Review of "Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth", by Reza Aslan

Aslan's book became a bestseller after a particularly incompetent Fox News interview went viral. As Aslan points out in that interview, whatever else the book is about, it isn't a traditional Moslem gloss on the gospels. Aslan holds a PhD in the Sociology of Religions and has written extensively about several world religions. The first sentence of the book states, "When I was fifteen years old, I found Jesus." Aslan describes a personal journey from nominal Islam through Christian enthusiasm to a more detached, academic understanding of the historical figure whose life and death gave birth to the world's largest religion.

The main body of the book contains 216 pages of intelligent and engaging prose. Aslan tackles many themes addressed in theological texts, but he introduces his material gradually, and I would expect his argument to be easily accessible to non-technical readers. I found some of the storytelling sections a little contrived, but overall it was an enjoyable book to read.

Aslan's central argument is that the historical Jesus was a radically different figure to the one recreated by the church. Given that this argument has been advanced by literally thousands of biblical scholars who have been unable to agree on anything about this alternative Jesus except that he was radically different, my expectations were not high, and I was pleasantly surprised to find much which was useful and challenging:

1. Aslan paints a vivid picture of First Century Palestine. He points out that when Jesus began his preaching by announcing the Kingdom of God, no-one at the time imagined some other-wordly set of abstract values. Israel had been fighting for political liberation for centuries, in the expectation that, one day soon, YHWH would send Messiah to show the world the one true God living with his one true people. He points out that Galilee was a poor rural district that was despised even within Israel, and that by the First Century it was suffering from an aggressive urbanisation programme driven by the Romans. He also dwells upon the many different factions within Judaism, who often hated each other more they hated the Romans. Other writers have covered this ground, but Aslan's rendition is compelling.
2. Aslan points out that the message of Jesus is often far more concrete and far more aggressive than the Jesus presented in Sunday School. Jesus speaks of dramatic upheaval in society; he worries about the fate of pregnant mothers when "the End" comes; he says that he has come to bring not peace but a sword. In my view, Aslan is on the right track here. Too often, the church has turned Jesus' ministry into a series of spiritual aphorisms, and thus missed the clear social challenge behind his words.
3. Perhaps surprisingly, in a book that rejects much of the face-value teaching of the gospels, Aslan recognises that claims of resurrection cannot easily be discarded, simply because something clearly happened to mobilise the movement that became the church. Aspiring messiahs were crucified all the time, yet no other crucified messiah maintained his following after his death. Aslan maintains that the historicity of the resurrection is not a question that historians can easily deal with, but he considers the disciples' subsequent behaviour to be "a nagging fact". "It was precisely the fervour with which the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection that transformed this tiny Jewish sect into the largest religion in the world." (p175)
4. Aslan correctly perceives evolving understandings of Jesus within the New Testament, as well as the tension that often exists between different "voices". At Pentecost, the disciples see themselves as a messianic Jewish sect, and there is at best muted enthusiasm for world mission within the first assembly in Jerusalem. Paul - the bicultural, bilingual convert who eventually wrote half the New Testament - refers rarely to the life and words of Jesus, and introduces new ways of understanding Jesus' mission. Tensions between the Jerusalem of Peter and James and Paul's Antioch are explicit in Scripture, and Aslan is right to suggest that euphemisms such as "after much discussion" in Acts 15 suggest that there was outright conflict at times. The church described in Acts is clearly making theology on the hoof.

Nonetheless, despite some excellent analysis and attention to scriptural detail, I ultimately found Aslan's overall argument unconvincing, not so much because of what he says but because of what he ignores. Although Aslan is clearly aware of work by New Testament historians and theologians, I could not shake the impression that at many points he was struggling to reinvent concepts that have been taken for granted by many in those disciplines for many years.

1. I think that Aslan draws a false dichotomy between earthly and heavenly understandings of the Kingdom. While it is easy to find churches whose sole interest is getting disembodied souls to heaven, the long history of Christian philanthropy and social reform and more recent movements such as Latin American Liberation Theology show that this has never been the whole story. The Lord's Prayer anticipates the Kingdom "on Earth as it is in Heaven". In many cases, mainstream theological thinking would say that statements by Jesus have both an immediate earthly and an eschatological heaven meaning, and that God's plan is to bring Heaven and Earth together rather than abandoning one in favour of the other. In the famous words of Ladd, the Kingdom is both now and not yet.
2. I think that Aslan draws a false dichotomy between Jewish and Hellenic thinking. At points he suggests that Hellenic Jews living outside of Jerusalem would be basically clueless about the Jewish Scriptures and about Jewish tradition. That cluelessness undoubtedly came to characterise many in the increasingly Greek-dominated church in later centuries. But the whole point of synagogues in the diaspora was to preserve Jewish teaching and culture, and a synagogue is literally defined by the presence of the Torah. And thus, for example, I would be inclined to see Stephen's account of Jewish history in Acts 7 as deliberately subversive rather than inaccurate because of ignorance. (One problem I always have with such claims is that the church had several centuries to fix this kind of apparently glaring error. So maybe, if they didn't fix it, they didn't consider it to be an error, and it is our analytical framework that should be reconsidered.)
3. I think that Aslan makes some strange calls about the historicity or otherwise of specific claims about Jesus. To be fair, this is the fundamental paradox encountered by all attempts to discover "the historical Jesus" from the New Testament, while at the same time insisting that the same New Testament hides and distorts the truth about that historical Jesus. It seems to me that once Aslan has convinced himself that the historical Jesus as he sees him "has been almost completely lost to history" at the end of the book (p216), he really ought to abandon the manuscript and write a book about some other topic on which the historian's toolset can work, especially as "outside of the New Testament there is almost no trace of the man" (p xxiv). But, like many other scholars who have started down this path, he ends up trying to reconstruct what has been lost on the basis of a series of more or less tendentious assumptions about the detailed workings of society 2000 years ago. Space forbids, but one example is Aslan's take on the conflict between Paul and James around p191. It seems to me that the un-reconstructed account of the conflict in Acts makes as much sense as Aslan's reconstruction, once we accept Tom Wright's argument that Paul is reforming Jewish thinking from within, in the best traditions of the Old Testament prophets. From that perspective, the conflict becomes a quintessentially Jewish scene of debate and eventual compromise between rabbis, rather than a DaVincian fight between two completely different world views. The problem with trying to reconstruct detail that has allegedly been removed is that you may sometimes end up constructing something that was never there in the first place.
4. Finally, I could not work out what would drive the flip-flop doctrinal progression that Aslan describes in the concluding chapters of the book. For example, Aslan has Paul the non-Jewish outsider being resoundingly defeated by James and his follower, with Peter beating him to Rome... and then the church in Rome promptly abandons all the disciples' teaching to accept all of Paul's teaching almost as soon as Paul is dead. Such things sometimes happen, but in this case it seems to me that the more linear account of mainstream theology fits both the text and human nature a lot better - the church realised from the start that Jesus was more than a man, struggled with ways to express this, especially as the church found itself needing to explain itself in Greek culture, and eventually settled on forms of words that most Christians at the time could live with. (I recognise that, by the time of the Nicean Council, the church was subject to major political influence. But that wasn't the case in the First Century, when there really wasn't a single entity that could impose a doctrinal sea change even if anyone had wanted to do so.)

Overall, I enjoyed "Zealot". I learned some things, and I was challenged to think about my own beliefs at several points. But, if I had to choose one book on this topic, I would opt for Wright's "Jesus and the victory of God", which in my opinion puts most of Aslan's concerns into an equally scholarly but broader and less contentious framework.