I wish that the
furor over Reza Aslan’s book, “Zealot,” had never occurred. The outage over a
Mulim writing a book about Jesus was a huge distraction, and set up the kind of
phony battle lines that our culture is famous for. On one side, the
conservative and Islamophobes who hated the book on principle because of its
author's religious identity. On the other, the atheists and the kind of
reflexive liberals who support whatever their enemies hate. In the middle are
those like me who hope to read the book on its own merits.
And while those
merits are well-deserved, they are too often shaky.
The main thesis of
Zealot is that Jesus of Nazareth was very much a person of his own era. Like
many others in his day, he was antagonistic to the economic inequities that
were becoming more pronounced in first-century Galilee. Like many others, he
looked upon the Roman occupiers as signs of evil times in Israel. Aslan wants
us to believe that Jesus, while not an armed rebel leader, was a Jewish
nationalist bent on removing the Romans fro m Israel. It’s this thesis that, In
the end, he fails to prove.
Along the way,
however, Aslan treats us to many aspects of 1st
century life that are generally unknown to casual believers, and which are
worthwhile keeping in the mix when we try to understand Jesus and his times. He
will also introduce readers to aspects of New Testament scholarship and history
that are shocking to the lay worshipper, yet are (for the most part) well
established among non-fundamentalist scholars. While he has a tendency to
embrace the most shocking scholarly hypotheses
(no Joseph!) and accepts or rejects the historicity of certain gospel
traditions in his own unique manner, his opinions are not out of line with what
many scholars say about Jesus and the first century world.
In the first
century, the ancient subsistence farming economy was breaking down under the
pressure of increased taxation from the Romans. Small shareholders found it
increasingly difficult to maintain
themselves in an economy where 50% of their earnings were siphoned off to the
Romans, to local landowners to pay off debts, or to the Temple treasury in
Jerusalem. Add to this the local political instability. When kings like Herod
the Great were in power, they hired lavishly from the local peasantry to build
and to decorate their new cities. When kings died or were overthrown in
revolts, these artisans and other workers were out of work, unable to return to
failed farms and unable to find new work.
Aslan does a nice
job of explaining the Temple economy, which required Jews to sacrifice animals
(which cost money) in order to fulfill their religious observances. He does
skate the edge of anti-Semitism by calling the priestly class, and their money
changing network,
"moneygrubbers." But to the average illiterate and
impoverished Jew, with no other recourse for forgiveness of sins and removal of
impurity, the machinery of the Temple’s sacrificial system was ruinous
financially. It might well be that this led people like Jesus to wonder
whether it was also empty spiritually.
Aslan tries hard to
draw a straight line between the Jesus of the gospels and the various messiahs
and rebels that sprouted up during this time period. He thinks that when Jesus
asks his disciples whether they have swords (they produce two) this makes him a
bandit leader. He takes literally Jesus’s statement that he came not to bring
peace, but the sword. He claims that "Render under to Caesar" was a
political statement about returning the land to Jewish ownership. And he makes
too much of the short, violent scuffle in Gethsemane when Jesus was arrested.
Yet though it's doubtful that Jesus welcomed the Romans into Israel, there is a
great deal of subtlety here that Aslan does not bring up. For instance, Jesus's
command to turn the other cheek is hardly the kind of advice a Rome-hater would
proffer. And neither is his advice to walk two miles with the soldier who
pressed him to carry a load for one mile. If Jesus wanted Rome to go, it was
God who would make that happen. And that is a critical difference between
Messiah Jesus and all the other messiahs of his age.
Aslan is correct in
his statements that Jesus foresaw a reversal of fortune in the near future.
(Read Luke's "Magnificat" if you want to get an idea of how radical
was early Christianity!) Jesus saw the Twelve disciples as judges who would
rule over the twelve tribes of Israel. He saw himself as the Son of Man, a
conquering figure drawn from the Bible’s eschatological tradition. Aslan is
correct that Jesus offered a critique of the Temple system, at a time when the
Temple leaders and Roman overlords were in uneasy alliance against rebels and
others who would cause disturbances. And he is correct in seeing Jesus’s
cleansing of the Temple – with its direct physical action against the money
changers – as the action that precipitated his arrest and death. Finally, he is
completely on target by noting that crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a
Jewish one. It was reserved for political crimes – sedition, rebellion, treason
and revolt.
While Christians
have complicated and overthought Jesus's teaching in order to make him seem too
other-wordly, Aslan has gone too far the
other way, making him too ordinary. For Jesus to have been seen as a threat to
Rome and the Temple did not require him to advocate physical violence against
them. Given the cruel and suspicious times, it was enough that he was actively
planning to rule Israel, after God intervened in history, in place of the
Romans. An ethical teacher and self-styled prophet, whose healings taught the
peasantry that God was on their side, didn't have to raise a finger or an army
to seem like a threat to established power. Merely by publicly standing against
them, rather than sinking into safety and anonymity, Jesus drew too much public
attention to himself and had to be dealt with. Pilate's writing on Jesus's
titulus -- "King of the Jews" -- was a cruel joke, something that Aslan thinks the Romans, those
spawners of satirists and bawdy poets, were incapable of.
Though
"Zealot" contains a great deal of scholarship, the book has serious
faults. Aslan minimizes the range of opinion within biblical scholarship. One scholar might reject the birth narratives
as entirely spurious, while another finds some or much truth in them. Aslan,
for instance, goes farther tha n most in suggesting that Joseph, Mary's
betrothed and Jesus's step father, did not exist. He suggests that Mary was an
unwed mother, which has some possible support in Jesus's opponents calling him
"Son of Mary." But though this is a legitimate hypothesis, it's
hardly the consensus of scholars. Aslan is also somewhat arbitrary in his
rejection of gospel verses that he doesn't like. Gone are the trial before
Pilate, the infancy narratives (Jesus was born in Nazareth) and even a
synagogue in Jesus's hometown (though he later backtracks and suggests that
there might have been a room devoted to the Torah). And he is maddenigly
contradictory. The Jews of Jesus time were mostly illiterate, yet Jeses seems
to have been familiar with Scripture, and his disciples enough so to
immediately bring to mind that Jesus as being "zealous for the law"
when he cleaned the Temple. Most unforgivably, though, for Aslan and his
editors, he commits some serious errors of fact. He thinks the Sea of Galilee
was salty, when it is an inland, fresh-water lake. He confuses James the son of
Zebedee with James the brother of the Lord. He claims (in opposition to actual
archeological finds) that Jesus was nailed through wrists (OK , so says the
possibly-forged Shroud of Turin) and ankles, which don't have the same bone
structure as wrists! And that Jesus
carried the crossbeam of the cross (most scholars agree on this) but
that it was attached to an upright laid on the ground, which was then hoisted
up into position. Though these errors not consequential to his thesis about
Jesus as a religiously-zealous Jewish nationalist, they do point to a rather
slapdash creation for what should have been a very careful analysis.
For all its
shortcomings, Aslan's "Zealot" is not a bad book. It is certainly not
an attack on Christianity or on the person of Jesus. And, taken with a grain of
salt, it will expose readers to controversies about Jesus's life that scholars
have been wrestling with for years. The book is the continuing effort, by
people of goodwill twenty centuries after the death of Jesus, to make sense of
a figure of immense complexity and seeming contradictions. I don’t agree that Aslan's Jesus is as "compelling,
charismatic and praiseworthy" as the Christ worshipped in churches. But
taken with an element of caution and skepticism, it does sketch a story of his
times that is richer and more robust than the watered down Jesus of sermons and
popular culture.
My little Catholic community has a special connection to one of the famous Marian apparitions. We even had a feast day for her recently, at which I played an important part. Yet the night of the feast, when the nice little old Congregationalist neighbor lady came by and asked what I had been up to, I told her about the feast and went into scoffing mode. "You know us Catholics," I said, "seeing Mary everywhere." I downplayed as somewhat embarrassing the apparition that had been the founding vision of my community. But instead of joining in with my hilarity, she let me prattle on. I think she felt bad for me.
