Galadriel
Well-Known Member
So this book is hitting the charts at Amazon, and the author claims to be a religious scholar and the book a "biography" of Jesus--well, here are some things you need to know about Reza Aslan's "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth"
(From Jimmy Akin @ The National Catholic Register):
There’s a new best-seller out there which claims to give us “the real story” on Jesus.
It’s called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is one in a long line of books challenging the portrait of Jesus given in the gospels.
The author is giving interviews in the major media, promoting his book, and people are asking questions about it and how to respond.
Here are 14 things to know and share . . .
1) What is Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth?
It is a book authored by Reza Aslan and published by Random House in July of 2013.
With the power of the Random House marketing machine behind it, the book quickly shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.
The book is billed as a biography of Jesus of Nazareth.
In keeping with Aslan’s creative writing background (see below), much of it is written in a casual, narrative style that does not stop to cite sources, mount arguments, or consider alternative viewpoints.
It reads rather a lot like historical fiction, with Aslan inviting us to imagine the colors of the curtain of the Jerusalem temple, how scene at the temple would have sounded, and even how it would have smelled (rather putrid, according to Aslan).
2) Who is Reza Aslan?
Aslan is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside. He lives in Hollywood.
He was born in Tehran, Iran but raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.
His family background is Muslim, though not devout.
He himself experienced a conversion to Christianity in his teens but later lost his faith.
He has a doctorate in the sociology of religions from the University of California Santa Barbara.
3) Is Aslan trying to hide his Muslim background?
He has been accused of doing so in television interviews, but this seems unfounded.
He certainly does not hide it in the book. In fact, there is an “Author’s Note” at the beginning of Zealot that explains his religious background very forthrightly.
Aslan’s Muslim background is not very relevant to the views he proposes in Zealot, and given the dynamics of TV interviews, it wouldn’t make sense for Aslan to discuss this unless he were specifically asked about it.
4) Is Aslan giving us a Muslim re-reading of Jesus?
Aslan has similarly been accused of doing so, but this is also unfounded.
Muslims typically hold that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was the Messiah, and that he was not crucified.
Aslan appears to reject all three of these positions.
· Early in the book he casts doubt on Mary’s virginity.
· He does not appear to regard Jesus as fulfilling the role of a divinely-authorized Messiah.
· And he believes that Jesus was crucified.
In fact, early in the book he states that Jesus’ crucifixion is one of only two “hard historical facts” about Jesus that can be relied upon (see below).
Rather than providing a Muslim re-reading of Jesus, Aslan offers a standard liberal-skeptical re-reading of Jesus.
5) What does he think we know about Jesus?
His bottom line summary is as follows:
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.
If Aslan were to stop with what he considers the only hard historical facts on which we may confidently rely, it would make for a rather short biography.
So he goes beyond these bare bones to offer an imaginative reconstruction of the life and times of Jesus based on his own thoughts about what most probably happened.
6) Is that the way biographies are normally written?
No. Biographies typically go beyond trying to offer imaginative reconstructions of a person’s life.
If you really think that you only know two things about a person then you can’t write a biography of more than a few sentences.
Providing a book-length exercise of imagination, however much detail from historical sources you include, puts you in the realm of historical fiction rather than biography.
One is tempted to say that Aslan’s Zealot is only a “biography” of Jesus of Nazareth the way that Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God are “biographies” of the Roman Emperor Claudius.
That is to say, all three are works of historical fiction written as if they were biographies.
The difference is that Graves has more literary style than Aslan and is more up-front about the fictional nature of what he is doing.
7) How does Aslan imaginatively reconstruct the figure of Jesus?
Drawing on the facts that Jesus led a popular movement in Palestine and that the Romans crucified him, Aslan adds a third supposed fact:
Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition.
He then infers that Jesus must have been guilty of sedition and re-casts him in the role of one of the many political revolutionaries of the day who tried to throw off Roman rule, only to get squashed.
This is where the book gets its title—Zealot. The claim is that Jesus was just one of the many zealot-like revolutionaries of the time.
Aslan then cherry-picks the evidence of the gospels, accepting whatever agrees with his thesis and discarding everything that doesn’t.
8) How does he explain the fact that the gospels do not depict Jesus as a political revolutionary?
According to Aslan, the gospels were written long after the fact and are unreliable on these points.
However, they are apparently reliable whenever they say something that he can use to support his thesis.
According to Aslan, all of the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. (He dates Matthew and Luke to between A.D. 90 and 100 and John to between A.D. 100 and 120!)
At these late dates, Aslan informs us, Christians wanted to de-couple their religion from the failed political messianism that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, and so the gospels falsify their depiction of Jesus and make him a non-revolutionary.
Continued below...
(From Jimmy Akin @ The National Catholic Register):
There’s a new best-seller out there which claims to give us “the real story” on Jesus.
It’s called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is one in a long line of books challenging the portrait of Jesus given in the gospels.
The author is giving interviews in the major media, promoting his book, and people are asking questions about it and how to respond.
Here are 14 things to know and share . . .
1) What is Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth?
It is a book authored by Reza Aslan and published by Random House in July of 2013.
With the power of the Random House marketing machine behind it, the book quickly shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.
The book is billed as a biography of Jesus of Nazareth.
In keeping with Aslan’s creative writing background (see below), much of it is written in a casual, narrative style that does not stop to cite sources, mount arguments, or consider alternative viewpoints.
It reads rather a lot like historical fiction, with Aslan inviting us to imagine the colors of the curtain of the Jerusalem temple, how scene at the temple would have sounded, and even how it would have smelled (rather putrid, according to Aslan).
2) Who is Reza Aslan?
Aslan is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside. He lives in Hollywood.
He was born in Tehran, Iran but raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.
His family background is Muslim, though not devout.
He himself experienced a conversion to Christianity in his teens but later lost his faith.
He has a doctorate in the sociology of religions from the University of California Santa Barbara.
3) Is Aslan trying to hide his Muslim background?
He has been accused of doing so in television interviews, but this seems unfounded.
He certainly does not hide it in the book. In fact, there is an “Author’s Note” at the beginning of Zealot that explains his religious background very forthrightly.
Aslan’s Muslim background is not very relevant to the views he proposes in Zealot, and given the dynamics of TV interviews, it wouldn’t make sense for Aslan to discuss this unless he were specifically asked about it.
4) Is Aslan giving us a Muslim re-reading of Jesus?
Aslan has similarly been accused of doing so, but this is also unfounded.
Muslims typically hold that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was the Messiah, and that he was not crucified.
Aslan appears to reject all three of these positions.
· Early in the book he casts doubt on Mary’s virginity.
· He does not appear to regard Jesus as fulfilling the role of a divinely-authorized Messiah.
· And he believes that Jesus was crucified.
In fact, early in the book he states that Jesus’ crucifixion is one of only two “hard historical facts” about Jesus that can be relied upon (see below).
Rather than providing a Muslim re-reading of Jesus, Aslan offers a standard liberal-skeptical re-reading of Jesus.
5) What does he think we know about Jesus?
His bottom line summary is as follows:
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.
If Aslan were to stop with what he considers the only hard historical facts on which we may confidently rely, it would make for a rather short biography.
So he goes beyond these bare bones to offer an imaginative reconstruction of the life and times of Jesus based on his own thoughts about what most probably happened.
6) Is that the way biographies are normally written?
No. Biographies typically go beyond trying to offer imaginative reconstructions of a person’s life.
If you really think that you only know two things about a person then you can’t write a biography of more than a few sentences.
Providing a book-length exercise of imagination, however much detail from historical sources you include, puts you in the realm of historical fiction rather than biography.
One is tempted to say that Aslan’s Zealot is only a “biography” of Jesus of Nazareth the way that Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God are “biographies” of the Roman Emperor Claudius.
That is to say, all three are works of historical fiction written as if they were biographies.
The difference is that Graves has more literary style than Aslan and is more up-front about the fictional nature of what he is doing.
7) How does Aslan imaginatively reconstruct the figure of Jesus?
Drawing on the facts that Jesus led a popular movement in Palestine and that the Romans crucified him, Aslan adds a third supposed fact:
Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition.
He then infers that Jesus must have been guilty of sedition and re-casts him in the role of one of the many political revolutionaries of the day who tried to throw off Roman rule, only to get squashed.
This is where the book gets its title—Zealot. The claim is that Jesus was just one of the many zealot-like revolutionaries of the time.
Aslan then cherry-picks the evidence of the gospels, accepting whatever agrees with his thesis and discarding everything that doesn’t.
8) How does he explain the fact that the gospels do not depict Jesus as a political revolutionary?
According to Aslan, the gospels were written long after the fact and are unreliable on these points.
However, they are apparently reliable whenever they say something that he can use to support his thesis.
According to Aslan, all of the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. (He dates Matthew and Luke to between A.D. 90 and 100 and John to between A.D. 100 and 120!)
At these late dates, Aslan informs us, Christians wanted to de-couple their religion from the failed political messianism that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, and so the gospels falsify their depiction of Jesus and make him a non-revolutionary.
Continued below...