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ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan
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Amazon.com Review
Q&A with Reza Aslan Q. Why did you title your biography of Jesus of Nazareth Zealot? A. In Jesus' world, zealot referred to those Jews who adhered to a widely accepted biblical doctrine called zeal. These “zealous†Jews were strict nationalists who preached the sole sovereignty of God. They wanted to throw off the yoke of Roman occupation and cleanse the Promised Land of all foreign elements. Some zealots resorted to extreme acts of violence against both the Roman authorities and the Jewish ‘collaborators,†by which they meant the wealthy Temple priests and the Jewish aristocracy. Others refrained from violence but were no less adamant about establishing the reign of God on earth. There is no evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was himself a violent revolutionary (though his views on the use of violence were more complex than it is often assumed). However, Jesus’ actions and his teachings about the Kingdom of God clearly indicate that he was a follower of the zealot doctrine, which is why he, like so many zealots before and after him, was ultimately executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. Q. Yours is one of the few popular biographies of Jesus of Nazareth that does not rely on the gospels as your primary source of information for uncovering Jesus’ life. Why is that? What are your primary sources? A. I certainly rely on the gospels to provide a narrative outline to my biography of Jesus of Nazareth, but my primary source in recreating Jesus’ life are historical writings about first century Palestine, like the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, as well as Roman documents of the time. The gospels are incredible texts that provide Christians with a profound framework for living a life in imitation of Christ. The problem, however, is that the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, historical documentations of Jesus’ life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith written many years after the events they describe. In other words, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man. The gospels are of course extremely useful in revealing how the early Christians viewed Jesus. But they do not tell us much about how Jesus viewed himself. To get to the bottom of that mystery, which is what I try to do in the book, one must sift through the gospel stories to analyze their claims about Jesus in light of the historical facts we know about the time and world in which Jesus lived. Indeed, I believe that if we place Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived, then, in some ways, his biography writes itself. Q. You write in the book that you became an evangelical Christian in High School, but that after a few years, you abandoned Christianity and returned to the faith of your forefathers: Islam. Why did you decide to make this change and how did it affect how you understood the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. A. When I was fifteen years old I heard the gospel story for the first time and immediately accepted Jesus into my heart. I had what Christians refer to as “an encounter with Christ.†I spent the next five years as an evangelical Christian, and even spent some time traveling around the United States spreading the gospel message. But the more I read the Bible – especially in college, where I began my formal study of the New Testament – the more I uncovered a wide chasm between the Jesus of history and the Jesus I learned about in church. At that same time, through the encouragement of one of my professors, I began to reexamine the faith and traditions of my forefathers and returned to Islam. But the irony is that once I detached my academic study of Jesus from my faith in Christ, I became an even more fervent follower of Jesus of Nazareth. What I mean to say is that I live my life according to the social teachings preached by Jesus two thousand years ago. I take his actions against the powers of his time and his defense of the poor and the weak as a model of behavior for myself. I pray, as a Muslim, alongside my Christian wife, and together we teach our children the values I believe Jesus represents. The man who defied the will of the most powerful empire the world had ever known – and lost – is so much more real to me than the Jesus I knew as a Christian. So in a way, this book is my attempt to spread the good news of Jesus the man with the same passion that I once applied to spreading the good news of Jesus the Christ. Q. What do you hope readers, especially religious readers, take away from your book? A. My hope is that this book provides readers with a more complete sense of the world in which Jesus lived. We cannot truly understand Jesus’ words and deeds if we separate them from the religious and political context of his time. Regardless of whether you think of Jesus as a prophet, a teacher, or God incarnate, it is important to remember that he did not live in a vacuum. Whatever else Jesus was, he was, without question, a man of his time. This is true for all of us. The key to understanding who Jesus was and what Jesus meant lies in understanding the times in which he lived. That’s what this book does. It drops you in the middle of Jesus’ world and helps you understand the context out of which he arose and in which preached.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The person and work of Jesus of Nazareth has been a topic of constant interest since he lived and died some 2,000 years ago. Much speculation about who he was and what he taught has led to confusion and doubt. Aslan, who authored the much acclaimed No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, offers a compelling argument for a fresh look at the Nazarene, focusing on how Jesus the man evolved into Jesus the Christ. Approaching the subject from a purely academic perspective, the author parts an important curtain that has long hidden from view the man Jesus, who is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. Carefully comparing extra-biblical historical records with the New Testament accounts, Aslan develops a convincing and coherent story of how the Christian church, and in particular Paul, reshaped Christianity's essence, obscuring the very real man who was Jesus of Nazareth. Compulsively readable and written at a popular level, this superb work is highly recommended. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates (July)
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Product details
Hardcover: 296 pages
Publisher: Random House; Later prt. edition (July 16, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 140006922X
ISBN-13: 978-2523470201
Product Dimensions:
6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
4,992 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#62,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Most Americans rely on the bible and religious instruction at their local church for their entire knowledge of the life of Jesus and the people in his life. This book makes it very apparent the limitations of relying on a text produced by political bodies with their own agendas over the centuries. The author makes very clear that there is the historical Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ figure and his book is about only the former.The author does a great job of putting into context the history of the area and the politics of the region with successive rulers and how this shaped the response to Jesus the man when he began to preach and how that was by its very nature and act of sedition. The fundamental question is who owns the land and its resources, which at the time of Jesus was the Roman empire headed by its emperor. Now in the United States those of European ancestory believe we have a God given right to all the land and all that is beneath the land as the Romans did for the lands they claimed to be within their empire and anyone who claimed otherwise was branded a seditious criminal and crucified.I can understand where the historical context provided by the book would upset "true believers" who prefer to believe that the bible is the literal and factual description of actual events and not the interpretation and reinterpretation and embellishments done by authors over the centuries.Something I had not thought much about until reading this book and the author's comment that the first gospels were written not only more than a century after the time of Jesus but in Greek. They were not written in Hebrew or Arabic, the languages Jesus would have spoken, nor in Latin the language of the Roman overlords, but in Greek. How anyone can think that words spoken in Hebrew or Arabic and then passed from one person's recollections to the next over a couple of generations and then translated into Greek and then into Latin and then again into old English can be accurate and relied as the literal representations of what was said has not knowledge of languages or how a translator's cultural bias will affect the outcome of their work. It takes a very simple mind to be a literalist with regard to the bible or any religous text.I would disregard the 1 ratings by religious fanatics who it is doubtful have bought and actually read the book. For a book authored by a true scholar on religions it is very well written and easy to understand. The author is trying to educate rather than impress and I intend to read his other works as well based on this book of his.
In fairness, I’m a Christian, so it’s unlikely that I’d love this book. I was interested in seeing if he had any insight into Jesus the historical person (archaeology, etc). As the book turned toward a theme of discrediting Jesus as the Son of God, I wasn’t particularly pleased. However, there are probably a lot of non-Christians who have a point of view similar to the author’s, so it would prove instructive to continue reading.My main issue is that I just didn’t find his arguments convincing. How to explain the radical change in behavior of the apostles from chickens to courageous preachers of the gospel? How to explain the conversion of Saul of Tarsus into Paul, a committed devotee of Jesus? How to explain why none of these people recanted under threat of death and torture. Surely the stories of a apostle recanting would have been maintained somewhere?! Without undercutting the motivations of these people to believe in a risen Jesus reinterpreting the other events that occurred feels incomplete and unconvincing.
Reza Aslan book is a readable defense of the Schweitzerian theory of Jesus (so called because it was popularized by Albert Schweitzer in his "Quest for the Historical Jesus"). Seeing ancient Palestine as a hot bed of revolutionary activity, he finds the most plausible explanation of the historical Jesus as one which sees Jesus as revolutionary who was ultimately crucified for his anti-roman views. The position is fairly common in Biblical Studies and a form of this argument is held by people like Bart Ehrman, N.T. Wright, John Meier, E.P. Sanders and many others. Aslan's version of it plays up the political aspect of it more than some others, but all agree that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet. Aslan makes the argument in fairly traditional ways, beginning with the idea that crucifixion is a Roman punishment for treason and building the argument on the twin pillars of Jesus as a original follower of John the Baptist (who is also understood as an apocalyptic preacher) and the cleansing of the temple (understood as a prophetic act signifying the coming apocalypse). These two events are considered firmly historically established and when connected with the crucifixion draws a picture of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. I would again note that there is actually nothing particularly new is what Aslan does here. His emphasis on the political ramifications of apocalypticism is a important gloss, but the crux of the argument is found in many other scholars' work. Additionally, there is nothing particularly "Muslim" about Aslan's reading, even if he is himself a muslim. Many Christian and non-Christian scholars read the texts the same way.The real problem with Aslan's work (and this holds true I believe for other scholars who are in the Schweitzerian tradition), is a lack of clear method. Aslan challenges this or that saying or text as being late creations and thus not relevant to the historical Jesus, but methodologically he is all over the map. Occasionally he uses multiple attestation to support the authenticity of passage, but he is certainly willing to use a singly attested passage if it suits his image of Jesus. Occasionally likewise he will use dissimilarity, but this method he also will abandon as necessary. Essentially, the problem in dealing with the sayings tradition is that you can't know the answer before you work with it. But those in the Schweitzerian tradition have discovered the answer through those three "Certain facts" and then they evaluate the sayings tradition in light of that. This makes for a haphazard and problematic method which cannot be replicated. But of course, by not starting with the sayings tradition first and applying a method to it (as say Dominic Crossan does) you ultimately sort the sayings tradition subjectively based on what fits your image and what does not. This is what Aslan ends up with, but again he is not alone among Biblical Scholars in this regard.The reader might ask if I have such strong criticisms of Aslan, why I rated it so highly. The answer lies in its readability and its presentation of the history starting around 300 years before Christ. I used this book in my "Life and Teachings of Jesus" class at a public university, and students were impressed with Aslan's accessibility and information. While I think in the end the book has methodological issues which is rampant among all scholars in the Schweitzerian tradition, much of its history is informative and engaging. Additionally, I think the emphasis on the political ramifications of Jesus is something that is important to consider and often gets lost in those with a more "cynic-like" Jesus. For those reasons I think this book should be read though I would suggest it be read in dialog with John Dominic Crossan's "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography" for a different and more methodologically sound approach to the Historical Jesus.
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