First appeared in artsfuse.org:
The responses, to date, to Reza Aslan's concise, suggestive study
— "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" — have been
of two kinds. There is, to start with, the Fox News kind of response, which,
inflammatory and uninformed as it is, can still generate enough faux
controversy to blunt attention to what might be deemed genuinely controversial
about Aslan's book.
The Fox interchange, which immediately went viral on line, begins
with Lauren Green, Fox's religion correspondent, challenging Aslan: "I
want to be clear, you are a Muslim. So why did you write a book about the
founder of Christianity?”
For a fraction of a second Aslan seems nonplussed before responding
that he, too, wants "to be clear," and that: "I am a scholar of
religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament, and fluency in
biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two
decades, who also just happens to be a Muslim." The interchange continues
in this vein, with Green questioning Aslan's motives and Aslan restating both
his unimpeachable academic credentials and the fact that they dovetail with a
lifelong interest in the subject matter.
Green has had her defenders on the religious right but by and large
has taken a drubbing from the media for hosting a discussion about Zealot that
managed to steer clear of anything pertaining to its contents. Following the
interchange, Random House rushed another 50,000 copies of Zealot into print.
The book, at this writing, sits atop the NY Times nonfiction bestseller list
and is near that same position on the
Amazon.com list.
Those curious about Aslan's personal religious trajectory, and why a
Muslim might have devoted himself to the copious amounts of research
synthesized so well in Zealot, will get satisfaction from the Author's Note with
which the book begins. Its first sentence reads: "When I was fifteen years
old, I found Jesus", and continues: "For a kid raised in a motley
family of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists, this was truly the greatest
story every told."
We learn that Aslan's family fled Iran when the Islamic Revolution
of 1979 put Ayatollah Khomeini in power, at which point, "religion in
general, and Islam in particular, became taboo in our household." With the
economy of expression that has earned him praise as a prose stylist, Aslan adds
that in the United States, "our lives were scrubbed of all trace of
God," and, furthermore, that: "In the America of the 1980s, being
Muslim was like being from Mars. My faith was a bruise. .
. it needed to be concealed."
Then, as a faith-free teenager, a year into college, Aslan attended
a summer camp where he encountered the Jesus who became a "best friend,
someone with whom I could have a deep and personal relationship." Becoming
a Jesus freak had a social dimension as well, since "accepting [Jesus]
into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American." That
said, Aslan emphasizes that his was no "conversion of convenience".
He burned with "absolute devotion to my newfound faith," and armored
himself with arguments against those who cast doubt on the literal truth of the
gospel stories.
Still, as he pursued academic studies, doubt crept in. The disparity
between the gospel accounts and the findings of historians about Jesus and his
age became too great for him to resolve by leaps of faith. Aslan turned back
toward "the faith and culture of my forefathers, finding in them as an
adult a deeper, more intimate familiarity that I ever had as a child." But
his academic pursuits led him, again, to Jesus — not the "detached,
unearthly being I had been introduced to in my church," but the
"Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most
powerful empire the world had ever known." That Jesus is the focus of
Zealot.
Aslan has often said there's nothing particularly new in his version
of things. He told the NY Times: "What I’ve done is take this debate that
scholars are immersed in and simply made it accessible to a nonscholarly
audience. It’s something I wish more scholars would do, in various
fields."
That may be so, while also being disingenuous. Between defending
Aslan from Fox News, and applauding him for a work of scholarly compression and
literary finesse, it's easy to miss the fact that Zealot comes equipped with a razor
sharp polemical edge, one that aims to cut back to the Jewish Jesus from what Christianity has made of him.
"Simply put" is one of Aslan's favorite ways to begin a
bold statement, as in: "Simply put, crucifixion was more than a capital
punishment to Rome; it was public reminder of what happens when one challenges
the empire."
Simply put, then, Aslan's chief point is that the suppression of the
Jewish Revolt in 70 C.E. — a
calamity of incalculable proportions for the Jewish people, especially those
who had dwelled in Jerusalem, which was razed and depopulated by Roman forces
— served, at the same time, as a
birth pang for Christianity
as it came to define itself. Judaism, so far as Rome was concerned, was a
pariah religion, and Jews the "eternal enemy of Rome". The followers
of Jesus (crucified circa 33 C.E.), scattered by then throughout the Roman
Empire, with a key outpost in Rome itself, endeavored to scrub — to borrow
another of Aslan's elocutions — Jesus of his Jewishness. He is no longer one of
the mass of Jews who detested the
alliance between Roman rulers and the Temple's high priesthood.
Aslan characterizes this arrangement as nothing less, "for all
intents and purposes," than "a temple-state," which, between the
tithes imposed by the priesthood and the tribute owed to Rome, drove the Jewish
masses to seek salvation from a slew of bandits cum messiahs. Jesus, as
construed by Christian followers after the Jewish Revolt, was never interested
in purifying the Temple and freeing it from the grip of Rome; no, he opposed
the institution entirely and wished it destroyed.
Momentously, for the direction Christianity took — and the "two thousand years of Christian
anti-Semitism" — Rome is
deemed, by Diaspora Christians of the time, to be innocent of Jesus's death. It
is Pilate, the Roman governor, who is depicted as wanting to spare this poor
deluded Jew, and the Jewish High Priest who demands his death. Aslan tears this
story to pieces: Pilate ordered the crucifixion of self-proclaimed messiahs by
the hundreds. They proliferated in an age rife with the expectation of a
Kingdom of God that would wipe Judea clean of the reign of the Ceasars. "To
call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to
declaring war on Rome." Pilate was unhesitating in response to such
messiahs. Nor would such a high Roman lord have thought to interrogate Jesus in
person, as Christian legend has him do.
After the Jewish Revolt, Jesus ceases to be the lower class Jew from
the Galilee who could neither read nor write Aramaic, his only spoken tongue;
nor yet Hebrew, the holy language employed by scribes and in Jewish rites; and
certainly not Greek, language of the Hellenized elite. And yet it is in Greek
that the chief discourse about Jesus then proceeds, amplified by men "immersed in Greek
philosophy and Hellenistic thought," who "reinterpret Jesus's message
so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to
their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora."
In the process, Jesus
ceases to be "a revolutionary zealot" and becomes "a Romanized
demigod." He is transformed from a man "who tried and failed to free
the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any
earthly matter."
That *Zealot* is polemical should be abundantly obvious: Aslan has
his points to make, but he is never didactic. The book is rich with detail
about life among Jews in Jesus's time. For example, Aslan voices what he
maintains is the scholarly consensus — the notes in which he combs over his
sources are nearly as rewarding as the main text — when he asserts that: "Illiteracy rates in
first-century Palestine were staggeringly high, particularly for the poor. It
is estimated that nearly 97 percent of the Jewish peasantry could neither read
nor write. . . "
However startling this may be for those who think of Jews as
eternally the people of the book, it does help explain the strange fact that
there is no written testimony from the rebels themselves about the Jewish
Revolt in which they fought and died. What we know from contemporary sources
comes in large part from Josephus, a Jew, yes, but one who had gone over to the
Roman side and wrote in Latin.
Aslan's easy command of detail gives this book peculiar resonance beyond
the core story of Rome, Jews, Christians,
and Jesus, as if that story were not resonant enough. For example, the Jews who
committed suicide at Masada, rather than surrender to Rome after Jerusalem had
fallen, had printed coins labeled, in Hebrew, "Year One". Year one
was how French revolutionaries characterized the end of the monarchy and the
beginning of the Republic.
Another example: "No lord but God!" is the slogan of the
Sicarii, fierce Jewish assassins who targeted Jews they thought in league with Rome
or the Hellenized elite. If that slogan reminds one of "There is no God
but Allah" perhaps this is one place where Aslan invites readers to grasp
that the history he writes about has some connection to the Islamism from which
his family fled.
But that is only speculation.
Put simply, Zealot is a passionate and powerful book. I am a secular
Jew who can't but welcome its conclusion that Christianity pulled a role
reversal on Jesus, and made this failed revolutionary Jew into someone who
eschewed his people and its traditions in favor of Roman power. But Jewish or
not, I would welcome this book for its account of the epochal events that took
place in first century Judea.
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