Bingo: Migrant. Jesus has often been identified as a migrant, although it is not likely he was born in Bethlehem and fled to Egypt; he was simply born in Nazareth. However, as he grew older, he likely did travel to local cities to work as a laborer.
I have a mixed religious history. My grandfather was Jewish, and I am ethnically part Ashkanazi. I was raised a Catholic and while I stopped going to church in my teens, I remained a person of faith until I was about 30 years old. At that time, I became an atheist and remain so to this day. Despite my atheism, I have remained interested in the historical Jesus. So much of my life revolved around his story, as I went to Catechism until I was confirmed at 13, and there were always new testament readings in church, from the gospels to Paul’s letters. My father gave me Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth some time ago, and I finally opened it up this week. It is a fascinating, extremely well written book that serves as a compelling history of Palestine, Judaism, and Rome, as much as it does an in-depth exploration of the historical Jesus.
The book generally covers the history between the Maccabean Revolt in 164 B.C.E to the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., where Roman bishops came together to make a pronouncement about Jesus’s nature (they declared that Jesus was the literal son of God, a progression of thought that was deeply influenced by Paul, whose preaching emphasized this point, as well as his urgence to abandon the adherence to Jewish law and the Jerusalem committee that arose after Jesus’s death). As for historical fact, we know that Jesus was born around 4 C.E., was an illiterate peasant of the time, and wandered parts of Palestine preaching to his fellow downtrodden. We also know that he was crucified for sedition. Beyond that, there is very little written about Jesus outside of the gospels.
Aslan does incredibly important work putting Jesus in his historical context. Using the text in the gospels, Aslan explains the gaps between our modern reading of Jesus’s life and how the people of his time viewed him and his works. For example, people of the time would have understood that Jesus being born in Bethlehem was not so much fact as the confirmation of earlier prophecies that stated the messiah would be of King David’s lineage. As Aslan remarks:
Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God. The descendant of King David. The promised messiah.
Aslan also talks about how Jesus’s miracles were viewed:
How one in the modern world views Jesus’s miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates raged within the early church over who Jesus was–a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?–there was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role as an exorcist and miracle worker.
Further, Alsan writes:
As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant. What mattered was Christology, not history.
Aslan explores Jesus’s own understanding of his identity. In the gospels, he shies from the “messiah” designation and more typically calls himself the Son of Man (Aslan goes at length to explain this term). He called for nothing less than a revolution, to turn over society by overthrowing the Romans, condemning the Jewish aristocracy and priests and elevating the poor and dispossessed. Jesus did not envision this as a peaceful change. Like any zealot, he understood that an uprising would likely be necessary. Aslan writes: “Jesus was not a fool. He understood what every other claimant to the mantle of the messiah understood: God’s sovereignty could not be established except through force.” The “blood-spattered God” of the Torah, Aslan states, “is the only God that Jesus knew and the sole God he worshipped.”
Aslan also debunks certain stories, such as Pontious Pilate’s supposed reluctance to condemn Jesus. As Aslan writes:
The gospels present Pilate as a righteous yet weak-willed man so overcome with doubt about putting Jesus of Nazareth to death that he does everything in his power to save his life…This is pure fiction. What Pilate was best known for was his extreme depravity, his total disregard for Jewish law and tradition, and his barely concealed aversion to the Jewish nation as a whole. During his tenure in Jerusalem he so eagerly, and without trial, sent thousands upon thousands of Jews to the cross that the people of Jerusalem felt obliged to lodge a formal complaint with the Roman emperor.
The book also goes into detail about how Jesus was understood in his own time and how he was later understood as Christianity was founded, much of that change due to the preaching of Paul. It also discusses how Christianity became distinct from Judaism as it became increasingly Romanized and more gentiles converted to the new religion.
All in all, this was a fantastic book. I would encourage anyone interested in the topic to pick it up.