Thursday, August 15, 2013

To Fox News: Read the book next time


I will admit that I have sort of placed my faith on hold for the last five or six months (sorry, sunday
school teachers, I remember you said if you're not building it up, it's falling apart).  I've been trying to focus all my energy into my family and school.  I've been feeling quite lost and confused at church and now I'm in the nursery so I don't feel like much of a Mormon anymore.

I finally broke out of my funk and acknowledged reality again this past week.  I read Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.   I've debated for some weeks whether or not I should read this book.  I first heard about it on npr while driving home the day before it was released.  They interviewed Aslan who admitted that his book was about the humanity of Jesus.  After discussing it with Adam, I felt very discouraged about it.  How much good could a book that disagrees with my faith do for me?

The reality is that within Mormonism, I believe in Jesus Christ and God more than anything else.  I believe in Them even if Mormonism is all false.  Conversely, if I were to come to the conclusion that They aren't real, Mormonism would not be true.  I was very worried about reading a book that could literally make my beliefs fall apart and make me into an even greater outcast than I already am.

So I put it out of my mind until the Fox News thing happened.  While watching it, I kept thinking "lady, why didn't you read the book? Or even the prologue?"  So I decided I had to read the book.  There is nothing that makes a book more compelling for me than to have it be controversial.  Sad, but true.

So I bought it and read it with in four days (while being on vacation with my family and in-laws no less).  The book is split into three parts.  1. Historical context of Jesus, 2. Life of Jesus, and 3.  What happened immediately following the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus.

The history is pretty interesting, I learned a lot about Jerusalem and the Roman Empire from the time.  He reiterates many times throughout the book that the Apostles altered the story of Jesus when they wrote the books of the New Testament to suit what they needed them to say.  Mark is the first book written in 50 CE, then Luke and Matthew around 70 CE, and John in 100 CE (ish on the dates).  He uses the change in language and stories through the Gospels as evidence for the change in the early Christians.  Particularly important, is the growing Gentile audience.  Aslan claims that Paul is so important in the New Testament because he was preaching to a Gentile audience in Rome and elsewhere.  When the Christians in Jerusalem were scattered and killed during the last Jewish Rebellion in Jerusalem (the one where the Romans destroyed the Temple and evicted most of the Jews, they even changed the name of Jerusalem), Paul's teachings became more popular.

Aslan makes some interesting points, I never realized, for example, that Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, don't see eye to eye (I clearly need to reread the New Testament).  I never knew that from Jesus, James was actually the next leader (although for reasons Aslan describes that I wont go into, the New Testament is written to sound like Peter became the leader).  After James came a cousin of Jesus.   I also never considered that the story of Jesus going to Egypt as an infant and returning to Jerusalem would be a symbol of the story of Moses and a promise of the the role of Jesus.

Aslan's general thesis of Jesus being a Jewish man rather than a Christian Messiah was not that bothersome to me.  Mostly because a lot of things he uses as evidence don't exist in the Mormon church, but also because I agree that it is very difficult for a person to think beyond the constraints of the environment in which they are born into.  For the former, Aslan uses the Trinity as evidence of the New Testament being more Greek than Jewish.  After all, a lot of the text is not written by the actual authors (except for Luke), but by others.  In Judaism,  there is no such thing as a God man or a demigod.  They are plentiful in Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology.  The trinity makes the case that God and Jesus are the same and one can interpret the life of Jesus as also being the life of God.  I'll admit, I'm not particularly familiar with that idea so I may have understood it wrong.  But in Mormonism, we believe that everyone has the potential to be a god.  So I've taken that to mean that while Jesus was perfect, He was a man and will be a god someday.  I've always sort of been confused, aren't we all children of God?

Aslan does contest the virgin birth, but as a scientist that doesn't really bother me.  I did think it was interesting that the early Christian church emphasized the virginity of Mary so much that they reduced the significance of the siblings of Jesus (this is the primary reason Aslan believes that the role of James is downplayed in the New Testament).  Surprisingly to me, Aslan seemed to miss a point in this argument.  He later argues that when Jesus is called the son of Mary (rather than the son of Joseph as was common then) is potential evidence that Jesus was born out of wedlock.  But if he referred back to his own argument that the writers of the New Testament wanted to reinforce the virgin birth, it only makes sense that they would have written out Jesus, the son of Mary.

I really enjoyed this book largely because I felt a challenge to my beliefs so I needed to actively think.  The book itself is very well written, not too academic.  Aslan, with his four degrees, is actually a professor of creative writing and it shows.  He ends by saying,

"..the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth--Jesus the man--is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ.  He is, in short, someone worth believing in."

I'm still thinking it all through, but it was a great read.  If you'd like a more academic review, here is one from the New York Times written by a Yale professor of religion.