Eastern Orthodox Churches and Western Churches happen to celebrate Easter, the holiest of Christian festivals, commemorating the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, together as it happens to fall this year on 20 April. This is not always the case as Easter usually falls on the first Sunday after the lunar vernal equinox. Last year, 2013, for instance, the Eastern Orthodox churches celebrated Easter on 5 May, while Western churches celebrated Easter on 31 March. However, this is not the subject of this phenomenal study. It is about Jesus, the “Zealot” channeling the public anger of a subject and oppressed people, the Jews at the time of Jesus, against their Roman overlords and the corrupt Jewish priestly elite that collaborated and connived with the Roman rulers to persecute the hapless peasants of Palestine. Putting Jesus in the pillory so to speak did not initially prompt the pendulum of history to swing in favour of Christianity. Yet the Romans and their Jewish subjects needed a villain, and Jesus was about as bete as noire can get. Still, why was he so revered? Four centuries after his execution by crucifixion, Christianity was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire. And, Zealot is no tragic hero's tale. Another gripe is that this work, despite a perfunctory prologue and opening chapter, “A Hole in the Corner”, the book is not only intensely personal, penned from the perspective of a Muslim who converted to Christianity and draws parallels between the Roman Empire of yesteryear and the contemporary United States, but focuses on Jesus the man, demystifying the Christ, and elaborating on how the elite, Roman and Jewish, had a stake in penalizing Jesus, the revolutionary “Zealot”. “When I was 15 years old, I found Jesus,” Reza Aslan, author of this extraordinary and seminal work elucidates. The Iranian-born author was raised in the United States and became a committed Christian until he embarked on an academic career in religious studies. “The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions — just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years — left me confused and spiritually unmoored,” Aslan concedes. And, there is an anomaly: Jesus was both selfless prophet and an ambitious perfectionist. “All of the gospels, including the noncanonized scriptures, confirm Jesus's miraculous deeds, as does the earliest source material Q. Nearly a third of the gospel of Mark consists solely of Jesus's healings and exorcisms. The early church not only maintained a vivid memory of Jesus's miracles, it built its very foundation upon them,” the author elucidates. Aslan points out that Jesus was not the only miracle worker trolling the Palestinian countryside healing the sick and casting out demons. There was Honi the “Circle-Drawer” and his grandsons Hilqiah and Hanan the Hidden. There was Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa and Apollonious of Tyana. Magicians were indeed ubiquitous, as the author stresses and “dark magic” was considered a form of charlatanry punishably by death under “After all, in America of the 1980s, being Muslim was like being from Mars. My faith was a bruise, the most obvious symbol of my otherness; it needed to be concealed. Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America's national drama,” the author recollects. I personally, was astounded by his confessions. “Today, I can say that two decades of rigorous academic research into the origins of Christianity has made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ,” Indeed, I personally, was flabbergasted. Readers of Aslan's precious works will not be surprised at how meticulous he is. His first work, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam has been translated into 13 languages Beyond Fundamentalism have received considerable critical acclaim. What I find fascinating is that along these trails of the life and times of Jesus is that Aslan jots down everything with such precision. He does not pretend to have all the answers, and he explains precisely why that is so. The pedagogical purpose of his work depends on several sources, but as he illustrates there is very little historical evidence of Jesus the man apart from biblical stories. Even the gospels do not have much to say about the early life of Jesus, and focus mostly on his ministry, the last three years of his life. And, the famous first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus does not shed much light on the life of Jesus the man. “Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus, the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that he defied, the more I was drawn to him. Indeed, the Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost became so much more real to me than the detached, unearthly being I has been introduced to in church,” Aslan explains. And, hence for me, as I leafed through the pages of this New York Times bestseller, I understood better what I had considered something of a bombshell to begin with. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword,” Mathew 10:34 in the New Testament. The author does make clear that as far as Josephus was concerned there were 24 fractious Jewish sects in and around Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, not taking into account other sects in the dejected Samaria and the unruly Galilee, the home region of Jesus. However, as the Bible states and Josephus elaborates there were certain sects or schools of Jewish thought that had preeminence. First and foremost were the Pharisees, who were “primarily lower- and middle class rabbis and scholars who interpreted the laws for the masses” and whom the Bible asserts that Jesus did not generally approve of. Second, were the Sadducees, a “more conservative and with regard to Rome, more accommodating priests from wealthier farm-owning families” who is the author's claim that they collaborated with the Roman authorities accounts for the distrust of Jesus, the “Zealot”, of their motives. Josephus mentions another group, the Essenes, situated on a remote hilltop in the Dead Sea valley named Qumran who eschewed the authority of the Temple. The birth of Jesus is a contentious issue claims the author. The Bible itself is vague on this particular subject. Jesus was presumably born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. He was known by tradition as the Nazarene. “Why, then, do Matthew and Luke, and only Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus was born not in Nazareth but in Bethlehem but in Bethlehem, even though the name Bethlehem does not appear anywhere else in the entire New Testament?” The answer, the author goes on to stipulate may be found in a single verse in the gospel of John. The Jews at the time of Jesus had conflicting views about the precise nature of the Messiah, the “Anointed One”. Incidentally, it was the ancient Egyptians who held the tradition that the pharaoh was not proclaimed king by coronation, rather by anointment with crocodile fat. Did the Jews borrow the tradition from the ancient Egyptians? “The Essenes apparently awaited two separate messiahs, one kingly, the other priestly, though most Jews thought of the Messiah as possessing a combination of both traits,” Aslan explains. Indeed, there was a traditional belief among Jews that the Messiah, a descendant of King David would be born in Bethlehem. Nazareth was out of the question, for no prophet “comes out of Galilee” as the Bible categorically states. “But as interest in the person of Jesus increased after his death, an urgent need arose among some in the early Christian community to fill in the gaps of Jesus's early years and, in particular to address the matter of his birth in Nazareth, which seems to have been used by his Jewish detractor do prove that Jesus could not possibly have been the Messiah, at least not according to the prophesies. Some kind of creative solution was required to push back against this criticism, some means to get Jesus's parents to Bethlehem so that he could be born in the same city as David,” the author didactically deducts. Yet, there was the conceptual problem that Jesus was not actually Joseph's son, but was conceived miraculously of the Virgin Mary. Luke, nevertheless, states that Joseph, the husband of Mary belonged to the house and the lineage of David”. The author's argument is, indeed, convincing. “The Wisdom of Solomon situated in heaven, the place where God's throne sits, where the angelic court sees to his every demand, and where his will is done always without fail. Yet the kingdom of God in Jesus's teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on a cosmic plane,” the author extrapolates. Acid remarks about this work abounds. Yet, Jesus emerge as a revolutionary figure who fought ideologically against those who held political power over the weak and the vulnerable peasants of Palestine. The country was divided into ethnically and religiously based communities who did not necessarily get along. The picture emerges that neither the Jews of the time were united, nor was Palestine exclusively Jewish. “If the Kingdom of God is neither purely celestial nor wholly eschatological, then what Jesus was proposing must have been a physical and present kingdom: a real kingdom with an actual king that was about to be established on earth,” the author adds. Jesus is portrayed as a “Zealot” an extreme nationalist anti-Roman Jewish group more akin to the fundamentalists of today. I am not sure if I was convinced, as I still view him as the very embodiment of Divine Love. Yet, by leafing through the pages of this study I understood better how Jesus metamorphosed into the Messiah. The Hellenized Jewish elite of the Palestine of the time had nothing to do with Jesus. He is presented as a peasant who hailed from a troublesome corner of the country, Galilee. The demons who haunted the Palestine of Jesus were apparently not those he cast out by exorcism, but rather they were the Roman imperial elite and their Jewish lackeys and the Jewish priestly elite. And, hence Jesus famous altercation with the traders and vendors in the Temple at Jerusalem. He obviously advanced the interests of the marginalized and most vulnerable group of the population of the day. The Galileans were viewed as troublemakers and uncouth. And, Jesus was widely believed to be a Galilean (a Nazarene) at heart, whether he was born in Bethlehem or not. The Roman rulers invented ever more ingenious forms of segregation. They adopted a policy of divide and rule as well as deployed the most brutal force to crush Jewish nationalism. Racial ideologies abounded precisely because the Romans could not comprehend why the Semitic Jews had such a superior complex. And, why they imagined their God to be over and above all other gods. Yet another bone of contention between the ruling Romans and the subject peoples they oppressed was why the designation “King of the Jews” was so important. And, indeed, in the end it was this particular charge regarded as high treason that led to the crucifixion of Jesus. Perhaps the author reads too much into the notion of Jesus as a Jewish nationalist, but his arguments are enthralling. “These abiding words of the Beatitudes are, more than anything else, a promise of impending deliverance from subservience and foreign rule,” Aslan notes. The open-minded reader cannot help but ponder the implications and religious ramifications of his assertions. Rome itself, and its colonies it spawned reached their zenith during the days of Jesus. Peoples, like the rebellious Galileans in particular and Jews who did not comply with Roman rules more generally, were persecuted with ever greater ruthlessness. Jesus had to be sacrificed and made an example of, for other Jewish “messiahs” to fall in line. One particular aspect of Aslan's study attracted my attention: women who served Jesus. In the chapter entitled “Follow me”, Aslan notes that according to the gospel of Luke, there were 72 disciples of Jesus and that “they undoubtedly included women, some of whom, in defiance of tradition, are actually named in New Testament: Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward, Chuza: Mary, the mother of James and Joseph; Mary, the wife of Clopas; Suzanna; Salome; and perhaps the most famousof all, Mary from Magdala, whom Jesus had cured of ‘seven demons'. That these women functioned as Jesus's disciples is demonstrated by the fact that all gospels present them traveling with Jesus from town to town, from his first days preaching in Galilee to his last breath on the hill of Golgotha,” Aslan observes. For the author, Jesus was special because he championed the poor, the dispossed and the sick. “The Kingdom of God is not some utopian fantasy wherein God vindicates the poor and the dispossessed. It is a chilling new reality in which God's wrath rains down upon the rich, the strong, and the powerful,” Aslan elucidates. “By the Finger of God” is an intriguing chapter and an eye-opener. “In the first century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mason, and far better paid,” the author explains. To me, this was a revelation. “Galilee especially abounded with charismatic fantasts claiming to channel the divine for a nominal fee. Yet from the perspective of the Galileans, what set Jesus apart from his fellow exorcists and healers was that he seemed to be providing the services free of charge,” the author observes. This again was yet another revelation. “By connecting his miracles with Isaiah's prophecy, Jesus is stating that in no uncertain terms that the year of the Lord's favor, the day of God's vengeance, which the prophets predicted, had finally arrived, God's reign has begun, ‘If by the finger of God I cast out demons, then surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you',” the author quotes Matthew and Luke. Yet, Aslan's study indicates that Jesus was not just an Galilean rabble-rouser. His mission was a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and the oppressed. He was, he declared over and over again “the Son of Man”, a phrase attested to in the Old Testament in the Books of Ezekiel, Daniel and the Psalms. The title never belittled his messianic identity. “When Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, using the description from Daniel as a title, he is making a clear statement about how views his identity and his mission,” the author concludes. The “Son of Man” is inextricably intertwined with the “Kingdom of God”. Nevertheless, there are other aspects of this most startling work that were as intriguing to me as the revelation of Jesus as a revolutionary “Zealot”. Ablutions, and purification by water, was so vividly described by the author in the chapter about John the Baptist, the Prophet Yehya in Islam and the Quran, in the chapter of Aslan's Zealot entitled “The Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness”. The centrality of purification by water in all monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — came to mind. And, Hindus, too, bathe in the waters of the sacred River Ganges. Since time immemorial, ablutions were an integral part of religious practice, first recorded in ancient Egypt. There was a continuum. In Islam ablution before prayer is compulsory. And, so it was among the priests of the temples in ancient Egypt. In Christianity, baptism is a key ritual in most churches. “The Jews revered water for its liminal qualities, believing it had the power to transport a person or an object from one state to another: from unclean to clean, from profane to holy,” the author notes. Last, but not least, on the subject of Easter “Paul makes a key point. Without the resurrection, the whole edifice of Jesus's claim to the mantle of Messiah comes crashing down,” as Aslan so aptly puts it.
