Jul 15, 2014 Amnon Peery Evangelic, Christian 0
Mosaic of Jesus at the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. (Wikimedia Commons)
Upstate New York in the early 19th century was known as the “Burned-Over District,” on account of the wildfires of religious enthusiasm that regularly swept through the area. The revivals came and went, but one of the preachers to emerge from the Burned-Over District turned out to be the founder of an enduring new faith—Joseph Smith, the creator of Mormonism. So, too, with Judea in the 1st century C.E. The Jewish population, filled with resentment for their Roman occupiers and for the priestly class that collaborated with the Empire, had an insatiable appetite for prophets and preachers. Our best source for Jewish life in this time and place, Josephus’ The Jewish War, is like a roll-call of self-declared messiahs. One of these, known only as “the Egyptian,” led 30,000 Jews in a march on Jerusalem, threatening to seize power; another, a rabbi named Judas, tried to convince the Jews to stop paying taxes and to accept God alone as their ruler. But of all those charismatic figures, only one is remembered today: Jesus of Nazareth.
Although Reza Aslan’s new biography of Jesus is titled Zealot, he acknowledges that Jesus was not, strictly speaking, a Zealot at all. The capital-Z Zealots were a revolutionary political party that emerged in Jerusalem at the time of the uprising against Rome in 66 C.E., long after Jesus died. But the idea of “zeal,” in Hebrew kinah, had a long and potent history in Judaism, dating all the way back to the Israelites’ wandering in the desert. The original zealot was Phineas, the grandson of Aaron, who in the book of Numbers impales an Israelite and his pagan bedmate with a javelin. This murder wins God’s strong approval: “Phineas … has turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, because he was zealous for my sake.” Zeal, then, is a jealous passion for the sanctity of God and a fierce desire for revenge on God’s enemies.
In Judea at the time of Jesus, zeal was both a religious passion and a political one. God had promised the land of Israel as an inheritance for his people forever; yet now the Romans were in charge, their troops guarding the Jerusalem Temple, their tax-collectors feeding on the livelihood of the poor. In these circumstances, the desire for national independence was at the same time a longing to restore God’s sovereignty. The two motives combined in the idea of the Messiah, a figure who was supposed to be both a divine redeemer and an earthly king. It was this fusion of worldly and otherworldly grievances that made Judea such a difficult place for the Romans to govern: Every time a legionary misbehaved, the Jews were offended on God’s behalf. There were so many of these provocations that, reading Josephus, one has the impression that the disastrous rebellion of 66 was only a matter of time.
For thousands of years, however, Christianity tended to remove Jesus from this historical context. Starting with Saint Paul, Christian doctrine emphasizes Christ as a cosmic principle—the Logos, the son of God—at the expense of Jesus as a human being. It was only with the rise of the “quest for the historical Jesus,” in the biblical criticism of the 18th century, that Christians began to acknowledge that Jesus was a Jewish preacher, whose ideas about God and redemption were drawn from the common culture of his time.
To understand Jesus, Aslan argues in Zealot, it’s necessary to understand that culture and the zeal that was at its core. Drawing on a well-established body of scholarship, Aslan paints a vivid, accessible portrait of Jesus as a Jewish nationalist, “a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine.” He knows that, even now, this idea will come to many Christian readers as a shock: The real Jesus, he writes, “bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.”
There are, of course, some serious problems facing anyone who wants to write about the historical Jesus. Like Moses, Buddha, or Muhammad, Jesus is known to us not through objective documents—the earliest secular reference to him comes in another work by Josephus, written some 60 years after his death—but through religious scriptures. And these scriptures—the Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul—are, as Aslan shows, the products an internal Christian struggle to define just how Jesus should be remembered. Their goal was not factual accuracy but spiritual truth, which makes it very hard to evaluate them as historical evidence.
In Jesus’s case, the Gospel writers were driven in large part by the need to make his story conform with pre-existing Jewish expectations about the Messiah. Understanding this helps us make sense of some of the conflicts and contradictions in the four Gospels. Aslan takes as an example the problem of figuring out just where Jesus came from. Everyone familiar with Christmas carols knows that Jesus was born in Bethlehem; yet he is also known as Jesus of Nazareth, a small town in the Galilee.
To explain this discrepancy, the gospel of Luke invents a deeply implausible story about how, just before Jesus’s birth, his parents traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to comply with a Roman census. The details make no sense, but as Aslan explains, that was beside the point. Jesus had to be given roots in Bethlehem so that he could be born in the same city as King David—the Messiah, after all, was supposed to be a descendant of David’s house.
The paradox of writing about Jesus is that we can only form an idea of him from the scriptures we have, yet we can only evaluate the scriptures if we have an idea of what he must have been like. Aslan marches boldly into this vicious circle, guided by the certainty that the real Jesus must have been, above all, a Jewish zealot. He was a figure like “the Egyptian,” or the rabbi Judas, or for that matter John the Baptist: a religious virtuoso who played on the familiar tropes of Jewish grievance to ignite a mass movement. “The new world order he envisioned,” Aslan writes at characteristically high volume, “was so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response would be to arrest and execute [his followers] for sedition.”
There is much to be said for this point of view, and Aslan’s reading of the Gospels helps to clarify some of their ambiguities. Take, for instance, the moment when Jesus is asked, “Is it lawful to pay the tribute to Caesar or not?” In response, he takes a coin and asks whose picture is on it. “It is Caesar’s,” comes the reply; to which Jesus says, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” At least, that is how the King James Bible translates his words; and in this form, their message seems to be a kind of political quietism. Keep paying taxes, Jesus seems to advise, and obey the government, since money and worldly affairs are the government’s concern. But entrust your soul, which is what really counts, to God.
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Menachem Begin in December 1942 wearing the Polish Army uniform of Gen. Anders’ forces with his wife Aliza and David Yutan; (back row) Moshe Stein and Israel Epstein
(photo credit: JABOTINSKY ARCHIVES)
During the inauguration of a memorial to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad in Jerusalem’s Sacher Park on January 24, 2020, before the climax of Holocaust remembrance events at which Russian President Vladimir Putin was given a central platform, we were stunned to hear a rendition of The Blue Kerchief (Siniy
Giant figures are seen during the 87th carnival parade of Aalst February 15, 2015
The annual carnival in Aalst, Belgium, is expected to take place on Sunday with even more antisemitic elements than in previous years.
Aalst’s organizers have sold hundreds of “rabbi kits” for revelers to dress as hassidic Jews in the carnival’s parade. The kit includes oversized noses, sidelocks (peyot) and black hats. The organizers plan to bring back floats similar to the one displayed in 2019 featuring oversized dolls of Jews, with rats on their shoulders, holding banknotes.
Pope Francis waves as he arrives at the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in the southern Italian coastal city of Bari, Italy February 23, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli.
Pope Francis on Sunday warned against “inequitable solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying they would only be a prelude to new crises, in an apparent reference to US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace proposal.
Francis made his comments in the southern Italian port city of Bari, where he traveled to conclude a meeting of bishops from all countries in the Mediterranean basin.
Palestinians walk past a shop selling fruits in Ramallah, Feb. 20, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.
Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have reached an agreement to end a five-month long trade dispute, officials said on Thursday.
The dispute, which opened a new front in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, began in September when the PA announced a boycott of Israel calves. The PA exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank under interim peace deals.
Antisemitic caricatures on display at the annual carnival in Aalst, Belgium. Photo: Raphael Ahren via Twitter.
Disturbing images emerged on Sunday of the annual carnival at Aalst, Belgium, showing an astounding number of antisemitic themes, costumes, displays and statements.
Israeli journalist Raphael Ahren documented people dressed as caricatures of Orthodox Jews, a fake “wailing wall” attacking critics of the parade, blatantly antisemitic characters and puppets wearing traditional Jewish clothes and sporting huge noses.
Feb 02, 2020 0
The remarks from the US official came in wake of the Palestinian decision to reject the administration’s peace plan. US PRESIDENT Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrive to...The stench of anti-Semitism always hovers over Switzerland’s Lake Geneva when the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is meeting there. The foul emanations reached a new nadir last week with UNHRC’s publication of a “database” of companies doing business in the disputed territories in Israel.
Following the publication of the list, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, deputy director for advocacy of NGO Human Rights Watch, stated, “The long-awaited release of the U.N. settlement business database should put all companies on notice: To do business with illegal settlements [sic] is to aid in the commission of war crimes.”
One of the many things that annoys me about politicians is how sure they are of themselves. Everything is black and white. Every idea is good or bad. Take globalism, for example. You either love it or hate it. It works or it doesn’t.
Another thing that annoys me is how so much of a politician’s life revolves around power: Do everything you can to get it, and everything you can to keep it.
Why am I ranting? Because, while our politicians have been consumed with power and the media with the fights over power, a threat to our nation has been virtually ignored.
Blue and White Party leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid are establishing their diplomatic credentials in the immediate run-up to Israel’s March 2 election with an insult to a U.S. administration that has arguably provided Israel with more diplomatic gains than any previous administration.
The Times of Israel reported that at a campaign stop in front of English-speaking Israelis, Gantz accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “of neglecting bipartisan ties in favor of exclusive support from U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” under the headline “Gantz pledges to mend ties with U.S. Democrats if elected.”
Bipartisanship was in short supply at the State of the Union address earlier this month—with one notable exception.
Nancy Pelosi had been looking dyspeptic, shuffling the papers she would later rip to shreds, when President Donald Trump reminded his audience that “the United States is leading a 59-nation diplomatic coalition against the socialist dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.”
Suddenly, the House Speaker applauded. Trump then introduced “the true and legitimate president of Venezuela: Juan Guaidó.”
The law professor Alan Dershowitz has thrown a legal hand-grenade into America’s political civil war by claiming to have evidence that former President Barack Obama “personally asked” the FBI to investigate someone “on behalf” of Obama’s “close ally,” billionaire financier George Soros.
He made his cryptic remark in an interview defending U.S. President Donald Trump against claims he interfered in the prosecution of his former adviser, Roger Stone.