by Father John P. Cush
“Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” by Reza Aslan. Random House (New York, 2013). 333 pp., $27.
Some speak of a contemporary third quest for the historical Jesus. For a definition of the historical Jesus, a contemporary scholar, John P. Meier, states: “the Jesus whom we can recover, recapture or reconstruct by using the scientific tools of modern historical research.” The first quest for the historical Jesus is said to have begun in the 18th century with the writings of Hermann Reimarus and D. F. Strauss, who issued a clarion call for “unbiased” historical research on the life of Jesus. The second quest had been initiated by Albert Schweitzer and Martin Kähler, who focused on the faith that the historical Jesus inspires. Later scholars like Rudolf Bultmann took this to mean that we should separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith.
Perhaps fueled by archaeological and manuscript discoveries, new refinements in methodology and new interest in historical data, a third quest seemed to have emerged again in the last two decades of the 20th century and into the 21st century. This research into the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth can either be as subjective and ridiculous as the Jesus Seminar’s voting on the historicity of Gospel passages by dropping colored beads, or as well documented and grounded as E.P. Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism or John Meier’s A Marginal Jew. Depending on whom one reads, Jesus of Nazareth might be portrayed as an itinerant cynic philosopher (J.D. Crossan), a “man of the spirit” (Marcus Borg), a prophet calling for social change (Gerd Theissen) or an early feminist (Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza).
Reza Aslan’s new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, which recently shot to the top of the best-seller list, falls into this category of the third quest for the historical Jesus. The author, a Muslim-American who for a while practiced Evangelical Christianity, seemed to get himself into some controversy with Fox News back in July, primarily it seems because he is a Muslim writing on Christ.
Aslan’s book is very much part of this third quest for the historical Jesus. It tends to tell us much more about the author and his ideas than about Jesus himself. The book itself is a fairly easy read and almost reads like a novel, which is appropriate as the author is an instructor of creative writing. However, the author is also a professor of the sociology of religions, who focused his own particular study on the history of the Jihadist movement in Islam in the 20th century. This is reflected throughout his study.
Like many involved in historical Jesus research, Aslan’s attempt at objectivity makes a sharp distinction between the Christ whom we know through faith and the Jesus whom we know through history. Anything miraculous found in the life of Jesus is discounted by Aslan. Reading Jesus almost through the eyes of a modern religious zealot, he portrays a Jesus Who is a political revolutionary and Who would not have even understood the role of Messiah that we profess Him to be today.
Although an entertaining read and researched well enough, there are several issues with the book that would discount us taking it as a good “biography” of Jesus. His thought, that the faith is based on a concept of a mythical Jesus rather than the Jesus Whom the Apostles and disciples knew and loved and by Whom they were taught, is only one of them. The claims of Mr. Aslan in his book really are nothing that hasn’t been brought up over the past 300 years, and we as Catholic Christians would do better to focus in on other books written on who Christ is, like Thomas Weinandy’s Jesus the Christ; Roch Kereszty’s Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology; or, for a more spiritual biography, Romano Guardini’s The Lord and Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth series. Like most of the books on the historical Jesus, Zealot is more revelatory of the scholar’s own interest and personality than the Jesus Who can be known through history and scripture.
We would do better to read some of the books listed above rather than this new controversial text that most likely won’t be remembered as a scholarly work in the future.