In his book “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” Reza Aslan follows this long tradition, settling on the hypothesis, also around for hundreds of years, that Jesus was a Jewish zealot, a rebel against Rome and the Romans’ local agents. For at least two centuries, scholars and popular writers have mined the Christian Gospels to “look behind” them, to create a portrait of Jesus, using purely modern methods: the historical Jesus as opposed to the Christ of faith.

People have constructed many different Jesuses.

You can deny that this claim is true, but it is scholarly folly to deny that Jesus and the early Christians believed it.Jesus the loving shepherd. There is a good reason to believe that Jesus claimed to be a divine king and savior who would die and rise again, and would one day return to judge the world: All four gospels, and indeed the entire New Testament, make this claim. Suffice to say this, as others have said before: there is something a little bizarre about using our only historical documents about Jesus (the New Testament) to come to conclusions quite in opposition to those documents. Aslan repeatedly presents highly unlikely interpretations of passages in the New Testament, makes little effort to defend those interpretations, then moves on as if he has made his case. There are numerous other problems with Zealot, too numerous to address in an already-too-long blog post.

In many cases, I had to come to the conclusion that Aslan was just not familiar enough with modern scholarship related to the New Testament. claims that Mark does not describe Jesus’ resurrection.claims that Luke was knowingly writing fiction, not history.claims that ancient people did not understand the concept of history.very late, unlikely dates for the writing of the four gospels.claims that Pilate crucified “thousands upon thousands” without trial.claims that violence against foreigners was the only faithful Jewish response.unawareness of literary approaches to the gospels.unawareness of the evidence for high literacy in ancient Israel.using the wrong Greek lexicon for the New Testament.use of Greek definitions not found in any standard Greek lexicon.Here are only a few examples of significant scholarly errors: I took pages of notes just on historical and linguistic errors in Zealot. The Good Book Company Blog also has a review by Gary Manning Jr., associate professor of New Testament at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology.įinally, despite his generally good understanding of the field, Aslan makes a number of significant errors. Ross Douthat has a good post on the book, and Mike Bird will be reviewing the book for TGC.

Zealot by reza aslan summary