Book Review, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

By Reza Aslan

“You´re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

The most awkward interview in the history of television must certainly have been when Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner interviewed Reza Aslan about his new book. No scholar, at least no one of distinction, likes to brag about his credentials, but the most awkward interview ever gave him no choice in the matter. After a hilarious interlude of stunned silence, Aslan replies that he is a scholar of religion with four different degrees as well as a fluency in biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for twenty years. The anchor doesn´t seem to grasp any of this and continues to press him relentlessly. At this point he understandably loses his patience and points out that “…this isn´t a Muslim opinion, this is an academic work of history…”. He also makes the rather convincing point that, being a scholar of religion, writing about Jesus is kind of your day job.

Fox News aside, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into the life of one of the most famous people who ever lived. The crucial distinction that Reza makes early on is that there is an ocean of difference between Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ. Most people, I´m sure, knows at least the basics of Jesus´s life. Born into poverty in the small town of Nazareth, the young carpenter sets out on a divinely inspired mission with his apprentices in tow. A communist before there were any, and a hippie born way before the Swinging Sixties, he preaches about love and forgiveness but is unfortunately nailed to a cross by the rather nasty Pontius Pilate. After three days Jesus miraculously rises again and joins his father in heaven, with Pilate probably feeling rather cross (no pun intended). This version, as told by Hollywood-Catholic Mel Gibson in The passion of the Christ, doesn´t really match what leading scholars such as Aslan have found out about the real Jesus. Although the circumstances and significance of Jesus the Christ is also explained within it´s pages, the main purpose of Zealot is to shed light on who Jesus really was.   

Finding any accurate information about someone who lived two thousand years ago isn´t easy, especially since Jesus was crucified and one of the best sources of information about ancient romans is to study their often elaborate tombstones. These will reliably tell you about it´s owner´s name and occupation, but to a crucified criminal a tombstone was a rare luxury indeed. Maybe that´s why Aslan had to study Jesus´s life for two whole decades.

What we know for certain about the real Jesus is that, just like the Christ, he was born in Nazareth and ultimately crucified by the Romans. Unlike in The Life of Brian, the two unfortunate men crucified to his left and right were not merely bandits, they were so called “lestai”, a term used for rebels and insurrectionists who violently resisted the Roman occupation. This means with almost complete certainty that Jesus was also a dangerous and subversive “lestai”. Rather than being hanged next to someone who had nicked a loaf of bread in the marketplace, Jesus and his crucifixion-companions were the historical equivalent of dangerous terrorists. As some of you will no doubt already be thinking, this sounds rather like an altogether different man than the peace loving Marxist hippie who turned a woven basket into a fish. That´s because, Aslan argues to Fox News chagrin, the real Jesus was decidedly more Che Guevara than mother Theresa.

Zealot covers, besides Jesus, the violence and oppression in one of the most politically unstable provinces of the Roman Empire. Even before Jesus was born, there had been numerous self-proclaimed messiahs who rebelled against Rome, even one who was also called Jesus. All of them were put to the sword, while the wealthiest Jewish families happily supported the empire out of their own self-interest. The reasons for this lack of public order are many, and includes many hardships as well as the occasional drought, but at the heart of it lay the Monotheistic nature of the Jewish faith. While the Romans worshipped a variety of different gods, the inhabitants of Judea were certain that their deity was the only one. When the Romans conquered a different people, such as the Gauls or the Carthaginians, their gods were often welcomed into the roman Pantheon and the locals could continue to pray to whatever idol that took their fancy, as long as they also worshipped the emperor. For the descendants of Moses, who were rather more serious about their religion than most people are today, this presented a bit of a problem. In fact, from the perspective of the Roman state, most of what Jesus the man championed and believed in would´ve been viewed as sedition and treason. The man who was called Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish ultranationalist and religious fundamentalist who wanted to overthrow Roman rule and restore his people’s ancestral home to the care of their almighty monotheistic god. With an attitude like that Christianity would have never become the Roman state religion, which happened during the reign of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century CE.

Granted, not that much of Jesus´s life is known for certain, but what Aslan writes is not guesswork, his conclusions are based firmly on scripture and contemporary sources. In case you would like to argue with him, come prepared, since Zealot contains more than fifty pages of notes explaining his various sources in greater detail than you could ever imagine. Unless you have also spent the last twenty years of your life studying Jesus, that is.

Where then, do we find the origins of the peaceful and hippie-like Jesus the Christ? To be brutally honest with you, I´m an Atheist and tired quickly of leafing through all the scripture that Aslan referenced. This book is certainly very interesting, but it´s not a page-turner. Decoding the hidden meanings of ancient scripture and religious superstition requires an understanding of the political climate of the time it originates from. Basically it all boiled down to the fact that the efforts of successive Roman emperors to violently suppress Christianity failed and the followers of Christ steadily grew in number. This was not due to the influence of Jesus´s brother James, who shared his more famous brother´s nationalistic view when it came to their religion. The founder of Christianity as we know it was Saul of Tarsus, a contemporary of Jesus and James. He was struck by an epiphany when travelling from Jerusalem to Damascus. Exactly what the epiphany meant or looked like remains slightly unclear, but since we are talking about religion and not science I suppose vagueness isn´t a deal-breaker. This epiphany came after Jesus had perished and the epiphany meant that Saul, now for some reason named Paul, believed that his was the one and only version of Christianity. Paul´s Christianity was, unlike the version preached by James, a missionary one, where converts who were not Jewish were welcome without first having to be circumcised. On top of this substantial benefit there was also the fact that the original temple in Jerusalem was burned to the ground by Roman soldiers under would-be-emperor Titus in 70 CE after the Jewish people had risen in armed rebellion. Without a sacred temple and a priestly cult anchoring the fledgling religion to the land of Jesus´s birth, the more universal version of Christianity preached by Paul was now rapidly picking up steam.

The intricacy of early Christianity’s history might require several years of study at a seminar to fully grasp, but Aslan manages to condense it to a version that is accessible to non-clergymen. The Fox News anchor who criticized Aslan might prefer her colleague Bill O´Reilly´s Killing Jesus. That book, I strongly suspect, covers neither Jesus the man nor Jesus the Christ, but the version of Jesus that HBO´s Bill Maher jokingly refers to as supply-side Jesus. If you are interested in reading about supply-side Jesus I would highly recommend The Reagan Diaries.  

Book Review: Once Upon a time in Russia

By Ben Mezrich

The early nineteen nineties was a period of immense social and economic upheaval in Russia. After nearly eighty years of communist rule, the Berlin wall came crashing down and with it the socialist republics of Eastern Europe. When the Soviet Union finally crumbled this was hailed in the west as the triumph of liberty over oppression. For a small number of immensely talented but unscrupulous men, this was not so much a moment to savor their newfound freedoms as a chance to get filthy rich if they acted fast enough. Once Upon a Time in Russia tells the tale of how modern Russia came to be by charting the rise and fall of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Written like a suspense novel yet based entirely on facts, it proves that actual history is often more dramatic and unbelievable than fiction.

Berezovsky´s tale is a tragic and Shakespearean one. A brilliant young mathematician who rose to be one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Russia, before falling from grace and dying under mysterious circumstances in his manor home in Berkshire, England.  For a man of boundless energy and ambition, the fall of the Soviet Union gave a young Berezovsky the opportunity to rise high above the vast majority of his fellow Russians. The old communist order didn´t go quietly, however, and Russia´s transformation from crumbling socialism to vulture capitalist free-for-all was exceedingly messy and corrupt. Old state owned businesses and assets were suddenly thrust into a cutthroat open market where they were often sold for a pittance. Berezovsky’s rise began when he and a Georgian business associate started LogoVAZ, a company developing payment systems and software for the old Soviet car company AvtoVAZ, manufacturers of the Lada automobile. I don´t know what kind of computing power they had access to in the old Soviet Union, but if Berezovsky had offered them a pocket calculator it would probably have been a vast upgrade. His main business scheme brilliantly profited of the rampant hyperinflation that Gorbachev´s Perestroika had unleashed upon the country. By purchasing factory fresh cars on consignment, paying only a small down-payment, he sold the cars on to various dealerships and only repaid his debts once the inflation had rendered the outstanding sums largely symbolic. This might would never have worked under normal circumstances, but the so called “Red Directors” who were appointed by the Russian government to run its formerly state owned businesses were hopelessly inept and corrupt. Like myopic dinosaurs they had more or less no idea what capitalism meant and had probably yet to swap their Mahorkas for decadent and capitalist Marlboros.

His rising wealth meant that Berezovsky could enter the game of politics and become a serious power broker in Russia. His moment of sublime triumph came during the Russian election in 1996. The incumbent president Boris Yeltsin was massively unpopular and virtually a dead man walking who battled a string of heart attacks as well as prodigious alcoholism. By all accounts his main opponent, the charismatic communist Gennady Zyuganov, looked set to win by a landslide. Berezovsky resolved to prevent this by any means necessary, and at the world economic forum in Davos that year he managed to assemble a cabal of fellow oligarchs who feared a return to communism more than they hated dealing with each other. Much political maneuvering behind closed doors as well as untold millions of rubles secured a victory for Yeltsin as well as a figurative jewel in Berezovsky´s crown. Here Mezrich delves into the minds of our favorite oligarch and tries to explain his motivations. It wasn´t just money, he reckons. Men like Berezovsky honestly thought that what they were doing were not only in their own best interests, but that it was also best for mother Russia. They dreaded a return to communism and sought to turn Russia into a neo liberal republic without any closet pinko sympathies. Electing the ageing Yeltsin, whose skin was wax-like and pale and his every movement slow and labored, meant that Russia would finally escape the clutches of Stalinism. I get the impression that there might have been some sort of healthy middle ground between an Ayn Rand-style free market and Communism. This is something that I remember Dilip Hiro writing about when I reviewed After Empire.  

In Russian krysha means roof. Besides being the word for what you hopefully have over your head, it is also a Russian slang word for protector. In a society where corruption was rife and business success depended on having the powers that be on your side, a krysha was a well-connected individual you payed to keep various gangsters and unscrupulous government officials off your back. The distinction between the two doesn´t always seem to have been crystal clear. This was how the fateful partnership between Berezovsky and his protégé Roman Abramovich came into being. The future owner of the Chelsea football club grew up under humble circumstances yet eventually came to eclipse even Berezovsky himself. But to do so, Abramovich needed Berezovsky´s connections to help him bag that elusive first billion. Having come a long way since selling imported rubber ducks from his Moscow apartment, Abramovich now eyed the vast state owned oil companies with the same rapacious lust that might normally be reserved for a premier league footballer seeing a Range Rover with ostrich leather seats. Together with Berezovsky, he acquired a controlling interest in the oil giant Sibneft. Abramovich seems to be the kind of brilliant and self-made billionaire that Donald Trump would have you believe that he is, and both men were soon raking in the petro-rubles like there was no tomorrow.

At this point Berezovsky, with countless yachts and lavish mansions all around the Mediterranean, seemed to have it made. However, his constant need to be in the center of things eventually got the better of him. After helping Vladimir Putin get elected in 2000, he was summoned along with every other oligarch worth mentioning to an ominous meeting to be held at Stalin´s former Dacha outside Moscow. Putin explained to the gathered oligarchs in no uncertain terms that from here on out, they were allowed to keep making money as long as they stayed out of politics. The luncheon that followed was utterly delectable, but Mezrich is probably right when he paints the mood among the gathered oligarchs as being a little uneasy. What followed was Berezovsky taking on a fight that he lost spectacularly. After the Kursk submarine was lost at sea with all hands, he ordered his television company to attack Putin savagely. This attack failed to dent Vladimir Vladimirovich´s popularity, and Berezovsky soon had to flee to Great Britain to avoid being thrown into jail. His close associate, the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko had previously been put behind bars under dubious circumstances and getting him released had taken all of Berezovsky’s considerable resolve.

For Abramovich, a man who has always avoided the media spotlight at all costs, Berezovsky was becoming a liability. He strongly encouraged his associate to buy out his stake in the oil company, Sibneft, that they owned together. This is said to have taken place under dramatic circumstances in the Swiss Alps in 2001. Mezrich skillfully builds up the suspense and allows himself the literal flourish of having Abramovich descend onto the ski-resort in a helicopter. The money he made out of this reluctant business deal could have made Berezovsky set for life, unfortunately he seem to have been more profligate than all the Kardashians put together. He constantly lavished huge sums on various projects to discredit Putin´s government.

His friendship and association deepened with the like-minded Litvinenko during their shared exile, but the latter sadly lost his life due to polonium poisoning in 2006. Naturally foul play was, and still is, suspected. As if things couldn´t have gotten any worse, Berezovsky faced a costly divorce while his coffers were drying up. Instead of trying to deal with the situation in a calm and controlled way, and maybe selling of a villa in Antibes or two, I suspect he wanted go out the way he had always lived his life, firing on all cylinders. In 2011 Berezovsky launched the largest civil court case in British history against Roman Abramovich. He accused him of blackmailing him into selling his share of Sibneft and demanded 3 billion pounds in damages. The ensuing trial was torture for Abramovich, who abhorred the attention of the media, while the British gutter press had a field day. Ultimately Berezovsky lost, and emerged from the courtroom a broken man.

The man they found dead in his mansion barely two years later was a mere shadow of who he was in his prime. A man whose story was one of incredible success and even more terrible setbacks. I am glad that Mezrich decided to tell his tale, and in doing so shine a light onto a period of Russian history that is steeped in wealth, power and corruption.