why did you title your biography of Jesus of Nazareth Zealot?
A. In Jesus' world, zealot referred to those Jews who adhered to a widely accepted biblical doctrine called zeal. These “zealous” Jews were strict nationalists who preached the sole sovereignty of God. They wanted to throw off the yoke of Roman occupation and cleanse the Promised Land of all foreign elements. Some zealots resorted to extreme acts of violence against both the Roman authorities and the Jewish ‘collaborators,” by which they meant the wealthy Temple priests and the Jewish aristocracy. Others refrained from violence but were no less adamant about establishing the reign of God on earth. There is no evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was himself a violent revolutionary (though his views on the use of violence were more complex than it is often assumed). However, Jesus’ actions and his teachings about the Kingdom of God clearly indicate that he was a follower of the zealot doctrine, which is why he, like so many zealots before and after him, was ultimately executed by Rome for the crime of sedition.
Q. Yours is one of the few popular biographies of Jesus of Nazareth that does not rely on the gospels as your primary source of information for uncovering Jesus’ life. Why is that? What are your primary sources?
A. I certainly rely on the gospels to provide a narrative outline to my biography of Jesus of Nazareth, but my primary source in recreating Jesus’ life are historical writings about first century Palestine, like the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, as well as Roman documents of the time. The gospels are incredible texts that provide Christians with a profound framework for living a life in imitation of Christ. The problem, however, is that the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, historical documentations of Jesus’ life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith written many years after the events they describe. In other words, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man. The gospels are of course extremely useful in revealing how the early Christians viewed Jesus. But they do not tell us much about how Jesus viewed himself. To get to the bottom of that mystery, which is what I try to do in the book, one must sift through the gospel stories to analyze their claims about Jesus in light of the historical facts we know about the time and world in which Jesus lived. Indeed, I believe that if we place Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived, then, in some ways, his biography writes itself.
Q. You write in the book that you became an evangelical Christian in High School, but that after a few years, you abandoned Christianity and returned to the faith of your forefathers: Islam. Why did you decide to make this change and how did it affect how you understood the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth.
A. When I was fifteen years old I heard the gospel story for the first time and immediately accepted Jesus into my heart. I had what Christians refer to as “an encounter with Christ.” I spent the next five years as an evangelical Christian, and even spent some time traveling around the United States spreading the gospel message. But the more I read the Bible – especially in college, where I began my formal study of the New Testament – the more I uncovered a wide chasm between the Jesus of history and the Jesus I learned about in church. At that same time, through the encouragement of one of my professors, I began to reexamine the faith and traditions of my forefathers and returned to Islam. But the irony is that once I detached my academic study of Jesus from my faith in Christ, I became an even more fervent follower of Jesus of Nazareth. What I mean to say is that I live my life according to the social teachings preached by Jesus two thousand years ago. I take his actions against the powers of his time and his defense of the poor and the weak as a model of behavior for myself. I pray, as a Muslim, alongside my Christian wife, and together we teach our children the values I believe Jesus represents. The man who defied the will of the most powerful empire the world had ever known – and lost – is so much more real to me than the Jesus I knew as a Christian. So in a way, this book is my attempt to spread the good news of Jesus the man with the same passion that I once applied to spreading the good news of Jesus the Christ.
Q. What do you hope readers, especially religious readers, take away from your book?
A. My hope is that this book provides readers with a more complete sense of the world in which Jesus lived. We cannot truly understand Jesus’ words and deeds if we separate them from the religious and political context of his time. Regardless of whether you think of Jesus as a prophet, a teacher, or God incarnate, it is important to remember that he did not live in a vacuum. Whatever else Jesus was, he was, without question, a man of his time. This is true for all of us. The key to understanding who Jesus was and what Jesus meant lies in understanding the times in which he lived. That’s what this book does. It drops you in the middle of Jesus’ world and helps you understand the context out of which he arose and in which preached.
From Publishers Weekly
From Booklist
Review
“A lucid, intelligent page-turner.”—Los Angeles Times
“Aslan’s insistence on human and historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology. . . . This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Aslan brings a fine popular style, shorn of all jargon, to bear on the presentation of Jesus of Nazareth. . . . He isn’t interested in attacking religion or even the church, much less in comparing Christianity unfavorably to another religion. He would have us admire Jesus as one of the many would-be messiahs who sprang up during Rome’s occupation of Palestine, animated by zeal for ‘strict adherence to the Torah and the Law,’ refusal to serve a human master, and devotion to God, and therefore dedicated to throwing off Rome and repudiating Roman religion. . . . You don’t have to lose your religion to learn much that’s vitally germane to its history from Aslan’s absorbing, reader-friendly book.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Be advised, dear reader, Sunday school this isn’t. Yet Aslan may come as close as one can to respecting those who revere Jesus as the peace-loving, turn-the-other-cheek, true son of God depicted in modern Christianity, even as he knocks down that image. . . . Aslan is steeped in the history, languages and scriptural foundation of the biblical scholar and is a very clear writer with an authoritative, but not pedantic, voice. Those of us who wade into this genre often know how rare that is. . . . Fascinatingly and convincingly drawn.”—The Seattle Times
“[Aslan’s] literary talent is as essential to the effect of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth as are his scholarly and journalistic chops. . . . A vivid, persuasive portrait of the world and societies in which Jesus lived and the role he most likely played in both. . . . Fascinating.”—Salon
“Accessibly and strongly presented . . . Readable and with scholarly endnotes, Aslan’s book offers a historical perspective that is sure to generate spirited conversation.”—Library Journal
“A well-researched, readable biography of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth is not the same as Jesus Christ. The Gospels are not historical documents. . . . Why has Christianity taken hold and flourished? This book will give you the answers.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[Aslan] parts an important curtain that has long hidden from view the man Jesus. . . . Aslan develops a convincing and coherent story of how the Christian church, and in particular Paul, reshaped Christianity’s essence, obscuring the very real man who was Jesus of Nazareth. Compulsively readable and written at a popular level, this superb work is highly recommended.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A bold, powerfully argued revisioning of the most consequential life ever lived.”—Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
“The story of Jesus of Nazareth is arguably the most influential narrative in human history. Here Reza Aslan writes vividly and insightfully about the life and meaning of the figure who has come to be seen by billions as the Christ of faith. This is a special and revealing work, one that believer and skeptic alike will find surprising, engaging, and original.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
“In Zealot, Reza Aslan doesn't just synthesize research and reimagine a lost world, though he does those things very well. He does for religious history what Bertolt Brecht did for playwriting. Aslan rips Jesus out of all the contexts we thought he belonged in and holds him forth as someone entirely new. This is Jesus as a passionate Jew, a violent revolutionary, a fanatical ideologue, an odd and scary and extraordinarily interesting man.”—Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Hole in the Corner
Who killed Jonathan son of Ananus as he strode across the Temple Mount in the year 56 c.e.? No doubt there were many in Jerusalem who longed to slay the rapacious high priest, and more than a few who would have liked to wipe out the bloated Temple priesthood in its entirety. For what must never be forgotten when speaking of first-century Palestine is that this land—this hallowed land from which the spirit of God flowed to the rest of the world—was occupied territory. Legions of Roman troops were stationed throughout Judea. Some six hundred Roman soldiers resided atop the Temple Mount itself, within the high stone walls of the Antonia Fortress, which buttressed the northwest corner of the Temple wall. The unclean centurion in his red cape and polished cuirass who paraded through the Court of Gentiles, his hand hovering over the hilt of his sword, was a not so subtle reminder, if any were needed, of who really ruled this sacred place.
Roman dominion over Jerusalem began in 63 b.c.e., when Rome’s master tactician, Pompey Magnus, entered the city with his conquering legions and laid siege to the Temple. By then, Jerusalem had long since passed its economic and cultural zenith. The Canaanite settlement that King David had recast into the seat of his kingdom, the city he had passed to his wayward son, Solomon, who built the first Temple to God—sacked and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.e.—the city that had served as the religious, economic, and political capital of the Jewish nation for a thousand years, was, by the time Pompey strode through its gates, recognized less for its beauty and grandeur than for the religious fervor of its troublesome population.
Situated on the southern plateau of the shaggy Judean mountains, between the twin peaks of Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, and flanked by the Kidron Valley in the east and the steep, forebidding Valley of Gehenna in the south, Jerusalem, at the time of the Roman invasion, was home to a settled population of about a hundred thousand people. To the Romans, it was an inconsequential speck on the imperial map, a city the wordy statesman Cicero dismissed as “a hole in the corner.” But to the Jews this was the navel of the world, the axis of the universe. There was no city more unique, more holy, more venerable in all the world than Jerusalem. The purple vineyards whose vines twisted and crawled across the level plains, the well-tilled fields and viridescent orchards bursting with almond and fig and olive trees, the green beds of papyrus floating lazily along the Jordan River—the Jews not only knew and deeply loved every feature of this consecrated land, they laid claim to all of it. Everything from the farmsteads of the Galilee to the low-lying hills of Samaria and the far outskirts of Idumea, where the Bible says the accursed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah once stood, was given by God to the Jews, though in fact the Jews ruled none of it, not even Jerusalem, where the true God was worshipped. The city that the Lord had clothed in splendor and glory and placed, as the prophet Ezekiel declared, “in the center of all nations”—the eternal seat of God’s kingdom on earth—was, at the dawn of the first century c.e., just a minor province, and a vexing one at that, at the far corner of the mighty Roman Empire.
It is not that Jerusalem was unaccustomed to invasion and occupation. Despite its exalted status in the hearts of the Jews, the truth is that Jerusalem was little more than a trifle to be passed among a succession of kings and emperors who took turns plundering and despoiling the sacred city on their way to far grander ambitions. In 586 b.c.e. the Babylonians—masters of Mesopotamia—rampaged through Judea, razing both Jerusalem and its Temple to the ground. The Babylonians were conquered by the Persians, who allowed the Jews to return to their beloved city and rebuild their temple, not because they admired the Jews or took their cult seriously, but because they considered Jerusalem an irrelevant backwater of little interest or concern to an empire that stretched the length of Central Asia (though the prophet Isaiah would thank the Persian king Cyrus by anointing him messiah). The Persian Empire, and Jerusalem with it, fell to the armies of Alexander the Great, whose descendants imbued the city and its inhabitants with Greek culture and ideas. Upon Alexander’s untimely death in 323 b.c.e., Jerusalem was passed as spoils to the Ptolemaic dynasty and ruled from distant Egypt, though only briefly. In 198 b.c.e., the city was wrested from Ptolemaic control by the Seleucid king Antiochus the Great, whose son Antiochus Epiphanes fancied himself god incarnate and strove to put an end once and for all to the worship of the Jewish deity in Jerusalem. But the Jews responded to this blasphemy with a relentless guerrilla war led by the stouthearted sons of Mattathias the Hasmonaean—the Maccabees—who reclaimed the holy city from Seleucid control in 164 b.c.e. and, for the first time in four centuries, restored Jewish hegemony over Judea.
For the next hundred years, the Hasmonaeans ruled God’s land with an iron fist. They were priest-kings, each sovereign serving as both King of the Jews and high priest of the Temple. But when civil war broke out between the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus over control of the throne, each brother foolishly reached out to Rome for support. Pompey took the brothers’ entreaties as an invitation to seize Jerusalem for himself, thus putting an end to the brief period of direct Jewish rule over the city of God. In 63 b.c.e., Judea became a Roman protectorate, and the Jews were made once again a subject people.
Roman rule, coming as it did after a century of independence, was not warmly received by the Jews. The Hasmonaean dynasty was abolished, but Pompey allowed Hyrcanus to maintain the position of high priest. That did not sit well with the supporters of Aristobulus, who launched a series of revolts to which the Romans responded with characteristic savagery—burning towns, massacring rebels, enslaving populations. Meanwhile, the chasm between the starving and indebted poor toiling in the countryside and the wealthy provincial class ruling in Jerusalem grew even wider. It was standard Roman policy to forge alliances with the landed aristocracy in every captured city, making them dependent on the Roman overlords for their power and wealth. By aligning their interests with those of the ruling class, Rome assured that local leaders remained wholly vested in maintaining the imperial system. Of course, in Jerusalem, “landed aristocracy” more or less meant the priestly class, and specifically, that handful of wealthy priestly families who maintained the Temple cult and who, as a result, were charged by Rome with collecting the taxes and tribute and keeping order among the increasingly restive population—tasks for which they were richly compensated.
The fluidity that existed in Jerusalem between the religious and political powers made it necessary for Rome to maintain close supervision over the Jewish cult and, in particular, over the high priest. As head of the Sanhedrin and “leader of the nation,” the high priest was a figure of both religious and political renown with the power to decide all religious matters, to enforce God’s law, and even to make arrests, though only in the vicinity of the Temple. If the Romans wanted to control the Jews, they had to control the Temple. And if they wanted to control the Temple, they had to control the high priest, which is why, soon after taking control over Judea, Rome took upon itself the responsibility of appointing and deposing (either directly or indirectly) the high priest, essentially transforming him into a Roman employee. Rome even kept custody of the high priest’s sacred garments, handing them out only on the sacred festivals and feast days and confiscating them immediately after the ceremonies were complete.
Still, the Jews were better off than some other Roman subjects. For the most part, the Romans humored the Jewish cult, allowing the rituals and sacrifices to be conducted without interference. The Jews were even excused from the direct worship of the emperor, which Rome imposed upon nearly every other religious community under its dominion. All that Rome asked of Jerusalem was a twice-daily sacrifice of one bull and two lambs on behalf of the emperor and for his good health. Continue making the sacrifice, keep up with the taxes and tribute, follow the provincial laws, and Rome was happy to leave you, your god, and your temple alone.
The Romans were, after all, fairly proficient in the religious beliefs and practices of subject peoples. Most of the lands they conquered were allowed to maintain their temples unmolested. Rival gods, far from being vanquished or destroyed, were often assimilated into the Roman cult (that is how, for example, the Canaanite god Baal became associated with the Roman god Saturn). In some cases, under a practice called evocatio, the Romans would take possession of an enemy’s temple—and therefore its god, for the two were inextricable in the ancient world—and transfer it to Rome, where it would be showered with riches and lavish sacrifices. Such displays were meant to send a clear signal that the hostilities were directed not toward the enemy’s god but toward its fighters; the god would continue to be honored and worshipped in Rome if only his devotees would lay down their arms and allow themselves to be absorbed into the empire.
As generally tolerant as the Romans may have been when it came to foreign cults, they were even more lenient toward the Jews and their fealty to their One God—what Cicero decried as the “barbarian superstitions” of Jewish monotheism. The Romans may not have understood the Jewish cult, with its strange observances and its overwhelming obsession with ritual purity—“The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred,” Tacitus wrote, “while they permit all that we abhor”—but they nevertheless tolerated it.
What most puzzled Rome about the Jews was not their unfamiliar rites or their strict devotion to their laws, but rather what the Romans considered to be their unfathomable superiority complex. The notion that an insignificant Semitic tribe residing in a distant corner of the mighty Roman Empire demanded, and indeed received, special treatment from the emperor was, for many Romans, simply incomprehensible. How dare they consider their god to be the sole god in the universe? How dare they keep themselves separate from all other nations? Who do these backward and superstitious tribesmen think they are? The Stoic philosopher Seneca was not alone among the Roman elite in wondering how it had possibly come to pass in Jerusalem that “the vanquished have given laws to the victors.”
For the Jews, however, this sense of exceptionalism was not a matter of arrogance or pride. It was a direct commandment from a jealous God who tolerated no foreign presence in the land he had set aside for his chosen people. That is why, when the Jews first came to this land a thousand years earlier, God had decreed that they massacre every man, woman, and child they encountered, that they slaughter every ox, goat, and sheep they came across, that they burn every farm, every field, every crop, every living thing without exception so as to ensure that the land would belong solely to those who worshipped this one God and no other.
“As for the towns of these people that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance,” God told the Israelites, “you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them all—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deuteronomy 20:17–18).
It was, the Bible claims, only after the Jewish armies had “utterly destroyed all that breathed” in the cities of Libnah and Lachish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir, in the hill country and in the Negeb, in the lowlands and in the slopes—only after every single previous inhabitant of this land was eradicated, “as the Lord God of Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10: 28–42)—that the Jews were allowed to settle here.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; Illustrated edition (July 16, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 296 pages
- ISBN-10 : 140006922X
- ISBN-13 : 978-2523470201
- Item Weight : 1.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 6.1 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #66,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #26 in Christian Historical Theology (Books)
- #64 in Christology (Books)
- #192 in Religious Leader Biographies
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About the author

Dr. Reza Aslan’s bachelor’s degree is in religious studies, with an emphasis on scripture and traditions (which at Santa Clara University means the New Testament). His minor was in biblical Greek. He has a master of theological studies degree from Harvard University, in world religions, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the sociology of religions. UCSB’s doctoral program is an interdisciplinary one that draws from religion, history, philosophy, and sociology, among other fields. Aslan’s doctorate in the sociology of religions encompasses expertise in the history of religion. Reza also has a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa.
Dr. Aslan is currently professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, with a joint appointment in the department of religion, and he teaches in both disciplines. He was previously Wallerstein Distinguished Visiting Professor at Drew University, where he taught from 2012 to 2013, and assistant visiting professor of religion at the University of Iowa, where he taught from 2000 to 2003. He has written three books on religion.
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1) This is a popularization of recent (late 20th-early 21st century) reputable scholarship regarding Jesus. There's nothing in this book that would surprise a person (like myself) who has read pretty much all of the accessible scholarship on Jesus published in the last 30 or so years. Just going through the (extensive!) notes and bibliography at the end indicates to me that Aslan has done his homework.
2) Aslan takes the position that Jesus was a zealot for God and God's Temple, but (and this is repeated several times in the book) he was not a member of the Zealot Party, which wouldn't arise until over 30 years after Jesus' death. In this, Jesus was just one of a number of people who arose in the period from the reign of Herod the Great to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and his fate was like those others. In short, Jesus was killed for his zealotry, which was perceived as a threat to the Roman authorities and particularly to the Jewish sycophants who ran the Temple (and profited nicely from it). This is not a position shared by many members of the religious scholarship fraternity, who have attempted to carve out a position for Jesus where he's a religious figure who did not delve at all into politics. It's an interesting argument that I can't do justice in a few short sentences. If you're interested, you'll have to read the book yourself and decide if Aslan makes his case.
3) Aslan doesn't stop with the death of Jesus, and, as someone writing history, not hagiography, he carefully notes that he can't pass judgment on whether Jesus' resurrection occurred, because it is not a historical event but an event of faith. He then pushes on to a discussion of the earliest Christians and, in particular, the conflict between James the Just, described as the brother of Jesus and the head of the Jerusalem Christians, and Paul of Tarsus, the evangelizer of the Gentile world. This part is definitely worth the read, because it brings out the fact that the early Christians were not "in one accord" but were in fact fractiously divided over what Jesus taught and what it all meant.
4) My only serious factual gripe about the book comes from the first paragraph of Chapter 15, where Aslan describes James the Just as follows: "He himself owned nothing, not even the clothes he wore--simple garments made of linen, not wool." The problem is that historically linen was an elite fabric, not the fabric of the poor. (For example, Luke 16:19 points out that the rich man in Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus wore purple and fine linen and all four gospels are agreed that Jesus was buried in linen.) Making linen from flax took a lot of preparation as compared to wool, which can be spun practically straight from the sheep. But getting back to James the Just: The sources, by putting James in linen, were more likely comparing James to the Temple High Priest, who would have worn linen for the sacrifices.
5) I'm knocking off one star for not being footnoted. Granted, there is an extensive set of chapter-based endnotes (and I strongly suggest reading them, they're as engaging as the book itself), but the lack of footnotes is a serious flaw. Even if the book is intended for a popular audience, it should have been footnoted.
6) As for the assertion that the book is fatally flawed because it's influenced by Aslan's Muslim background: That is flatly false. Let me state again that there is nothing in this book that can't be read in the scholarship done by *Christians* published over the past several decades. Moreover, if Aslan was pushing Islam, you'd think that he'd make a point of saying, "Well, Islam considers Jesus a prophet," but he doesn't. Not at all. The reviews which make the assertion that the book is terrible, horrible and awful because of "OOOOH EVIL ISLAM!!!!" appear to have been influenced by Fox News' promotion of a screed by John Dickerson. As a former journalist for Phoenix New Times, Dickerson should know better, but perhaps that's why Dickerson is no longer a journalist but now pastors a church in Prescott, AZ and churning out inaccurate and inflammatory junk for the fearful faithful.
Aslan was born in Iran and came from a family of as he puts it "lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists." The Iranian revolution made his family flee Iran and at the age of fifteen he was converted to Christianity at a summer evangelical youth camp in Northern California. He later, after much study, became convinced that: "The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions-just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years---left me confused and spiritually unmoored. And so, like many people in my situation, I angrily discarded my faith as if it were a costly forgery I had been duped into buying. I began to rethink the faith and culture of my forefathers, finding in them as an adult a deeper, more intimate familiarity than I ever had as a child, the kind that comes from reconnecting with an old friend after many years apart." [Azlan, Reza. Zealot: Author's Note, p. xix. (New York: Random House. 2013)].
He continued his work in religious studies and after decades of academic research finds that he is a more committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than he ever could be of Jesus the Christ. Throughout the book there is always the juxtaposition of two concepts: "Jesus of Nazareth as the Historical Jesus and Jesus the Christ which is the creation of subsequent writers including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul who never knew the Historical Jesus because among the gospels none of them are written by the people they are named for with the possible exception of Luke and all were written by persons who did not know Jesus of Nazareth while he was living and were written many years later.
He warns the readers that "for every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it." He has recorded the sources for other arguments, also, but presents his view of what can be known of the historical Jesus in this book.
To some people the notion that Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem because of an order to go to the places of their birth because of an order of the Romans has been puzzling because it appears that no Roman record of such a thing exists. Aslan offers a very intelligent explanation of the need for Jesus to have been born in Bethelehem and how this story came to have been in the New Testament.
Also, it must have occurred to many people that there is such a distinction between the Jesus of the New Testament and the Teachings of the early church that it is necessary to attribute to Paul the creation of the Christian Church. Aslan gives extensive and thorough arguments in support of that hypothesis in this book.
As far back as the 1960's and possibly before studies of the beginnings of Christianity seemed to indicate that Jesus was a revolutionary figure. I think that Aslan has made a compelling argument that this is the case.
Some scholars have thought that the historic Jesus cannot be found. I believe this was the viewpoint of Albert Schweitzer after his study of the problem. Aslan correctly points out that even though very little has been documented of the Historic Jesus the Romans kept quite good records of the first century and beyond and it is possible to reconstruct the times in which Jesus lived.
Pontius Pilate is shown to have been a cruel procurator although his mention in the gospels has been whitewashed to appeal to the Romans and the Jews were maligned in a gospel causing two thousand years of anti-Semitism.
I have had a vague notion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and knew that this was destroyed by Titus in about 70 C.E. In this book Aslan gives a literary picture of that temple so vivid that one can almost smell it and see the various parts of it. This was an outstanding portrait of that Temple which was the site of so many happenings and the seat of so many High Priests prior to the dispersion of the Jews by the Romans.
I think that the persons who will most value this book are those who are aware of the scholarship regarding the Bible and are aware that the viewpoint of the scholars does not necessarily conform to the viewpoint of various churches. In trying to excuse this Aslan makes the distinction between Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ. Jesus the man being an illiterate Jewish peasant from a tiny village named Nazareth and Jesus the Christ being the Jesus who was created by the Paul and other writers seeking to appeal to the Greeks and the Romans. In this Jesus the man is lost to the New Testament and Jesus the Christ becomes the Jesus of organized religion. This is a valid distinction and one that persons believing in a literal acceptance of the Bible stories find hard to make.
If Jesus is placed firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the time in which he lived with the revolt against Rome that transformed the faith and practice of Judaism, then the biography of Jesus in some ways writes itself according to Aslan.
Most modern Christians would not recognize this Jesus but this Jesus may be the only Jesus that can be accessed by historical means. All else is a matter of faith.
Aslan states that there are only two historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can rely:
1. "Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E."
2."Rome crucified him for doing so."
Aslan writes that his book is an attempt "to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary who, two thousand years ago walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. It is also about how, in the aftermath of Jesus' failure to establish God's reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted not only Jesus' mission and identity, but also the very nature and definition of the Jewish messiah." [Aslan, Reza. Zealot, Introduction p. xxx. (New York: Random House, 2013)]
According to Aslan, when these facts are combined by what we know of the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived and a lot about this is known thanks to the Romans, the Jesus that emerges is not the gentle shepherd of the early Christian community but a zealous revolutionary swept up in the turmoil of the first -century Palestine.
To justify this belief Aslan points out that:
1. Crucifixion was a punishment Rome used almost completely for the crime of sedition. The plaque hung on the cross stating "King of the Jews" was like plaques hung on all the other crosses showing the crime for which he was executed. The crime was striving for kingly rule or treason. This was the same crime that all the other messianic aspirants of the time had been executed for.
2. The men on each side of Jesus were in Greek called lestai translated into English as "thieves" but which actually means "bandits" and was the most common Roman word for an insurrectionist or rebel.
Aslan states that the above image of the crucifixion should cast doubt on the Gospel portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace separated from the political upheavals of his time. The term "Kingdom of God" would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome. The notion that someone talking about "Kingdom of God" could be uninvolved in the revolutionary forces that gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.
He next considers the question of why the gospel writers went to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of Jesus' message and movement.
It is necessary to realize that almost every gospel story written regarding the life and mission of Jesus was written after the Jewish rebellion in 66 C.E. against Rome. These rebels somehow managed to take the Holy Land away from the Romans for four years until the Romans returned in 70 C.E. The soldiers destroyed everyone they reached who was in their path and set fire to the Temple. Everything burned. Josephus wrote that there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. According to Aslan tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered and the rest were taken from the city in chains.
Aslan believes that there was a spiritual trauma suffered by the Jews because of the above. They were exiled from the promised land and forced to live as outcasts among the pagans.
The rabbis deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism which had caused the war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in Jewish life. Rabbinic Judaism emerged.
According to Aslan, the Christians also felt a need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal causing the sacking of Jerusalem not only to protect themselves from the wrath of Rome but because, with the Jewish religion becoming pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church's evangelism.
So a long process of transforming Jesus from a Jewish nationalist into a spiritual leader having no interest in earthy matters began. The Romans could accept such a Jesus.
After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and Jerusalem destroyed what remained of the Jerusalem assembly dispersed and Paul took over the Christian community. Except for a hypothetical work known as the Q document the only literature about Jesus existing in 70 C.E. were letters of Paul in circulation from 50 C.E. These were letters of Paul to the Christian communities left known as the Diaspora communities. Without the assembly in Jerusalem to guide these communities the movement's connection to Judaism was broken. Paul became the person by which a new generation was introduced to Jesus the Christ.
According to Aslan there is a trace of Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew but the gospel of Luke which was written by one of the followers of Paul shows the dominance of Paul and the gospel of John is Paul's theology in narrative form.
In 398 C.E., according to legend, a council in the city of Hippo Regius gathered to canonize what was to become the New Testament. They chose, according to Aslan:
1. One letter from James, the brother and successor of Jesus.
2. Two letters from Peter, the chief apostle and first among the Twelve.
3. Three letters from John, the beloved disciple and pillar of the church.
4. Fourteen letters from Paul, the deviant and outcast who had been rejected and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem.
Aslan states that more than half of the twenty-seven books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul.
Aslan does not consider the above surprising because after Jerusalem was destroyed Christianity was almost exclusively a gentile religion which needed a gentile theology. Aslan believes that is what Paul provided.
The choice was between the vision of James of a Jewish religion following the Law of Moses coming from a Jewish nationalist who fought Rome, and Paul's vision of a Roman religion divorced from Jewish provincialism and requiring nothing for salvation but a belief in Christ. It was not difficult for second and third generations of Jesus' followers to make this choice.
In Alan's words: "Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth-Jesus the man-is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in." (Aslan, Reza. Zealot. New York: Random House, 2013 Page 216.)
I believe that Aslan has accomplished his goal of presenting the Historical Jesus in the context of the times in which he lived. He has referenced more than one hundred twenty seven books by various scholars in support of or against his views and articles by more than forty-one different scholars.
The book is highly readable by non-scholars as well as by scholars which accounts for Aslan's previous and current success as a best selling author and I do not hesitate to recommend this book to all thinking persons.
Top reviews from other countries
Jesus of Nazareth, a journeyman carpenter, advocated for rebellion against the Roman state, and was executed for his treason. The details and insights in this book help you understand not just the history, but the modern hypocrites of those who call themselves Christians.
I recommend this book to anyone wanting a few more answers to what went on at that time in history than a western bible can offer them but be prepared to find out that the man was just that [a man] and he had only one race of people at heart.
This is not an easy subject, the author recognises such and the huge gaps in historical data and knowledge of the time, however the piece trips along at a great pace, chapter by chapter.
In the end while offering little new about the life lived by Jesus it offers and new prism through which to view that life and as the author says there are few more interesting men in history to re-examine than the life of Jesus.













