5/26/2023 0 Comments Zealot by reza aslanThe assassin "has melted back into the crowd," and "You should not be surprised if he is the first to cry, 'Murder!'" Aslan can't resist referring to the prophesied Kingdom of God as "a radically new world order" (although it's not Aslan's fault that this makes me think of Al Jourgensen). The prologue ends with the assassination of Jerusalem's high priest. Even worse is his hyperventilating prose, as bombastic as Glenn Beck's (or so I imagine, not having read any of Glenn Beck's prose - but hey, we're in the realm of speculation here). So Aslan's cocksure tone is weirdly inappropriate. Indeed, as Harold Bloom writes, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews." It's fashionable to claim that Paul watered down Jesus' original revolutionary message, but the truth is that we just don't know. Paul's epistles predate the gospels, but Paul never met Jesus, even though they were contemporaries. We know little about "the historical Jesus." We can be fairly certain only that an itinerant preacher named Yeshua came out of Nazareth in the first century, gathered a following among the Jews of occupied Palestine and was executed by the Romans for sedition. The Gospels, as Aslan notes, are not history.
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