Mormon Midrashim
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Reza Aslan's "Zealot" and "The Five Books of Jesus"
James Goldberg
This is not your typical Jesus and lamb painting. In this world, the
shepherd boys travel armed and shoot first if you get too close. In this
world,
people who want to live watch their tongues.
Both Aslan and I agree on these essentials of the regional background.
Jesus lived in the sort of times that produce the men who become legendary
freedom fighters or hated terrorists (largely depending on whether they win or
lose). Jesus walked down roads where dirt regularly mixed with blood.
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Zealot Point #2: We can know the historical Jesus by considering what
would have been typical in his world.
Starting from this setting, Reza Aslan borrows an old distinction between
Jesus of Nazareth (the historical figure) and Jesus the Christ (the
religious figure). Like German researchers in the 19th century, he wants to
strip
the Christ of faith from the gospels to find Jesus the man. And he
believes that studying typical Jewish life in Jesus' time and place will help
him
know who Jesus really was.
I'm not sure I buy that basic assumption. For one thing, Aslan may be
overestimating how much we can say about Jesus' time and place--one review
points out he uses a _source from the 180s CE as if it were contemporary with
Jesus._
(http://historicaljesusresearch.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-review-of-reza-aslans-zealot.html)
For all the Roman documents and archeological digs
that have been done, our sense of everyday life way back then isn't all that
precise.
More importantly, though, I'm not convinced that studying a cultural
pattern can really help us pinpoint an individual person. Would we reject
1890s
Mormon sources on Joseph Smith whenever they don't match the broad patterns
of a Second Great Awakening preacher or visionary? I hope not. Because
we'd end up with a view of Joseph Smith that does nothing to explain
Mormonism's difference from other movements. And yet Aslan seems prepared to
throw
out any parts of the gospels that suggest Jesus was different than any other
murdered Messianic revolutionary in his century. He tries to project that
broad pattern onto the individual person.
Aslan looks primarily for a Jesus who was a typical Jewish revolutionary
of the era (with missing archetype DNA borrowed from revolutionaries of
subsequent eras),
In the end, the difference may be in which part of Jesus we think is
missing. Both Aslan and I want to look beyond the Christ of contemporary
faith--but I think the Jesus Christ of the gospels is even more surprising and
unexpected than any historical image of Jesus a scholar can construct.
Zealot Point #3: Pilate was a jerk. And the gospels soft-pedal that.
Speaking about endless pages of footnotes and the Romans' penchant for
record-keeping might give the false impression that we can look up detailed
information on Pilate in an old government file. So far as I know, what we
know about Pilate outside the gospels is that the Roman-employed Jewish
historian Josephus and the Hellenized Jewish philosopher Philo didn't care for
him. Both cited his cruelty and incompetence in explanations of later
Jewish revolutionary violence.
In other words, there's tension between the softer Pilate of the gospel
accounts and the brutal, arrogant Pilate of Jewish accounts. Both have
ulterior motives: the Jewish historians are looking for low-ranking fall guys
to
blame the Jewish revolt on so authorities won't blame the entire Jewish
community. The gospels are trying to communicate a radical message about God's
order without getting mistaken for run-of-the-mill revolutionary
propaganda.
Whose version of Pilate do you believe?
Both Aslan and I opt for the "Pilate was a jerk" view of classical Jewish
writers. Aslan does so not because it's proven, but because it sounds more
natural in a volatile province to punish first and ask questions later than
to agonize over a fairly routine execution.
Zealot Point #4: The gospels feature a thoroughly Romanized faith at odds
with Jesus' Jewish teachings.
Aslan seems to believe that the likely soft-pedaling on Pilate is evidence
of a larger pattern: that the gospels were written for assimilated Roman
citizens largely at peace with the Empire.
As someone who has studied the allusions and rhetorical strategies of the
gospels, it's hard for me to agree. If the gospels were written to serve
happily assimilated Romans, they did a pretty bad job.
The gospels, especially the synoptic gospels, rely on readers' knowledge
of Jewish prophecy and precedent to deliver their core messages. They
constantly allude to the Hebrew Bible's motif of the kingdom of God ultimately
smashing the kingdoms of the earth to pieces. They leave out the cosmopolitan
cities of Galilee--places like Sepphoris and Tiberias--which would have
been the perfect locations for pro-Roman scenes, and focus on traditional
Jewish farming and fishing villages instead.
If they were so focused on helping Gentiles and assimilated Jews feel good
about themselves and the Empire, why did they leave so much kingdom
theology in their accounts?
The Christian community that developed after Jesus certainly differed from
the Kingdom of God movement he developed in his lifetime, but I think
scholars like Aslan underestimate the overlap between the two. Paul's thought
is apocalyptic just as surely as Jesus' is--and for all his outreach to
Gentiles, it matters a great deal to him to see converts as transformed into
descendants of Abraham. The gospel writers still seem to be waiting for a day
when the apostles rule over a restored House of Israel. And the gospels'
view of Atonement owes far more to Yom Kippur imagery and psalms in their
narratives of Jesus' death than they do to pagan views of the relationship
between men and the gods.
What a modern scholar or reader needs to understand that, though, is not
just historical research into the political and economic conditions of Jesus'
time. It's textual research into how the story-world of the gospels built
on the story-world Jesus came from.
--
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