Every few years some scholar somewhere writes a new “groundbreaking” book on Jesus that will change the world’s understanding of the traditional Jesus. He or she will share compelling reasons why we can no longer trust certain portions of the biblical accounts. In the end, we are presented with images such as the Apocalyptic Jesus, the Secular Jesus, the Gnostic Jesus or, my favorite, the California Surfing Jesus.
Modern re-writes of Jesus tend to make four interpretive mistakes: cherry picking, stereotyping, conjecture, and biblical misunderstanding. I will use Reza Aslan’s Zealot as an example.
Rejecting the traditional view of Jesus, Aslan theorizes that Jesus was a political revolutionary who toured the Galilean countryside with the purpose of establishing a Messianic movement. Though Jesus had aspirations of establishing the Kingdom of God in the face of the Jewish aristocracy and the Romans, when his movement failed, he was arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition (xxx).
Where does Aslan go wrong? Stay tuned!