“A tough-minded, deeply political book” — my review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Reza Aslan’s best-selling ‘Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth‘

‘Zealot’?  A biography of Jesus could have no more provocative title.  But it turns out to be the perfect one for Reza Aslan’s unearthing (or should that be un-heavening?) of “the Jesus before Christianity.”  As he cogently demonstrates, the real Jesus — the radical Jew who preached, agitated, and was executed for his pains — was a far more complex figure than many Christians care to acknowledge.

The zeal in question is both religious and political.  At a time when this kind of zealotry is associated predominantly with Islamic extremists, it’s fascinating to see similar processes at work in first-century Jewish Palestine, which was occupied territory – occupied, that is, by the Romans.  In opposition, messianic nationalist movements created what Aslan aptly describes as “zealous warriors of God who would cleanse the land of all foreigners and idolaters.”

This is the historical and political context Jesus was born into, one that takes us beyond the Christ figure created by his followers after his death to the actual man, “a revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of his era were, in religious and political turmoil.”

Given that turmoil, it should come as no surprise that “the Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence” than is usually assumed.  Gentle shepherds don’t have much place here.  Aslan reads the admonitions to love your enemies and turn the other cheek as directed toward relationships between Jews, not between Jews and foreigners, and especially not between Jews and occupiers.  “The message was one of repossessing the land,“ he writes, “a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed.”  A kingdom, that is, very much of this world, not another.

This historical territory has been explored before, by biblical scholars such as Richard Horsley and Dominic Crossan.  But in Aslan’s hands, it gains broader resonance.  He brings to bear his expertise in the volatile territory of politics and religion (his earlier book Beyond Fundamentalism analyzed the root causes of militant religious extremism) as well as his deep background as a scholar of religion, renowned especially for the most readable history of Islam yet written, No god But God.

As in those earlier books, not only does he get the full picture, but he can also write – sometimes irresistibly, as when he drops into a kind of tongue-in-cheek interfaith slang, mentioning Herod’s “nebbish sons,” for instance, and Herod himself as “King of the Jews, no less!”

But cherished legends, watch out.  Aslan can be scathingly dismissive of such episodes as Salome dancing for John the Baptist’s head, or Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.  Prepare for words like “nonsense” and “fairy tale” as he traces what holds up historically (and geographically), and what’s been elided, even deliberately disguised, in the gospel accounts.  Which is not to blame the gospel writers.  Aslan points out that the concept of empirically valid historical reality is a relatively modern one.  “It would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers, for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.”

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Zealot, then, is the analysis of how Jesus was tamed by his own followers, and why.  Soon after his death, the early Jesus movement split between the “Hebrews” who stayed in Jerusalem under James’ leadership, and the Hellenists abroad led by Paul.  The bitter infighting between them would be resolved by force majeure:  the disastrous failure of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which led to the torching of Jerusalem in the year 70 and the expulsion of surviving Jews from what remained of the city.  With the ‘Hebrew’ faction thus in disarray, the Hellenist appeal of Paul’s Christianity won out, and Jesus’ specifically Jewish revolutionary fervor would be toned down to suit a much larger audience:  the Roman empire itself.

This entailed absolving the Romans from responsibility for the crucifixion, instead blaming the unruly (and unrulable) Jews, and thus laying the basis for two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. Where the early Jesus movement was Jewish, Christianity would now be anything but.  As Aslan notes, the gospels are, in this sense, a radical break with history – a wiping out of the specific past to be replaced by a universal future.

Yet Zealot itself is testament to the fact that they didn’t quite succeed.  Aslan’s insistence on human and historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology, and certainly more intriguing and exciting for any modern reader not piously devoted to the idea of gospel truth.  This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.

(Seattle:  I’ll be talking about the book with Reza Aslan in the auditorium of the downtown Central Library on Monday July 29, 7-8.30 pm.  Free admission.)

Happy Rapture Day, all!

Why the strange assumption that a brilliant man in one field is brilliant in all fields?  Nobody doubts Ray Kurzweil’s technological innovations, like speech recognition technology.  But isn’t saving the world on, let’s say, a slightly different level of complexity?

Yet on Sunday the NYT devoted most of its Business section to Ray Kurzweil the self-proclaimed messiah — that is, to the weird combo of libertarianism, advanced science, and wishful thinking that is the Singularity movement, for which Kurzweil is the foremost advocate.

In a case of nerds gone wild, he has founded his own university, Singularity U., “to address humanity’s Grand Challenges.”   Note the caps — a dead giveaway.  Note too the military language:   Singularity U. will  “create a cadre of leaders” to “seize control of the evolutionary process” since that, says Kurzweil, is “the only way to solve the world’s ills.”   A kind of biotech coup d’état, I guess.

“Ultimately,” he says, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.  This is the destiny of the universe.”

I’m not much up for talk of universal destiny at the best of times — too close to evangelical visions of the Rapture — but when it comes from a man with an attic full of kitschy kitties, I’m all the more wary :

I can see why the kitty kitsch, though.  It’s a good antidote to Kurzweil’s over-the-top rhetoric.   You might almost call it exponential rhetoric, since Kurzweil loves that word.  He talks constantly of exponential growth — exactly the kind of imaginary growth that collapsed the housing market.   But not, per Kurzweil, the tech market.  Technological progress will be 1,000 times greater in this century than in the last, he asserts, with the cavalier use of numbers characteristic of deluded grandiosity.  Perhaps that’s why some NYT newsdesk editor had the ironic wit to put this story on the front page of the same issue:

There is nothing like the cornucopia of new drugs that some experts predicted the genome project would yield. A decade ago, drug companies spent billions of dollars equipping themselves to harness the newly revealed secrets of human biology. Investors bid the stocks of tiny genomics companies to stratospheric heights.

That “genome bubble” has long since popped. And not only has there been no pharmacopeia, but some experts say the Human Genome Project might have at least temporarily bogged down the drug industry with information overload.

Of course for Kurzweil, such inconvenient facts exist only to be transcended — another of his favorite tropes, as in “transcend all of the limitations of our biology.”   He intends to live hundreds of years, he says, and to that end, takes 150 vitamin and supplement pills a day, has intravenous transfusions of chemical cocktails to “reprogram” his biochemistry, measures the chemical composition of his urine, and keeps a detailed log of every bite of food    Perhaps all those pills explain the shimmering circular light floating around his head as he talks in a documentary due out soon promoting his ideas.  It’s called — I kid you not —  “Transcendent Man.”

For anyone with $25,000 to plunk down for a ten-week “student program” at Singularity U., or with a mere $15,000 for a nine-day “executive program” (and top officials and executives are rushing to do so, or so at least Kurzweil claims), I checked out the curriculum and found an enticement or two .  “Neuroenhancing pharmacological agents” under Medicine and Neuroscience sounds like great fun — a few good acid trips? — but I’d guess are far more along the lines of 150 vitamin pills a day (Kurzweil sells his own brand of super-expensive nutritional supplements).   And for those addicted to video games, which many Singularist devotees probably are, there are “existential extinction events” in the Energy and Environmental Systems section — not some kind of Sartrean nightmare, but good old end-of-the-world eschatology tarted up in tech jargon.

I’d say it was all very Nietzschean — the psychedelic muddle of Thus Spake Zarathustra with its ideas of an übermensch race — except that I suspect Kurzweil and his cadre are far more familiar with the comic-book version:  Superman.   This is what happens when you consume too much pizza and coke and believe all those people who tell you how brilliant you are.  You become a believer in your own adolescent fantasies.   And with such religious fervor that others do too.

But then maybe Kurzweil really is brilliant after all.  How else could he have gotten the NYT Business section to act as his shill?   Do you think I could get the name of his publicist?   I can’t wait to start saturating the universe with my intelligence…