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THE ASPEN INSTITUTE

ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2015

ASPEN LECTURE:

THE JESUS OF HISTORY VERSUS THE CHRIST OF FAITH

Paepcke Auditorium

Aspen, Colorado

Saturday, July 4, 2015

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LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

REZA ASLAN

Professor of creative writing, University of

California, Riverside

Author of "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of

Nazareth"

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ASPEN LECTURE:

THE JESUS OF HISTORY VERSUS THE CHRIST OF FAITH

SPEAKER: Good morning, everybody. Welcome.

Last morning of the Aspen Ideas Festival, we're excited to

see your faces this morning. For the Aspen lecture, Reza

Aslan is going to close us out today. We're really lucky

to have him. For those of you who don't know his work,

he's a professor of creative writing at the University of

California, Riverside. But he's also a writer and scholar

of religion, which is why we have him here today. He

serves on the board of the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Among other things, he's written a number of books. But

for today, most relevant is "Zealot: The Life and Times of

Jesus of Nazareth," which we will have right outside

afterwards should you want to get a copy and talk with

Reza a little bit.

Just a word about this format. It's something

new we're doing. It's our second year of the Aspen

Lecture, and it's a result of the feedback we've gotten

from you all that you really wanted a chance to hear in-

depth from some of our best thinkers. So we hope you

enjoy it, and turn your phones off, please, or silence

them. And I think that's all I have. So Reza, come on.

(Applause)

MR. ASLAN: Thank you. Thanks, everyone. It's

a great pleasure to be here talking about Jesus on the 4th

of July, which somehow seems right, doesn't it? Jesus,

kind of the national icon of America, the mascot of -- if

we had a mascot, I think Jesus would probably be our

mascot. I'm going to keep my comments fairly brief

because I've discovered after, you know, a couple of years

now traveling the world with this book that when it comes

to Jesus, people have a lot to say. Who knew? People are

apparently interested in Jesus.

And so, I'm going to just basically give some

opening thoughts and then we'll open this up for

conversation. I'll tell you a little bit about me. I was

born in Iran. I sometimes like to joke that I come from a

long line of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists. And

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in my family, my mother was the lukewarm Muslim and 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, you

know, like that kind of atheist.

My father's atheism actually served us pretty

well in 1979 when the Iranian revolution happened, and

Ayatollah Khomeini returned to the country, and I don't

know if you remember, but he said that he had no interest

in any kind of political role. He just wanted to be left

alone and go back to his studies and back to his mosque.

And my dad who never trusted anything, anyone wearing a

turban ever said, heard that said bullshit and thought

that it might be a good idea for us to leave the country

for a little while until things settle down.

That was 36 years ago. Obviously things did not

settle down. My dad was right about Khomeini, which he

reminded me of on a daily basis. We settled in the Bay

Area of California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. This

was the 1980s. I'm not sure if you remember the 1980s; it

wasn't exactly the best time in the world to be Iranian in

the United States, as opposed to now when it's fantastic.

(Laughter)

MR. ASLAN: This was at the height of the Iran

hostage crisis, 444 days in which Americans were being

held hostage in the embassy in Tehran, and for a seven-

year-old kid trying his hardest to fit in and not be

weird, it was very important for me to distance myself as

much as possible from my heritage, from my culture,

certainly from my religion. In fact, I've admitted on

numerous occasions that I spent a good part of the 1980s

pretending to be Mexican. Yeah.

(Laughter)

MR. ASLAN: Which by the way tells you how

little I understood America, because it did not help at

all. It turns out we don't like Mexicans that much

either. But, you know, I always had this fascination with

religion, which is I know a weird thing for a seven-year-

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old to say. I've always been deeply interested in

religion and spirituality, religious history, religious

phenomenology. I didn't come from a religious family, as

I said. I mean we were culturally Muslim the way that so

many people are culturally religious. But it wasn't

really a very big part of my life or my upbringing.

I think if I were to say why it was the case, it

was probably because those childhood images of

revolutionary Iran and the power that religion has to

transform a society for good and for bad really seared

itself in my consciousness and created this abiding

interest in religion and spirituality. But as I say, I

really didn't have that much of an opportunity to really

do anything about it, to really have any kind of spiritual

edification.

That is until I went to high school. When I was

in high school, when I was about 15, 16 years old, I went

with some friends to an evangelical youth camp in Northern

California. And it was there that I heard the gospel

story for the very first time, this incredible story about

the God of heaven and earth coming down in the form of a

child, of dying for our sins, the promise that anyone who

believes in Him would also never die, but have eternal

life. I had never heard anything like this before in my

life. It was a transformative moment for me.

I immediately converted to this particularly

conservative brand of evangelical fundamentalist

Christianity and then began preaching that gospel to

anyone, whether they wanted to hear it or not, frankly. I

was, I think, what is like officially referred to as a

Bible thumper. I thumped bibles for most of high school.

And then when I went to university, I went to the Jesuit

University, Santa Clara University in the Bay Area, I

decided that this is what I was going to do for a living.

I was going to study religion, and more specifically,

study the New Testament, that this is where my passion

lay.

And it didn't take long in my studies to be

confronted with this kind of uncomfortable fact that

almost everything that I thought I knew about Jesus was

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incomplete if not just incorrect, that there was this

chasm between the Jesus of history, as I was learning

about him in university, and the Christ of faith, as I was

-- as I knew of him in church. Okay, do this here; let's

see if it works. Great, okay. Sometimes this works,

sometimes it doesn't. We'll see.

Now, when I talked to people about this divide,

about the difference between the Jesus of history and the

Christ of faith, I get a lot of confused stares because,

well, frankly, for billions of people around the world,

Christian and non-Christian, the Jesus of history and the

Christ of faith are the same person. You know, this guy.

You know this guy. You've seen this guy. Blonde, blue-

eyed, probably speaks with a British accent, you know.

(Laughter)

MR. ASLAN: I've seen -- yeah, he's American,

exactly. I've seen enough movies to know that like all

gods, angels and Nazis speak with British accents. I

don't know what that's about. I sometimes -- I really

just -- I sometimes like to joke that I call this Megyn

Kelly's Jesus. For those of you who don't know what I'm

talking about, Megyn Kelly, of course, is the wildly

popular Fox News personality who last Christmas caused a

little bit of a controversy when she said on her show

that, "It is a historical fact that Santa Claus and Jesus

Christ were white."

(Laughter)

MR. ASLAN: So I don't know what to say about

that, but okay. I actually -- the truth is I actually

came to Megyn Kelly's defense when she said that in print

and on TV, and not just because every time Fox News

mentions Jesus, I sell books, but because she's actually

right. Megyn Kelly is right. Her Christ is white because

Megyn Kelly is white. Now, if Megyan Kelly were, say,

Kenyan, her Christ would be Kenyan. If Megyan Kelly were

Ethiopian, her Jesus would be Ethiopian. In fact, the

entire gospel story would be understood exclusively

through an Ethiopian cultural lens. If Megyn Kelly were,

say, Japanese, her Jesus would be Japanese. If she were

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Chinese, her Jesus would be Chinese.

You see, that's the difference between the Jesus

of history and the Christ of faith. The Christ of faith

is infinitely malleable. He can be and always has been

whatever a worshiper needs him to be. He can take on any

race; he can take on any history. Whatever your history

is, your Christ will adopt to that history. He can take

on your politics. This, of course, is the Jesus of Latin

America, the Jesus of liberation theology.

And while I understand that for a lot of people,

certainly the faithful, the notion of a Jesus packing heat

might be somewhat disconcerting, somewhat incongruous,

perhaps even unhistorical, but I would just remind you

that the image of Jesus as a warrior with a bloody sword

with which he strikes down the enemies of God goes all the

way back to the very beginning. It goes all the way back

to the scriptures themselves.

And I would argue further that this image is

perhaps, while uncomfortable for many people, a little bit

more historically relevant than the traditional image of

Jesus that we find of him as king, certainly as the

European king, the image of Jesus that don so many

churches around this country and around the world.

Back to what I was saying, the Christ of faith

is infinitely malleable; he can take on your race, your

ethnicity, your culture, your heritage, your history, your

politics. He can even take on your religion. This is

Jesus in Korea. That look familiar to you guys? This is

the Buddha crucified. This is the Jesus of the Christian

community in Korea.

This is Jesus in India. He has taken on the

iconography of Krishna. He has become Krishna. This is

Jesus in Thailand who has become actually part of the

entire pantheon of Thai gods. He is at the center of it.

The Christ of faith is infinitely malleable; he can be

whatever you need him to be. He can take on any identity

that you need of him.

The Jesus of history, however, is frozen in

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place. And while it is enormously difficult to get to

that person, to dig through the layer upon layer of

interpretation and tradition, of myth and legend, of

theology and creed to actually get to that first century

Jew, it is not impossible. It's actually not an

impossible task. Because while we know very little about

the historical Jesus -- and we know very, very little

about him. Take away the gospels, take away the Christian

writings, and we know almost nothing about this man who is

so pivotal in the history of the western civilization.

In fact, I would say that we probably know, I'd

say, maybe three things with some measure of confidence

about the historical Jesus, minus, of course, the

Christian writings which, as we'll talk about in our

conversations, are not really historical documents.

They're creedal formulas; they're documents of faith.

They're testimonies of faith, not historical biographies.

We know probably three things about this man, this

historical Jesus of Nazareth.

Number one, well, that he was a Jew, which

sounds obvious, but it's actually kind of an important

thing to bring up, something we tend to forget every once

in a while. In fact, I would say that the most important

differentiation between the Jesus of history and the

Christ of faith is that the Christ of faith is a kind of

celestial spirit who founds a brand-new religion, whereas

the Jesus of history is a Jew preaching Judaism to other

Jews. That is the most important lens through which to

understand the historical Jesus. I'll say it again. The

Jesus of history is a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews.

That's how you interpret him. Number one, that he was a

Jew.

Number two, that sometime in the first half of

the first century, he launched a popular apocalyptic

movement, a messianic movement, one of dozens of movements

in his time. In fact, if you read my book, you'll know

that one thing that's quite fascinating about Jesus is he

was probably the least well-known and least popular and

probably even the least successful of these messiahs of

his time. But nevertheless, he launched this movement

predicated on something that Jesus referred to as the

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Kingdom of God.

Now, what he meant by the Kingdom of God,

there's 2000 years of argument about that. But there is

no argument that the core and kernel of Jesus' message,

the entire purpose of his ministry was to talk about this

notion that seems he himself did not create -- it's

actually very clear that he adopted this idea from John

the Baptist, his mentor, John the Baptist. But it was a

very new notion in his time, this concept of the Kingdom

of God. That was the core and kernel of his preaching.

And then what it meant, we can have a conversation about.

So number one, he was a Jew; number two, he

started this Jewish movement predicated on the Kingdom of

God. And number three, as a result of that movement, he

was arrested for the crime of sedition by Rome, and

ultimately crucified, executed. That's it. That is the

sum and total of anything that we can say with any

confidence about the Jesus of history. So then how do we

fill in the rest of this story? How do we find out the

rest of this biography of this man who was so steeped in

shadow, so steeped in interpretation?

Well, you do it in the way that most historians

deal with any of these kind of legendary figures in the

ancient past. You steep him fully in his time and place,

and then you allow his time and place to define him. Now,

in Jesus' case, we're really lucky, because while as I

said, we know very, very little about the historical Jesus

himself, we know almost everything about the world in

which he lived.

First century Palestine is an era that has been

exhaustively documented by the way, not least because of

the Romans, the Romans who occupied this region. Listen,

whatever else you want to say about the Romans, they were

good at documentation, very good at documentation. It was

a very -- it was a skill of theirs. Documentation and

killing, those were the two sort of -- and roads, we'll

give them roads. Documentation, killing, and roads; those

were the pillars of the Roman Empire.

We know how much a bushel of wheat cost in

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Jesus' time. We have an enormous amount of information

about the religious, political, economic, social, cultural

milieu out of which Jesus arose. And so it's a very

simple proposition. You take what little you know about

Jesus, you put him in this world that we know almost

everything about and you let that world define him. What

does that mean? Well, it means first of all, you have to

understand that Jesus was speaking to a very specific

audience, that he was addressing very specific social

ills, that he was in confrontation with very specific

religious and political leaders.

And so if you want to know what Jesus actually

meant when he said something, you need to know who he was

talking to, who he was talking about. In our case, of

course, we're talking about three major sort of poles of

power in his time. First and foremost was the temple

authorities. This is the high priest of Israel. The

temple, you have to understand, was the heart of the

Jewish people. It wasn't just the living, dwelling place

of the Spirit of God; literally the living, dwelling

place, okay.

I want to make sure that you understand that the

Spirit of God, as far as the Jews of Jesus' time were

concerned, existed everywhere, but it had a single source,

and that was the holy of holies inside the temple. There

was no other place in which God could be communed with

except for this temple. And so if you controlled the

temple, you controlled the religion. You decided who

could and could not access that Spirit of God; you decided

what the religion actually meant, what God wanted for the

people.

And in this case, the temple was not just the

sort of the center of the Jewish faith; it was also the

heart of the Jewish nation. It was the repository for the

laws, for the documents that the Jews use to define

themselves as a people. It was also the largest bank. So

it was the center of commerce, the center of politics, the

center of religion. It really was everything about the

Jewish people of Jesus' time existed inside this temple,

which gave the high priest an enormous amount of power.

In Jesus' time, of course, the high priest was a man by

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the name of Caiaphas.

The high priest used that power to extract an

enormous amount of wealth from the Jews and to hoard that

wealth on his own. He was probably the richest Jew in the

entire holy land at that time and he maintained control of

his authority by completely marrying himself to the Roman

occupation. In fact, Rome really treated the high priest

like a kind of employee. In a sense, Rome wouldn't decide

who would become the high priest. The Sanhedrin decided

that, but if Rome was ever displeased with the high

priest, and it often was, it would just simply remove the

high priest and replace him with somebody else.

When the high priest was finished with whatever

ceremonies, be it Passover or Tabernacle or whatever the

case may be, Rome would actually seize the high priest's

holy vestments and the tools that he would use to commune

with God and hold on to those and then hand them back out

again for the next festival or feast day. And by the way,

if there was any confusion about who actually controlled

the temple and the high priest, all you had to do was just

look at the facility itself, the temple mount itself.

And the northwest corner of the temple mount

literally attached to the temple was the Antonia Fortress,

which is where the Roman governor in Jesus' time, of

course, Pontius Pilate, actually resided. And so the

temple crawled with Roman soldiers. And so for many, many

Jews, particularly poor pious Jews like Jesus, there

really was no difference between the Roman governor and

the high priest, the Roman occupation and the temple.

For them, the temple had become completely

corrupted. It was an abomination as a result of not just

the corruption and the ineptitude of the high priest and

the priestly aristocracy which passed this title amongst

themselves like it was a legacy, but also because they had

so fully absorbed the Roman occupation, creating a

situation that was intolerable for the vast majority of

Jews in Jesus' time.

Besides the high priest, of course, there was

what was referred to at the time as the Herodian elite.

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This is the great Herod the Great, the king of the Jews

who died in the very year that Jesus was born, 4 BC. Yes,

Jesus was born before Christ, I know. It's confusing; 4

BC is Jesus' birth date. Herod's revolution in the Holy

Land created a new class of Jews. They're referred to as

Hellenistic or the Herodian elite. These were Jews that

had married themselves again to the Roman occupation and

had managed to amass an enormous amount of wealth,

creating an unbelievable gap between the very, very rich

and basically everyone else, who was very, very poor.

They would use this money to buy up land from

farmers and then employ those very same previous

landowners as essentially slave labor on the land that

they used to own. The Herodian elite had essentially also

absorbed these sort of Greek-Roman Hellenistic ideals.

They had in the minds of many Jews essentially abandoned

Judaism altogether. In fact, they began to stop actually

circumcising themselves. So really there's sort of a

pivotal connection between the Jewish people and their

past, their father Abraham. They had cut themselves off

of -- no pun intended; there truly was no pun intended,

truly, truly in that sense -- again, an enormous amount of

wealth.

And by the way, this was at a time in which

currency, physical currency was just then adopted in first

century Palestine. This notion of going from bartering

and trade to actually coins stamped with the face of, you

know, the emperor that became sort of a symbol for what

something was worth had profound implications on the Jews

of Jesus' time.

And what it meant to actually be wealthy wasn't

about how much land you owned or how much sheep you owned.

It was about how much coin you owned, and if you could

just amass enough of that coin, then you can swallow up

everyone else's land and sheep. And so you can understand

how the sudden introduction of currency like this

absolutely upended the traditional economy of this place,

and created, as I say, this enormous gap.

And then finally, of course, was Rome itself.

In the time of Jesus, of course, the emperor was Octavian,

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also known as Caesar Augustus. And again, it's very

important to understand that the Roman occupation was

utterly complete in Jesus' time. Rome controlled every

aspect of life for the Jews; the religion, as I said,

because of their control of the temple; the economy,

because of the relationship that they had with the

Herodian elite; the social aspect of it; the cultural

aspect of it. In fact, for the Jews of Jesus' time, it

was impossible for -- even their very movement was under

the control of a Roman occupier, a heathen Roman occupier

who lived thousands of kilometers away.

This was, as I say, an intolerable situation for

the Jews, which is why that Jesus' era was an era that was

awash in apocalyptic expectation. One after another,

messiahs rose up preaching liberation from Roman

occupation, preaching things like the coming of the

Kingdom of God and God's justice coming to earth. And one

after another, they were killed for it, for a very simple

reason. Messiah in Jesus' time means something very, very

specific. It means that you are the descendant of King

David, that you are here to reestablish David's kingdom on

earth and to usher in the rule of God. That's it. That's

what it means.

If you stand up in Jesus' time and say, I am the

messiah, you mean you are the descendant of King David,

you're here to reestablish David's kingdom, of course, to

reconstitute the twelve tribes of Israel -- that's what it

means to establish David's kingdom -- and to usher in the

rule of God. Well, if you were claiming to be ushering in

the rule of God, you are claiming to be ushering out the

rule of Caesar; that's treason.

It's as simple as that. Which is why to a

person, every Jew who stood up and called himself the

messiah was killed for it. Most of them were killed in

the way that Jesus was killed, crucifixion. After all,

crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved

exclusively for crimes against the state, crimes like

treason, sedition, rebellion, insurrection. These are the

only crimes for which you could be crucified.

Now, people at a certain point will say, yeah,

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but wasn't Jesus crucified alongside two thieves? No, he

was not. The Greek word that the gospels used to describe

the two men on either side of Jesus, "lestai," does not

mean thieves. It can mean thieves, but it doesn't.

"Kleptai" means thieves, "lestai" means bandits. And in

Jesus' time, "bandit" was the most common term for an

insurrectionist, for a rebel. Jesus himself was called a

bandit, a "lestes" on a number of occasions in the

gospels. In fact, it's quite clear what Jesus was

crucified for. Every human -- every person who was

crucified was given what was called a "titulist," a giant

sign that was either put at their feet or at their head

declaring the crime for which they were being crucified.

Jesus' crime was there for all to see, king of

the Jews, striving for kingly duty, which by the way, is

synonymous with claiming to be the messiah. You have to

understand the crucifixion, as weird as this sounds, was

not even a form of capital punishment in Roman times. In

fact, it was often the case that Rome would kill you first

and then crucify you. The purpose of crucifixion was not

to kill the criminal; the purpose of crucifixion was to

act as a deterrent against any kind of rebellion or

insurrection, which is why it was such a grotesque form of

punishment, and a public form of punishment.

Crucifixions were also done in public squares at

-- on top of hills, at the entry way to major cities, for

instance, like Golgotha where Jesus was crucified, which

was a hill right at the entrance to the main gates of

Jerusalem. So understand this, you could not walk into

the city of Jerusalem without first passing by hundreds of

dead or dying Jews, all of them put on a cross for daring

to defy the will of Rome. It's about as clear a message

as it gets.

And so when you look at the historical Jesus,

when you look at the Christ of faith on that cross, that

pivotal icon of Christianity, what you see is an innocent

man dying for the sins of humanity. But when you look at

the Jesus of history on that cross, what you actually see

is one bandit being crucified alongside two other bandits,

all of whom were given the same punishment for the crime

of defying the will of Rome.

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Now, instead of going through and talking about

what all of this means for an understanding of who Jesus

was -- that's what I want the last 30 minutes of our

conversation to be about -- I just want to sort of stop

for a moment and say something that's kind of important.

Because, you know, sometimes when I talk about this

difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of

faith, I get particularly faithful people in the audience

who will sometimes criticize me, because they'll say that

I'm sort of -- I'm taking away anything that's

extraordinary about Jesus, right, I'm treating him like

he's just a human being, that I'm making him normal, that

he's no longer special when I talk about him in this way -

- I get criticized for a lot of things, and well, those

are perfectly valid criticisms.

This one I don't get at all. Because for me,

thinking about Jesus as a man, whatever else he may be, he

may be God, he may be the son of God, he may be the

messiah; those are perfectly fine views about Jesus. But

even if you believe he is God incarnate, you also believe

that he's a man. And if he's a man, then that means

something. It means that you have to look to some of his

motivations as human motivations.

And so when I think of Jesus as a man, what I

see is not somebody who's normal or no longer

extraordinary. On the contrary, what I see is a man, a

poor, pious, illiterate, uneducated Jewish peasant from

the backwoods of Galilee, what we would nowadays refer to

as a country bumpkin basically, who despite that, despite

all of that, through the power of his teachings, through

the power of his charisma, was able to start a movement on

behalf of the poor and the weak, dispossess the

marginalized, women especially -- we can have a

conversation about what that means, about the role of

women in Jesus' ministry -- a movement that was seen as

such a threat to the most powerful empire the world had

ever known, that he was hunted down like a bandit, like a

criminal, arrested, tortured, and executed for the crime

of sedition.

I don't know about you, that sounds like the

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most interesting man in the world, okay. I mean you can

call that guy a threat if you want to. If I told you that

story about anyone, you would be -- you would want to know

more about that person. And so for me, Jesus, the man, is

as compelling, as extraordinary, as worth knowing, in

fact, as worth following as Jesus, the Christ. And so I

don't really see a kind of -- I don't know, a lessening of

his position in seeing him as a historical figure. You

can see him as the Christ of faith; you could see him as

malleable if you want to, but freezing him in his time and

place doesn't make him less interesting, as far as I'm

concerned. In fact, it makes him more interesting.

In fact, I can say with total confidence

standing here before you that now that I'm no longer a

Christian, I am far more a devoted follower of the Jesus

of history than I ever was of the Christ of faith, that

the lesson, the example that he taught 2000 years ago

about how to confront social injustice, how to confront

the gatekeepers of salvation and the powers that be is an

example that is as resonant today as it was back then.

So I'll stop here. I think we've got someone

with a mike walking around. We've got lots of time for

questions. And I'm happy to talk about any part of the

conversation or any issue about Jesus. Or if you want to

have a much broader conversation about the role of

religion in history and how a scholar sort of navigates

those too, I'm happy to have that conversation too. I

just have one sort of rule about these things. And it's

not please ask a question and don't make a statement -- I

actually like statements; I think sometimes statements are

even more interesting than questions -- is that I always

go male, female, male, female, I go back and forth.

So if a gentleman asks a question, you know,

we'll just wait here all day until a lady asks a question

as well.

(Laughter)

MR. ASLAN: So let's start with the lady back

there.

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SPEAKER: Hi. First of all, thank you for this.

But my question is if the Christ of faith is infinitely

malleable, as you said, can he be a woman? And if not,

why not?

MR. ASLAN: That's a very, very good question.

Well, there is an enormous corpus of material written not

just by contemporary scholars, but stuff that goes back

hundreds of years about the feminine nature of Christ.

And if you do just a research on sort of Christ as

feminine, you'll get a lot of that material. But that

material is predicated not just on the sort of the kind of

Judaism that he is preaching, which is a very sort of

interesting mix between the kind of muscular ethno-

nationalistic Judaism that he preaches, right.

So when he goes to see the Syrophoenician woman,

the -- really the only non-Jew that he ever kind of has a

real contact with in the synoptic gospels, this -- and

some of you might remember the story, like he goes to draw

some well and there's a Syrophoenician woman there, and he

asked for some water and she says, you know -- where he

sort of announces himself as the messiah to her, and she

says, come to my village and preach, and Jesus very

famously says, it's not fit to give the food meant for the

children to the dogs, meaning the children are Israel and

the dogs are the Gentiles.

And the woman says quite famously, well, but the

dogs can eat the crumbs that fall from the table. And

Jesus says, you're right, go, your faith has healed you.

But he doesn't go with her. In fact, Jesus never, ever

sets foot in a Gentile city, he never preaches to a

Gentile community. Why? Because he's a Jew preaching

Judaism to other Jews. So there's a muscular ethno-

nationalistic element to it. But then it sort of softened

with this conception of this Kingdom of God.

That is, to put it in somewhat crude terms, very

feminine in its approach, right, that is all-inclusive,

that even has a role for Gentiles at the end of time, not

during Jesus' preaching. His conception of the Kingdom of

God is for Jews, but he quite openly keeps open the

possibility that non-Jews can join this movement at the

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end of time, that there is a space for them, as he kind of

puts it in his final preaching to the disciples before he

is taken up.

So that aspect to it has actually led a lot of

fascinating conversations about the sort of the feminine

nature of Christ. I would suggest, I think, probably my

favorite writer on this topic is Elisabeth Schussler

Fiorenza, and so she would be a good resource for that.

Gentleman, yes, up front. Yes?

SPEAKER: Good morning. Could you talk about

Jesus' family life, his parents --

MR. ASLAN: Yes.

SPEAKER: -- his sketchy girlfriends --

MR. ASLAN: It's a very, very good question and

a really tough one to talk about. What we know about --

what we can be confident about Jesus is that he is a

Nazarene. In fact, it's really the -- one of the few

things that people could all agree on, that he came from

the village of Nazareth. And the reason that's

significant is because Nazareth was such a small village

that it doesn't actually appear on any maps until the end

of the first century, almost the beginning of the second

century.

This was a village of maybe a hundred families

tops, a village of mud and brick homes. As far as we

know, the archeological evidence indicates there was not a

single road in Nazareth, there was not a single bath in

Nazareth, not a single school, not even a synagogue in

Nazareth. That's how small this village was. And the

reason that we are sort of confident about, you know, his

-- Nazareth as his birthplace is because throughout his

entire life Jesus was not called Jesus. Jesus was called

the Nazarene.

This is interesting because Jesus or -- Jesus,

of course, is the Greek for Yeshu. Yeshu is the nickname

of Yeshua. So Jesus' name was actually Yeshua, but

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everyone would call him Yeshu for short. Yeshua was the

most common name for boys in Jesus' time. I mean, if you

said, you know, Jesus in a crowd, like 50 people would

say, "Huh?" It was an extremely common name. And so you

had to constantly figure out a way to differentiate one

Jesus from another.

And you could do that either by a father, but

interestingly, Jesus is never, ever referred to as Ben

Josef, right. He's never referred to as the son of

Joseph. At one point in the gospels, he's referred to as

Ben Merriam, which is so bizarre we don't know what to say

about it, okay. He's actually called the son of Mary in

the gospels. That is, well, impossible. It's impossible,

okay. It's just -- it doesn't happen, which has led to an

enormous amount of speculation about maybe Jesus was a

bastard, maybe, you know, Mary had an out-of-wedlock.

What we do know for certain is that in first

century, if someone referred to a son as Ben Merriam, it

was a swear word, it was a derogatory term, it was a way

of saying, you're a bastard. That's the way to say it's a

very, very weird thing. But he was known as the Nazarene,

because the truth of the matter is Nazareth was such a

Podunk town that it's very rare that there would be -- you

would be talking about some other Nazarene. You know, it

was going to be like, "Hey, did you see the Nazarene?"

"Which Nazarene?" There's just the one Nazarene. Nobody

else famous is from this town.

So we know he's from Nazareth; we know he

belongs to a very large family. We know the names of four

of his brothers; Simon, Judas, Joseph, and James. James,

of course, is the most famous of his brothers. James

Ya'aqov, as he was known, will ultimately not just become

one of the most prominent followers of Jesus, but he will

actually be Jesus' successor. He will lead the church

after Jesus' death and become an enormously influential,

prominent man.

In fact, again, take away all Christian

writings, we know more about James than we know about

Jesus. Romans wrote about James; nobody cared about

Jesus. James was a very important man. Want to know how

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important he was? Jesus led the Jesus movement for three

years; his brother James led it for 30 years; very

important. And then he had an untold number of sisters

who unfortunately are not named in the gospels, which is

fairly standard in that time.

Was he married? This is a very difficult

question, because it rests on two conflicting facts. The

first is that for a 30-year-old Jewish male in the first

century to have not been married, he may as well be from

Mars. Now that is not to say that there's no such thing

as celibacy in Jesus' time. There were celibates, but

they were monks, they were monastic orders. For instance,

the Essenes, the Essenes were celibate. But if you were a

celibate, then you belong to one of these orders and you

went and lived off in the Judean desert by yourself

because you not only rejected marriage and children, you

rejected society altogether, because those mean the same

thing. Jesus obviously did not.

There's also a problem and that the Midrash

makes it very clear that you are not allowed to be called

rabbi unless you have a wife and children, and yet Jesus

was called rabbi. By everyone he was called rabbi. So

they must have known something that we don't know. That's

what people think. So there's that problem. That's the

first fact.

But here is the second fact; in everything ever,

ever written about Jesus by his friends and by his

followers, by his detractors and by his disciples,

everything ever written about Jesus, there was never a

mention of a wife and children, never, ever. And we don't

know what to do with that silence. And so we don't have

an answer. Logic dictates he must have had a wife and

children, he must have, but the fact that there is not one

iota of evidence, not one mention anywhere in anything

ever written about him makes it very difficult for us to

kind of figure out what's going on there.

Let's see. Do we have a lady? Yes.

SPEAKER: There has been some discussion in the

Gnostic gospels that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

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Could you comment on that, please?

MR. ASLAN: Yes. So not married, not married,

but in the Gnostic gospels, so just to be clear, so we --

you know, there are four canonized gospels, Matthew, Mark,

Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the

Synoptics, because they're essentially the same gospel.

Mark is the first gospel. It was written sometime after

70 AD. Jesus was born, as I say, around 4 BC. He died

somewhere around between 28 and 32 AD. And the first

gospel was written, Mark, sometime between 70 and 73 AD.

And then Matthew and Luke's gospels were written 20 years

later, around 90 AD. Interestingly, Matthew and Luke were

writing at completely different places. They had no

knowledge of each other at all, but they both had the

Gospel of Mark and they were both trying to sort of, you

know, expand it.

The Gospel of Mark, if you read it, is somewhat

unsatisfying gospel. There's no infancy narrative, Jesus

just shows up on the banks of the River Jordan and he gets

baptized. There's no resurrection in the Gospel of Mark.

The women go to the tomb to wash Jesus. The tomb is

empty; there's a man there that says, who are you looking

for. And they say, we're here for Jesus, and they say,

he's not here, go tell the disciples and Peter -- it's a

weird thing to say -- go tell the disciples and Peter that

he'll meet them in Jerusalem. And then the Gospel of Mark

ends with this line, "And the women ran away from there

and they told nothing to no one, because they were

afraid." The end.

That is a really weird way to end the gospel,

the first gospel, A, because obviously they told someone.

So that's not true. In fact, it's such an unsatisfying

way to write a gospel that 200 years later, a monk

actually wrote eight more verses to the Gospel of Mark.

We know that those versus were added later, because we

have earlier versions of the gospel that don't have that

line.

So as you can understand, this was unsatisfying

for a lot of Christians. And so Matthew and Luke decided

to fix the situation. And so they took the Gospel of

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Mark, they added infancy narratives, they added

resurrection narratives, they sort of added some of their

own material in the middle of it. And we call those three

the Synoptics.

And then there's John. John, the last of the

four gospels, was written sometime between 100 and 120 at

a time in which this is now a -- no longer a Jewish

movement. It's now Christianity, it is a Roman movement.

In fact, it's totally divorced itself from Judaism. The

Jews are the enemy in John's Gospel. Jesus is not a Jew

in John's Gospel at all. He just rails against the Jews

constantly. In the Synoptics, he rails against the

Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes and the

priests. In John, it's just the Jews. He just -- he's

against the Jews in general. Those were the four

canonized gospels.

But they're, of course, not the only gospels.

About 70 years ago, we knew they existed, because we had

sort of traditions about them, but about 70 years ago, in

a cave in upper Egypt, in a village called Nag Hammadi, we

discovered a treasure trove that we now refer to

incorrectly as the Gnostic Gospels. And these are all the

gospels that didn't make the cut, and they include the

Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Phillip, the Gospel of

the Egyptians, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a whole host

of letters, et cetera, gospels that, with the exception of

the Gospel of Thomas, were written very late, second,

third, fourth centuries, and they represent for us the

enormous diversity of belief when it came to early

Christianity and who Jesus was.

They're not very helpful in discovering the

historical Jesus because they were written so late, but

they do tell us how wildly eclectic people's views of

Jesus was. In a number of those gospels, talking about

the feminine nature of Jesus, you get this kind of Gnostic

quality, this idea of a spirit within that is the real

individual and the body is just a shell that has to be

sort of discarded in order to have, you know, a communion

with God, traditional mysticism.

But very famously in a number of those gospels,

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there are these hymns about a very special relationship

that Jesus has with Mary Magdalene. In fact, he in --

very famously the disciples, and Peter especially,

complains about -- he says how come the Lord kisses us on

the cheek, but kisses Mary on the lips, that's not fair.

You know, the disciples are constantly complaining about

how Mary is always with them, like why is Mary always

here, why Mary is following us everywhere. And Jesus very

famously says, if I choose to make Mary a man, I will

choose to do so. It's a weird thing to say, but it's very

Gnostic in that notion.

We know that Jesus had female disciples. This

is very important. Jesus did not have 12 disciples. He

had 12 apostles. Apostles are different than disciples.

Apostles are essentially 12 disciples that he gave the

power to go preach without his supervision. Those are the

apostles. Those are the 12 that you're all familiar with.

But according to the Gospel of Luke, he had 72 disciples.

And among those disciples, because the definition of

"disciple" was someone who traveled with Jesus from

village to village. If you traveled with him from village

to village, you were a disciple.

And most definitely he had women disciples. In

fact, we know their names, which is crazy. We don't even

know the names of Jesus' sisters, and we know the names of

his disciples. They must have been enormously

influential. To have been named in the gospels is a very

big deal if you're a woman, and we know their names. And

most prominent among these disciples was Mary of Magdala.

Now, the interesting thing about Mary of Magdala

is that if I asked you who is Mary Magdalene, almost

everyone of you would say, yeah, the prostitute, which is

weird, because she is never, ever called a prostitute in

any gospels. There is no -- at no point is Mary Magdalene

ever referred to as a prostitute at all. There is this

very famous story about a prostitute in the Gospel of

John, which is so unhistorical, nobody ever takes it

seriously, but that prostitute is not called Mary

Magdalene, whereas Mary Magdalene was quite clearly one of

the leading disciples of Jesus.

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And so that caused an enormous amount of

consternation in the early church. And so, very quickly

May Magdalene, the first among the female disciples,

became associated with this prostitute that Jesus saved.

And so she was so grateful to him that, you know, she

followed him around everywhere like a puppy dog and Jesus

just sort of allowed it to happen. That is not who this

woman was. She is in all four gospels the only individual

that all four gospels agree was the first to see Jesus

risen from the dead. She's an enormously complex and very

important figure in Christianity, which is why she -- her

role has been diminished. Whether she was also Jesus'

companion or lover, hard to say. She's never called his

wife. But yes, in the Gnostic gospels, there is clearly a

much more intimate relationship that they must have had.

A gentleman, I guess, up front here. Anyone?

I'll let you decide.

SPEAKER: Hi, thank you. And thank you very

much. So something that runs through my mind and you

know, I was recently in Israel in Jerusalem, Jerusalem

often. And throughout the country, anti-Muslim sentiment

is probable. The Christians, however, seem to get a free

pass. Like, I don't know whether that's simply about

because of tourism or whether there's some other thing

going on there, but something that puzzles me and feels

like a dark space that I just don't understand is

evangelical agitation and/or support within Israel today,

having something to do with end times and apocalyptic

scriptures. And I wonder can you help clarify for me what

the hell they're doing --

MR. ASLAN: Sure, sure.

SPEAKER: -- and how that's -- how -- where the

free pass comes from?

MR. ASLAN: I've written a lot about this, by

the way, in my second book, which is in paperback, is

"Beyond Fundamentalism." First of all, let me say, the

Christians don't get a free pass in the occupied

territories. They do in Israel proper, but in the last

decade, there have been 29 cases of arson, vandalism and

25

outright destruction of Christian churches and monasteries

in the occupied territories as a result of what is

referred to now as "price tag terrorism."

This is a group of radical Jewish settlers who

believe, of course, that their loyalty is not to the

secular state of Israel, but to the Biblical land of

Israel who are trying to rebuild the kingdom of David, and

to do so they have to cleanse that land of all non-Jews.

And they've made life absolutely miserable for Palestinian

Christians in the occupied territories. But you're right,

in Israel proper, yes, thanks largely to an enormous

amount of money that is coming from Christians around the

world, you have a completely different situation there.

So I'm going to give you the very, very quick

version of this, because I do want to get one more

question before we run out of time. Okay. So in the year

'70 -- in the year '66, the Jews rose up against the

Romans, miraculously managed to kick Rome out of

Jerusalem, keep them at bay for about four years, mostly

because Rome was dealing with its own civil war and to

them the Jews were just a flea on their back that they

didn't even worry about until they finished their civil

war and then they realized, oh, right, the Jews, let's go

kill them too.

So they showed -- they came back, they killed

everyone. Nearly a million Jews were slaughtered, if you

believe Josephus; they burned the city of Jerusalem and

the temple, the actual living, dwelling place of the

Spirit of God literal, dwelling place of the Spirit of God

to the ground, defiled its ashes, renamed the city

eventually Aelia Capitolina. Josephus says that when they

were done, you would never guess there was a city called

Jerusalem. And then what Jews remained were exiled out of

the Holy Land.

This was, of course, an apocalyptic moment. And

so this notion started to arise, both in Judaism and in

Christianity separately interestingly, on separate tracks,

that the return of the messiah, or in the case of the Jews

the advent of the messiah, because they didn't believe

that Jesus was the messiah, would be predicated on the

26

rebuilding of that temple, that if they can just rebuild

the third temple, the Jews say, the messiah will arrive,

and the Christians say, well, the messiah already arrived,

he'll just come back if we rebuild the temple.

The problem, of course, is around the seventh

century, Jerusalem became an Islamic land and the Dome of

the Rock was built atop there and that Dome of the Rock

still exists, and the temple is still under the authority

of the Waqf, the Islamic authority in Jerusalem. So there

is no third temple building unless you destroy the Dome

first. And so you have this, over the last 50 years, this

fascinating collusion between rightwing Christian

evangelicals in the U.S. and rightwing Jewish fanatics in

Israel who have nothing in common with each other except

for this, to bring -- tear down that temple, and there's

been at least three thwarted attacks against the Dome of

the Rock.

One, which, in 1992, very, very famously, I mean

it was just a total accident that some janitor discovered

bombs that were encircling the Dome of the Rock and

alerted the authorities, to tear that thing down, rebuild

the third temple. Now, here's the weird thing about it,

is that for Christians, who are essentially the money

behind it, they're the ones who send all the money, and

for Jews who are actually doing the work on the ground

there, they have this cooperation, but theologically that

cooperation is -- doesn't work, because for, according to

Christianity, the first thing that Jesus does when he

comes back is get rid of the Jews.

Now, the Jews obviously don't believe that.

They don't really pay any attention to it. And so for

them, they're more than happy to take all of this money

and to build things like the temple institute, et cetera,

which overlooks the temple mount today in order to, you

know, essentially get rid of the Muslims and rebuild this

temple and to consecrate the land for the messiah. So

yeah, it's a weird fellowship. It's a weird, weird

bedfellows, but it is what it is.

Do I have to stop even though we started a

little bit late, or can I get one more question? Okay,

27

one more question from a woman. Maybe that nice lady over

there who's been raising her hand like crazy. And then

I'll answer more questions while I'm signing books at

last.

SPEAKER: Thank you for appreciating my

willingness --

MR. ASLAN: You're very enthusiastic about it,

yes.

SPEAKER: Yes, that too. So I was a religious

studies major in college. And I think it, one, shocked my

parents because they used to have to drag me to

confirmation class, and, two, kind of concerned them. But

luckily I have a job. So that's good. They're very happy

about that.

MR. ASLAN: Yeah, that's always nice, yeah.

SPEAKER: And I wanted to know, there was during

college that I fell in love with the humanity of Jesus and

with the gospels specifically. And I wanted to know what

your favorite story in the gospel is.

MR. ASLAN: Very good, very good. There's a lot

of these stories that I love. But I would have to say,

the one that kind of stirs me -- besides, I do love the

Syrophoenician story because it's so weird in so many --

like, it just -- I think for a lot of people it doesn't

make any sense at all. The one that I think stirs me the

most is the one in which -- so Jesus comes back, he's, you

know, born and raised in Nazareth, and then sometime

around the year 26, 27 just disappears and goes off to

hang out with John the Baptist.

John the Baptist, an enormously influential,

very popular, way, way more famous than Jesus, in his

lifetime, preacher, and Jesus becomes one of his

disciples. And then John dies, and then Jesus leaves and

he goes back to Nazareth, but he comes with two other

people with him, right. And those two people, Andrew and

Philip, are actually John's disciples. So most scholars

believe that essentially what happens is that John's

28

movement fragments and Jesus becomes sort of one of the

leaders of that movement to continue to preach John's

message.

And indeed, the first two things, the first

thing that Jesus says and the first thing that Jesus does

are borrowed from John, "Repent; the Kingdom of God is

here," that's verbatim John's message and; of course,

baptism, that's John's invention. He sort of created that

very notion. And then most famously, of course, the

Lord's Prayer, right. We all know the Lord's Prayer, but

we don't know how the Lord's Prayer begins, which is with

a question from the disciples, "Oh, Master, teach us to

pray the way John taught you to pray." And then Jesus

says, it's like this: "Our father, who art in heaven," et

cetera, et cetera.

So it's quite clear that he began his ministry

as just one of John's disciples, but he comes back to the

-- to Nazareth and he starts to preach. And he gets, you

know, thrown out of there. So he goes to Capernaum. And

in Capernaum, that's where his ministry first begins, and

his family is scandalized, absolutely scandalized by the

things that Jesus is saying, because obviously they're

worried, they're afraid that the Romans are going to show

up and kill everybody as a result of this.

So they decide that they're going to come down,

James and Mary, his mother, they're going to come down and

they're going to put a stop to it, right. And so as Jesus

is preaching, he -- somebody says to him, hey, your mother

and your brother and your sisters are here, and they want

to talk to you. And then you all know what Jesus says,

right? "Who is my mother? Who is my brother? Who is my

sister?" And he looks around and he says, "These are my

mothers, these are brothers, these are my sisters. Anyone

who follows me is my mother, my brother, my sister."

And I always love that phrase, because you have

to understand that at this moment, this is a tiny, tiny

group. It's a tiny movement. And so the way that it's

sort of -- Jesus sort of envisions it is as a family,

right, as a family unit, that this is kind of the core

bond of what it means to be -- well, they wouldn't have

29

called themselves Christian then, but to be a follower of

Jesus.

And I think for me, why that's really valuable

is in my experience both as a Christian and having left

Christianity, I think the thing that is most beautiful

about the faith and the thing that it strives so often and

fails to achieve is that sense of family, that idea that

in the midst of this global religion of two billion people

with an infinite number of sects and schisms and an

infinite number of interpretations, that at the core of it

is this notion of a single family, that's all about

brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. And I think

that if Christianity could get that back, to get that

sense back that Jesus first kind of inaugurated 2000 years

ago, it would be a far more, I think, fruitful and

successful faith.

Thank you, everyone.

(Applause)

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