Reza Aslan argues that Jesus Christ who ‘loved his enemies’ and advocated ‘the turning of the other cheek’ is a myth, writes Ashok Vohra
Zealot
Author: Reza Aslan
Publisher: Harper, Rs 499
Followers of all religions in their eagerness to find solace are not only keen to learn the theories, practices and preaching of their respective religion, but also have a yearning to know about the life and historicity of its founder-preacher. The difficulty in an authentic description of the life of the founder of any religion/religious sect is that religious texts and preachings contain almost next to nothing about the historico-biographical details of the founder.
The biographical details are to be culled from secondary sources — be they the writings of the contemporaries of the founder or his immediate followers or the historians and archaeologists. Many a time because of the adoration of the devotee, the biographical details become a mix of folklore, myth and the historic persona. The biographical account of the founder given by the committed follower, therefore, becomes an ‘internal quest’ — it imbibes the image of the founder as the devotee wants to see him. Such an account remains subjective in the sense that the description contains the devotee’s own perception and reflections. For an objective outsider it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between myth and reality.
As a result, it becomes almost impossible to know the factual details of the life of the founder of a religion. The more ancient and the more influential a religion is and the more adherents a religion has, the more mythical is the description that surrounds the real persona of the founder. Consequently, it becomes more difficult to make a distinction between fact and fiction.
Based on these difficulties, the scholars of religion are divided into two classes. The first category is of those who proclaim that archaeological and historical research with the help of modern scientific tools shall one day help us to know the objective biographical details of the founders of every religion. The second category is of those who argue that it is a waste of time to ponder over the historico-biographical details of the persona of the founders; instead, we should concentrate on their teachings.
Christianity is no exception. Reza Aslan — who in the present book sets out to “reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity” — belongs to the first category. In his endeavour to know the historical Jesus, Aslan is painfully aware that though the gospels narrate the infancy and, mostly mythical, biographical details of Jesus, they “are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God”. For the authors of the gospels the purpose of history was neither “a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past” nor “a matter of uncovering facts”. For them the writing of gospels was primarily an undertaking for “revealing truths”. Their purpose was promotion of Christology.
To get the biographical details of the historical Jesus — the tekton — an illiterate woodworker or a builder or an artisan and day labourer, Aslan in the first part of the book traces the history of Israel and Palestine from 37 BCE to about 30 CE. He has narrated the trials, tribulations and triumphs of the Jews as subjects of the Roman Empire. His narration of the Temple, the geographical details and the life of people of the inconsequential ancient hamlet Nazareth, in lower Galilee, is quite captivating. However, the reader is disappointed by the fact that very little is stated about the biographical details and events in the life of Jesus — ‘son of man’, the helpless poor child, and his growth from a simple migratory labour to ‘Jesus the Christ’, the saviour of humankind.
The year 30 CE marks the most significant event in Jesus’s life as it is in this year that Jesus — the Zealot — enters the Temple with his followers and sets about “cleansing” it of the commercial malpractices which had become an integral part of life of the Temple. Though Aslan regards this as the singular moment which clarifies Jesus’s “mission, his theology, his politics, his relationship to the Jewish authorities, his relationship to Judaism in general, and his attitude towards Roman occupation”, he as claimed in the earlier part of the book fails to support it with sources other than the gospels.
likewise, one agrees with Aslan that how the modern world views the miracles, the acts of ‘healing the sick and casting out demons’, and other ‘startling deeds’ performed by Jesus is completely irrelevant to understanding his life and times; what matters is how his contemporaries viewed these acts. Whereas the contemporaries of Jesus viewed the acts and deeds of the exorcists who abounded in the Palestine of his times, as magical acts, tricks and deeds; they viewed his miraculous acts as the acts of God. Jesus’s acts were perceived as spiritual acts and were seen as marking the beginning of God’s reign.
One of the main reasons for upholding this view was that Jesus, unlike his contemporaries, did not perform the miraculous acts with a motive to earn money or fame, but for purifying the sick in a manner that transformed them internally so that they would become eligible to enter the Temple. His teachings were radically different from others. He argued that the reign of God would be established not merely by purification or internal transformation of the individuals alone but by “a complete reversal of the present political, religious, and economic systems”.
Aslan is not only an iconoclast in upholding that Jesus’s view about “the sole sovereignty of God was not all that different from the views of the prophets, bandits, zealots and messiahs who came before and after him”, but he also upholds that historical Jesus did not advocate non-violence. He argues that Jesus Christ who ‘loved his enemies’ and advocated ‘the turning of the other cheek’ is a myth. The historical Jesus, according to him, “had a far more complex attitude towards violence”. He was far from being a pacifist as has been made out to be. In support, he quotes Jesus’s instruction to his disciples immediately after the Password meal, “If you do not have a sword go sell your clock and buy one.” Aslan also considers the resurrection of Jesus, his rising from the dead “purely a matter of faith”.
For his arguments even about the historical Jesus, ‘the son of man’ Aslan though claiming to the contrary, has to rely more on the gospels than other new historical facts discovered by the modern archaeologists and historians. The book is a must read for the scholars interested in the growth and development of Christology, particularly in the study of the New Testament.
The reviewer is Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi