Zealot by Reza Aslan

If Aslan ever writes a fictional retelling of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, I will be the first to pre-order it. His writing is fluid and descriptive, yet still crisp. He seems quite knowledgeable about the politics of Ancient Judea, and he is able to bring it to life. 

As an historical account of the life of Jesus, and a history of early Christianity, however, this book is awful. Aslan's approach to Biblical criticism pushes all bounds of reason. He speaks as if he has read Q, the hypothesized source text that many believe informed Matthew and Luke, proclaiming with some specificity not only what was but also what was not in it, going beyond what even many of the more audacious scholars would dare assert about a text from which we don't even have the smallest fragment and which is not mentioned in any historical source.

His presentation of the intellectual and religious history of Judaism is a bit confused. He looks at all of the ideological currents through a purely political lens and therefore misses the deeper elements of where first century Judaism was relative to later and earlier periods.

He claims elements of Christian teaching as too foreign to Judaism to have come from the Jewish Jesus, even when the teachings were a central part of the messages of some of the prophets and even, at points, where they were fairly representative of the beliefs of the followers of the Pharisees of the day. He quotes passages of Deuteronomy which he claims would have been beyond question by any Jew, when those same passages are directly challenged by other texts of the Hebrew Bible (for example, Isaiah 56, which was plainly written as a rejection of the application of certain of Deuteronomy's laws).

Ultimately, because OTHER messiahs imagined themselves as political figures, Aslan seems to think it impossible that Jesus, who plainly, even to Aslan, had his own unique view of what it meant to be Messiah, could have reimagined the idea so dramatically. He openly wrestles with figuring out what Jesus could possibly have meant by ideas like the Son of Man and Kingdom of Heaven and then, despite the evidence that Aslan, himself, lays out, decides that he could only have meant armed rebellion against Rome because a Jewish peasant couldn't possibly have had a different idea... until after Jesus' crucifixion. He readily admits the obvious fact that, at that point, Jesus' peasant followers were able to re-imagine Messiah-ship just fine.

While, from a writing perspective, this book was a joy to read, from the perspective of the history in it, it was borderline torturous. From the bold proclamations about the contents of texts that we've never seen to the absolute certainty that the Kingdom of Heaven was an earthly Kingdom (despite Aslan's own admission that the only text that predates Jesus that uses the term uses it to refer to a spiritual dominion), the shoddiness of his arguments, and the absolute certainty with which he asserts them becomes rather grating.

If you're interested in a semi-historical story of political intrigue in first century Judea, you might enjoy reading this book as the writing is great and Aslan really does make the period come alive, but don't go into the book expecting its historical claims about Jesus of Nazareth to be unimpeachable, or even remotely reasonable.