Book review: Jesus the man
Zealot: The Life and
Times of Jesus of Nazareth
By Reza Aslan
Reviewed by Dilip Simeon
(Biblio, November-December 2013)
This is a fascinating account of the life of Jesus of
Nazareth. I suspect it will also be disturbing for believers. The argument
rests on the distinction between the historical Jesus and the man later known
as Jesus the Christ (Christ being
Greek for messiah). Two lines on consecutive pages run thus: ‘Jesus of Nazareth Kingdom of God
The unknown villager
Reconstructing
the story of Jesus has always been difficult. Yeshu of Nazareth, crucified as a
seditious rebel in Roman Palestine circa 30 C.E. had preached in Aramaic. For
four decades the tradition remained oral. The Gospels were not historical texts
but the means of propagating faith. Yet they are the sole source of information
about the Passion. They began to be written two generations after Jesus’s
death. Mark’s was the first of the three ‘synoptic’ gospels which carry a
common narrative. It was written circa 70 C.E. in Rome .
Matthew and Luke’s gospels followed, circa 70-90 C.E. John’s dates to 100-120
C.E.
Jesus
may have been born between 4 to 6 B.C.E.
There is an interesting debate about this which Aslan does not venture into,
but he does examine the welter of tendentious statements in the gospels, to
question Jesus’s birthplace as Bethlehem (it was, rather, the village of
Nazareth); and Matthew’s story about Herod’s massacre of infant sons in Bethlehem,
for which he says there is no corroboratory evidence. The earliest non-biblical
reference to Jesus comes from the historian Josephus, who died circa 100 C.E. Other
first-century historians mention Jesus, but focus on the movement. The same is
true of the epistles of Paul, the originator of the cult of Christ, who died in
66 C.E. The great Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann called the gospels ‘extended
mythic legends’, and believed that ‘simply nothing’ may be known of the actual
life and personality of Jesus. It is to Aslan’s credit that he uses
contemporary texts, secondary works and intricate textual analysis to make an
argument that goes beyond Bultmann.
His
method is simple. He places Jesus’s life in the context of the history of Palestine
after its conquest by Rome in 63 B.C.E.
He uses comparative history and textual analysis to glean the most plausible
aspects of Jesus’ life, utterances and those of his important disciples; and he
contrasts this with Paul’s version of the Christ. Along the way he debunks
myths such as the attribution to Jews the demand that Jesus be crucified, and
Roman governor Pontius Pilate’s allegedly benign stance towards Jesus. (Pilate
was the most bloodthirsty of Jerusalem ’s
rulers). Aslan speaks of Jesus’s brothers, notwithstanding the Catholic dogma
of Mary’s virginity. His brother James was one of the Apostles, and became the foremost
leader of the early church. Mathew’s argument for the virgin birth ‘holds no
water at all’, says Aslan - the relevant citation did not read ‘behold a virgin
shall conceive’, but ‘behold a young maiden shall conceive’.
Aslan
recounts the history of the church after Jesus, and the dispute between the
Jerusalem-based believers, the Hebrews, and the Hellenic preachers led by the
convert Paul. This first schism was momentous. It demarcated the figure of the popular
revolutionary carrying a promise of justice, from Jesus the Christ (Greek for messiah); God
incarnate, whose promise lay in the future. It demarcated the Hebraic
Christians of Palestine from the new converts in the Hellenized, Latin-speaking
world of the empire.
Messianism in Palestine
Prior to the Roman occupation, Jerusalem
had been the capital of a dynasty of priest-kings. ‘The very term theocracy was coined to describe Jerusalem ’.
Conquest resulted in alliances with the Jewish aristocracy, and the
continuation of the political economy of the Temple-State of Judea .
As far as religious beliefs went, the Romans were tolerant rulers. But the peasantry
had now to pay taxes to Rome as
well as to the Temple . The book offers
interesting details about the polity, including the strangle-hold of the
priests, the crucial place of ritual sacrifice, the intrigues of the ruling
class, and periodic rebellions that resulted in massacres and destruction. There
was a history of messianic rebellions in the region of Galilee ,
(where Nazareth lay) whose rustic
people were known to be fiercely independent. The charismatic leaders of these
insurrections were referred to by Rome
as lestai - meaning bandits, but used
generically for any violent rebels.
The period of Jesus’s birth also saw a rebellion, led by one
Judas the Galilean and marked by fervent rejection of Roman rule. This oppositional
spirit was accentuated by the exceptionalism that puzzled the
philosophically-minded among the Roman elite. Aslan argues that this
exclusivity was rooted in faith in the promise of the jealous God, ‘who
tolerated no foreign presence in the land he had set aside for his chosen
people’. The single-minded ardor for God’s law was known as zeal - decades after Jesus, zealotry
came to be identified as a sectarian designation. In his time, it was a model
of piety, linked says Aslan, ‘to the widespread sense of apocalyptic
expectation that had seized the Jews in the wake of the Roman occupation.’
This is the clue to the title of this book. Jesus was the
Zealot before zealotry. When asked by the high priest Caiaphas if he was the
messiah, he answered in the affirmative. But in Aslan’s reading of the texts, and
of the debate around the ‘messianic secret’ (Jesus’s ambiguity) this assertion
was associated with the term Son of Man,
an indication of a kingly, Davidic paradigm. The Romans felt threatened enough
to have him crucified. For the Jews of his time, Jesus was another failed
messiah. To blunt the sense of failure, the early church turned that
expectation towards heaven and the future. This was the basis for the
resurrection myth – the claim that Jesus arose from the dead and was seen by
his followers prior to being taken by God. It was crucial for the first
Christians that Jesus be portrayed as immortal. ‘But Jesus’s kingdom’, says
Aslan, ‘was very much of this world.’
The Son of Man
Jesus’ childhood was probably spent as a wood-working
apprentice in the city of Sepphoris . The major prophetic figure preceding him was
the popular priest called John the Baptist. The gospels struggle to explain
Jesus’ baptism at the hands of John, whose disciple he became. After John’s
execution, Jesus began preaching his conception of the Kingdom
of God Galilee .
He castigated the priestly nobility and Jewish establishment for exploiting the
poor. He became famous for his acts of healing, dubbed miracles by his
followers. (The book has an interesting discussion of miracle-making and magic).
The story of his entry into Jerusalem
circa 30 C.E., mounted on a donkey, and storming the Temple
to overturn the tables of the money-changers and set free the caged animals, is
underplayed in the New Testament. Aslan thinks the early evangelists wanted to
gloss over the story’s radical implications. That it occurs in all four gospels
indicates its universal acceptance. It is apparent that his following was
mainly among artisans and villagers, and that his message was not a benign one.
Jesus was not promising heavenly bliss and redemption but imminent liberation
from oppressors.
Confronted
with the Jewish rebellion, Emperor Vespasian caused Jerusalem
and its Temple to be razed in 70
C.E. After this the Christian cult distanced itself from the Jewish diaspora
and took root among Roman citizens. Mark’s gospel was written around this time,
and in Greek. Jesus of Nazareth was supplanted by Jesus the Christ. His message
would be divested of Jewish nationalism and promoted as a universal calling. He
would be portrayed not as the purifier of the Temple
but as one who replaced it. When in 66 C.E. the Emperor Nero ordered the
execution of both the evangelist Paul and the apostle Peter, he thought they
espoused the same faith. He was mistaken. More than half of the New Testament’s
books are by or about Paul, whose dogma was to emerge as Christianity. But Aslan
believes his doctrine ‘would have been utterly unrecognizable to the person
upon whom he claims it is based.’
The second and third generation of Jesus’s followers cast
aside the religion derived from the nationalist who fought Rome ,
and chose a Roman religion divorced from Jewish provincialism and requiring nothing
for salvation save belief in Christ. The zealot who defied the Temple
priests and the Roman occupation was lost to history. But Aslan turns our minds
toward the man from Nazareth whom he
believes was ‘every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus
the Christ’. The gods ask us to pursue truth, and the truth overtakes the gods.
Dilip Simeon
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all - Dilip
A Radical Vatican? BY NAOMI KLEIN
