Reza Aslan: Jesus as a zealot

[maryhelena]

Bart Ehrman blog post 7

Aslan Zealot: A Deeper Evaluation of the Thesis Itself

Scholars have had all that time to examine every surviving piece of evidence for the perspective, and it’s safe to say that 99% (probably 99.9%!) have found the thesis wanting. That doesn’t make it wrong, of course, and we have to examine it anew every time it appears. And now in Aslan’s intriguing account, it has appeared anew. So I want to examine it and explain why I don’t find it convincing.

Let me say at the outset that I am not personally troubled by it and for personal reasons almost wish it were true. I am not a Christian who wants to paint Jesus in his own image, and the idea of a political insurgent would sit perfectly well with me. I just think it’s not historically the most plausible explanation of what we know about Jesus from our surviving sources.

<snip>

Let me explain this final point. Try to imagine the picture of the historical Jesus that emerges from a rigorously, historical, critical examination of our surviving sources as a large tapestry. The individual threads make up the overall portrait. There are a few threads here and there that appear out of place at first glance. But you can’t take these few threads and claim that they represent the overall portrait of the tapestry. The tapestry has to be understood as a whole, looking for the major features of its portrayal (and of course the stray threads need to be fit into it somehow).

Still need to get to the counter-argument.....

[maryhelena]

Bart Ehrman blog post 8 on Zealot

Back to Aslan’s Thesis. An Alternative View: Jesus the Apocalypticist.

Aslan’s idea that Jesus may have been a zealot interested in the political overthrow of the Romans by a show of force in which Israel would be established as a nation by use of the sword is based on very scanty evidence – a hint there, a hard to explain detail there, in one source or another – as I have already pointed out. These hints and details do indeed need to be explained. But there is no way at all that they dominate the early tradition. Not even close. The idea that Jesus proclaimed a cosmic, supernatural, intervention of God (rather than a political revolution), on the other hand, is all over the place, abundantly attested precisely in our earliest sources. It is, in fact, in all of them.

Here is some of the evidence as I give it in my earlier book on the subject.

my bolding

So, Apocalyptic prophet verse Zealot....

Sad really, Bart Ehrman has not taken the bull by the horns. He has not provided a critical and scholarly critic of Reza Aslan's zealot theory.He simply prefers his own apocalyptic prophet version of the gospel Jesus story. And that, unfortunately, is the failure of the historicist position. It cannot account for all the Jesus 'types' that are reflected in the gospel story. It has to go with a specific version of Jesus - cutting off the pieces of the Jesus character that don't fit their set piece.

A mythicist position with a composite Jesus, a literary character, is able to accommodate both a zealot type Jesus as well as whatever character trait one can discern within the gospel story.

Anyway, Zealot , the movie, might just prove to be a 'player' in the Jesus game.....

[maryhelena]

Bart Ehrman blog post 9 on Zealot

Final Loose Threads on the Zealot Hypothesis

Second: according to the Gospel traditions (both Synoptic and Johannine) Jesus’ followers were armed in the garden of Gethsemane and put up armed resistance to those who came to arrest Jesus. I have come to think that this is not a historical datum.

<snip>

So where did the idea that they were armed in the Garden come from? This is a bit tricky, and I’m trying to be brief. We have a number of instances in the traditions about Jesus where there is a story connected to one of his fantastic one-liners.

<snip>

There was a great one-liner in circulation that probably goes back to Jesus (it coincides well with all the other pacifist things he says in the tradition): “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.” Since I think the disciples could *not* actually have been armed in the garden, I think the story that they *were* armed is one of those stories that was made up in order to provide a narrative context for this one-liner.

The “invented context” is that Peter pulls out a sword and lops off the ear of a servant of the high priest, and Jesus rebukes him, “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.” In other words: don’t use a sword to oppose those who are your enemies. That idea is in line with Jesus’ teaching otherwise, as attested all throughout the Gospels. It may go back to him. But if that’s what he was teaching, why would he urge or allow his followers to be armed in the first place? He almost certainly wouldn’t. The story that they were armed was made up in order to provide narrative support for a great one-liner of his. That, in my judgment, is the best way to explain the evidence.

Jesus throughout his ministry preached non-violence. He was not a zealot. He was an apocalyptic preacher who thought that God was soon to intervene in human affairs.

So? Gospel stories, re Bart Ehrman, that suggest that the gospel Jesus was a zealot are not historical - they are made up!!!!!

Maybe someone should suggest to Ehrman that maybe the Gospel stories about Jesus being an apocalyptic preacher are made up as well.....

[neilgodfrey]

Aslan’s Zealot: Historical Mistakes

Claim: After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Jews were “exiled from the land” (p. xxix)
Claim: Legions of Roman troops were stationed throughout Judea.
Claim: “Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything Judaism represents” (p. 32).
Claim: “It would have been almost unthinkable for a thirty-year-old Jewish male in Jesus’ time not to have a wife” (p. 37).
Claim: “Nazareth was just a day’s walk from …the capital city, Sepphoris” (p. 38).
Claim: “[Pilate] announced his presence in the holy city [Jerusalem] by marching through Jerusalem’s gates trailed by a legion of Roman soldiers carrying standards bearing the emperor’s image.”
Claim: “A mysterious Jewish sorcerer called ‘the Egyptian,” declared himself King of the Jews and gathered thousands of followers on the Mount of Olives.”
Claim: “Henceforth [after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE] Judaism would no longer be deemed a worthy cult. The Jews were now the eternal enemy of Rome.”
Claim: [After 70 CE] “Rome expelled every surviving Jew from Jerusalem and its surrounding environs.”

It should be noted that the majority of these mistakes are closely tied to his overarching themes about the political situation in Palestine that Jesus’ found himself in – a central feature of the book, since Aslan wants to claim precisely that this political situation is what explains Jesus’ life, ministry, and death. Not getting the political picture straight is therefore a particular problem for the book. In the next post I’ll give a few more of these kinds of problems, before turning my attention to other kinds.

Will one find any fewer "mistakes" in any book by biblical scholars -- including (sometimes especially!) a book by Ehrman? How many of these mistakes are differences of interpretation? How many are sourced from works by biblical scholars?

[neilgodfrey]

After seeing what Ehrman did in his last published polemic would we trust anything he says (unpublished) about Aslan's book without doing our own homework first?

[MrMacSon]

I'd like to see Aslan & Erhman also address, generally, the notion of the probability of Jesus historicity (in the context of the historical method and definitions & principles of primary sources, and in the context of elaboration & layering of the narrative over time). They would probably now need to address concepts in Carrier's new book On the Historicity of Jesus.

It seems they are "putting the cart before the horse".

[neilgodfrey]

I'd like to see Aslan & Erhman also address, generally, the notion of the probability of Jesus historicity (in the context of the historical method and definitions & principles of primary sources, and in the context of elaboration & layering of the narrative over time). They would probably now need to address concepts in Carrier's new book On the Historicity of Jesus.

It seems they are "putting the cart before the horse".

Why don't you try the same with the Caesar is Jesus scenario?

Go to Carrier's calculator at http://www.richardcarrier.info/bayescalculator.html

Be extremely ridiculously generous and give the hypothesis a 0.3 chance of being true given our background knowledge -- i.e. assuming one in three religions started by worship of an emperor have outlived the emperor the way Christianity has outlived Caesar and of those religions that survived only 2 out of 3 began other than as an emperor cult.

So P(H|b) = 0.3

Then be just as absurdly generous and suggest that there is an 80% chance that the evidence we have is exactly what we would expect if Christianity began as a Caesar cult.

So P(E∣H.b) = 0.8

Then be slightly cruel and say the evidence that we have today is only 70% likely if Christianity began some other way.

So P(E∣-H.b) = 0.7

Result of the Caesar = Jesus hypothesis being true given the most absurdly a fortiori case imaginable = 0.3

But to return to the topic of this thread you might like to try out the same on the zealot hypothesis here.

[maryhelena]

I'd like to see Aslan & Erhman also address, generally, the notion of the probability of Jesus historicity (in the context of the historical method and definitions & principles of primary sources, and in the context of elaboration & layering of the narrative over time). They would probably now need to address concepts in Carrier's new book On the Historicity of Jesus.

It seems they are "putting the cart before the horse".

The historicity of the gospel JC can be doubted but, as of now, it cannot be settled. All that can be done is raise doubts about it - as Carrier has done in his book. (I really wished he had stopped there and not complicated his book with the Carrier-Doherty mythicist theory. Offering an alternative as though that alternative was the only one available - an alternative that can itself be questioned - only serves to detract from the main objective of the book - to cast doubts on the historicity of the gospel figure of Jesus.)

In this regard an interesting comment from Carrier:

OHJ: The Covington Review (Part 3)

Should the Gospels Count More Against Historicity?

First, note how I am not arguing that I already used up all the Gospel data in generating the prior. I am arguing that I only used up a subset of that data. Which leaves plenty of data in the Gospels that can legitimately affect the consequents, just as Covington says (so, I actually said exactly what Covington says). The reason I find the remaining data indeterminate is not that I already used it, but that it’s just as likely to be there even if Jesus existed. In particular, “completely fictional accounts can be written about historical persons.” Thus, even if we granted that the Gospels are completely 100% fictional, that can still just as easily be true if Jesus existed, and very little was remembered or transmitted about him (or what was, was simply unusable to suit the evangelists’ purposes).

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/arc ... ent-504506

Thus, people like Aslan and Ehrman, are able to run with the historical Jesus idea. i.e. if the gospel story is 100% fictional - that does not, in and off itself, rule out a historical Jesus. As I've said over the years - one makes a decision either way. Either from a scholarly position or that of a layperson. One then runs with that position in order to see where it will take one. Ehrman finds an apocalyptic prophet/preacher and Aslan finds a Jewish zealot.

Perhaps some mythicists could take on board what Carrier says in the above quote - "Thus, even if we granted that the Gospels are completely 100% fictional, that can still just as easily be true if Jesus existed".
In other words; one cannot rule out a historical component, a historical core, to the gospel Jesus story. Proposing that it's all spiritual, all fictional, all symbolic, does not cast doubts on a historical core - it evades the issue.

The JC historicists seek a historical core to the gospel story. What they propose, a historical gospel Jesus, however imagined, cannot be historically verified. But offering them 100% gospel fiction amounts to asking them to reject their core value - a historical core to the gospel story. That's a win/loose scenario that will not work. A win/win scenario requires that the historicists erroneous historical core - a historical Jesus - be replaced by actual, real, history. Pauline interpretations don't make the grade here. The JC historicists need to 'see' Jesus in actual history. i.e. they need to see how actual Hasmonean/Jewish history is reflected in the gospel literary figure of Jesus.

What historicists like Ehrman and Aslan have done is provide specific characteristics of the gospel Jesus, a composite literary figure. Rather than knock these writers because of their historicity bias - their insights can contribute towards a search for early christian origins. They are pieces of the Jesus puzzle.

[maryhelena]

Reza Aslan ‏on twitter:

Jesus Was Crucified Because Disciples Were Armed, Bible Analysis Suggests. By guy who criticized me for saying same http://www.newsweek.com/jesus-was-cruci ... sts-271436 …

Jesus Was Crucified Because Disciples Were Armed, Bible Analysis Suggests

Jesus may have been crucified because his followers were carrying weapons, according to a scholarly analysis of New Testament books.

Dale Martin, a professor of religious studies at Yale University, says that this aspect of stories about Jesus, as told in the gospels, has received too little attention, but could alone explain Jesus’s execution and also show that the man from Nazareth was not the pacifist he’s usually made out to be.

http://www.newsweek.com/jesus-was-cruci ... sts-271436

And Bart Ehrman?

The paper also suggests that Jesus may have been in favor of fighting, at least in this apocalyptic instance, Ehrman tells Newsweek.

“It’s making me rethink my view that Jesus was a complete pacifist,” he says. “And it takes a lot for me to change my views about Jesus.”

Abstract

Dale B. Martin

In debating the meaning of Jesus’ arrest and death at Jerusalem, scholars have paid too little attention to normal Roman practices of dealing with persons found armed in public in Rome or other cities under their control. Moreover, the idea that only one or two of Jesus’ disciples were armed has been accepted uncritically in spite of the probability that more or all of them were armed. This article highlights the significance of Jesus’ disciples being armed when he was arrested just outside the walls of Jerusalem, linking that fact with other details from the sources, such as Jesus’ opposition to the temple, the presence of Samaritans among his early followers, the absence of lamb at the last supper, and the fact that he was executed by the Romans as a ‘social rebel’. Jesus led his followers, armed, to Jerusalem to participate in a heavenly-earthly battle to overthrow the Romans and their high-priestly client rulers of Judea.


http://jnt.sagepub.com/content/37/1/3?etoc

[steve43]

If Jesus was a Zealot, why wasn't he identified as such?

A Zealot was identified as one of Jesus' disciples in Luke and Acts, Simon.

Perhaps Jesus was not identified as a Zealot along with Simon because he WASN'T a Zealot?

Or is that too simplistic?

I hear a thundering herd of Winged Frogs a'comin'...