There is a sense in which each “biographer” of Jesus of Nazareth is like my young son: once I finish the work then I will know what the subject looks like.
The stories that grew up around him have affected the world for two thousand years and have touched the deepest parts of our humanity with their simplicity of image and their promise of “salvation“. He is portrayed as a charismatic man who lived with intense purpose and drive, who had an existential thrust to his life, who cared deeply about human beings, and who wrestled with profound questions of ethics. There is a sense in which Jesus is a model for human beings to follow. He was a man of his time who held the assumptions and beliefs of his era. Think for a moment of the Christian hero, Jesus. The bible, for example, means by means of its stories. We do indeed give form and meaning to concepts and ideas in works of the imagination that we create including paintings and stories. Isn’t that an amazing insight? Why do I find it important? “I will when I finish the painting,” he said as he began to paint. The teacher came up behind him and said, “What are you going to paint?” He stood there holding a brush ready to start painting. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time and the birth of a religion.When our first son was about four he went to play school one day and immediately went over to an easel. Zealot yields a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of Jesus of Nazareth's life and mission. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity. Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. Who was the Jewish peasant who, two thousand years ago, walked across what is now Palestine to gather followers with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God? Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret and ultimately the seditious King of the Jews whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime.
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