Sunday, August 4, 2013

Stephen Prothero Asks The Most Important Question About Reza Aslan's Book ZEALOT

Here in The Washington Post:

What are we to make of Jesus’s apparent lack of interest in doing anything practical whatsoever to prepare for holy war? If he has come to fight for “a real kingdom, with an actual king,” where are his soldiers and their weapons? And why no battle plan?


The reason this is the most important question about the book is that its answer, which Prothero does not provide, exposes the false choice between a Jesus who is a political revolutionary, the argument of Aslan's book, and a Jesus who is the founder of a spiritual religion whose kingdom is not of this world, the argument of most Christians and especially of the Fourth Gospel.


As an apocalyptic preacher, Jesus' thorough-going eschatology fully expected God to handle the practical details of the holy war to end all holy wars, a war which was coming imminently, when the Son of Man would descend from heaven with a shout and the angels of God would gather up the wicked in bundles and cast them into the eternal flames, and God would install his holy one on the throne of God in a heavenly Jerusalem descended from heaven to earth on the very spot where the temple of Herod once stood, its stones not left one upon another.

The framework for this interpretation was first erected by Albert Schweitzer about a century ago, and while a fair number of New Testament scholars continue to build on his work, like James Tabor and Dale Allison, Reza Aslan is not one of them.