A look at Jesus not as divine but as a historical man. Excerpted from “Zealot,” July 23, 2013.

REZA ASLAN, Author, Zealot, No God But God and How to Win a Cosmic War; Editor, Tablet and Pen

 

When I was 15 years old I heard the gospel message for the first time. It was at an evangelical youth camp that I went to one summer before my sophomore year. This message that 2,000 years ago the God of the heavens and the Earth came down to Earth in the form of a baby and grew up to be this man who sacrificed himself for the sins of humanity and that those who believe in him can share in his eternal life was unlike anything that I had ever heard in my life.

I’d grown up a marginal Muslim from a family of exuberant atheists and lukewarm Muslims, and really when my family left Iran and came to the United States we more or less abandoned the religion of our homeland. I didn’t really grow up with any kind of religious instruction, but I yearned for a spiritual connection. This was the first time that I had been offered a path toward feeling as though I had some sense of communion with a God that I desperately wanted to know.

I spent the next few years traveling around preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ as I had learned it from my evangelical church. When I went to college I began to pursue the academic scholarship of New Testament studies. It was then that I noticed this widening chasm between the Jesus of history, as I was studying him – this man who lived 2,000 years ago in the land that the Romans called Palestine – and the Christ of faith that I had learned about in church.

That figure was a kind of detached celestial spirit with no interest in the things of this world. The Jesus of history, however, lived in the most tumultuous era in the holy land, which is saying a lot if you think about it. [He] took on the greatest empire the world had ever known, on behalf of the weak, the poor, the marginalized, the dispossessed, the outcasts, and as a result of the movement that he launched, [he] was seized by Rome as a criminal of the state, tortured and executed, and he ultimately founded the largest religion in the history of the world. In a sense that person, that man beyond the interpretation of him as God made flesh which I had been taught about in church, became so much more real to me, so much more relatable than the Christ.

In a sense I stopped being a Christian, in that I no longer believed that Jesus was God, and became instead a follower of Jesus of Nazareth; the values that he preached, the teachings that he espoused, the model of behavior that he set forth became the model that I based my life around. Ironically speaking I often say that I feel as though I’m a far more devoted follower of Jesus the man than I ever was, as a Christian, of Jesus the Christ.

What I wanted to do with this book was to, in a sense, share the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, this man, with the same fervor that I used to share the gospel of Jesus the Christ as God. My hope with the book is to, essentially, show people that you can be a follower of Jesus without being a Christian. I do want to say something from the very beginning: This book is by no means an attack on Christianity. On the contrary, my mother is a Christian, my wife is a Christian, my brother-in-law is an evangelical pastor. I have no interest in attacking anyone’s beliefs or ideas about Jesus.

I understand that there are billions of people in the world who believe that Jesus is God incarnate, God made flesh, and I have no problem with that belief. But the foundation of orthodox Christianity is that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. Whatever else Jesus was, whether he was God, whether he was the messiah or whatever, he was also a human being. He lived in a specific time. His teachings, therefore, must be placed within the context of the world in which he lived. His words have to be understood as addressing the social ills that he confronted. His actions must be seen as a response to the political and religious leaders and forces that he confronted. Whatever else Jesus was, he was a product of the world in which he lived. Whether you think of Jesus as God or you think of him as a man, if you truly want to know who this individual was, you have to know the world that gave rise to him. That’s what this book is about.

 

Question and answer session with Michael G. Maudlin, senior vice president and executive editor, HarperOne

 

MICHAEL MAUDLIN: I was fascinated by your treatment of what Jesus meant by calling himself “the son of man.” Can you explain that a little bit?

ASLAN: Wow, you just want to jump right into it. This is probably the most complex issue for biblical scholars to deal with, the phrase “son of man.” We don’t know exactly what this phrase meant. What we do know is that it was the primary term, the primary title that Jesus used to refer to himself. There were a number of titles, obviously, that were around in Jesus’ time and were ascribed to him; “messiah” is one of those titles. Some scholars would say that Jesus never declared himself to be the messiah, at least not in the way that we think of.

The “son of God” is another title that was used with Jesus a lot. I think it’s important to understand that “son of God” in Jesus’ time was not a description, it was a title. Many, many people are called “son of God” in the Bible, none more often than King David, the greatest king. “Son of God” only much later on became understood as some sort of description of Jesus’ filial relationship to God, but it was never intended as such in Jesus’ time. Again, many scholars question whether Jesus would have ever called himself the son of God.

There is almost unanimous consensus among scholars that Jesus called himself “son of man,” but no one knows what this phrase actually meant. In the Hebrew Bible “the son of man” is used as synonymous with just man. It’s a term that in Hebrew and in Aramaic can just mean human being. If you say, “I am a son of man,” what you mean is I’m just a human being. I don’t think that’s how Jesus used it. He was using it not as a description or an idiom, he was using it as a distinct title. He was fashioning it in a wholey new way that would have been quite remarkable to his Jewish audience.

What I think most scholars agree upon is that Jesus’ use of the phrase “son of man” comes from its use by the prophet Daniel. Daniel talks about this vision that he has, this grand apocalyptic vision where in the midst of it he sees “one like the son of man” coming with the clouds from heaven. My argument in the book is that while the later rabbis of the first and second and third centuries understood Daniel’s vision of the son of man to describe a messianic figure, what is absolutely clear in Daniel is that he is describing a kingly figure. The son of man that Daniel talks about is given rule over all the Earth, over all the kingdoms of the Earth. He is literally called king.

I use that argument amongst a lot of other arguments, to try to fashion how Jesus may have thought of himself. This is the million-dollar question. We know how his followers viewed him; we know how his enemies viewed him. It’s almost impossible to figure out how Jesus viewed himself. I think that there’s a clue in the term that he used to describe himself, because he was describing himself in kingly terms. He was ascribing a title to him that was given, at least in his interpretation, to kings.

MAUDLIN: I was also fascinated by the fact that him being crucified tells us a lot about what Jesus was intending. Can you go into that a little bit?

ASLAN: It actually has to do with the son of man.

MAUDLIN: I think it’s hard for us to get back there, because after 2,000 years of tradition we stop seeing it with fresh eyes. It’s through our religious eyes.

ASLAN: Which is exactly the purpose of this book, to get past that tradition and to get to the Jesus who lived in this very specific time. What you have to understand about crucifixion is that it was a punishment that Rome reserved exclusively for crimes against the state, crimes like sedition or insurrection or rebellion. In fact, crucifixion wasn’t exactly a capital punishment. It was often the case that Rome would kill you first and then crucify you.

The purpose of crucifixion was to serve as a deterrent against subject peoples revolting against the state, which is why crucifixions were always done in public, in marketplaces, on hills, at crossroads; somewhere where it would be impossible not to see these criminals hanging on the cross. What I’m arguing is that if you know nothing else about Jesus except that he was crucified, you know enough to understand who this person was because the only reason that you would be crucified under Roman imperium is if you were an insurrectionist, if you were a rebel. 

Which means that everything that we know about Jesus, every word that he said, every action that he conducted has to be seen in light of this one incontrovertible fact. Jesus of Nazareth was arrested, tortured and executed as a state criminal for the crime of sedition.

MAUDLIN: By the title Zealot you want to emphasize Jesus’ political ambitions as a revolutionary and perhaps kingly ambitions, but it doesn’t come out of the blue. You do a wonderful job in part one of the book of setting the context of why people were open to revolutionary thought. Can you set the scene of where Jesus came out of and why the idea that a political and religious frame of a political movement made sense at that time?

ASLAN: First of all, let’s remember that this is an era in which there is no division between religion and politics. They are one and the same. I think a lot of times people think, Oh, you’re thinking of Jesus as a political figure. There is no difference between a religious and a political figure in first-century Palestine.

But you’re right; this was an era that was awash in apocalyptic expectation. First century Palestine was a time in which there was a brutal military occupation by Rome of the Holy Land. This concept of zealotry was a widespread biblical principle that many, many Jews adhered to. Most Jews in Jesus’ time would have proudly referred to themselves as zealous for the Lord.

Zealotry meant walking in the footsteps of the great heroes and prophets and kings of the Hebrew Bible who were all described as zealous for the Lord. Zeal meant something very specific in Jesus’ time. It meant an uncompromising devotion to the Torah, a refusal to serve any human master at all,  building your entire life on the principle of the sole sovereignty of God and a devotion to cleansing the land that God set aside for his chosen people of all its heathen and pagan influences, in particular of the Roman abomination that controlled this land.

Again, the majority of Jews in Jesus’ time would have proudly called themselves zealots, but there were some Jews that took zealotry to its extremes and used it as a means of taking up arms against the Roman occupation. We have the names of a lot of these Jews. A lot of them referred to themselves as messiahs in their actions against Rome.

The argument that I’m making in the book is that that conception of zealotry was a sentiment that Jesus himself shared. Though he himself, insofar as the evidence that we have [shows], never espoused violence against Rome, never had his followers take up arms against Rome as though they were in the midst of a battle, though his views on violence were far more complex than I think a lot of modern Christians think, he was by no means a simple pacifist. Nevertheless, the core ideal of zealotry, a firm commitment to the sole sovereignty of God and a devotion to removing the yoke of occupation from the neck of the Jews, is deeply embedded in Jesus’ teachings and actions.

MAUDLIN: I don’t want to give you the impression that all I have to say is how great the book is, because I do have one –

ASLAN: Go ahead.

MAUDLIN: I wanted more about Jesus. Part two deals with some aspects of him, but you talk about him being a political figure and what his ambitions were to accomplish, what his punishment meant. As you show, there were a lot of revolutionary movements at the time – messiahs, revolutionary figures – but they all kind of disappear afterwards. Jesus obviously did not and had a number of followers that were motivated for whatever reason, however you’re going to explain it, to continue and turn into the world’s biggest religion. I wish you would have spent a little more time on the teachings and the parables and what was compelling about Jesus. Why was he different than all those other figures at the time?

ASLAN: First and foremost the problem with talking about the historical Jesus is that outside of the New Testament there is almost no trace of this person. The New Testament is certainly a helpful document, but it’s not a historical document. The gospels, we have to understand, were not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ actions. They are testimonies of faith written by communities of faith who already believed that Jesus was God incarnate and then based on that belief began to write about him.

It means that there is a kernel of history that can be extracted from the gospels, but the gospels themselves are not very helpful as histories in and of themselves.

MAUDLIN: There is a question [from the audience]. How do we know that Jesus even existed?

ASLAN: Outside of the Bible we do have this one throwaway line written by a Jewish historian by the name Flavius Josephus in a book called The Antiquities that he wrote in the year 94 C.E. In this book he is describing what happens after a Roman governor by the name of Festus all of a sudden dies.

There is a vacuum of power in Jerusalem while the Jews wait for the new Roman governor to arrive. In the midst of this vacuum of power Josephus describes this fiendish, young high priest named Aninis who decides that he is going to take advantage of a lack of Roman presence to take revenge on his enemies. He begins to sentence these enemies of his to death. One of those enemies is a man named James. The way that Josephus refers to James is James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah. That’s it. By the way, the phrase “the one they call messiah” is obviously meant as a statement of derision. It’s a dismissive way the way that Josephus says it.

The fact that in 94 C.E., about 60 years after Jesus died, this historian writing to a Roman audience, not talking about Jesus but talking about Jesus’ brother James, believes that Jesus is so well known that he will use Jesus as a way to get people to understand which James he’s talking about is enormously significant. It proves without a doubt that Jesus existed but more important that by the year 94 C.E. the movement that he had founded had become itself so permanent and so significant that Josephus assumes his audience is aware of it.

MAUDLIN: You said at the beginning that you could be a follower of Jesus without being a Christian. I don’t think what you mean is that you’re willing to take up arms against the current empire and foment revolution. What do you follow?

ASLAN: Christians believe that Jesus went to the cross for the sins of humanity, which again is a perfectly valid viewpoint. What we know about the historical Jesus is that he went to the cross on behalf of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed; that he lived at time in which there was this massive divide between the absurdly rich – those that had managed to connect their fates with the Roman Empire – and the absurdly poor, Jesus’ followers, his friends and neighbors, he himself.

The fact that this man took on not just the Roman empire, but the priestly aristocracy, who, in his teachings about the Kingdom of God and what his parables about those teachings mean, and the world that he envisioned when talking about the Kingdom of God, a world in which the poor and the weak and the dispossessed trade places with the rich and the powerful. That “trade places” is very important. The great words of the beatitudes, that the meek shall inherit the earth and the hungry shall be fed, people always forget the rest of the beatitudes which is the woes; that the well-fed shall be hungry, the powerful will be made weak, the rich will be made poor. Jesus is not talking about some utopian fantasy. He is talking about a reversal of the social order where the rich become poor and the poor become rich. That was a profoundly appealing notion to the Jews of Palestine. At the same time it was an incredibly dangerous threat to the powers that be.

MAUDLIN: As you’re looking through the gospel and the New Testament text and figuring out which comes from the historical Jesus and which was added on to, how do you not descend into pick-and-choose-what-you-like?

ASLAN: This is a very important question. It’s one that scholars have tackled for a long time. The paradigm for a historical analysis of the gospels was set way back in the 19th century, all the way back with Albert Sweitzer’s quest for the historical Jesus and all these great scholars that have put forth a sort of historical analysis of the New Testament.

There are a number of steps. The first is the most important step. We may not know a lot about Jesus but we know almost everything about the world in which he lived, thanks to the Romans, who happen to be very good at documentation. We know how much a bushel of wheat cost during Jesus’ time. First-century Palestine is an era that was very well recorded and chronicled. What we do then is take the claims of the gospels and put them in the light of the history that we know about the world in which Jesus lived. If those claims seem wanting then we count them as very likely unhistorical.

I’ll give you an example of that. For instance, the great trial before Pilate. [This is] a quintessential moment in The Passion narrative when Jesus stands before Pilate, and the Roman governor tries everything that he can in his power to release this Jew that he is convinced is innocent, but he is just forced, compelled by the Jews to put this man to death. In the end Jesus himself finally absolves Pilate of the guilt and the Jews instead put the guilt upon their heads.

With all due respect, this is the most absurd story that you could ever imagine. We know who Pontius Pilate was. He was a cruel, hard, bloodthirsty, brutal governor who on a regular basis sent his troops on the streets of Jerusalem to slaughter the Jews when they disagreed with even the slightest of his decisions. The idea that yet another Jewish rabble rouser would even have an audience with Pilate, let alone have Pilate spend a moment of his time thinking about his fate, is difficult to reconcile with the history that we know of.

There are other tricks that we use. If a story exists in all four gospels it’s more likely true. If a story is embarrassing to the Christians – for instance, in all four gospels the primary witnesses to the empty tomb are women, that’s embarrassing for the gospels to say. We think Jesus’ ethno-nationalism, this constant refrain of Jesus that he was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel, the only people that he cares about, that [would have been] an embarrassing thing for the early church that was trying to promulgate this movement to non-Jews, to have Jesus say; it’s probably historical.