Reza "Zealot"

We are what we read. Reza spent 20 years to research the New Testament. He's scholar of religions. He studied Ancient Greek which is indispensable in understanding The Old Testament and the Ancient World in the Mediterranean. He wrote the book as a reaction of being duped into believing in Jesus the Christ when he was an impressionable lad of fifteen. As self-regarding educated persons and, heavens forbid!, intellectuals, we must pledge allegiance only to facts and truths, not fictions and myths. 

As a sidebar, there was a stupid grammatical error in my post: "have held", not "have hold". The error resulted from haste, not ignorance. I have corrected it in the enclosed.

Also, the following was what I wrote to two friends about what Scott Turow said about Toni Morrison, a joke among Nobel Prize winners. While many uninformed Vietnamese-Americans look down upon Latin Americans, especially Mexicans, Latin Americans are well regarded in the world for their literature. A number of them have won the Nobel Prize. Right now, perhaps with the exception of Duong Thu Huong, no Vietnamese is remotely qualified as a Nobel Prize winner in Literature. I strongly recommend you read Gabriel García Márquez (Colombian) Octavio Paz (Mexican), Carlos Fuentes (Mexican), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatamelan), Pablo Neruda (Chilean) and the lesser known Agustín Yáñez (Mexican). I read the above authors in the original. 

Regards,

Wissai

"Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?  

I may be the only person in captivity who wasn’t persuaded by “The Remains of the Day,” which I regarded as largely a parlor trick with the passive voice. I also have had a violent reaction against a couple of Toni Morrison’s novels, which I deemed deliberately opaque."

The above was what Scott Turow said in a recent interview in the NYT. 

Granted, Scott Turow is not considered a "literary" writer, but as a hugely successful writer of legal fiction, Turow at least knows how to capture a reader's attention while Morrison did not. To this day, I cannot bring myself to read a Morrison's novel to a conclusion. The fact that somehow Morrison captured a Nobel Prize in literature in 1993 was considered a joke by many. Morrison has not been much respected by fellow writers. They ignore her. They don't think she deserved the Nobel Prize while they uniformly respect Alice Munro and said so, even before she won the Nobel. 

Murakami, widely considered a favorite to win this year, lost again. He is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. I only read his "Norwegian Wood", and it is very good. Highly recommended. 

Roberto Wissai/NKBa', BSR

A summary of Reza's "Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth"
Random House, 2013

"Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword."
      
                                                                                            Matthew 10:34

Ah, religion, all the strange manifestations of it, the fanaticism, the blind faith, the orgy in dogmas leading to bloodshed and religious wars, without the benefit and aid of philosophy and rational thinking and scholarship. I've been thinking about religion since the age of 11 and reading some religious texts and books about religion and philosophy since I turned 15, the age I began to exercise seriously my faculty of reasoning. It was also the age I seriously thought of putting an end to my life. So I immodestly fancy that I know first hand and quite intimately many existential questions. Reading  "Zealot" was part of my personal quest to see if Reza confirmed or disproved some thoughts of mine I have held dear about the man named Jesus (yes, to me, Jesus was always a man, never a "Son" of God as his followers claim him to be. Jesus was a remarkable and charismatic man, but nonetheless still a man, no more and no less. Attributing to him qualities he never possessed is an act of supreme deception and self-deception, unfit for any self-respecting, educated person who takes the time to read history and science).

The Bible, both the Hebrew Scriptures portion,---also known as the Hebrew Bible or the more common name The Old Testament---and the New Testament, was not words of God or written under the inspiration of God. Rather, it was written by many scribes who contradicted each other. And contrary to popular image established by thousands of years of unrelenting Christian propaganda, Jesus was not a man of peace, but a man of the sword who launched a revolutionary movement that so threatening to the political established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal. 

Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. Jesus didn't die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called "lestai", a word often rendered into English as "thieves" but which actually mean "bandits" and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel. 

Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of J's message and movement? To answer this question we must first recognize that almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of J was composed after the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. For four glorious years, the city of God (as the Jews fervently believed Jerusalem was) was once again under Jewish control. Then, in 70 C.e., the Romans returned. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were marched out of the city in chains. Exiled from the land promised to them by God, forced to live as outcasts among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged. 

The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because it allowed the early church to ward off the wrath of a vengeful Rome, but also, because , with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church's evangelism. Thus the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a J the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher's movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity was born. 

The book is an attempt to reclaim the J of history, the J before Christianity: the politically conscious revolutionary who, almost two thousand years ago, walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed failed when! after a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. 

Roberto Wissai/NKBa', BSR