Perhaps, the greatest insight of this book is right at the
beginning. Reza Aslan refuses to accept
Jesus as Christ, something that is completely absurd, and looks deeper into
developing who Jesus was based on what we know, what we don’t know the great
supposition that Jesus is really only Jesus of Nazareth, and not some sort of
deity or Christ. That is Jesus is Jesus
of Nazareth and not Jesus Christ.
This book is full of wonderful insights to Jesus of
Nazareth. My major criticism of Zealot
in Part 1, chapters 1-6, is the overuse of names of ancient times, using them as
if they were commonly known among us modernists of this century, and discussing
these people, as if we might even find out who they where if we googled them.
Really, I don’t know of any other work where the information
in part 1 is available. I have never
come across much of any of it elsewhere, to gauge my opinion of it fairly. In fact, part 1 could have probably been made
into a book by itself, all the while elaborating more on the various characters
of the text, if there is anymore text available.
I come as a fairly knowledgeable person, reading this part
1, as a non-Christian, and even still it practically puts me on Mars. I am not used to these words. There were many capital letters to nouns, proper
nouns that I am unfamiliar with.
In Part 1, Reza paints a picture that is hard to verify even
without some grand library. It is a
picture that maybe someone like they highly decorated and great scholar Bart
Ehrman would readily recognize. However,
for me, not knowing who each of these seemingly unknown and new entrances to
the theological playing field at the time of Jesus is quite overwhelming. I won’t criticize Zealot so much as to say
that the reader probably won’t even get the crucial main ideas because of the
difficulty knowing enough to criticize what Aslan is writing about in Part 1.
Part 2 is information that I don’t know cold, but most of
which I am familiar with. Reza Aslan did
a really good job with this part of the book.
If there was any way to fix this book, it would be to be able to distill
part 1 and part 2 into a single part.
However, that much I don’t believe is possible due to missing information.
Even though this work comes almost 2,000 years after the
fact, I would say that it is as relevant to the teaching of Jesus as any work
in the New Testament. I almost see this
book as the nearly the Final Testament, as what more could be done in the study
of Jesus of Nazareth, such that we can put him in his proper place, as an intelligent
Zealot from the underclass looking to change the face of Judaism, as well as
gaining a following of poor Jewish folk who probably identified with Jesus of
Nazareth as a person from a tough background, such that his early followers
probably took because Jesus was born into impoverished circumstances and his
followers wanted his story to be the one that was told, instead of that of rich
priests.
Frankly, a part of me thinks that the reason Jesus despised
what was going on in the Temple so much is that he was jealous of the money
that was being made there, and would have accepted a priestly job if he were
given one early in his life; late in his life though this was impossible, as he
was a committed zealot messiah against the religious establishment; the Temple
priests were his enemy, and he hated them for their wealth because it seemed
that he was born into an unjust world.
Like part II, part III is also familiar, but I think it
doesn’t even do justice to the start of the Christian religion cult, which
really began under Constantine, with his vision, and the teaching of Jesus that
Jesus said he had not come to bring peace, but that he had come to bring a
sword. Constantine’s sword is the true
story of how Christianity began as a religion.
Christianity would have burned out like other cults without Constantine
and his ethnic cleansing for the sake of “Christ.”
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