Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions—just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years—left me confused and spiritually unmoored.

Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus, the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that he defied, the more I was drawn to him.

The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that, outside of the New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would so permanently alter the course of human history.

(Paul’s first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, can be dated between 48 and 50 C.E., some two decades after Jesus’s death.)

Regardless, the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness accounts

They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe.

Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, ...

Mark’s account was written first sometime after 70 C.E., about four decades after Jesus’s death.

Even the earliest Christians were left wanting by Mark’s brusque account of Jesus’s life and ministry, and so it was left to Mark’s successors, Matthew and Luke, to improve upon the original text.

there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely:

first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century

second is that Rome crucified him ...

Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition.

Jesus’s crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e., treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed.

the rabbis of the second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome.

Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter.

That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity emerged.

Unlike their heathen neighbors, the Jews do not have a multiplicity of temples scattered across the land. There is only one cultic center, one unique source for the divine presence, one singular place and no other where a Jew can commune with the living God. Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state.

only the high priest can enter the Holy of Holies, and on only one day a year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when all the sins of Israel are wiped clean.

God told the Israelites, “you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them all—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deuteronomy 20:17–18).

Pharisees, who were primarily lower- and middle-class rabbis and scholars who interpreted the laws for the masses;

Sadducees, more conservative and, with regard to Rome, more accommodating priests from wealthier landowning families; and the Essenes, a predominantly priestly movement that separated itself from the authority of the Temple and made its base on a barren hilltop in the Dead Sea valley called Qumran.

If John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins, as Mark claims, then Jesus’s acceptance of it indicated a need to be cleansed of his sins by John.

The story had to be told. But it also had to be massaged and made safe. The two men’s roles had to be reversed: Jesus had to be made superior, John inferior. Hence the steady regression of John’s character from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor to Jesus—to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose at all except to acknowledge Jesus’s divinity.

There is one coming after me who is stronger than I am,” John says, “one whose sandals I am not worthy to untie” (Mark 1:7–8)—but strangely, John never actually acknowledges Jesus to be the one he is referring to.

Even after Jesus’s perfunctory baptism, when the sky opens and the spirit of God descends upon him in the form of a dove as a heavenly voice says, “You are my son: the Beloved. In you I am well pleased,” John neither notices nor comments on this moment of divine interjection. To John, Jesus is merely another supplicant, another son of Abraham who journeys to the Jordan to be initiated into the renewed tribe of Israel.

John’s birth to a barren woman, Elizabeth, may have been miraculous, but it was not nearly as miraculous as Jesus’s birth to a virgin. This is all part of Luke’s concerted

Andrew and Philip—were not his disciples at all; they were John’s (John 1:35–37). They only followed Jesus after John was arrested.

Rome may have been right to focus so brutally on Galilee. The region had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity for centuries. Long before the Roman invasion, the term “Galilean” had become synonymous with “rebel.”

His very ministry is founded upon the destruction of the present order and the removal from power of every single person who now stands in judgment of him.

Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on a slip of papyrus.

Never mind that outside the gospels there exists not a shred of historical evidence for any such Passover custom on the part of any Roman governor.

What is truly beyond belief is the portrayal of Pontius Pilate—a man renowned for his loathing of the Jews, his total disregard for Jewish rituals and customs, and his penchant for absentmindedly signing so many execution orders that a formal complaint was lodged against him in Rome—spending even a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser.

With Jerusalem despoiled, Christianity was no longer a tiny Jewish sect centered in a predominantly Jewish land surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Jews. After 70 C.E., the center of the Christian movement shifted from Jewish Jerusalem to the Graeco-Roman cities of the Mediterranean: Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, Damascus, Antioch, Rome.

Not only did all traces of revolutionary zeal have to be removed from the life of Jesus, the Romans had to be completely absolved of any responsibility for Jesus’s death. It was the Jews who killed the messiah.

The gospel of Matthew, written in Damascus some twenty years after the Jewish Revolt, paints a picture of Pontius Pilate at great pains to set Jesus free.

Matthew’s Pilate literally washes his hands of any blame for Jesus’s death.

Luke, writing in the Greek city of Antioch at around the same time as Matthew, not only confirms Pilate’s guiltlessness for Jesus’s death; he unexpectedly extends that amnesty to Herod Antipas as well.

In the gospel of John, written in Ephesus sometime after 100 C.E., Pilate does everything he can to save the life of this poor Jewish peasant, not because he thinks Jesus is guiltless, but because he seems to believe that Jesus may in fact be the “Son of God.”

Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame for Jesus’s death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point of absurdity, becoming in the process the basis for two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism.

Crucifixion was a widespread and exceedingly common form of execution in antiquity, one used by Persians, Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Romans, and Greeks. Even the Jews practiced crucifixion;

The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal as it was to serve as a deterrent to others who might defy the state.

The criminal was always left hanging long after he had died; the crucified were almost never buried.

crucifixion was more than a capital punishment for Rome; it was a public reminder of what happens when one challenges the empire. That is why it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, banditry.

His offense, in the eyes of Rome, is self-evident. It was etched upon a plaque and placed above his head for all to see: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. His crime was daring to assume kingly ambitions.

“The one who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death: the congregation shall stone him to death” (Leviticus 24:16).

Stephen for his blasphemy when he calls Jesus the Son of Man (Acts 7:1–60). Stephen is not transferred to Roman authorities to answer for his crime; he is stoned to death on the spot.

Jesus is not stoned to death by the Jews for blasphemy; he is crucified by Rome for sedition.

Jerusalem was the center of spiritual activity for the Jews, the cultic heart of the Jewish nation.

Every sectarian, every fanatic, every zealot, messiah, and self-proclaimed prophet, eventually made his way to Jerusalem to missionize or admonish, to offer God’s mercy or warn of God’s wrath. The festivals in particular were an ideal time for these schismatics to reach as wide and international an audience as possible.