Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

This book provides a very interesting view to the history of Christianity and its belief system. It paints a picture of Jesus of Nazareth as a revolutionary rebel, challenging the status quo and trying to reverse the wealth and power dynamics of the society he lived in. Religion lessons in school would've been way more interesting if these aspects would've been discussed!

For a long time, I've thought that pretty much everything in the Bible is made up. Apparently, this is not the case. This book provides an interesting dive into the historical aspects of Jesus and the Bible and the religious layers added onto the accounts later on.

I've never thought about the political situation in ancient Palestine and knew practically nothing about the Roman occupation and the status of the Palestinian Jews. This book gave me a whole new understanding of how modern Christianity was born – and created – and what its relationship with Jesus' teachings and views is like. (Very distant and often contradictory.) I also learned about one of the earliest roots of antisemitism: the Jews were explicitly blamed for killing Jesus in an attempt to appeal to the Romans who became the biggest target audience for early Christianity. This was very interesting to me.

The book is a well-functioning mix of nonfiction and academic literature. The main book is in literary style, while the notes are more academic and contain a lot of sources. They're still quite readable, at least in my opinion.

My biggest grievance with the book is not providing the original names of the people discussed. Jesus' original name (Yeshu) is mentioned, but anyone else's is not. I would have also liked to know the definition for a cult, as Aslan often refers to the "Jewish cult". And I was left wondering why Jesus started to follow John the Baptist in the first place. Maybe it's not known, but it could've been addressed. However, these are quite small things; it's a very good book.

Over the past four years I've read several books, similar in concept to this one, including many by Bart Ehrman who possibly has the largest number of texts in the area including: [b:Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth|11543839|Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth|Bart D. Ehrman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328053160s/11543839.jpg|16483538], [b:Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them|6101996|Jesus, Interrupted Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them|Bart D. Ehrman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348078937s/6101996.jpg|6279259], [b:From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity|2397133|From Jesus to Constantine A History of Early Christianity|Bart D. Ehrman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1438441668s/2397133.jpg|2404151][b:The New Testament|260609|The New Testament (Great Courses, #656)|Bart D. Ehrman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1409471782s/260609.jpg|17875076], and a good portion of [b:The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption & Restoration|240196|The Text of the New Testament Its Transmission, Corruption & Restoration|Bruce M. Metzger|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388535910s/240196.jpg|232680].

Of the group, which has a lot of overlap in general thesis and examples, this is by far the best in terms of presentation of a story and all the details. Aslan's writing is interesting, evocative, well-researched, and intrinsically entertaining. As a product, in part, of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, I'm loathe to acknowledge a graduate of Iowa's wriiting program, but Aslan certainly does great credit to his alma mater. He does a relatively good job of describing his own background for those interested in his viewpoint from a historical perspective. He also does an excellent job of pointing out what his own opinions are as well as highlighting where his though differs from that of other scholars in the field and where theirs differs from each other.

While this is most assuredly a popular-press title and aimed at a far broader audience (like many of Ehrman's works) than the more specialized scholarly treatises he references, I have to take Aslan (or far more likely his editors) to task for the poor presentation/layout of the notes provided in the back. The book would appear to be relatively well footnoted with exception to the fact that the footnotes don't appear within the text, nor do they appear even at the bottom of the pages. Even worse, the 50+ pages of excellent (and actually read-worthy) notes in the end are sorted by chapter and have no indicators to the portions of the main text to which they directly relate, which make them terrifically painful for other scholars to contemplate using in any functional way. Hopefully future editions will at least include numbered indicators in the main text that tie to the notes in the back. While this is aimed toward the masses, it's really a shame that the presentation of the notes within the book wasn't handled a bit better. At least the biblical references were included within the primary text - and these in themselves do a great job of indicating the synoptic nature of the New Testament gospels.

One thing that Aslan includes that I haven't seen thus far in much of my reading is a fantastic overview of first century Palestine from a sociological and political perspective to help put the balance of the story into context. All of the major players seem to be well represented and given reasonable weight. If only more histories could be written in this way, perhaps the world would read non-fiction for entertainment rather than the litany of romance, thrillers, sci-fi/fantasy, and general fiction that dominates the best-seller lists. His overview is not only interesting in and of itself, it takes up almost the first third of the text and continues on as necessary through the remainder of the text to provide continued context.

In summation, the book was well-researched, entertainingly presented and phenomenally interesting, even to someone who's read the majority of the details in the recent past. I would highly recommend this to anyone and everyone (regardless of their religious leanings), particularly as the subject concerns two of the most influential figures in all of western history/philosophy. Aslan presents some excellent facts, ideas, and thoughts that are assuredly not known by a majority of people, who really should be aware of them.