Claudia Putnam's Reviews > Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

I really need to get this off my currently reading list, but I can't do a decent review because most of my Jesus books are packed away in crates. I think AN Wilson's Jesus: A Life, though it's nowhere near as scholarly, stands up pretty well to this. I can't pull it out to refer to it, unfortunately. It takes a different tack by trying to integrate all the Jesus personas into a single lifestory... as in, what if Jesus was at one point a zealot and at a later point a hippie and at another point a mystic healer? IE, he evolved from this adolescent revolutionary. Wilson makes an interesting case that all along there was tension between his zealot followers and his hippie Jesus followers (the Sermon on the Mount types). For example, during the fishes and loaves scene, there's this point where people get worked up and he says LET THE MEN STAND DOWN, and then he gets talks to the women about peace and love. That is, he is concerned about where all this rebellious zeal will lead--bloody repression by Rome--and tries to elevate the women's roles as a peacekeeping measure. (Wilson argues that the meltdown in Gethsemane came because the zealots and the hippies disagreed at the end, which isn't that different from what Aslan thinks, so that the various groups, always uneasily allied, really did feel betrayed by one another, with Judas, the zealot, taking the fall.)

It's an interesting argument, though later analyses, like Aslan's, and Aslan of course is mainly building off other scholars who are looking at redactions, feel that the peace stuff came much later, as the Christian Church developed.

I am not entirely convinced that that we can settle upon A Jesus, as opposed to several reformist rabbinical figures who might have formed a composite character that we now think of us as OUR Jesus. That is, there might have been a hippie Jesus and a zealot figure and a mystic, perhaps with similar names, who got merged into one figure around whom all the stories congealed, much as they have around the persona we know think of as King Arthur. (As another example, it now seems that there may have been at least two people merged into Butch Cassidy, and that was barely a century ago, when there are all kinds of historical records and eyewitness accounts. Even these conflict; it is very difficult to straighten out information about folk heroes.)

So what emerges in Aslan's synthesis is that Jesus was kind of a fanatic for as much as can be discerned. As in, a Jewish jihadi. Zealot would be the Jewish word for jihadi, I guess. As in, cleanse the homeland of the foreigners and infidels. Got it? An ISIS type of nut. Aslan concludes with the statement that it's too bad the historical record was so corrupted by the church, which, wanting to make peace with the Roman Empire, which Jesus definitely did not want to do, glossed over all this (you kind of wonder why they bothered, rather than just founding some new church having nothing to do with Jesus, and everything to do with Paul, but whatever), because Jesus was, Aslan thinks, a cool guy to get to know on his own. But I question that statement, because the Jesus he describes sounds like a nutcase to me.

Whereas Aslan avoids considering Jesus's potential nutcasery. He keeps trying to figure out what Jesus might have been thinking, as if Jesus might have been completely sane. I mean, are these guys, who think God is talking to them, who think they have the keys to the Kingdom, EVER sane? Name one. These charismatic religious leaders. Joseph Smith for instance. Name me one. I'm not talking about visionaries like MLK Jr or Gandhi. I'm talking about the end of the world guys, which Jesus was. NAME ME ONE. Jesus sure doesn't sound like he's sane.

The other weird thing about Aslan's analysis is that he keeps repeating that Jesus was illiterate and that he came from a part of the Jewish world and a class of people where they would only have known the most basic verses of the Torah. And then Aslan keeps looking for the parts of the Old Testament, these most obscure parts, where Jesus would have got this or that rationale or justification for strange ideas or preachings. Hm. Is he or is he not illiterate? Is he or is he not well versed? Did his time with John the Baptist bring him up to speed? Or what?

Example, the Son of Man thing. Like many before him, Aslan goes to great lengths to figure out where Jesus might have come up with that stuff. Book of Daniel, Ezekiel, etc. It might be more simple. The Essenes said they were, or maybe they said they worshipped in, the Temple of Man. I think this was because the Temple in Jerusalem had been corrupted. (Aslan does such a great job describing Jerusalem, Year Zero.) Perhaps the Son of Man business just means that Jesus considered himself a son of that Essene tradition, a man uncorrupted by the Jerusalem Temple?

You're welcome, Aslan, you can have that for free, though a footnote would be nice.

Window into my mind: throughout I struggled with the way Aslan used revolutionary. I kept feeling that "revolutionary" applied to people who fight against their OWN governments, rather than against invading or conquering forces. For example, in the American Revolution, British subjects fought British Monarchist forces in order to establish a new form of government on one part of British territory. In the Russian Revolution, Russian Communists fought Russian Autocratic forces to establish a new form of government. In the French Revolution... etc. I don't think Jesus was a revolutionary. He was a rebel or a insurrectionist or--this is probably best--a leader of the resistance. Unless Jesus's argument can be seen as primarily with Jewish collaborators rather than with Rome, and that his idea was to create a new Jewish order never before seen. Then perhaps he was a revolutionary. I wasn't quite clear on which it was, anyhow.

Good, stimulating read, and highly recommended. Aslan may not be right that this is the only historical Jesus, but it's just one more piece of evidence pointing to how much of a fabrication Christianity is. Certainly the Jesus as represented by Christianity did not exist, ever, and there is no "core truth" there, either. Or rather, the core Jesus that has survived in any Biblical versions is not likely to be any Jesus we will ever like.

He's more likely to be the fire and brimstone guy that the fundamentalists believe in, though unfortunately for them, hostile to Gentiles.