A Book A Week - Week 32: Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

This week's book:
  Zealot   by Reza Aslan 

Grade:  A

Score one for the academics.  In prior nonfiction by academics I have graded the work down because it tended to be... honestly, a little boring and didactic.  This one, however, is the exception.  Reza Aslan is a working academic, a scholar of religions.  He is also, no coincidence, a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside.  So he's kind of like Meg Wolitzer there.

This is the way to write a scholarly book intended for a mass audience.  If you have an idea for a nonfiction book and you need a template of how to go about writing it, this is the book you absolutely need to read.

The format is simple, hook 'em early.  The very first chapters, in which the author sets up everything else he's going to argue later, are all short.  Eight, nine pages.  Easily read, easily digested, and focused on one major point.  Each chapter made me eager to read the next, and that's always a good thing.
    After about the halfway mark the chapters get longer, about twelve to fourteen pages, and by the end of the book the chapters are twenty pages long.  Slick.  Well done.

As for the content, it's clear that the author has researched the historicity of Jesus thoroughly.  The bibliography is 20 pages long, and the Notes are 108 pages long.  Yup, 108 pages of notes.  In a mass-market book.  The author takes his scholarship very seriously.

The whole point of this book is to put the historical Jesus in context.  Not Jesus the idea, or the Savior, but the man.  The dude, if you will, who lived in Palestine in the First Century AD.*
   I know a bit about this already, I studied Latin, and I have a degree in History, and read several of the original sources he cites.  In Latin, so, yeah, I'm kind of a smarty-pants.  Mr. Aslan gets it all right.  That part of the world - the Levant - has been contentious and poorly-behaved as long as people have been alive to write about it, and the first few decades of the First Century were no exception.  Lots of politics, lots of conflict, lots of strife, lots of malcontents, lots of death.  LOTS of death.  Crucifixions all around.  The 'good old days' were actually very deadly and horrible, and the author makes this point well.

His main point, though, is that Jesus was a rabble-rouser.  He was a man very much of his time and place, and a man of his his people.  That is, of the Jews under Roman occupation of Palestine.  He dissects Jesus's words in the context of their time, showing that utterances that seem benign or even pacifistic in our age were actually very politically charged and seditious in his time.  Jesus was a zealot before there were official Zealots, is what he's saying.  Jesus was a man who challenged the status quo, when the status quo was Rome at the height of its oppressive power.

Who should read this book?  Well... if you're a particularly churchy sort that's kind of a hard call.  Sometimes people don't like their assumptions and prejudices called into question.  But if you're churchy and really want to know more about the geographical and historical context of Jesus's teachings, then by all means read the book.  If you're churchy and more of a tortoise - meaning you don't want to hear anything that contradicts what you've already decided the truth is - then you should probably give it a pass.
   If you're not churchy at all, and you want to have your head filled with details about that era, then by all means read this book.   It's really good.

* the author, being a scholar, uses CE instead of AD.  Which I hate.  The dividing line hasn't changed, and changing the name of your date designation is just an exercise in pointless, mealy-mouthed political correctness.  But it's accepted scholarship these days, so what are you gonna do?

Next week:
 City of Bohane  by Kevin Barry
 Techincally it'll be in two weeks.  I've got stuff to do next week that'll keep me from writing a review.