Not a Zealot: Review of Reza Aslan’s Zealot – Mark Rich

Reza Aslan’s book first came to my attention via The Daily Show, where he was interviewed by John Oliver, who gave the book a high recommendation: “It’s a fantastic read – You’ve got to get it.”[1]  Despite Aslan’s claim to intellectual originality this is not at all a new thesis. S.G.F. Brandon argued this thesis 47 years ago in his book Jesus and the Zealots, which is well-known to Jesus scholars but the thesis of which has never gained much traction among them. Aslan conveniently neglects to mention this clear scholarly antecedent as it would undercut his appearance of scholarly originality and intellectual courage.

I began reading this book thinking of it as a popularization of Jesus. It is certainly that, and there would certainly be nothing new about that. Jesus is always a bestseller, a fact that has never been forgotten by Time, Inc. with its regular Christmas and Easter Jesus covers. So one does not expect accuracy or even serious competence from a popularization, and Aslan does not disappoint in that regard. But that is just the first part of the book. The surprising part is the second part, which goes entirely unmentioned in the title (as well as the reviews, the professional summaries, and the amazon.com interview). That part is nothing less than a literary drive-by shooting of the apostle Paul. The agenda of the book is not merely to present Jesus of Nazareth to modern readers (who are generally educated persons but also generally ignorant about the Bible, Jesus, and things religious in general) but also to trash Paul as the inventor of the heresy now known as Christianity. To be an orthodox Christian is to be a gullible believer in a myth of Jesus as a pre-existent heavenly being, which is the same criticism that Islam has always made about Christianity, along with many modern middle-brow Western intellectuals whom G.K. Chesterton referred to as “the cultured despisers of Christianity.”

So Aslan joins a long line of critics of Paul in repeating this charge. It is now a stock cultural proof of intellectual integrity and free-thinking, not like those gullible Christians. With this book one can think oneself both liberated from Christianity and more faithful to the newly-discovered Real Jesus.[2] What a neat intellectual trick! One is now able to be superior to the Christians while claiming to be more faithful than them to their own leader. You can be more Christian than the Christians while dismissing all of Christianity.

There are over-simplifications and mistakes on every page of Zealot, so many that it would require a book far larger than Aslan’s to fix them all. However, Aslan puts his history of religions and sociology of religion credentials up front as a claim to expertise. He claims that, rather than the gospels, “my primary source in recreating Jesus’ life are [sic] historical writings about first century Palestine, like the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, as well as Roman documents of the time.”[3] This is patently untrue because it is impossible. There simply isn’t nearly enough material on Jesus in these other sources. Therefore, much of his Jesus section consists of Aslan swinging wildly and apparently unconsciously between criticizing the New Testament writings and then uncritically recounting them.

Jesus was not a Zealot, and it matters very much that he wasn’t. First, the Zealots did not exist anywhere near Jesus’ time.[4] They were a quickly-formed peasant group from northwest Judea who played a key role in the First Jewish Revolt. Jesus had no direct connections with that area or those people or that time. Second, the nonviolent and jubilee aspects of Jesus’ movement are too many and too serious to dismiss as a late attempt by Jesus’ supposed followers trying to make Jesus appear unthreatening to the Romans. Without going into those details now, suffice it to say that if it were really the intent of Jesus or his followers, even late followers, to make nice with Rome, they would never have attempted nor kept the title “Son of God” – a key and irreplaceable imperial title. One can either believe in Jesus as the Son of God or the emperor as the Son of God, but not both at the same time.

By trotting out the argument that Jesus was actually violent and his later followers were trying to cover that up to make him appear nonviolent, Aslan falls into nonsense. To understand this, let’s first think some about lying, and then go on to the evidence.

Aslan claims that Jesus’ followers were lying. (He doesn’t hang that charge primarily on the Twelve; Aslan treats them mostly as country bumpkins not educated enough to seriously lie. He hangs it mainly on the Hellenistic Jews Stephen and Paul.) So let’s examine that charge.

There are three essential characteristics of lies: they must serve the selfish interests of the liar(s); they must resemble the truth, i.e., they must seem plausible; and, when it’s a group lie, is all the parties to the lie must conspire to agree in its essentials. Anyone who jumps out of the conspiracy must be suppressed.

The claim of the early Christians was that Jesus was raised by God into a new form of existence following his crucifixion by the powers-that-were and is therefore revealed as the true Son of God in order to bring about the new creation that has already begun in his ministry. That claim fails all three tests of a lie. 1) It isn’t anywhere near plausible. First, this resurrection had never actually happened before, much less to someone crucified and therefore cursed by God. Second, as Aslan rightly notes, there was no expectation whatsoever that the resurrection would begin with a single individual. 2) None of the claimants personally profited by it. Many of them suffered persecution and death rather than surrender that claim. 3) None of those who were in on the conspiracy, if it were such, broke ranks and ratted out the others, even though there would have been good reasons to do so. Everyone who maintained the claim stayed true to it, which is not what people do in the face of broad and sustained persecution. No one deliberately lies and then sticks with it when the lie is clearly bringing down punishment that could be easily avoided by giving up on the lie.

However, I understand why Aslan’s treatment of Jesus is so broadly appealing. Even wrongheaded, Aslan does give Jesus the compliment of a real political treatment, and that is certainly far better than “the gentle, peace-loving, otherworldly Christ”[5] (one could add ‘simpering idiot’) that generations of Almost Christian teaching has produced.[6] In a religiously and spiritually ignorant age, Zealot easily looks like something serious and political, and that comes to nearly all its non-specialized readers as a revelation. They discover, with the force of a revelation, that it is possible to think politically about Jesus and his movement. It is unfortunate that they are learning this through such a trashy book.

The dark side of that appeal is that, for all of his claims to originality and courage, Aslan’s description of the politics of Jesus is thumpingly conventional. He’s one more failed rebel. But let’s be clear about something. Simply put, Jesus is the most transformative person of the past two millennia. He began a movement of anti-war, anti-slavery, anti-poverty (and hence also anti-wealth), anti-sacrifice commoners who shared possessions and forgave sins in the name of God. All that was 2,000 years ago, and we fancy moderners don’t anywhere near live up to his transformative radicalism. So Aslan’s characterization of him as one more violent revolutionary (out of many others of the time) is absurd – there’s just nothing transformative about that.

The failed violent revolutionaries are the next generation’s romantic heros; the successful ones are the next generation’s despots. Neither actually transform anything, for they completely buy into the System’s addiction to the myth of redemptive violence, of peace through victory. The failed violent revolutionaries of Jesus’ time are remembered only by scholars and are celebrated by no one. Only Jesus is remembered and celebrated exactly because his revolution was and is more radical than the others. It breaks entirely with the whole system of oppression and violence in the name of God in favor of a new community of love that overcomes evil and death by the power and name of God.

Aslan bases his claim about Jesus’ zealotry (a misnomer) on a misreading of Jesus’ arrest scene in Luke 22. After the strange evening meal, Jesus instructs his disciples “‘But now, whoever has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And whoever has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless’; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’ They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’ He replied, ‘It is enough.’”

Jesus cannot be ordering his disciples to arm themselves for an attack, for the obvious reason that two swords couldn’t possibly be enough for that purpose. The fact that there were two swords already present when Jesus asked for them indicates two things at the same time: the disciples had already been thinking in violent terms, and they were in no way prepared for revolution as Jesus had not ordered it. The reason why Jesus declares two swords to be enough is that it will be enough to make him look like one of the rebels, the lawless ones. Two swords is the bare minimum needed for the plural “the lawless.” So they are enough. What counts for him at the moment is the perception that will be created.

Aslan then conveniently (or perhaps ignorantly) omits the renvoi of that first scene from vv. 36ff. After Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives and the arrival of the mob led by Judas, then “When those who were around [Jesus] saw what was coming, they asked, ‘Lord, should we strike with the sword?’ Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus answered saying, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and cured him” (vv 49ff).

This scene was crystal clear for the early Christians: Jesus had outlawed all violence in general and in particular had disarmed them. As Martin of Tours put it three and a half centuries later, “I am a soldier of Christ; I am not allowed to fight.” The two things, Jesus’ lordship and their nonviolent obedience, were understood by all early Christians as inherently linked.

This scene confuses modern Americans because first, we are literalists, and second, we are ideologically committed to violence. Jesus and the early Christians were neither. This pair of scenes is like the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, a case of commanding something in order later to prohibit it. (Yes, that’s a thing.) He commands his followers to get swords, so that when they draw them at his arrest he can then entirely prohibit their use.

Part of Aslan’s populist appeal is to make Jesus seem political (which he definitely was) but then to make the dumb mistake of making him fundamentally like the politicians we already know, who always want to keep religiously-validated political violence among their options. He also knows that most people are ignorant enough about the New Testament witness to Jesus and the church traditions that grow out of it that we won’t notice how much of that witness we would have to suppress in order to take his hypothesis seriously. Maybe Aslan is bright, but he’s not brighter than the whole Christian tradition.

We should give Aslan credit for crediting Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection as real, which is a claim that is directly opposed to the teachings of the Qur’an and his Muslim tradition. But he is apparently incapable of reasoning through what that event then means politically, spiritually, and theologically, which is far more radical than mere zealotry.

Tomorrow Eric Lindner will give his assessment of Aslan’s book. On Wednesday we will repost a review by Fr. Robert Barron. Then on Thursday I will return with some further discussion about the cultural significance of Aslan’s argument.