NPR’s Fresh Air had an interview on Monday with one Reza Aslan, author of a book entitled Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, in which an effort is made to find TRHJ (“The Real, Historical Jesus”). I don’t listen to NPR anymore except for CarTalk, but am not surprised at its attempt to dismiss two millenia of Church history and the documentary evidence of the Gospels and Acts in order to seek out the Truth which has been hidden this whole time. It’s funny how the debunkers always unsuccessfully try to debunk the same bunk; first the Gnostics, then Dan Brown, now we can’t even trust Aslan. Some quotes from the interview:
[W]hen I was 15 years old I went to a camp sponsored by an evangelical Christian youth group named Young Life. And in this camp it was the first time that I had heard the Gospel message, this incredible story about God who gave his only begotten son to humanity to die for our sins and that anyone who believed in him could have eternal life and not die… [My parents] were certainly surprised when I returned home and explained that I had accepted Jesus into my heart, and I began to aggressively evangelize to them… [Y]ou couldn’t be more American than to accept Jesus into your heart.
I am increasingly noticing that critics of Christianity aren’t really critics of historical Christianity, as it has been lived by the Church since Jesus’ day. Most critique the straw man variants put forward by relatively recent Protestant denominations (seriously, do you think you’ve demolished the Church by successfully arguing against young-earth proponents?). The notion of accepting Jesus into your heart (as that phrase is commonly understood) as the one-time, irrevocable, sufficient means of salvation is only a few centuries young and has much in Scripture to refute it.
[A]fter a while I started noticing a bit of a distance between the Jesus that I was finding in the text and the Jesus that I was hearing about in church… [I]t was not until college, when I began my formal education of the New Testament and early Christianity, that those doubts started to really form in my mind. And I began to find that the Jesus of history, that the man who walked 2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth, was quite different than Jesus the Christ… I turned away from Christianity, began to really reject the concept of Christ. But I continued my education. I continued my scholarly work… The more I learned about Jesus the man, Jesus of Nazareth, the historical figure, the more I became attracted to him. In fact, in a way Jesus of Nazareth became far more real to me than Jesus the Christ. The man who 2,000 years ago started a movement and defied the will of the greatest empire the world had ever known and lost was someone I wanted to know, someone I wanted to follow.
Without having read Aslan’s book, it seems he would benefit greatly from learning about Jesus of Nazareth by reading Jesus of Nazareth. Benedict, on the very first page of the forward, addresses the seeming disconnect between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” The forward presents many of the same arguments which Aslan makes six years later. It’s also interesting that Aslan says he “wanted to follow” Jesus the revolutionary; he isn’t the first in that camp (see the last paragraph here, or the entry here).
Aslan is not impressed with the historical accuracy of the infancy narrative, specifically claiming that there was no Roman census and thus no reason for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem:
Luke, the person who wrote this story, knew that what he was writing was technically false. Luke’s readers, the people who read this story, the early Christian community, who were only a generation or two removed from the events that Luke is talking about, knew that this census never happened, that under Roman law no one had to go to the place of their father’s birth to be counted. In other words, they understood that the facts of this story were incorrect, but they didn’t care…
So I guess Aslan and his sympathizers are birthers. It isn’t clear why Luke’s readers would want to support the lie, since doing so courted death (maybe even at the hands of Saul). While Aslan wants a defense from silence (“there is no documentation in any Roman source ever written” so therefore the census never happened), there is an equally loud defense from silence supporting Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem (there is no documentation that Jesus, arguably the most famous person in history, was born in Nazareth or anywhere else). The fact that Aslan so easily dismisses the documentary evidence of Luke’s Gospel itself seems to suggest a bias against certain types of evidence.
[T]he idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways it’s a product of the scientific revolution. You know, when we sort of decided that that which is true is that which can be scientifically verified, well, that put into doubt the stories of the Bible, and what we now refer to as fundamentalism, this belief in the literal and inerrant nature of the Bible, arose out of the scientific revolution… It doesn’t really trace itself back to the time of Jesus.
Of course, you can’t scientifically verify the truth of the statement “that which is true is that which can be scientifically verified” either. Again, the presumption seems to be that if you can poke holes in fundamentalism, then you’ve poked holes in Christianity, which doesn’t at all follow.
Oh, you found the historical Jesus? Yawn. Pope Benedictus XVI january,20 2006 (2).JPG at wikimedia commons
Aslan claims that “Jesus was deeply a part of this zealot movement, that he himself had these intense zealot tendencies, and that can be revealed in the words and in the actions that we see in the Gospels.” There seems to be no distinction between a proper understanding of the kingdom of God (see second paragraph here), as Jesus spoke of it and as we recall in the third luminous mystery, and a political revolt against Rome. Aslan points to the cleansing of the temple and the question about paying taxes to Caesar as evidence of Jesus being of the Zealot party; the Ignatius study bible has good commentary to refute such claims. It seems odd that Jesus would be “deeply in the Zealot camp,” yet be completely passive at the hands of the Roman authorities. He took up His cross, after all, not a sword. Maybe Aslan can coin a new phrase: the pacifist zealot.
The crucifixion itself solidifies, for Aslan, the fact that Jesus was a revolutionary: “[T]here’s only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition… [I]f Jesus was in fact crucified by Rome, he was crucified for sedition.” I don’t know enough history to say whether crucifixion was so used, but is it possible that it may have been used occasionally for other crimes? Say, for lesser crimes perpetrated by criminals accused by a potentially riotous mob? It’s easy for us to dismiss the idea of the government easily quashing a riot since they have tanks, tear gas, and SWAT teams, and so the threat of a riot rings hollow. But when the only thing you have are swords, which the rioters also have, the balance of power is a bit different and the possibility of a riot is a lot more dangerous.
Pilate in the Gospels slowly transforms into this deeply sympathetic character, right up to the point where in the last Gospel, in John, he is deeply pained at the idea of having to put Jesus to death… This story is, of course, complete fantasy. I mean, what we know about Pilate – the historical Pilate – is that he was a deeply cruel and hard man who had absolutely no sympathy for the Jewish sensibilities at all, routinely sent his soldiers into the streets to slaughter Jews whenever they disagreed with any of his decisions. The idea that he would be strong-armed by the crowd into handing over yet another Jewish rabble-rouser, one of probably hundreds that he had sent to the cross that month alone, it really begs the imagination.
No credence given to the fact that Jesus was innocent, that he was being framed by the Jewish authorities on trumped-up charges, nor that his wife may have influenced him to be lenient in this one particular case.
Aslan then states that, to get along with the new Roman authorities after the fall of Jerusalem, the Christians changed the story of Jesus so that the Jews were to blame, not the Romans who crucified Him for treason. Again, this seems odd since Luke takes pains to mention his consultation of eyewitnesses, Mark’s Gospel is believed to be the account of the eyewitness St. Peter, and John’s Gospel (if believed to be written by St. John the Apostle) is itself an eyewitness account.
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Okay, I’ve spilled enough digital ink and haven’t even read through half of the interview. Perhaps a part two will follow next week.