Zealot by Reza Aslan A Critique Part Two

This is the second part of my critique of the 2013 book Zealot by Reza Aslan who argued that the historical Jesus was really a revolutionary zealot. This post will discuss the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the supposed development of beliefs about Jesus in the early church. Part One can be read here. All page references are from Reza Aslan, Zealot, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2017, unless otherwise indicated.

Aslan says that the Gospel’s portrait of a weak-willed Pilate who was pressured into crucifying Jesus by the Jewish leaders is “pure fiction”. The historical Plate was a crueller, harsher person who would not hesitate to crucify a Jew (p. 47). In fact, there is a possible explanation for Pilate’s apparently wimpish behaviour in the Gospels. About the time Pilate became governor of Judea in 26 AD, the Roman emperor Tiberius went into semi-retirement and Sejanus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, assumed a lot of the emperor’s responsibilities. In 31 AD Sejanus was accused of conspiring to overthrow Tiberius and was executed, along with many of his followers. We cannot be sure but Sejanus may have actually appointed Pilate who was now in a very vulnerable position. He had to keep his head down and not waves, such as keeping the massacres of Jews to a minimum. This would be true even if Sejanus had not appointed Pilate. You do not draw attention to yourself in the middle of a political purge. When the crowd told Pilate that if he released Jesus who they were accusing of sedition, even if Pilate thought Jesus was harmless, that he was no friend of Caesar (John 19:12), it was basically a threat that they would accuse him of disloyalty to Tiberius.

A young Patrick Stewart with hair as Sejanus in the 1976 BBC production of I, Claudius

The Gospels’ account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate is historically accurate (A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, London, 1963, pp. 24-47). Nevertheless, Aslan says that Jesus’ trial before Pilate is a fabrication. Pilate would have probably just signed his execution without a trial or Jesus being in the room (p. 148). Of course, Aslan does not know this. It is what he wants to believe happened.

In spite of the multiple attestation of the four Gospels, Aslan doubts there was a custom to release a prisoner at Passover because it was not mentioned outside the Gospels (p 149). In the light of how little we really know about the ancient world, the fact that this custom was not mentioned in other surviving sources proves nothing. Aslan suggests that Mark made it up because he was writing to a Roman audience who could not tell it was made up (p. 149), but that does not explain why he would make it up. Matthew, who was apparently writing to a Jewish audience, still mentions it.

Aslan writes about Jesus’ trial, crucifixion and death, “The sequence of events did not contain a narrative, but was strictly for liturgical purposes. It was a means for the early Christians to relive the last days of their messiah, through ritual by, for instance, sharing the same meal he shared with the disciples, praying the same prayers he offered in Gethsemane, and so on.” (pp. 153-154)

It sure looks like narrative to me. In what way are they not narrative? Other ancient biographies also tended to focus on the deaths of their subjects. That does not mean they were written for liturgical purposes. If the early church used the Gospel accounts to “relive” Jesus’ passion, then it must have happened. Just because the early Christians “relived” events from Jesus’ passion in their services does not mean that they were not historical events.

Then, there is the reference to the young man who ran away naked after Jesus was arrested (Mark 14:51-52). Was this written “strictly for liturgical purposes”? I have never seen it relived or re-enacted in an Easter service.

Aslan adds, “As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial and execution was written for one reason and one reason only, to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant.” (p. 154)

Yes, the Gospels were meant to show that Jesus was the Messiah, but this belief that Jesus was the Messiah was a result of what Jesus did, so factual accuracy was very relevant. If Jesus did not do and say what the Gospels say he did, the early church, which would not have existed, would not have believed he was the Messiah. It is cause and effect.

Like many historical Jesus searchers, Jesus’ resurrection is a stumbling block for Aslan. He writes, “Then something extraordinary happened. What exactly that something was is impossible to know. Jesus’ resurrection is an exceedingly difficult topic for the historian to discuss, not least because it falls beyond the scope of any examination of the historical Jesus. Obviously, the notion of a man dying a gruesome death and returning to life three days late defies all logic, reason, and sense. One could simply drop the argument there, dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen Jesus to be the product of a deluded mind.” (p. 174)

Aslan acknowledges that Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection was very early and the early Christians were persecuted for their belief so there must be something to it (p. 174-175). However, he writes,

“Nevertheless, the fact remains that the resurrection is not a historical event. It may have historical ripples, but the event itself falls outside the scope of history and into the realm of faith.” (p. 176)

So “something extraordinary happened” (p. 174), but it was “not a historical event.” (p. 176) Huh?

To say that the resurrection is “not a historical event” does not mean that it did not happen. Rather, Aslan has a worldview which does not accept that a historical event could have a supernatural cause. When he says belief in the resurrection “defies all logic, reason, and sense” (p. 174), this is because it conflicts with is worldview which does not allow for the possibility that God could raise someone from the dead. There is no law of history which says that an event cannot have a supernatural cause. Many historians do believe an event could have a supernatural cause. It has to do with the historian’s worldview, rather than what the historical evidence suggests happened.

Aslan and other historians only make this argument because they cannot explain the resurrection by appealing to natural historical causes. If it were obvious from reading between the lines in the Gospels that the disciples must have stolen Jesus’ body, they would not be saying that the resurrection “falls outside the scope of history” (p. 176). They would say that the cause of Christian belief in the resurrection was that the disciples stole the body. However, these explanations do not make sense. If the disciples stole the body, they would have probably recanted when they were persecuted and a missing body does not explain the appearances of the resurrected Jesus. Rather than acknowledge that a supernatural explanation for the resurrection of Jesus makes the most sense, they say it was not a historical event and is outside the scope of history and in the realm of faith, which means nothing.

Aslam claims that the Gospel accounts of the resurrection were “not meant to be accounts of historical events; they are carefully crafted rebuttals to an argument that is taking place offscreen.” (p. 177) For example, Jesus could not have been a ghost or an incorporeal spirit because he ate food and could be touched and the disciples could not have stolen the body because there were guards (p. 177).

This is an anachronistic argument. Just because modern Christians use the resurrection accounts to argue that Jesus rose from the dead, does not mean that the Gospel made up these accounts to argue that Jesus rose from the dead. It does not explain where this belief came from in the first place, and Aslan admits he cannot explain it, he just does not believe it.

If Luke and John wanted to show that Jesus had a physical body and was not a spirit, they would not have said that he just appeared in the room, which is not the thing a physical body would do (Luke 24:36, John 20:26). They also said that Mary Magdalene and some disciples did not recognize the risen Jesus (Luke 24:16, John 20;15). Matthew says that some doubted when they saw Jesus (Matthew 28:17). The Gospel writers would not make up stories like this if they were trying to prove Jesus physically rose from the dead, since they could be used to argue against it.

Furthermore, the first witnesses to the resurrection were women. In the ancient world women were usually not regarded as being credible witnesses, as good as men. If the Gospel were going to make up the resurrection story, they would not say the first witnesses were women, because they would not be taken seriously. Celsus, a second century pagan critic of Christianity, did just this and ridiculed the resurrection story because the witnesses were women (Origen, Contra Celsum, 2:55). If the Gospel were going to risk saying the witnesses were women, then it must have happened that way.

Aslan writes that Jesus did not fulfil the requirements to be the Messiah, the Jews had not been liberated from the Romans, so the early Christians went through the Jewish Bible to formulate a new version of the Messiah who suffered and died (p. 166). This is implausible if Aslan is right and the apostles could not read (p. 171). There were other messianic claimants who came to nasty ends. Their followers did not reinvent the idea of the Messiah after they died. None of Bar Kochba’s followers claimed that he was the Son of God after they had been defeated. They gave up and moved on. There must have been something different about Jesus, i.e., he rose from the dead.

In fact, Luke says that it was the resurrected Jesus who gave them the new understanding of the Messiah’s purpose (Luke 24:27).

Aslan claims that after the defeat of the Jewish revolt in 70 AD, the early Christians distanced themselves from the Jewish revolutionary movement and “all traces of revolutionary zeal [had] to be removed from the life of Jesus” (p. 150) and Jesus was transformed “from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher of good works whose kingdom was not of this world. ” (p. 150)

Even though all traces of revolutionary zeal were supposedly removed, Aslan still purports to find evidence of Jesus’ revolutionary zeal in the Gospels. It looks like the early Christians did not do such a good job after all. There is no historical evidence this is what happened. The New Testament and other first century Christian writings, such as the Didache or I Clement, do not warn Christians to distance themselves from the Jewish revolutionary movement. This is just speculation on Aslan’s part. He believes Jesus was a revolutionary zealot but the New Testament does not say he was, so he claims the New Testament tried to remove the evidence that he was a zealot. It borders on a conspiracy theory in which the conspiracy theorist explains that there is no evidence for his theory because the conspiracy covered it up.

Aslan claims that these changes were made to make Jesus and Christianity into “a thoroughly Romanized religion” (p. 190) which was more acceptable to Rome and the Gentiles. He writes, “This was a Jesus which the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 385) made the itinerant preacher’s movement the official religion of the state.” (p. xxx)

This is not supported by history. Christianity was not acceptable to the pagan Romans. The Christians believed Jesus was the only God so they refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods. The pagans believed their refusal dishonoured the gods and risked brining their punishment down on the whole society. hey persecuted the Christians and threatened to kill them if they refused to sacrifice to to their gods. If the Christians had said that Jesus was only a man and not the only way to reach God, they would not have been persecuted. If they wanted to make Jesus more acceptable to the pagan Gentiles, making him the Son of the only true God was the worst thing they could have done.

I found Aslan’s hypothesis somewhat inconsistent as he also writes that Jesus’ supposed transformation began before 70 AD. He believes that the apostles were illiterate, so educated Greek-speaking Jews from the Diaspora “gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being uninterested in earthly matters.” (p. 171)

However, Jews living in the Diaspora outside Israel were still Jews. They resisted paganism. They still had a Jewish worldview and believed in the one true God. they did not believe in the pagan demigods. Why would they compromise their beliefs and turn Jesus into one?

The words of Jesus in the Gospels were written in Greek, but they were not made up by Greek-speaking Christians or Jews. If we translate Jesus’ words, which were written in Greek in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, back into Aramaic which Jesus spoke, as much as 80% of it is poetic or rhythmic (Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, Eerdmans, Michigan, 2009, p. 158). The words of Jesus were not made up by later Greek-speaking Christians. They are Greek translations of the original Aramaic which Jesus spoke.

Aslan writes that Paul “displays an extraordinary lack of interest in the historical Jesus” (p, xxvi) and “had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.” (p. 187) This is the logical fallacy of the argument from silence. Paul’s letters do not a lot of biographical information about Jesus, but that does not mean he did not know or was not interested. He was writing theology, not biography. Paul could have known more about the life of Jesus than Luke. He just did not mention it.

On the other hand, Paul, Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity by David Wenham shows that Paul knew quite a bit about the historical Jesus and his teachings.

Aslan says that after the Apostolic Council meeting in Jerusalem around 50 AD, Jesus’ brother James “Began sending his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in Galatia, Corinth, Philippi, and most other places where Paul had built a following, in order to correct Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus.” (p. 192) As Aslan has mentioned (pp. 186, 191-192), the tension between Paul and James was over whether or not Gentile Christians had to sill follow the Law of Moses (Acts 15, Galatians 1-2). There is nothing to suggest, apart from Alsan’s imagination, that they disagreed over who Jesus was.

James was the leader of the Jerusalem church. He was not a follower of Jesus before his crucifixion (John 7:5). He probably regarded Jesus as an embarrassment to his family. Jesus appeared to James after his resurrection ( 1 Corinthians 15:7). As a result of this encounter, James apparently changed his mind about Jesus and joined the early church. If Jesus did not appear to James, there is no reason why he would have joined the church. Aslan gets around this by simply denying the evidence and saying James was always a follower (p 94).

Aslan describes James as “a zealous devotee of the law” (p. 198) and “a faithful follower of Jesus” (p. 198) and “the living link to the messiah” (p. 197). James was apparently the true follower of Jesus with correct understanding of his teachings, in contrast to Paul and the Gentile Christians. Aslan appears to be contradicting himself because he does not portray James as a revolutionary zealot like Jesus was supposed to have been. He got along with the Jewish authorities (p. 187). The Romans did not crucify James because even in the heightened tension of the 50s and 60s, the Romans did not consider the supposed true follower and successor of Jesus to be a political threat.

As I mentioned in Part One, Aslan is now a moderate Muslim. His version of Jesus, a religious zealot who believes he is God’s messenger and is prepared to resort to violence to achieve his religious goals, reminds me of Muhammed, founder of Islam. Aslan writes, “The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves – their own reflection – in the image of Jesus the have constructed.” (p. xxxi) I do not now if Bultmann said it or not, but Albert Schweitzer said much the same thing before Bultmann (Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, A.C. Black, London, 1910, p 4). (Of course, it is not just scholars who do this. Many evangelical Christians are guilty of remaking Jesus into their own image as a defender of conservative middle class family values.) In spite of what he has written, Aslan also writes, “I was drawn to him” (p. xix), the version of the historical Jesus which he has come up with. This suggests that he is making the same mistake which he warned against and by his own criteria, his conclusions about Jesus are dubious.

Zealot by Reza Alsan A Critique Part One

This is a critique from an evangelical historian’s perspective of the bestselling book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan who claims that the historical Jesus was not the Son of God, but a zealot. Aslan is a graduate of Santa Clara University and Harvard Divinity School and is a professor at University of California, Riverside. He has also been a television producer whose credits include The Leftovers (2014-2017) and Believer (2017) in which in an episode on the Hindu Aghari sect he ate part of a human brain which, if you must, you can watch if you Google “Reza Aslan eats brain”.

On a less sensationalist note, Aslan was born into a nominally Muslim family in Iran in 1972. His family fled to the United States following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. He became an evangelical Christian when he was 15, but after a few years he abandoned his evangelical faith at university. He has returned to his Muslim roots although he now describes himself as a more liberal one.

(All page references are from Reza Aslan, Zealot, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2017, unless otherwise indicated)

In his 2013 book Aslan claims that the historical Jesus was really a zealot, “a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine. (p. xxviii) He explains,

“Many Jews in first-century Palestine strove to live a life of zeal, each in his or her own way. But there were some who, in order to preserve their zealous ideals, were willing to willing to resort to extreme acts of violence if necessary, not just against the Romans and the uncircumcised masses, but against their fellow Jews, those who dared submit to Rome. They were called zealots.” (p. 41)

Aslan believes Jesus was a small “z” zealot,

“These zealots should not be confused with the Zealot Party that would arise sixty years later after the Jewish Revolt in 66 C.E. During Jesus’ lifetime, zealotry did not signify a firm sectarian designation or political party. It was an idea, an aspiration, a model of piety, inextricably linked to the widespread sense of apocalyptic expectation that had seized the Jews in the wake of the Roman occupation. There was a feeling, particularly among the peasants and the pious that the present order was coming to an end, that a new and divinely inspired order was about to reveal itself. The kingdom of God was at hand. Everybody was talking about it. But God’s reign could only be ushered in by those with the zeal to fight for it.” (p. 41)

(There might have been a lot of Jews with bit of zealot in them. They expected the Messiah to come and liberate them from the Romans and restore Israel. However, as I have discussed here, most Jews were prepared to put up with Roman rule as along as their religious sensibilities were respected.)

Aslan claims, “I have constructed my narrative upon what I believe to be the most accurate and reasonable argument, based on my two decades of scholarly research into the New Testament and early Christian history.” (p. xx) It sounds like he is such an expert that he must be right. I will show that Aslan’s hypothesis is flawed and not as conclusive as he purports.

There is no doubt that Jesus was a zealous person (John 2:17) and he believed the kingdom of God was coming (Mark 1:15). However, that does not mean he was a zealot who was prepared to resort to violence. Not every Jew with zeal was a revolutionary. There were other revolutionary or zealot leaders with Messianic pretensions at that time, but that does not mean Jesus was like them. He clearly was not, because they have been largely forgotten, except to scholars, while Jesus was the most influential figure in history.

Lay readers may not necessarily be aware of it, but Aslan is not the first person to suggest that the Jesus of the New Testament was not the real or historical Jesus. Many New Testament scholars assume this. Their research into what Jesus was supposedly really like is called the quest or search for the historical Jesus who was “really” an apocalyptic prophet or an itinerant preacher, rather than the Christ and Son of God as he is portrayed in the New Testament. I have argued here that the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the New Testament, or the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith, are the same, and the Jesus of the New Testament is historically credible.

Aslan agrees that Jesus identified as the Messiah, which many non-Christian historians do not (pp. 27-28, 94, 132-135, 141-142). The idea that Jesus was a zealot makes more sense than many proposals about the historical Jesus supposedly really was. The Romans crucified Jesus. The Romans did not crucify people for being prophets or rabbis or wisdom teachers. They crucified people for sedition, for attempting to overthrow the Roman state.

However, if the Romans really believed Jesus was a political threat, they would not have stopped with Jesus, they would have also crucified his disciples. They would not have just killed the revolutionary leaders and left all his revolutionary followers to keep stirring up trouble. The scenario in the Gospels, in which the Jewish leaders pressured Pilate into executing Jesus although Pilate did not take the charge too seriously but just wanted to keep the peace, makes more sense.

I found Aslan vague about how violent he believes Jesus “really” was. His approach to the historical evidence could be described as cherry picking. he picks the evidence, which supports his version of what he wants Jesus to be like, and rejects any evidence, which undermines his Jesus, as unhistorical or made up. He says Jesus’ disciples in Gethsemane were “armed with swords”(p. 146), making them sound like violent zealots, but he does not mention that Jesus said, “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52), which is not a very zealoty thing to say. Jesus’ words about peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), turning the other cheek (Matthew 5:39) and loving your enemies (Matthew 5:9) are ignored. Aslan would presumably say they were made up by the early church.

Likewise, Alsan writes that when Jesus asked Peter who did he think he was, he says Peter replied, “You are messiah”(p. 130), but he omits the next clause where Peter added, “the son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). That would not fit his hypothesis.

While Zealot is another “search for the historical Jesus”, Aslan ignores some of the fundamental conclusions of recent historical Jesus research. For example, Aslan writes that the Gospels were “a wholly new literary genre” (p. xxvi) and they “are not, nor were they never meant to be a historical documentation of Jesus’ life” (p. xxvi) and are not “a historical biography about a human being”(p. 134). However, in his 1992 book What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, Richard Burridge argued that the Gospels resemble other ancient biographies and they are biographies of Jesus. The Gospels were describing what they believe happened in Jesus’ life. The consensus among New Testament scholarship is now that the Gospels are biographies, not a new literary genre. (Richard Burridge, What are the Gospels?, 2nd edition, Eerdmans, Michigan, 2004, pp. 252, 288, Craig Keener, Christobiography, Eerdmans, Michigan, 2019, pp. 1, 24).

Quite frankly, I am surprised that someone with “two decades of scholarly research into the New Testament” (p. xx) would apparently not know this, or would not at least explain that his opinion is at odds with the academic consensus.

Aslan claims that the Gospels were “testimonies of faith, composed by communities of faith” (p. xxvi). I would say that they are both biographies and testimonies of faith. The faith of the writers was founded on the life of Jesus and what he did. Where else could it have come from?

Aslan writes that the Gospel of Mark was written after 70 AD, Matthew and Luke were written between 90 and 100 AD and John was written between 100 and 120 AD (pp. xxvi-xxvii, 28-29). There is no explanation for these dates. However, other scholars have argued that Mark was written after 70 AD because it says Jesus prophesied the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 79 AD and they do not believe Jesus could have prophesied because they do not believe in the supernatural. It is a belief based on their worldview, not a study of the evidence.

On the other hand, Aslan accepts that Jesus’ prophecies about his future arrest and execution could be historical and were not made up later by early Christians because Jesus would have known he would most likely be executed because he challenged the Jewish and Roman authorities (p. 124). In theory, Jesus did not need supernatural power to predict the Temple was going to be destroyed in the future. He could have read that it was going to happen in Daniel 9:26.

Furthermore, Luke appears to have been written much earlier than Aslan asserts, in the early 60s. Luke’s sequel Acts, which Aslan describes as a biography of Paul (p. 184), ends with Paul still alive in Rome (Acts 28:30). (Somehow, Acts is a biography of Paul, but the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus.) There is no mention that Paul was executed around 64 AD. If a biography ends with the subject still alive, it was obviously written while he was still alive. If Acts was written 30 to 40 years after Paul’s death as Aslan asserts, why didn’t Luke mention it? Luke also does not mention the deaths of Peter and James in the 60s or the Jewish Revolt (66-70 AD), presumably because they happened after Acts was written.

Common sense suggests that Acts was written in the early 60s AD. Since Acts is the sequel to Luke, Luke must have been written earlier. Most Bible scholars agree that Luke used Mark as a source (p. xxvii), so Mark must have been written in the 50s or earlier, not after 70 AD.

It is not just fundamentalists who argue for earlier dates of the Gospels. In his 1976 book Redating the New Testament, the very liberal John Robinson argued that all of the New Testament must have been written before 70 AD. Similarly, in The Date of Mark’s Gospel, James Crossley suggests that Mark could have been written as early as the late 30s or early 40s AD.

Early dates for the Gospels means that it is more likely that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who were still alive. Like many scholars, Aslan believes that most of the New Testament, with the possible exception of Luke-Acts, is pseudepigraphal (p. xxvi, 204). They were supposedly written by someone else who ascribed it to a more famous person to give it more prestige and authority. Aslan does not explain why someone would name a Gospel, they had written after Matthew or Mark who were not exactly high profile figures.

There is no evidence that the Gospels were ascribed to anyone else, such as an ancient manuscript of Matthew with the title “The Gospel according to Bartholomew”, or that the early Christians thought they were written by someone else or had different names.

Some scholars claim that the titles, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were not in the original manuscripts, but we do not have the original manuscripts so how would they know? They do not refer to themselves as the authors in the text. However, another ancient biographer Plutarch (46-120AD), who was the author of Parallel Lives, which contained 46 biographies of ancient figures, also did not include his name in the text. There is no suggestion that Parallel Lives is pseudepigraphal. Many scholars are inconsistent when it comes to the New Testament. they have one set of standards and criteria for the New Testament and another for every other text from the ancient world.

Because most people were illiterate at the time, Aslan says that the apostles were illiterate (p. 171), so they could have written the New Testament. He also says that Jesus’ brother James was probably illiterate and could not written the Epistle of James (p. 203-204). Aslan does not really know if the apostles or James was literate or not. Even if they were illiterate, that does not mean they could not have written the New Testament books attributed to them. Paul was literate and educated, but he did not physically write all of his epistles. He dictated some of them to a scribe (Romans 16:22). If James and the apostles could not write, they could have simply dictated to a scribe. Quite frankly, I do not understand why this is not obvious.

(There is some debate about whether Paul wrote the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. I have addressed this controversy here.)

Aslan also claims that Jesus was probably illiterate (p. 35). However, Jesus was addressed as a rabbi (Mark 9:5, 14:45, Luke 19:39, John 1:38, 3:2, 20:16) which suggests he must have been literate. Jesus read in the synagogue in Nazareth, however Aslan claims this must have been made up because there was no synagogue in Nazareth (p. 25, 35). However, only a handful of synagogues in Israel from before 70 AD. This is because synagogues were often just a room in a house, so archaeologists would not be able to identify them.

In their quest for the historical Jesus, historians have proposed criteria of authenticity to determine whether or not the words and actions of Jesus in the Gospels are authentic. These include the criteria of multiple attestations which means the more historical sources there is for an event, the more certain we can be that it is historically accurate. Aslan writes that Matthew and Luke “were completely unaware of each other’s work'(p. 36) and both say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Two independent sources, which say Jesus was most likely born in Bethlehem, should mean that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. However, Aslan writes that Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem (p. 33). He has no historical evidence such as an ancient manuscript saying Jesus was born in Nazareth. Instead, he argues that Matthew and Luke said that Jesus was born in Bethlehem because that was where the Messiah was supposed to be born (p. 31).

Aslan claims that Luke got it wrong about the date of the census during the Syrian governorship of Quirinius which was in 6AD, not 4 BC, and which the reason Joseph and Mary had to go to Bethlehem, which they did not need to do (p. 30). He even suggests that Luke knew that what he was writing was not historically accurate,

“What is important to understand about Luke’s infancy narrative is that his readers, still living under Roman dominion, would have known that Luke’s account of Quirinius’s census was factually inaccurate. Luke himself, writing a little more than a generation after the events he describes, knew that what he was writing was technically false. This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have no idea what we in the modern world even mean when we say the word “history”.” (p. 30)

I wonder what Aslan thinks was going on in Luke and Matthew’s heads. They knew Jesus was not born in Bethlehem so he could not have been the Messiah, but they believed Jesus was the Messiah, so they said he was born in Bethlehem.

In what appears to be a case of Aslan imposing his own presuppositions on the ancient writers, Aslan makes Luke and the other Gospel writers sound like postmodernists, “for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths” (p, 31), as though facts and truths were two different things. There may be modern-day ideologically driven postmodernist “historians” who believe that history is something which you can make up to say what you want it to say, but that does not Matthew and Luke were like that, especially when we consider that there was no advantage for the Gospel writers to make up evidence that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God because this belief would bring persecution upon themselves.

It is not clear why Luke would make up a story about Joseph and Mary having to go to Bethlehem for a census if everyone knew the census did not happen. He could have simply said they went to Bethlehem because they had relatives there. it is plausible and it cannot be easily disproved.

In contrast, William Ramsay as written,

“Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of a true historic sense … In short, this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.” (William Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1915, p. 222)

Aslan says that Quirinius was not the governor of Syria when Jesus was born around 4 BC but from after 6 AD. However, we do not know who was the governor of Syria from 4 BC to 1 BC. In fact, Luke 2:2 is the only historical reference for who was governor of Syria at that time and Luke would have known more than we do today.

It has been suggested that Quirinius was governor of Syria twice, first around 4BC and late after 6 AD (Darrell Bock, Studying the Historical Jesus, Baker Academic, Michigan, 2002, p 69-71). Luke says that the census during which Jesus was born was the first census (Luke 2:2). He also mentioned the census which provoked the revolt of Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37) (p 42-43), which would have been the second census.

Aslan also ignores the criteria of multiple attestations when he claims that Josephus’ single account of the death of John the Baptist is more reliable than the four New Testament accounts (p. 82). He writes that the Gospel writers “seem to confuse the place of John’s execution, the fortress of Machareus [according to Josephus], with Antipas’s court in the city of Tiberius” (pp. 81-82), even though the Gospels do not say where John was executed.

Aslan is somewhat agnostic about whether or not Jesus performed miracles. He says there is “more accumulated historical material confirming Jesus’s miracles” than there is for “his birth in Nazareth” (p 104). There is no historical evidence Jesus was born in Nazareth. Then he says, “To be clear, there is no evidence to support any particular miraculous action by Jesus. Attempts by scholars to judge the authenticity of one or another of Jesus’s healings or exorcisms have proven a useless exercise.”(p. 104) Aslan does not explain why “accumulated historical material” does not constitute historical evidence. it is a question of worldview rather than evidence. Historians with a materialistic or naturalistic worldview are going to accept evidence for miracles. It has little to do with the quantity or quality of the evidence.

Aslan writes that there were other miracle workers, exorcists and magicians in the ancient world (p. 108). Jesus was later accused of being a magician. However, Aslan points out that Jesus was different from a magician and other exorcists and miracles workers because he never charged a fee for his services (p. 110). This is probably the only thing I learned from Aslan’s book.

To be continued in Part Two.