Brandon in his general thesis as well as in many details, a borrowing that should have been better acknowledged. The most famous case for the thesis is the 1967 book by S. That Jesus was a Jewish peasant who attempted to foment a rebellion against the Romans and their Jewish clients has been suggested at least since the posthumous publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s “Fragments” (1774-78). Nor is it as outlandish as described by his detractors. Aslan’s thesis is not as startling, original or “entirely new” as the book’s publicity claims. Since only the Roman Senate could appoint kings within the Empire, claiming to be a king was treasonous and punishable by the worst kind of death: torture and crucifixion. The charge on the cross is historical: the Romans took Jesus as claiming to be the messianic king of the Jews.

The Romans crucified him as a rebel, a zealot and a pretender to the Judean throne. Provoked by that action and his other rantings against the Temple and its caretakers, the authorities arrested Jesus. Aslan writes, but also their representatives in Palestine: “the Temple priests, the wealthy Jewish aristocracy, the Herodian elite.” Jesus opposed not only the Roman overlords, Mr. He was loyal to the law of Moses as he interpreted it. Jesus never intended to found a church, much less a new religion. Like John, Jesus preached the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God, which would be an earthly, political state ruled by God or his anointed, a messiah. He was a disciple of John the Baptist until John’s arrest. Aslan, Jesus was born in Nazareth and grew up a poor laborer. Aslan’s thesis controversial, at least among scholars of early Christianity.Īccording to Mr. This should be no more controversial than a Christian scholar’s writing a book about Islam or Muhammad. Some conservatives seem offended by merely the idea that a Muslim scholar would write a book about Jesus. Aslan’s book has been greeted with unwarranted controversy.

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.

Zealot jesus of nazareth review