Reza Aslan - In Search Of Jesus - 04/10/14

[Music] welcome to the Westminster town hall forum where for 33 years we have engaged the public in reflection and dialogue on the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective we invite those who are listening on Minnesota Public Radio to visit us in person all forums are free and open to the public and information on upcoming events can be found online at Westminster forum org you can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter as well my name is Tim Hart Anderson I'm the senior minister at Westminster Presbyterian Church located on Nicollet Mall in beautiful downtown Minneapolis and I'm the moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce today's guest speaker Reza Aslan is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions and the author of the best-selling book zealot the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth he's an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California and a research associate at the University of Southern California's Center on public diplomacy he served as the Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop and was named a visiting professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Iowa nearly seven years ago he spoke to the town hall forum when his first book no god but God the origins evolution and future of Islam was published and he captivated our audience then with his insights into faith and politics in the Muslim world in his presentation today in search of Jesus he will share his research and perspective on the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth and provide provide fresh insight into the times in which he lived ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the Westminster town hall forum Reza Aslan thank you very much what a joy it is to be back here at the Westminster town hall forum I'm a little bit older a little bit more grizzled a little grayer now than I was before but just as pleased to be part of this congregation in this conversation and as Tim said what I really remember from my last visit here was the incredible questions the robust dialogue that we engaged in after my talk so that's a reminder for me to keep my opening comments as brief as possible so that we can get right into it and you know I've been around the country talking about this book and about Jesus for a you know seems like forever and the one thing that I've discovered is that when it comes to Jesus people have a lot to say ah turns out people are interested in Jesus who knew and so I want to get to your questions right away let me tell you a little bit about myself I was born in Iran I like to sometimes joke that I come from a long line of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists my mother was the lukewarm Muslim my father the exuberant atheist you know the kind of atheist who always had a pocketful of Prophet Muhammad jokes that he would pull out at inappropriate times that kind of atheist when the revolution happened in 1979 my father who never trusted anyone with a turban thought that it might be a good idea for us to leave Iran for a while until things settled down that of course was 35 years ago things did not settle down turns out my father was right about what was going to happen in Iran which he reminds me of on a daily basis by the way and so we settled more or less in the bay area of California in San Jose San Francisco Bay Area this was the early 1980s not sure if you remember the 1980s it wasn't exactly the best time in this country to be either Muslim or Iranian as opposed to now when it's fantastic yeah it's great now this was at the height of the Iran hostage crisis right 444 days in which Americans were being held hostage in the American Embassy and Tehran and for seven-year-old boy trying his hardest not to be weird to try to fit in as much as possible I tried everything I could to separate myself from my culture my heritage my language my religion in fact I've admitted before that I spent a good part of the 1980s pretending to be Mexican yeah which by the way tells you how little I understood America just right no idea no idea did not go any better for me at all but I despite sort of growing up in the US and kind of an a religious environment I've always been deeply deeply fascinated by religion and spirituality I'm not sure why I didn't grow up in a particularly religious household never really had much of a spiritual education I think partly it had to do with my childhood images of revolutionary Iran and the power that religion has to transform a society for good and for bad that has never left me and it's created this deep interest in religious phenomenology in spirituality even though as I say I never really had much of an opportunity to do anything about it until it was 15 years old when I was 15 years old I went with some friends to an evangelical youth camp in Northern California and it was there that I first heard the Gospel story this incredible story the greatest story ever told of the God of heaven and earth coming down in the form of a child dying for our sins and that this this promise that those who believe in him shall also never die but have eternal life I had never heard anything like this before it was a transformative moment for me I immediately converted to this fairly particularly conservative brand of evangelical Christianity and then spent the next four or five years preaching that gospel as I knew it to everyone I met whether they wanted to hear it or not frankly I became absolutely obsessed with understanding who Christ was and and dove headfirst into studying everything that I could about him when I went to university I went to Santa Clara University a nice Catholic Jesuit college in the Bay Area and was taught by the Jesuits there or as Glenn Beck recently referred to them my godless calm professors sure where he got that from and in in my sort of studies of the New Testament and the world of Jesus I was all of a sudden confronted with this undeniable fact this chasm between the Jesus of history as I was learning about him at university and in my studies and the Christ of faith as I had understood him through what I'd been taught at my church and this sudden realization that these two are not exactly the same that there is a gulf separating the two of them now I understand that this may sound weird and that for hundreds of millions of Christians around the world many in this room many listening on their radios the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are the same person this guy you know the blond blue-eyed Jesus probably speaks with a British accent you know as as all angels gods and Nazis do we know that now for a fact I call this Megyn Kelly's Jesus megyn kelly of course for those of you unfamiliar megyn kelly was is the the very popular Fox News commentator a personality who last December quite famously said and I quote it is a historical fact that Jesus Christ and Santa Claus were white so there you go I actually came to Megyn Kelly's defense and not just because every time FoxNews mentions Jesus I sell books but but also because what I would might the point that I was making is that megyn kelly is right her christ is white because megyn kelly is white in fact Megyn Kelly's Christ is probably a middle-class carpenter who really really hates taxes but if megyn kelly were Kenyan then her Jesus would be Kenyan if megyn kelly were Ethiopian then the way that she understood Jesus's life and teachings would be through an Ethiopian lens if she were Chinese her Jesus would literally be Chinese if she were Japanese her Jesus would be Japanese you see this is the thing about the Christ of faith is that he can be whatever a community of faith needs him to be and has been throughout the last 2,000 years he's infinitely malleable he can take on whatever cultural or racial or ethnic identities his worshippers themselves have he can take on a community's history he can take on a community's politics I am showing here an image of the Latin American Jesus with a rifle slung over his shoulder this is the Jesus that would be familiar to so many Christians in places like Nicaragua in El Salvador in Guatemala the Liberator Jesus the Jesus who takes up arms against the oppressor and while this image of Jesus toting a gun may seem strange and even anathema to everything that we understand about the Christ I should remind you that the notion of Jesus warrior goes all the way back to the beginning the Scriptures themselves talked about Jesus as a warrior for God carrying a sword his cloaks his cloak dipped in blood to take on the enemies to smite the enemies of God and again while that image may be uncomfortable to many of us it may seem foreign to many of us is it all that much foreign than the image of Jesus as King as the kind of European King that we see him in so many portraits so many paintings of European Christianity in fact I would go so far as to say the image of Jesus as warrior might be even more historically accurate than the image of Jesus as king but the important thing to understand is that the Christ of faith can take on all of those political issues the Christ of faith can even take on whatever religious identities his community may have in Korea Christ looks like the Buddha in India he becomes Krishna in Thailand he takes on the entire panoply of the Hindu gods the Christ of faith is infinitely malleable the Jesus of history however is frozen in time the Christ of faith is a celestial spirit who founds a new religion the Jesus of history is a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews and while again for the vast majority of Christians around the world these two figures are one and the same and in many ways they are for the historian what becomes a point of interest is how to separate them how to dig through the layer upon layer of interpretation of legend of dogma of myth of doctrine that have accumulated over the the person of Jesus over the last 2,000 years and to get to the man himself now this is obviously an incredibly difficult task not least because when you remove the Gospels from the picture we know almost nothing about the Jesus of history we basically can be confident in three fundamental facts about the Jesus of history number one that he was a Jew which sounds obvious but it's an important thing to keep in mind because there is a consequence to that belief the consequence being that everything that he says everything that he does has to be understood through a Jewish lens as a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews number two that sometime in the first half of the first century he started this movement this movement that was predicated on something that he referred to almost uniquely as the kingdom of God and that number three as a result of that movement Rome executed him for the crime of sedition that's pretty much it takeaway the Christian writings and that's all we have when it comes to the Jesus of history but what I argue is that it's enough because while we know very little about the historical Jesus himself we know a great deal about the world in which he lived first century Palestine is an era that is quite well documented heavily researched we know a great deal about the social political cultural and religious makeup of the world in which Jesus lived this was of course a world awash in apocalyptic expectations it was perhaps the most politically tumultuous time in the history of the Holy Land and yes that is saying a lot in era in which countless bandits prophets preachers and messiahs were traipsing through this land calling for the end of the Roman occupation the liberation of the Jews prophesying the coming judgement of God an era that was dominated by a priestly aristocracy that maintained an absolute grip not just over the meaning and message of the Jewish faith but over who could access the Spirit of God which dwelt in the temple that they and they alone controlled an era in which a new class of Jews sometimes referred to as the Herodian elite named after the great Herod the Great a class of Jews that was hellenized romanized a class of Jews that by marrying themselves to the Roman occupation had managed to accumulate an enormous amount of wealth and had created this unbridgeable gulf between the very very rich and everyone else the very very poor and of course an era that was dominated by a brutal bloody Roman military occupation that controlled every aspect of life for the Jews in the first century including the religion itself in fact Rome maintained a very close supervision over the Jewish cult the temple cult in fact it was Rome that would often choose who the high priest would be and if that high priest displeased the Roman authorities in any way they would remove that high priest Rome would often actually seize control over the high priests vestments the holy materials that he would use to communicate with God they would seize those tools and then give them out to the high priests whenever he needed them to perform the feasts or the sacrifice and then as soon as those rituals were over they would take them back again in fact if there was any confusion in the minds of most Jews about the collusion between the priestly authorities and the occupation it was more or less dispelled by the fact that the Roman governor in the time of Jesus a man by the name of Pontius Pilate actually resided in a fortress that was connected to the temple that was all the symbolic gesture anyone needed to understand that the temple authorities the Herodian elite the Roman occupation that this was one dominant force that controlled every aspect of life for the Jews particularly for those poor pious Jews like Jesus what do we know about Jesus himself well very little we know that he comes from a village called Nazareth a village that was so poor it didn't even have a road it didn't have a bath it didn't have a school it didn't have a synagogue a village of mud and brick homes that essentially housed maybe a hundred families poor families just like Jesus's we know that if the Bible is correct in calling him a Tecton which unfortunately in our modern parlance has come to be call has come to be referred to as a carpenter which means something else entirely carpenter I mean we always have this image of Jesus you know with his own shop building chairs for customers that's not what Jesus did Tecton can mean woodworker but it actually means builder and in fact the word Tecton implied such a lowly position in the first century that the Romans used the word as a swear word as a cuss word they would use Jesus's profession as a swear word are you getting my drift here in fact if Jesus was a Tecton as a day laborer he would have been at the second lowest level of the social hierarchy in his time just above the slave the indigent and the beggar and he himself would have had a profound personal sense of this incredible gap between the powerful and the powerless between the rich and the poor because his message teachings these extraordinary teachings that really set him apart from all the other revolutionaries and prophets and messiahs that came before and after him his teachings were predicated precisely on this notion of a reversal of the social order that's how he envisioned the kingdom of God blessed are the poor for the kingdom of God is theirs blessed are the hungry for they shall be fed blessed are those who mourn for they shall rejoice these abiding words of the Beatitudes which have survived for 2,000 years give us an image of the kingdom of God as a place of equality a place where all people can be the same a place sort of a utopian fantasy if you will but that's mostly because we forget to keep reading in the Beatitudes because Jesus is not done then he continues woe to the rich for they shall we they have received at their consolation woe to those who are fed for they shall go hungry woe to those who rejoice for they shall mourn the first shall be last the last shall be first this isn't some utopian fantasy where everyone is equal this is a frightening new reality in which those on the top and those on the bottom are about to switch places in which the rich shall become poor and the poor shall become rich and as you can imagine this was as threatening a message 2000 years ago as it would be today if someone preached this today we would shove them out of the room as fast as possible and of course in Jesus's time this was a powerfully appealing message to those on the bottom to those on the top not so much in fact it's enough to get you killed which is precisely what happens this goes back to the third thing that we can be fairly confident of when it comes to Jesus and that is his crucifixion for sedition by Rome indeed sedition was the only crime that you could be crucified for crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for crimes against the state rebellion insurrection treason sedition these were the only crimes for which you could be crucified now people often say well but weren't there two thieves that were crucified alongside Jesus no not really the gospel uses the word less sty to refer to these two and while lest I can mean thieves it doesn't cut die means thieves lest i means bandits and in Jesus's time bandit was the most common term for an insurrectionist for a rebel indeed Jesus himself in the Gospels is on more than one occasion called a bandit by the authorities and so when you think of that iconic image that we will all be meditating upon in a week or so the image of Jesus on the cross try not to think of it as an innocent man surrounded by two thieves on either side think of it as three rebels crucified together and that image changes everything and indeed putting Jesus in the context of his time changes everything what comes out of that historical experiment a Jesus who is privy to all of the political and social confusion and tumult that every other Jew in the Holy Land was Jesus who dared in the midst of this declare himself to be the promised Messiah the liberator of the Jews here to re-establish the kingdom of David by which he also meant to usher out the kingdom of Caesar because those two things go hand in hand that that Jesus was seen as such a threat to the religious and political authorities of his time that he was hunted down like a criminal arrested tortured and executed now sometimes when I talk about the Jesus of history and when I tried to separate him from the Christ of faith I get a lot of pushback from people of faith not because they have a hard time recognizing the Jesus of history but because they feel as though removing the the Christ from Jesus makes him ordinary makes him just a man makes him no longer interesting I couldn't agree disagree more I mean for me the notion of a man who on behalf and and when I say a man I'm talking about a poor poorest of the poor uneducated very likely illiterate marginal Jewish peasant from the backwoods of Galilee what we would today refer to as a country bumpkin who nevertheless through the power of his teachings through his charisma formed a movement on behalf of the weak the poor the dispossessed the marginalized women especially a movement that was seen as such a threat to the very stability of the Empire the largest empire the world had ever known that he was executed for treason executed for sedition against the state to me that seems like a man worth knowing no matter what else you want to say about him whether you also see him as God whether you also see him as the Son of God whatever else Jesus may have been he was also a man a man who was a product of a specific time and place a man who was shaped by that time and place and for me that man and the example that he set two thousand years ago and how to confront social injustice how to confront the religious and political powers of his time how to confront the self ascribed gatekeepers of salvation that man and his example is as relevant today as it was 2,000 years ago and he'd part of the reason why I wrote this book was to demonstrate that you can be a follower of Jesus without necessarily being a Christian just as you can be a Christian without necessarily being a follower of Jesus thank you very much thank you reza aslan you're listening to the Westminster town hall forum broadcast from Westminster Presbyterian Church on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis I'm Tim Hart Anderson senior minister at Westminster Presbyterian Church and moderator of the forum our speaker today is author Reza Aslan we'll be taking questions from the radio audience through Twitter and Facebook our Twitter handle is Westminster THF and you can find us on facebook at westminster town hall forum while the ushers collect questions from the in-house audience I'd like to invite the radio audience to join us here at Westminster church for our next forum on Thursday May 1st at 7:00 p.m. when cantos vocal ensemble will offer a concert with commentary on the power of music our events are always free and open to all and further information can be found on the website Westminster forum org and now reza aslan if you would return to the pulpit I will present the questions from our audience first one I'd like to ask is on behalf of all those like myself who have to get up in the pulpit on Sunday and preach on Palm Sunday particularly because you call that the definitive moment in the gospel story to kind of shape the Jesus narrative that you see in your scholarly work you want to say more about that well the one of the most remarkable aspects of Jesus's ministry is that it was very very short perhaps barely three years and that for every single day of the three years except for the last four or five days he spent it not just in his home province of Galilee but only in the small tiny poor villages in the countryside of Galilee there are cities in the Galilee there Sepphoris he never preached there there's Tiberias he never preached there there's tyre and sidon he could have gone to the Decapolis these massive cities I mean if Jesus wanted a large audience he had access to some fairly significant populations in the Galilee and yet he avoids all of them he preaches only in these villages to people just like him people for whom his message was was created and then out of the blue one day he says to his disciples let's go to Jerusalem and not only does he decide to go to Jerusalem all of a sudden but he does so in this incredibly provocative way we are familiar with the images of the story Jesus on a donkey with his followers shouting Hosanna and waving palm branches putting cloaks in front of him and when we think about that image from the perspective of the Christ of faith we think about it as an image of humility that Jesus is lowering himself that he's lowly that he's a humble person but that's not at all what is taking place here in fact if you put the Jesus of history in the context of his time and interpret his actions through you know how the Jews themselves would have understood it it's the exact opposite of a humble act after all he himself says that the entire thing is in a fulfillment of the prophet Zechariah who says that this is how the king shall enter Jerusalem the notion of his followers waving palm branches well that's a signal of what the the Jews did after the Maccabee ins defeated the previous heathen occupiers of Jerusalem the notion of his disciples putting cloaks on the on the road before him to ride over well that's what the followers of King Jay who did when he declared himself king of the Jews when he entered Jerusalem in other words for us looking at this story from an a contextual point of view we see it as a symbol of Christ's humility for those Jews in Jerusalem who watch this take place the message was absolutely unmistakable this man is declaring himself to be the king the king of the Jews the promised Messiah the descendant of King David and that in and of itself is a crime punishable by execution let's pick up on that particular point in terms of how Jesus understood himself what does your research led you to conclude about Jesus own self-perception you know this is if the million-dollar question I mean we have a lot of access to the way that Jesus's followers understood him how the second community of Christians the community that wrote the Gospels understood him we have access to how his enemies understood him both the pagan Roman and the Jewish apologists who wrote against the movement in the 1st and 2nd centuries but we really don't have any access to how Jesus saw himself the closest that we can come to that is by figuring out what Jesus called himself what did he call himself well there are two answers to that question that most scholars would agree on he either called himself son of God or he called himself son of man now if he called himself son of God again if a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews calls himself son of God he means something very specific he means he is the king because son of God is a title in Judaism it is not a description in fact many people are called son of God in the Bible none more often than King David it is a title for kings so if Jesus did call himself son of God and I don't think that he did but if he did he meant he was king what the vast majority of scholars believe is that Jesus called himself son of man in fact there is pretty good consensus among scholars that that was Jesus's favorite phrase for himself the problem is is that we have no idea what he meant by that no idea at all I mean the term son of man shows up in the Bible but in the same way that son of God is a title not a description in the Bible son of man is a description not a title in the Bible son of man in the Bible just means man that's all it means but it's quite clear that that is not how Jesus is using this term he's using it as a title and as far as we know this was quite innovative for him now what did it mean I can tell you all the 400 different interpretations but I'll just tell you my interpretation and if you want to find out everybody else's interpretation look at the notes section of my book because I'll give everybody who disagrees with me but I think what he meant when he used this term the son of man is that he was referencing the the prophet Daniel and the vision that he had of one like a son of man coming from the clouds of heaven now in Jesus's time the majority of rabbis thought that that was a description of the Messiah so Jesus when he used the term Son of Man was calling himself Messiah now you may say to yourself well then why didn't he just call himself Messiah this is another mystery you know we see this in the Gospel of Mark we call it the Messianic secret in mark where in mark the first gospel every time anyone ever calls Jesus the Messiah he says she did Shh he shuts them up instantly he tells people don't say anything don't tell anyone what you've seen don't tell me until the very very end when he finally and somewhat begrudgingly says yes I am I'm the Messiah but every time someone brings up are you the Messiah or you're the Messiah he changes the subject and starts talking about the Son of Man instead and so the best guests that we have is that this was his way of declaring his messianic ambitions without immediately falling into the problem that everyone else who declared themselves Messiah had which is instant execution by Rome because remember Messiah means the descendent of King David the principle task of the Messiah is to re-establish David's Kingdom on earth if you are walking around saying that you are here to usher in the kingdom of David you are saying you're here to usher out the kingdom of Caesar and that's not a good way to keep your head and so I think that he saw himself as the sort of the Jewish concept of the Messiah the liberator of the Jews and he used the term son of man to express that to his in-group while confusing as much as possible the out-group in your opinion why did the Christ of faith develop so differently from the historical Jesus well first of all that's not unique I mean we know when you look at the world's religions the first thing that you realize very quickly is that it's very rare that these religious traditions actually have all that much to do with the Prophet himself we have this idea that prophets invent religions that that's what prophets are that they create religions but that's not true prophets don't create religions prophets are reformers the Reformers of their own religion and of course when you're talking about an era in which religion and politics and social issues and economic issues are all the same thing then it's as much a social reformer as it is a religious reformer as much a political reformer as it is a religious reformer Jesus did not invent Christianity Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews his followers were tasked with figuring out how to interpret his words and deeds into a system an institutional system that could be called a religion the Buddha did not create Buddhism the Buddha was a Hindu reforming Hinduism his followers were tasked with figuring out everything that just happened and turning that into a religion called Buddhism the Prophet Muhammad did not create Islam over and over again the Quran says this is not a new message this is the exact same message that was given to every prophet who came before you their God and your God are the same they're scripture in your scripture are the same it was the prophets followers who then had to figure out everything that just happened and turn it into an institution so we should not be all that surprised when we look at modern religious traditions whatever the modern tradition is and realize that you know there's some disconnect between what the Prophet himself was crece and what the religion is now preaching is there scholarly work on what might be called a Muhammad of history and Muhammad of faith yes mine I'm just gonna go ahead and plug my other book if you don't mind no I mean people people do ask me all the time uh well when are you gonna write a book about the historical Muhammad and I say I did and it was you know kind of a best-seller now it's funny when you do that you notice a lot of parallels of course I mean Muhammad just like Jesus was trying to reform the the social religious political economic milieu in the world in which he lived Mohammed like Jesus was firmly predicated on this idea of the the poor and the dispossessed the weak the marginalized the outcasts of societies that's who we preached for that's who we preached to and that those parallels I think are really fascinating now I will say one very brief thing there's this idea that because the Prophet Muhammad showed up you know six hundred years after Jesus and that unlike Jesus who you know died after three years and in sort of an earthly sense was not all that successful during his lifetime the Prophet Muhammad his ministry lasted a good three decades and he was fairly successful in that time in establishing you know this movement at least in the two tiny absolutely insignificant villages of Mecca and Medina but the truth is however that we are just as much in the dark when trying to reconstruct the Prophet Muhammad's life as we are in trying to reconstruct Jesus's life because while it is true that you know Muhammad arose at a time in which there was at least a better sense that something magnificent was happening in there were more people to write some of this stuff down the truth is is that the material that we rely on to reconstruct Mohammed's life it's a hundred years old it's a hundred years later than you know the prophets death just like the material that we use to try to reconstruct Jesus's life the Gospels was many many many decades written many decades after Jesus's death by people who never actually met him and so the task becomes equally difficult but not impossible because in both in both cases as long as you are committed to placing the Prophet firmly and inextricably in his time in place and allowing his world to define him to give shape to him then you're in a far stronger sort of footing to figure out who the Prophet was then if you rely solely on the material written about him by his followers by his acolytes by his worshipers with Jesus of Nazareth recognized Christianity in America today well um no but but that's because he was a Jew and not a Christian I think he would be confused I think if Jesus showed up right now he would say where's the nearest synagogue because that's what he would understand that's what his religion was it's what his spirituality was based in is Judaism I think that if he walked into a church he wouldn't really understand what was being said what was being expressed now part of that of course has to do with this kind of fundamental way this fundamental divide between the way that many Christians understand what the Messiah is in the way that many Jews understand what the Messiah is for the Jews the Messiah is just a man a man who is the descendent of King David who is promised by God who is the Liberator of the Jews but just a man who does all of his functions on earth as I said many many people arose in Jesus's time claiming to be the Messiah we know their names many of them were quite more popular in their lifetimes than Jesus was but if you're a Jew in the first century and if you stand up and say I am the Messiah what you mean is that you are the descendant of King David here to re-establish David's Kingdom on earth if you die without doing that guess what you're not the Messiah and so when all these other messiahs died without doing the one thing that Judaism requires the Messiah to do their followers went home but Jesus's followers did not and that's the mystery why well I think that there's two reasons for that number one I've already talked about Jesus's messianic mission was accompanied by this profound revolutionary social teachings the likes of which the Jews had never heard before this idea of the reversal of the social order the teachings about the poor the dispossessed this was unprecedented and it survived Jesus's death it was his teachings less so than his actions his actions were not as important as his teachings it was his teachings that were spread in the first few years after his death among the followers that kept this movement alive so part of it has to do with the extraordinary charismatic teachings of Jesus himself that set him apart from the other messiahs but it more than anything else had to do with what the disciple said about Jesus after his death buoyed by this ecstatic experience of him as risen from the dead which you can interpret however you want to I say that as a historian the resurrection is outside of my boundaries because it is an a historical event it is a matter of faith not a matter of history but what is an unquestionable matter of history is that very very soon after Jesus's death within a few years in fact belief in his resurrection became the foundation of this new movement so whether Jesus himself rose from the dead that's not a question that a historian is allowed to answer whether his followers absolutely believed and claimed that he rose from the dead that's a fact and it's a fact that we have to confront because that fact more than anything else forced his disciples to do something absolutely unprecedented when confronted with this uncomfortable reality that according to the Jewish definition of Messiah Jesus was not the Messiah they changed the definition and they the Messiah became something else something spiritual something celestial something even divine something that could be understood in light of this resurrection experience which changed everything for these guys and girls and so women I'm sorry women and so that I think is how the Christ of faith begins to develop dirty evidence for Jesus having ever been married and if not what do you as a scholar conclude about his relationship status yeah it was a complicated complicated I think would be his facebook status probably this is a very good question and unfortunately it's one that we just don't have an answer for because it makes us confront one of the most difficult paradoxes in the Gospels on the one hand it is inconceivable for a 30-year old Jewish male in the first century in Galilee to have not been married and had children it's in conceived as well be from Mars in fact the the Midrash is very clear about this you were not allowed to be called rabbi unless you have children and obviously his followers and even his detractors called Jesus rabbi now if that by the way that's not to say that there weren't celibates in Jesus's time there were but they were sort of monastic orders they separated themselves completely from society and went off and lived in the desert went off and lived in the in the wilderness and Jesus obviously did not do that so on the one hand everything that we know about Jesus's world insists that he was married and have and had children on the other hand every single word ever written about Jesus by his friends and his enemies by his followers his detractors by the the Christian community in the first few centuries by the pagan and Jewish apologists who wrote against him every single word ever written about Jesus never mentions a wife or children ever and we don't know what to do with that we don't know what to do with that now my friend and colleague Karen King at Harvard recently discovered a piece of papyrus that may change that there is now at least some mentioned that perhaps this is a very sort of throwaway line and a piece of papyrus written I believe in Coptic that says that you know Jesus makes mention of his wife but even if that piece of papyrus turns out to be legitimately from the fourth century that's still the 4th century that's still 300 years removed from Jesus and it's written in Coptic so it's written by a completely different community you know it doesn't really prove that Jesus had a wife and kids but at the very least it stops people from like me from saying never has anyone mentioned wife and kids so we'll see but this is this is a conundrum we really don't know what to say about it we really don't as a parent who takes seriously both history and faith I wrestled with what to teach my young children you as a father of a couple two year old twins are doing the same I know how do you approach this with your children as some of you may know I'm now a Muslim and my wife is a Christian and so we have two year-old twins that we are raising not just in both religious traditions but in all religious traditions in other words we believe that religious literacy that religious language is as important as any other kind of literacy you know we would love them to be able to speak Persian and Spanish because they live in LA and and English and maybe French just so we can be a little bit pretentious maybe maybe Chinese so they could have a job when they grow up as much as we'd like them to learn multiple languages we'd like them to learn multiple languages of faith not just mine not just my wife's and then give them an opportunity when they get older to actually decide for themselves what they want to believe but this larger question of history and faith is a very good one to end on because there is this sense particularly among people of faith but also among sort of you know secular atheistic historians that these two things are in conflict with each other that faith in history are in a collision course with one another and I don't think that that's true at all I think we have to understand that history and faith are just too modes of knowing that they are asking fundamentally two different questions the historian is interested in what is likely the person of faith is interested in what is possible and these two things don't need to conflict with each other is it possible that Jesus was born of a virgin is it possible that he was born in Bethlehem is it possible that unlike 95% of his fellow Jews he could read and write is it possible that unlike every other Messiah who came before or after him his conception of Messiah was as a divine being is it possible that he rose from the dead three days after he was executed sure it's possible I believe in God so I'm obviously open to some absurd possibilities of course it's possible is it likely no it's not likely but so what so what if what you are interested in is what is likely great I've got a good book for you if you're interested in what is possible I have another good book for you Thank You reza aslan you

Channel: westminstertownhall

Views: 69,921

Keywords: Westminster Town Hall Forum, Pablo Jones, Minneapolis, Ethics, Ethical Perspectives, Critical Issues, Ideas, Explore, Examine, Arts, Economy, Civil Rights, Education, Environment, Family, Government, Health, Human Rights, Media, Politics, Spirituality, Science, Policy, World Affairs, Thought Leaders, Thinking, Forum, Speaking, Public Speaking, Non-Profit, Activism, Social, Jesus, Zealot, Reza Aslan (Author)

Id: 6MznXsEQshE

Length: 52min 52sec (3172 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 14 2014