Unless the publisher censors it, this column will be published in the Springfield News-Leader on Wednesday, Oct. 2 Though he lived more than four centuries before Jesus, there is little doubt that Athens’ most famous citizen, Socrates, was a real person. Three of his contemporaries wrote about him either during or immediately after his death. Aristophanes made fun of him. Xenophon and Plato, two of his students, spoke of him lovingly though all three of his contemporaries had their own agendas. Plato likely wrote his first works as a defense of his executed teacher. Of the five hundred pages of Plato’s collected dialogues in which Socrates is always the main character, there are probably fifteen or twenty pages that actually describe the people and circumstances of the historical Socrates. The rest is Plato’s own thinking and work, which was brilliant and world changing, but he is not playing fast and loose with the reputation of his beloved mentor but rather out of honor for him. Later generations would form a virtual religion around his writings and the much more profound work of Plato’s star student, Aristotle, finds its roots in the dialogues of Plato. In Reza Aslan’s recently published Zealot, Aslan attempts to describe the similar evolution of the Jesus tradition from Jewish revolutionary and wisdom teacher into the character of theological honorific fiction found in the canonical gospels and later church tradition. The book is, in my estimation, an uncomfortable blend of scholarly insight and romantic reflection making it unfit for use in a college classroom and possibly too controversial for a traditional Sunday School. We use Aslan’s wonderful book on the history of Islam in the World Religion courses we teach at Drury University but I doubt that few scholars will choose this life of Jesus over the equally readable and more accurate works on the historical Jesus by such scholars as Marcus Borg, John Crossan and John Spong but for reasons known only to the media, Aslan has appeared in more print and broadcast interviews in the last year than the three more serious scholars mentioned above combined. Unlike Socrates, apparently, no one who actually met Jesus in the flesh ever wrote about him. Paul, who was the first known writer to mention Jesus, only knew of him by reputation and through visions and yet his version of the Jesus tradition was so influential that we see echoes of Paul’s divination of the Palestinian teacher in almost everything said about him in the four New Testament gospels, all of which were written after Paul was dead and long after Jesus was dead. So, we are in possession of several versions of Jesus. There is the Jesus of history about whom scholars endlessly speculate. There is the Jesus of the gospels and another version in the early church and a dramatically different Jesus who is the creation of the Constantinian church. Sadly, the magical Jesus of Constantine is the triumphant one in almost every church for the past 1600 years. That being said, though I wish Aslan had allowed for some scholarly editing to remove about 20% of his book that is poorly done, what he has to say is so much better than most of the hymns and Sunday school literature used in churches today, I reluctantly recommend it to anyone who has the courage to think beyond what is commonly sanctioned under our fair city’s steeples.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 21:47:26 +0000
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