A review of Reza Aslan’s Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan is one of the voices in the USA media explaining Islam to Christians today. He is popular, because he makes most Muslims seem anti-extreme, a comforting thought and one that helps promote the unity of humanity against extremism in our time. I read his book about Jesus in part to calibrate his credibility. My theory is he will be similarly accurate when evaluating Islam’s faith history, and that errors in his view on Islam would not be something I can so easily detect.
The book provides valuable historical context and there is much to learn from it. However, Reza suppositions in the story at crucial junctures that seem hard to justify. Other reviewers have commented it is possible footnotes would have helped to decipher the sources of his hypotheses. In any case, these changes have consequences, and need examination.
Here are key examples I see:
Both Reza Aslan and Christian tradition have Luke and Paul hanging out together after Saul’s conversion to become Paul. Christian tradition is Luke was a respected competent historian and a likely mentor to Paul. Aslan thinks less of Luke. The divide becomes one of Luke mentoring Paul vs. Paul mentoring Luke. As with any relationship the relationship was likely two-way. Why does it matter? Because Aslan frees himself to say Luke is putting in fiction or covering truth over to create a dispute that he believes is larger than what was documented by Luke between Paul and the other apostles. In the end Christians rely on the judgement that Luke is competent by Irenaeus(2nd century), and by the Nicaean council (4th Century) that made his books part of the scriptural canon. This judgement was further confirmed by the archeological research of Sir William Mitchell Ramsey (20th Century) who said “You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment.”
1) Aslan seems to discount some scriptures while elevating others, sometimes based on historical analysis, but not always. Most Christians stand guilty of this same crime. An example Aslan does not justify well concerns the story of the Good Samaritan. Aslan clearly recognizes this parable is in response to the question “Who is your neighbor?” and that Jesus really told the parable (p. 100–101). Christians believe this story shows Jesus came for everyone. However, later in the book (e.g. p. 134–135) Aslan decides that Jesus would have had a traditional Jewish view of what the messiah should be and do and therefore that he would come for the Jewish nation only. Aslan purports the church changes the scope of Jesus’s audience. Believing Jesus to be inspired, Christians believe that Jesus saw the scriptures in ways previously unseen. Jesus would come to be the light to the nations that the Jewish people had been intended to be, but had not been faithful enough to God to fulfill to date. In the end, saying Jesus provided the new interpretations showing he would come to Israel first to be light to all the world vs. the body of Christ the Church provided the new interpretations need not be such a large distinction except that Aslan would make the divide so large as to represent two different faiths (p. 196). Scriptures Aslan finds contradictory do not seem so in their context, as other analysis (e.g. Robert Allen King: though you will have to endure some lengthy opinion to get to the detail), explains. For Christians it is Aslan that is in error, but with a cleverness, along the lines of the tradition of the serpent seducing Eve in Genesis 3. Because Christians believe God to be the final authority behind scripture, Christians believe He expects us to know it well enough to find a other author’s errors.
2) Aslan seems to actually believe what he says on page 177, that even though Jesus says “it is written” when he prophesies being destroyed and rebuilt in three days there is no such scripture. This is a beautiful case in point of Jesus putting scriptures together in ways previously unseen. He takes the substitution of messiah for the light of Israel from Ezekiel — and realizes his own body is a temple of the Lord. He is quoting Hosea 6:2 and applying these substitutional insights. These are common concepts in the Christian faith especially given the writings of Paul but would, as Aslan correctly notes, have seemed strange and novel and mysterious when Jesus first spoke them.
3 ) James the Just vs. Paul the Inspired …. hmm. Surely there was a controversy, that much is documented. However, Christians believe that is the honest tension between a man who knew Jesus as human since his childhood and one who only knew him first hand as vision and in prayer. Jesus’s transformation had to be one hard to completely comprehend. Christians can be vicious as they argue, but Luke documents that they did come out on the other side of that argument united. Great leadership allows that to happen —Jim Collins calls is facing the brutal facts — the passion in the arguments enables a better resolution. But Aslan hypothesizes that the argument never really ended, that one side of the argument was silenced in the temple destruction. Even if Aslan is correct, a Christian would have said there are no accidents, if God had wanted a remnant of that other argument to survive he would have made it so. If Luke is competent, he explicitly says the controversy was resolved while all the parties were alive.
In any case, it is Paul who seems like us, experiencing the risen Jesus in vision and prayer. We can all be like Paul, we cannot all be like James the Just. Paul’s way of meeting Jesus we can all know first hand. In that sense, Paul was the first of our kind.
Reza Aslan is most caught when he approaches the resurrection. He does a great job here. He is caught because, as he points out, the loyalty of the witnesses is a remarkable testament the depth of their testimony. Yet if he says as modern historian that a miracle occurred he will lose his Western secular credentials as historian. That is a sad fact of our age. Many would-be Christians stumble at this point. The good news Christians proclaim is you can meet Paul’s Jesus in prayer first, while unable to suspend disbelief. You can follow Jesus asking him to help in your remaining unbelief. Reza Aslan says you can also meet a James the Just version of Jesus in history … and that may be so. If one continues to pray for help with remaining unbelief, that too is good news. It may be worthwhile to get additional introduction to that historical Jesus by Craig Keener or N T Wright.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled
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