The Face of Reza Aslan's Jesus

And it was at this point in reading Zealot that I went for a walk, and prayed for a little while.

I was "couch-bitin'-mad," as they used to say in my college fraternity.  Don't ask.  Really.  Don't ask.

Here is the best-selling book in America, making what felt like a full-frontal attack...so certain, so sure...on everything that I hold to be most precious and good about the founder of my faith.  I would not follow Jesus if he was the Jesus Zealot describes, and I'd be lying if I said the bizarro-world Jesus presented by Aslan didn't make me feel like Mr. Furious.

But I walked, and prayed, and walked a little more.  And quiet came.

From the quiet, a thought came to me: does Reza Aslan hate Christians and Christianity?  Is this a book filled with hate?  Is intended as an attack on Jesus?

And in truth, it is not.  Reza Aslan loves Christians.  He does, with all of his heart, and not in an abstract way. He is--as a Muslim--trying to find a way to love the Jesus of his Christian wife and her family, who love him just as he is.

Then what is this strange mess of a book trying to do?

This is not a book that serves the purposes of scholarship.  That's a mistaken assumption, the wrong lens through which to consider his writing. If you try to see it that way, it is unreadably terrible.  Nor is it a Christian book, intended to shape Christian faith. This is a book written for love, the love of a man whose wife does not believe quite as he does.

As a Christian pastor with a Jewish wife, I know what that feels like.

Here, I found myself musing on his Muslim faith.  Not in the manner of FoxNews, whose clumsy attempt at rabble rousing at the expense of Islam probably sold more copies of this book than any glowing review ever could.  [Reminder to self if I ever get published by a large imprint: Go on FoxNews. Get attacked.]

Instead, I thought of it in the manner of someone who is open to interfaith relationships, and also realistically aware of the differentials between faith traditions.

I have studied the Quran at great length.  Cover to cover, I've read the whole thing, in a variety of translations.  I've gone searching for Jesus there, hoping to encounter the heart of what I find in the Gospels.  There's a book in that, somewhere in the future.

What strikes me, in reading Reza Aslan's Zealot, is how his Jesus compares with the Jesus I found described in the Quran.

The Jesus of the Quran isn't at all the Jesus he's describing.  Not at all.  The Quran says many things about Jesus, that are actually wildly and surprisingly orthodox.  According to the Quran, Jesus is given the title Messiah (Al Maeda 75, At-Tauba 31).  He's born of the Spirit of God (Al-Anbiya 91), which impregnates the Virgin Mary.  He preaches with the authority of the Spirit (Al Maeda 110).  Heck, it even says he's going to return on the last day (Aal-e-Imran 55).  There are plenty of churches out there that'd take those as perfectly adequate grounds for membership.

But the Quran makes no claims about his being a revolutionary, a zealous warrior for the truth.  None at all.

Then it struck me, with the force of a full Schweitzer: He's not describing Jesus as if he was the Jesus of the Quran.  Neither is he projecting Jesus from his own identity.  I thought for a while about the ways Aslan praises this Jesus he's envisioned.

His Jesus is a man of humble birth.  He lives in a backwater, an area disrespected by the world.  He looks out at the faith around him, and sees corruption.  A vision of God comes, and he is stirred to take up an uncompromising stance against the powers around him.  He takes up the sword, and gathers followers, and stakes his life in a battle against the powers that have corrupted faith.  This Jesus, after his death, passes real authority on through his bloodline, through his family.

This Jesus is a noble and valiant warrior for justice, a fearless zealot in the service of the Creator of the Universe, one willing to put his life on the line to defend the assertion that Aslan puts into the lips of all zealots: Only the Lord is God.  "Someone worth believing in," as the book concludes.

Having read the Quran, I know that guy.

Reza Aslan's Jesus is the Prophet Mohammed.  Peace be Unto Him.

Yeah, I know, Reza doesn't up and say it.  But the whole book suddenly didn't bother me any more.  It suddenly made sense. It's like talking with a Buddhist who says, you know, I see my Buddha in your Jesus.  Or to a Hindu who sees Krishna in Jesus.

Here's a man who tries to describe Jesus, and finds himself instead describing the very best and most worthy person of his entire faith tradition.  It's hard to take offense at that.

To which I might say, you know, there's more.  There's so much more.

But I wouldn't be angry in the saying of it.

This Is Not the Jesus You're Looking For

Few things about Reza Aslan's Zealot are likely to cheese off more Christians than his assertion that Jesus was a failed violent revolutionary.

For two thousand years, the best spirit of our faith has been radically self-sacrificing and nonviolent.  Oh, sure, we've messed that up on frequent occasion.  But the best and greatest souls of our faith have embraced this teaching.  On those occasion when we've lived into that faith, it's done amazing, world-transforming things.  But Reza Aslan rejects that as a fantasy.  To quote, from his conclusion:

Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history.  The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defined the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.

For Reza Aslan, the defining story of the Gospels is the story of the temple cleansing.  It comes up again and again.  That event is the lens through which he sees and interprets the identity of Jesus.  Which is hard to hear, because it is also the most consistent sign--in Christian circles--of someone who doesn't totally get the message of Jesus.  It's the proof-text we go to when we're looking for justification for a fight.  It's the story we let become the whole message, so we can lay some whupass on that person we're itching to tear a new one.

It is that story that shapes Reza Aslan's understanding, of a strong Jesus who lays into wrongdoers.  He loses, but he's willing to fight injustice even in the face of that loss.  And by fight, I mean fight.  The Jesus of Zealot is a dangerous mystic bandit, surrounded by armed followers.

The relentlessness of Aslan's rejection of Christian nonviolence is a solid thread throughout his book. The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain?  G'bye.  Instead, we hear:

There is no reason to consider Jesus's conception of his neighbors and enemies to have been any more or less expansive than that of any other Jew of his time.  His commands to 'love your enemies' and 'turn the other cheek' must be read as being directed exclusively at his fellow Jews and meant as a model of peaceful relations exclusively within the Jewish community. The commands have nothing to do with how to treat foreigners and outsiders..."

and

In any case, neither the commandment to love one's enemies nor the pile to turn the other cheek is equivalent to a call for nonviolence or nonresistance. Jesus was not a fool. He understood what every other claimant to the mantle of the messiah understood: God's sovereignty could not be established except through force.

Cobbled together from a selective, fabulistic reading of the Gospels, Zealot's Jesus becomes something utterly different, nothing at all like the Jesus whose nonviolent message is written all over the Gospels and the Epistles, and whose message was clearly lived out by his earliest disciples.  It is not the Jesus whose countercultural message resonated throughout the world, or the Jesus known to history.  It is another Jesus entirely.

It is, however, the very particular Jesus that Reza Aslan seems to be eagerly seeking out.

Who is that Jesus he wants to find?  Following Schweitzer, we have to look at the author himself.  What does he believe?  What is important to him?  Why is he writing this?  Honestly, I was starting to get a little angry.

And with my anger very much in place, I thought about it.

Reza Aslan In Bizarro World

The more I get into it, the more peculiar Zealot becomes.

Reza Aslan's approach to the history and texts that form and shape our understanding of the growth of Christianity is a hot mess.  On the one hand, the story he's telling...and this is storytelling, not history...is totally rooted in the kinds of materials you'd encounter in a competent seminary.  He knows the source material, and uses it, but is so radically selective in how he engages in the text that it's baffling.

On the one hand, he out and out rejects story after story from the canonical Gospels as absurd and obviously flawed.  Take, for example, his approach to the stories of Jesus engaging with the synagogue in Nazareth.  "There was no synagogue in Nazareth," says Reza, with total confidence.  It was a small Jewish village of between 1,500 and 2,000 souls, and they were all--every last one of them, according to the book--illiterate.

He also mentions, in passing, that nothing at all remains of the village as it stood in the time of Jesus. Other historical sources tell us much the same thing.  It was a backwater.  One with a reputation for being a welcoming place for holy people, as an inscription mentions.  But now, nothing remains.  So with no evidence at all, he makes a bold and affirmative statement of certainty about a synagogue that may or may not have existed.  Odd.

And on the other hand, he waxes eloquent about how Jesus certainly followed his father Joseph to a large nearby town looking for work, spinning out a story about how he watched the rich Roman oppressors and grew to hate them.  It is utterly imaginary, but he states it with such confidence.

He has beef with the story of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, because that wasn't the practice in the period after 70 CE.  But...it was supposed to have happened before that, you might say.  Well, that doesn't matter, he replies.

It gets odder.  Reza says repeatedly that Christian nonviolence--every saying in every Gospel--only stems from the Gospel writers seeking to make Christianity palatable in the Roman Empire after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.   Jesus never said any of those things, he argues. It all got written in after Jerusalem fell.

In making that assertion about nonviolence, he blunders right on past the continuing debate about the dating of Mark, the earliest Gospel, placing it confidently after the fall of Jerusalem.  He also ignores that most of the Q source sayings--on nonviolence--come from a now-lost document that was likely circulating well before the Gospels were written.  And...bizarrely...he forgets that most of Paul's Epistles predate those Gospels, and that the ethos Paul teaches is completely simpatico with the nonviolent spirit.

It gets odder and odder, as he at one point claims that statements about Paul's importance to the early church are just the work of "sycophants" like Luke, and should be viewed as "ahistorical."  Hwaaat?  I know plenty of really excellent scholars who might have a little bit of an issue with that.

Paul, he suggests, was totally at odds and in conflict with the real leaders of the church, who were really led by Peter and James in Jerusalem.   Paul, we hear, was a frustrated failure, whose influence was ultimately negligible and would have been utterly eliminated if it hadn't been for those meddling Romans.  Oh, and James was the real leader of the early church, because authority in religious movements always has to do with kinship.

If you're a serious scholar of the Bible, it's hard not to want to tear your hair out while reading Zealot.
But nothing, nothing made me more personally frustrated with the book than its view of Christian nonviolence.

So to that in more detail, I will go next.

Reza Aslan, Schweitzer, and the History of Jesus History

My encounter with Reza Aslan's Zealot has been shaped by decades of studying the history of the faith, both personally and as part of graduate and undergraduate work.  I do it for a living, every single week.

That journey began in earnest at the University of Virginia, where I received my degree in Religious Studies.  This weren't no two-bit "bible college" in my grandpappy's garage.  This was Mistah Jeffahson's University.

It was and is a remarkably good program, filled with competent and well-known scholars of religion.  It was also not a seminary.  The purpose of the program was not to train pastors, but to study religion using the tools of historical critical and textual analysis.  Period.

I remember much of it, these decades later, because it lit me up and laid the groundwork for my current faith.  For some, particularly those who thought these would be easy classes after years of Sunday School, it was a rude awakening.  The first-year fundamentalists in my classes would protest ferociously, rising up to challenge professors on those first days of class, only to find that the professors--churchgoers and pastors--knew the Bible with a depth they couldn't even begin to match.  Those folks fell away quickly.

But I loved it.  I found that the engagement with the reality of my tradition only enriched my faith.  History and textual analysis gave a richness and reality to my beliefs.  Knowing the context makes for a much richer faith.

But history has its boundaries, as we were reminded in one of my early seminar courses.  Around the turn of the last century, the historical critical method was in full swing.  It dominated Christian intellectual discourse.  And yes, there was such a thing.  I know it seems hard to believe sometimes, but there really was.

In the late 19th century and early 20th, if you were a Christian, there was a formula for producing best-selling books: Write a history of Jesus.  "Discover" some new and amazing insight into who this person actually was, which would then be argued and discussed and debated while you raked in the royalties and the acclaim.

This trend cranked along for a while, until a book was published by Albert Schweitzer entitled The Quest of the Historical Jesus.   Schweitzer was a brilliant man, a theologian/historian/adventurer/doctor who spent much of his life serving in a hospital in Africa as a way of recompensing for what he saw as the dehumanizing blight of European colonialism.  He particularly hated the fusion of colonial power and Christian faith, which he saw as a monstrous betrayal of the Gospel.  To quote:

The name of Jesus has become a curse, and our Christianity--yours and mine--has become a falsehood and a disgrace, if the crimes are not atoned for in the very place where they were instigated.  For every person who committed an atrocity in Jesus' name, someone must step in to help in Jesus' name; for every person who robbed, someone must bring a replacement; for everyone who cursed, someone must bless.

Amazing stuff, from the Buckaroo Banzai of the Jesus world.

Schweitzer noted, in a review of all of the histories, that the scholars who were creating these works tended to come up with exactly the Jesus they wanted to encounter.  That Jesus would share all of their insights, all of their theological predilections, and affirm everything they'd ever written or thought.

Meaning, the Jesus they created from "history" was exactly the Jesus they wanted to see.  It was a brutally revealing insight to late 19th century Christian scholarship, one that took the wind out of the sails of "Jesus histories" for serious historians of the faith.

Those books still sell, of course.  But they are not history.

Reza Aslan appears to have missed that memo.  Or rather, he wants us to imagine that it does not apply to him.  People do this, he says, in a single sentence.  But my history is the best real history.

For Aslan's aspirations, Schweitzer's challenge does apply, radiantly and self-evidently so.  How?

For that, another post.

Vampire Slayer: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

I've read two books over the last week.  Once I finished up Tolstoy's remarkable Anna Karenina, I inhaled my next book in two sessions.

It was a little bit of delicious nothing by Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the same guy who wrote the actually much-more-entertaining-than-the-movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  He does the historical twist mashup better than most souls I know.

The book was entitled Unholy Night, and I was drawn to it by the premise, which was as follows:  The wise men?  They're actually wise guys, three crooks on the lam.  They've stolen gold, frankincense, and myrrh from Herod, and are making their escape.  I mean, what a premise.  How could I resist?

It ended up not quite working, though.  It was well researched, steeped in the history of the region enough to give a sense of place.  And it was well written, punchy, sharp, and playful.  Grahame-Smith has a thoroughly enjoyable way with words.    But it was too jarring, as he tried to respectfully juxtapose the sacred narrative of Christianity with a hack'n'slash bit of brutal pulp action.  With a little magic thrown in for good measure.

If I wanted to see a Jesus-themed bloodbath, I could just stream the Passion of the Christ.

But it was readable, and a little fun, and almost infinitely less annoying than the other work of wild historical speculation that I'm heaving myself through this week.  Because after reading Unholy Night, I got into Reza Aslan's remarkably successful Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.  Number one on the New York Times Bestseller List, as it so proudly announces on the cover.

As a pastor, I've been asked now about a half-dozen times what I thought of it, and I've said: wait until I've read it.

Well, now I have.

God help me, but it's a terrible book so far.  Terrible.  The sort of book where I'm sitting there next to my wife in the evening while she clacks away on the laptop, and she says, "Honey, can you please stop muttering angrily to yourself.  It's distracting."

It's not badly written, mind you.  He's a smart guy, with a good way with words.  Nor does Reza have a weak grasp of Roman history.  But his "Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" is such a preposterous fabrication that--as a pastor who thoroughly embraces the historical-critical approach to my own sacred texts--it boggles my mind.

When Reza says that Jesus was a zealot, a peasant revolutionary bent on the violent overthrow of the powers that be, he's creating a Jesus out of whole cloth, one that has as much basis in history as the Abraham Lincoln who killed vampires as a sideline to his lawyering.

He presents us with a Jesus who is peculiarly unrelated to any of the narratives of his life and teachings. Not just the canonical gospels of Christianity, mind you. This Jesus looks like nothing at all like any witness of any ancient tradition I've ever encountered in 25 years of undergraduate and graduate study.

It's historical fiction, not history, the work of someone reimagining Jesus in a way that works with his particular worldview.   But what is that worldview?

For that, I'm going to have to blog a little further.