Roman-Occupied PalestineĪslan’s book does an exemplary job of situating Jesus in a very particular historical moment, namely the region of Palestine, mostly in Judea but in the end Jerusalem, occupied by the Roman Empire and internally divided among mystics, militants, corroborators with the occupiers, and the masses of the poor who most acutely suffer from all of the above regimes. The essay that I’m going to attempt here is no complaint that the book isn’t more than it is it’s more a call to Christian teachers to look at the assumptions that the book makes (under the cover ID of the historian who does not make assumptions) and to think hard about the ways that we teach the life of Jesus among the faithful. Sometimes Zealot reveals a fairly strong grasp on the network of overlapping human phenomena that make New Testament Studies so difficult, and sometimes the book seems either unaware of or willfully ignorant of large and important arguments, bodies of knowledge, and traditions of inquiry.
I note all of that because Reza Aslan does some of those things very well. That’s why I always look upon my teachers and colleagues who do New Testament studies with some deference and great respect. In sum, the skillful New Testament interpreter is a true master of the liberal arts and a specialist, holding very particular bodies of learning in tension with the philosophical and rhetorical moves that the practice of synthesizing that learning requires. Beyond that, she must have the sort of philosophical mind that can situate a two-thousand-year tradition of Scriptural exegesis and theological commentary in some kind of relationship to what’s going on in the text and in the reconstructed historical contexts around all the steps along the way, and doing all of those things in a way that’s adequate to the ways that literary traditions work is just as difficult. To dig in for real, one must have some facility with ancient languages (preferably Aramaic as well as Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew) a grasp of Roman, Seleucid, Ptolemaic, and Parthian histories working familiarity with the rites and sacred texts of half a dozen worship-traditions, most of which are no longer extant the ability to spot references to the Hebrew Bible at all turns and a host of other skill-sets that most folks, myself included, simply do not have the drive to master.
Its difficulty comes from the wide range of academic departments involved in doing it well. I’ll say this up front: New Testament Studies is a hard discipline. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
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