By Randy Rosenthal
Random House, July 2013
Once there was a man born to a virgin. As an adult, he healed the sick, made the blind see, and raised the dead. He was followed by twelve disciples, and he died on a cross. Three days later, he was resurrected. He was the Son of God.
No, this isn't the story of Jesus of Nazareth.
It is the story of Jesus Christ, and these two figures have little in common.
The debate over who Jesus of Nazareth actually was originated within his lifetime, and has continued for over two millennia. Some consider him to be a prophet, others believe he was the incarnation of God, and many think of him as a spiritual teacher. The one thing modern scholars agree on is that, yes, Jesus did exist. This certainty is based on one reliable phrase of the Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus, who in 94 C.E. wrote significantly about the death of "James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah." That's it. This means that the story of Jesus, and of modern Christian ideology, is essentially a result of a two thousand year game of telephone, completely disfigured after countless redactions.
Thankfully, Reza Aslan has performed a miracle. As he did with the origins and evolution of Islam in his book, No god But God, Aslan again sets the record straight in Zealot; The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Previously, in order to find the actual Jesus of Nazareth, you would have had to wade through dozens of scholarly books that separate historical facts from faith-based beliefs. Many of these books are long and most are boring. Zealot, on the other hand, is a concise and captivating 216 pages, with an additional fifty pages of notes for anyone concerned with sources. In the introduction, Aslan says he wrote Zealot to "reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary" who was "arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition."
In rebuilding the historically real Jesus, Aslan stays away from mysticism or Gnosticism, and does not attempt to explain the meaning of mysterious parables. He does not present dubious theories that cannot be supported with historical evidence; no, Aslan's Jesus does not marry or produce children, and he does not study Buddhism in the Himalaya. Aslan doesn't even mention that the resurrection story is based on the personified astrological myths found in various ancient sun worship cults. He looks only to the social, religious, and political life in first century Palestine (and thankfully, the Romans were very good accountants and kept meticulous records) and compares it to what is found in the gospels and letters of the New Testament. With the ease and style of a master storyteller, Aslan then separates the wheat from the chaff, leaving us, as much as possible, with what really happened.
Let's start with a basic example of Aslan's miracle work. It's traditionally thought that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Yet everyone knows that Jesus is from Nazareth. The gospels have to account for why he wouldn't have been born in his hometown. Luke says that the Romans called a census, and everyone had to go to their town of birth to have themselves and their property counted. This is why Jesus's family was in Bethlehem. However, the point of a census is for taxation, and Roman law assessed one's property in their place of residence, not birth. This inaccuracy leads Aslan to write that
Luke's suggestion that the entire Roman economy would periodically be placed on hold as every Roman subject was forced to uproot himself and his entire family in order to travel great distances to the place of his father's birth, and then wait there patiently, perhaps for months, for an official to take stock of his family and possessions, which, in any case, he would have left behind in his place of residence, is, in a word, preposterous.
And here we have a glimpse into what Aslan does in Zealot; step-by-step, in easily digestible prose, he clarifies what could not have happened, in order to present what probably happened. Jesus needed to be born in Bethlehem because that's where the Hebrew Scriptures prophesized the messiah would be born. Similarly, the scriptures also say that the messiah would come out of Egypt. This is why the gospel of Matthew has the fanciful account of Jesus's flight into Egypt to escape King Herod's order to massacre all first born sons, despite that "there exists not a shred of corroborating evidence in any chronicle or history of the time whether Jewish, Christian, or Roman" that such an event took place.
The gospels are full of many "flagrant inaccuracies" that demonstrate the evangelists' extremely poor grasp of Jewish law and their ignorance of geography—Aslan writes that there are no cliffs in Nazareth, for example, so a mob could not possibly have tried to push Jesus off of one. In actuality, nothing is known of Jesus's life prior to his ministry, because before he became a disciple of John the Baptist, Jesus was simply another uneducated, illiterate, day-laboring peasant from a backwater village.
But the gospel writers would not be concerned about such inaccuracies, because they did not mean for their stories to be considered historical fact, which is a modern idea. Rather, the gospels were written "as carefully crafted rebuttals to an argument that is taking place off screen." It is to the "off screen" historical situation in which Jesus lives that Zealot focuses on, specifically the various zealous revolutionary nationalistic movements aiming to rid the Holy Land of its Roman occupiers.
Indeed, Roman rule of volatile first century Palestine makes the U.S. occupation of Iraq seem like an easy job. For decades, dagger-wielding terrorists known as Sicarii assassinated priests and Roman officials in broad daylight, creating a chaotic environment in which thousand of Jews were routinely crucified, and entire cities burned to the ground, its inhabitants brutally exterminated. This chaos culminated in the Jewish Revolt of 67 C.E., in which the zealot revolutionaries managed to throw the Romans out of Jerusalem. When the Romans returned three years later, they destroyed the Temple, banished all Jews from the Holy Land, and left Jerusalem a heap of ash and dust. Aslan does a perfect job of placing Jesus within this chaotic historical context:
In 28 C.E., an ascetic preacher named John began baptizing people in the waters of the Jordan River, initiated them into what he believed was the true nation of Israel. When John the Baptist's popularity became too great to control, Pilate's tetrach in Peraea, Herod Antipas, had him imprisoned an executed sometime around 30 C.E. A couple of years later, a woodworker from Nazareth named Jesus led a band of disciples on a triumphant procession into Jerusalem, where he assaulted the Temple, overturned the tables of the money changers, and broke free the sacrificial animals from their cages. He, too, was captured and sentenced to death by Pilate. Three years after that, in 36 C.E., a messiah known only as "the Samaritan" gathered a group of followers atop Mount Gerizim, where he claimed he would reveal "scared vessels" hidden there by Moses. Pilate responded with a detachment of Roman soldiers who climbed Gerizim and cut the Smaraitan's faithful multitude to pieces.
This begs a question. If Jesus was simply one failed messiah among many, why him? Why is the world's largest religion (not to mention our annual calendar) based on a man who, like so many others in first century Palestine, failed in his mission and was executed? Why didn't history forget him like they did the others?
The answer to this question ultimately lies with Paul of Tarsus, but there are a couple of other factors that made Jesus unique among first century Jewish nationalists with messianic ambitions. It wasn't that he performed miracles, exorcisms, and healings, because there were many traveling magicians who made a good living doing the same. Compared to them, Jesus was unique only because he "provided these services free of charge." And he did so because, unlike other traveling magicians, these miracles were not ends in themselves, but rather a means of "conveying a very specific message to the Jews." The message was: Your corrupt system is going down.
At the time, the aristocratic priests controlled the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Any pilgrim or visitor who wanted to make offerings to God first had to change their money into Shekels, for an exchange fee. Then they used these Shekels to purchase an animal to sacrifice; a dove, if they were poor, or a sheep, if they were rich. The animal was then led into the inner sanctum of the Temple, where it was skinned and slaughtered. Its fats and innards were consumed by fire, but its skin and meat were used or sold by the priests, who dressed themselves in finery, and generally lived luxurious lifestyles while the majority of Hebrews were poor day laborers or subsistence farmers.
Understandably, it was a shock to the priests when they heard that some peasant was cleansing lepers and forgiving sins. By bypassing the whole priestly monopoly of tithes, sacrifices, and incense, Jesus rendered "irrelevant the entire priestly establishment and their costly, exclusivist rituals." In order words, Jesus threatened to topple the entire system by declaring that God is free. This was trouble for the priests, just as it was trouble for the Romans who depended on the priests for stability. This is why that troublemaker from Nazareth had to die.
The earliest gospel was written by Mark in Rome in 70 C.E. The next two gospels were written around 90 C.E., Matthew's in Damascus and Luke's in Anitoch. The last gospel, John's, was written in Ephesus sometime in between 110 and 120 C.E. Though they have many contradictions, anachronisms, and inconsistencies, these gospels have several things in common. The first is that they all share the scene of Jesus attacking the Temple, overturning the tables, releasing the sacrificial animals, calling the place a den of thieves. The gospels also have Jesus dying on the cross. Crucifixion was a punishment reserved only for those accused of treason and sedition against Rome, and Jesus's act in the Temple could not have been viewed as anything else. These two events alone are enough to establish the fact that Jesus was a zealous political rebel. Sure, in the Sermon on the Mount—which Aslan regrettably neglects to discuss—Jesus presents revolutionary ideas of nonviolent protest, teaching people to "resist not evil" and "turn the other cheek." But overall, Jesus was not the gentle prince of peace he is usually thought to be.
The explanation for this mistaken identity can be found in the other thing the gospels have in common, which is that they were all written after the destruction of Jerusalem and expulsion of the Jews. This means that by then, Jews were anathema to the Roman Empire and anyone living in it. In order for the story of Jesus to be heard, the gospel writers couldn't present Jesus as a political revolutionary aiming to establish an independent Kingdom of Israel, with himself as king. No one wanted to hear that story. Not then. Simply put, the story of Jesus had to be stripped of its Jewish nationalism in order to sell.
This redaction was all the more necessary when considering that the intended audience of the gospels was the Greco-Roman intellectual elite. Similarly, this is why writers of the gospels had to absolve Romans from any responsibility for Jesus's death. Pontius Pilate was notorious for his harsh suppression of all uprisings, sending so many supposed rebels to be crucified that the Jews lodged an official complaint against him in Rome. Judging by the plentiful evidence, Pilate "had probably signed a dozen execution orders that day alone," and would have hardly glanced at Jesus, much less have cared if another rebellious Jew was crucified. There was no trial. But in the gospels, Pilate gives Jesus a personal audience, and then washes his hands. Blame it on the Jews. Begin two thousand years of anti-Semitism.
Before the gospels were written, there was the ministry and letters of Paul of Tarsus, which make up about half of the New Testament. These letters were written between Paul's conversion in 37 C.E. and his death in 66 C.E. Paul never met Jesus, but that didn't bother him. Paul even boasts that he didn't learn about Jesus from the apostles or anyone else who actually knew him. In fact, Aslan writes, "Paul shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus."
This explains why so much of what Paul preaches directly contradicts the words of Jesus in the gospels, particularly when it comes to observing Jewish law. More importantly, Paul changed the meaning of the word messiah from its Jewish to its Christian context, from the messiah being the promised deliverer of the Jewish nation, to the Messiah being the savior of all mankind; while Jesus calls himself The Son of Man—which according to the Hebrew Scriptures is an indirect way of saying King of Israel—Paul says that Jesus is the literal Son of God, an idea that would have been incomprehensible to Jews, and even to Jesus himself.
But Paul didn't care about converting the Jews. What Paul did was provide a gentile theology to the story, because he knew that if he didn't, non-Jews would never believe that some dead, uneducated, illiterate peasant in Palestine could somehow redeem their sins and give them eternal life, if only they believed in him. So Paul proclaimed a universal message of faith-based salvation focused on the resurrection, a story that would resonate with sun worshipping pagans. Indeed, Paul's version of Jesus was "his own creation," so much so that Jesus's brother James, who led the early Christian movement in Jerusalem before the city was destroyed, had to summon Paul on separate occasions to explain his errant preaching. (Later, James himself was all but written out of the religion he helped found, because if Jesus had several younger and older brothers, then his mother Mary could hardly have been a virgin.) But when Hellenist and Roman Christians later had to choose between, on one hand, Paul's completely fictitious version of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the comparatively profane historical Jesus of Nazareth, it wasn't a difficult choice.
In the summer of 325 C.E. the emperor Constantine summoned two thousand bishops to the Byzantine city of Nicaea to permanently define Christian doctrine and the officially sanctioned, orthodox beliefs of the Church. From then on, Jesus is the literal son of God, made of the same substance, and born to a virgin. For those who disagreed, there was banishment, persecution, and death. In 398 C.E, the four gospels were canonized along with the epistles in what would become known in the New Testament, and the rest is history.
Over sixteen hundred years later, after centuries of inquisitions, crusades, holy wars, and evangelical nut-jobs, the story of the historical Jesus has become available again. And no one tells it better than Reza Aslan. Even stripped of all the magic and miracles, it still might be the greatest story ever told.
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