Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Contextual Jesus

The textual religions of The Book - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have a common problem. No matter how hard they try, they can’t stop their adherents from interpreting their foundational texts, often in diverse and incompatible ways. Among the interpretations are those which claim to be ‘fundamental’, that is not just logically essential to a coherent theology, but also historically the most primitive and therefore the most original and, presumably, the most authentic.

In the case of Christianity, the problem of interpretation spawned what has become known as the ‘search for the historical Jesus’. The idea behind this effort was that the ‘real’ Jesus was a figure whose ambiguities and ephemerality - and the resulting plethora of interpretations - could be resolved by some good old scientific research and rigorous reasoning. Turns out though that the historical Jesus is just as elusive as the theological Jesus. The effort was a failure.

Aslan takes a very different approach to the interpretive problem. He has little interest in the history of the individual called Jesus or in his theological attributes. What matters to Aslan is context: the politics, sociology, governmental administration and culture of the times before, during and after Jesus’s short life. Piecing together what we know about this context with the very limited historical knowledge of Jesus and the first theological interpretations of his life, Aslan creates a very readable, entertaining, and exceptionally coherent story about the man and his mission.

Believers, of course, don’t respond well to Aslan’s method. Their issue isn’t likely to be with Aslan’s exegesis, which is professional and generally inoffensive, but rather with the ease with which Aslan can explain so much of the theology and history of Jesus by reference to events, conditions, and motives that are entirely independent of him, his followers, and his opponents. That the story Aslan tells incorporates biblical contradictions, non-sequiturs, and sheer impossibilities into a coherent narrative better than most, is a threat to which believers may feel some considerable irritation.

The sharpest thorn under the dogmatic saddle is likely to be the picture Aslan creates of contemporary religious zealousness - or as we have come to call it, terrorism. The Roman territories of the Middle East - Syria, Judea, Galilee, Samaria - according to Aslan, are little different today than they were at the start of the Christian Era. A series of heavy-handed governmental regimes, self-serving religious establishments and radical religious sects are the main components of civil strife and violence - then and now. Only then it was the Jews not the Arabs who were passing the mantle of armed resistance from generation to generation.

Messianism was the theme of Judaic terror for decades, even centuries, from the Maccabees, seven or eight generations before Jesus, to Simon bar Kokbha, an equal interval after Jesus. Messianic terror became a family tradition. Messiahs, the saving leaders who claimed to be appointed by God, were thick on the ground. This was “... an era awash with messianic energy,” most of which was used to drive unofficial wars against anyone who held official power. The Romans called those infused with this energy ‘lestai’, bandits. And these bandits often “claimed to be agents of God’s retribution.” Osama bin Laden in the 20th century CE fits the profile of Judas the Zealot in the 1st century CE precisely.

Aslan doesn’t claim that Jesus was such a bandit. But the claims made about him by his followers constituted sedition to which the Romans were acutely sensitive. Messiahship is inherently revolutionary; it implies both a sectarian division (sheep and goats) and regime change (the kingdom of God). The complete destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, was a definitive response by the Romans to the seditious tendency in contemporary messianism. Jesus’s death was a minor historical prologue to this later attempt to rid the world entirely of the Jewish messianic menace, the first systematic Holocaust in Jewish history and a model for future Anti-Semites. The population was annihilated, expatriated, and dispersed into Greco-Roman culture. Judaism was demoted from most favored religion status to that of dangerous threat to empire.

This situation presented a problem for early followers of the Jew, Jesus. On the one hand their religious legitimacy depended on their Judaic legacy; on the other, this legacy had become anathema. Not unlike the situation of many Muslims today, one supposes, in Europe and North America. The texts of the Jewish scriptures themselves were enough to prove the violently destructive and irrational intent of this strange and ungrateful tribe. Its God is unpredictable, irascible, homicidal, and apparently insane.

It makes sense, therefore, that Paul, the international proselytizer for the new Jewish sect, should avoid almost all mention of Jesus’s Jewish life, including what he said and what he did. For Paul, Jesus lived, ate a dinner, died because he offended other Jews (not the Romans), and could be expected back momentarily in order to save mankind (but not the Jews; and not from the Romans). He tells us nothing else about him. It is Paul who transforms Jesus into the Christ, an entirely spiritualised Messiah, one who has plausible deniability about the disruption of political power. This is the beginning of the long Christian con.

Paul’s lack of historical detail, however, was worrying - politically as well as theologically. A more comprehensive alternative history, creating a non-Jewish identity among believers was essential. It is not incidental therefore that the gospels, the good news of the Christian Jesus, were written just as Judaism was being outlawed and its adherents oppressed. Today we call this sort of public/political re-positioning ‘spin’. And there can be little doubt that sophisticated spin is the primary content of the unique literary form of the gospel. Sophisticated because it seeks to do what seems impossible: to claim the historical legacy of Judaism, while simultaneously distancing itself from Jewish political history.

In this light, the most implausible and improbable biblical events become understandable - from the patent fables of Jesus’s infancy narratives, to the so-called messianic secret of Mark’s gospel, to the paradoxical violent non-violence of Jesus’s preaching. The gospels are a sort of press release, useful for both attracting a crowd but also making the crowd innocuous in the eyes of authority. They are meant explicitly to make it appear that this new Christian sect had no interest in earthly power. And the ruse worked; it took three centuries for the ‘religion of love’ to become the Christendom of arbitrary power, established hierarchy, and oppressive persecution. The power of fake news has always been an evangelical specialty

The modern world, that is the remnants of Christendom, has, by Aslan’s logic, assimilated the essential Anti-Semitism of the gospels as a matter of fundamental identity. Christians have always defined themselves as those who are not Jewish. This was an historic necessity which became a culture. The persistent Anti-Semitism of the Christian Church is an irrational fact of its cultural history until it is recognised that the fact isn’t irrational at all but an essential aspect, in a sense the fundamental aspect, of Christian doctrine. Without the primordial separation from the stigma of Judaism, Christianity wouldn’t have been allowed to exist.

Messianism always implies potential terror. But the enemy of Christians was never the Jews, it was Rome. Or, if one prefers, it was any civil government which felt threatened by the radical adherents of any Judaic-like messiah. Jews, and more recently that other group of spiritual Semites, Muslims, are the scapegoats necessary to divert attention from the de-stabilizing possibility of messianic theocracy inherent in Christianity.

In sum: a fascinating narrative with revelatory implications. What more could one ask from a religious story-teller.

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