Zealot

Reza Aslan has written a book titled “Zealot”.

According to R. Aslan, his book is about Jesus as an historical person, who was a peasant-turned-rebel, a typical uneducated political activist, resurging against Roman rule in Israel. He intends to portray Jesus as a Jewish national extremist of some sort. By calling himself a Messiah Jesus had made himself an extremist political opponent to Caesar. That, according to Aslan, was the main reason Jesus was killed for.

Naturally, Aslan discards all traditional Christian views on Jesus and considers them laughable. His main argument is that all Christian ideas of divinization as we know them would be alien to Jesus, now. Because Jesus was too simple to even grasp the concept of hypostatic union.

Let us see if it would be difficult for us to describe to Jesus the union of Christ's humanity and divinity in one hypostasis. The First Council of Ephesus (held in 431 at the Church of Mary in Ephesus, Asia Minor) recognized this doctrine, stating that the humanity and divinity of Christ are made one. Accordingly, the nature of Christ is made from two natures, human and divine, but it may be referred to as one in its incarnate state, i.e. in the person of Jesus, because the natures always act in unity.

That is how Christianity explains the relationship between the divine nature of God the Father and human nature of Jesus.

There are two major aspects of Judaism relating to the interaction between God and the universe (including Man):

1. God is too far away to interact with Him or even to know Him!

God is an absolute one, indivisible and incomparable being who is the ultimate cause of all existence. Jewish tradition teaches that the true aspect of God is incomprehensible and unknowable! YHWH is "The self-existent One" and "I will be that I will be". The name relates to God as God truly is, God's revealed essence, which transcends the universe. Elohim, God as manifest in the physical world, is "the One who is the totality of powers, forces and causes in the universe".

According to Jewish religious philosophy God is "God-as-God-is-in-Godself". God dwells in a place where there is no aspect anywhere to search or probe; nothing can be known of it, for it is hidden and concealed in the mystery of absolute nothingness.

2.  God is not man!

“God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” (Numbers 23:19)

God is non-physical, non-corporeal, and eternal. Therefore, God is utterly unlike man, and can in no way be considered anthropomorphic. All statements in the Hebrew Bible and in rabbinic literature which use anthropomorphism are held to be linguistic conceits or metaphors, as it would otherwise have been impossible to talk about God at all.

People’s lives were heavily regulated by religious rules and precepts in Israel at that time but God was far away and had nothing in common with man! The distance between the rich and the poor in Israel was all too evident. Just as the distance between the God and man.

The reasons that the distance between the “haves” and “have-nots” existed in Israel or elsewhere was not purely political or economic. Jesus knew that if you want to see justice and harmony, and love in human society in general, you need to bring forth justice, harmony, and love from inside the man. The reason for inequality and injustice, and hate was in the mind of each single individual. The problems (economical, political, etc.) of the social body of humanity in general had their roots in the mind of the social body, i.e. the social consciousness as one entity.

There is no political means by which to change the social consciousness and bring about overall social justice, peace, and harmony. Various social experiments have proven that already many times. The only way to change the human society as a whole is to make its constituent members be of one mind so that together they could become the absolute one, indivisible spiritual (mentally, intellectually, morally) body even though they would remain separate as individuals.

Then they would become one entity with absolute properties, which are characteristic only of God. God had to be present with His people if He wanted His people to become one with Him! That meant Jesus had to overcome two most fundamental aspects of the Judaic thought. God was to be so close to His people that they would be able to see and touch Him, and learn from Him whatever wisdom He was going to give them. And there was to be such a close affinity between God and man that essentially God was to become man so that man could become God.

Jesus perceived the tragic state of human nature, as well as the human society, as a direct result of those tragic aspects of the Jewish religious thought at the time. God was so far from being comprehended by man and His nature so far away from the nature of man that there was no hope for humanity to ever be able to overcome its problems. And it was clear that those problems stemmed from this distance between God and man as well as from that insurmountable obstacle that lay between man and God, as it was presented and taught by the religious leaders in Israel.

Jesus was fully aware that that religious doctrine, which had been taught and guarded by kings, scribes and scholars in Israel, was not exactly what Moses had taught. Inventions and traditions were being added continuously which inevitably corrupted the meaning of the religious teaching, widely supported by the rich. It was that teaching, supported and preached by the Pharisees and Sadducees, that justified and exonerated the excesses of the religious, political, and economic practice in Israel. The religious Law turned Israeli people into slaves to their own kings and priests. But above all, it turned Israeli people into slaves to their own vices, which eventually separated and weakened them.

Israel was occupied by Rome. Roman emperor Tiberius had started his famous financial and taxation reforms that swept across the whole empire at that time. That was the reason that census was held, too. Israeli kings and priests were part of that process. They always profited from cooperating with the emperors, though. All the major burdens of the taxation and financial reforms in Israel were laid on the poor majority, naturally. That eventually led to an increasingly worsening drastic economic and social situation in Israel. The need for changes was clear. Unfortunately, the basic premises of the religious Law, backed up by the elite, blocked the way.

Certain drastic measures were needed and Jesus did just that. He brought about the change in his teaching that was needed the most and which diametrically contrasted with the basic tenets of the traditional Judaic religious thought. The traditional belief, which held that God was nowhere to be seen and was nowhere near like man, was destroyed by Jesus, who claimed that he was one with God and that every person, as long as he or she lived his or her life united in love with other people, could become one with God by being one with him, Jesus, in spirit (i.e. mentally, intellectually, morally).

“I and the Father are one”, (John 10:30). Jesus said those words when he was in the temple in Solomon's porch after the Jews had gathered around him and asked him if he was the Christ (Messiah). They wanted to get a clear answer (“tell us plainly”) and Jesus told them something they were not ready to digest at that time. He claimed to one with God!

The term God-man as a theological concept first appears in the writing of the Christian Apostolic Father Origen in the 3rd century AD: “- it being impossible for the nature of God to intermingle with a body without an intermediate instrument - the God-man is born”. Nonetheless, it would not be difficult for Jesus to understand what it means to be someone who brings together in his own person the two natures, which are completely incompatible, according to the Jewish priests.

Jesus himself claimed to be that "intermediate instrument"! He was the first man ever to equate man to God in a human person in such manner. The idea of the nature of God to be able to intermingle with the nature of man did not prevail in Israel. But it certainly did exist as an antithesis to the idea of the "unknowable, unreachable, and incomprehensible" God’s nature being so opposed to the nature of man. Therefore, such an idea would not be entirely novel to Jewish philosophical thought at that time. Albeit, it would be considered unacceptable and blasphemous from religious point of view. That is why the Jews wanted to stone Jesus when they heard him claim to be one with the Father.

That is why his disciples began to worship Jesus, as soon as they became convinced by the “miracles”, which he had performed. They saw Jesus as God! Everything Jesus said or did made people either love him and accept the truth of his words gladly or it made them hate him and reject Jesus’ words, because those words exposed the wrongdoers and criminals. Neither the deeds nor the words of Jesus as we find them in the Bible give us any grounds to suggest that he was uneducated or illiterate. Jesus was more than educated. He was divine!

Jesus certainly was not a “zealot”! He was not a fanatically committed person, as the notorious Fundamental Islamists are known today. And he was not a member of any Jewish movement that fought against Roman rule in Palestine at the time.

In every deed and word Jesus had shown that he was not pursuing any strictly political or social goals. He considered such activity superficial and primitive. Jesus had made it clear from the very beginning that he was not of this world and did not intend to play by the rules of this world. Jesus was a spiritual leader, not a political one. It took Jewish priests and lawyers a lot of effort and third party false witnessing to present Jesus as a rebel against the Roman rule and Caesar. But, even Pontius Pilate did not buy into it, when forced to pronounce death sentence to Jesus. If that unfortunate Prefect of the Roman province of Judea had not been so deeply involved in various financial schemes, of which the Sanhedrin was perfectly aware, perhaps he would not have been forced to kill Jesus.

The blame for murdering an innocent spiritual teacher and prophet lies with the Jewish political and religious leaders, though. They saw Jesus as a person, whose spiritual and prophetic activities challenged their authority on the one hand and on the other, could be misunderstood in Rome as an attempt on the part of the Sanhedrin to subvert the financial reforms, initiated by the Roman Emperor Tiberius. This way or the other, it could have undermined the financial activities of the Temple in Jerusalem.

At the core of the political conflict surrounding Jesus Christ is the principled stance that Jesus had taken regarding the financial activities in and around the Temple of Jerusalem. The "Cleansing of the Temple" story occurs in all four canonical gospels of the New Testament. The Temple was functioning essentially as a central bank in Jerusalem and was taking an active part in Roman financial reforms. The priests in Jerusalem operated as the principal financial and banking elite in Israel and used the traditional elements of the religious cult in Jerusalem as a major source of revenue.

Jesus Christ acted first of all in the interest of the ordinary Jewish people, as well as the poor people the world over, but not as a political figure. His purely humanitarian activities and his spiritual (moral and intellectual) teachings created such a great following that it began to jeopardize the holiest of holies of the Israeli society, i.e. the financial monopoly of the Temple of Jerusalem. That was the final straw that decided the fate of the prophet from Nazareth as Jesus was commonly perceived. Just as JFK was killed back in 1963 shortly after he had begun printing US Government Dollar bills, which were supposed to gradually oust the Federal Reserve notes, so Jesus was killed as soon as the priests of the Temple of Jerusalem began to see him as a potential threat to the normal course of their financial operations in Israel and around the Roman Empire.

Jesus Christ is not God for people like Reza Aslan. That is why they do not care to learn about the message that Jesus brings us, even as a "prophet". Most certainly, the author of the book has nothing to say about Jesus' message.  
You cannot get the message if you disregard the messenger.