![]() The difficulty here is that neither the earliest gospel sources we have (Mark and Q) nor the later ones (Matthew, Luke, and John) portray Jesus as a revolutionary zealot. First, he believes that after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD, the authors of the gospels had to “transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifist preacher” and that “all traces of revolutionary zeal to be removed” (p. – Aslan’s central thesis suffers from major problems. After Jesus’ death, “something extraordinary happened,” he writes, but concludes that whatever happened is “outside the scope of history” (p. ![]() Aslan agrees that the disciples probably did have experiences of the resurrected Jesus. ![]() – Provides a surprisingly honest, though brief, discussion of the resurrection of Jesus. I came away with a much deeper understanding of why Jesus eschewed the title of ‘Messiah/Christ’, freighted as it was with political connotations – Contains a lot of very interesting information on the religio-political climate of 1st century Judea. Reza Aslan’s central thesis in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is that Jesus was a revolutionary who predicted Rome’s sudden overthrow and a restoration of Jewish political sovereignty, like many other messianic figures of that period. ![]()
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