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.