frame of a political movement made sense at that time? ASLAN: First of all, let’s remember that this is an era in which there is no division between religion and politics. They are one and the same. I think a lot of times people think, Oh, you’re thinking of Jesus as a political figure. There is no difference between a religious and a political figure in first-century Palestine. But you’re right; this was an era that was awash in apocalyptic expectation. First century Palestine was a time in which there was a brutal military occupation by Rome of the Holy Land. This concept of zealotry was a widespread biblical principle that many, many Jews adhered to. Most Jews in Jesus’ time would have proudly referred to themselves as zealous for the Lord. Zealotry meant walking in the footsteps of the great heroes and prophets and kings of the Hebrew Bible who were all described as zealous for the Lord. Zeal meant something very specific in Jesus’ time. It meant an uncompromising devotion to the Torah, a refusal to serve any human master at all, building your entire life on the principle of the sole sovereignty of God and a devotion to cleansing the land that God set aside for his chosen people of all its heathen and pagan influences, in particular of the Roman abomination that controlled this land. Again, the majority of Jews in Jesus’ time would have proudly called themselves zealots, but there were some Jews that took zealotry to its extremes and used it as a means of taking up arms against the Roman occupation. We have the names of a lot of these Jews. A lot of them referred to themselves as messiahs in their actions against Rome. The argument that I’m making in the book is that that conception of zealotry was a sentiment that Jesus himself shared. Though he himself, insofar as the evidence that we have [shows], never espoused violence against Rome, never had his followers take up arms against Rome as though they were in the midst of a battle, though his views on violence were far more complex than I think a lot of modern Christians think, he was by no means a simple pacifist. Nevertheless, the core ideal of zealotry, a firm commitment to the sole sovereignty of God and a devotion to removing the yoke of occupation from the neck of the Jews, is deeply embedded in Jesus’ teachings and actions.
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MAUDLIN: I don’t want to give you the impression that all I have to say is how great the book is, because I do have one – ASLAN: Go ahead. MAUDLIN: I wanted more about Jesus. Part two deals with some aspects of him, but you talk about him being a political figure and what his ambitions were to accomplish, what his punishment meant. As you show, there were a lot of revolutionary movements at the time – messiahs, revolutionary figures – but they all kind of disappear afterwards. Jesus obviously did not and had a number of followers that were motivated for whatever reason, however you’re going to explain it, to continue and turn into the world’s biggest religion. I wish you would have spent a little more time on the teachings and the
“ [Jesus’]
era was awash in
apocalyptic expectation. This concept of zealotry was a widespread biblical principle t h at m a ny a d h e re d to. ” parables and what was compelling about Jesus. Why was he different than all those other figures at the time? ASLAN: First and foremost the problem with talking about the historical Jesus is that outside of the New Testament there is almost no trace of this person. The New Testament is certainly a helpful document, but it’s not a historical document. The gospels, we have to understand, were not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ actions. They are testimonies of faith written by communities of faith who already believed that Jesus was God incarnate and then based on that belief began to write about him. It means that there is a kernel of history that can be extracted from the gospels, but the gospels themselves are not very helpful as histories in and of themselves. MAUDLIN: There is a question [from the audience]. How do we know that Jesus even existed? ASLAN: Outside of the Bible we do have this one throwaway line written by a Jewish historian by the name Flavius Josephus in a
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book called The Antiquities that he wrote in the year 94 C.E. In this book he is describing what happens after a Roman governor by the name of Festus all of a sudden dies. There is a vacuum of power in Jerusalem while the Jews wait for the new Roman governor to arrive. In the midst of this vacuum of power Josephus describes this fiendish, young high priest named Aninis who decides that he is going to take advantage of a lack of Roman presence to take revenge on his enemies. He begins to sentence these enemies of his to death. One of those enemies is a man named James. The way that Josephus refers to James is James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah. That’s it. By the way, the phrase “the one they call messiah” is obviously meant as a statement of derision. It’s a dismissive way the way that Josephus says it. The fact that in 94 C.E., about 60 years after Jesus died, this historian writing to a Roman audience, not talking about Jesus but talking about Jesus’ brother James, believes that Jesus is so well known that he will use Jesus as a way to get people to understand which James he’s talking about is enormously significant. It proves without a doubt that Jesus existed but more important that by the year 94 C.E. the movement that he had founded had become itself so permanent and so significant that Josephus assumes his audience is aware of it. MAUDLIN: You said at the beginning that you could be a follower of Jesus without being a Christian. I don’t think what you mean is that you’re willing to take up arms against the current empire and foment revolution. What do you follow? ASLAN: Christians believe that Jesus went to the cross for the sins of humanity, which again is a perfectly valid viewpoint. What we know about the historical Jesus is that he went to the cross on behalf of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed; that he lived at time in which there was this massive divide between the absurdly rich – those that had managed to connect their fates with the Roman Empire – and the absurdly poor, Jesus’ followers, his friends and neighbors, he himself. The fact that this man took on not just the Roman empire, but the priestly aristocracy, who, in his teachings about the Kingdom of God and what his parables about those teachings mean, and the world that he envisioned when talking about the Kingdom of God, a