And we can’t trust Acts (composed 100 A.D.) because it hides the real conflict between James and Paul. We can’t trust Paul (50-60A.D.) because he invented the non-political message that he preached. We can’t trust the early gospel sources (composed 50-70A.D.), because they were also scrubbed of Jesus’ political zeal. by Aslan’s reckoning), because they were ‘scrubbed’ of Jesus’ political zeal. So his reasoning is: we can’t trust the later gospels (composed 90-100 A.D. Aslan explains this fact by creating an elaborate narrative in which Paul is a rogue apostle whose teaching is utterly opposed to that of Jesus or the other apostles. Yet these letters (written in 50-60 AD, well before the destruction of the temple) contain exactly the same non-violent, non-nationalistic, apolitical message that the gospels do. Second, the gospels are not our earliest Christian sources on the life of Jesus: Paul’s letters are. The difficulty here is that neither the earliest gospel sources we have (Mark and Q) nor the later ones (Matthew, Luke, and John) portray Jesus as a revolutionary zealot.
First, he believes that after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD, the authors of the gospels had to “transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifist preacher” and that “all traces of revolutionary zeal to be removed” (p. – Aslan’s central thesis suffers from major problems. After Jesus’ death, “something extraordinary happened,” he writes, but concludes that whatever happened is “outside the scope of history” (p. Aslan agrees that the disciples probably did have experiences of the resurrected Jesus.
– Provides a surprisingly honest, though brief, discussion of the resurrection of Jesus. I came away with a much deeper understanding of why Jesus eschewed the title of ‘Messiah/Christ’, freighted as it was with political connotations – Contains a lot of very interesting information on the religio-political climate of 1st century Judea. Reza Aslan’s central thesis in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is that Jesus was a revolutionary who predicted Rome’s sudden overthrow and a restoration of Jewish political sovereignty, like many other messianic figures of that period.
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