I am reading “Zealot”. I am surprised that the author does not cite Thomas Sheehan’s “The First Coming” since their themes and concepts are quite similar – Jesus of Nazareth came from an unsophisticated, rural community; that he developed a “zealous” philosophy that appealed to Aramaic-speaking Jews in the hinterlands of Judea; and that when he “took his show on the road” to challenge the Temple Cult in Jerusalem, he was arrested and executed for acts of sedition.
I am reading the chapter just before Saul of Tarsus makes his appearance. Aslan’s observatiions about the two groups of early Christians is particularly interesting as a language-based theory. The Jews of the Diaspora who spoke and read Greek, would carry the message of the risen Christ to the world.
The original Aramaic-speaking (and probably non-reading) Jews would primarily remain in Jerusalem and be slaughtered by the Romans in 70 AD. Their idea that Jesus of Nazareth was a faithful Jew (and like all Jewish males, a son of Yahweh); a Jew who was simply advocating the non-violent overthrow of the authorities of the Hellenized Temple Cult and of the Roman occupation forces.
Aslan also points out some interesting differences between the stories told by the gospel writers. The retelling of the scenes before the Sanhedrin and before Pontius Pilot are particularly interesting to me. They support the theory that the gospel of John is the least reliable version historically and contains early church theology that was evolving into that which would eventually become Fundamentalist Doctrine in America (as opposed to traditional Christian Doctrine). It seems to me that doctrines such as the Inerrancy Doctrine of the Fundamentalists are consistent with anti-intellectual values common in American politics.
Fundamentalists still seem to ignore the Hellenistic premise of John’s gospel – that Christ was the Logos, the original perfect Word, in the Platonic sense. They ignore the fact that the earliest gospel of Mark does not include a resurrection scene. When Fundamentalists promote the idea that the Bible was divinely dictated by the godhead, they oversimplify issues of faith to the point that scholarly research becomes their Scientific Creationism which they insist should be taught to every American child in every American schoolroom, and be paid for with public funds.
And then there’s that weird book that the church fathers nearly deleted from the Canon in the 4th century AD – the Book of Revelation.
How about this theory? Revelation was one of many books written between the second century BC and the second century AD that all purported to be eschatalogical visions of a new kingdom ruled by the godhead and by those who were faithful to the godhead, with the violent exclusion of the unfaithful.
Implicit in those visions is the possibility of an existent archetype commonly known as “blood ransom”. This archetype is present still in the mindsets of Middle Eastern cultures and explains why those cultures still insist upon annihilating each other to this very day.
“You’re unfaithful! Die!”
“No, you’re unfaithful! You die!”
“No, you.”
“No, you.”
dzinor2013 