Book Reviews

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Zealot
The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan
© 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6022-4
Random House
www.atrandom
New York, NY
298 pages, $27.00

I came upon this book when I saw it prominently displayed as a “sizzler” in a local library. It caught my attention, both the book and the photo of the distinguished looking young author that wrote it. The author entered the USA from Iran with his family when he was a young teenager, coming from an Islamic culture. He spent the summer of his sophomore year at an evangelical youth camp in Northern California, where he heard a remarkable story that would change his life forever. He found Jesus. Intrigued, I checked out the book and took it home with me.

Aslan, the author, goes into detail about his early conversion. For a kid raised in a motley family of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists, this was truly the greatest story ever told. Never before had I felt so intimately the pull of God. . . . Jesus was the central figure in America’s national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American. When I returned from camp, I began eagerly to share the good news with others. But when the arguments Aslan used to show that everything described in the Bible is literally true were so thoroughly refuted by his listeners, he became disillusioned with Christianity. The more I probed the Bible to arm myself against the doubt of unbelievers, the more distance I discovered between the Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus of history—between Jesus the Christ and Jesus of Nazareth.

After high school, he pursued a religious education in the USA, obtaining a B.A. in Religious Studies from Santa Clara Univ., a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard, and a PhD in Sociology of Religions from Univ. of Calif. After this secular education in religion, he no longer believes the Bible is literally true, and now sees Jesus no longer as God but simply as a human being, as he says, in a different light. He is now genuinely committed to Jesus of Nazareth (the Historical Jesus) more so than to Jesus the Christ (the Jesus of the Gospels).

It was sad for me to read Aslan’s unrelenting rejection of almost everything in Scripture that explains who Jesus the Christ really is. Here are some examples of it: Why do Matthew and Luke and only Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus was born not in Nazareth but in Bethlehem? When the Jews say we know where you are from (Nazareth), John has Jesus deflect the matter of his earthly home entirely, choosing instead to emphasize his heavenly origins. Such statements are commonplace in John, who wrote in 100-120 C.E. John shows no interest at all in Jesus’s physical birth, even though he acknowledges that Jesus was a Nazarean. A similar lack of concern about Jesus’s earthly origins can be found in the first gospel, Mark, written just after 70 C.E. Mark’s focus is kept squarely on Jesus’s ministry; he is uninterested either in Jesus’s birth, or perhaps surprisingly, in Jesus’s resurrection, as he writes nothing at all about either event.

The letters of Paul, which make up the bulk of the New Testament, are wholly detached from any event in Jesus’s life save his crucifixion and resurrection (though Paul does mention the Last Supper). Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean when we say “history.” The problem faced by Matthew and Luke is that there is simply no single cohesive prophetic narrative concerning the messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Commentating on Luke 24: 44-46 ‘Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day’, Aslan states nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of Moses, not in the Prophets, not in the Psalms. In the entire history of Jewish thought there is not a single line of scripture that says the messiah is to suffer, die, and rise again on the third day, which may explain why Jesus does not bother to cite any scripture to back up his incredible claim.

The story of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus is a bit of propagandist legend created by the evangelist Luke; Paul himself never recounts the story of being blinded by the sight of Jesus. Although Paul does not divulge any details about his conversion; he does repeatedly insist that he has witnessed the risen Jesus for himself. . . Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? But Aslan later discredits Paul’s testimony affirming that he saw the risen Christ. Aslan states that there is no credible historical evidence that Christ did rise from the dead. Strange that someone so keen on historical documents will not accept an eyewitness report written by a person testifying to what he, himself, has seen.

I don’t know where to start in critiquing Aslan’s book. I see that many people have criticized it already. I also see an overwhelming rejection of Christianity in the world today. The very notion that God even exists, much less created the world, is refuted by the Theory of Evolution. Like Aslan, I also found Jesus Christ, but I did not stall when I realized that not every statement in the Bible is literally true. I took a different view, like what St. Paul had to say about Scripture. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: Also I realized that Christ commissioned his apostles to preach, orally, what he taught. Aslan writes: Illiteracy rates in first century Palestine were staggeringly high . . . at least 97%. Why would any of the apostles feel compelled to write their message if so few people could read? Christ promised the Holy Spirit to guide his church in resolving the accuracy of his teaching that will be handed down through the ages. Every generation has always had this living human agency inspired by The Holy Spirit to clarify what Christ meant when he initially preached his gospel.

Aslan wrote another Book, How to Win a Cosmic War, in which he describes what he thinks is the source of conflict in human history. The cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens. Earthly wars are fought with weapons. Cosmic wars are won or lost with jihads, occupations, and forcible conversions. There can be no compromise in a cosmic war. There can be no negotiation, no settlement, and no surrender. A cosmic war is a war to capture the minds of people.

I see in Genesis a description of how this cosmic war started right at its beginning. As soon as God placed the first two humans in the Garden of Eden, Satan entered the garden and tempted the woman and her husband. God then punished the woman and her husband and Satan. God told Satan I will put enmity between you and the woman, between her seed and your seed. I think this is the cosmic war we are all still involved with.

I see in the world an incredible difference between the way humans act and the way God wants us to act. There is very little brotherly love among humans. There is bullying, robberies, oppression, wars. I see so many humans obsessed with their own pride pursuing their own betterment. As a result, there are so many other humans languishing in persecution and oppression and poverty. I think this rejection of what God wants is fueled by a spiritual bias promoted by Satan in his opposition to God. His influence incites humans into opposition against one another. They argue and fight. The talented and rich take advantage of the disadvantaged and poor. Even though many gifted people struggle for the good life, the reality is that most human beings live miserable lives. This is not what God is like. He is love. He loves everybody he created, and he wants us to love each other and to care for one another like the big family he intended for us to be.

I agree with Aslan that a cosmic war is behind human misconduct, but the war is much different than he describes. There is no victory in the war he describes. Humans have been fighting since their first appearance in the world. And the fighting will go on, I think, until the combatants, already having access to nuclear weapons, are likely to destroy human life on earth.

Aslan claims that in his search for the identity of Jesus, he rejected the notion that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. He found the fully human Jesus, the Zealot. Here is how he understands Jesus the Zealot: Here is what we know about Nazareth at the time of Jesus’s birth: there was little there for a woodworker to do. . . . He was a tekton—a woodworker or builder—though it bears mentioning that there is only one verse in the whole of the New Testament in which this claim is made about him. If that is true . . . then Jesus would have belonged to the lowest class of peasants in first-century Palestine, just above the indigent, the beggar, and the slave. Aslan even buys into the rumor that Mary was raped by the roman soldier Panthera, which would make Jesus an illegitimate child of mixed ancestry. Here is how Aslan sums it up: Regardless of how Jesus viewed himself, the fact remains that he was never able to establish the Kingdom of God. The sole weapon he had with which to build the Kingdom of God was . . . zeal. That’s why Aslan thinks of Jesus as the Zealot.

I get much more than that from Scripture because I believe the revelation Jesus made through the church he founded on his apostles. Jesus is both a human being and The Christ. As a human, one could describe him as a Zealot, if one insists. But he is not an ordinary human being like me. The person operating within the soul and body of Jesus is not a created person like my person is: it is the uncreated person of the divine Son of God. That’s why he is The Christ. His father sent him into this world to engage God’s cosmic enemies (if one wants to put it that way) who are fallen angels, all of whom were created out of nothing like we humans were. They have rebelled against God and make war against the one who created them. It’s a cosmic war because it is fought on a spiritual plane far above the capabilities of mortal men.

I don’t think there is any possibility that God is going to surrender his sovereignty to some creatures he created out of nothing. Why should he ever have to do that? Sooner or later this cosmic war has to end. I think The Christ, the divine Son of God, has entered this cosmic war in his human flesh allowing the victor to become the victim, and through the human effort of all of us victims, as God predicted to the original woman, Christ using us humans will crush the cosmic pride that led to this war and bring peace and love to all creation.

Maurice A. Williams

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