He points out that Jesus’ contemporaries fully believed that Jesus performed healing miracles. Interestingly, Aslan points out what strong eyewitness evidence there is for the resurrection, although ultimately he says that the resurrection is the sort of thing that historians simply cannot evaluate. While heavily influenced by Crossan, he abandons some of Crossan’s more bizarre claims. He explains well the multifaceted economic, political and religious setting of first-century Palestine (with some exceptions pointed out below). To be fair to Aslan, there are several strengths to his book. Paul radically changed the identity of Jesus from human rebel to divine Son of God, against the wishes of other leaders like Peter and James. They did this for two reasons: because Jesus’ actual prediction had failed, and because the Roman destruction of rebellious Jerusalem in AD 70 made Jesus’ real teachings both dangerous and unpopular.
Early Christians changed the story of Jesus to make him into a peaceful shepherd. Instead, Jesus was crucified as a revolutionary. Jesus believed that God would honor the zeal of his lightly armed disciples and give them victory. Driven by religious zeal, Jesus believed that God would empower him to become the king of Israel and overturn the hierarchical social order. The central argument of Zealot is this: Jesus, like other messianic figures of his day, called for the violent expulsion of Rome from Israel. Aslan is strongly influenced by (among others) John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar author who has written a number of books presenting Jesus as a peasant social revolutionary. Zealot is instead typical of other modern skeptical approaches to Jesus. This is simply not the case Zealot does not present traditional Muslim views of Jesus at all.
Since Aslan is a Muslim, some have responded to Zealot as if it is a Muslim look at Jesus. Aslan is able to take a lot of important historical background and present it in a riveting manner, accessible to most readers. His primary teaching role, after all, is as a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. First, a botched interview of the author on Fox News caused a huge surge of interest, making his book an overnight best seller. Because so many hundreds of books of this type have been published, Aslan’s book would most likely not have received significant attention at all, except for two factors. Reza Aslan’s new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House, 2013), is in most ways a typical attempt to paint a new picture of Jesus.
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