Zealot

When I committed myself to speaking about Reza Aslan's controversial book 'Zealot - the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth' at the 6:00pm service last night I was not aware that it was going to be a 38 degree day. Because I, therefore, tried to keep things as brief as possible so that people didn't have to suffer for too long, I undertook to publish what I had to say on this blog so that if anyone was interested they could read it for themselves. I have included some of the references for anyone who wishes to follow them up. I would be very happy to enter into correspondence.

"A couple of years ago I found the autobiography of James Frey on the Biography shelf of the Library. It’s called ‘A Million Little Pieces’. It is a great story and I read it voraciously over a few days. I was within 40 pages of the end when I had a conversation about it with our son. He said “’A Million Little Pieces ‘, that has been outed as a con. The author’s friends revealed that it is entirely a work of fiction”. Needless to say, the last 40 pages were very heavy going after that. It would have been a very good read if only the author had not tried to pass it off as autobiography.

‘Zealot – the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth”’ is not a con in the same sense as ‘A Million Little Pieces’. At least, I don’t think it is. From my reading of it, it is a serious attempt to understand who Jesus was and what happened among the movement of his followers after his crucifixion and resurrection. But then again, I am easily taken in! I looked for the book on the recommendation of one of my grumpy old friends. He claims now that he hadn’t read the book but only the reviews and listened to some of the interviews with Reza Aslan, the author. It wasn’t at St Mark’s Library but I found it at the Canberra Public Library. I was number 21 on the reserve list so I had to cool my heels for 5 months before it came my way. In the meantime I read the Guardian Review which basically said don’t waste your time. Read ‘Christian Beginnings’ by Geza Vermes. Vermes was the great Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, and this was his last book before his death in 2013.    

So what I want to do in this short time is to deal with three issues that come to mind when reading Zealot. Each of these issues will help us to unpack the controversy that has surrounded the book since its publication in 2013. The three issues are – What is a person with a PhD in Sociology of Religion doing publishing on early church history? Secondly, why is a book about the early church a number one best seller on the New York Times list? Thirdly, what is the explanation for the rise of Jesus of Nazareth, a peasant reformer from the Galilee region to be recognized as the long expected Christ and the founder of the most prominent worldwide religions? Clearly, there is not sufficient time to deal with these issues in depth so I recommend is that you get hold of the book and make up your own mind on what it has to say.

What is a person with a PhD in Sociology of Religion doing writing on early church history? Aslan claims that he is equally qualified in Early Church History which places him in an appropriate place to be writing on the subject. It is true that understanding the social forces that were at work in the early church are important for understanding why it is that the community of the church acts the way that it does today.  Aslan claims that in understanding who Jesus of Nazareth was, the early church was presented with two quite different options. On the one hand the church could understand the nature of Jesus’ ministry as being that of a gifted miracle worker – one of many who plied their trade in first century Palestine. On the other hand Jesus could be seen as a radical political revolutionary who was seeking to overthrow the repressive Roman regime that was so despised among the common people. Aslan suggests that as the early Christian Church reached out into the Roman Empire, eventually becoming the official religion of the state, the role of Jesus as a political revolutionary was diminished and the role of Pontius Pilate in the brutal execution of Jesus for his revolutionary actions, downplayed to make the Church acceptable in the Roman world. As a result, the image of Jesus as a gifted healer and exorcist gained ascendency and has coloured the church’s thinking about who Jesus was ever since.

Of course, such an understanding of Jesus’ ministry is simplistic. Jesus’ ministry was about bringing the Kingdom of God into being. In my opinion the Kingdom of God does not come into being through signs and wonders nor does it come into being through earthly political revolution. The Kingdom of God is an ever present reality in the lives and hearts of those who follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, those who take up their cross daily, regardless of the consequences.

Why is it that a book about the life of Jesus and the history of the early church should reach number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and also number 1 on the Amazon best seller list? Clearly ‘Zealot’ is popular! It is very well written and hard to put down. Aslan has confined theological arguments and references to 70 pages at the end of the book which means that the book can be read as a continuous narrative rather than interrupting the flow of the work with the need to follow up numerous references. Of course, this does make it difficult to test the strength of his hypotheses. The references are strong, including some of the world’s leading progressive New Testament scholars. They include our own Professor John Painter, a world authority on James the Just, the brother of Jesus. None of this explains why it is so popular. It was already at Number 4 on the best seller lists before the infamous ‘most embarrassing television interview ever’ as the reviewers call it. In an interview on Fox News, Aslan is forced to defend the right of a Muslim to write about Jesus and to defend his qualifications. It is not a pretty interview. Immediately after the interview the popularity of the book rose significantly, which only goes to show that any publicity is good publicity. Personally, I don’t care who writes about Jesus of Nazareth, so long as they get it right. One thing that the popularity of the book demonstrates is that while interest in the church is declining worldwide, the interest of ordinary people in who Jesus was has not declined at all. The book does raise a whole raft of issues that are important for us all to grapple with. If, from this debate we achieve a better understanding of who Jesus was and the nature of the church, the debate that the book generates will be worthwhile. How much ‘Zealot’ itself contributes to the debate is an open question.

Finally, how was it that Jesus of Nazareth came to be Jesus the Christ of the early church and Christ the King who we worship and celebrate today? Jesus was, after all, a radical peasant leader of a small band of followers from an outer region of a small country on the outer edge of the Roman Empire. In terms of the political reality of his time, he was a nobody, an outcaste. How could such a person, after his death, be transformed by the ever expanding community of his followers to the messianic figure of the early church, the Christ, the long expected one? Aslan claims that it was all down to Saint Paul and the tragic conflict between him and the Jerusalem Church under the leadership of James the Just.

He claims that Paul had no contact whatever with Jesus during Jesus earthly ministry but that Paul’s ministry was solely informed by the Damascus Road revelation. Personally, the more that I have studied and thought about this issue over the years, the less I am convinced that this is true. He further claims that after his conversion Paul had no contact at all with the Jerusalem Church for 3 years but rather set off on his own ministry among the Jewish Community of the diaspora and inevitably among the Gentile believers of those communities. In the meantime the Jerusalem Church under James’ leadership continued to participate in the worship and life of the Temple and to all intents and purposes continued as a sect of the temple cult. Aslan suggests that the conflict between James and Paul was strong. It was about the fundamentals of the faith, whether salvation was restricted to the Jews and whether converts had to comply with the law in all respects. Paul and James were both martyred in the mid 50’s of the first century. After that, the Jerusalem Church continued to operate within the confines of the Temple following the precepts of the Mosaic Law, in isolation, he suggests, from much of the missionary work which was occurring throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. The Jerusalem Church was obliterated along with everything else in Jerusalem in the Roman siege and invasion of 73 CE. With the end of the Jerusalem Church the only guidance available to the young Christian communities were the Epistles of Paul with their particular Greco-Roman Philosophical bent. It was Paul who turned Jesus of Nazareth into Jesus the Christ and that, he claims, is the reason that we worship him as Christ the King today.

There are many flaws in Aslan’s thesis. Firstly, his thoughts are not original and as the reviews point out, he barely acknowledges his source. In my opinion he places much too great an emphasis on the writings of Luke and particularly on the Acts of the Apostles. He seems unaware of the seminal work of Gunther Bornkamm, the great New Testament scholar who, in his 1969 work ‘Paul’ states that Acts is unreliable as an historic record of the work, life and ministry of Paul. His claim that the Gospel of Luke is the only Gospel written by the person who bears the name of the Gospel is speculation and his dating of all of the Gospels is much later than any dating I have previously come across. The critics also note that Aslan’s theory about how the early church reached the conclusion that Jesus was the messiah is one of a number and should not be given greater weight than any other.

For me the biggest challenge of this work is that he throws up again the question of the influence of Paul in the development of Christian thinking throughout history. I believe that in our Christian journey we follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, not in the footsteps of St Paul, though, of course, Paul’s writings have had a huge influence in the life of the church throughout the centuries. Our experience shows that when we follow in the footsteps of Jesus the Kingdom of God is present among us, bringing new life to all."

References:

‘Zealot – the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth’, Reza Aslan, The Westbourne Press. 2013.

 ‘Christian Beginnings – From Nazareth to Galilee’ Geza Vermes, The Penguin Book Ltd, London 2013.

‘Paul’ Gunther Bornkamm, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1971.

‘The Guardian’, ‘New York Times’ and ‘Washington Post’ reviews of ‘Zealot’ are assessable on line as are numerous interviews with Reza Aslan.

 

Blog, Sermon or Both

I am not sure whether a sermon counts as a blog but here goes. This is from 26 October 2014.

Last Saturday, the Feast of St Luke, Evangelist and Martyr was a significant event for me for three reasons.

The first was that it was the occasion for the St John’s Parish Fair. This is always a joyous event for me. It is one of those occasions when I can just wander around among people, communicating with members of our parish community as well as people who I have not met before from the wider community. There is no particular reason for me to be there. I don’t have anything to sell. I just enjoy being with the people who are there for a couple of hours. In clergy circles we call it ‘loitering with intent’ and it is one of the greatest privileges that we have. I would say that some of the most important conversations that I have had over the past 8 years have occurred at the Fair and this year was no different.

The second reason for the significance of the day was that it was 25 years since I learnt that I was to be ordained deacon at the ordination that year. The interesting thing is that I was informed that I was to be ordained by Bishop Owen standing under the Lychgate here at St John’s.  It was at the conclusion of the funeral of my good friend and mentor John McKellar. John was one of the last of a group of men who were ordained by Bishop Burgmann as deacons in the workplace. Most of them were later ordained priests and many went on to serve as full-time parish clergy. John was the exception. He served as a deacon and priest in this parish, St Paul’s Manuka and St Alban’s Lyons while maintaining his career in science with the CSIRO. I had felt for many years that I was called to a similar ministry in the workplace and had learned much about the pressures and great rewards of such a ministry. Bishop Owen’s challenge to me that day was to take up the baton that John had laid down.

The third reason for the significance of St Luke’s day last Saturday was that it was the culmination of 18 month’s planning by my friend Jim and a small committee of our colleagues to bring about an amazing reunion of the 1964 class of Coffs Harbour High School. That’s right, I know I don’t look that old but it is 50 years since my school friends and I did the NSW Leaving Certificate. I had heard about the planned reunion in the middle of last year and embraced the concept with enthusiasm. I thought it was a great idea to have the opportunity to catch up with people most of whom I had not seen for nearly 50 years. We were really the first big batch of baby boomers to hit the school so there was a very large number of us in the first 3 years of High School. Even in our final year there were nearly 70 of us, a previously unheard of number.

So we planned our year so that I could be there. It was one of those events where my ability to talk the leg off an iron pot comes to the fore so I would have been in my element. Unfortunately, there was no way to take into account the vicissitudes of life or that it would take well over 3 months for me to recover from a bout of whooping cough. So in the end I had to pull out.

The great thing was that even though I was not there I still felt very much included as I was asked to contribute in a number of ways. One was to make a short video with a message that could be played at the dinner. This proved much more difficult than I had ever imagined. It is not easy talking to a camera which refuses to respond no matter what. I said to my friend who had asked for it that preaching to a congregation of a couple of hundred was a piece of cake by comparison. Eventually, since no one else had managed to send a DVD we decided to cut our losses and not worry about it, but by that stage I had resorted to writing a brief script. So in the end I sent him the script which was read instead.

I talked about the enduring nature of the friendships that we made back then in which conversations could be taken up again as if it was yesterday. This was true even though in many cases we had not been in touch for 50 years. I went on to say, “We are a special community that has been around for the past fifty years and more – mostly unnoticed. It has taken the efforts of a few people to bring it to life. We all need this community to be vibrant – to be a visible sign of our care and support for each other.”

It is amazing where, and how easily, community pops up in our world today. In a place I visit, I am able to walk to church on Sundays. I walk past a particular café and there, Sunday by Sunday, are groups of people, sitting at tables together enjoying breakfast and each other’s company. Are these groups of people ‘community’? It is impossible to tell. But there is certainly a vibrancy about the interaction between the individuals which makes me realize that there is something positive going on here. Of course, communities like this and the community of the 1964 leavers from Coffs Harbour High School are of their nature closed communities. They incorporate a particular limited group of people who qualify for membership in a particular way. The community of the church is entirely the opposite. We are an open community that welcomes everyone.

We in the church pride ourselves on our ability to do community. We proclaim week by week that we are the community of the Body of Christ. And we mostly do incredibly well putting our community ideology into practice. This is never an easy task and it is one that we struggle with at times. For example, I often ask myself how effective we are at reaching the ideal , an open community where all people feel welcomed and at home no matter what their circumstances; how readily do we accept the stranger and those who are different from us? It is not at all surprising that we feel comfortable with a stable community. We know where we stand in a stable community and living in a community which is completely open can be exhausting. Being open to new and different people means constantly readjusting our lives as the people of God to incorporate others.

And it is this issue which was central to the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees which reaches its climax in the Gospel today. For the Pharisees, the thing that determined whether you were part of the Jewish community was whether you lived according the law. And it wasn’t this simple summary law that Jesus proclaimed. It was literally thousands of rules that governed the minutia of everyday life. These determined whether an individual was inside or outside the community. Trying to live according to the prescriptions of the law was oppressive. The revolutionary proclamation of Jesus was that in the Kingdom of God everyone is welcome. The Kingdom of God is an entirely open community which is based not on living by the law but on living in love.

As followers of Jesus Christ we are called into a community of love which is open to all without distinction.