_Zealot_

I finished listening to Reza Aslan read his book Zealot. If you aren't aware of who Reza Aslan is, he is the host of Believer in which he explores some of the different religions of the world. (Because I don't have a cable package, I haven't seen any of the show. He is a bit of a polemicist, to put it mildly, so some of what he does stirs people up. So, be warned*.)

The book has long been on my radar. Reza Aslan is a Muslim who has dabbled in Christianity and eventually dedicated his life to studying different religions. He is a believer in God--a practicing Muslim as he is, that should come as no surprise--but his own personal experiences with Christianity came about as a youth. After some time, he lost faith in Jesus the Christ, but never stopped wanting to know more about Jesus of Nazareth. Zealot is a culmination of his study of the life of the latter.

Lots of people have spoken about Aslan's work, and since it's widely available, I don't want to turn this into a book review. Instead, because there are a lot of things that he's trying to accomplish in the book, I'm choosing to focus on that angle here.

Clarifying Lines

Though I don't know how much I "agree" with Aslan in what he researched, I appreciate how his book helped me to understand certain aspects of the Christian tradition and biblical teachings that were, if not unclear to me, had never clicked into place before. This is a frequent occurrence for me. I'm fairly inept at most things I do, with a middling result for many of my attempts, and being a historian is certainly one of them. I learn a thing that I gain access to, usually through literature, and it sits as an isolated fact in my brain. I later invent an intersection of highways and country roads that take me from one thought to another, sometimes filling in the countryside with my own whims and desires. Because of the incomplete picture, I sometimes find a new detail--something that places new on-ramps or intersections--that reveal how the interconnecting system actually works. I get a jolt, as though reality falling into place actually involves gravity, and things suddenly make sense that I didn't even realize were incomplete.

What I mean by this clunky analogy, of course, in theory, my understanding of Jesus Christ and His teachings and His Church are pretty solid. But when I stop to look closely at what I assume of Christ, I'm always running an lds.org video of Jesus through my head. There's nothing inherently wrong with thinking of Christ through what I call the "soft focus lens" of faith. But the Seminary Jesus is rather difficult to approach for me. Not because of His divinity or His sacrifice or the fact that I worship Him. No, it's the stuff aside from that. Like, how bad was His breath? He probably stank, right? I mean, on a really practical level, what was He like? Did He dislike eating vegetables? Could He sing on pitch? 

Aslan doesn't answer any of these questions. Instead, what he does is he creates a picture of a person named Jesus--who may or may not be divine--but who was a man. This is one of the salient points of Mormonism (and Christianity, where the Venn diagram of the two beliefs intersect): That God (as Christ) became human. James E. Talmage makes this assertion in his book Jesus the Christ, which I've read a couple of times in my life. 

A great storm arose, and still He slept. The circumstance is instructive as it evidences at once the reality of the physical attributes of Christ, and the healthy, normal condition of His body. He was subject to fatigue and bodily exhaustion from other causes, as are all men; without food He grew hungry; without drink He thirsted; by labor He became weary. The fact that after a day of strenuous effort He could calmly sleep, even amidst the turmoil of a tempest, indicates an unimpaired nervous system and a good state of health. Nowhere do we find record of Jesus having been ill.

With this as my background, the map of my understanding of Jesus clarified when Aslan explained that, for example, Jesus, growing up in a tiny little village called Galilee, likely didn't find a lot of work, lived among a world filled with other men proclaiming their own messiahship, and needed the inspiration of John the Baptist to understand who He was. Small details that can be extracted through the different tools available to the historian help provide what I was missing from Jesus' life: Context.

Context Matters

It's fair to say that Aslan's approach to Jesus isn't to confirm anyone's faith in Christ as a Savior and a Messiah. If anything, it's to contextualize the entire movement, to draw attention to discrepancies in biblical versus historical records, and to outline ways in which (according to Aslan's hypotheses) the story of Jesus was taken and reconceptualized by the surviving apostles and Paul. These goals are lofty, and Aslan makes a persuasive argument throughout his book. As I am a believer in Jesus, it sometimes was hard to think of what was going on with this particular leader, this radical Jew (which Jesus most certainly was), in the broader context of Christianity's roots, and the eventual fruit of Mormonism from that selfsame tree.

And, in a lot of ways, it helped strengthen my belief in the Book of Mormon. I know that may sound strange, especially since Zealot recognizes how people have faith in Christ, but makes appeals always to the closest we can get in terms of records to piece together what transpired.** This context and connection to a world two thousand years old is appreciable to me. The thing is, as a Mormon, I was always taught that what Jesus did in the New Testament is essentially the same as what's done by His Church in the latter days. And to a certain extent, that makes sense, but the world of two thousand years ago is not even remotely close to the modern age--and I don't just mean that guys no longer wear dresses (okay, fine...robes). 

See, there are a lot of little things that don't fit together from the Bible. But a lot of that stuff that is theologically confusing is clarified by the Book of Mormon, which helps to anchor some of the teachings of Jesus in a larger view. What Zealot does is expose some of the fault lines in the traditions that have gloamed onto Jesus' name and message--the stuff that I feel is fundamental to Christianity and, sadly, incompatible with Mormonism--and give a historical justification for why an action was taken.

For example, the only way (according to Aslan) that Jesus could have been crucified how he was, complete with the sign above his head, "King of the Jews", was if the crime he was guilty of was sedition. And the word for the "robbers" who died next to him? It also means "rebel", or, basically, those who were seditious to Rome. Jesus was less being mocked with His plaque above His head and more being correctly identified with having laid claim to a title that Rome wouldn't countenance. 

Inhabiting the world of two millennia back, even for a short time (the book isn't very long), really made me appreciate Jesus of Nazareth more. In his features I could start to discern those of Him whom I worshiped. A Muslim scholar helped me gain a clearer image of a Jesus whom mainstream Christians deny, because I'm a Mormon.

What a world. 

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* Morgan Freeman also has The Story of God through National Geographic that looks at similar topics. I've been unable to dedicate the time to watching his program, either, though I'm definitely interested.
** I don't have the book with me, so I can't quote exactly, but a good example of this is paraphrased thus: Jesus' telling of the healed lepers to go to the priest makes more sense when taken in the context of Jesus' radical Judaism (radical in that it was anti-clerical and pushed against the elites who ran the temples). In Sunday School, that behavior was explained as being Jesus' support of the Mosaic law and tacit approval of the Jewish sacrifices and hierarchy. Yet elsewhere, Jesus dismisses those very same people as being vipers and unworthy of the power they wielded. But Aslan argues that Jesus was demonstrating his superior claims--his radical rendering of Judaism--in front of the priests, almost gloating a little that He could do what they could not...and do so without their hierarchy and their temple worship.