Comment

Zealot

the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Feb 02, 2018dnk rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Once again, I'm kicking myself for waiting two years to read something. While this book explores Jesus the person, not Jesus Christ, the messiah, it isn't simply about the man's life. Aslan describes the context that Jesus' movement rose up in: thanks to the Maccabees, Israel had enjoyed about a century of independence after Hellenistic rulers before infighting and ineptitude at the top created an opening for the Romans to jump into. As vicious as some of their administrators were- even Augustus expressed a little horror at Herod's excesses- the banal corruption exhibited by the priest class wasn't much better (and, in fact, it was pretty much a requirement that the priests work hand-in-hand with the governors). It doesn't take much imagination to realize that after centuries of war, infighting and constant political turmoil Israel was a place of Haves and Have Nots. It was the Have Nots that Jesus and the other prophets of his generation were speaking to; in other words, Jesus' message was a predominantly political one. When he called himself The Son of Man, he was making reference to an old code for King, and when he talked about the coming of The Kingdom of Heaven, he was referring to the "kingdom" that would be born of an actual revolution in which, literally, the meek would inherit the earth. Jesus wasn't the only promised messiah of his time, and his execution at the hands of the Romans (and it was the Romans, no matter how hard Paul tried to twist it later) excluded him from the title. This is why the story of the resurrection was necessary in order to keep Jesus alive (as it were). As with Jesus miracle working, I imagined Aslan stepping back from his keyboard with his hands up. As he notes, there is no historical or factual explanation for resurrection, and can't be argued along those lines. The issue is not whether it happened, but that all of his adherents came to insist that it did. This allowed Jesus the man to begin the evolution into Jesus the deity, and without this Christianity would not have taken hold. The throughline for Aslan is that Jesus was first and foremost a radical, rabble-rousing Jew who had specific, worldly ambitions for his fellow Jewish brethren. He also notes that Jesus was probably illiterate, as was a staggering 95%+ of the population at that time. That might explain some liberties his gospels take with the source material, although it's not clear what kind of education he might have learned from the man who would later be known as John the Baptist. As he notes, it's a tragedy that Jesus the revolutionary isn't as well studied as Jesus the messiah. Recommended for anyone interested in the history of religion