Zealot
Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee gathering followers to establish the "Kingdom of God." He was tortured and executed as a state criminal. Within decades, his followers would call him God. Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived.
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- Great post! One book that got a lot a press a few years back was Reza Aslan's "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth". It works to establish the historical Roman & Judaical context that Jesus the person would have been operating in. Probably a lot of crossover with the other books you've been reading.
- A trilogy of books from Reza Aslan: God: A Human History, Zealot, and No god but God.
These follow 1) the evolution of human conceptions of God, 2) the historical Jesus, and 3) the historical Muhammad, respectively. They're extremely accessible and have deeply influenced my thoughts on religion.
- After the Bible & The Quran, Reza Aslan’s “Zealot” (Christianity) & No god but God (Islam) provide some great historical context.
- This article disappointed me a little. For a deeper dive into this, I got a lot out of "Zealot" by Reza Aslan.
- For the record, I'm an atheist that just happens to be interested in biblical archeology and philology. I got no skin in this debate though.
There is very little question that Jesus the human being and Roman subject existed, professed some sort of fanatical messianic religious messages, and got executed for it. Stronger than any evidence for Jesus directly is the evidence for the existence of his brother, James, who was a respected religious leader in Jerusalem for about 25 years after the death of Jesus. It is James that Josephus was writing about--Jesus is only mentioned to explain who James is, "the brother of Jesus who some call Christ." But in addition to this one near-contemporaneous reference, there is also a dozen or so writers who talk about James in the 2nd century. That is a century after his death and the death of his brother, but these writers seem to be working from largely different sources so we can infer multiple historical accounts that would have existed at the time. If we agree that James existed, then the strongest argument for the existence of Jesus is that all of these motivated, non-Christian secular writers of the 1st and 2nd century would have been in a better position to know whether Jesus had existed, and if there was any doubt they would have definitely smeared James as having made up his imaginary brother. But none of them did.
If anyone is interested in this question btw, Reza Aslan's Zealot is an approachable book on the historical Jesus, what little we know for certain and the surprising amount we can confidently infer from the available evidence.
- I really enjoyed this book on the topic:
“Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is a book by Iranian-American writer and scholar Reza Aslan. It is a historical account of the life of Jesus and analyzes the various religious perspectives on Jesus as well as the creation of Christianity.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealot:_The_Life_and_Times_o...
