Answering Zealot Part 4- Final Responses

Read the previous parts here:

Answering Zealot (Introduction)

Answering Zealot (Author’s Note)

Answering Zealot Part 3

In the middle of dismissive assertions that much of what lays the foundation for the Christian faith is simply fabricated, Aslan has some wonderful insights about Jesus’s supreme authority that shines through even before his death on the cross. In a strange turn, Aslan finds himself unable to deny that early contemporaries of the NT writers, even those who vehemently opposed the message, had no interest in attempting to claim that Jesus didn’t perform miracles. The evidence was too clear, the message too widespread and corroborated by too many witnesses. Jesus performed miracles. The blind saw, the dead were raised, the lepers were cleansed. Instead, Aslan attempts to make the case that there were scads of magicians wandering around the countryside during those days, and so miraculous healings and exorcisms were really par for the course, and the only interesting thing about Jesus’s wonders was that he was offering them for free. For Aslan, in the final analysis Jesus was nothing more than a political revolutionary…. and a magician?

This notion raises tremendous questions for me. For example, Aslan’s claim is that Jesus was essentially “radicalized” as a would-be revolutionary between working for over a decade as a laborer in the nearest big city (where he would have been stricken by the stark contrast between the well-off and the poverty of his own village of Nazareth) and becoming a disciple of John the Baptist (an assertion which, surprisingly to me, holds some water- no pun intended- inasmuch as Jesus intended to validate John’s ministry and “fulfill all righteousness”. This paper harmonizes with Aslan’s notion that Jesus started out as a disciple, but disagrees with the idea that it was the “church” that had a need to change the narrative to make Jesus appear greater). Aslan has already insisted that Jesus would have been illiterate. So when did Jesus learn magic? When did he come under the tutelage of a sorcerer? How did he learn to perform exorcisms? This is left as a giant question mark.

Later Aslan notes that a certain interaction with a leper, whom Jesus tells after cleansing him to go show himself to the high priest, leads to a very telling up-ending of the Temple structure. Typically the leper would have had to make very costly sacrifices and jump through a great deal of hoops in order to receive purification rites from the priests. But here instead Jesus is asserting that the leper is already cleansed- this is an incredible claim to authority. I loved this insight and really appreciated Aslan’s ability to draw together the history and the scripture to point out a truth about Jesus’ claims to authority. Where we part ways is the ultimate purpose of those miracles. It’s also somewhat maddening that much earlier in the book Aslan asserts that Matthew, Luke, and John are fabrications. But when the scripture supports his own claims about Jesus, he is pleased to quote it liberally.

In another moment of insight, Aslan speaks of the Transfiguration:

“Elijah’s presence on the mountain has already been primed by the speculations in Tiberias and by the ruminations of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi. But Moses’s appearance is something else entirely. The parallels between the so-called transfiguration story and the Exodus account of Moses receiving the law on Mount Sinai are hard to miss. Moses also took three companions with him up the mountain- Aaron, Nadab and Abihu- and he, too, was physically transformed by the experience. Yet whereas Moses’s transformation was the result of his coming into contact with God’s glory, Jesus is transformed by his own glory. Indeed, the scene is written in such a way so that Moses and Elijah- the Law and the Prophets- are clearly made subordinate to Jesus.”

This elicited a fist-pump from me. Aslan makes it clear that he doesn’t believe it, but he puts it both simply and beautifully.

But then Aslan will go on to claim that Jesus did not fit any of the messianic paradigms offered in the Hebrew Bible (200k Jewish Christians disagree)

“Jesus spoke about the end of days, but it did not come to pass, not even after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and defiled God’s Temple.” R.C. Sproul’s The Last Days According to Jesus is a great place to start for a reasoned response to criticism of the Olivet discourse (what Aslan is referencing here) and why it is not a failed prediction by any means.

“He vowed that the twelve tribes of Israel would be reconstituted and the nation restored;” Jesus did not give any “vows” within time frames that he did not keep. Aslan does not clarify here which vows he is referencing.

“The Kingdom of God that Jesus predicted never arrived; the new world order he described never took shape.” This depends entirely on how you define the “kingdom of God” and Aslan has deliberately chosen an interpretation that shows Jesus to have failed. But that is not by any means the most common or commonly accepted interpretation. Why force something upon the text that isn’t there?

Aslan takes Jesus’s silence or reticence to take for Himself the title of Messiah until the very end of his ministry as a sign that he never viewed himself that way. That he then only accepts it passively is apparently evidence that Jesus didn’t believe himself to be the messiah, or rather didn’t want to baggage associated with the title. Yet Aslan has until this point made an important point of the wide range of other “messiah” figures roaming the lands, claiming royal titles for themselves and promising to free the Jewish people from the tyranny of the Romans. Could there perhaps be another reason Jesus strategically chose not to claim the title for himself, but rather much more often referred to himself as the Son of Man? More on the Son of Man from the Bible Project: https://bibleproject.com/explore/son-of-man/ (I don’t 100% endorse all TBP material but in this case it’s helpful). Aslan insists that the term is “so ambiguous… that to this day no one is certain what it actually means”, which could not be further from the truth. Check out the link above for a helpful explanation as well as links to more explorations of the term. Also compare Jesus’s use of the term “Son of Man” with Daniel chapter 7. Aslan’s argument is that Jesus diverts attention away from the “messiah” title and back to the “Son of Man” title because he knows that the term “messiah” is already openly charged, and Jesus is “wanting to avoid, if at all possible, the fate of the others who dared claim the title,” which is in direct contradiction with Aslan’s concession that Jesus did in fact predict his own brutal death many times. How could he both “want to avoid the fate of others who dared claim the title” of messiah, yet anticipate, down to the details, his own crucifixion?

As tempting as it is to provide page-by-page refutations for the entire book, I think this review is lengthy enough to turn away most readers as it is. I want to give a few parting thoughts about Zealot, and then I will provide another post with a lot of resources providing alternative viewpoints, theories, and scholarship for those who want to explore more.

I have pointed out several of Aslan’s strengths: he has some genuinely great insights when he connects his great knowledge of 1st century Palestine’s socio-cultural and political history with the gospel accounts. They provide rich background and context and really bring a lot of Jesus’s words into sharp clarity. I think every Christian would benefit from a better understanding of the historical context in which the gospel story takes place.

The problem, however, is that Aslan, influenced by the widely-discredited scholarship of the Jesus Seminar (see this link and this book for more), has come at the text of the gospels with an unsupported notion of what counts as “historical fact” and what is “fabricated”. More often than not, he does not provide much or ANY substantiation for his claims that the majority of the gospels were made up by the church. He simply asserts his opinions as a fact and expects the reader to accept them.

This strategy breaks down quickly for discerning readers, when Aslan proceeds to quote liberally from all 4 gospels whenever they support his thesis. The suggestion seems to be that Aslan is the only one who knows which of the gospels are historical fact and which is fiction. Combined with the lack of substantive evidence supporting his primary claims, it is impossible to take the book seriously. I truly enjoyed parts of it, really loved how he expounded on the history of the unique political and cultural pressure-cooker that was first-century Palestine, but I was profoundly disappointed with both his dismissiveness of thinking Christians and his “scholarship.”

See the final post here: Answering Zealot: Other Resources