Jesus: who He is, and who He wasn't

Allan Nadler writes in the Jewish Review of Books that Reza Aslan has written a book called Zealot, which is creating lots of controversy. The book, according to Nadler, claims that Jesus

was an illiterate peasant from the Galilee who zealously, indeed monomaniacally, aspired to depose the Roman governor of Palestine and become the King of Israel.

Aslan’s essentially political portrayal of Jesus thus hardly, if at all, resembles the depiction of the spiritual giant, indeed God incarnate, found in the Gospels and the letters of Paul.

The only novelty in Aslan’s book is his relentlessly reductionist, simplistic, one-sided and often harshly polemical portrayal of Jesus as a radical, zealously nationalistic and purely political figure.

What is Aslan's political agenda?

Aslan achieves the two central goals of his book with this distorted, and terribly unflattering, depiction of the treatment he alleges Jewish law demands of the foreigner. It at once hardens his argument about Jesus’s “fierce nationalism,” while at the same time creating an image of the Jews as a hateful bunch, profoundly intolerant of the mere presence of others in their land. It is difficult when reading this, and many similar blatant distortions, to suppress all suspicion of a political agenda lying just beneath the surface of Aslan’s narrative.