Reza Aslan talks to Tony Harris
Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American scholar of world religions and the author of several books on faith. His most recent book about Jesus is a best-seller — and controversial. He sat down with Tony Harris to talk about how he became acquainted with the subject of his latest book, as well as converting from Islam to evangelical Christianity before returning to the religion of his birth.
Tony Harris: Look at the conversation that you started with this book, "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth." And the Jesus that you're talking about, the Jesus that so many of us came to know through the Bible, through church, from pastors, was also the Jesus of your youth.
Reza Aslan: That's right. When I was 15 years old, I heard the Gospel story for the first time. It was a transformative experience for me. I didn't really grow up with much religious instruction. I mean, my family was nominally Muslim — culturally Muslim, as people say, but once we came to the States from Iran, we more or less scrubbed our lives of any trace of Islam, really, as an attempt to fit in. It's the '80s — not a great time to be either Iranian or Muslim in the U.S.
This is the time of the Iranian Revolution.
The Iranian Revolution, the Iran hostage crisis — a lot of anti-Muslim, a lot of anti-Iranian sentiment in America. I guess some would say not much has changed 30 years later, but I’ve always been a deeply spiritual kid. Maybe part of it had to do with those childhood images of revolutionary Iran, the sort of way in which I experienced in a deep and profound way how religion has a power to transform a society for good and for bad. I think that really seared itself in my unconscious because I have always been deeply interested in religious and spiritual matters, but never had any kind of outlet until when I was in high school and someone shared the Gospel story with me.
Reza Aslan
What was it about that story that resonated within you?
It’s the greatest story ever told. I mean, the God of the heavens and the earth came down to us in the form of a child, grew into a man who, for our sins, sacrificed himself, and those who believe in him and in that story have eternal life and will never die. It's an amazing, amazing story, and one that hit me deep in my heart.
Did it help you — this relationship that you came to have with Jesus, with God — did it help you assimilate into the country?
Yes, of course. How much more American can you be than being a Christian and an evangelical Christian, no less? Absolutely, it gave me a sense of belonging in a country where, at the time, I wasn't even a legal citizen. Certainly my conversion to Christianity gave me a sense of belonging, but I don't want to make it sound as though it was just a conversion of convenience. I really, truly burned with this faith.
And maybe you can tell us about these moments when you began to have questions?
During my years of preaching this Gospel, I would encounter many people who had doubts and who would implant those doubts in me, but I think part of the fundamentalist lifestyle is learning how to just wash clear those doubts, those questions. When confronted with something that does not fit with what you believe, you just simply treat it as an attack, which is —
The fundamentalist lifestyle, the approach.
Right, which is why, to be perfectly honest with you, I have an enormous amount of compassion for some of the fundamentalist responses to this book, because I know what it feels like. When I went to college and began to study the Bible in an academic environment, on day one you realize that's not the case, that the Bible is replete with the most obvious errors and contradictions.
When you encountered that in college, how shocking, surprising — a shock to the senses — was it for you?
It's like that rug is pulled out from under you. I mean, everything that you believe suddenly collapses, and I responded the way I think a lot of people in my situation respond — with anger, as though I had been duped. All this time I've been fooled into believing something that turns out isn't true, and I really rejected my faith, felt spiritually unmoored, and, interestingly enough, it was — I went to a Catholic Jesuit university. It was the Jesuits, God bless them, who, recognizing that in me, who were the ones who taught me how to read the Bible in the first place as a historical document, encouraged me to not give up on spirituality, to instead look for some other way of expressing my spirituality, and they were the ones who introduced me to Islam.
“Zealot” — how did you settle on this title?
Certainly in our modern parlance, "zealot" has very negative connotations, but it didn't in Jesus’ time. Zealotry was actually a widespread phenomenon in the first century. Most Jews in Jesus’ time would have said, “I am a zealot.” But some zealots in Jesus’ time took that belief, that identity, to its necessary consequence, which is that if you are zealous for the Lord and for his law, his law says that none but the chosen people can live in the Holy Land. Now, this is a land that is in Jesus’ time being occupied by a bloodthirsty, brutal, imperial pagan power called Rome. My argument is that if you look at Jesus’ teachings and actions, and you place them firmly within the historical context of his time, you cannot miss the zealotry that is inherent in what he is saying and doing.
What is it about Jesus, his words and his actions, that posed a far greater threat to the Roman Empire than — or did it — than the others who claimed to be the Messiah, who claimed to be the interpreter of sacred text?
In the first century, simply saying the words "I am the Messiah" is a treasonable offense. "The Messiah," in its Jewish context — and let's not forget that Jesus was a Jew, speaking to a Jewish audience — means the anointed one. If you are claiming to be ushering in the rule of God on earth, you are claiming to be ushering out the rule of Caesar, and so every person who said "I am the Messiah" was eventually killed for it, and usually killed for the crime of treason, sedition, for rising up against the state. So in that sense, there is nothing actually unique about either what Jesus says or what happens to him as a result.
You have to understand that according to everything that Judaism has ever said about the Messiah, a dead Messiah is not the Messiah anymore. If you die — if you say you're the Messiah, and you die without re-establishing David's kingdom, you are not the Messiah. It's interesting that we refer to everyone else as failed Messiahs, but we don't refer to Jesus as a failed Messiah because, according to Jewish law, he was just as successful as everybody else. The difference, however, is, whereas the followers of all these other Messiahs essentially went home when their Messiah was killed — that's the end of that revolution — Jesus' followers did not. They claimed to have had this ecstatic experience in which they experienced the risen Jesus, they saw him again.
The resurrection.
That's what they said. And spurred by that belief, they began to redefine what "Messiah" means. The job of the Messiah isn't to re-create the Kingdom of David, the Messiah's kingdom is a heavenly kingdom. The Messiah isn't a political office, it's a celestial title. Everything that we've thought about the Messiah was wrong because it didn't fit what Jesus said and did, and it was the reinterpretation of "Messiah" that turned this movement started by a Jewish nationalist revolutionary peasant into a Roman imperial religion and what we now call Christianity.
You didn't really expect to be in a conversation where you are left to defend your right as a person, as a Muslim, to write about Jesus, did you?
I knew that there were going to be people on the fringes who, simply by the fact that my faith, tradition, is Islam, are going to look at me with distrust, with fear, and are going to reject anything that I have to say based on just simply the fact that it's the messenger, not the message, in other words. What I didn't expect was this sort of soft bigotry of the center who, far from saying — questioning my right to write a book like this because I’m a Muslim, instead questioned my credentials as a scholar of religions to do so.
Has the book started the conversation you had hoped to start?
More than that. I hoped to start a conversation about who Jesus was. This book has started that conversation, but I think it started another equally important conversation, which is, who gets to speak for Jesus? I didn't expect that, and it's fun to watch that conversation take place.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
This episode premiered in September. Check back here for repeat dates.
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