Photo: Vinoth Chandar (Flickr)
"In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so," writes Reza Aslan in his new book.
If you search for the name “Jesus” on a popular internet search engine, you will get more than 450-million results.
You’ll find pages about Jesus’s life and times, his teachings, a PBS documentary, news stories about archaeologists claiming to have found a piece of Jesus’s cross … even an @jesus Twitter account.
Jesus — the man, the preacher, the rebel, the Son of God — has captured people’s imaginations for centuries. Theologians have struggled to understand what his message meant; writers have struggled to understand the man Jesus was.
Anne Rice, Dan Brown, Nikos Kazantzakis, Norma Mailer, and Christoper Moore are just some of the authors who have published fictional accounts of the life of Jesus.
At the same time, historians and scholars have attempted to unpack the historical and socio-political contexts of the world in which Jesus lived in order to better understand what might have propelled him into his ministry.
With the publication of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, religious scholar Reza Aslan adds to the body of literature on the life of the man many consider the Son of God.
Zealot has been both a New York Times and Amazon bestseller. The book only gained more visibility after Aslan’s credibility as a scholar was attacked during a FOX News interview. The anchor suggested Aslan’s Muslim faith made him a suspect expert, to which Aslan replied:
I think that the fundamental problem here is that you’re assuming that I have some sort of faith-based bias in this work that I wrote. I write about Judaism, I write about Hinduism, I write about Christianity, I write about Islam. My job as a scholar of religions with a PhD in the subject is to write about religions. And one of the religions that I have written about is the religion that was launched by Jesus.
The interview became infamous after it went viral on various social media outlets.
Muslim Voices Managing Editor Rosemary Pennington had the chance to ask Aslan why he felt compelled to write Zealot, as well as why he thinks it has been controversial for some.
Rosemary Pennington: I know you’ve probably been asked this a hundred times by now, but why did you feel drawn to writing about the life of Jesus?
Reza Aslan: I have been interested in Jesus for a very long time. Obviously I used to worship him as God when I was a Christian. But even after I left Christianity and returned to Islam, I could not shake my interest in him.
Indeed, I would say that I became even more interested in Jesus the man than I ever was in Jesus the Christ. Part of that interest comes simply from a recognition of who he was.
We are talking about an illiterate, uneducated, poor, marginal Jewish peasant from the backwoods of Galilee who nevertheless, through the power of his charisma and his teachings, managed to gather a movement to himself on behalf of the poor, the weak, the marginalized, and the dispossessed, that was so threatening to the religious and political powers of his time that he was ultimately arrested as a state criminal, tortured, and executed.
That definitely seems like someone worth knowing about.
RP: You were Christian at one time, which implies a particular understanding of Jesus being the Son of God and in some way divine. What was it like for you, given that part of your past, to examine Jesus through the lens of a scholar?
RA: I think it provided me with a unique perspective on Jesus both as Christ and as a man.
On the one hand, I was able to approach Jesus no longer burdened by the baggage of dogma. I was able to see him with fresh eyes, to think about him in a different and unique way.
At the same time I never forgot how important this man is to billions of people around the world who view him as God incarnate. That led me to respond with upmost respect to the beliefs of Christians, even when I question their historical veracity.
RP: So many writers — fiction and nonfiction — have taken Jesus as their subject. Some of the nonfiction writers even profiled a Jesus — a revolutionary or Essene or itinerant preacher — that feels not all that different from your own. Why do you think your book seemed to produce such controversy? Was it inevitable given your subject matter?
RA: Whenever you write about any kind of reviewed religious figure whether Jesus or as (I did in No god but God) the Prophet Muhammad, you are bound to disturb some people because you are questioning some basic tenets of faith.
In this case however I think many critics have focused on attacking me rather than the book itself. Some have claimed that I have some secret Muslim agenda to destroy Christianity. Others have attacked my credentials — something, by the way, that never happens when I write about Islam or any other religion.
In the end I suppose that my book was more controversial than many other books about Jesus simply because it was more successful than those other books. Success naturally breeds criticism. But I don’t worry about that too much. I’m just happy that I started a conversation.
RP: As you were conducting your research, what surprised you about Jesus’s life?
RA: I think the thing that surprised me the most in my research is just how many other messiahs there were in Jesus’s time. I was aware of some of these figures but was shocked to learn about so many more of them.
There were perhaps dozens of individuals who roamed the Holy Land in the first century, who gathered disciples to themselves, who healed the sick and cast out demons, who spoke about the coming of the kingdom of God, who called themselves Messiah and challenged the Roman occupation, and who paid for it with their lives.
Jesus was just one of many making these claims. Of course 2000 years later Jesus is the only one of these men who was still called Messiah. What I try to do in the book is to figure out why that is.
RP: You point out the inconsistencies in the birth stories found in the Gospels and suggest that Christians would have (and were) okay with those differences. Why?
RA: We must understand that what we recognize as history – the accumulation of empirically verifiable dates and events – is a product of the modern world. That definition of history is at best 300 years old.
For the ancient mind history was less about uncovering facts than it was about revealing truths. The notion of Biblical literalism is a completely new phenomenon. No one in the ancient world would have read the Gospels and thought that the stories were literal.
They were far more interested in what the stories meant than what they actually said. It is only as a result of the scientific revolution that Christians have forced a scientific understanding of truth upon the Bible. That is not how the people who wrote the Gospel thought and it shouldn’t be how we think either.
RP: An interesting point you raise is the one about Jesus’s divinity. You write that “the messiah is a human being,” that a divine messiah would have run counter to Jewish thought and belief. How then, if Jesus was a poor, ultimately human, preacher did he become divine?
RA: Jesus as divinity had less to do with anything he himself said than with what those who followed him said.
While it is true that Judaism has no concept of the divine man the Romans did. And very soon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Christianity became an exclusively Roman religion.
It divorced itself from Judaism and focused its energy on converting Gentiles, not Jews. As a result, and thanks to the influence of Greek inspired Jews in the Diaspora, the notion of Jesus as divinity became a part of Christian orthodoxy.
But, frankly, such a thought would have been absolutely foreign to Jesus himself.
RP: What do you hope a reader is left with after finishing your book?
RA: It is my hope that people who read this book understand what I have understood – which is that you can be a follower of Jesus without necessarily being a Christian, just as you can be a Christian without necessarily being a follower of Jesus.
