Zealot
I have just finished reading a book called "Zealot," by Reza Aslan.
Dr. Aslan is associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. He was born in Iran and is a Muslim. And his book is about Jesus. It is the result of twenty years of research on the New Testament and the beginnings of Christianity conducted at the University of Santa Clara, Harvard University and University of California Santa Barbara.
In my book Em busca de Deus (In search of God) I wrote a chapter about Jesus. It caused me a good deal of satisfaction to see that Aslan's opinions are the same as mine. But there is no question that his research was much more thorough than mine. And his book is definitely worth reading.
I do not regard Jesus as God, I regard him as a man. An extraordinary man for whom I have an enormous admiration. As a God, his intrinsic qualities can be taken for granted. As a man, he was totally exceptional. The fact that he changed the world cannot be dismissed; and no other man changed the world in such a profound manner.
I quote for you the last words of Reza Aslan's epilogue:
Two thousand years later the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus shoud 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, worth believing in.
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| Mortuary mask of Jesus, drawn by my uncle Francisco Mangabeira Albernaz |
Dr. Aslan is associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. He was born in Iran and is a Muslim. And his book is about Jesus. It is the result of twenty years of research on the New Testament and the beginnings of Christianity conducted at the University of Santa Clara, Harvard University and University of California Santa Barbara.
In my book Em busca de Deus (In search of God) I wrote a chapter about Jesus. It caused me a good deal of satisfaction to see that Aslan's opinions are the same as mine. But there is no question that his research was much more thorough than mine. And his book is definitely worth reading.
I do not regard Jesus as God, I regard him as a man. An extraordinary man for whom I have an enormous admiration. As a God, his intrinsic qualities can be taken for granted. As a man, he was totally exceptional. The fact that he changed the world cannot be dismissed; and no other man changed the world in such a profound manner.
I quote for you the last words of Reza Aslan's epilogue:
Two thousand years later the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus shoud 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, worth believing in.
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| My uncle's view of how the Last Supper must have been, according to the uses of the time. |
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